Hello all. I have a plan for a character, Bargon, a chaotic good half-orc barbarian who's bond is "It is my duty to provide children to sustain my tribe". This is a character I played in a goofy one shot adventure I played once. Soon I will be DMing an adventure, and I want to introduce Bargon as an NPC.
My thoughts: when the characters meet, he has a a small clan of children with him, a few he has fathered himself, and the rest he adopted along the way in his travels. (The children eventually grow up and form a tribe led by Bargon.) As a whole, this group is just chaos that crashes its way throughout the landscape looking for adventure.
My question: Should my party join this group in a short quest, how do I handle stats and combat for the children. Most would be barbarian class, but a few probably might be druid or sorcerer. Do I treat them as level 1 characters? Do they have limited stats and abilities? How should I go about this?
Commoners? Scouts? Orcs? How much training are these kids supposed to have?
Not really sure. I presume Bargon will teach some of them of his Barbarian ways, but the sorcerer child probably learns things on his own. I honestly don't know how this should work, so I'll take suggestions.
Children are NPCs, so use NPC classes. Use a variety of stats that reflect their respective ages: no child has a 12 strength, and how smart can a child be? (Outside of savants, of course.) Charisma and dexterity can be left alone, but constitution shouldn't be very high (there's a reason diseases and certain bug bites are fatal in children).
What about making the children something to protect during an encounter? Or give a child NPC to each player to control on their initiative turn and the children basically can either hide or use small rocks to throw for pitiful damage.
Combat would be very specific to them. Definitely not a child soldier thing, but as a Half-orc barbarian, Bargon will be teaching them to fend for themselves and protect each other.
I don't plan to let the clan stick around for longer than a session, it's just a story element I want to explore.
One of the ways my party rolls stats is what we call the "Puberty" method. You write down the attributes in order, then roll 2d6 per stat. These rolls are your stats at puberty, in your case you would stop here, for a full blown character we then roll 6-8 d6 and put them whole(so no splitting that 2 into two 1's) to get final stats (none over 18 without racial.)
If you want them to be well-trained but not quite fully trained, you could take the tribal warrior stat block, give them better weapons, and reduce all some or stats by x. X can be 1, 2, 1d4, 1d6, or whatever you want. I'd just drop Str and Con by 1d4 each.
Hello all. I have a plan for a character, Bargon, a chaotic good half-orc barbarian who's bond is "It is my duty to provide children to sustain my tribe". This is a character I played in a goofy one shot adventure I played once. Soon I will be DMing an adventure, and I want to introduce Bargon as an NPC.
My thoughts: when the characters meet, he has a a small clan of children with him, a few he has fathered himself, and the rest he adopted along the way in his travels. (The children eventually grow up and form a tribe led by Bargon.) As a whole, this group is just chaos that crashes its way throughout the landscape looking for adventure.
My question: Should my party join this group in a short quest, how do I handle stats and combat for the children. Most would be barbarian class, but a few probably might be druid or sorcerer. Do I treat them as level 1 characters? Do they have limited stats and abilities? How should I go about this?
I play a medium amount of board games.
Commoners? Scouts? Orcs? How much training are these kids supposed to have?
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
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I play a medium amount of board games.
Tribal warriors with the casters using stat blocks similar to acolyte or apprentice wizard, all of them having half-orc racial traits?
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
This isnt easy to pull off.
Children are NPCs, so use NPC classes. Use a variety of stats that reflect their respective ages: no child has a 12 strength, and how smart can a child be? (Outside of savants, of course.) Charisma and dexterity can be left alone, but constitution shouldn't be very high (there's a reason diseases and certain bug bites are fatal in children).
All in all, kids should never be Combatants.
What about making the children something to protect during an encounter? Or give a child NPC to each player to control on their initiative turn and the children basically can either hide or use small rocks to throw for pitiful damage.
Combat would be very specific to them. Definitely not a child soldier thing, but as a Half-orc barbarian, Bargon will be teaching them to fend for themselves and protect each other.
I don't plan to let the clan stick around for longer than a session, it's just a story element I want to explore.
I play a medium amount of board games.
One of the ways my party rolls stats is what we call the "Puberty" method. You write down the attributes in order, then roll 2d6 per stat. These rolls are your stats at puberty, in your case you would stop here, for a full blown character we then roll 6-8 d6 and put them whole(so no splitting that 2 into two 1's) to get final stats (none over 18 without racial.)
This might be a fun way to stat out your kids.
If you want them to be well-trained but not quite fully trained, you could take the tribal warrior stat block, give them better weapons, and reduce all some or stats by x. X can be 1, 2, 1d4, 1d6, or whatever you want. I'd just drop Str and Con by 1d4 each.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
Thank you all! This is very helpful!
I play a medium amount of board games.