Nobles Vs Commoners: a thought

I was brainstorming a way to delineate the difference between Lord and commoner characters in yet-another-project-that-will-never-be-done ™, and I had an idea as to how to give each an edge while giving them a distinct feel. I was curious for feedback, or if there were any ideas you all had bumping around

My first idea was to have Nobles/Lords have access to a scrolls mechanic, a la FE 5, each noble family having a major scroll or relic that altered growth rates slightly, but required noble blood for reasons as yet to be determined; that struck me as easy enough, check a few boxes in builder, work out the stats, boom done, and gave the impression of some kind of “Noble” bloodline. It’s classist, I know but roll with me

So how do commoners stack up? Easy, training classes. Taking from Shadows of Valencia/Gaiden and 3 houses, the commoner characters will start as an in training class of one of three flavors - sword and lance, bow and axe, or staves and tomes. This will allow for more flexibiliy as to their potential, with the extra 9 levels on a fast EXP curve to pick up stats the lords are likely to get, as well as more options as to deployment compostion and replay variety. The thought was, while the nobles have a bit more gravitas due to their lineage, commoners aren’t bound by pedigree and have equal potential to be as potent and heroic as lords and nobles

Any way, thoughts on this? Does it seem balanced, or convoluted for the sake of convolusion?

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You can’t trademark this! Then what will the rest of us without finished hacks do?!

I think it could work. Might take some tweaking to really refine.

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I mean it’s balanced if you… balance it? Assuming they both start and end the game with similar levels of ability, then that would be fair. But if it’s more a Ross/Garcia situation where commoners start out weak but will technically catch up close to endgame if you bother to train them, that would of course be less so.

It’s pretty straightforward so i don’t think it’s terribly convoluted or would distract from the gameplay.

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But is 9 levels with a chance to gain, say, Strength, fair compared to a flat 10-15% extra on top of growths get that same point(s) in STR? I get its similar to bases vs growths (a whole other can of worms) I just wouldn’t want it to boil down to a clearly stacked tier system where “Boy” gets a head and shoulders advantage because you slap a hezul and neir scroll on him early and you become a physical juggernaut

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Like the idea but i think it might quickly turn every commoner you get after the first chapters neglegible, considering the example of Fe8.
Personaly i think you could give nobles prf weapons while comoners can have higher growhts.
Also storywise some classes(like knights and cavalliers) make sense only for nobles.

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I do like the idea of proficiencies, would also help an Innes-esque character or say, an axe-lord stand out

Horses would be good too. Maybe there could be mounted and unmounted equivalents, like a soldier class who can wield swords and lances vs a cavalier? mmm, but then there’s a bias with movement and mechanics like canto

Well i was assuming from the description that each noble gets their own thing that only they (or their family) can use. If you can stack multiple growth boosters on a single unit, that would indeed be busted! But as long as you only allow one, and the bonus averages 10% per stat, that seems fairly decent.

Let’s say we have a character with a 40% natural growth rate. As a commoner, they get 9+19+19 potential levels, 47 total. Multiply by 40, that’s 1880, so just shy of 19 points of that stat over their career.

As a noble, they get 19+19 = 38 levels. They get a scroll for +10, so a 50% growth; 50*38 is 1900.

So, theoretically, that looks quite fair (depending a little on promotion bonuses from trainee->real class). Given the same amount of attention, the commoner will grow those first 9 levels much faster and probably gain a bit of an advantage early on. But the noble will also be a few levels ahead, a few levels closer to promotion, and probably enjoy the promotion benefits for a couple more maps. I think it would work.

(And looking at more reasonable numbers, if our commoner hits 10/15/10 that’s just shy of 13 points. If we guess the noble will be at 15/13 or so, that’s exactly 13. So still seems to work out reasonably well.)

(Edit: I don’t like the idea of horses for nobles, despite real-world accuracy; horse movement is Very Good and would need some serious thinking to balance it out vs horseless commoners.)


Yeah it probably works best if most of the cast joins early and with low levels. But of course you can also have “pre-promoted” commoners show up later on, too.

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Yeah but it doesnt change much fe mechanics, horses are simply a great advantage, my suggestion was more text flavour to avoid having villagers join your party with armor, warhorse and war training necessary.