Tweaking Classes for Cooler Characters: The Class Mish-Mash Challenge, Part 1

One of the core premises of our current campaign is “Play the character you want to play”. As this is possibly our last D&D 3.5 game, we agreed that everyone would play along these lines, irrespective of party roles … if there was to be no rogues or clerics, so be it, a large part of the loot was going to pay for healing and Reflex Save buffs.

As mentioned before, once the campaign started, we noticed a great discrepancy in the level of effectiveness between some characters. I tried to address it here and it worked rather beautifully for Math’s Mashed-up Arcane Archer/Duskblade . Unfortunately, I can’t post it as its all closed content owned by Wizard of the Coast (But reading the original post should give you enough clues to piece it together…).

However, a bit later, I noticed that Stef still wasn’t too happy with how is Dragon Shaman character turned out, even with the tweaks I had implemented. We fixed that too by making him a completely new character (More on this in my next DM chronicles).

Finally, while Yan was pretty happy with the way Lillie played out (Pixie Sorcerer), he would often say how much he’d like her to have a spell-selection that was more geared toward druidic and enchantment spells to reflect the Fey link to the natural world and their mischievous/ manipulative nature.

So after we had seen Math’s character in action, seeing how easy it had been to mash 2 classes together and keep the balance and reading how Monte Cook created a bunch of 20th level racial classes in his version of the World of Darkness, I decided to challenge Yan:

“Why don’t you design a 20 level character class that combines most of the Pixie’s racial characteristics and abilities with those of the Sorcerer variant we use.”

By the way, Yan is a software developer for a telecom. I knew he’d gleefully take the bait and take a stab at such a challenge.

I gave him the following instructions:

• Start with the Pixie as Character writeup from the Monster Manual (or SRD).
• Merge with the Variant Sorcerer class from Monte Cook’s Complete Book of Eldritch Might (Which I heartily recommend as one of the sanest and crunchiest d20 Sourcebooks).
• All ability adjustments and Special Abilities of the Pixie can be retained except Otto’s Irresistible Dance, spread over several levels .
• Spread abilities over 20 levels, with a slower spell progression than a sorcerer to take into account the Pixie’s racial abilities.
• The class should have 20 Hit Dice and 20 caster levels
• A slight power creep from the original character was acceptable as long as it was roughly equivalent to one potent feat/class feature (possibly 1 1/2).
• The spell selection can be tweaked to include more in-flavour spells by cherry picking from the Druid, Bard and Wizards list.
• I needed to be consulted over any tweaks or additional mechanics created for this class and I kept final veto as DM.

Yan took up the challenge and we exchanged quite a few emails and Gtalk chat sessions, going back and forth, bouncing ideas, accepting many, discarding others and vetoing a few for balance issues (which I must say, is more a question of guts than reason in my case).

I am quite impressed with Yan’s work and especially his restraints. While he is mostly a Story Teller and Brilliant Planner, he has a significant Power Gamer streak that likes to find and exploit combos.

I’m not going to post the class today, I’m sorry, but I need to edit its fluff further and clarify some things. However, as mentioned here, Monte Cook as graciously granted me permission to post it even though it borrows heavily from his Variant Sorcerer class (part of which is closed game content). I will post the second part (with full class writeup) tomorrow evening.

But here’s a teaser…

One of the cool mechanics Yan created was to replace the Pixie’s innate spell-like abilities with what he called Slow-spells. They are spells (from the druid/bard/wizards spell list) that the class gains 1 level ahead of his normal class progression, take 1/2 of a spell slot to cast, but take 4 times longer to cast (A standard action spell now takes 2 full rounds). The character must also perform a certain action, in Lille’s case, play the flute uninterrupted, to cast them.

This makes slow-spells extremely useful for buffing and healing, but not nearly as useful for combat.

See you in part 2…