Andy Griffin's page

Creating characters to play-test the mythic rules with I noticed the following:

Take a level 1 wizard eith a bit of optimisation it's entirely possible for them to have an 18 or 20 in their casting stat. Now take say a monk who may only be able to get a 16 in their highest stat, needing a decent score in multiple stats. This translates into an immediate two extra mythic power uses for the wizard over the monk.

Things tend to get worse as levels go on, with the wizard putting all his increases into his one good stat, while the monk might put most of them into one stat, he may need/want to put a few into other scores, especially if he ended up with a few odd number at character creation.

This isn't a wizard/monk thing, those are just the two builds that I had in front of me when I noticed this, basically the more stats your build depends on, the few mythic power uses you will have.

Also, save DC's will increase with mythic tier (due to attribute increases) much faster than save's will, since most classes derive their save DC's from a single stat while each save keys off a different stat. This essentially allows single attribute classes to pump their DC's even higher.

Since multi attribute classes are already often said to be at a disadvantage, I'm concerned about a rich get richer effect.

So I have finally gotten around to running a DS game, something I've been talking about for a long time. I am using the athas.org 3.5 with conversions to pathfinder. Also I am using the Psionics Unleashed rules for the psionics stuff.

One of my players has asked to play an alchemist, and I am a bit unsure how to respond. There is no history of the class being available on Athas, but it is also a new class created by Paizo, so it never existed when the DS material was written. Athas' bards are masters of alchemical goods and poisons, and potions exist, so there seems no reason why an alchemist would be out of place in the setting.

I also don't really see a problem with the use of alchemist to avoid the stigma of arcane casting. Since alchemists must be literate (which is and of itself a crime) carry a formula book (which looks much too much like a spell book to an execute first and ask questions templar) and carrying around contraband items (like poisons) should be enough to keep the alchemist in trouble with the authorities. Other NPC's could regard the alchemist similarly to a bard.

My main concerns are mechanical, and how an alchemist would interact in a low magic, low gold game. Bombs are a powerful weapon available early. I don't know how I feel about the alchemist tossing bombs around when other characters don't even have metal weapons. Feral mutagen also seems like it could be a problem. The natural attacks are good in normal games, they look even better when compared with the weapons available to low level DS characters. I think I would forbid that discovery, or give it a level requirement. The extracts seem like they wouldn't be a huge problem.

I'm leaning towards allowing it, partially out of curiosity to see how it works out. But I'm wondering what other people think. Would you allow it? If so what modifications if any would you give the class?