Class Review: Hilander's Fighter
Pedro de Rojas. Don Quixote in the 20th Century. 1905. Chromolithograph.
There are so many GLOG classes! More than you could playtest in a lifetime and more being written all the time. I want to comb through them and write critical reviews, gradually curating a list of suggested classes for my table and honing my sense of how exactly a GLOG class works.
The Fighter by Hilander
Today I'm reviewing Hilander's Fighter from The Common GLoG 1.4. Presented as a trio alongside the Scoundrel and the Wizard (which I will no doubt review soon enough), the Fighter is intended as a baseline class for Hilander's "high-compatibility, low-oddity ruleset." It's generic - not in that it's non-specific but in that it is intended to fulfill certain genre expectations. For me, there is a great appeal in treating these "core" classes, so I am always interested to see how people handle them. It's like admiring a traditional landscape painting - I am looking for something that demonstrates familiarity with the tropes of the genre while also presenting me with a surprising encounter or observation on the form.
As ever, Hilander shows his flair for economy. The whole class fits in a 1/3 page column. The wording is clear and unambiguous, though sometimes reliant on keywords or concepts found elsewhere in The Common GLoG ("shatter with advantage") or never really defined but easily derivable ("Physical Attacks," capitalized?). As much as I like to read a nicely laid out blog post, I prize a class that I can just see laid out before me.
If a class flags the kind of story it wants you to tell, the Fighter wants to tell stories about combat. Half of the class features either contribute bonuses to hit, action economy, or "shock" - a form of automatic, to-hit independent damage likely adapted from Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number. This is all competent, but feels like it engages with GLOG as a petit tactics games in a way that I rarely run it at the table. The Fighter wants to be in a game where chipping for 1 to 2 points of damage each turn over many rounds matters.
The other half of the abilities run into a peculiar issue: they read like story-gaming narrative moves, but in practice they give you mundane effects you could probably already acquire through roleplay. Fearsome makes low HD monsters shy away from high level fighters, but this feels like it might already be the case. Master gives you a hireling. Size Up is a little more nuanced in that you get hard numbers, but is very comparable to the information I would just give an interested player who asked for details and maybe had a relevant skill.
As a sidebar, I am actually pretty opposed to just giving away details like "HD, AC, and Physical Attacks." I want my monsters to be mysterious. I take great pains to never refer to them by a canonical name, waiting for the players to give them one then using that. Giving this kind of info away for free feels like a deflationary move and more or less obliterates the Witcher-esque monster hunting I increasingly gravitate towards.
For me, the stand out feature here is Technique. This feels like a restrained version of Loch's Duelist's techniques and stances (another class I'll likely review after a fashion). You could probably freely implement a Duelist style in lieu of the current list. The reason I flag these though is that they point to a broader goal for player and character - seeking out new techniques in manuals or from experts to add to your repertoire. This kind of thing is catnip for me, and I appreciate setting a benchmark here for a version of this that integrates with the rest of the class through shock while still pointing to an open-ended design space.
Here is where I think the generic of Hilander's Fighter starts to condense into something more concrete. The fighter depicted here is interested in developing personal techniques. They accumulate hit points and guaranteed damage, wearing down their foes. They gain a squire at the apex of their career who has a whiff of their feature set. Their skills are poetry, heraldry, or horsemanship.
This isn't a fighter. This is a knight - an armored combatant who cares about a linked hierarchy of master and apprentice. They just don't have the magical trappings that the knight archetype often has invested in it. I think my ideal version of the class leans further in that direction. These are extremely solid bones that could support a class that was more invested in the institutions it participates in, fights for.
But this is the issue at the heart of making a "core" class. The goal is, to some degree, to be generic - to fit the mental model of readers coming from a 50 year old tradition of dungeon crawling games or 20 years of MMOs. Hilander has put in a yeoman's work grappling with that challenge, but I think more could be done to extend the modularity we see elsewhere in GLOG into core classes like this one. Give me the backbone and let me articulate the ribs to fit my table. Or articulate them in two slightly different ways to differentiate a knight from a brigand.
For these reviews, I'll be adopting the simple tier system proposed by Skerples in his Many Rats on Sticks hack - Ultra-Core, Core, Novelty, and Extra. These aren't letter grades. Instead, they reflect how suitable I think this class is to pick up and play without needing significant revisions, a specific group, or an extremely invested player.
In light of that, I'm happy to enshrine Hilander's Fighter as the first Ultra-Core class on my list. I have a lot of respect for the craft that went into this class, but it's missing key notes that I am looking for, even in a core class.
12/15: Since publication, I have amended my rating system. I would now rate this as light effort to bring to the table for the reasons listed above.