Concepts for "not covered by existing classes" characters

[Innominat]

I'm making up new classes for my party, and one player has no idea what concept to use for a "not covered by existing classes" character. Power will still be balanced against existing classes, but I will try to make up new mechanics.

Pitch him a character concept that is novel and far outside of what can be done by existing classes.

[Albatoonoe]

I think there is still room for a martial class that works on recklessness. Something to incapsulate the "Drifter" of Samurai and Western movies. A class that utilizes high-risk/high-reward mechanics.

[breithauptclan]

Albatoonoe wrote:

A class that utilizes high-risk/high-reward mechanics.

Ever played a Swashbuckler?

[AceofMoxen]

Quoting myself from a previous thread like this.

Comedy relief--Think Pippin and Merry. A character who advances the plot by screwing up. I have no idea how to create this without breaking the math of pf2, but it's an character type that is common and missing. In certain other games, you can get this with a bard, but bards in pf2 are much more power fantasy than comedy relief.

Distance-mancer--Vista from Worm, parahumans. She has the power to manipulate distance. Could be a single spell that scales. So you cast the spell, no character moves, but the distance between them is reduced or expanded. Maybe even a character who bends space like a gravity wave. Even on a virtual tabletop, this would be hard to represent.

Power thief--Kirby from Nintendo. 3.5 had the spellthief, which is kind of what I'm looking for. Someone who steals enemy abilities and uses them.

[Innominat]

Albatoonoe wrote:

A class that utilizes high-risk/high-reward mechanics.

Wouldn't that just be taking a penalty to success checks and increasing the effect? For example, PF1E's Power Attack. Seems trivial to implement, but could make a better archetype than a class.

AceofMoxen wrote:

A character who advances the plot by screwing up

I mean, anyone can try and fail and still advance the plot. That's more player choice to choose consequences than character mechanics.

I think the key thing is they somehow screw up, cause serious consequences for others but don't face serious consequences personally. Perhaps the player invokes this ability which results in some kind of bonus to not face the consequence (attacks against them, saves, etc)?

The characters you mention also play off the "lucky halfling" trope. Like the old line "Providence protects idiots, drunkards and children"

AceofMoxen wrote:

the power to manipulate distance

Yeah, I have no idea how to do that mechanically. That would basically need to rewrite all the rules on distance/range/movement. This sounds hard.

AceofMoxen wrote:

steals enemy abilities and uses them

This is a super common archetype in video games. It does kind of break the normal rules about character knowledge of enemy abilities. Quina Quen would be the character I'd base it off of (though Kirby is similar) . It pulls from ancient traditions of eating things to gain their power. Bite off the target's flesh and swallow to understand their powers, another bite and swallow with a declared target power to gain a use of that power. How you get this to progressively scale over 20 levels would be interesting, probably mostly relaxing restrictions as you grow.

I would totally make this Gourmand class. Plus, it gives a setting specific reason why people would want to kill monsters and collect their bodies. Probably can steal some aspects of barbarian and sorcerer. I think there was also a 1e Sorcerer archetype that gained bloodline powers based on drinking the blood of creatures.

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

I never came up with a formal idea how the mechanics would play, but for a long time I considered the design space of a "Blue Mage" type character i.e. the Kirby/Spell-Thief power stealing character.

Since obviously not all monsters even have abilities worth stealing and of those who do, many are not remotely balanced for use by PCs at comparable levels, I started off with considering what sorts of ability groups you might be able to gain. For example, if you steal power from a fire trait creature perhaps you gain fire resistance, or perhaps you can gain dark vision temporarily by consuming a portion of a creature who already has it (with reference to the 1e barbarian with similar concept)

[LordVanya]

I've been sitting on a half finished class for my Android character Nth with a similar premise to a "blue mage". This one is instead based on Megaman.

Admittedly, I never considered the power of the abilities monsters have, but the Megaman concept has a built in solution in that the copy system pretty much never copies abilities perfectly.So for most abilities I'd just find a similar spell of the player's level then alter it as needed.

Since then I evolved this idea to be based on a homebrew Robot ancestry instead.

[25speedforseaweedleshy]

AceofMoxen wrote:

Quoting myself from a previous thread like this.

Comedy relief--Think Pippin and Merry. A character who advances the plot by screwing up. I have no idea how to create this without breaking the math of pf2, but it's an character type that is common and missing. In certain other games, you can get this with a bard, but bards in pf2 are much more power fantasy than comedy relief.

Distance-mancer--Vista from Worm, parahumans. She has the power to manipulate distance. Could be a single spell that scales. So you cast the spell, no character moves, but the distance between them is reduced or expanded. Maybe even a character who bends space like a gravity wave. Even on a virtual tabletop, this would be hard to represent.

Power thief--Kirby from Nintendo. 3.5 had the spellthief, which is kind of what I'm looking for. Someone who steals enemy abilities and uses them.

unexpected sharpshooter

distortion lens vector screen tesseract tunnel

steal spell