Shattered Kingdoms

I have a suggestion to make griffons more fun to play, without a lot of coding. I'll let our PK experts comment on balancing; that's out of my league.

It's not that griffons don't have strengths in exchange for their weaknesses. It's that the class system makes it hard for griffons to employ them. Griffons have great physical stats and good intelligence. They're too fragile to be great melee, and too lacking in attributes to be great mages. But they'd be great hybrids. However, griffons don't have that option. All their classes are either pure physical or almost-pure magical at high level. This also leads to their attribute point problem: lots of points, but marginal places to spend them by level 40.

Give griffons a chance to play hybrid a bit, and I think they'd be much more satisfying. Specifically, I'd suggest:

* Either let griffons have Enhanced Damage, or 1 more point of maximum strength. Most magic classes should be able to do something with that. Some weighty weapons that reward spellcasting griffons for going max-strength would be welcome, as the game develops.

* Give griffons the Haste spell. Being a quadruped has disadvantages compared to humanoid, but speed is one thing griffons should do well. ICly call it a wind-based blessing. OOCly call it a use for the intelligence stat.

* To suck up still more of those attribute points, let griffons go up to 25 CON. Certainly their help file makes them sound hardy enough. It also lets them get more from the Haste spell: they can endure more fatigue before their saves drop to normal.

Adding more spells is possible, but that could require counter-balancing nerfs. Being able to carry half as many items would be appropriate. (Claws on legs are terrible compared with hands on arms.) So would losing that silly belt slot, and having the few griffon-appropriate items changed to about the body. But that's more of a coding effort.

I don't like griffons at all.

(Just thought I'd throw that out there.)

As far as your suggestions go, enhanced damage is a no-no, haste as well, and giving them more hp really won't fix anything.

I'd give them more eq slots if anything.

Or just.. remove the race entirely.

Griffon bards would be awesome.

Or let them be bards.

Yes! Let's combine the worst race is sk with the worst class!

I'm only half-serious.

Confirmation of awesome!

Griffon bard lol.

Remember before toughness, and all the leet griffon weapons, and extra stat points they got? They sucked back then, they are okay now. Not great, but okay.

The only thing I would suggest making them better is to make them easier to level to GM. It would be a good class for n00bs to start out of.

*immagines a griffon singing and dancing*

...

Interesting.

Depends on what you're looking for. IMO, much of the fun of griffons is in their difference from the standard human/near-human races. But they don't particularly play differently at higher levels.

A barbarian/scout/cleric griffon has easier access to flight, and a different set of weapon choices. Griffons are less durable when equipped than other races, and more durable when not equipped. And that's about it. Quite a letdown after the early levels, where innate Endurance and Self Defense are meaningful.

Griffons are a success in terms of RP; they have an amusing set of character traits to play off of. But it'd be nice to see more mechanical realization. If the objection is that griffons are too strong relative to other nonhuman races, all the more reason to lose the belt slot and add something interesting.