I'm homebrewing some modifications to the Roll For Combat Intelligent Weapon ancestry, and I'm taking a look at the "Symbiotic Weapon" heritage. By the default rules, the Symbiotic Weapon heritage has you working with a "neophyte wielder", powering them up with all your class abilities and advanced, player character bonuses. If you are ever separated from your symbiotic partner, the de-powered wielder is given the stats of a level -1 NPC, or a level 0 PC if the GM is feeling generous.
THE biggest media example of this "symbiotic intelligent weapon" paradigm is "Reincarnated as a Sword" (Tensei S**$ara Ken Deshita), but the fact that the ancestry doesn't allow for the wielder to grow is a pretty grave failing in fantasy. A truly symbiotic weapon should theoretically strive to allow for their wielder to grow and learn from them, not become increasingly dependent on them. In "Reincarnated as a Sword" the sword character has made it his entire goal to help his wielder level up and hopefully one day evolve.
I figure the best way to fix this would be to have the wielder essentially be a lower level copy of the current PC when they are separated, ideally enough levels lower (4 levels might be a good starting point) so that there couldn't really be overpowered shenanigans when separated. Unfortunately, handling that on the fly would be waaay too cumbersome.
I've often heard that the Frightened condition effectively reduces a foe's level by X (depending on who's talking about what Frightened level). How true do you think that is?
Could I reasonably houserule the wielder has stats of a permanently Frightened 5 version of the intelligent weapon PC?
Is there another smoothly scaling statblock I could reference instead?
Other ideas? The goal is to make it easy to apply and track and keep consistent.
Literally just a -4 untyped malus would work fine. -5 is justifiable as well, but seems overkill tbh.
Literally just a -4 untyped malus would work fine. -5 is justifiable as well, but seems overkill tbh.
I think you're probably right
I'm trying to make it as simple as possible to apply on the fly, so going through the feat choices and deactivating them and their potential downstream effects would be too much of a cognitive load I feel.
I want it to be quite rare that it comes up, but if it does it should have a more satisfying rule than "your lvl -1 wielder is instantly annihilated by the weakest enemy mook nearby".
Both Stormbringer and Soul Edge are more on the parasitic side, which the heritage expressly says may require special group consent to permit. Soul Calibur is closer. But I should have said biggest recent media example, which Mark Seifter explicitly referenced when talking about it.