I thought magic missiles were force dmg which can't be resisted.
Force damage in the PHB didn't seem to say anything about ignoring damage resistance.
It would depend on how the damage resistance is worded, but for instance, an Oath of the Ancients Paladin gains resistance to all magical damage from spells, which would seem to apply to all spell damage.
silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
edited February 2018
So question about a character:
If a character can't help but rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
If a character can't help rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
Kind of depends on the setting. Are there good goblins in this world? Would he murder humans too? Would it be normal to turn in goblins to the fantasy police?
So it's long been known that the bulette, alongside the rust monster and the owlbear, were inspired by some cheap toys Gary Gygax found (the original illustrations for these monsters are in fact pretty much just drawings of the toys). Over on RPG.net, though, there's speculation that the toy set were bootleg plastic figures of kaiju from the Ultraman series.
If a character can't help but rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
Intention is an important consideration. And how helpless can a goblin be if it's taking hostages?
I expect a Good person would first try to reason with a hostage-taking goblin anyway, since attacking the goblin gives him little incentive to keep the hostage alive. I like to think about what tends to happen in movies. Your typical Good Guy is going to put down his weapon and surrender if the goblin has a knife to the neck of an innocent. It's your grimdark antihero that'll take the shot anyway.
If a character can't help but rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
I think it's time to visit the local cleric and ask them to cast Detect Good or Evil on your character and let the GM sort out the moral quandaries that inevitably pop up in a world where problems are normally solved by hiring some traveling murder-hobos and having them murder-hobo their way over to whoever is causing your problem and do their murder-hobo thing until your problem goes away.
Alignment is honestly a Bad System anyway. Morality is way too muddy and flexible for it to make much sense, especially when you consider the things one does to keep your loved ones/community/city/kingdom safe in a setting where the privilege of the average person is almost below 0%.
If anyone wants to avoid what I'm sure will be a fruitful discussion about alignment that will finally resolve the myriad problems with the system in a way that is satisfactory to all parties, the new UA is up and it's all about providing more granular rules for overland travel
so arguing about that again is definitely an option, too.
The UA is fairly innocuous, I'd like if it had better examples, possibly multiple of them for quick constructing regions you don't necessarily care about 100%. Like more tactical terrain examples and regional effect examples that you could kindof mix and match for a region. Like outside of those its fairly straightforward advice on things to consider while devising a travel sequence and associate skill checks.
+1
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
i have a vague notion that i would prefer never to play through a travel sequence again
I find that in the current edition navigational checks are somewhat unnecessary as at least one party member will have some feature that keeps the party from being able to get lost.
If a character can't help but rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
Would still be Good, technically, as Goblins in D&D are Evil by nature. Obviously, in the real world it's never as simple as a person being Evil at birth, but in D&D, a lot of the "bad guy" races (Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls etc) are created by Evil gods to serve them on the mortal plane, and they were made to be evil. In the case.of an escaped Goblin, the question is not if the goblin will kidnap another child it's a question of when. A character can be merciless towards Evil and still be Good, even if some might view it as extreme.
Alignment, in my eyes, has always been more of a guideline rather than a hard rule anyway. So, the character who kills the hiding Goblin is Good, probably Lawful, too, if they're following a code in their execution, but has tendency towards extreme punishment or has a black and white view of the world. In that character's mind, if they let that Goblin escape they'd be morally reaponsible for any evil actions it commits, so killing it now is for the greater good. Again, it's extreme, but not necessarily Evil.
It can make some great party tension if another PC was of a more merciful disposition. Both PCs are Good, but have a different philosophy in regards to how to act. I can see an Oath of Vengeance Paladin and a Life Domain Cleric having all sorts of philosophical and ethical debates.
Zomro on
+1
silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Thanks all for your responses.
I was basically imagining a classic LG Paladin, but one who sees the practical ramifications of murdering beings he or she knows to be evil doers (small "e" evil, not alignment). Basically a self righteous judge jury and hangman all in one.
It doesn't matter what the "monster" races are like in D&D. What matters is how they are done in your DM's world. Even if running an official module a DM might go "That doesn't make sense " but... it's best to maybe have a vague mention of this in Session 0.
alignment is both something that is (and always has been) important to what makes D&D different from other tabletop RPGs and also poorly understood.
The game was much more strongly influenced by fiction from people like Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Robert Howard etc... and very little by Tolkien. Remember that the Silmarillion wasn't even put into print until after the first major revision to the game (the Greyhawk supplement that added Thieves, Paladins and a ton of other stuff that wasn't in the original game).
Also for a long time alignment was just law vs chaos (no good or evil axis). Which had more specific connotations than just the common usage of the words. These are Law and Chaos (note capitalization), cosmic forces represented by gods and heroes (or anti heroes) on each side. Chaos is more Elric or Ulrik vonBek than Sauron.
Matt Colville makes a better pitch for why it's still relevant to D&D today than I could. But one thing I can say for sure is that "detect evil" is not gonna trigger for some guy whose killed some noncombatants. Someone needs to be knee deep in some serious supernatural evil, like trying to resurrect Orcus kind of evil or whatever, for a spell like that to show up for them.
If a character can't help but rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
"The goblin who only ever glorified kidnap and slaughter secretly wrote poetry and had a family! NEVER MORE PALADINS!" is about on par with "The little girl turns into an evil witch in a puff of illusion and oh no you just killed all the clerics of the god of puppies and rainbows! NEVER MORE PALADINS!", okay? If you want people to care about goblins having feelings and families, put those out there with the goblins: you track them back to their village and children chase each other through the streets and the crops are failing and the kidnappers are having an argument in goblin with some doddering old beardy goblin. Still got that kidnapped kid, though. What are you doing?
Evil kills them all. Good puts up a white flag and tries to address the crop situation. Neutral tries to get in and out with the kid, because that's what they're paying you for, and a minimum of casualties.
Or, you know, put more generally, Evil will take risks to hurt people, Good will take risks to help people, and Neutral thinks there are quite enough risks already, thank you.
If you don't want people to care about goblins having feelings and families, sure, go for it! Even the kids have a wicked sharp knife and a mouth full of fangs and they're not afraid to use either one of 'em! By default that's probably what most people are thinking anyway because they've punted approximately 20,000 goblins in various media to date. But if you want people to make actual moral decisions, you need to clearly establish moral grounds first.
I try and make it a point to always ask the DM on first contact with D&D "born evil" like orcs how they want to run it. Are they ALL evil bastards (LotR) or are they just another race (Elderscrolls)? Elderscrolls style doesn't preclude the ones we run into being evil bastards but it's gonna inform how I interact in the more general sense, with potential backstory reasons refining that.
I try and make it a point to always ask the DM on first contact with D&D "born evil" like orcs how they want to run it. Are they ALL evil bastards (LotR) or are they just another race (Elderscrolls)? Elderscrolls style doesn't preclude the ones we run into being evil bastards but it's gonna inform how I interact in the more general sense, with potential backstory reasons refining that.
I'm trying to figure out if i want a born evil race in my setting, just so the demon armies have cannon fodder that isn't dretches, I'm thinking gnolls, but I may also make them outright infernal.
I try and make it a point to always ask the DM on first contact with D&D "born evil" like orcs how they want to run it. Are they ALL evil bastards (LotR) or are they just another race (Elderscrolls)? Elderscrolls style doesn't preclude the ones we run into being evil bastards but it's gonna inform how I interact in the more general sense, with potential backstory reasons refining that.
The lotr books dont have "born evil" races. Gandalf even calls out that sauron wasnt evil in the begining: he had to fall via his actions. The orcs met by the characters, which isnt many, are certainly raised into slave army in a very violent society. And most are to some degree magicially dominated by powerful supernatural beings. But part of what makes the books work is that the glimpses we get of orc society (from when merry and pippin are captured or what frodo and sam overhear in mordor) are so hideously plausible.
Even without a domineering supernatural force if the only orcs in a given region are pastorialists who engage in frequent raiding of more settled people (a way of life that shows up many times in many places in history) the people being raided sure are gonna call them evil.
I'm slowly dredging through R.A. Salvatore's Demon Wars Saga, they have some legit pure "evil" races. It... uhh it's not great literature. Basically: goblins are super evil bloodthirsty tribal scavengers, but usually don't bother humans because humans are in a different part of the world. But humans are doing pretty good and are settling further inland. Goblins still don't bother them much, because they mostly attack each other. But then a big bad evil awakens and takes control of the goblins. So now they are super evil and are ruled by a smarter evil.
Speaking of Salvatore and goblins... didn't he do a short story where Drizzt was killing some goblins, then he found one in a prison that wasn't so bad? The whole story was about him letting the goblin free or something, just because he was a member of an evil race, did not mean that there could not be exceptions to the rule. Gasp! Just like Drizzt himself is!
IIRC the human community killed the goblin anyway.
0
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I'd want them to be default enough to just be plopped down into any improvised story, would that work with what you are proposing?
If this is more of a box of toys to plop down, then I don't think they need roles. Roles in my mind was "someone you save", "someone who helps you", "someone who hinders you", etc. Although a small bit of personality would still probably be helpful for a DM pressed for time.
Speaking of Salvatore and goblins... didn't he do a short story where Drizzt was killing some goblins, then he found one in a prison that wasn't so bad? The whole story was about him letting the goblin free or something, just because he was a member of an evil race, did not mean that there could not be exceptions to the rule. Gasp! Just like Drizzt himself is!
IIRC the human community killed the goblin anyway.
The goblin was a "goodly" goblin who had been enslaved by humans in a revenge raid. He didn't fight back, so they just made him a slave. Drizzt wanted to make his master free him, but realized he couldn't do that because he was there as an official of Silverymoon, so he offered to help the goblin escape.
The salient point of the story was that Drizzt was only accepted because he was a ripped killing machine who also happened to be a fabulously good looking and was an exotic elf-person. The goblin saw it better to be a protected slave, rather than get murdered on the side of the road because he was a weak, ugly goblin.
Drizzt went to Silverymoon, got him an official pardon and a government office, road back to the village, and saw him strung up because the owner world rather kill him than see him go free.
Seeing the depth of hatred in man, he realizes that he's not accepted as who he is, he's just a novelty. If he was born a goblin, he'd be strung up too.
It wasn't prime reading material, but it was still pretty solid for lowest-common-denominator YA fiction.
I'd want them to be default enough to just be plopped down into any improvised story, would that work with what you are proposing?
If this is more of a box of toys to plop down, then I don't think they need roles. Roles in my mind was "someone you save", "someone who helps you", "someone who hinders you", etc. Although a small bit of personality would still probably be helpful for a DM pressed for time.
I'll likely add some personality and/or story-hooks for each NPC.
I'll do the same in just coming up with 100 sample adventure hooks to utilize the different monsters & locations.
Lastly, I'm thinking I'll swap out the graveyard terrain for a more basic Forest/Jungle terrain (just seems more versatile).
I'd want them to be default enough to just be plopped down into any improvised story, would that work with what you are proposing?
If this is more of a box of toys to plop down, then I don't think they need roles. Roles in my mind was "someone you save", "someone who helps you", "someone who hinders you", etc. Although a small bit of personality would still probably be helpful for a DM pressed for time.
Do a bit of reading of the Commedia Dell'arte. It's almost exactly what you're looking for.
I want to feature a city and am considering having the lifestyle expense rules be important in determining how people react to PCs, what factions they may be able to contact, and random encounters.
Here's what I've got so far:
- A squalid lifestyle lands you in the Jetsam district, which is really just a collection of caves that partially flood with the tide. Living here makes you a pariah and puts you at risk of attack or disease. The elemental cult known as the Darkfathomers has members hiding, and some of the mad artificers of the Archanus Heresy also keep secret labs here.
- A poor lifestyle allows you to live among the exploited laborers of the Flotsam district. You are still at risk of theft, along with the other peasants. It may be possible to make connections with the Wormrock Gang that preys upon the wealthier citizens of the Waterline and Middle Reaches. Alternatively, one may be approached friendly-seeming cultists from the Fellowship of Inscrutable Others.
- A modest lifestyle affords living quarters in the Waterline district as a commoner. You may ally with the Circle of Stone to oppose the Wormrock Gang, and sometimes agents of the Vulturehound League may come around looking for potential applicants.
- A comfortable lifestyle accounts for lodging in the Middle Reaches. The Vulturehound League accepts many applicants from this district. Though representatives of the Circle of Stone are present, a more fanatical group called the Vigilance Committee serves as the neighborhood militia here. The Committee is extremely suspicious of anyone from the lower districts, and there are rumors in the Flotsam district in particular that the Vigilance Committee abducts and tortures poorer visitors in the Middle Reaches.
- A wealthy lifestyle is required for access to the splendors of the Crowns district as most of its gambling halls and other facilities have strict dress codes and high prices. The White Lantern Consortium has a branch office here. In addition to the Crownguard the district is defended by a small, all-female mercenary company of hippogriff riders from the north called the Sky Ponies. The Sky Ponies are well-paid for their services and can afford much of what the Crowns district has to offer, but they are not accepted by most in the district due to cultural differences.
- An aristocratic lifestyle may grant access to the Farkeep Estates in the Crowns district, if one can gain a sponsor among the nobility visiting here from the Sixfold Kingdom of Erathenor. A number of secret societies have sprung-up here thanks in part to the boredom of the idle rich. Some are harmless (such as the bards of the Heraldic College and the sorcerers of the ominously-named-yet-benign Sanguine Society), others are eccentric and self-important (such as the Sacred Brotherhood of the Supreme Edge of Canetar or the near-delusional Queens of the Empire Endless and Eternal), but among these lurks the devil-worshiping manipulators of the Fateful Council.
I'll have to go through the DMG to figure out more potential penalties and perks.
I imagine that you also would loose access to some possible contacts as you climb. The poor vagabonds you used to party with as Flotsam are going to be jealous/insist you "sold out" when you start cavorting with people in the Crowns District.
Posts
You can blow every slot on magic missile.
This fight was ten rounds long, he blew every slot on magic missile.
I don't know exactly how many hit points the enemy had but it was probably something in the 200 range.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Nice, force missile mage is a cool mage
Force damage in the PHB didn't seem to say anything about ignoring damage resistance.
It would depend on how the damage resistance is worded, but for instance, an Oath of the Ancients Paladin gains resistance to all magical damage from spells, which would seem to apply to all spell damage.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
If a character can't help but rescue those he or she considers needy, that would make them lean Good, no? They see Goblins have taken a Human child hostage, so the character jumps into combat to save the child right away.
If the same character also sees it as practical to murder helpless evil creatures, that would make them lean Evil, no? After combat and saving the hostage, the character finds a Goblin that ran away mid-combat, hiding in a barrel. The character executes the Goblin, both for its crimes, and to prevent it from committing any more.
Does the Evil tendency overwrite the Good? Or do they cancel out and the character is around Neutral?
Kind of depends on the setting. Are there good goblins in this world? Would he murder humans too? Would it be normal to turn in goblins to the fantasy police?
Intention is an important consideration. And how helpless can a goblin be if it's taking hostages?
I expect a Good person would first try to reason with a hostage-taking goblin anyway, since attacking the goblin gives him little incentive to keep the hostage alive. I like to think about what tends to happen in movies. Your typical Good Guy is going to put down his weapon and surrender if the goblin has a knife to the neck of an innocent. It's your grimdark antihero that'll take the shot anyway.
I think it's time to visit the local cleric and ask them to cast Detect Good or Evil on your character and let the GM sort out the moral quandaries that inevitably pop up in a world where problems are normally solved by hiring some traveling murder-hobos and having them murder-hobo their way over to whoever is causing your problem and do their murder-hobo thing until your problem goes away.
so arguing about that again is definitely an option, too.
choose the form of your destroyer, thread
just skip forward in time pls
Would still be Good, technically, as Goblins in D&D are Evil by nature. Obviously, in the real world it's never as simple as a person being Evil at birth, but in D&D, a lot of the "bad guy" races (Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls etc) are created by Evil gods to serve them on the mortal plane, and they were made to be evil. In the case.of an escaped Goblin, the question is not if the goblin will kidnap another child it's a question of when. A character can be merciless towards Evil and still be Good, even if some might view it as extreme.
Alignment, in my eyes, has always been more of a guideline rather than a hard rule anyway. So, the character who kills the hiding Goblin is Good, probably Lawful, too, if they're following a code in their execution, but has tendency towards extreme punishment or has a black and white view of the world. In that character's mind, if they let that Goblin escape they'd be morally reaponsible for any evil actions it commits, so killing it now is for the greater good. Again, it's extreme, but not necessarily Evil.
It can make some great party tension if another PC was of a more merciful disposition. Both PCs are Good, but have a different philosophy in regards to how to act. I can see an Oath of Vengeance Paladin and a Life Domain Cleric having all sorts of philosophical and ethical debates.
I was basically imagining a classic LG Paladin, but one who sees the practical ramifications of murdering beings he or she knows to be evil doers (small "e" evil, not alignment). Basically a self righteous judge jury and hangman all in one.
The game was much more strongly influenced by fiction from people like Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Robert Howard etc... and very little by Tolkien. Remember that the Silmarillion wasn't even put into print until after the first major revision to the game (the Greyhawk supplement that added Thieves, Paladins and a ton of other stuff that wasn't in the original game).
Also for a long time alignment was just law vs chaos (no good or evil axis). Which had more specific connotations than just the common usage of the words. These are Law and Chaos (note capitalization), cosmic forces represented by gods and heroes (or anti heroes) on each side. Chaos is more Elric or Ulrik vonBek than Sauron.
Matt Colville makes a better pitch for why it's still relevant to D&D today than I could. But one thing I can say for sure is that "detect evil" is not gonna trigger for some guy whose killed some noncombatants. Someone needs to be knee deep in some serious supernatural evil, like trying to resurrect Orcus kind of evil or whatever, for a spell like that to show up for them.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
"The goblin who only ever glorified kidnap and slaughter secretly wrote poetry and had a family! NEVER MORE PALADINS!" is about on par with "The little girl turns into an evil witch in a puff of illusion and oh no you just killed all the clerics of the god of puppies and rainbows! NEVER MORE PALADINS!", okay? If you want people to care about goblins having feelings and families, put those out there with the goblins: you track them back to their village and children chase each other through the streets and the crops are failing and the kidnappers are having an argument in goblin with some doddering old beardy goblin. Still got that kidnapped kid, though. What are you doing?
Evil kills them all. Good puts up a white flag and tries to address the crop situation. Neutral tries to get in and out with the kid, because that's what they're paying you for, and a minimum of casualties.
Or, you know, put more generally, Evil will take risks to hurt people, Good will take risks to help people, and Neutral thinks there are quite enough risks already, thank you.
If you don't want people to care about goblins having feelings and families, sure, go for it! Even the kids have a wicked sharp knife and a mouth full of fangs and they're not afraid to use either one of 'em! By default that's probably what most people are thinking anyway because they've punted approximately 20,000 goblins in various media to date. But if you want people to make actual moral decisions, you need to clearly establish moral grounds first.
I'm trying to figure out if i want a born evil race in my setting, just so the demon armies have cannon fodder that isn't dretches, I'm thinking gnolls, but I may also make them outright infernal.
The lotr books dont have "born evil" races. Gandalf even calls out that sauron wasnt evil in the begining: he had to fall via his actions. The orcs met by the characters, which isnt many, are certainly raised into slave army in a very violent society. And most are to some degree magicially dominated by powerful supernatural beings. But part of what makes the books work is that the glimpses we get of orc society (from when merry and pippin are captured or what frodo and sam overhear in mordor) are so hideously plausible.
Even without a domineering supernatural force if the only orcs in a given region are pastorialists who engage in frequent raiding of more settled people (a way of life that shows up many times in many places in history) the people being raided sure are gonna call them evil.
IIRC the human community killed the goblin anyway.
Though I suppose that might be covered by the dungeon or cavern map.
I'd want them to be default enough to just be plopped down into any improvised story, would that work with what you are proposing?
If this is more of a box of toys to plop down, then I don't think they need roles. Roles in my mind was "someone you save", "someone who helps you", "someone who hinders you", etc. Although a small bit of personality would still probably be helpful for a DM pressed for time.
The goblin was a "goodly" goblin who had been enslaved by humans in a revenge raid. He didn't fight back, so they just made him a slave. Drizzt wanted to make his master free him, but realized he couldn't do that because he was there as an official of Silverymoon, so he offered to help the goblin escape.
The salient point of the story was that Drizzt was only accepted because he was a ripped killing machine who also happened to be a fabulously good looking and was an exotic elf-person. The goblin saw it better to be a protected slave, rather than get murdered on the side of the road because he was a weak, ugly goblin.
Drizzt went to Silverymoon, got him an official pardon and a government office, road back to the village, and saw him strung up because the owner world rather kill him than see him go free.
Seeing the depth of hatred in man, he realizes that he's not accepted as who he is, he's just a novelty. If he was born a goblin, he'd be strung up too.
It wasn't prime reading material, but it was still pretty solid for lowest-common-denominator YA fiction.
I'll likely add some personality and/or story-hooks for each NPC.
I'll do the same in just coming up with 100 sample adventure hooks to utilize the different monsters & locations.
Lastly, I'm thinking I'll swap out the graveyard terrain for a more basic Forest/Jungle terrain (just seems more versatile).
Do a bit of reading of the Commedia Dell'arte. It's almost exactly what you're looking for.
Don't be evil and make the guy that wants to play a Fighter play as a Champion.
So many more interesting options. Battlemaster is a general choice, though Cavaliar has its fun bits as does Samurai.
Here's what I've got so far:
- A squalid lifestyle lands you in the Jetsam district, which is really just a collection of caves that partially flood with the tide. Living here makes you a pariah and puts you at risk of attack or disease. The elemental cult known as the Darkfathomers has members hiding, and some of the mad artificers of the Archanus Heresy also keep secret labs here.
- A poor lifestyle allows you to live among the exploited laborers of the Flotsam district. You are still at risk of theft, along with the other peasants. It may be possible to make connections with the Wormrock Gang that preys upon the wealthier citizens of the Waterline and Middle Reaches. Alternatively, one may be approached friendly-seeming cultists from the Fellowship of Inscrutable Others.
- A modest lifestyle affords living quarters in the Waterline district as a commoner. You may ally with the Circle of Stone to oppose the Wormrock Gang, and sometimes agents of the Vulturehound League may come around looking for potential applicants.
- A comfortable lifestyle accounts for lodging in the Middle Reaches. The Vulturehound League accepts many applicants from this district. Though representatives of the Circle of Stone are present, a more fanatical group called the Vigilance Committee serves as the neighborhood militia here. The Committee is extremely suspicious of anyone from the lower districts, and there are rumors in the Flotsam district in particular that the Vigilance Committee abducts and tortures poorer visitors in the Middle Reaches.
- A wealthy lifestyle is required for access to the splendors of the Crowns district as most of its gambling halls and other facilities have strict dress codes and high prices. The White Lantern Consortium has a branch office here. In addition to the Crownguard the district is defended by a small, all-female mercenary company of hippogriff riders from the north called the Sky Ponies. The Sky Ponies are well-paid for their services and can afford much of what the Crowns district has to offer, but they are not accepted by most in the district due to cultural differences.
- An aristocratic lifestyle may grant access to the Farkeep Estates in the Crowns district, if one can gain a sponsor among the nobility visiting here from the Sixfold Kingdom of Erathenor. A number of secret societies have sprung-up here thanks in part to the boredom of the idle rich. Some are harmless (such as the bards of the Heraldic College and the sorcerers of the ominously-named-yet-benign Sanguine Society), others are eccentric and self-important (such as the Sacred Brotherhood of the Supreme Edge of Canetar or the near-delusional Queens of the Empire Endless and Eternal), but among these lurks the devil-worshiping manipulators of the Fateful Council.
I'll have to go through the DMG to figure out more potential penalties and perks.