Rupeemaster

[Aldragon]

Feedback on the Rupeemaster, which can be found here: http://z12.invisionfree.com/Zelda_RPG/inde...?showtopic=3802

This class is a neat idea, but I don't think it will be easy to balance with others without being in very specific types of games.

The ability to magically find more treasure than normal whenever you find it means that in downtime your friends will borrow money from you, then hide it somewhere really obvious in your house and tell you to search there.

The ability to magically carry any amount of money means that you can pull a 10-ton weight out of your pocket if you want to, then drop it on someone.

In general, tying one character's power to money may incentivize the group to give all it's money to that one individual. This is not always a desirable outcome.


However, in spite of these issue, this character concept could be very interesting in a solo game or one where everyone had a similar dependance on money.

[Da' Vane]

Those are some wacky exploits described there... but quite a few of them are literally: "Errr... no."

The power isn't tied to money or wealth, but tied to the power of rupees. Rupees just happen to be the currency of the setting, but they are also a form of power in and of themselves, and in large enough quanitites can produce very potent, and often debilitating effects.

This is all based on lore from Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, where Tingle is tricked by Uncle Rupee into becoming a Rupeemaster and gathering rupees for Uncle Rupee's nefarious schemes. During the adventure, Tingle discovers that he has been duped, and redeems himself and his greed by harnessing the rupee power for himself and defeating Uncle Rupee, but this doesn't undo the damage already done, and Tingle is forever trapped as a Rupeemaster...

The rupeemaster can carry an unlimited number of rupees, not an unlimited amount of weight. Treasures, magical items, and other things of worth still weigh the rupeemaster down. The rupeemaster may still drop 10-ton of rupees on their enemies if they wish, but then they have to find them again, and later on when the rupeemaster becomes more dependant upon rupees, this is quite risky as it brings the rupeemaster closer to death.

The rupeemaster's Lucky Find ability is not magical, but a trained ability by the Rupeemaster. The ability doesn't "create" extra rupees of any kind, but increases the amount that is discovered, because it is assumed that the additional rupees are always there to be found. Thus, if the GM says there are 100 rupees in a horde, a level 1 rupeemaster will find 105 rupees instead - there are actually 105 rupees in the horde. This is a behind the scenes mechanical increase that the GM usually handles: If the party includes a rupeemaster, the GM should be automatically increasing the size of the treasures found by the party. There is no exploit to this ability - the party cannot willingly "create" rupee hordes, because any such rupees are already considered discovered. The GM should not have to mentally record which rupees have already been found or not, it should be fairly easy for them to determine if the rupees come from the PCs or not.

There's nothing to stop the party looting allies for rupees, but such actions are not likely to keep them allies for much longer, even if the party do return the rupees. That said, since there is no issues with smashing up pots in NPCs houses for rupees in the games themselves, if you are going with this approach, then looting allies for rupees is fair game. They cannot collaborate with allies to "grow rupees", as such rupees would already count as discovered. Of course, if the ally hides rupees for the party to find, they can be "grown", but the GM would be complicit in the scheme, in whcih case it isn't so much of an exploit, but more of a "mini-game"...

As for incentivizing the party to give all their rupees to one individual, this is an inter-party issue. Giving their rupees technically counts as healing, and it's like using all your MP on cure light wounds spells for a single PC, which may be part of the party strategy. Of course, the hard part will be normally be getting the rupees back from the individual, especially to pay for healing after a particularly brutal combat...

I have clarified the Lucky Find ability to include the term party, and that the rupeemaster must be present when the party finds the rupees. I have also clarified most of the rupee-based abilities so that they specify that they require actual rupees, and not other forms of wealth, including the entry requirement. Instant Wealth now provides actual rupees, rather than any other form of wealth as well. Finally, the threshhold at which a rupeemaster dies has been altered so that it occurs whenever they are carrying less than 100 rp worth of rupees on them for any reason - and for the short period when this is not instant death for them, they must continue to make save or die Fort saves every hour until they get above this threshhold.