The Avenger Class in Miasma and Monsters

“Everything my god needs to say to you can be said with my weapon.”

I love this class from 4E D&D. It's unique as all get out, a zealot with a big weapon teleporting to and from, whacking mooks with the power of almighty Glob. What's not to love about that? 

In this post, I'll explain how the class can be recreated using the Miasma and Monsters system of mine, specifically with the Advanced rules (basic still in progress, get off my back). 

As a refresher, let's start with the character creation steps and work our way through each. Gotta play by the book! It would be embarrassing as the creator of the system to make an error(s).

 

• Buy Ability Scores or choose an Ability Score Array
• Choose a Bloodline
• Choose a Path for your first level
•     You receive an Archetype and a Passive Bonus from that Path
•         If your Bloodline is Human, you gain a bonus Minor Trait
• Roll for your starting HP
•     HD + BB + any modifiers from your Path
• Determine number of inventory slots
• Roll 3d6 for starting silver coins
• Roll d27 twice for your starting Adventuring Gear
• Roll d15 once for Other Items
• Choose a Starting Equipment Pack
• Spend any remaining coins
• Calculate AC
• Note down your attack and damage modifiers for your weapons

 

For our abilities, we care a lot about the Teleporting Striker Major Mind Trait, so we will make sure that Mind is our highest score, followed up with Skill. Brawn and Charm have some import, so our character will be more balanced than other classes.

Our beginning stats will be Brawn 13, Skill 9, Mind 15, Charm 10 for bonuses of BB 2, SB 0, MB 3, and CB 0. A balanced start, we don't care about our Skill stat for AC due to some key Traits we'll be taking later.

We will be a Human so we can start with an Extra Trait to give us a maximum of 7 at level 12.

We will pick the Mind Path at level 1, choosing +1 to all Mind Saves as our Passive Mind Bonus (PMB) and the Adept Archetype. The spell we will take is Haste, and it is a permanent part of our body (tattoo, brand, etc.).

 

Starting HP is D8 + 2.

We have 13 inventory slots.

We roll 3d6 for starting silver coins.

We roll for our Adventuring and Other Gear items.

 

We will pick the Mind Starting Weapon/Armor and choose a medium melee weapon to wield in two hands for D10 damage. We will also get a blank book and 1 random spell book.

With whatever money we have, we should prioritize 1 ration, a light source, and a sack.

The Trait we will take at level 1 from being a human is Bound Weapon. We will attune ourselves to our medium weapon. This will let us use your MB for attack and damage rolls, we can recall it to our hands, and we can expend a Quality to deal extra damage on a hit.

To maximize our damage output, we will use our high Mind to harvest materials to perform Field Repairs on our Bound Weapons, letting use the Quality expenditure to increase our damage potential. When we can, we will use the Haste spell we have etched onto ourselves to increase our Actions per Round and gain an AC bonus.

As for level ups, this is the general progression we'll want to follow:

• Level 2
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1. (14 Brawn 16 Mind)
  
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die PBB, Barbarian Trait. 
• Our AC is now 14 unarmored (16 w/Haste) and we have much more HP on average. Haste now lasts 2 Turns.
• Level 3
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (15 Brawn 17 Mind)
  
• Mind Path, +1 to all Mind Saves, Ocular Patdown Trait.
• Our AC is now 15 unarmored (17 w/Haste) and we can deal more damage with our extra Haste Action to add our MB a second time.
  
• Level 4
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (16 Brawn 18 Mind)
  
• Mind Path, +1 to all Mind Saves, Teleporting Striker Major Trait
• We can now use teleport before or after attacking, dealing an additional HL damage. We can also teleport for 30' at will!
• AC is now 16 (18 w/Haste)
• Level 5
• We don't care about the Mind Path anymore
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (17 Brawn 19 Mind)
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die, Weapon Master (choose Heavy), more consistent damage!
  
• You get the deal about AC already
• Level 6
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (18 B 20 M)
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die
  
• Reroll 3 HD
  
• Level 7
• Last Major Trait!
• Increase Mind and Brawn by 1 (19 B 21 M)
  
• Brawn Path, D10 Hit Die, Meat Dabbler Major Trait
• Another consistent damage improvement AND we can get free attacks when we miss.

The remaining levels can be filled out as you wish. You could continue with Brawn to maximize damage, go to Skill to get some consistency and extra movement options, Mind for more out of combat utility, or even into Charm to get Turn Undead, Templar, or something else that fits your fancy.

Our character will be a Glass Cannon for the early levels, but once we can teleport we can strategically pick targets that we can kill quickly and won't put us into too much danger. Once we start increasing our HP to high levels, we can start titan slaying.

I hope this post was a good exploration into the options Miasma and Monsters gives you with creating your characters and how it allows you to recreate most of your favorite classes from other games.

Good hunting!

GM Tips: Avoiding "Dead Air"

There's a concept in live radio and TV broadcasts of "dead air": the event where nothing is being presented to the users, the live feed being paused as the actors wait for a cue, freeze up, or anything that interrupts the normal flow. This is to be avoided at all costs in these forms of media for fear of the a powerful "Ratings" dipping too low.

Dead Air can be a huge problem in our hobby when running games! It's perfectly normal to get lost in thought as a GM during a session. Your players are staring at you, waiting for your response to their burning questions. "Did I hit the beast?", "What do I find?", "What's in the room?", "What is the name of the tavern?" are all potential causes of Dead Air and new GMs may have a hard time dealing with the pressure. 

I have found in my years as a "Forever DM" that it is just as crucial to avoid Dead Air at the table as it is during a broadcast. When I run a game, I don't prep endless pages of notes, build encounters, write dialog, or anything that would cause me to stop the game to read it. That stuff feels good to do in the pregame phase of GM-ing but I deem it useless when the pavement hits the road, so to speak. You can still write all those, but you should merely do so to help keep it in your mind. Being a slave to your prepped info will result in your game constantly hitting red lights as you reabsorb the quotes, monster stats, and minutia. 

Enough faffing about on why it's bad. Here's how I avoid Dead Air in my games. 

- my notes are always in bulleted form, separated into logical groupings for very fast retrieval

- random encounters have a # of creatures and what they're doing at the moment, nothing more

- I never write quotes for NPCs, I instead get 2-3 quick sentence fragments about their personality, desire, and hit dice

- I make sure to have a solid grasp on the system I'm running so I can recall rules quickly for players 

- I use that understanding of the game system to make up rulings on the fly when I don't know the rule or it's not contained within the text

- I try to gently nudge off topic conversations back to the game by always keeping in active role in these "sidebars" so I can steer it back to the game

The last one is truly an art in and of itself. Staying in these conversations about a joke, what we ate yesterday, or whatever miscellany that's inevitably gonna come up during a session helps build your social links with your players AND gives you the ability to easily bring it back to the game. You can insert a quip or additional joke to relate with the others then refer to the sidebar starter's PC name and ask them what they're going to do next. 

I have other thoughts about running a table as a GM I will certainly share in future posts. I think for the next topic I will muse about engaging less proactive players into the game. 

Until next time, swear the blood upon your steel will never dry!