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The Order of the Tome seems weaker than most other Cavalier Orders, mainly for 2 reasons:
1. Specialized Knowledge is too specialized. It certainly isn't useless, but compared to what other Orders offer, it doesn't come up nearly as often. It would be nice if (just off the top of my head) it were changed to a free Skill Focus (either Arcana or Religion) feat.
2. Unlike all the other Cavalier Orders, the Tome knight's Challenge benefit doesn't get any better with levels. This should be very easily fixable.
Also, I think Powerful Knowledge could stand being more powerful. Maybe make it so the Tome Knight can use their Cavalier level as the scroll's caster level, and/or allow them to apply their own Intelligence or Wisdom modifier to the scroll's DC rather than the minimum, and/or grant some sort of trick that gives Tome Knights a chance to sometimes keep spells from being erased from the scroll upon use.
I welcome others' suggestions on how they might otherwise improve the Order of the Tome's abilities (and for Goodness' sake, I don't want to hear any whining about "caster-martial disparity" or whatever - let's keep it constructive!).
A basic fact of the game is that some options are not as strong as other options, and that there are so many options that balancing them all against each other would be a monumental task. A task that hardly anybody seems interested in doing.
Since this is the house rules forum, if you have an idea for how the order of the tome could be improved, it's appropriate here, but you're not going to get any official word for Paizo on it. After all, if they fix one functional but underpowered option, why didn't they fix all the other ones too?
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I would argue that this might be an exceptional case. For the most part, I don't buy into talk about "such-and-such is too powerful/not powerful enough," (for example, the only reason I could ever see for Rogues being considered underpowered was how they measured up against the come-lately Alchemist and Ninja classes, but otherwise I thought they were fine as presented in the Core Rulebook), so it might be said that if *I* think something has such a problem, it's a better-than-average sign that it might be true.
If nothing else, the Order of the Tome is unique in that its Challenge bonus ability doesn't improve with levels, so they could at least fix that.
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Specialized knowledge would be okay if it were sufficient for the cavalier to consult his personal pocket library to gain the bonus.
Regarding challenge, it is probably worse than Order of the Star (which grants a bonus on saves as well), but not by a huge margin.
I think powerful knowledge is actually quiet good (considering the UMD DCs normally required to activate a scroll). You can bump up your CL by 2 by taking the magical knack trait, and you should be good to go with a starting score of 12 or 14 in your 'casting stat' (assuming you pick up a headband somewhere on the road).
Maybe the scrolls are more effective against the target of the cavalier's challenge?
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Maybe the scrolls are more effective against the target of the cavalier's challenge?
Just noticed this. I like this idea!
I still think Specialized Knowledge is too little, too seldom. If only they offered a greater array of super-specialized applications (a la the Sovyrian Pantheist trait, amped up to class-feature-level), that could be good.