Custom Monk: Sensei / Ki-Blaster


Homebrew and House Rules


So I've been trying to come up with a custom monk for some time - now that I think the concepts are laid out, I will post a draft to see what people think. I plan to do two additional custom characters and take all 3 of them through a campaign to see how they play. So here we go:

Kurasamu wrote:


Kurasamu

Male Human Monk

SKILLS
Strength d6 □+1
Dexterity d6 □+1 □+2 □+3
Constitution d6 □+1 □+2
Intelligence d8 □+1 □+2 □+3
-Knowledge: Intelligence +2
Wisdom d10 □+1 □+2 □+3 □+4
-Perception: Wisdom +2
Charisma d6 □+1 □+2

POWERS
Hand Size 4 □5 □6
No Proficiency

For your Combat Check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning trait (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force trait); you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if you don't have a blessing in your hand, you may draw a card. (□ If the drawn card is a blessing, you may recharge a card from your discard pile).

CARDS LIST
Favored Card Type: Blessing

Weapon - □1
Spell - □1 □2 □3
Armor -
Item 3 □4
Ally 5 □6 □7
Blessing 7 □8 □9 □10

The skills are meant to reflect both roles, which are archetypes that loose class features tied to training of the monks body:

One is the sensei from Ultimate Combat and the other is a mixture of the Ki-mystic combined with a homebrew version of ki-blast.

Therefore, no fortitude or acrobatics.

The first power is a mixture of insightful strike and ki-blast.
The second power is supposed to reflect a bigger Ki-pool - amongst other things, it is meant to encourage discarding blessings, even though they are the main ressource.

Next, to the roles:

Sensei wrote:


Kurasamu (Sensei)

Rather than using wisdom for his own benefit alone, the sensei uses it to better those around him.

POWERS
Hand Size 4 □5 □6 □7
No Proficiency

For your Combat Check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force) traits; you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if you don't have a blessing in your hand, you may draw a card. (□ If the drawn card is a blessing, you may recharge a card from your discard pile).

□ You may recharge a blessing or a spell to add 1d4 (□+1)(□+2) to a check by a character at your location.

□ You may discard (□ recharge) a blessing to add 1d10 to a noncombat Strength, Dexterity or Constitution check of another player at your location.

□ You gain the skill Divine: Wisdom +1 (□+3). After you play a spell that has the Attack trait, banish it.

As in the archetype, the first new power is 'Advice' that mimics badic performance. Therefore it is taken straight from the bard class.

The second and third new powers are my interpretation of 'Mystic Wisdom', focused on giving buffs to other characters. The casting is taken straightly from Athnul.

Ki-Blaster wrote:


Kurasamu (Ki-Blaster)

Most monks hang on to their ki. The ki-blaster has learnt to let it go – right into her enemies.

POWERS
Hand Size 4 □5 □6 □7
No Proficiency

For your Combat Check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force) traits; you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if you don't have a blessing in your hand, you may draw a card. (□ If the drawn card is a blessing, you may recharge a card from your discard pile).

□ You may recharge a blessing to add 2d4 (□ 3d4) to your combat check with the Force trait.

□ When a character at your location would fail a noncombat (□ any) check, you may recharge a blessing to allow her to reroll 1 die (□2 dice). She must take the second result.

□ When you play a spell and would banish it, you may bury (□ or discard) it instead.

The first new power is just a way to scale up the ki blast to keep it competetive. There is no such way for the sensei, since the sensei loses a lot of martial prowess in favour of support.

The second new power is based on the 'Mystic Insight' and a slightly weaker version of the class feature of Meliski. Personally, I think this power is really powerful.

The third new power is an alternative to spellcasting which is again taken directly from Athnul.

I have not playtested yet, so any feedback or remarks would be greatly appreciated!


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Sorry, it's been a while, but I just got back into the forums and figured I'd provide advice in case you were still looking for it.

I'll be honest, I think Kurasamu is underpowered, and could really use a bit of a buff, particularly the baseline (the role cards are much more powerful). To explain, I'll compare him to Athnul, one of the Monks in the class deck, which I've used a lot of late. Their stats are similar (she has much higher Con, but lower Int and Cha to compensate), and she has 6 skill points to Kura's 4, with similar distribution. She has an ability to discard any card in hand to add Wis skill to melee, and that actually gives higher average damage baseline than Kura's first power, which requires recharging a specific card, and benefits more from skill points. Before adding the power feat, Kura's second ability is almost strictly worse than just having a hand size of 5, which Athnul has baseline.

The long and short of it is, I think he needs another skill and another power (or buff existing ones). You specifically mention not having fort or acrobatics, but you could add something like survival or diplomacy. Alternatively, you could bump both skills to a +3. For an additional power, obviously you can go a lot of ways, but it should be something simple and which doesn't want a lot of power feats, since you already have those out there. A scouting ability might make sense, or possibly make the heal option from the draw baseline. Another option would be to move the first skill from sensei to be a baseline power, but that might be to powerful.

Aside from the power level issue, I do really like the card and the character. Once you give him a bit of love, I'm sure he'll be quite fun.

Let's get into the role cards. One point I'd like to make is that neither role affects your baseline powers. While that does happen, I feel like it is good to at least have one way of getting better at what you've already been doing, since some players enjoy that. I actually have a suggestion on this a bit later.

The sensei has mostly tried and true abilities, and they should play well. I think restricting the first ability to spells & blessings is smart, since it makes it clearly weaker than the bard's power (which should be the best of its kind), while still being useable pretty much whenever you really need it. One issue I have is that the first and second abilities read incredibly similarly. I understand that they're representing different class abilities, but from someone reading it, they're both just buffs. I'd consider trying to merge them together. Maybe something like the following:
You may recharge a blessing or a spell to add 1d4 (□+1)(□+2) to a check by a character at your location. (□ If the check is a noncombat Strength, Dexterity or Constitution check, You may instead discard (□ recharge) the card to add an additional 1d10 to the check.
There's obviously some differences (you need the first power to get the second, you can affect yourself with it, you only have to use once card to get both) but I think it's worth considering.

I have a somewhat similar point for the Ki-Blaster role. The first new skill in that role is essentially designed to be used with the base ki-blast ability. It might read better to just go ahead and add that to the first power. It removes interaction with other force-based combat, but I'm not sure how significant that is. I'd also consider buffing it a bit, since I feel this role should be very good at combat, and I don't think d10+5d4+4 for recharge 2 blessings is going to match up with even the decently powerful end-game fighters (as a comparison, RotR Valeros with a Greatsword+2 is d10+2d6+9 as a reveal, which has .5 lower average damage). Maybe up it to 2d4/4d4 or 2d6/3d6. Another possibility is to go all out on the idea of loading all your power into one shot, like the following (in this case, it would probably stay a separate power):
On your combat check with the force trait, you may recharge any number of cards. Add 1d4 (1d6) to your check for each card recharged this way.
That is obviously less powerful as a baseline single discard, but has the overload potential if you're fighting a current-adventure monster to just win, and removes the fail-state of not having a second blessing in hand (since you can use any card).

I like both the other abilities here. I really appreciate how each role has an ability to not lost spells, but which are flavorfully so different from each other. You're right that the second ability is very powerful, but I wouldn't be surprised if it felt a lot worse in practice than it seems on paper. The main reason is that you are going to be using a whole lot of blessings with this character, and I imagine there will be many times where you want to use this power but can't because you don't have enough blessings left.

Overall, I really like your execution in using multiple different archetypes to create a character that can go in two very different directions while still making sense at his base. I also really admire your restraint in creating a character that is clearly in line with power levels of actual cards, possibly going too far in the other direction. If you can get the base character to a sufficient power, and possibly clean up a few of my role suggestions, I think Kurasamu will be in great shape!


Wow, that is amazing feedback and I agree with pretty much everything!

I'm just now playing through SotR with Ashnul and feel like her combat prowess was not good at keeping up during the later adventures, so kurasamu definitely feels much weaker to me now.

The low hand size was meant to make it easier to get a draw at the beginning of a turn, but I turned that into a better idea... You are completely right in that its actually strictly worse than having a bigger hand.

I incorporated most of your ideas into this new version:

Kurasamu wrote:

Kurasamu

Male Human Monk

SKILLS
Strength d6 □+1
Dexterity d6 □+1 □+2 □+3
Constitution d6 □+1 □+2
Intelligence d8 □+1 □+2 □+3
-Knowledge: Intelligence +3
Wisdom d10 □+1 □+2 □+3 □+4
-Perception: Wisdom +2
Charisma d6 □+1 □+2
-Diplomacy: Charisma +1

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6
No Proficiency

For your Combat Check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning trait (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force trait); you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2), you may draw a card. (□ If the drawn card is a blessing, you may recharge a card from your discard pile).

At the end of your turn, when you are at an nonempty location, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the locations adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck.

Cards List
Favored Card Type: Blessing

Weapon - □1
Spell - □1 □2 □3
Armor -
Item 3 □4
Ally 5 □6 □7
Blessing 7 □8 □9 □10

I added diplomacy, improved knowledge and added a conditional scouting power, since I feel like scouting is very powerful. The starting hand is bigger and the power feat can be used to make the draw at the beginning of the turn more likely, thus increasing the chance of the healing.

Sensei wrote:

Kurasamu (Sensei)

Rather than using wisdom for his own benefit alone, the sensei uses it to better those around him.

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6 □7
No Proficiency

For your Combat Check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 (+□4d4) and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force) traits; you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2)(□ 3), you may draw a card. (□ If the drawn card is a blessing, you may recharge a card from your discard pile).

At the end of your turn, when you are at an nonempty location, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the locations adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck.

□ You may recharge a blessing or a spell to add 1d4 (□+1) to a check by a character at your location. (□ If the check is a noncombat Strength, Dexterity or Constitution check of another player, add another 1d6).

□ You gain the skill Divine: Wisdom +1 (□+3). After you play a spell that has the Attack trait, banish it.

Consolidated the buff powers and gave options to increase the drawing likelihood as well as the base damage.

Ki-Blaster wrote:

Kurasamu (Ki-Blaster)

Most monks hang on to their ki. The ki-blaster has learnt to let it go – right into her enemies.

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6 □7
No Proficiency

For your Combat Check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 (+□3d6) and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force) traits; you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2), you may draw a card. (□ If the drawn card is a blessing, you may recharge a card from your discard pile).

At the end of your turn, when you are at an nonempty location, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the locations adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck.

□ On your combat check with the force trait, you may recharge any number of cards. Add 1d4 to your check for each card recharged this way. (□ You may add 1d6 instead for every blessing recharged this way).

□ When a character at your location would fail a noncombat (□ any) check, you may recharge a blessing to allow her to reroll 1 die (□2 dice). She must take the second result.

□ When you play a spell and would banish it, you may bury (□ or discard) it instead.

Added your great idea about the ki-blast storm and increased the base damage.

I'm not sure if the character is yet strong enough, but I have a serious fear of making him too strong somehow.
If you'd like to give some more feedback, I'd appreciate it!


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Love the changes! I think it looks to be in a solid place. I've got a few notes, let me go down the line.

Skills look perfect now, I don't think I'd change anything.

For the scouting power, I don't think you have to specify non-empty. The game is smart enough to figure out that if you try to examine an empty location nothing happens, and I think most players will be too. I'm curious why you used the location's adventure deck number instead of scenario number. The vast majority of Locations are base set, and locations will only ever be from Base, 1, and the current set, so it could be somewhat awkward going from attempting a 7 to attempting a 13 in the same scenario. That being said, I've never seen a power use location set number, so it might be worth seeing it in action just for novelty. There's also some flavor in that base locations are often (but not always) more friendly and easier to explore.

I like the new power feat to make it easier to draw. With how blessing dependent you are, that will probably feel great in action. Overall, he is a lot stronger now. It's possible this is too much of a swing in the other direction, but I think it's still well within the correct power band. Good work!

Sensei looks good. I see you took my advice to add feats to the starting powers, which I think works well. You did a good job modifying the support power. I appreciate that you took my advice but didn't just copy/paste it, rather putting your own spin on it. It is a bit awkward that the second half of the power is only other characters, while the baseline part includes yourself, but if you think that is valuable for the flavor or power level, I think it's formatted well. Also, going straight from 2d4 to 4d4 on the non-combat role sends an odd message. You might consider having that be 2 feats, but it's by no means necessary.

Ki-Blaster also is looking pretty close. I do think it is a bit awkward that the first power goes straight from 2d4 to 3d6. It reads like a massive jump, even though it's barely larger than the sensei's 2d4 to 4d4 jump (and arguably is less appealing, since 4d4 is more consistent, which is usually preferable to spikey numbers). There isn't necessarily anything wrong with it, but I'd recommend playing with the numbers a bit before finalizing it. I see that you took my version of the overload ability, but you added a spin with the blessing bonus. I will admit, I at first misread it and didn't recognize that it was blessings that boosted to d6, but I don't think that's a major issue. Overall, I think the power works.

Great job on this! Personally, I'd be excited to play this character as is.

Silver Crusade RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

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I think you two have done a great job of making a character that would be fun to play and feels relatively balanced to me. I'm just going to give you some small suggestions on things like wording and such, to make it feel more like an "official" character. :)

-De-capitalize the word "check" in "Combat check" in the first power.
-Change "and add both the Melee and Bludgeoning trait" to "and add the Melee and Bludgeoning traits"
-You can combine the two parts of the second power more clearly, and specify that the heal is random (I'm assuming). I would word it like this: "At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2), you may draw a card; (□ if that card is a blessing, you may recharge a random card from your discard pile)."
-"Nonempty" isn't a thing. I would word it like this instead: "At the end of your turn, if your location contains at least one card, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the location's adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck."
-On the Kurasamu, reword this power a bit as shown: " On your combat check with the Force trait, you may recharge any number of cards; add 1d4 to your check for each card recharged this way. (□ For each blessing recharged in this way, you may instead add 1d6."
-The last power on the Kurasamu might be overpowered. My example is the case of Charm Person, which is normally a Bury spell. Since the character doesn't have the Divine or Arcane skill, it's instead a banish, but the second checkbox would allow you to discard it instead. It would be worth considering whether this is TOO powerful.

Overall, a very well-designed character!


Hey, thanks for the feedback to the both of you!
I'm very happy that you like the concept.

Apart from the rewording suggested by cartmanbeck, the following version incorporates a slight rebalance of the first power after the remark from isaic16:

I buffed the pre-role power a bit by adding the blessings adventure deck number to the check and decreased the dice being added in the roles. Since it's fairly hard to get blessings with a higher AD number (I still had several B blessings at the end of SotRu with my Athnul), I think that's reasonable:

Sensei can get 1d10+3d4+AD+4 while Ki-Blaster can get 1d10+4d4+AD+4.

Athnul can get 1d10+1d6+AD+6 at minimum in both roles, but has an easier time getting a high AD since she can use any card for her check, and since her check is a melee check, there are much more cards she can play to boost the check.

Regarding the spell power of the Ki-Blaster role - I've taken it straight from Athnul, so I figured it would be balanced. I guess there is room to abuse things like Invoke from RotR, but that's also possible with some other characters (CD Athnul and CD Damiel for example).

I hope that this will be the final version:

Kurasamu wrote:


Kurasamu

Male Human Monk

SKILLS
Strength d6 □+1
Dexterity d6 □+1 □+2 □+3
Constitution d6 □+1 □+2
Intelligence d8 □+1 □+2 □+3
-Knowledge: Intelligence +3
Wisdom d10 □+1 □+2 □+3 □+4
-Perception: Wisdom +2
Charisma d6 □+1 □+2
-Diplomacy: Charisma +1

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6
No Proficiency

For your Combat check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 plus its adventure deck number and add the Melee and Bludgeoning traits (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force trait); you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2), you may draw a card; (□ if that card is a blessing, you may recharge a random card from your discard pile).

At the end of your turn, if your location contains at least one card, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the location's adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck.

Cards List
Favored Card Type: Blessing

Weapon - □1
Spell - □1 □2 □3
Armor -
Item 3 □4
Ally 5 □6 □7
Blessing 7 □8 □9 □10

Sensei wrote:

Kurasamu (Sensei)

Rather than using wisdom for his own benefit alone, the sensei uses it to better those around him.

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6 □7
No Proficiency

For your Combat check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 (□ +3d4) plus its adventure deck number and add the Melee and Bludgeoning traits (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force trait); you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2) (□ 3), you may draw a card; (□ if that card is a blessing, you may recharge a random card from your discard pile).

At the end of your turn, if your location contains at least one card, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the location's adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck.

□ You may recharge a blessing or a spell to add 1d4 (□+1) to a check by a character at your location. (□ If the check is a noncombat Strength, Dexterity or Constitution check of another player, add another 1d6).

□ You gain the skill Divine: Wisdom +1 (□+3). After you play a spell that has the Attack trait, banish it.

Ki-Blaster wrote:

Kurasamu (Ki-Blaster)

Most monks hang on to their ki. The ki-blaster has learnt to let it go – right into her enemies.

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6 □7
No Proficiency

For your Combat check, you may recharge a blessing to use your Wisdom skill +2d4 (□ +4d4) plus its adventure deck number and add the Melee and Bludgeoning traits (□ or the Ranged, Magic and Force trait); you may not play a weapon on this check.

At the start of your turn, if the number of blessings in your hand is less than 1 (□ 2), you may draw a card; (□ if that card is a blessing, you may recharge a random card from your discard pile).

At the end of your turn, if your location contains at least one card, you may succeed at a Perception check with a difficulty of 7 + the location's adventure deck number to examine the top card of your location deck.

□ On your combat check with the Force trait, you may recharge any number of cards; add 1d4 to your check for each card recharged this way. (□ For each blessing recharged in this way, you may instead add 1d6.)

□ When a character at your location would fail a noncombat (□ any) check, you may recharge a blessing to allow her to reroll 1 die (□2 dice). She must take the second result.

□ When you play a spell and would banish it, you may bury (□ or discard) it instead.

The feedback actually motivates me to make two additional characters for a balanced party of 3. I'm working on a Skirnir Magus now and would like to do a vigilante at some point, too.

Silver Crusade RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

I made the vigilante iconic into a PACG character that I'm super proud of. If you're interested, you can get the cards on drivethrucards.com here:
Aric
Red Raven
Aric Role
Red Raven Role
Token Card


Whoa, that's cool!
I wasn't quite sure how to do the vigilante, but I'll take a closer look at what you did once I have more time.

I looked at drivethrucards before but I think it's hard to filter the good submissions from the bad ones, so I didn't delve in too deep.

Is there a way to browse by creator? I'd be interested to see what else you contributed.

Silver Crusade RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

I wish I could give you a link to all my stuff on there, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. I can tell you the other characters i made, though, they shouldn't be too hard to find with a search on there.

Chuffy Lickwound
Ekujae (there are two versions, one of them duplicates the Survival skill, get the other one)
Grizzelle
Mogmurch
Poog of Zarongel
Reta Bigbad
The Terrible Tup

I also made a ton of Cohort characters both to go along with Grizzelle and Ekujae, and also to add more Witch cohorts to the witch deck characters.


I didn't realize that they'd gotten character cards up on Drive Thru. I may have to try that with some of mine.

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