I always liked the idea of an armored pugilist character. Someone who wears heavy, maybe spiked, gauntlets to deliver punishing blows while letting the armor take the brunt of the hit for them. It was always a cool visual for me and I'm sure if I looked hard enough at the movies and books I was into as a kid I could tell you exactly what scene or chapter cemented this in my heart as a cool thing. Unfortunately this time I really don't know off the dome and haven't looked back that hard. Instead I recently linked this class and realized I never made a post about it!
This came to me back in 2022, when I was running the first campaign in the setting I made using wasteland all those years ago. I got to a point in the game where I had a session scheduled but almost half the players couldn't make it. So I asked a bunch of people last minute if they wanted to play a one shot in DCC and mingled them with my players who could make it. I made the game an interlude related to the current game, I called it "druid genocide one shot". Players took on the role of mercenaries who were tasked with killing the druids that the main game were trying to protect and help. I planned on using it for making a group of villains that the players in the regular game might come up against. But I needed something to run with for the one shot.
So I, at 3 in the morning, spat out extremely basic versions of two classes, The Pit Fighter who we're talking about today and was at the time known as the brawler, and the musketeer. I also used the Dervish from Gongfarmers (2015), and the human version of the elf and dwarf featured in GLOSS. I rolled up 3 of each of these and had the players randomly roll to see which ones they got, each player getting 3 characters and expecting to lose at least one. They each had a few alchemical items, some had a randomly generated magic item like a potion or a scroll. This game created some awesome villains that I kept and used later, players who tried out my down and dirty proto classes really liked them and I ended up making a proper write-up of the Pitfighter... Then Nick Baran released the Bruiser, or I became aware of it, I really don't know the timeline of when it came out and it was SO close to what I wanted from my class that I just used that instead. Eventually a player asked to use the original one I wrote and it ended up back in the rotation, leading us here. If you read all that, thanks for coming out and reading my long story, Enjoy the class!
