The GM and I have agreed to not make the Black Blade intelligent. It is mostly his idea and I am going along with it.
I know I can just live with an intelligent blade and ignore the intelligent bits, but I wanted to see if I could "simplify" things. I wouldn't need Telepathy for example. I wanted to get rid of the sword's INT, WIS/CHA, and EGO stats and then figure out if there was a way to get Arcane pool points for the sword.
Any ideas on how to do that?
Okay, too late to edit. I figured I can just used the Sword's Enhancement bonus in place of the INT bonus. I am still stuck on EGO.
There is that ability down the line called Spell Defense that uses the weapon's Ego as spell resistance. Of coarse I may never use that but I wonder how I could get rid of Ego and yet still use the weapon's special ability.
the blade bound magus/black blade is a delineate ripoff/homage to Elric/stormbringer.
storm bringer and mourn blade were actually extra dimensional creatures akin to demons who looked like and behaved like swords.
hence the intelligence/ego.
they had different , secretive goals, compared to their wielders…this is kind of hard to portray as written, with a weapon that has the same alignment as its wielder.
but, technically, Elric was Chaotic and so was storm bringer.
If I had been the designer, for the blade bound magus, I would have used the animal companion rules for the blade (or at least tried to) and written the archetype as the spontaneous Cha based magus everyone was looking for.
The Black blade would be a specific subspecies of extra dimensional mimic that can only survive via humanoid symbiosis, a creature that controls and takes over most hosts, who do not have the blackblades class abilities to counter it.
the blade would grow in power with the wielders class levels, thus a multclassed magus would fall behind the power curve and runt he possibility of becoming possessed.
Much missed fun to be had in my opinion.
What's your goal of trying to avoid the swords intelligence/ego, rather than running the route most players do…and ignore it..because its so easy to do?
Do you mean how to calculate the arcane pool for the sword without INT? For this (and most of your concerns) it's easiest to just consult the chart to see what abilities you have, even though the sword isn't 'intelligent.' Though, the blackblade table shows that the sword's enhancement bonus is always 1 higher than it's INT modifier. So in this case, Enhancement bonus = INT + 1. The blades arcane pool is always equal to it's inherent enhancement bonus (from the table, without any extra abilities).
For the ego, just keep the column and rename it the blackblade's Power/Draw/Gravity rating or something. Alternatively, a progression like (Enhancement Bonus x4) is pretty close to the ego progression. Unfortunately, the ego doesn't follow a standard progression.
What's your goal of trying to avoid the swords intelligence/ego, rather than running the route most players do…and ignore it..because its so easy to do?
Since the GM doesn't want to run the Swords Intelligence, I thought I could just make the sword non-intelligent. There isn't a longstanding goal. I thought I could just remove these stats.
As it has been a few days since I posted last, I realized I could replace Intelligence with the weapon's Enhancement bonus for the Arcane pool. Since I am playing an AP I don't have to worry about the numbers matching there.
I was thinking about level+enhancement bonus for the Ego which mostly matches.
We also have a Co-GM who would take the Intelligent weapon and run with it (and get side tracked). I wasn't considering that when I built the character but I want to keep the Black Blade.
For the ego, just keep the column and rename it the blackblade's Power/Draw/Gravity rating or something. Alternatively, a progression like (Enhancement Bonus x4) is pretty close to the ego progression. Unfortunately, the ego doesn't follow a standard progression.
What I came up with 'sort of' worked. If you look at the Black Blade Progression chart:
Magus level 4th + enhancement bonus = 5 egoMagus level 6th + enhancement bonus = 8 ego
Magus level 8th + enhancement bonus = 10 ego
and it starts to stray from there.
Yes I could call EGO "purple" or some such, but it would still be EGO. Having it based off of something other than the stats that identify it with intelligence is better in my mind.
One of my GMs could have me just ignore things and be happy. It is just the other GM that I have to think about.
What's your goal of trying to avoid the swords intelligence/ego, rather than running the route most players do…and ignore it..because its so easy to do?
Since the GM doesn't want to run the Swords Intelligence, I thought I could just make the sword non-intelligent. There isn't a longstanding goal. I thought I could just remove these stats.
As it has been a few days since I posted last, I realized I could replace Intelligence with the weapon's Enhancement bonus for the Arcane pool. Since I am playing an AP I don't have to worry about the numbers matching there.
I was thinking about level+enhancement bonus for the Ego which mostly matches.
We also have a Co-GM who would take the Intelligent weapon and run with it (and get side tracked). I wasn't considering that when I built the character but I want to keep the Black Blade.
intelligent weapons are supposed to impose their wills and whimsies on weak wielders and treat them like a high maintenance girl friend or a wicked step mother.
but most of this in the past has been warrior types with low mental stats, and a weapon thats usually a different alignment.
this just inst the case with the black blade…as a result it's very vanilla… and it could literal say nothing , and nothing would be missed.