Character Customization

Game: Character Customization
Publisher: Throwing Dice Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 20th, July 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00

“This book is not meant to be read cover-to-cover.” I think that’s true of many RPG supplements but Throwing Dice Games‘ Character Customization is the only one that I can think of that makes the point of saying so.

With the aim of writing a solid review, I sat down, ignored the advice and read it cover to cover. Ouch. My brain. It didn’t really work. The next day I printed it off, sat down with the pages beside me and tuned in the TV. During the commercial breaks, I picked up a page or two at random and read them.

I found myself reading through to the natural conclusion of the section even when cute animated policewomen from the future were tracking down rogue robots again. That’s the first note to make on Character Customization. You need to use it right in order to get the most from it.

Throwing Dice Games describes themselves as a vanity imprint for a few veteran gamers. Character Customization really isn’t for the rookie gamers. If you’re at the level where you already comfortably creating your own classes or seriously editing existing ones while respecting game balance then that seems about right to start using Character Customization. Character Customization will work at a professional level too.

There’s the risk that if you’re not at this minimum level of competency that Character Customization becomes too much work for the reward. I guess this is the second note to make on the supplement. You need to use it right in order to get the most from it.

Yeah. I know the first and second notes on Character Customization are the same. I think it’s an important enough observation to make twice.

Character Customization allows you to design customised classes, feats, prestige classes, monster classes and templates. That’s an awful lot for a 75-paged PDF. The front and back covers for the product are offered up in two separate PDFs, I guess it makes it easier to print and reduces the amount of heavyweight graphics in the bulk of the document.

There are illustrations in the supplement but they’re rare, you get a lot of tightly presented text and helpful tables for your money. There are a whole lot of bookmarks in the PDF, bookmarks that expand into even more bookmarks and given the modular nature of the supplement this is essential.

The customization process for classes works largely by being able to break down classes into equal component pieces. These chunks of character can then be swapped about. You could, for example, remove the Bard’s magical abilities and increase the classes’ hit dice by a suitable amount.

Clerics could gain access to more feats as they level up in exchange for their bonus domain spells and powers. Each chunk of character that can be swapped is known as a track. It’s slightly more complicated than that. You can’t abandon the core track for any class. You can’t remove that quintessential element of a character.

Sorcerer’s, for example, can reduce their magic abilities but can’t lose them entirely. Paladins can’t lose their “Required Abilities” track, the set of core powers d20 associated with the class.

You can’t make a customized version of the Fighter and multi-class your character with another customized version of the Fighter. These restrictions aren’t too bad and there are more than noted here.

There are variants on the Druid’s wildshape track and you don’t have to build a barbarian based class that rages. “Should all uncivilized creatures rage?” wisely asks the author Joe Mucchiello (of Joe’s Book of Enchantment). You could easily build a barbarian based class for some wild jungle tribe, where berserk frenzies among the vines are not an evolutionary winner, and so rage is gone and the “Tropical Track” is in. This class will see Disease Resistance at level 1, Trap Affinity (+1) at level 3, Wilderness Camouflage at level 4, and so on.

Much of the Skills Chapter talks about feats. These are those feats that can be built and designed to enhance the use of skills though. Skill points can be spent on things other than skills and the trick is to limit how many skill points can be spent on other things. The supplement runs through the core classes and offers a costing for class enhancements. The monk can trade in four skill points for a faster movement or more skill points for a better AC bonus.

The feats chapter itself begins with feat templates and I think most DMs will pounce on the chance to design their own feats and back their creations up with this sort of expertise. Following this, there is a long list of feats. Unlike other feat galleries, this supplement presents the collection by rule cluster, all the combat feats together, all the magic feats together, etc.

Character Customization does for prestige classes what it does for core classes. In addition, there are intelligent observations on the rights and wrongs of prestige class building. Here’s an excessive quote from the chapter introduction:

“One of the first things that many prestige class designers get wrong is that they decide what classes would want to take the prestige class. They then proceed to design the requirements around those classes. They will also pick the hit die type and BAB of the prestige class so that it goes with the base class(es) in mind.

This is backwards. Choice of the class components and requirements should be based on what the prestige class is designed to do. Unless the class in question is specific to a class, as an order of knights might be specific to fighters or paladins or a mage guild might be specific to wizards and sorcerers, assumptions about the base class of the character joining the prestige class should be minimized.”

The prestige classes are built from templates rather than tracks though and this seems to work well enough.

I’m not a fan of Effective Level modifiers. They don’t help if you want to start everyone at level one. Character Customization wades in here on two fronts: for templates and for monster classes.

There’s the interesting “Maturity Level” requirement for Monster Classes that notes the minimum level that must be attained before the character can multi-class. The Shadow Class ensures that as some monster classes progress in level that their abilities increase in step so their CR matches their effective level.

The Drow, for example, have no noted Maturity Level and so must complete all five levels of shadow classing before multi-classing is possible. In addition, there’s a 20% experience point penalty so it’ll have spent an extra 2,500 extra XP by the time its 5th level. It’s this combination of being locked into the monster class for Y levels with Z% experience point penalty that replaces the game balance Effective Character Levels try to do.

The PDF concludes with summary tables that bring much of the supplement’s wisdom together. Feats, for example, are spread out between the Skills chapter and the Feats chapter proper. In the back of the document, there’s an uber-table for all the listed feats.

It is well worth reading the appendices. Joe bravely invites people with questions to email the company but notes you should read the appendices first. Designer’s Notes are always something I welcome in a supplement and they’re especially helpful here.

I’m going to keep Character Customization close at hand. Not only is the supplement one of a kind, but it’s also good at what it does. I do admit that I’d like to spend some time with 3.5 edition rules in front of me and my printed copy of this product to see what, if anything, needs to be changed.

With Character Customization, any lingering obligation I might have felt to use canon classes is gone. I’ll be custom creating core classes or tinkering with them at least for every campaign that I run.