Spooky

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In place of Bloodrager, what about Wreaker, Maelstrom, Furor, Havoc, Fury, Frenzy, or Stormblade?


Did a bit of poking around earlier and it's kind of scary how many different scholarly adventurer who gets combat advantage through knowledge checks have been done for d20-based systems.

So, sneak attack does an average of 3.5 per die extra damage, and that comes every other level, so it's something like 1.75 extra per level, assuming all hits... and since it is considered harder to achieve than some of the alternatives I have seen for it (my instinct is that flanking is probably the easiest way to meet sneak attack requirements in most cases, and it's not hard to flank in most cases either, but I'll run with the idea that it's harder to achieve overall), it is allowed to do more damage...

It's probably not too far a stretch to give them something that equalizes to +1 damage/level if they are meant to be near base rogue potential.

What if we took the smite evil mechanic and refluffed and typed it to make it based on knowledge of anatomy/weak points, or whatever else struck us as appropriate for this theme/flavor? Under a certain set of specific circumstances, you can achieve this bonus, and maybe you get +Int to attack and +1/level to damage.

I know it's not a rogue kinda thing, per se, but when I looked at what got posted upthread about the alternative sneak attack that already exists (I am drawing a blank on the name right now) where you deal +2 damage instead of +1d6, but you can get the damage bonus when you attack something subject to a negative condition. +2 damage/2 levels averages out to +1 damage/level.


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I see we are debating terminology again. What count as spirits? Between how they are mechanically defined in d20-based books (including some 3pp Pathfinder products), it seems like:

incorporeal undead (spirits of the dead/ancestors)

fey and elementals (spirits of the land/nature)

And then other stuff is up for grabs, depending on whether you want to count astral entities projecting, non-undead that are naturally incorporeal, outsiders, or whatever, plus anything specifically defined as a spirit that may not fit these other categories, for whatever reason (I could see Princess Mononoke style magical beasts being considered spirits, especially with some of the comparisons in fluff I've seen between shaman spirits and kami in discussions).

In terms of stories outside D&D, whether fiction or mythology, it seems pretty frequent, if not universal, that spirits are basically ghosts/ancestors and land/elemental creatures or god-like representations of animals.

If we want to preserve that flavor, there does need to be some hybridizing in the spell list, whether it amounts to giving one class's and additions from another, or whatever. I think witch would be the closest to covering it without making a new list or needing to mash together cleric and druid - because it is a spell list that has already been hybridized plus it includes some of its own elements. If it's between druid and cleric spells, I think druid is the best as a thematic base and then the "spirit" spells that people believe are necessary but lacking from druids can come from clerics/oracles.

Heals, buffs, debuffs, wards, weather, interaction with other elements, divination, psychology/enchantment/mind-based effects, inspiration/knowledge, language/poetry and/or literacy/writing, some offense - whether derived from another category or separately, and shapechanging (plenty of shamanic material deals with physical or spiritual shapechanging) probably cover a good portion of a shaman's kit. In an animist worldview, potentially anything could have a spirit, so there is really a multitude of possible spirit types out there, which means a shaman could theoretically do a wealth of things, but there is a theme/flavor to how they do it and that usually focuses around these ideas.

edit: cut a large chunk about flavor issues for space/relevance.