Trying to put together Legend of Dragoon again :/

[Popertop]

And this time I finally gave in.

I've decided the only way to do it is maneuvers combined with an alternate form ability that grants psionics (not even bothering calling it anything else at this point, since essentially that's what it will be).

3.5 stuff is game, as well as Pathfinder if you find it fits.

This is my first real homebrew project that I'm going to tackle, so bear with me.

What maneuvers/disciplines do you feel best correspond to each Dragoon?

A few that are obvious from the get go are Stone Dragon for Kongol, and perhaps Diamond Mind for Haschel.

[Deviston]

What about making your OWN maneuvers in addition to what there, to have the ones from the game. I would love to leap forward yelling "GUST OF WIND DANCE!" and it actually do something besides.... be loud.

[BladeTempest]

well perhaps mini disciplins would work... but i must ask... are you intending to set the game up to be played as per the storyline from the game? or are you setting it before/after any of the events mentioned during the game? perhaps as part of the original dragoon war? (that would be kick ass to play i think)... i think the biggest issue would be handling the dragoon transformation... that has always been the brick wall preventing me from setting up a setting based off of the lore of the game and so on.

[Seerow]

Maybe consider modeling it as a spellcaster variant of Rich's Champion class. A normally mundane guy who can flip out and start killing people with dragon magic.

[Popertop]

are you intending to set the game up to be played as per the storyline from the game?

perhaps as part of the original dragoon war? (that would be kick ass to play i think)...

i think the biggest issue would be handling the dragoon transformation...

Right now I'm just putting the classes together.

One of the requirements to enter the Dragoon class is to have a Resonating Dragoon Spirit, and of course, we know you can usually only get that by killing a dragoon. So if you wanted this to work in your game world, there would at least have to be some dragoon lore, and a few dragoons running around to get the stones from. I think it would be kind of hard to rationalize why there's a dragoon running around doing random stuff, since in a setting they would be the chosen ones of fate, not a free agent like I'm thinking out making them.

I also have wanted to do the original dragoon war for a long time now, that would be perfect for a campaign. Lots of opportunity for interesting things to happen.

For the transformation, I'm going to look at lots of stuff that has an alternate form ability and go from there. The only problem is fitting the maneuvers and everything in there. Of course, Druid has spellcasting and wild shape, so I don't see it as too much of an issue.

I wonder if it would be better to have it operate as a ten level prestige class, with level 3-5 as optimal entry.

[Seerow]

Honestly I'd go with a full 20 level base class, rather than try to squeeze it into 10 levels. With a full 20 level class you can make the feature scaling stronger, and have a more smooth progression. Especially when you're talking about something as big as shapeshifting and gaining full casting, you want that to be a full class.

[BladeTempest]

well the most recent thing that i have had near "success" with in making the dragoon idea work was to make each of the dragoon spirits legendary "semi"-intelligent artifacts. basically they have emotions and things that resemble thoughts and if they come into contact with someone who has very similar "view points" the spirit within the stone gives the user access to their power.

the main problem is fueling the transformations. the sp system works great for the game but becomes obscene in dnd as a character can fill up the entire gauge with a single full attack in some cases.

i for one think the pc classes and the dragoon powers should be seperate but grow in a (skewed because of the tremendous power of the dragoon transformation but still) parallel line, making semi-intelligent artifacts one of the better options. but that is just my opinion.

as to address your "floating free agent" perhaps most of the lore was actually lost but the stones themselves survived and give rise to a whole new host of powerful heroes and villains as the world once again is on the brink of a war that threatens... well everything... but not as outright... something cold war-esk that could turn out to be very outright bloody combat literally overnight

[Popertop]

for the transformations, I was going to have it a number of times per day, or I might even have it be fueled by the power points.

[dethkruzer]

This looks rather promising, I'll be keeping an eye on this.

[Popertop]

actually, yeah, I'll have it based off power points.

Makes it really easy to add different effects like fast transform, explosive transform, that kind of stuff.

[Cieyrin]

Maybe consider modeling it as a spellcaster variant of Rich's Champion class. A normally mundane guy who can flip out and start killing people with dragon magic.

That's...actually not a bad idea at all and fits really well. Basically, flip the Champion's and Avatar's roles. Switch out the casting for a martial discipline and require a dragoon spirit to actually transform to Avatar/Dragoon form. Let me look over the Champion and see what can be refitted to make this work.

Also, I'm still of the opinion that ErrantX's Libram of Battle fits the feel of each Dragoon better than Tome of Battle. Plus, I'm sure Errant wouldn't mind additional feedback, so it saves us work by building on the shoulders of giants, am I right? :smallwink: