So, I'm playing in a really casual game with some friends. I am the only player with any experience at all. The DM wants me to build something fun and thematic but viable in case the rest of the party fails at building things. Straight up cheese is discouraged, and as such I want to build a believable character. As such, I will be selecting weapons and things based on what suits the character, not was is strictly the best option.
As a bit of background (you can skip this if you want to get to the crunch), Undines in this setting are semi-aquatic nomadic sea people whose evolution was influenced over centuries by a whale and dolphin-lubbng marid from early humans living on the coast. Over the generations, they moved further and further out to sea, learning to hunt with the dolphins and whales they travel with. They are reclusive by nature, and as such are more or less unheard of by anyone that doesn't live underwater. They have been nearly wiped out by the sahuagin(sp?), and are now reduced to a few scattered tribes on the fringes of sea elf territory. The pod is lead by a huntmaster, who I imagine is a tactician(psionic) or some s@+%. My character was his son. Long story short, he inherited some psionic ability, but we separated from the pod during a sahuagin attack shortly after his father died and was then marooned by a storm(which he may or may not have caused, GM is being enigmatic), and finally rescued by human sailors. He was so traumatized by the whole thing(he was 10 at the time) that he has a block on his psionic abilities now and a pretty piss-poor fragmented memory of what all went down. The sailors helped him look for his people for a few years to no avail, decided to adopted him, gave him a silly human name because aquan names are hard to pronounce and tend to involve echolocation, and eventually took him shoreside. As he grew up, he got used to life on land and spent some time at a monastery(where he gained his first level in waterben- er, monk) in hopes that repairing his damaged chi would help him to figure out what the f@*# happened to his people.
So here we are. We are level one. I am a flowing monk. I carry a short spear because I can throw it and it makes sense underwater. I mostly attack with unarmed strikes though.
We rolled stats, and I got this after race adjustments.
STR 10
CON 14
DEX 17
INT 14
WIS 17
CHA 13
Racially, I traded water affinity for hydrated vitality, hydraulic push for amphibious (quingong will give me more use for hydraulic push eventually anyways), considering trading cold resist for something (maybe blindsense?)
Featwise, I am going with Weapon Finesse, Improved Unarmed Strike, and Improved Trip. I am taking both the Flowing and Quinggong archetypes for monk. Level 2, I plan to take another level of monk. 3 and 4 will be rogue, building to vicious stomp. Then what. Probably back to monk for the quingong stuff. Maybe a dip in fighter so I can start working on elemental fist stuff. I'm afraid I'm trying to do too many things.
My questions are, will this be viable at all? How am I going to pull of a rope dart? What is the fastest way to get Marid Style? Should I dip AGAIN into unarmed fighter, or just stick with monk and rogue? Should I also take maneuver master? Any archetypes for rogue worth a s###? Is hydraulic maneuver actually any good/worth a feat? What other maneuvers should I try to utilize? Disarm? Grapple?
These are the things I want eventually:
A rope dart, because rope darts are cool
Marid Style Feats
Hydraulic Maneuver
Rest of the party is:
Dwarf Paladin
Elf Monk(plain ole vanilla monk, so we should be pretty different)
Human Ranger
Samsaran Druid using 3.5 vow of peace s%*!
We are not optimized.
