Excaliburproxy's page

This just occurred to me when reading through some of the Paizo blogs. Whenever I see something with the "uncommon" tag, I immediately think "well, this might have been neat but it is only usable if I play mother-may-I with the DM". And really, that is essentially exactly the experience I have when I read a homebrew rule online; I know that I will need to justify the use of that rule.

I really don't like this. Part of the reason that I kept coming back to Pathfinder is because I liked coming up with new builds and new character concepts as new official rules were released. When I see the "uncommon" tag, I just feel shut down, though. The rule stops being part of "pathfinder" and becomes part of "a version of pathfinder that no one may ever actually play". This was always really the case since any rule could theoretically have been excised by any GM for any reason. "Uncommon" rules are everywhere though and every instance of it is just another "no" that I will need to overcome ahead of time before I bring a character to the table.

Frankly, I find it very discouraging. It makes me sad, even. It takes away the joy I used to have in learning new rules and imagining new character because it just makes me think of all the rhetoric and self defense I'd need to engage in before even starting the game.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Why or why not? Is this a good or bad thing regarding the rarity system?

My question is what is says on the tin. Is there a way to play a character that uses thrown weapons that does not require the use of returning runes? I feel like throwing a returning shuriken or javelin is kind of dumb but that seems to be the only way to play a character specializing in these kinds of weapons.

Am I missing something?

I am going to be starting a game soon and I am going to house rule in more feats.

Specifically:
Starting at level 3 and every odd level thereafter, you gain an additional class feat with a level requirement of up to 1/2 your character level rounded up; these can't be multiclass feats.

What does this rule break? What new builds does this open up? Should I be worried about any of these builds as a GM?

My players are generally pretty smart/experienced RPG nerds and all but one took part in the playtest.

I have not followed developer scuttlebutt since the playtest ended but has anything been said if anything will replace the role of resonance in the final game?

Have they indicated that they will try to regulate magic items with only prices?

That seems like the worst and least interesting course of action to me but I also know that is what a lot of people clamored for and I know a lot of people besides me were actually satisfied with the PF1 item meta. I could maybe see a price-only system working for me if the game also gives good guidance to GMs for magic item purchasing/management.

I encourage people to report existing evidence and bloviate on whatever sparse evidence exists.

Right now, it seems like casters need to have high dexterity to have any kind of effective ranged options and that seems weird to me. Looking through the cantrips, the only save-based direct damage options are disrupt undead (which is highly situational of course) and electric arc (which is quite good but it is odd that it is the only option).

I am fine with attack-roll-based cantrips doing more damage since it gives casters better reasons for investing in attack stats (though why they would ever invest in strength rather than dex is beyond me), but I feel like a casting-stat focused caster should have a few more options when they are not burning spell slots. For that matter, I feel like Warrior/Casters should be able to dump their dex a little bit and actually let their casting be a reliable ranged option rather than having to choose dex as their second best stat like nearly every other build in the game.

I was flipping through the wizard again and I just realized that I have no idea how the Spell Combination feat is supposed to work when you are combining spells with different types of/different number of actions.

If I want to caste true strike (1 action verbal component) and longstrider (2 action verbal and somatic) on myself, am I using one, two, or three actions to do that?

If I want to combine true strike (1 action verbal component) and jump (1 action somatic component), what type of action am I using here?

I know level 20 abilities are all kind of silly and don't matter but there should probably be a ruling on this somewhere.

It is also a unclear on how this kind of combined spell handles range if the two spells have different ranges.

I will preface the thread by saying this: I actually like resonance and sort of want it to stay in the game in more or less the form it currently takes. That said, other people really don't like it and Jason has been quoted elsewhere that he does not think resonance will make it to the release version of the game in its current form.

I have an alternative that I have been thinking about. I propose a system players can use as many items as they want but will begin incurring "spell sickness" after their first use of a magic item.

To offer an example as an explanation, a player wants to drink some healing potions. A player could drink one healing potion in a day without making a spell check but after that first use of a "healing" item, the player would need to make a flat check or 10 (or perhaps 11 - 1/2 Cha mod) in order to gain the benefit of another item. When a player fails this check, the consumable is not wasted and the item still activates but the player gains a level of "Spell Sickness".

Spell sickness lasts until the player takes a rest for the night or casts a special ritual that removes spell sickness. The rank of spell sickness applies a penalty to saves against spells, spell sickness checks, and . If a player gets to 3 spell sickness, they also gain slowed 1--effectively ending their adventuring day. At spell sickness 4, the player falls unconscious.

Additional item keywords and class feats/features could modify this system of course.

You could introduce lines of items with the "redundant" keyword for instance. Redundant keyword items might be more expensive than competing items but could ignore the need to to make spell sickness rolls once a day. Similarly, higher level items might have the keywords "double redundant" that lets you use the item once after you had already used a "redundant" keyword item already. You could even go farther and eventually introduce "triple redundant" items.

The ritual part of this story is actually inspired by another thread that asks if there can be ritual healing spells added to the game:
Introduce a common ritual that removes spell sickness, the cost of which is dependent on a player's level and whose cost increases each time a player tries to benefit from the spell again in the same day.

A proposed cost:
1gp/level in materials. Double this cost every time a character would try to benefit from this spell again in the same day.

Do people have thoughts?

We ran Pale Mountain with 1 GM and 2 players each building two PCs.
The party composition was as followed:

Dwarven Crossbow Ranger (played by me)
Dwarven Evocation Wizard (played by me)
Dwarven Wild Druid (played by my friend)
Dwarven Warrior w/ Dwarven Waraxe (Played by my friend)

General comments and impressions

-Healing-
All healing was spread between the Druid w/ the support of a lesser staff of healing and the wizard w/ the support of a lv. 1 wand of heal and the extra resonance feat. This healing solution worked well enough, actually. The party actually managed to complete 3 encounters per day even with our limited healing capacity but we played it pretty carefully and got lucky here and there.

-Crossbow Ranger Impressions-
I actually found this to be reasonably effective. I used hide armor and maxed out my dexterity while also prioritizing wisdom and constitution. I dropped strength like so many hot rocks. When I used hunt target I could attack at a range of 240 ft w/o penalty and deal 1d10+1 damage. This comes in handy! This build kind of leans on critical hits and favored aim (which brought his attacks to +12) to be effective. This guy is a real one trick pony in combat and honestly kind of boring to play, but out of combat he was pretty useful because his skill list included survival (in which he is an expert), stealth, and thievery. Even though this build seems to work best when staying at range and out of trouble, I often found myself walking slowly towards my enemies while reloading my crossbow in the hopes of taking heat off the party’s casters due to my relatively high HP, AC, and saves. It made me feel like a low rent medieval judge dread except that my “gun” sometimes only does 2 damage.

-Evocation Wizard Impressions-
I really should have picked up armor proficiency but with my charisma penalty meant that I would be unable to help out with healing w/o remarkable resonance so I tried to muddle through by blowing a 2nd level spell each day on mage armor. I’d call him a “glass cannon” but that would actually imply he was particularly dangerous. He was more like a “glass slingshot”. On my first day of adventuring, I realized that I readied some bad spells. Namely, I readied flaming sphere and a couple other spells that had no effect on a successful save. Flaming sphere is g*+#*%n worthless. Every monster in this scenario besides the mummies has reflex saves high enough that they seem to almost always succeed and this spell does no damage on a miss. The wording on it makes it seem like you can only ever effect one monster at a time per round and it does not seem to do damage to the monsters that it moves through. This is a sorry state for a one time favored spell. On days 2 and 3, I switch my level 2 evocation spell to heightened burning hands. On separate notes: Tasha’s hideous laughter ended up being nice and magic missile was indispensable reliable damage in the Manticore fight.

-Great Weapon Fighter impressions-
This build seems really straightforward and good. The GM handed this fellow a +1 dwarven axe and then the fighter proceeded to hand fools their asses. He only had a rough time in the Manticore fight because it stayed out of axe range. It felt real bad when this guy missed because he was like ½ of the party’s damage usually.

-Wild Druid impressions-
I feel like my friend didn’t do this build particularly well but it still seemed serviceable enough. Between his healing staff and readied heal spells, this guy kind of planned on being our main healing source. The plan was to fight as a giant frog or whatever and save most of his spells for heals and those few situations where frog combat seemed untenable. This strategy kinda sorta worked. He also had an 8 charisma so he could only use his healing staff twice a day. Moreover, he had middling dex (14) and no magic armor (to maintain resonance) so he took some crits for sure when he wasn’t frogging it up (which he could only do twice a day cuz he only had 14 strength).

In terms of the general effectiveness of your character, it seems to me that the number of meaningful options available to your build has gone down. Ancestry feats and General feats seem to be generally less useful and more situational than your combat feats with the possible exception of those ancestry feats that grant you weapon proficiencies and the human's option of gaining an additional level 1 class feat.

In PF1, a talent-based class would essentially gain a meaningful new power every level in that they were always either getting a new talent or a new feat which could be useful in building towards a new playstyle or just gain the character an extra talent.

Moreover, the game is still full of effective feat chains that take up a lot of feats to remain effective:
Animal Companions, Multiclass feats, Spell Power Builds, totem feats etc.

I am always wishing I could build a character that does two things well rather than just one thing well.

Want to make a ranger that has an animal companion and uses crossbows competitively?
You can't.

Want to make an alchemist whose bombs are a meaningful offensive threat but also have poisons that are worth a damn?
You can't.

Want to make an arcane monk that multiclasses wizard so he can use intelligence as his spell pool?
You can't. (you kinda can but you suck)

I either want more class feats or I want general feats to be a lot better (and likely include the option to use general feats as multiclass feats).

It seems to me that monsters in general are calibrated to be hit-able by an optimized fighter about 65%-55% of the time and hit-able to other optimized classes about 50%-35% of the time. Have other people noticed this? Has anyone done the spreadsheet work yet?

To me, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs. Missing on your first and best attack feels bad. Moreover, having all attacks having a high fail rate makes the game less tactically interesting as that level of uncertainty limits the amount you can plan ahead. It also makes the game really swingy in general.

I would much prefer it if all attacks were generally more accurate and monsters and players just had more health.

I want to talk about things that you had hoped to see "down the line" in PF1 but the designers never made.

For instance, I am sort of bummed that we never got Mark's "expanded" version of the Medium that was discussed during the playtest for Occult Adventures; for the uninitiated, Mark's early pass at that class involved having one spirit for each arcana of the Harrow Deck. I was super hyped to play that version of the class and kind of underwhelmed by the final class and its archetypes. I had always hoped that we would see the "original" version of the class as a soft cover or something.

I also always wanted to see a true dedicated "generalist" similar to the 3.5 DnD factotum. The final version of medium kind of got at the "factotum" type of character but I would have prefered a class that could "do anything" comparable to other classes (spells/skills/martial attacks) limited by a small finite resource rather than a class that could "choose one thing to do worse than another class at the start of each day". I get that is a design challenge but I do not think it is an insurmountable one and I hope to see this sort of thing in 2E eventually.

I wanted to see a mundane "leader" type class (like the 4e Martial) and--perhaps more specifically--a "lazy lord" style of class that could impel their allies to take extra actions and/or gave out bonuses in general (ala the Noble class in Star Wars Saga Edition or certain 4e Martial builds). You could do some of this "lazy lord" stuff with certain bard spells and haste, but I have always thought that playing with action economy is sufficiently fertile soil that a whole class could go there. I also generally like playing "squad leader" styles of characters and I don't know if any of the archetypes that tried to do this sort of thing (Like the "sensei" archetype) ever really did the job I wanted. I'd love to see a "commander" in PF 2E. It seems like Ranger may get some tech to support this kind of build in 2E but I'd really like to get that kind of build going earlier than it seems the Ranger will be able to.

I am also really bummed that PF1 never experimented with alternate magic systems like 3.5e eventually did (i.e. Tome of Magic, Magic of Incarnum, 3e Psionics, Tome of Battle, etc.). I know a lot of that stuff burned people out but those later books kept me interested in 3.X way longer than I would have been interested otherwise; in many ways, it kept me interested in DnD long enough to jump ship to Pathfinder. Occult Adventures got at this alternate magic system stuff a little bit with Kineticist and Medium, but there was never anything as well developed as some of the stuff we saw in 3.5e. Honestly, I kind of quit playing Pathfinder 1E after Occult Adventures underwhelmed me (though I picked up Starfinder right when it dropped). I am a little worried that I'll eventually get bored with casters in 2e since Paizo is cutting down on the number of spell lists they have running around. Maybe something radically different could scratch itches that uniform spell list leave behind.

This is a class idea that I had been tinkering with for a while. The ideas for this class actually drew heavily from the game Bravely Default--both from that game's BP system and the Time Mage class in particular.

This is a class with a d6 hit die, 1/2 bab, and no traditional casting.

I generally like where the class is at, but feed back is always cool.

Here is the text:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tlgz7pnot4dsc2a/Chronomancer.docx? dl=0

Here is the chart:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/78bekcm37fk0nhu/chronomancer.xlsx? dl=0

I have an older version with a lot more flavor information, but a lot of it was specific to my fantasy setting so I took it out since I felt like it kind of cluttered the document to not much effect.

If you want flavor from my setting, though: Chronomancy is an ability that manifests from contact with certain extraterrestrial creatures or creatures from certain reaches of the far planes. In my setting, there is a dwarven government that experiments with supernatural powers besides magic in secret (gaining otherworldly knowledge through secret interplanetary teleportation). As such, Chronomancers in my setting are often members or former members of that government's programs or have come into contact with incomprehensible beings from other worlds.

The specific power source of chronomancy comes from an idea I have in my setting about the weird physics that allows magic to exist on some planets but not others that has to do with Gods having a kind of gravity that makes reality "softer" on planets where they exist (which also creates a sort of localized series of extradimensional planes that are inaccessible from other planets). Chronomancers directly interact with the "reality stuff" that allows magic to exist but chronomancy is not quite magic in itself.

Is having a secret identity useful when your party members don't have a secret identity?

I would argue that it is not very useful. Even if the powers at be never learn the Deuce Gwain isn't really Gatman (the shining gun of Justice), they will quickly learn that Gatman does associate with Phil Fighterman, card-carrying adventuring fighter with 3 kids and a wife. Then Duke Evilface kidnaps little Stevie Fighterman and everything as as bad off as if Evilface knew Gatman's real identity. Moreover, perhaps Phil Fighterman is in the employ of a one Deuce Gwain (the party is probably also friends with the secret identity, right?); so now, the right honorable Duke Evilface has every reason in the world to investigate Mr. Gwain's business practices and perhaps look into why exactly Deuce seems to disappear every evening.

Frankly, I feel that the secret identity mechanic is worthless if you think about it from a story-telling standpoint. Hiding your own identity is really only helpful when the vigilante is working alone, but I tend to like playing pathfinder in the context of a party.

In that context, the all vigilante party might work, but I feel like that is tying the players' hands a little bit.

Let us talk solutions:

1. Secret Team Feature: At a certain level (I would say 3 or 5 maybe), the vigilante can form a sort of "society of justice" where party members who adventure with the Vigilante while in disguise obtain their own immunity to srcying so long as they are disguised with the costumed Vigilante near by. Allies could perhaps also benefit from the first effect of Loyal Aid. I think this sort of idea has a lot of precedent in the idea of there being a "Bat Family" [Nightwing, Robin, Oracle, etc] or really any hero that tends to deputize others.

2. Special Feats For Allies: Allies can gain the previous benefit so long as they have a teamwork feat (which the Vigilante himself would get automatically). I think this is unnecessarily punitive given that it would eat up one feat for every player, but it would keep the all vigilante party uniquely useful. I don't feel that needs to be a design goal, however; the second bard is almost always going to be much less useful than the first (unless you are playing with certain archetypes), so it is fair if the same thing is true for the vigilante. Perhaps something like "amateur vigilante" could solve this problem similarly, but that too is punitive.

3. The "Adventurer" Persona The Vigilante actually has a third adventuring identity that still gets the abilities of the vigilante form (save for the vigilante's renown-based intimidate schtick) but is distinct from the social identity and "vigilante" identity. It may be easier to draw the line between adventuring identity and the crime-fighting identity, but at least it has a chance of keeping the party safe from supervillain intrigues.

4. The Power to Cloud Men's Minds: This is a lot like the first suggestion but could happen more so on the battlefield (and is perhaps a little more of a stretch). When a vigilante makes his appearance, perhaps he can automatically make an intimidate check (or some such thing) that scares people so bad that they could not possibly remember the face's of the vigilante's allies. Perhaps you could take out the intimidate check and have this effect apply to any enemy that is defeated by a vigilante and his party, whether that means getting knocked out or having to run away. This later version of the ability makes the class feature more reliable and makes intimidate less of a necessity.

People in several threads here are complaining about the social identity. Some people think they should get access to more (or really any) of their vigilante talents in their social identity form and yet others want the social identity shaved off to make room for more immediately relevant class abilities.

I don't like those solutions but I do like the idea of buffing the Vigilante identity.

My idea 1
In another thread, I said that I would like to see some bard-like leader-y abilities added to the class. Perhaps the social identity could have a small pool of leadership points (1/2 lvl+cha mod) that he can spend as a swift action to grant allies a moral bonus to attack for a round. At higher levels, you could do other things with this resource, but the small size of the pool will keep this from being the "main" combat mode for the class.

My idea 2
Alternately, perhaps there could be different social identity "paths" as well.
Good paths might include:

Noble: When in your social identity, you have bonuses to dealing with the upper crusts of society and perhaps you gain contacts amongst a community’s leadership when you spread renown. Maybe you can have a special hex-like (one use per enemy ability) that lets you cow members of lower social stations.

Crime Boss: When in your social form, you can get additional bonuses for dealing with criminals and are likely to gain contacts in the underworld when you spread your renown. Perhaps you can give people a criminal-mastermind like ability thank can give allies additional "training" in things like stealth and picking locks while you are advising them in your social form.

Merchant: When in your social form, you have additional bonuses for dealing with other merchants and you always know where to find good product (you treat communities as one size category larger for the purposes of the availability of items). Maybe this type could also get a version of the “I have just the right thing for this power” when they have access to a cart or ship that is already transporting goods (where you can spend gold for an item on the spot up to some limit based on your level to “find” that item already in your cart somewhere).

Performer: You have additional bonuses to your given favored type of performance when in your social form, and you will often attract one or two wealthy patron contacts when you spread your renown. This could also get a weaker version of certain types of bardic performances.

Artist/Artisan: You could have additional bonuses to your favored type of crafting when you are in your social form and can craft nonmagical items much quicker and at reduced costs of production in an area when you have spreed your renown (as everyone wants their input good associated with this famous artisan). Perhaps you could also fix broken weapons or grant bonuses to allies using weapons or tools of your own design.

Those are just two approaches, however.

I would love to hear about people's thoughts on these and their own ideas.

Also, what do people think of the design philosophy that the social identity should have more power but that power should not necessarily increase the power of the vigilante identity?
To what extent to these ideas or your ideas fall in line with that stated philosophy?

Okay, so if mystic bolt does not count as a weapon for the purposes of arcane strike does that mean you can use mystic bolt and still have a free hand to reload a weapon? This ruling could also be important for feats that require a free off hand such as fencing grace.

Is your magic bolt hand free (and thus not a held "weapon" for the purpose of arcane strike) or does mystic bolt get the worst of all worlds?

As it stands, I think mystic bolt is an interesting class ability but may be too weak to really be a particularly meaningful addition to damage in a fight if it is limited to one attack per round per 8 BAB. Mystic bolt well circumvents the classic 3/4 BAB problem by making an attack against touch rather than AC, but the damage is still pretty small.

Maybe TWF+sword is okay, but I suspect that this will start looking pretty lame at later levels when that sword starts missing a ton. Perhaps a gun (pumped with arcane strike) would do a good job doling out damage, though?

I dunno. has this ruling been made yet? Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

I saw an archetype version of the Spellslinger yesterday. I thought it would work better as a full class. I took all of the level 1 abilities from the spellslinger wizard archetype to hand to this class at level 1. I think they are working well enough.

Past that, I am wondering what opinion people have regarding the Spell Round escapade. I think things with it are balanced well enough since it adds an attack roll to a spell that otherwise would not require one, but I am still interested in other opinions.

I know some people don't like Arcanist spellcasting, but I am not going to take that out. I sort of consider "Clear Head" to be a signature class feature and that really doesn't make much sense otherwise.

Class text

Charts

Just the other day I saw someone say that they wished there were a class that focused on blasting. That got me to thinking about that design challenge.

In the end, I kind of came up with the idea for a kind of "Dragon Ball Z" wizard that mixed ki and magic to make blasts with the residual energy left over from spells. I drew heavily on the arcanist and the monk for design tropes but and the class's core mechanic is something like a ki pool or the arcanist's spell reservoir. They cast like an arcanist but with 6 levels of spells.

However, this class's main trick is the ability to get temporary resource points from the spells they cast. This encourages this class to save its spells for combat since they rely on spells to generate the temporary resources they need to be effective in combat as blasters.

I am open to comments or suggestions, especially for new wave exploits and thoughts on balance.

Here is the class chart

Here are the class abilities

So I bought the 5e player's handbook for D&D on friday and I think it is really well designed. I just don't really like it. This has to do with the complexity of the game.

I may write more parts later.

Part 1: Pros of 5th Editions Simplicity and Where it Annoys Me
Compared to 3rd edition, 4th edition, and Pathfinder, there are far fewer choices for players in 5e. Feats are an "optional rule" (which I hate) and you choose between improving your attributes or getting the feat; I recognize some cleverness here. For the most part, taking the feat at lower class levels is for chumps (accuracy and damage all key off the same stat for almost every class), so players without much gaming savvy are going to be making a lot of the best choices just through their inclination to make the simplest choice. Moreover, these feats come very rarely (most classes have just 4 feats over all 20 levels. Even though the feats themselves offset this by having more punch in each one (each single feat is more like what a short feat chain would grant in pathfinder), an even mildly optimal build is only going to have one or two feats at all. The mind reels with the lack of possibilities!

Without feats, player choice must come in the form of race, background, and class. I will admit that a lot of characters' level 1 choices are made with race and background. Some racial abilities are kinda neat and each background has a neat little ability. However, there are not enough backgrounds (many of my favorite backgrounds such as trader, politician,and lawman are notably absent) and races are about what one might expect. Race has about as much mechanical weight as 2 feats taken in a bundle and backgrounds are a delivery mechanism for additional skills plus one RPing mechanic. I like that the background gives RP mechanics, but I dislike how the only RP mechanic in the game is given at first level. If I had my druthers, I would want a game where your background or profession could progress along with your class in some way (perhaps through just structured roleplaying) that could unlock new social advantages.

In the war of combat archetypes some things are done right:
Dex builds are better at range but worse at melee while strength builds are the opposite. I will note that strength builds have a ranged option at all in the form of thrown weapons keying of of strength for both accuracy and damage.
Between sword and board, dual wielding, and great weapons, the one handed sword does the least damage, dual wielding does "middle" damage (and is the most viable damage option for melee dex builds), and great weapons do the most damage. Dual wielding does jump ahead of great weapons for some low-level ranges and can overtake great weapons for even broader ranges if you take the associated feat. Conversely, sword and board will have the highest defense while the TWF feat will grant the second highest defense and great weapon fighters will have the lowest defense.

I think Pathfinder should strive for this model in the futures. These build balances feel right to me. Every build has its advantages and disadvantages and have various places at the gaming table. In 5e, this goal is achieved almost seamlessly in the way one-handed and light weapon damage is balanced against two handed weapon damage and the way strength-based thrown weapons balance against dex-based bows and crossbows. Actually, there are a lot of little tweaks and interactions that I am leaving out (like how crossbows can become the "optimal" ranged damage build with a feat, but still are balanced against bows since bows have a slightly greater range).

It is almost immaculate but also kind of boring in its execution. If I make a good two-handed-fighter in 5e, I feel like I have done nothing at all. Comparing 5e to pathfinder, I miss having a guiding hand in my character's effectiveness. That is not to say that there are no "bad" builds in 5e (you can still have a barbarian put his highest stats into intelligence and charisma), but a short list of guidelines will always lead to the same short list of "good" 5e character builds (which I would say there are around 4 or 5 for each class on average).

Am I a weirdo for feeling this way? I feel like a lot of the joy I got from 3.5 and Pathfinder is thinking about builds and how rules work together. I like that system mastery is part of Pathfinder, finding new builds and concepts within a vast myriad of rules.

I just can't get that with 5e and I feel as though maintaining complexity should be the core point of differentiation between the Pathfinder and D&D lines.

What do you think?

I am maybe gonna do more sections on specific classes and magic in general later maybe. Should this be on another board?

This guy was talking about making the Final Fantasy Dark Knight class and I got sort of excited about it. So I thought that I would want to take a shot at it and proceeded to take said shot at it. I tied it to themes of "death" (and negative energy) so it would fit in most settings (I couldn't have it dealing "dark" damage).

Here is the Dark Knight:
Dun dun dun

Just banged it out in like two or three hours so I am pretty open to suggestions. I am also lazy/busy, though.

As such, edits will probably come slow (I have another class on here that I would probably work on first).

My friend on the internet was complaining to me on skype about how terrible crossbows are in Pathfinder when they were like the noble-killing napalm of the late medieval era. So I made a house rule for him. Here it is:

Simple Ranged Weapon:
Heavy Duty Crossbow: this specially made partially metal crossbow has much more pull strength than a standard crossbow. They are designed with a metal crank that pulls back the bow string.

Damage: 1d8 (small) 1d10(medium)
Crit: 19-20 x2
Range: 120ft
Cost: 100gp
Qualities: Special

Special Qualities: Like composite longbows, the Heavy Duty Crossbow allows the user to add part of the wielder's strength to the damage of the weapon. All particular Heavy Duty Crossbows are made with a particular strength rating. If the user's strength modifier is at least the rating of the crossbow, this weapon takes one full round to reload. If your strength is below the strength rating, the Heavy Duty Crossbow takes one additional full round action to reload for each point wielder's strength modifier is below the strength rating of the Crossbow. The crossbow deals 1.5 additional points of damage for each point of strength rating, the heavy duty crossbow has. Each point of strength rating increases the cost of the heavy duty crossbow by 150gp. Without enchantments, the maximum rating of a steel or iron heavy duty crossbow is 4, the maximum rating of a mythril heavy duty crossbow is 6, and the maximum rating of an adamantium heavy duty crossbow is 8. A heavy duty crossbow may be fired in one hand at a -6 penalty.

New Adaptive Rules:
A crossbow with the adaptive quality (still 1000 gp) adjusts the strength rating of a heavy duty crossbow to the wielder's strength modifier but only up to the crossbow's normal maximum rating plus the weapon's enhancement modifier. If one creature loads a weapon with the adaptive quality for another creature, that second creature must have a strength modifier of at least the strength modifier of the creature that loaded the crossbow or the creature firing the crossbow makes the attack at -4 as the strength of the trigger pull has also adapted to the strength of the creature that loaded the crossbow.

The Class:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4o19rOxPaipS2xtQ0NvMUVYVHc/edit?usp=shari ng

The Reflections:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4o19rOxPaipVC1Xc3dSQl9QaTQ/edit?usp=shari ng

For the past two weeks or so, I have been working on a "Prince" class whose existence is compelled by a few things:

First, I wanted to make a lazy lord class for Pathfinder. Though there are a few ways to do it already, I wanted to make a class that gains this ability as a core class feature.

Second, I wanted to make a half BAB class that approaches Wizards in their complexity and versatility without just giving them full casting. I did end up giving them access to a lot of spells through the Spell Crafter reflections (which will take you some reading to understand what I mean), but the class is not overflowing with spell slots to to solve problems.

Third, I wanted a factotum-style face class that is not the bard. Moreover, I wanted the class to ACTUALLY be able to fill in for missing party roles rather than just pretend to fill them in while playing sick guitar riffs of power (I have some other factotum-y ideas that I might implement as an archetype later).

And fourth, I wanted an actual prince class that kind of sucked but had minions and the resources of a kingdom to help solve his problems. I am not sure how balanced this part of the class is, but it makes up a lot of the class's class features in the second half of the class. I pretty much give them an partly expanded and partly limited version of the Leadership feat.

I am looking for really any sort of constructive feedback. I reserve the right to chastise anyone I think is being a dick. I will chastise them so damn hard, you guys. It will be nuts.

Let me jump out ahead of one criticism though:
"You should call this class something else" and/or "This is not what I think of when I think of a `prince' class"

Rebuttal:
No YOU call the class something different! May I suggest Magical Prince, Spirit Binder, Ghost Lord, Genie/Imp/Elemental/etc. Master, Archpimp or some combination thereof?

I chose just the name prince because this is the class I made when I followed the concept of a Prince character class to its logical conclusion. They need magic to access their kingdoms and minions in a way that starts to be either balanced or possible.

Moreover, I wanted to call the class something descriptive and evocative while also remaining a single word. I want the player to be reminded of a sort of Miltonic sinister "Prince" or Machiavelli's "The Prince" when they read through the character. Also Aladdin. Some stuff in this class is inspired by that one scene in Aladdin.