Nikaea the Beastmaster's page

This is for Voyager.

The idea of suppressive fire is to make the enemy take cover for fear of getting shot, keeping the enemy pinned down so that you can flank, call in armor or fire support to wipe them out, cover a retreat, or do whatever else requires keeping the enemy in one place. In game terms, this is how I feel it should work.

While wielding a semiautomatic or fully automatic weapon you may suppress a target that has full cover. Beginning suppression is a standard action, and you may suppress a five foot area with a semiautomatic weapon or a 10 foot area with a fully automatic weapon. You must fire 5 rounds with a semiautomatic weapon or 10 with a fully automatic when you begin suppression (full attacks are almost always standard actions in Voyager, as are some normally full round spells, as I want people to be able to fire and move a fair distance in one round, not stand around making five foot steps at the most), and you must fire the same amount of rounds every round thereafter. These rounds are fired at the cover the target is behind, not the target itself. If the target exposes itself in any way that downgrades the cover to partial cover or no cover at all, you make an immediate full attack against the target. The suppression ends if you fail to fire the required number of rounds or somehow fail to hit the cover.

If you successfully hit a target with 3/4 or 9/10 cover with a ranged attack (You need not be suppressing the target. This is a separate rule from suppression), you automatically threaten a critical hit. This is because a target with that much cover is likely only exposing the head or upper chest, so while that person is harder to hit with gunfire, any shot that does hit is very likely to have hit something vital.

Thoughts?

How's this for an ability?

Oh, you could call the archetype the "Action Hero"

Endless Thunder (Ex): An Action Hero need not carry ammunition with him. At 3rd level, the Action Hero's firearm is considered loaded at all times. He need not reload after firing his weapon, it merely stays loaded endlessly.

I'm willing to consider it as a Barbarian rage power.

There's already Urban barbarian; more modernized barbarians that can apply their +4 to any physical stat and can do things that require thought. Also, the move through crowds with ease etc; probably the "default" in this sort of campaign.

Urban Barbarian is good, but I want this archetype to maintain it's wildnerness ability instead of having abilities that deal with crowds. The Urban Barbarian should be available, but this would be an alternative for those who want to be rural Barbarians with ranged focus. Vanilla Barbarian also remains available.

Also, a druid or barbarian being a little "behind the times" and charging in against massed musket fire is pretty thematic.

Okay. So druids still work well.

Oh, I've decided that if you are proficient with a particular firearm, you are also proficient when swinging it like a club. I could so see a Barbarian doing that.

I've also thought up a Barbarian archetype that switches the Str bonus to a Dex bonus during rage (so pissed off, she's aiming and firing on scary good reflexes). That makes a good ranged Barbarian, and it fits thematically (Remember pissed off Schwarzenegger firing at everything in sight? That's what this archetype is.).

This is what I'm going for with the ranged Barbarian archetype. Skip ahead to 1:35 where the shooting starts.

There are two great builds of the Druid; the combat Druid and the support Druid. While the combat Druid is more popular (more powerful in the first 8 levels, being hands-on is more effective) the support Druid tends to stay on par in mid-levels and vastly outpower in the high levels. If more emphasis is put on the support Druid, melee is not a necessary element; indeed, when ranged combat is the standard, the support druid's array of de-buffs (weather domain) and options to make sight impossible make them a much more imposing class. They just lose the default standard option; a shame, but in a world of firearms turning into an animal and gnawing things alongside your companion may not be as effective.

Aw. I like wild shape. What if I kept the ability, but acknowledged it as less useful than in a melee setting and added a couple extra things to compensate that make support Druids a bit better with weapons?

The Voyager Project

Thanks to the way Pathfinder is designed, most of the core and base classes, even the Barbarian, look like they should work just fine in a campaign where firearms are the primary weapon. The Fighter needs a replacement for Armor Mastery and the Rogue needs to be able to sneak attack at greater than 30 feet, but other than that the only glaring changes needed are defense bonuses to replace armor. The Cavalier is an exception to this, but a host of ranged archetypes. What I need

In this thread, I am handling the Druid. I don't have that much experience with them, so I do not know how heavily they use Wild Shape, which seems to me a primarily melee ability. Are ranged Druid builds feasible? If Druids are a melee heavy class, what can be done to make them not so melee heavy?

I'm willing to make them. Just post the animal you want stats for, and I'll write them up and post theme here. Please do not ask for anything that already has a stat block here.

Please only ask for creatures that exist, once existed (yes, I will do dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals), or are well described in myth and legend (this covers anything from fiction [Nothing from copyrighted fiction, please. Keep it limited to myth and legend.] and crytozoological things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster). Animals and Magical Beasts only, please. If I cannot find enough information on a requested creature I may refuse the request for lack of materiel to work with. Nothing with intelligence greater than 2, please.