Class Baselines with Flexible Options

Five Magiks is designed to make any character at least passable at the class they choose, but the system of skill and perk will allow any character to pursue any kind of specialty. This applies to a rogue seeking to become more capable as a frontline fighter or a barbarian seeking to be a wizard. All the magic types are represented by skills with outstanding mastery falling into the realm of perks. Perks is the catch-all term for all the extraordinary feats, supernatural metamagics, or hard trained masteries that characters are able to select during character creation or when gaining a level.

So, to relate this to the previous post, a wizard can actually sacrifice feats to gain more masteries and perhaps even match the number of masteries that a fighter would have. However, this sacrifice would most often see the wizard being a worse wizard compared to other casters who spent those perks in ways that supported their magical abilities. Not all such tradeoffs come with such weaknesses, however. A fighter wishing to become more nimble, stealthy, and precise can choose many of the same perks that rogues naturally get and it will nicely complement their existing martial skills.

Similarly, a carefully selected magic type can support the natural class abilities of a character in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts, if done carefully. In this way, it’s feasible to create cunning spellblades, arcane archers, deadly mage hunters, and nearly any other archetype that exists in books or media. For spellcasters, the mechanics of M5 allow two different magic types to support one another in ways that wouldn’t be possible in other gaming systems. A sorcerer could leverage an additional magic type to fill in while they are on cooldown. A wizard may prefer a different magic type for direct magical attacks and most casters can use a second magic type in some way to stretch their limited spellcasting resources. 

What character types have you struggled to run in other game systems? Drop me a comment below and I’ll try to respond with at least one or more options that would function under the M5 system.

Next time, I’ll talk broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the various magic types.