Bard casting off int?

[Magicdealer]

Is there any way in pathfinder, short of dm fiat, for a bard to use int as his casting stat instead of cha?

[ShadowcatX]

None off the top of my head. I'd suggest looking through the archetypes.

Are you allowed to use 3pp material? There's ways there I suspect.

[LazarX]

Magicdealer wrote:

Is there any way in pathfinder, short of dm fiat, for a bard to use int as his casting stat instead of cha?

Yes, create a wizard and make him a loremaster, you got bardic knowledge equivalent, int casting stat mechanics and unlimited spell choices. :)

Give him a couple ranks of Perfom and he's golden!

[Magicdealer]

no, no 3rd party material allowed :(

ahh well, thanks anyhow

[Nezthalak]

the whole idea of the bard is built around his charisma. inspiring courage, performing, and what not. Would defeat the purpose if a workaround was out there.

3PP have some ridiculous materials.

[blackbloodtroll]

You can have Int based sorcerers.

[Corlindale]

Depending on what exactly you want to achieve with being Int-based, a dip in Oracle of Lore might help you a little, since it can give you Cha instead of Int to all knowledge skills.

[blackbloodtroll]

As an inquisitor, you can basically use your wisdom for every thing.

[Axebeard]

I think it's not like that for good reason. The bard, as has been mentioned before, has a very distinct flavor of being a performer.

Plus, given how many skill points the bard gets, it would be pretty nuts if suddenly intelligence was their casting stat. Skill points generally don't break the game, but that would be a LOT of skill points. Sort of like if rogues got to use intelligence for attack and damage.

[Cheapy]

Nezthalak wrote:

the whole idea of the bard is built around his charisma. inspiring courage, performing, and what not. Would defeat the purpose if a workaround was out there.

3PP have some ridiculous materials.

to be fair, so does paizo stuff.

I think an Int based bard would be a huge boost, and I would recommend taking some features away. Possibly removing bardic performance and adding more fitting things in.

[Magicdealer]

Yeah, I was hoping there was an archetype or prestige class buried somewhere out there in the paizo books that allowed bards to run off int.

Since there's an archetype that allows sorcerers to run off int, I figured it wasn't completely impossible. And I certainly don't have the money to pick up all the pathfinder stuff I want :)

I think it would be entirely possible to create a balanced bard archetype that allowed the bard to run off int. Actually, I think it would have fit in well with the magician or arcane duelist archetypes as long as it was kept balanced.

I suppose I'll keep an eye out for something like that in future paizo material.

[LazarX]

blackbloodtroll wrote:

You can have Int based sorcerers.

That's one of two badly conceived archetypes.

[Paladin of Baha-who?]

LazarX wrote:

blackbloodtroll wrote:

You can have Int based sorcerers.

That's one of two badly conceived archetypes.

Not really, it's for characters that are almost wizards in terms of flavor, but use spontaneous instead of prepared spellcasting. That's about it. Nothing really wrong with it. Makes it easier to play a sorceror of a race that gets an INT bonus such as an elf.

[LazarX]

There are a fair number of ways to deal with this.

As a GM you can go the route of either banning level boosting items, or declare that the Gate has like other spells a caster level ceiling, say 20 or 25.

You can boost the power of certain beings like solars to put them up the cap. If Solars in your world have 10 class levels in addition to thier stated bestiary dice, that puts them in another ball park altogether.

You can limit the availability of class boosting items as well.

As for the Tarrasque, unless you change the rules text that makes it a unique creature, it's not an issue regarding this spell.

Given the ceiling in PFS, this is obviously a venue in which that problem will never come up.

As far as home games go, there's not much point in trying to impose uniformity on super high level games. They're like singularities, the higher level the game goes the YMMY factors scales exponentially. Ultimtely it's up to the level of GM's on what the PC's can accommplish on the spectrum leading from "it's too easy to even ask to roll about it" to "routine with a given amount of development" through "doable with either extreme effort or a lucky shot", "to flat out impossible".

Each campaign will define itself differently as to how different sets of tasks fall into the above ranges... and that's okay. It's what gives worlds character is that the results will be different for each one.

[Rezgrio]

Reviving this thread to let other people searching that there is an int casting bard archetype in the newer planar adventures book, the chronicler of worlds bard