Class kits on a level 1 character feel wrong to me!
Icallhimlecobra
Member Posts: 59
I'll be playing my first bgee play play through with a standard class, Why? It makes no sense to me that a level 1 character would be specialised in their class of choice. Class kits make more sense for the PC in bg2 where your character is more experienced and may have specialised by that time.
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But yeah, obviously it's fine to follow your own sense of what your character is like in terms of experience and capabilities.
It's probably 3ed that's making you think of kits as prestige classes which they're not.
Part or that is because some of them feel overpowered (like, wow, the Cavalier gets a ton of advantages for a guy with zero experience). And part of that is because half of the descriptions list abilities you don't get until BG1 is well over!
I don't have a problem with the specialization aspect of it. I think of it as the same kind of distinctions as between EMTs and nurses, plumbers and truck mechanics, cops and firefighters. Those people went into medical care, mechanical maintenance, and public safety, respectively.
The only ability I see being game-breaking at level 1 is Totemic Druid summons. Then again, they are fairly game-breaking at level 13 still. It's just a really, really good ability. Shapeshifters properly implemented would also make low levels a total joke.
But that's about it. Even the paladin kits, as strong as they are, don't really make it much easier than a regular paladin for low levels.
I'm struggling to come up with anything else that strikes me as particularly "overpowered" specifically because of low level advantages and I'm coming up blank.
Level 1 adventurers are not inexperienced as most people think. They're highly trained elite individuals. A level 1 human mage normally starts his training when he's 10-11 years old and is not considered a level 1 mage until his early 20s.
The same apply to fighters as well. They're not the guy who is given a sword and told to go kill goblins, he was trained from an early age and is highly skilled knowing how to fight in all kind of armors and how to correctly use a shield. Just compare him to an NPC soldier from the DMG which rarely has more than 4 hit points and rarely knows how to fight in more than one kind of armor.
Kits reflect different training. A Transmuter is still a mage, who concentrated so much in his school of magic that he completely neglects others. An Inquisitor is a Paladin, trained from early age to hunt and kill evil spellcasters, foregoing the training that allows a Paladin to channel holy energy from his god in the form of healing touch and spells and instead concentrating on using this holy energy to see through illusions and dispel evil magics. The P&P version's description went to the length of limiting his dispel power to spells cast by evil casters. It didn't work on a spell cast by a good caster.
The kensai is a fighter who was trained to fight with no armor, concentrating on weapon techniques.
So a kit is NOT an experienced adventurer who specialized into something, although that kind of kit existed as well, it just reflects a completely different training from an early age.
Mechanically they still use the THAC0, saves and hit dice from their root class, so they are considered a kit from a class.
Regarding relative strengths, in P&P, their higher requirements would make most kits quite rare. BG mechanics make it easier by automatically adjusting the stats to match the minimum requirements of the kit/class you wish to play. And that's exactly how it should work in a computer game. I see no sense in forbidding the player to have the character he wishes to play.