Im having a quick gander at the classes, and i was wondering about building a character whose sole purpose was to provide social skills to the party.
ie, taking skills and feats all based around things such as diplomacy, sense motive, bluff, etc.
my questions are, is this viable in a long term campaign that will also have combat situations.
And, would a bard be best for this? or would a rogue with his 8+int +1 for human +1 for favoured class ranks per level outweigh the bard?
using a point buy system of 15, would it also be viable to run almost all the points in int, wis, and cha?
eg, 7str 10dex 9con 14int 14wis 16cha (with +2 in int or cha)
Im having a quick gander at the classes, and i was wondering about building a character whose sole purpose was to provide social skills to the party.
ie, taking skills and feats all based around things such as diplomacy, sense motive, bluff, etc.
my questions are, is this viable in a long term campaign that will also have combat situations.
And, would a bard be best for this? or would a rogue with his 8+int +1 for human +1 for favoured class ranks per level outweigh the bard?
using a point buy system of 15, would it also be viable to run almost all the points in int, wis, and cha?
eg, 7str 10dex 9con 14int 14wis 16cha (with +2 in int or cha)
I would go with the bard. Depending on how much you want to spend on being a skill monkey, I'd consider Geisha Bard.
Cha would of course be primary. You can get sense motive through versatile performance, so I'd choose to lower wisdom, and possibly raise dex to 12 and con to 10.As a bard, you'll mostly be a support character. But you'll be great at that.
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Im having a quick gander at the classes, and i was wondering about building a character whose sole purpose was to provide social skills to the party.
ie, taking skills and feats all based around things such as diplomacy, sense motive, bluff, etc.
You could, yes. Bard's best for this, but Inquisitor (with the Conversion Inquisition), and Ninja are also pretty good.
my questions are, is this viable in a long term campaign that will also have combat situations.
Possibly. But more importantly, you can easily have this character and be an effective combatant with little or no loss of social capability.
And, would a bard be best for this? or would a rogue with his 8+int +1 for human +1 for favoured class ranks per level outweigh the bard?
Bard is best due to Versatile Performance (which, as of 6th level gives them equal skill points to the Rogue, and beats them out at 10th and up).
using a point buy system of 15, would it also be viable to run almost all the points in int, wis, and cha?
eg, 7str 10dex 9con 14int 14wis 16cha (with +2 in int or cha)
No it wouldn't. But as a Bard, you can ignore Wisdom (since, via Versatile Performance, you can use Cha on Sense Motive), and need not focus on Int to quite that degree.
That lets you do something like this:
Str 12 Dex 14 Con 10 Int 12 Wis 7 Chr 16
Put your Human bonus into Dex and you've got the makings of a decent archer, as well as a social master. That's really a pretty good combination.
If you take the bard you can help with bardic music and everyone, even someone not combat oriented can aid another or help with flanking.
What I'm asking myself: Can someone with swift aid make two aid another actions per turn? One as swift action for +1 and another as standard action for +2? Would both stack?
If you take the bard you can help with bardic music and everyone, even someone not combat oriented can aid another or help with flanking.
What I'm asking myself: Can someone with swift aid make two aid another actions per turn? One as swift action for +1 and another as standard action for +2? Would both stack?
Yes, that is possible.
On top of that you can get Team Up that allow an aid another as a move action.
Bodyguard allows aid another using an AoO, so that can stack as well (but only to AC).
The cream is taking 3 levels of Pathfinder Chronicler, which raises the Aid Another bonus from +2 to +4.
As a DM, I would recommend giving yourself something interesting to do in combat. You can do that without diminishing your role as a social rolls all-star too much. I've seen plenty of players come to me with characters deliberately built to contribute almost exclusively out-of-combat.
And they get bored in combat.
Not always immediately and not uniformly, but players playing characters who can't contribute much to combat tend to enjoy combat less, and it's the nature of most PF games that combat takes up a huge chunk of the time at the table. It might be tolerably fun to be an aid-bot and flanking partner for a combat, or even a few sessions, but in my experience "I thought it would be fun to play this character with minimal combat utility, but it's not" is the number one reason players ask me to be allowed to rebuild their characters. (I know at least one guy who's a repeat offender in this area.)
Pathfinder is set up such that you can be awesome at social skills while still being adequate at combat. Sacrificing that adequacy in combat for an extra +1 to bluff is a major trap, not only in terms of character power, but in terms of how much fun you're likely to have with the character.
I would suggest either mixing with rogue or going archeologist bard. Use tht bluff and intimidate in unique ways. Feint in combat might give you more options to add sneak attack in combat.