At journeyman I’m going to stick with being able to wear armour with 2 point reduction to the speed penalty. I may also allow training in another weapon group, but given that the warrior gets that at 8th level, I’m not sure that it’s necessary.

For master I think I’ll leave it as is in the Dragon Hack, but I will require an activate action to enter the defensive stance, as per Vaelorn’s suggestion.

Novice: You are skilled with all manner of weaponry: you gain an ability focus in a weapon group of your choice. You can also use the Threaten stunt for 1 SP rather than the usual 2. In addition, you can use it multiple times in a round, affecting a number of foes up to your Communication, using the same Strength (Intimidate) roll against each one.
Journeyman: You are used to wearing armour on the battlefield. All armour penalties to Speed are reduced by 1. You are also accustomed to being in the front line, standing against a tide of enemies. By using the Activate action you can enter a defensive mode which allows you to use the Stand Firm action as a free action until the end of the encounter.
Master: Your skill at arms has grown. You gain an ability focus in another weapon group of your choice, and gain +1 damage when wielding a weapon you are proficient in.
Also, all armour penalties to Speed are reduced by 2, and you can perform the Seize the Initiative stunt for 3 SP.

(Note: This was thought up before the Set 3 play test rules came out, and with the ‘double focus’ rule and other bonuses the warrior gets from 11-20 I’m thinking about changing the Fighter again!)

However, what I am now thinking is that giving a free ability focus is too overpowered for a talent. Lots of the Dragon Hack class talents do this: the wizard gets a free choice of magic focus, sorcerers get a focus based on their bloodline etc. Now I’m not trying to balance the talents particularly – it just seems to me that the focuses a character gets should be separate from his talents. It also means that if you wanted to use a class talent as a specialisation (i.e. for multi-classing) then the Dragon Hack classes would be preferred over, say, the Set 2 ones – “hey, free ability focus!” etc.

If you analyse what talents give to a character, it breaks down into something like this:

1. Re-roll a specific test
2. Re-roll a choice of test
3. A conditional +1 bonus to a test
4. A stunt bonus (use a specific stunt for fewer SP)
5. A new stunt
6. A new effect
7. A weapons group
8. A spell
9. Allow the character to take a talent that they otherwise wouldn’t (e.g. Arcane Warrior can take Armour Training etc)
10. Do something as a free action (once per encounter)
11. Use a major or minor action to perform a stunt for no SP

And this is per degree – very rarely does a talent degree give more than one ‘thing’. I think Arcane Warrior, for example, is an exception because you need a minimum set of ‘things’ just to make it work. The nice thing about focuses though is that they can be used as shorthand for a class feature: You’re a sorcerer of the celestial bloodline? Here’s the Magic (Creation) focus! Without them you must make something else up!

Thanks for the link to the Mystara update. I hadn’t seen that yet.

BTW, Josh – did you get the PDF I emailed to you?

This just cements that I have to get off my behind and get the 2.0 playtest done, it’s just that I’ve been so busy with work and other freelancing lately. Thanks again for dropping by. Your comment made my night.

FYI My game isn’t quite RAW. The biggest change is that characters get new hp at even levels and a +1 to defense at odd levels. The theory being that they won’t get hit as often, but when they do get hit it will hurt more. I’ll see how that works in the long round, but so far I like it.

I also have a wound point system, to distinguish between the bruising and battering of health loss and the more serious and difficult to recover damage of actual injuries.

Where power balance gets difficult is in spells such as haste, like you mention. That’s one where you really have to weigh the costs against the benefits. Giving every character two attacks a round would be crazy powerful, unless the spell cost say 20 mana, had a TN of 21, and you had to pay an additional 15 mana per round to maintain it for more than one round. Even the huge mana pools of high-level mages would suffer under a spell like that.

Another thing that has to be balanced between Pathfinder and AGE is the fact that in Pathfinder it is a given that a person cannot cast the same spell more than once (sometimes rarely twice, if they memorized it more than once) a day, whereas in AGE they can cast the same spell until their mana runs out. This makes spells that rob opponents of actions particularly dangerous, because it would be easy for a mage to spam such a spell and allow the rest of the party to act with impunity each round.

To answer some of your concerns, I do not intend to recreate every Pathfinder spell in the AGE system. Some, such as Wish spells and the like, just don’t seem to have a place in the game. Also, I would like to avoid the CoDzilla problem by not granting mages the ability to become better warriors than regular warriors through a few carefully chosen spells. That’s also why playtesting and feedback will be so important after the updated playtest document is ready.

I hope you’ll stick around and help out.