Well, this thread stuck in my head and in spite of my better judgement I have created The Esoteric.
It's horrible, it's a mashup, and while there are kind of cool things about it, it's basically a joke. But here it is!
If I was to revisit this in reality I think I would heavily subtract the magus elements and the ripped off class features and try to build out physical adept in an interesting way.
This is very rough and needs fleshing out. Many ideas are half-formed.
There is nothing wrong with borrowing a magus element, but if you are going to do so then copy and paste the class feature and modify the wording to fit your new class. The way you have paraphrased leaves holes in the class feature.
Also, you don't need Full Contact Casting. You can already deliver spells with an unarmed strike.
Instead of just granting blanket access to phrenic amps, ki powers and arcana, I think it would be fun if you created a unique list of selectable talents for these guys, including three talents called Phrenic Amplification, Ki Power and Magus Arcana, each allowing you to pick from a limited list of these three kinds of powers. This will lend the class more of a unique flavor. For instance, the investigator hybrid class can select both rogue talents and discoveries, but from a limited list, and also gains a set of unique investigator talents in addition to these options.
Cheers,
- Gears
This is very rough and needs fleshing out. Many ideas are half-formed.
There is nothing wrong with borrowing a magus element, but if you are going to do so then copy and paste the class feature and modify the wording to fit your new class. The way you have paraphrased leaves holes in the class feature.
I don't actually think it's that unreadable, though its definitely half-formed. I don't think I'm going to work on it more anytime soon, but I do think there's some cool ideas so I thought I'd share. This really was sort of a 'what can I throw together in 2 hours?' exercise.
The problem with borrowing the magus element isn't that it doesn't work, but that the inspiration for the class came from thinking that rather than making a 'magus with monk elements', it would be better to go to the source of the magus - Fighter/Wizard hybrid, and make a Monk/Full Caster hybrid (and psychic seemed much more thematic than arcane). Hybrids should have their own unique features, not just draw from another class that they resemble. It should just have something different in order to not be a mash up.
Beyond that, 'Spell Flurry' and such, while sort of cool don't really work - I just combined both features and changed the language to make it fit a little better, but it isn't elegant or balanced.
Also, you don't need Full Contact Casting. You can already deliver spells with an unarmed strike.
I thought the same thing, but if you look at the actual language, while you can deliver a touch spell through unarmed strike, you aren't *granted* a free unarmed strike. Thus by rules your options are standard action cast => make free touch attack
orstandard action cast => hold charge => standard (or full) action unarmed attack.
Additionally full contact casting as written does two things: it also fulfills thought components, which is necessary for ever effectively casting defensively with this class. This is the cooler part of the ability imo and actually considered making it even better somehow, either making your spell not provoke, or various other things.
[...]
Yes, that is how this would have to work if you wanted a viable class. Right now it wasn't worth the effort - if someone was actually going to playtest this (which I think you actually *could*, though I'm not sure why you *would*), the gm and the player would have to figure out what was fair.
Other things: I stuck the psychic discipline in there because it actually fit *so* well (especially self-perfection obviously), but if you were really going to build the class, what you'd want is unique disciplines/'traditions' for your brain monk that combine mind & body features.
I actually really like the concept of 'Physical adept' - the sort of wuxia/charles atlas superpower character is cool to me, and the idea of using extremely phyiscal magic that amplifies your abilities is cool.
I was considering breaking it out as 4+wis+2*lvl rounds of physical amplification, and then giving them a selection of improving abilities to do go things, but I think that'd be too short duration - min/day or spending ki points seems to work better. I bring up 5e a not insignificant amount, but what I think would really work is n rounds/short rest.