In my current table top campaign, my character and the party tank died tumbling from a rope bridge after two natural ones on a skill check, which as a house rule as auto fail, despite the fact I was rolling a +9 to acrobatics and the first DC was a 5. While this frustrates me, it's left me with the question of what I should play to help out the party.
The party is fourth level, and currently consists of:
a cleric with the animal and glory domains, going into brightness seeker at 6th level for at least a level or two.
two wizards, one necromancer with a bloody skeleton and skeletal champion wandering around with him, and the other a thassilonian wrath mage who enjoys some enchantment and invisibility spells
one gnomish (everyone else is human) grenadier alchemist.
More information about the campaign setting:
Magic works differently in the campaign world, with each spell learned by our wizards is expensive, and takes at least a week of game time, and spells are limited to what we can find among other wizards in the group. All in all, our resources are rather few, magical item creation is rare, our wizards can't scribe scrolls and have other abilities in their stead, and the world as we know it seems to be undergoing some major ominous changes, with portals opening up to the abyss, a great howling storm that hangs over every where we've been and grows more ominous, strange cultists who may be manipulating these events, and our home empire a week or so away under attack by what appears to be legions of demons. The game is very very sandbox, and the DM builds his world around where we decide to explore and what we decide to do.
I've juggled half a dozen different character ideas and am jonesing for suggestions! Ideally, I'd play a summoner considering the circumstances, but my DM has nixed the idea for fear of crowding our already crowded game in combat (skeletons, plus us, and what ever monsters involved.) Thoughts, folks? Thank you in advance!
Hm, well, I do like Kyrt's idea, as bards are always good, but if you were the party tank, going bard may make the party a bit too squishy. But, if you're OK with that, I'd say go with archery and the plan of going into arcane archer.
Or, if you want something heavier, go with another barbarian, but with intent of picking up a single level of sorcerer (draconic bloodline) and going into dragon disciple.
I recently tossed together both of these builds as high-end NPCs for my own campaign, and they look absolutely awesome. If you'd like details, let me know!
I don't think a single summoning spell has been cast thus far, so I'm not sure how effective a bard will be in adding to combat, at least in that regard.
I think it's fairly obvious: you should play a full caster.
Actually, I would consider a cavalier or inquisitor. Not that the cavalier is outrageously useful on its own, but there are some archetypes which manage to work with the parties like yours. The inquisitor could also work well, though I'm not really sure if you would want to go to the front lines with one.
Otherwise, why not an oracle? The Battle ones seem to be fairly hardy, and you can still be a caster like everyone else.
I agree with Kyrt. Make as few rolls as possible. A bard would be fantastic. A cavalier, while attacking a lot, can add teamwork feats to the whole party. A luck based cleric can make it so who ever has to roll gets to roll twice and keep the better roll.
Without a tank, you have to convince your spellcasters to summon tanks for you. Then your bard, cav, or cleric can boost up the power of the summons.
Personally, I hate the critical miss table. No matter how good you become, you always have a 5% chance for every swing to go horribly wrong - sorry, but no.
All those casters and not one dedicated battlefield controller? My heart, it weeps...
I was in an almost all-caster party once. It rocked. You know why? At range, we were > basically any challenge remotely near our CR. I would lockdown foes w/ battlefield control spells, and the other casters would just bombard the hell out of them with their spells (both damage and targeted/area debuffs) like shooting fish in barrel. It's a great combo. It is nice to have one melee guy to fight enemies that survive and crawl out of the mire of suck, but you have a cleric, he can do that.
So, good BFC classes are Wizard, Sorc, Druid, and yes, the Summoner you did want to play. Summoner also handily comes w/ a free meat shield. I suggest playing summoner since you wanted to anyway. Be a Half-Elf, take Wild-Caller, and use the favored class bonus. Eidolon is the tank, and you focus on BFC spells. If the DM still protests, just tell him you plan to not learn a single summoning spell (other than Summon Eidolon, learn that) and never use the summon class feature. a) because the eidolon will be out at all times possible and b) you only get summon nature's ally w/ the archetype, which is much worse than summon monster anyway. Ask if you can just swap out the summon feature for something else. Make it clear your goal is to just do Eidolon smash + BFC and support spellcasting.
And yes, try to avoid a PC that makes a lot of d20 rolls, your DM's houserules are abhorrent.