Alright so we have tried for awhile and found no one to help us fill out of Kingmaker campaign. So we have decided to run this as a gestalt to help us better fill out our power and positional needs.
Now I need advice on class combos that would be best for the game.
I was thinking of a Bard//Swashbuckler (Appropriate archetypes included) for myself. I really like that style of charming character who can hold his own with a sword or sling a spell when he needs to.
A Brawler//??? for my buddy he likes the unarmed style but he does want a lot of power, perhaps Barbarian?
I know our third plays either Healers or Rogues. Is there any happy middle ground?
3.5 is allowed within reason.
well in a small party game i generally strongly recommend the pet classes. Specifically the druid and summoner. Their buddies help fill out the action economy, and in a small party they arent actually as detrimental to play time.
Druid/anything is often a very good choice, particularly in this campaign (lots of wilderness and nature), so maybe your 2nd friend could be a druid/slayer. Divine caster, animal buddy, and lots of rogueish goodness from the slayer. Plus wild shape is among the most useful single abilities in the game, both for combat and non-combat situations. Need to sneak, turn into a mouse. Need to scout, bird on the way, need to swim im a dolphin etc.
Summoner is also very good, perhaps combining with swashbuckler for you. Still charisma focused but now with an outsider buddy backing you up. Again this fills out the party's action set and ofcourse the summoner has lots of great control spells to help out all those combatatants in addition to the combat abilities of the swashbuckler.
For the brawler, thats a bit tough, I am not sure what you mean by 'doesn't want a lot of power'. If you mean he doesnt want it to be overly complex, you might want to go fighter. Very straight forward. Barbarian works, but both are sort of just doubling down as a beat stick, and thus not the best use of gestalt. Really depends on what he wants to go for, but those two would be the simplest additions. I'd personally recommend he combine it with SOME kind of caster to flesh out the party better.
I ran King Maker with 3 players with high than normal stats. It worked just find. With 3 classes you can cover things pretty even better now with Ultimate classes. I'd avoid Gestalt as it get over powered, did that with Council of Thieves with the same group. It ended up being lot more work for me as the GM to modify encounters.
I ran King Maker with 3 players with high than normal stats. It worked just find. With 3 classes you can cover things pretty even better now with Ultimate classes. I'd avoid Gestalt as it get over powered, did that with Council of Thieves with the same group. It ended up being lot more work for me as the GM to modify encounters.
I think gestalts power level entirely depends on what player's do with it. If they double down on a certain set of abilities, yes it creates higher powered characters, but if they do the intended thing and diversify, it doenst really do that. I've played gestalt games with both 2 and 3 player parties and they've run just fine with published aps. But in these cases the players made sure there wasnt a huge amount of stacking of abilities, and instead focused on versitility.
Bard/ Swashbuckler, Brawler/ Cleric, and Druid / Rogue should be awesome and viable. Stacking the self buffs of a cleric on a brawler chassis will be strong in battle and still useful with spells out of combat, and sneak attack + wildshape is freaking awesome.
Kingmaker isn't very hard and is mostly 5-minutes workday (not even 15 minutes, it's one encounter per day, if even that). As long as your party are not monks, rogues, fighters, swashbucklers and kineticists, you'll be fine.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned it, but without spoiling, I can say having a druid, hunter, ranger, or other resident "woodsy guy" is tremendously useful for the first two books.
Also, at least one of you should be extremely charismatic.
Make friends with as many named NPCs as you can. There's a reason.
If you DO have a rogue (or other sneak attacker), he should worship Erastil. You'll thank me by book 2.
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Bard/Swashbuckler sounds solid. And makes a very good party leader/king.
Brawler/Cleric (as suggested above) also sounds good, though so would something like Brawler/Alchemist (probably Vivisectionist) or Brawler/Investigator (Good news! You get to play Batman!). Brawler/Investigator in particular, on top of being Batman, gets really ridiculous with all good Saves, wonderful skills, full BAB, whatever Feats he wants, Pounce via Pummeling Style, and adding half his level to attack and damage via Investigator.
The final character going Slayer/Druid sounds better than Rogue/Druid, and can easily manage trapfinding as well as the whole 'wilderness guy' (in fact, he's the ultimate wilderness guy with all the Druid stuff plus tracking to boot). If the Brawler guy is going Investigator, you could instead go Druid/Ranger for even more wilderness goodness, or Cleric/Ranger to focus more on healing, while retaining much of the wilderness stuff. They'll also very much be the party's healer if the Brawler goes with anything non-Cleric-y.
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Just for starters you could do daring champion cavalier. You keep the panache, get tactician and challenge, and get better saves. But you could be picking up supplemental divine casting as an oracle or paladin or wider arcane selection as a summoner or eldritch scion magus as well.
This is true to some degree. Definitely true for Daring Champion, anyway. Well, and Paladin, but that's a very specific flavor.
A battle cleric build isn't bad and adding sneak attack isn't going to actually make anything worse. If the bard is pairing with oracle and you're not doing the see through fog party slayer is better than rogue but you'll miss out on the combat style stuff because the natural weapon style is terrible.
Who says you need to go Natural Weapon style? The style you take doesn't need to match the weapon you use and Two-Handed Style gives solid Feats, just for example.
I also feel like you're really overemphasizing how much a Slayer needs to rely on Sneak Attack to be awesome. It's more of a nice bonus than something needed.
As a third note, a Druid/Slayer plus a Brawler/Investigator with Infusion can handle condition removal pretty well, with the Druid doping most of it, and the Investigator picking up the slack in the areas where the Druid spell list falls short. You lose out on in-party Raise Dead, but that's about it.