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While on the topic of the knight, there's one thing about the class that really bugs me: the taunt mechanism (Test of Mettle). I'm fine with the knight getting morale bonuses when he calls someone out; that's a good mechanic, and it's fun and cool to boot. But magically controlling people's behavior by yelling at them always seemed overly gamist, especially when you turn around and label it "(Ex)," a way of weakly pretending like it's not magic. If you want to take over people's minds, be an enchanter or beguiler, I think.

I'm in agreement there. Upon reading Tom Baumbach's knight conversion above, I saw a few modifications that I'd like to incorporate into my prototype... His altered Test of Mettle being one. If a creature is affected by Test of Mettle it takes a -2 penalty to basically any action other than something to attack the knight. I think that's sufficiently annoying to the creature and not going into the realm of mind control.

Since there seem to be some people who are interested in how I plan to convert knight. I've taken some of the opinions of it on these boards into consideration, and have made some additional tweaks for realism purposes (specifically the Shield Ally class feature).

To be fair, I have definitely added more power to the class than many of you have suggested is required, but I am rather skeptical that the abilities Knight is given stack up to some of the equivalent classes available in Pathfinder. That being said, I am willing to hear comments and criticisms regarding this conversion, and would be happy to discuss points of contention. My primary interest here is making a class that will be balanced and won't require too many tweaks, as this character will be played by a new-ish player to D&D/Pathfinder.

Here are the details:

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Fighting Challenge (Ex) 1st

The rate at which the bonus to Fighting Challenge improves has been altered such that at 5th level and every 4th level thereafter, the bonus increases by 1 (+2 at 5th, +3 at 9th, +4 at 13th, +5 at 17th).

Test of Mettle (Ex) 4th

In addition to its usual effects, Test of Mettle provides the knight a morale bonus to her AC equal to her Fighting Challenge bonus against the creatures affected by Test of Mettle only.

Shield Ally (Ex) 6th

As an immediate action, a Knight may respond to a melee attack against an adjacent willing ally by entering the ally's space. This results in both the Knight and her ally having 50% odds each of being targeted by the attacker. The attacker must roll a percentile die for each attack: 1-50 targets the knight's ally, 51-100 targets the knight. The knight may choose to take a -4 penalty to AC until her next turn to have 75% odds of the attacks against her ally to be treated as attacks against her instead. Once all attacks against the knight's ally have been resolved, the knight may choose an adjacent space to eject her ally to as a 5-foot step (for the ally). During the ally's next turn, his movement speed is reduced by 5 feet to account for this.
To perform this action, the knight must have at least 5 feet of unused movement left over from her previous turn.

Improved Shield Ally (Ex) 12th

This class feature operates as Shield Ally, but does not require that the knight have 5 feet of unused movement left over from her previous turn to be performed. Additionally, the knight may choose to take a -4 penalty to AC to ensure that all attacks against her ally are treated as attacks against her instead.

Greater Shield Ally (Ex) 18th

This class feature operates as Shield Ally, but when sharing an ally's space, the knight has 75% odds of being targeted by attacks against her ally. The attacker must roll a percentile die for each attack: 1-25 targets the knight's ally, 26-100 targets the knight. The knight may take a -2 penalty to AC until her next turn to ensure that all attacks against her ally target her instead. Additionally, the knight can perform this special attack of opportunity action to respond to an attack against an ally up to 10 feet away, as long as the knight has at least 10 feet of unused movement left over from her previous turn and there is line of effect between the knight and her ally.

Armor Mastery (Ex) 19th

At 19th level, a knight gains DR 5/— whenever she is wearing armor or using a shield.

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The change to Shield Ally is in response to its original definition allowing the knight to take half damage for the shielded ally. I honestly cannot visualize how one could take half of the damage from each blow. It just doesn't work in reality. So instead, I've converted this to probability, which makes a lot more sense here than a straight up division. It takes more rolling, but I think it'll be a lot more suspenseful, and it behaves more accurately with regards to DR.

Let me know what you think.

P.S. There are a few more posts here now than there were, so I'm looking into them and how they compare.

Thanks, everyone.

I also believe that Knight gets a pretty steady flow of abilities as it progresses, but I find that some of them don't really stack up against some of the other PF classes... Paladin in particular.

I may take your advice and alter Test of Mettle. I also have plans to adjust Shield Ally a bit. We'll see.

Again, thank you all for your input.

I'm planning on converting a campaign over to Pathfinder rules and I've got a character playing a Knight, from PHB2. I'm in the process of figuring out how best to convert a Knight, as there is no definitive guide for it, and I was wondering if anyone else out there has done something similar. I'd really appreciate any input, so I can make this a clean transition.

Thanks =D

You need to distinguish between an attack and a successful attack or hit.

You may make unlimited touch attacks but as soon as you are successful, the spell is discharged unless it allows for multiples hits.

For example, you cast inflict serious wounds and try to touch the enemy fighter. You could theoretically miss him 100 times in a row without losing the spell and then succeed with a hit and the spell would still affect the target.

Then what's the point in specifying the circumstance of touching 6 willing allies as a full-round action? Such an action is guaranteed to connect in every case.

Edit:
And if you happen to think "There are touch spells that clearly state that you can touch multiple targets"... Why put the sentence talking about touching multiple allies in the paragraph about holding the charge instead of in the more general one about touch spells?

I hope you can see why I'm pretty tangled about this one... ^^;

Hey everyone.

Right now I'm in the midst of reading through the Pathfinder rules (and loving them, for the most part) and I came across an old, badly worded rule that has left me wondering how to treat it since the dawn of 3.5e.

Let me recount it so we're all on the same page here.

Holding the Charge: If you don't discharge the spell in the round when you cast the spell, you can hold the charge indefinitely. You can continue to make touch attacks round after round. If you touch anything or anyone while holding a charge, even unintentionally, the spell discharges. If you cast another spell, the touch spell dissipates. You can touch one friend as a standard action or up to six friends as a full-round action.

The section I've bolded appears to explicitly specify that a caster can hold the charge on a touch spell and then perform touch attacks or willing touches with it round after round, indefinitely, then goes on to explicitly specify that touching ANYTHING or ANYONE intentionally or otherwise, discharges the spell. Furthermore, why even go on to detail the act of touching 6 allies as a full-round action if the first ally you touch will discharge the spell?

Am I missing something here? It appears to me that the rule makes itself impossible. Could it be that the word "discharge" is not defined as the spell's charge being lost but rather that the spell's effect takes place but the charge remains held?

So my question to you all is simple... What's going on here, and how should this rule be adjudicated in-game?