Otheusrex's page

Premise:
In both 3.5 and Pathfinder, I've long been dissatisfied with the way the bard works. It isn't about them being either underpowered or overpowered, but it's more about the blahness of their core class power, the bardic performance. This overall is an attempt to address this issue.

Introduction/ Bard 'roles'
A guiding question for me was "what should the bard be uniquely good at?"
In pathfinder, the answer seems to be a 'jack-of-all-trades,' at least in my opinion, since I would rate this as the bard's strongest set of abilities. I like this role, but don't feel it should be the best one, rather, I think it should be one out of several equally good roles a bard can fulfill.

With this in mind, I decided that, with as few changes as possible to the vanilla bard, the roles that one might focus their strengths into fulfilling would be: Combat Aid, Saboteur/Enchantress, and Jack-of-All-Trades. I'll describe these below, but first I want to just say that these aren't set paths that a bard must rigidly adhere so much as models I thought of to make sure bard players would have abilities to enhance their 'role' as they progress should she decide to make a specialist bard. A player is free to pick and choose whatever abilities they like regardless of what 'role' that power up falls into.

Descriptions of roles: (note that a ! indicates a revised or new ability)

Combat aid: what most people think of first with a bard. Wins the day by helping everyone else function better. Classic tactics include inspire courage, competence, heroics, and greatness; buff spells; and battlefield tactics like aid another and flanking; as well as the newer abilities Spell power!, paragon of hope, and mighty guard!

Saboteur/Enchantress: manipulates the battlefield and opponents directly. Both focus on diminishing opponents' ability to fight effectively, but the enchantress does so more through magical means and relies more heavily on mind-affecting effects, whereas the saboteur relies on more roguish methods. They also often exert their influence over several cumulative effects. Sample tactics include mockery!, distraction!, fascinate!, countersong!, dirge of doom, diva of disaster!, cloak and dagger!, suggestion, and deadly performance, as well as their proficiency with whips and access to various saboteur spells.

Jack of All Trades: Probably what most people think of for bards outside of combat, the jack-of-all-trades focuses on filling in the cracks in the party. They make the most of their skills, and even borrow features from other classes to ensure that they have an answer for most every situation. Jack-of-all-trades abilties include: bardic knowledge, lore master, versatile performance, trapfinding!, jack-of-all-trades, as well as their moderate spell casting combined with moderate melee or range fighting ability.

http://i.imgur.com/nAeCmbK.png?1

New Rules:

Perform Skill Checks: perform checks during Bardic Performances can raise (or lower) the DC to resist your Bardic Performance. The Performance Skill Check DC is 15. Exceeding or failing the check results in a bonus or penalty to the DC to resit your Bardic Performance, respectively. The formula for the bonus/penalty is as follows: (perform skill result / 5) -3

New Performance types: the following are additional performance types a bard can invest ranks in. Listed with them are the associated skills a bard can substitute as per the Versatile Performance talents:

Perform (charlatan): sleight of hand, Use Magic Device
Perform (pantomime): stealth, bluff

Bardic Performance: As before, use bardic performances to aid yourself and allies in battle or to achieve other effects. The DC for unwilling creatures to resist your performance is 10+1/2 Bard Level+CHA mod.
Newly changed is that you may start and maintain any number of bardic performances as you have available actions. Maintaining a performance is now a move action, though the talents coordinated performance I and II reduce this to a swift and free action, respectively. Each new performance effect must also be made with a separate performance skill (dance, singing, instrument, oratory, ect...). This allows a low level bard to use both his move action and standard action to maintain 2 bard performances at the same time, a low-mid level bard with the coordinated performance can maintain 3 performances at the same time, and a high level bard with coordinated performance II can maintain as many performances as he has perform skills of the appropriate rank.

Finally, if a performance takes more than 1 round to complete, this means a bard must 'maintain' the performance for those rounds rather than spending X continous rounds of actions to achieve the desired effect. This goes for masterpieces as well.

New Feats: Extra Bard Talent*, Mesmerizing Performer (raises the DC to resist your bard performances by 1), Enthralling Performer (prerequisite Mesmerizing Performer) (raises the DC by an additional 1)
List of Bardic Performances: (grouped by how many ranks a bard needs in order to learn). Any time a Bard may learn a new performance, he may instead choose to learn a Masterpiece for which he qualifies.

(I want to apologize for the lousy formatting on these lists. I originally tried to do these on google docs, but the links wouldn't work on the site for some reason)

List of Bardic Performances:

http://pastebin.com/eZhRiXuT

List of Bard Talents: Arranged in order of availability by level. Prerequisites are put in parantheses

http://pastebin.com/8535Qmvg

* you may select this ability more than once, each time you do, it's benefits applies to a new song or talent.

Overcome Immunity: During his travels, a bard gradually learns to move the unmoveable through their performance. At first level, and every level divisable by 4, a bard chooses one of the following abilities, which enables his mind-affecting performances and spells to function against creatures of the appropriate type, although these creatures receive a +2 bonus on will saves to resist.

Requiem: Undead
Pied Piper: Vermin
Avant-Guard: Abberations
Basso Profundo: Oozes
Plain Song: Plants
Acoustic Maestro: Constructs

Music of the Spheres: at 20th level, your performance can tap into the music that binds all things in the cosmos, allowing your performance to affect any creature even if they are normally immune to such effects with no penalty to your your DC. Against humanoids, your DC is 2 higher.

Kirth Gersen wrote:

Excaliburproxy wrote:

Also: it going off on every attack is going to be a huge problem because every attack roll is then going to involve another d8 roll first. It would really bog down the game.

So, instead of simultaneously throwing some d20s and d8s (or whatever), add some different-colored d8s. You can still throw them all simultaneously.

And then roll more dice when it rolls an 8 or one of the d6s. Lots of time in that time sink.

No, he's saying roll all the dice together at the same time. If it hits but doesn't crit, ignore the other d8 and d6, and if it doesn't hit at all then obviously ignore the damage dice completely

I don't know if you're interested, but the pantheon presented in tolkien's silmarillion is pretty interesting. I know even to provide basic descriptions of all the gods in it along with what domains they might have

Wow, really? you mean like most of the time it does nothing? that sounds pretty awful to me. With a flaming burst weapon, you still get an extra d6 of fire damage all the time on top of the d10 on critical. Even calculating the extra damage you can deal when you get the stunning and confuse effects this prismatic ability still deals a similar amount of damage on average

@excalibur You mean like, only when it crits have the player roll on the prismatic table?

@kirth The weapon ability doesn't duplicate Prismatic Spray exactly, that would be pretty OP indeed! Rather, it's inspired by the prismatic spells in that it does a random effect when it strikes a target like the prismatic spells do, with the actual effects being nerfed versions of the real prismatic spell effects. The red, orange, yellow and blue effects deal 1d6 points of elemental damage,instead of a straight 20, 40 or 80 points. The indigo effect instead of having them go insane permanently only causes confusion for 1 round. The green power deals 1d3 con damage as poison (this I could see maybe needing to be brought down to a straight 1 point of con damage if a 1d3 is too much). And the violet effect stuns the target for 1 round but also makes them ethereal. Finally, if you roll an 8 then you get to re roll twice and add two effects.

I wanted to avoid complicating things with having an opponent having to make a save half the time you hit them, although I understand that it's a balance issue. I thought that it would be ok though since the effects only last 1 round and you only have a 2/7 chance of rolling them. On top of that, with confusion there's still a chance the target will act normally or attack the nearest creature (most likely you), so often when you get the confusion effect it won't make a difference. The stunning without a save I realize is really good, but it's the violet effect so I thought it should be pretty good, and the target going ethereal means that there's a good chance it won't be taking extra damage from you.

@ beopere I don't imagine it would slow down games any more than rolling sneak attack damage, or the mage trying to figure out exactly what spell they're going to use and how it works. I think it would depend a lot more on how well versed the player is. An expedient player could simply roll a d8 and 2d6 along with their attack, ignoring the non d20 dice when it you don't hit, or the extra d6 when you don't roll an 8
Also, it's true that not many things stun or confuse automatically, but the Cruel(+1) and Glorious(+2) weapon abilities cause the sickened (if they were already shaken, which is extremely easy to do if you make an intimidate focused character) and dazzled conditions with no saves.

@lazarX I can see the prismatic ability being a +3 power if the blinding effect were made better. I image the biggest issue with it being too OP for +2 is the automatic 1d3 poison damage, but even so, the rest of the abilities don't seem so good that it becomes equally powerful as the speed ability. If not a +2, then in my best guess I'd place it at a +2.5 ability, which means I'd bump it to +3 cost and improve something else about the ability, such as adding a dazzling effect like the Glorious ability, or having the elemental damage be a straight 6 points.

In any case, the way I calculated for average damage, the prismatic effect was doing on average the same amount of extra damage as any of the elemental burst weapons, and definitely less average damage than a weapon wtih the Speed ability. I also accounted for the average extra damage a creature would likely take when being confused or stunned for 1 round.

The math was rather involved though, so I'd be eager to see someone else's calculations to see if it comes out similarly

TBH I don't even care about the blinding effect but only added it for color. I thought it would evoke the prismatic spells a little more since they all blind creatures of a certain HD or lower. I made this to suggest to my DM so he'd let me add it to a sword, but I don't care about the blinding ability.

If I wanted to improve the blinding thing, I'd love to have it dazzle struck targets like the glorious ability does, but i'm afraid that might be too good. what do you think?

I'd actually say that going with a Battle Sorcerer is a good place to start from, but replace all the bloodline stuff with the magus abilities, like Spell combat, spellstrike, arcane pool and arcana. I think that accomplishes most of what it sounds like you want, while being pretty much a simple 1 to 1 transfer of abilities.

This makes it more powerful than the Magus since you have a much greater choice of spells all the way up to 9th level, so perhaps make it so that a 'Battle Caster' uses a special that's bonded to him as a focus for spellcasting and thus must have it drawn to cast spells. This is kind of like a mix between a Wizard's Arcane Bond and one of the Cleric archtypes called Weapon-Sworn. This would also replace Eschew materials.

On the flip side though, you aren't getting the armor proficiency, weapon proficiency, good fort save, or quite as many special abilities as you level up, so maybe it comes out about even as this new battle caster is more vulnerable than a magus.

Sadly, in sacrificing some of the Magus and bloodline traits, you're cutting some flavor from the class. You still haven't chosen an ultimate 20th level ability; I might suggest starting by choosing a powerful ability that mixes melee and spellcasting and then retroactively altering one of the magus abilities to progress towards that.

I just designed this Weapon Special ability inspired by the prismatic spells. I tried to design it to be about a +2 cost. I'd appreciate some feedback on it.

http://imgur.com/b66UmBn