garrote and strangler archetype - help?

[melferburque]

is there a way of making the garrote effective using the strangler archetype? the garrote specifically states no sneak attack damage is allowed, but the rules for suffocation are crazy dumb. you would need to strangle a commoner for a full minute before they passed out?

I'm looking to make a geisha who uses her shamisen to strangle people, like from the movie zatoichi. the strangler archetype has a decent means of making this effective, but it's bare hands and not a garrote. I suppose it's just flavour at that point, but it still bugs me.

two level dip of strangler and then levels in rogue or ninja (not sure if I want to give up trap finding yet) should give me a decent social geisha assassin, but I'm looking to maximize her abilities.

I'd go with a DEX and CHA build with agile maneuvers. would be nice to add heirloom weapon garrote to get the extra CMB, but that doesn't seem to be feasible or worthwhile.

any help here? I'm open to suggestions.

[Cauthon1987]

Hey there so i know that this thread might be dead but I had this exact idea come up in a campaign i was running not long ago. I house ruled that the garrot could be used for the purpose of applying sneak attack damage and that they could use the standard melee damage of a brawler for damage during the ongoing rounds of strangulation. This made the strangler actually quite viable in combat. Sometimes if the rules seem stupid you need to change the rules for your house game. I felt that especially appropriate here because in real life a garrot is an extremely dangerous and deadly weapon so much so that im surprised it wasnt addressed when this archetype was introduced.