Lets say you're about to GM some unnamed adventure path.
Say it's a 15 point buy.
Now before the AP begins you offer the following choices to your players. Rolled, picked by lot, etc, etc. One choice per player - no duplicate choices.
I'm wondering if any of these are stronger than the next.
What would you add, subtract? Never mind it unbalancing the AP. Adjustments can be made.
1)
You gain one additional trait; open to traits from other campaigns.
You may count things granted by a PrC towards meeting the requirements of the PrC.
Whenever you gain a level, you may use retraining taking zero days - 50% cost.
2)
You gain the ancestral weapon trait.
You gain the Exotic Weapon Proficiency feat
You gain the Elven Battle Focus feat.
You gain the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat.
You gain Skill Focus Craft Magic Arms and Armor
3)
You may make stealth checks, even while observed, at no penalty.
For the rest of your turn, your melee sneak attacks work regardless of immunity to precision damage. You may do this the number of times per day equal to half your level + your highest attribute modifier.
Your armor check penalty for AC is equal to your DEX modifier.
You gain the trap Spotter Rogue talent.
4)
You gain the Craft Wands feat.
You gain Skill Focus UMD.
You gain the Pragmatic Activator trait.
You may use a wand as an SLA as long as it's in your possession - ie, a bag.
You start the game with a 3rd level wand with ten charges.
5)
You gain the bonus spell list from one Sorcerer bloodline. Whenever you heal an ally during combat with a "cure" spell, you may spontaneously cast an equal level spell or lower off your Sorcerer bonus spell list as a swift action. You may do this the number of times per day equal to your highest attribute modifier.
6)
You may use a 25 point character buy.
I think which ones you chose would depend heavily on the class you played.
The 25 point buy might cause problems within the group, especially in the early levels. Also you have put a lot of useful crafting rogue and UMD stuff. You could use this to also allow some more annoying martial feats to be picked up early. Like combat expertise.
A few thoughts when looking this over:
Option #1 seems to be the weakest, at least at the front end. Cheap retraining at later levels could be fantastic, mind you ( but for the sake of clarity, you may need to clarify whether the player still needs to find an appropriate trainer, despite it taking no time). I'm having a hard time seeing the value of the PrC bit, but perhaps someone could point to some obvious examples.
For Option #2, this seems to have some value to certain builds, particularly a INT-based gish, probably a Magus using Weapon Finesse for DEX to hit (with Elven Battle Focus for INT to damage), maybe paired with something like an Elven Branched Spear and picking up the Manuever Mastery arcana to focus on tripping. Might not be *generally* useful to everyone, but you could definitely plan a fun and effective build around this. However, I don't think you can take the Skill Focus feat as applied to a Crafting feat (I think you'd have to apply it to Spellcraft, or to crafting mundane arms and armor using the Craft skill).
Option #3 is obviously amazing for Rogues and Ninjas. Free Hide in Plain Sight is gamechanging (breaking?), especially when combined with the ability to effectively get auto sneak attacks against targets that would otherwise be immune. You should consider clarifying what action type it would be to use this ability -- I'd suggest a swift action makes sense -- and to also make it clear if this bypasses the need to be flanking, or to otherwise have the target be flat-footed.
It is unclear to me what this is supposed to mean though: "Your armor check penalty for AC is equal to your DEX modifier." Does that mean you have an armor check penalty equal to your DEX modifier regardless of what armor you wear? That would actualy seem to be a major penalty if so, as even light armor would come with a high penalty (which would grow even higher as the character levelled up and improved their DEX). Doesn't seem like that's what you intended, so maybe you could clarify.
Option #4 is a really nice boon for someone intending to double down on the use of various wands to round out their abilities. I see this taking off at mid-levels, especially, where you have more time and money to craft wands, but where low level wands still have good value. Not as strong as Options #2 and 3, in my view, but still a nice perk. Probably most useful for a Wizard due to the depth of the spell list, though Cleric, Shaman or Druid could also be good choices (esp. a Shaman using the Arcane Enlightenment hex to pull spells off the Wizard list on a dailyu basis and then crafting wands with them... as they would also likely have enough INT to leverage Pragmatic Activator).
Lastly, I agree with Chromantic that Option #5 seems like arguably the most powerful choice, at least apart from the game-changing Rogue stuff at Option #3. Getting those significant extra boosts to key attributes will make the character significantly more effective than his or her 15 point buy allies, in most instances, especially at earlier levels where the extra +1s and +2s matter more. I have a sneaking suspicion that most players would prioritize taking this option over the rest, unless they had a particular build in mind. The side effect of that is that the ones who don't get it are a bit salty about it (especially whomever gets stuck with #1).
All of these are conversation starters.
If someone has other idea's on options, I'd love to hear them.
1) Yes, they'd need to find a trainer. It's not an optimized example but with every 2 levels of Arcane Trickster, you gain one sneak attack die. After two levels of Arcane Trickster, you could retrain two Rogue levels to Arcane Trickster - which per errata you can't do otherwise. It make's PrC's not suck. Another example - you could end up with Barbarian/1, Wizard/1, Eldritch Knight 10, and a nice Furious Finish build for example.
2) Yeah, it bends toward Magus doesn't it.
3) Interesting comment on the stealth check. The idea on the armor check penalty is that you get your full DEX to AC the way I worded it. Rogues are generally under powered and wanted to something fun for the person who played the role.
4) This is a fun one. They still provoke, but yeah - fun.
5) 25-point buy is option 6. Five is you gain the bonus spell list from one Sorcerer bloodline. Another fun one, I think.
6) I agree with you both that it is the strongest at level one. Probably weaker and weaker as everyone levels up.