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Actually, I worked recently on a similar concept. Instead of focusing on technology, the character was very deeply involved in magical study, maxing out skills like Kn: Arcane, Kn: Planes, spellcraft, etc. The blasting abilities can be attained through a combination of the magic evolutions and Eldritch Heritage: Elemental Bloodline.(fire or air, your choice). The character that I had made was a gnome with the pyromaniac alternate racial trait and the Fire elemental bloodline that I had dubbed "Tiny Stark".
So, by this logic a human cannot take the alternate class reward without this feat? I have a feeling that this feat is in fact allowing one to either take:
Granted, I do agree that this a hefty bonus, but if this isn't RAI, why even put a reference to alternate class rewards in the feat? Seems that an official ruling would be needed for this one.
I'd recommend for Iceman an Oracle with the Waves mystery instead, if for nothing else the ice armor ability.
I can totally identify with your frustrations, man. There is nothing worse than having to surrender playing a favorite character, even worse if your character has to bow out of a continuing campaign. Honestly though, your anti-paladin idea won't make the situation any better. Nevermind causing possible r/l strife in your group, you obviously really enjoyed your paladin and I doubt that turning him into a twisted mockery of his former self would make you feel any better at all. Realistically, I would say that if you want to continue adventuring with this group (a question I would be asking myself at this point), but consider your former paladin to be a "loose end" for lack of a better way to put it, work out something with your DM to where your paladin and cohort become NPCs and your paladin feels it necessary to give some sort of message or indication to the vampire in the group that he will no longer tolerate her existence and formally challenges her to honorable one-on-one combat. The way I see this going is either:
or B). The rogue decides to meet for the fight, but enlists the rest of the party in taking him down. I'm sure that most people will agree that CN is not exactly known for possessing a dearth of honor, so I don't really see the one on one happening. Either way, the paladin gets to die with honor and the rest of the party gets to see how far down the rabbit hole they have gone when they are directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of one of their former traveling companion, whose only crime against the party was refusing to tolerate the existence of a soulless abomination in the group. Cheers
I skimmed through your class description and figured I'd give you a couple minor suggestions based on what I saw. First, for your class skills I would replace Knowledge: Nobility with Knowledge: Planes. It seems to be a better fit for the class. Second, some of your amendments are a bit on the powerful side. Specifically, misplaced item and crippled. I would remove misplaced item, as it is far too powerful an ability. With a duration of 1 min / lvl, you are going to completely shut down any equipment reliant character for an entire combat. Not to say that a DM's spiked chain wielding orcish weapon master wouldn't be annoying, but once you make his weapon vanish off of the face of the earth, he's pretty much just relegated to sitting quietly on the ground, picking his nose. Even if he had a backup weapon, what's to stop you from pulling the same trick on him next round? If you absolutely need to keep this ability for the class to function properly, I would recommend making the ability last no more than 1d4 rounds and making the target immune to the amendment for 24 hours after. For crippled, remove the duration and make it simply an ability that knocks the target prone. You are essentially tripping someone by targeting their fort save instead of their CMB. Giving it a duration makes it a bit too good.
I've tried the aforementioned combination before. Honestly? I had much more fun as a "simple" bladebound magus. You simply sacrifice too much by combining the archetypes, and I've found that spell recall trumps any of the archetypes in UC. Now granted, I know that the same results can be achieved by carrying a fistful of pearls of power wherever you go, but I try not assuming that any particular magic item will be made available, unless I decide to invest in craft feats.
I also attempted to make a Belmont-style character. I mean, how could you not after seeing the new whip feats? Honestly, I'd say that your two best options, with the penalties and drawbacks would be: A) Your Bladebound Kensai magus build. Granted, perfect strike is going to be a sub-par ability to you, since the whip is not really fantastic for damage or critting. However having the magic abilities can increase your versatility, and your patience will eventually be rewarded with Iaijutsu and Superior Reflexes, giving you unparalleled ability to fling out multiple AoO's. Couple this with tripping feats and you can be a very flexible damage dealer and combat controller. In my humble opinion, you'd probably do better avoiding the kensai though and just using the bladebound archetype (or heck, go all Simon's Quest with a whip and shield Bladebound Skirnir). Kensai is much more engineered towards using high threat range decent damage weapons, such as the katana (surprise surprise), scimitar or rapier. If you go magus, don't forget about the Maneuver Mastery arcana; really nice for pulling off those trips or disarms. B) I ended up making a Witch Hunter Inquisitor and it worked out really well for me. The character is pretty nasty at being able to take down undead but will be able to very effectively shut-down any magic user that gets within whip reach, especially with the Spellkiller Inquisition. Teamwork feats such as Precise Strike and Tandem Trip can also be very useful to this build, especially if you intent to work together with your Grant guy a lot. While this build can't quite shovel giant heaps of damage onto your foes like the magus can, You maintain a touch more combat versatility, divine spellcasting, and most importantly a more Belmont-esque feel. Hope this helps.
I'd like to bump this one up. I noticed this too and I'm curious as to what the official ruling would be.
Well, if you're looking for more styles to add, I'd like to see something like Bartitsu. It's a bit more of a "western" style (derived from and inspired by eastern styles) that would be very well suited to a more refined, gentlemanly society.
I also played in a Escape from the Dungeons of the Slave Lords campaign. 2nd Edition style. DM was again nice enough to grant access to a big ol' pile of bones that the party could use as makeshift weapons, but my character went a step further. Since back in those days we had weapon and non-weapon slots, I hadn't taken proficiency with clubs. I was, however the proud owner of a broken set of manacles that had been recently been removed. So, I beat one of the cuff ends into bending around the end of a large thighbone and made myself a flail, which I could use. DM liked the creative thinking and allowed me to make a weaponsmithing roll. Got a natural 1, which for some reason in 2nd ed was a good thing when it came to skill rolls (thank goodness they changed that huh?), so he ruled that my makeshift flail was, for all intents and purposes a perfectly serviceable flail. I carried that thing with me throughout the rest of the campaign as my trusty backup weapon.
A few years ago, I was running a 3.5 game with some friends. They were all reletively inexperienced, but had all come up with wonderful back stories that I fully implemented with all of them to create side quests for them. My side quests pretty much ran the gamut of different possible ways to handle the situation. For example, one of the characters had a sidequest that had rather cohesively flowed into the main story, so no deviation was required from the main questline for the characters. Another one dealt with the elf in the party going back to her homeland, where the humans/gnomes/etc. would be forbidden to follow. For this particular sidequest, I had written up a few NPC characters for the others to play (since the character was of the royal bloodline, the other players played her royal guardsmen) and the whole scenario played out rather swimmingly. I even had the opportunity to kill off the expendable NPC/PC characters by refusing to pull punches on them (I had been going a little easy on the group since they were all new). In the end, all of the players loved it. The third and last one didn't end up being so much a side quest per se, but I worked together with him between games to deal with the "voices in his head". I'd say your best bet is to try different ideas to keep the game moving forward, and try to avoid sidelining a player, even if you do have to sideline their character. Also, all of the above ideas were situations that were able to be fleshed out within one to two sessions, so if you do end up splitting the party, you wouldn't want it to go on too much longer than that, since playing a throwaway character could get very tedious very fast.
I am currently playing a 13th level Inquisitor in my friend's homebrew campaign. Early on (6th - 11th levels), I was doing some pretty terrifying things with my little +1 flaming hand crossbow, having taken appropriate feats. At later levels, though, I'm starting to lean into more of a weapon finesse type character, especially since I can buff myself up pretty good early on in an encounter in order to survive close combat. I'd recommend you give a mix of the two styles a shot, since with weapon finesse and rapid reload (or a repeating x-bow), you can pretty much use whatever the situation calls for. More than anything else, I believe that suits the "feel" of the Inquisitor class; having the right tools for different jobs as opposed to specializing in one stlye.
Too man options, eh? I'd say it's time to break out the ol' 2nd Edition books....
Well, I gave a glance-through to your idea, and it seems pretty interesting. The only two minor changes that I would suggest would be to replace your good fort save for a good will save, since it seems that the class itself would more lend itself to being an individual of great willpower. Also, I'd recommend to remove the "Guns of the Father" class feature and replace it with a precision-based ability for purposes of improvement and simplification. I understand that you're going for the Gunslinger from the books (which I confess that I have very little knowledge of, having only read the first one), but this will generalize the class a tiny bit in order to prevent hitting snags in your game where your gunslinger says to the party, "Well, I'm 8th level now, time to go out on a quest to get my new guns!" This option seem to me like it would be better to play out as a DM given "side-quest" than as a class feature. Just my 2cp....
Answering both as a DM and as a player who has played the cleric/paladin concept before (though not in PF), I would keep the LoH and Channel uses seperate, but I would see no problem with the amount of channeled energy stacking between the two classes. It would seem to make sense from the perspective of knowing two different ways to channel the "loving caress" of your BBEG's God. It's not really written that way in the literal RAW, but under the specific circumstance, I would handle it similarly to a cleric entering into a prestige class that also grants the channel energy ability.
The way that an inquisitor's teamwork feats work, you can swap out your most recently learned feat for a new one. So, for instance you have picked up two teamwork feats from your class abilities. You can swap out your second feat if you need to, but the first one is "locked in". When you would be gaining your third teamwork feat, your first and second choices will be locked in as well, meaning that they can no longer be changed, but you will be free to change the third one as the situations demand. My apologies for not being more concise or offering better examples, as that I don't have my book handy. Hope this helps you.
Sword and board + spell-slinger is going to be a kinda tricky combo to pull of, especially with spells requiring somatics to cast. Another option that you could try would be to give him a dancing shield, bonus cool points for surprising the party when all of a sudden your BBEG looses his shield to hover in midair while he blasts the party with something unpleasant. Option B would to be to use a Force Shield ring, which can be summoned or dismissed as a free action, keeping him still be able to keep a shield and cast spells. Option C of course would be to just have him Still Spell all of his spells. For a sword and shield undead spell casty guy, might not be a bad option to try making him a fighter/wiz(or sorc)/Eldritch Knight, then heading into making him up as a lich. On the other hand, since the requirements to lich are Craft Wonderous items and cast spells and have a caster level of 11th or higher, you could always try making a cleric lich as an alternative option....
Don't know if it was mentioned on here, but for a nice serious anime series, I have always been partial to Berserk. Pretty serious story, brutal at times, and an interesting concept. Also, since I take it you're probably a D&D (or similar games) fan, I'd recommend Record of Lodoss War as well, though you might want to see if you can get the manga for that one as well. I'm not sure why in the original OAV, they decided that Parn should be an inept tool in the beginning instead of the adept soldier he is in the manga. Still a good series though.
A lot of the problem with sword-n-board fighting I think comes from having the Bashing enhancement. As previously mentioned by Kae, your shield (95% of the time being an off-hand attack to begin with) shouldn't be able to do such a substantial amount of damage, and especially not such a higher amount than your sword, axe, what have you. I'm all for shield bashing tactics being usable in game, but the trade-off between SaB vs TWF should be higher AC, higher damage, respectively. Ultimately, my vote would be for shields to be a viable, low damage off-hand attack, but with some decent CMB options in place to utilize it more as a tactical option when the situation presents itself. |