You probably shouldn't get much at all for it- you're already trading away a lot of your fighting ability by losing defenses, so trading offense shouldn't come with anything too strong. +2 skill points per level by itself seems fair-to-generous. (Cardinal Cleric drops BAB, loses the same armor and shield stuff, and loses a domain for +4 skill points.)
A couple ideas:
- The ability to spontaneously convert a spell to a domain spell (or switch your domain spell upon casting) a number of times per day equal to the number of points of BAB you've fallen behind a regular Cleric.
- A number of times per day equal to the BAB you're missing, you can choose to reroll a channeled energy (all the dice). You have to take the second result.
BAB is a pretty major class feature, so my thought for a summoner type character is... Eidolon.
Maybe with a -3 level penalty (so you'd get it at 4th level) like what a ranger gets on his/her animal companion?
And lacking the other summoner class features that let you get shield bonuses or merge with it or such. Just the eidolon itself and it's progression/evolutions.
The issue with this is that BAB doesn't mean a lot to most spellcasters. So many spells don't require attack rolls that dropping your BAB could, potentially, be utterly meaningless.
A summon-heavy caster is a perfect example of this. You'll likely never fight, so that BAB reduction means doodly-fudge.
A couple things about your Cleric idea:
- While it's one way to compensate for things, more skill points probably isn't that important to a Cleric character, unless you're trying to specialize them to be more rogue or bard like.
- If you are going to reduce BAB and think of your Cleric as being like a pure caster, I suppose one of the logical routes to take would be to give them abilities that enhance their casting in some way.
- Another possibility is to find ways to alter or enhance your channeling ability to do different things.
That said, I kind of agree with the prior poster about the basic utility of BAB. Even without taking a power gaming perspective, there can be situations where it's useful for a character to at least have a back-up plan for situations where they will otherwise find themselves useless - such as when your party is confronted with flying enemies and no one does ranged combat in the party. This is especially true for Vancian magic, where the cliche example is that the Wizard runs out of spells, and is left just being a low HP and low BAB character running and hiding or using items if they can until they get their spells back.
For this reason, I've tended to want to make my Cleric characters specialize in ranged combat. Which also happens to be one of the best possible builds.
BAB applies to a few things, listed below:
- Attack Bonus
- Iterative Attacks
- Combat Maneuver Bonus / Defense
- Feat Qualifications
- Feat Scaling
Of these, only the CMB/CMD loss is going to matter for someone who's primarily summoning. None of the other features are important unless you plan on making attacks, which also cover touch and ranged touch attacks for spells. The question to be asked is whether the GM should consider your planned build when determining how much you lose.
In theory, dropping BAB is a big loss as that means you can't do martial combat as effectively. However, in practice, losing BAB doesn't mean that much to someone whose primary contribution will be via summons. That doesn't mean the character isn't losing anything at all, as keeping that BAB means they could potentially use weapons or spells with attack rolls more effectively, making them more versatile and effective in a range of situations.
Imo, I would grant something specific to spellcasting to emphasize the shift from a character who can do martial combat and spells into a full-fledged spellcaster. +1 spell per day for each spell level and the ability to spontaneously cast domain spells would be a nice bonus without bringing too much power.
To add some balance, also add a clause that causes you to lose your spellcasting if you wear armor of any kind. Losing proficiency from the Herald Caller archetype matters because armor check penalties would also apply to attack rolls, but decreasing BAB means you're already not planning on attacking and could thus wear heavy armor without proficiency and take no penalties. It's a way to reach a balanced middle ground.
I wouldn't give you much for it, since by your own admission, it isn't worth much to you.
Deific or Celestial Obedience, perhaps? It's a "small" (a single feat), thematic, scaling boon. That's about the most you'd be able to squeeze out of me, personally.
Or maybe Diverse Obedience to give you a bonus, but only by putting it behind a feat tax wall.
A summon-heavy caster is a perfect example of this. You'll likely never fight, so that BAB reduction means doodly-fudge.
Of these, only the CMB/CMD loss is going to matter for someone who's primarily summoning. None of the other features are important unless you plan on making attacks,
Um, that depends heavily on play style and table expectations.
A character at my table who "only summoned and never attacked" would be laughed out of the room for being "the load" and not contributing enough to the party. (To be clear, I am not suggesting that the OP is going to be a "load" - healing is another vital role, so summoner/healer would be an excellent example of a useful build - just not one I've seen before).
Most summoner-type characters I've seen are also melee fighters (or occasionally ranged fighters) fully capable of buffing themselves and their summons into beastly DPS attackers (or unstoppable tanks, or both).
Hence why I treated like dropping BAB as a big deal - that's how my table plays, and my expectation is that a summoner will be a major contributor to combat even when they are out of summons for the day (or before they start summoning, depending on build).
Anyway, the point is that the idea that a summoner will "likely never fight" or that summoners "only needs BAB for CMB/CMD" is pointedly untrue - or at least, is would be at a lot of tables. A lot of this depends on what this group considers "normal" for a summoner type characters - stand around doing nothing while your summons do all the work, or fighting along side them. If the later, then that BAB is very valuable and should have a valuable replacement.
Most summoner-type characters I've seen are also melee fighters (or occasionally ranged fighters) fully capable of buffing themselves and their summons into beastly DPS attackers (or unstoppable tanks, or both).
Hence why I treated like dropping BAB as a big deal - that's how my table plays, and my expectation is that a summoner will be a major contributor to combat even when they are out of summons for the day (or before they start summoning, depending on build).
In most circumstances I would agree that summoning characters tend to provide some amount of martial prowess to the party, but in this specific situation that isn't the case - the OP doesn't plan to contribute in that way due to their stat allocation. That's why I'm on the fence about treating it as a big loss, since it won't impact their character much either way.
I wouldn't be inclined to let a player who does not intend to roll to attack trade reduce their BAB to gain other benefits, since this strikes me as the bad kind of min-maxing; you're literally trading away all of your class features that don't contribute to the thing you're specializing in to be more specialized.
The 3/4 BAB will be handy for those times when you're in an anti-magic field and have to reach for a crossbow, or something. I mean, in that case your BAB will be even more useful because, as you say, your Dex isn't that high. It's going to be a while before you have enough spell slots to occupy every round of every combat of every day, so you might as well have something semi-productive to do then.
The biggest drawback to reducing your base attack bonus in-system is that a class' hit die type is tied directly to their base attack progression. "Meta mechanics"-wise, reducing your 3/4ths BAB progression (tied to having a d8 HD) to a 1/2 BAB progression drags your HD type down to a d6 right along with it.
For that reason alone I would not recommend asking for the exchange.
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Thank you for the answers!
Please keep them coming!
(...)To those who are saying that B.A.B isn't worth much to me so they wouldn't give me much, would you give me full B.A.B against not much since it still isn't worth much to me?
(...)@Gulthor and @Zhayne, would you accept that I trade a feat for full B.A.B? If not, then your trade isn't fair.
Let's ask the question this way, how much would a character, not necessarily mine, have to trade away to increase B.A.B from 3/4 to full?
*I* didn't say that 3/4 BAB wasn't valuable to you, *you* said that 3/4 BAB wasn't valuable to you.
I know it's a dirty concept in certain circles, but I'm not against min-maxing, but make no mistake that's what you're doing. You've identified a character resource that you have that you aren't using, and you're looking to trade it away for a useful, scaling, thematic bonus related to your character being a Cleric.
Deific Obedience is useful, scaling, thematic, related to your character, and is more than a fair trade for a class feature you've admitted you're not going to be using anyway.
The idea of putting everything on a budget falls apart pretty quickly, and things are part of a whole package. Class abilities can't simply be assigned point values, because as we've seen with Race Points, that crumbles against scrutiny. Classes aren't created on an equal point buy, but rather as kits and packages - and sure there are archetypes that trade a lot of those features away (which can make us start to think in terms of trading features away for other useful features as just a common, basic, matter of course).
I think someone suggested maybe designing a Cleric archetype that's 1/2 BAB, d6 HD, suffers from spell failure chance, and has greater spellcasting abilities. That seems pretty reasonable if you wanted to go that far.
But you're basically wanting something for nothing (in terms of this specific character). As a GM, I'd bite, and suggest Deific Obedience as what I'd be willing to offer in exchange.
And as you've brought up the value of feats relating to attack bonuses, Weapon Finesse, for instance, can regularly grant a bonus of +4 or more to hit, as can, say, Precise Shot (by negating the penalty for firing into melee.) So yeah, seems fair.
Given that you already get 2 more skill pts than the cleric, I'd be reluctant to add further skill pts. Absolutely no extra spells/day! A second domain, a firm maybe. IF you took the lower hit die and re-rolled your HP... Maybe.
My big concern is that this archetype is from a Player Companion, which makes me look at anything carefully three times over, right there. The staff who vet the archetypes that make it onto the PRD don't even see this stuff before it goes to print. And I don't think they bother reading it afterwards, either, to see if they need to FAQ (read: nerf) anything. So that leaves it up to the GM.
And I'm looking at Mighty Heralds, with two bonus feats and no apparent trade-off, with dark suspicion. Personally, I think that should be your benefit right there. Or to put it another way: I think you should be giggling hysterically at all that you got, and not trying for more.
But I might still allow a second domain, in exchange for the lower BAB & hit die.
I'd let you trade BAB for the Run feat. Get the former down low enough and the latter will really come in handy.
The Herald Caller is already better than the Cloistered Cleric. You already got the increased skill points to 4+Int for the trading away of armor and shield proficiency. But you don't suffer from reduced spellcasting, instead yours is actually better through the feats for summoning.
Though frankly +2 skill points to get up to +6 per level would certainly not be overpowering.
If you want to trade the 3/4 BAB to 1/2 and the d8 to d6, then I could see some additional options.
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It does matter what something is worth to you. When classes and archetypes are designed, they make trades (in theory) based on general value, providing multiple options so that the class/archetype gets multiple playstyle options. But when you're designing something for yourself, you know what playstyle you're going to be using, and trading options intended for versatility out for the one playstyle you're using.
Some examples:
- Clerics are a mixture of divine spells, healing (channeling and spontaneous conversion), martial (proficiencies and medium BAB progression), and sprinkled with domains on top. There's one archetype that trades out BAB, effectively getting rid of the martial category. It doesn't boost an existing category- making that category too strong- but instead gives the new category of skill monkey.
- Summoner have two big features apart from spells. An eidolon and the ability to summon monsters with SLAs. For balance, you can't do both. A common request is to trade the SLAs for a stronger eidolon. For the most part, aside from one mistake caused by two separately published options, Paizo hasn't done this except for very minor boosts, because when you're using your eidolon, the summoning option has no value.
That's what you're asking for, trading one unused category of versatility to strengthen the one you are using. Good design would say either you get part of a new category (since you only have part of the category to trade), or you only get a minor bonus to the existing category, equivalent to how much you actually value what you're trading.
Edit: Wait, Herald Caller already gets bonus skill points? Wow, that's good. Unless other players are getting custom modifications to trade out things they don't like, don't be greedy.
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it is a dextarity check it is not however a dexterity ability check"An initiative check is a Dexterity check."
Please, stick to the subject of the thread.
That's the definition of what an ability check is. A Dexterity check is an ability check. A Dexterity-based check is not an ability check. An Initiative check is actually an ability check; it's just unusual in that it has abilities that interact specifically with that kind of Dexterity check.
@pplouf Obviously, I'm not going to convince you. It doesn't really seem to me that anyone is going to be able to convince you (you should note that you're getting a *ton* of feedback here that suggests you shouldn't get much for it). I've shown that a single feat can easily equal or exceed the degree of attack bonus you're giving up (a total of +5 at level 20, which you're unlikely to reach, can be granted by Weapon Finesse at level 1), so I maintain it's worth about a feat.
I'm not your GM, though, so maybe you can con your GM into giving you more.
Actually, I'll throw out another suggestion: thematic, scaling, related to cleric - I'd allow you to take a second domain, since you lose one from Herald Caller - provided you also took the hit from d8 to d6.
EDIT: Though I now re-read your OP and see that you were thinking it was worth a second domain *and* more skill points *without* the HD loss, so I think we're simply on different pages.