Any Drizzt/Artemis Fans here

[Death Knight]

Ive been through all books except the recent ones with the ghost king, etc. I love the drizzt books and even more so the artemis entreri books.

 

I find that their personalities mesh well with my own, not so much drizzts but especially entreri's.

 

I was actually hoping that there might be some sort of type characters in some of the series here that i havent played, though redbeard reminds me of kane from rotp.

 

Anyone else on these boards Ra Salvatore fans?

[Tyranicus]

I really enjoyed The Crystal Shard, and the rest of the Icewind Dale trilogy was pretty decent. I couldn't get into the rest of the books though.

[Dantius]

I prefer the tales of the dark elf prince Drizz'l. It roughly translates as "The Relentless Scourge"!

[Randomizer]

I read the first two trilogies, but haven't kept up with the series.

[Niemand]

I've read a substantial number of Salvatore's books of that series/setting, but I found that their quality seemed to drop off steadily over time and so stopped. Also, I was never terribly fond of his fairly graphic (detailed?) approach to violence.

[Android]

Read the Drizzt books a decade ago. I found the Icewind Dale trilogy much better than the Underdark series.

[Earth]

I have read nearly all translated Forgotten Realms and Dragonlane books.

 

Ideal team of 2 would be Drizzt and Raistlin (w/o his sickness).

[Tyranicus]

I love the Weis and Hickman Dragonlance novels. It was one of the first fantasy series I ever read.

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

my friend was reading one of the drizzt books.

then he read a description that was so enthralling i knew i had to get into that series.

and here goes(might not be 100% accurate)

"using his warhammer wulfgar smashed the goblin on the head so hard he broke its ankles"

and with that i was hooked

[Sudanna]

I've read all of them except the Transitions trilogy (Which I have, but I currently have a lot of books to read and they're really only on the list for nostalgia, so it's a low priority), but years ago. They were decently good, for Forgotten Realms-style fantasy.

[Death Knight]

I read the homeland book and found that that and the rest of the first and second trilogy were great. What happened though was once the books went on, i drifted from drizzt and got more interested in artemis. As time went on, i found that artemis made more sense in most of the books. Drizzt needed his friends to survive, whereas artemis needed no one to survive. That lone badass approach was awesome and inspired me so much that from then on i only play finesse rogue characters in crpgs.

[Death Knight]

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

I have read nearly all translated Forgotten Realms and Dragonlane books.

Ideal team of 2 would be Drizzt and Raistlin (w/o his sickness).

What is this dragonlance series that i hear about? Is it in the forgotten realms and is it good salvatore good. Ive heard a lot about a series that salvatore wrote where each main character dies almost in every series. Is that the same one?

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Death Knight

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

I have read nearly all translated Forgotten Realms and Dragonlane books.

Ideal team of 2 would be Drizzt and Raistlin (w/o his sickness).

What is this dragonlance series that i hear about? Is it in the forgotten realms and is it good salvatore good. Ive heard a lot about a series that salvatore wrote where each main character dies almost in every series. Is that the same one?

R.A. Salvatore has not written any Dragonlance novels to the best of my knowledge. Dragonlance is related to the Forgotten Realms only in the sense that they are both Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings. There are hundreds of Dragonlance novels written by many authors, but the core series consists of 13 books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

[Alorael at Large]

The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy is, for my money, the finest D&D campaign-style literature. It's not highbrow and has no pretensions of being so. It is, instead, eminently readable, has good characters even if they largely don't have more than one dimension of depth, and it captures the spirit of D&D amazingly well.

 

Salvatore writes what he writes better than anyone else in the non-epic, D&D-basedd swords and sorcery genre. It's just not a genre that I really love. I can enjoy a trilogy (over about one lazy weekend), but the books don't really progress. I disagree that the quality has gone down; I just don't think it's a quality that can be sustained.

 

—Alorael, who is pretty sure that Salvatore intended to make Drizzt sympathetic and Entreri entirely monstrous. The no-friends approach basically loses out. But then Entreri apparently won over his creator's heart well enough to star in some books of his own, so...

[Sudanna]

Entreri is an antihero and Drizzt a hero, pretty plainly. Like all antiheroes, he looks like an evil bastard until he gets more screentime(pagetime?).

[Alorael at Large]

Entreri was a villain until he got an upgrade.

 

—Alorael, who is pretty sure he falls into the classic villain category. He's the evil foil who is so like and yet so unlike the hero! The fact that Drizzt is actually dark while Entreri is not adds poignancy, or maybe some other descriptor of at least medium length.

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

actually i like Jaraxle more than Enteri. while still being totally evil, he is also completely cool.

[Death Knight]

Entreri may have been a villain but some of the things he said made some sense. I found that his approach was very different from drizzt's and always wanted him to win their fights, though entreri didnt. Salvatore said in an interview that if he was writing the books based on fact, that entreri would win as he was more dedicated to just fighting. The reason he almost stated that drizzt wins all the time, is that salvatore has numerous times stated that he roots for the good guys.

[Earth]

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus

Originally Posted By: Death Knight

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires

I have read nearly all translated Forgotten Realms and Dragonlane books.

Ideal team of 2 would be Drizzt and Raistlin (w/o his sickness).

What is this dragonlance series that i hear about? Is it in the forgotten realms and is it good salvatore good. Ive heard a lot about a series that salvatore wrote where each main character dies almost in every series. Is that the same one?

R.A. Salvatore has not written any Dragonlance novels to the best of my knowledge. Dragonlance is related to the Forgotten Realms only in the sense that they are both Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings. There are hundreds of Dragonlance novels written by many authors, but the core series consists of 13 books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

and Dragonlance party at 1st books is basic party of 1 barbarian, 1 warrior, 1 mage, 1 thief, etc with personalities which makes wonder how they manage to work together.

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

actually there are eight characters which gradually get whittled down

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Darth Ernie

actually there are eight characters which gradually get whittled down

Click to reveal..

What? Only two of the original party die by the end of the original trilogy. Sure, they are pretty much all dead by the end of the War of the Souls, but that is many many years later.

[Alorael at Large]

There are at least 11 protagonists by the end of the first book, and while that number doesn't actually drop very much, they do get split into more manageable chunks for most of the series.

 

—Alorael, who also isn't quite sure that's an accurate portrayal. There's a wizard, a thief, and a whole lot of warriors at the beginning, and with one spoilerish exception that's more or less how things go throughout. Hitting people with swords and axes is the most popular form of employment.

[Tyranicus]

There is a cleric too! Also, in the original AD&D campaign, there were a bunch of warriors, but if it were made to 3rd edition rules, (possibly 4th too. I'm really not familiar with 4E) Sturm is clearly a paladin, Riverwind is obviously a barbarian, and Tanis is most likely a ranger.

[Aoslare]

I think Sturm would have been a Paladin and Tanis a Ranger even in 1st edition rules. Or was Dragonlance pre-Unearthed Arcana?

 

EDIT: Wait, Dragonlance definitely had Rangers. At least, Dark Queen of Krynn had Rangers. I can't remember if it had Paladins or if they were totally replaced by Solamnic Knights.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

I think Sturm would have been a Paladin and Tanis a Ranger even in 1st edition rules. Or was Dragonlance pre-Unearthed Arcana?

All I know is, the original Dragons of Despair module, which I have lying around somewhere with a bunch of other old D&D stuff, lists them as warriors.

I've never actually played the original AD&D. I have some modules that I've picked up here and there, but by the time I started playing D&D, everyone was doing 2E.

I tried to play a fan-made Neverwinter Nights module of Dragons of Despair once, but the person who created it did such a horrible job with the dialogue that I just couldn't keep playing.

[Aoslare]

Yeah, I never played pre-2E either, but I did pick up a copy of Unearthed Arcana once, because it was full of so much amusing stuff. Cavaliers (in addition to Paladins) and Comeliness (in addition to Charisma) and cantrips, oh my!

[Randomizer]

The first Dragonlance books were written based upon 1st edition AD&D rules. Unearthed Arcana was out when the books started and they tried to follow the rules for mages and clerics down to spells and number of spells cast per day for those low level characters. Raistlan finding a spellbook so he could learn his next level spells was one thing.

 

By the third book in the original trilogy the authors were starting to ignore the rules to make the story more interesting.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

The first Dragonlance books were written based upon 1st edition AD&D rules. Unearthed Arcana was out when the books started and they tried to follow the rules for mages and clerics down to spells and number of spells cast per day for those low level characters. Raistlan finding a spellbook so he could learn his next level spells was one thing.

By the third book in the original trilogy the authors were starting to ignore the rules to make the story more interesting.

The reason the third book started to diverge from straight representation of AD&D rules that the authors had caught up with and passed the campaign module production. About halfway through the second book, the modules started being based on the books and not the other way around.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus

There is a cleric too!

That's the spoiler I was trying to avoid. Although I suppose that's her party role from the outset.

Quote:

Also, in the original AD&D campaign, there were a bunch of warriors, but if it were made to 3rd edition rules, (possibly 4th too. I'm really not familiar with 4E) Sturm is clearly a paladin, Riverwind is obviously a barbarian, and Tanis is most likely a ranger.

The third edition barbarian fits culturally but not mechanically, but ranger and paladin are out because the magic isn't setting-appropriate. Fourth edition ranger works, and the profusion of classes means you could probably break everyone up into different types of guys with weapons anyway. Who wants to be the warlord?

—Alorael, who doesn't think books really break down well on class lines most of the time. Guys who use weapons and nothing else are various versions of warrior/fighter. You usually can't subdivide further. If they're sneaky, they can be rogues. Guys with spells are wizards/mages/sorcerers and guys with spells from divine sources are clerics. There you've got the classic party of four! If you want guys with swords and magic, you call it a paladin or you don't do it because D&D does not have a long-standing class that combines swords and sorcery, oddly.

[Roentgenium]

I have all 3 artemis books - Servant of the Shard, Promise of the Lich-King, and Road of the Patriarch. Huh, I just noticed that the titles are all the same style; *noun* of the *noun*.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: In the company of the average

The third edition barbarian fits culturally but not mechanically, but ranger and paladin are out because the magic isn't setting-appropriate. Fourth edition ranger works, and the profusion of classes means you could probably break everyone up into different types of guys with weapons anyway. Who wants to be the warlord?

It is possible to play a 3E ranger without using spells. I've done it. Ranger is usually my preferred class.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

I think Sturm would have been a Paladin and Tanis a Ranger even in 1st edition rules. Or was Dragonlance pre-Unearthed Arcana?

EDIT: Wait, Dragonlance definitely had Rangers. At least, Dark Queen of Krynn had Rangers. I can't remember if it had Paladins or if they were totally replaced by Solamnic Knights.

the Dragonlance setting does not in fact have Paladins as a class, at all

incidentally before it existed in the form of either modules or novels Dragonlance started out as a dude's D&D campaign, and all the other stuff is ultimately based on that. true fact.

Originally Posted By: In the company of the average

—Alorael, who doesn't think books really break down well on class lines most of the time. Guys who use weapons and nothing else are various versions of warrior/fighter. You usually can't subdivide further. If they're sneaky, they can be rogues. Guys with spells are wizards/mages/sorcerers and guys with spells from divine sources are clerics. There you've got the classic party of four! If you want guys with swords and magic, you call it a paladin or you don't do it because D&D does not have a long-standing class that combines swords and sorcery, oddly.

i'm not sure what you mean by "long-standing" but there have been ways to make a dude who uses both weapons and arcane magic ever since 3rd edition: apart from the option of multiclassing, there's hexblades, duskblades and a couple of prestige classes. the bard and swordmage classes in 4th edition both fit pretty well too

and there were probably spellsword-type classes in some obscure second edition AD&D book somewhere because there isn't anything in heaven or earth that wasn't in some obscure second edition AD&D book somewhere. plus there were multiclassing options for demihumans and dual-classing options for humans, although both were kind of a mess mechanically speaking, the latter more than the former

oh and if we want to go aaaalll the way back to Basic D&D, the Elf class (yes, Elf was a class back then) was pretty much a dude who fought a little worse than a fighter and cast wizard spells a little worse than a wizard, so i guess that's pretty much what you're looking for too

so basically whatever edition you favour there was a way to make a dude who uses weapons and magic in it

[Aoslare]

Multiclassing has been around since 1st edition AD&D. Or maybe since Unearthed Arcana? Not sure, but it definitely predates 2nd edition.

 

And the basic 2nd edition rules (Player's Handbook) did have bards. Granted, bards were more of a thief/mage combo than anything, but they could use (some) swords and cast (some) spells.

 

And actually, the same basic 2nd edition rules (Dungeon Master's Guide) had a point system for creating your own classes, which would work for a spellsword or whatnot. Granted, it was a bad system that by its own admission inflated XP requirements to absurd levels, because by its own admission it was paranoid about abuse. But it was there.

[Randomizer]

Non-human multiclasses were in 1st edition rules but specifying which races could have certain multiclasses wasn't done until a later date in The Dragon. Humans were banned as multiclasses since they were the only race that could have unlimited levels in any class.

 

Humans could start in a class and later stop going up and then start as another class without being able to use the first class abilities until exceeding the first class' highest level. This is how the bard class originally worked.

 

2nd edition completely changed the bard class.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

And the basic 2nd edition rules (Player's Handbook) did have bards. Granted, bards were more of a thief/mage combo than anything, but they could use (some) swords and cast (some) spells.

i thought 2E bards actually cast druid spells for various insane backstory-related reasons

also i really want to dig out my old 2E PHB and DMG now. not to play, just to read

[Student of Trinity]

First edition AD&D had multi-classing for non-humans, and allowed humans to change classes once, starting from first level in the new class while retaining all their abilities from the old one, including HP. You couldn't ever again gain exp in the forsaken class, and there was an awkward-to-implement rule that was supposed to make players tie their strong hand behind their backs until they had trained up their weak hand to equal it: if the DM felt that in an adventure you had used the high-level abilities of your first class more than your low-level new class, then you'd forfeit all exp from the adventure. This applied only until your new class level equalled your old. From then on you'd gain exp (in the new class only) normally, but be able to use all your old abilities as much as you liked.

 

It was a bizarre feature. Only one player of mine ever tried it; my brother got up to 7th level as a fighter before switching to magic-user, where over the years he eventually rose to 14th level. He sometimes swung a sword out of a sheer perversity, even long after this ceased to be a competitive option for him, but the main point was just that he had a ridiculous amount of HP for a wizard. While he was working his m-u level up to 7, though, there were some strange episodes. He'd go into a low-level dungeon, zap a couple of orcs with his wimpy magic, and retire to town to collect the meager exp, having lost maybe 1% of his health.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

also i really want to dig out my old 2E PHB and DMG now. not to play, just to read

The 2E PHB and DMG were almost better as literature than as gaming manuals. Oh, and that DEFINITELY describes the monstrous compendiums/manuals.

The human one-class-at-a-time feature was called dual-classing, at least in 2E.

[Randomizer]

Bards having druid spells was 1st edition. In 2nd addition they started off at 2nd level with mage spells.

 

I played a one-shot all night game where you could make any character with one million experience and buy items for a certain limit. That was the only time I ran a 2nd edition bard at 20th level. It was a weird game as we could greatly abuse the rules using items in ways they were never meant to be used.

 

Monster manuals were a compendium of mythological and literary beasts. The main changes in 2nd edition were to make dragons really hard to destroy because 1st edition ones were defeatable by parties over 15th level. Also to stop calling devils and demons by those names to placate the religious right.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Monster manuals were a compendium of mythological and literary beasts. The main changes in 2nd edition were to make dragons really hard to destroy because 1st edition ones were defeatable by parties over 15th level. Also to stop calling devils and demons by those names to placate the religious right.

don't forget daemons/yugoloths

actually do because they were pretty forgettable

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

how about battle kender? (or are they even playable characters??)

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Darth Ernie

how about battle kender? (or are they even playable characters??)

Only if you are using the Dragonlance world.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

[i'm not sure what you mean by "long-standing" but there have been ways to make a dude who uses both weapons and arcane magic ever since 3rd edition: apart from the option of multiclassing, there's hexblades, duskblades and a couple of prestige classes. the bard and swordmage classes in 4th edition both fit pretty well too

That's the problem. There have been many ways, but there hasn't been one way that gained traction. Multiclassing has the most history, but it by definition lacks a shorthand. Bards have gone through many mechanical shifts and are most (in)famous for being terrible, not for mixing spells with swords. Other options have come and gone, but none have become dominant. The term bandied about online, at least, is gish; that not only means nothing to most non-D&D gamers, it means nothing to most people who don't have the right D&D background or don't frequent character build forums.

 

Compare the paladin, which is popular enough to have cropped up everywhere. It's in D&D books, non-D&D books, games of all sorts. It's an unsurprising part of any system with priest spells, and everyone knows that if you add a sword to a cleric or some priest spells to your warrior you get a paladin. There's no such thing for mage-fighters despite their going back in mythology for a long, long time.

 

—Alorael, who blames D&D for seizing on the paladin and keeping it from edition to edition while having no such thing for the other side of the equation.

[Aoslare]

The paladin is very different from a "spellsword" or traditional mixed-skill character. The paladin has pretty much always been just as good as a warrior at fighting, with a bunch of minor priest abilities thrown in. Thus, "fighter plus" rather than "spellsword."

[Alorael at Large]

In part because a cleric is already a cleric plus; they've been decent at bashing heads since early on.

 

There aren't any options, that I know of, for wizards who are also okay with swords, mostly because that often leads to what SoT saw: not using the sword because spells are effective (even without higher mage level, the linear warrior quadratic wizard problem has been in force up to 4th edition). But while there are many options for fighter plus where the plus is arcane instead of divine, to take the 3rd edition classification, they're all different, they work differently, they balance their two sides differently, and they don't even keep the same terminology.

 

—Alorael, who just doesn't see a standard arcane counterpart to the paladin. "Paladin" can mean anything from priest with a sword to pious knight with powers that aren't really spell-like or priest-like at all. But bookworm knight? Not standardized.

[Aoslare]

No, a cleric is not a cleric plus. Since the beginning, clerics have been better fighters than mages but worse fighters than warriors. The balance is that their magic is supposed to be more limited or less powerful than that of mages. I think this is true enough. Healing is important, but it doesn't impact a big battle the way a fireball does. A paladin could not be a "cleric plus" either since a paladin only gets limited spellcasting, but a paladin literally has no disadvantages over a fighter, except a minor XP penalty and the stigmata. Paladin vs Fighter is like Divinely Touched vs not.

[Alorael at Large]

That all depends on edition, of course. In 4th edition, everything balances (at least in theory) because the differences between the schemes of classes have been really minimized. In 3rd edition, fighters get many more feats than paladins; which is better depends on what you're trying to do, but fighters certainly have more multiclass utility.

 

It's also not true that clerics are just healers. Maybe they are supposed to be less powerful, but they have always had substantial buffing, debuffing, and some few powerful damaging spells. In 3rd edition, it got to the point that clerics (and druids) were infamous for being better at everything than anything else. That's where the cleric as cleric plus came from.

 

Still, if there is a continuum with fighter on one side and cleric on the other, it's not clear that paladins are so skewed towards fighter. Clerics have always been fairly heavily armored and decently armed. They've been okay, but not great, at combat. They've had the best cleric-type spellcasting ability (obviously). Paladins are usually fighter-like in combat and given some limited casting ability. If they were any less fighty, they'd be just as fighty as clerics and would need more casting. If they were any more casty, they'd be clerics and need to have less fighting power.

 

The difference between fighter and mage is much greater than the difference between fighter and cleric in the melee arena. If you want to argue that the difference in casting power between zero and cleric is smaller as well, than there's just less middle ground to play with, and that middle ground is the paladin.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the key test is how characters act in play. Clerics often will start swinging their maces (or other favored weapons) right alongside the paladins. Not as well, certainly, but they don't have to cower. Mages are more likely to cast spells that help them flee the front lines safely. In fact, it might be the balance of huge power with puny defense that makes such repeated efforts at making melee + mage workable. Give them too much defense and they become non-glass cannons.

[Aoslare]

In AD&D and AD&D 2nd edition, Paladins are LITERALLY Fighters with slightly higher XP requirements, minor spellcasting ability that pops in around level 7, and a smattering of bonus abilities that show up at various levels. LITERALLY. Literally, take the Fighter class and add stuff to it.

[Alorael at Large]

In theory, at least, the experience requirements mean you're going to be lagging in levels some portion of the time. In practice, I don't have the experience (ha) to judge.

 

—Alorael, who supposes the stat requirements also provide some kind of balance, in that you can't play the class unless you get lucky with your rolls. Wait, that's not balance at all...

[Aoslare]

IIRC, the experience needed to reach level 2 was 2,000 for Fighters and 2,250 for Paladins and Rangers. This is a slight difference: compare to 1,250 for rogues, 1500 for clerics and 2500 for mages. It gets a bit better later: once you hit level 14 the fighter will normally have 1 extra experience level. But since at that point all you're getting out of a level is 3 HP, +1 THAC0 and maybe a nonweapon proficiency, the myriad bonuses of the paladin (laying hands, curing disease, permanent aura of protection from evil, and let's not even get into that holy avenger antimagic sphere crap) are absurdly better.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

incidentally before it existed in the form of either modules or novels Dragonlance started out as a dude's D&D campaign, and all the other stuff is ultimately based on that. true fact.

I am aware of this. I mentioned Dragons of Despair, which is the first Dragonlance campaign module and was later adapted into the first half of the novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

the Dragonlance setting does not in fact have Paladins as a class, at all.

The Knights of Solamnia are very clearly the Dragonlance equivalent of paladins. At higher levels, they are able to turn undead. On a related note, the Knights of Takhisis would equate to Blackguards.