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What would happen if I made a caster class where their spell get bonus damage, duration, etc based of of their CON stat bonus? And what would be some good flavor for this? I was thinking of making an order of mages that use the strength of their own body's to enforce the border between planes maybe have then take a planeal focus like a cleric domain.
First thing that comes to mind is Kineticist, which does all that except cast spells, the Adept/Eldritch Godling, which choose any ability score as their casting stat at 1st level.
I think some form of scarification would fit best though, and give plenty of flavor(it's also easy to reflavor things like the tattoo sorcerer archetype to scars).
There was a Shaman archetype that did this.
It was widely considered severly overpowered. And iirc they nerfed it heavyly.
Going by your premise you build the brokeness into the class's very fundament.
Have you looked at Spheres of Power? There are a lot of great ideas in there about casting traditions and how you can make constitution based casters. I generally stay away from the idea because it can lead to a powerful 9th level caster that is even more dependent upon a single attribute than a normal character.
Skipping that, perhaps the Kineticist class in Occult Adventures can give you some ideas.
Not a lot of advice here, just a word of caution. Have fun and good luck.
Spheres of Power? Well, the most compelling reason I find with using it is the simple system they have for magic. I think all of the spheres are covered in 30 pages. It is simply amazing how many different things my witch has been able to accomplish using that system. I could go on and on for awhile but you might be able to get a good idea of what you can do by reading some of the reviews.
Skipping that, it removes many over-powered or out of place options available in the normal magic system. Heck, the ability to use many powers without having to spend any resource, except a standard action, is wonderful. It might sound ridiculous, but we are almost up to 9th level and not once have I felt extremely powerful compared to a normal caster. There are a few odd little loopholes that can be exploited, but simply restricting a conjuration focused character to one active summon fixes that easily enough.
Another great thing; if you have a martial character that wants to get a bit of magic, two feats in and he has access to magic. Any other feats he spends keep netting him extra talents. The bloodrager in our group loves it as well.
I could go on and on, and I will simply say that the Spheres of Power PDF is one of the most used and most loved PDFs I have bought from a 3PP.
There's also the original scarred witch doctor as a base for similar changes.
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No, Scarred Witch Doctor is now, for most purposes, even stronger now than before.
Before, it made all the Int based Witch features to be based on Con.
Orcs get no Con bonus, Half Orcs can choose to put their bonus in Con.
Now, it treats your Int as 2 higher than it actually is.
This helps make up for the penalty Orcs get, but Half Orcs can just choose to put their bonus in Int, then get the effective increase on top of that.
They should have just left it as it was, especially since there was at least one published NPC with the archetype using the Con-based casting.
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Yeah. It's not exactly a 'mistake that needed fixing' when it was an entire paragraph. It's even stronger that Samasboy1 explains, because the original still needed Intelligence for bonus spells per day.
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It was errata'd, but the Scarred Witch Doctor once was a full caster whose main stat was CON.
Except for bonus spells per day. Those still went off of Intelligence.
As far as possible flavor goes, I did put up a Con based caster just yesterday. There's a couple summoning/binding focused talents in the class as well so that can also potentially inspire you for how you'd want to flavor aspects of your caster. It's not a perfect fit since it focuses more on self sacrifice than heartiness, but you might see something you like (worst case scenario you decide you hate the whole thing and then know what you don't want for your own caster).