Post/Author/DateTime	Post
battleaxbaby 11-04-06, 06:53 PM	Is there a technical difference? Help me out here Im' still learning alot of this stuff....
enygmatic_me 11-05-06, 12:06 AM	A member of the aristocracy isn't neccesarily part of the nobility. Aristocrat can represent any type of influential person, be it a wealthy merchant (who would probably be a mutliclass expert/aristocrat) or their family, a reknowned artist could be an aristocrat, it could just be as simple as being born into affluence (Great -grandma was a very powerful and successful Wizard who shared in the split of many dragon's hoards. Her decendant never had to work again.) Some one of the nobility holds a title of some sort. Dukes and Duchess', barons and baroness', counts and countess', and knights and dames' are people you would find amongst the nobility. They have authority granted to them by their superiors. This authority is limited to a vicinity of land that they rule in the name of, usually, the King. Though they have no real authority outside of this vicinity, a noble is usually afforded respect due his position outside of his domain. Then there is the cream of the crop, the Royalty. These are your Emperors, Kings and Queens, Crown Princes(ess'), and Princes(ess'). They have absolute authority throughout their entire domain. How they wield that power is what defines the Kingdom. Benevolant or tyrannical, etc... Hope this helps. ::EDIT:: Grammar
Rulebook 11-05-06, 07:16 AM	he might also mean the classes... where one is an npc class that gets virtually no benifits, and the other is a 20lvl PC class (its in Dragonlance off the top of my head) that gets some nifty social and support abilities.
Darth Sephiroth 11-05-06, 08:32 AM	Well the Aristocrat is designed to be slightly underpowered to fit the NPC class level of power. The Noble basically starts with the Aristocrat and boosts it with abilities to make it more powerful. Personally, I still find the Noble slightly underpowered so I boosted it by granting it a few other abilities to boost charisma based skills. I've also considered merging the Noble and the Marshal into a single PC class
battleaxbaby 11-05-06, 12:29 PM	All very helpful thank you. "Rich merchant", thats exactly what I was looking for, but i thought you had to be born into money to be an aristocrat.
enygmatic_me 11-05-06, 01:34 PM	Joining the aristocracy is just a matter of gaining money and influence, and the more money you have the more influence you can assert. It was even possible for those in the aristocracy to grow so powerful as to rival the influence of the royalty. Merchant houses could come together and form a conglomerate that had it's fingers in so many industries as to quite literally monopolize a kingdom's economy. The royal family would have no real choice but to accept something like that as to drive the merchants out would disrupt and ruin the economic base of the kingdom. A poor kingdom is a weak kingdom and a weak kingdom is a target for those that wish to expand their own authority and power. That said, it was not very common for a conglomerate to openly flaunt such control, knowing that the people might rise up in support of the royal family, boycotting the merchantry and making way for competition to come in and destabilize the conglomerates monopoly. New merchants in the kingdom meant that the royal family need not fear as much for the economic stability of their domain, freeing them from being beholden to the conglomerate in the first place.