Factotum ACF's (probably homebrew)

[Vhaidara]

So I have a friend who is thinking about playing a factotum (the DM is a first time so we're all dong kind of silly but awesome things to experiment). I know he's on GitP but felt like getting a thread started to have the collective gears of creativity start turning.

He wants to trade out Arcane Dilettante for something. But factotum has no official ACFs. so can anyone think of a balanced ACF he could use for it?

The current group is my warforged Fighter/Scout semi gestalt (custom class adding skirmish and fast movement to fighter), a shifter barbarian who is going Frenzied Berzerker (beasthide+longtooth), and a Sorcerer who is building into Dread Witch and Nightmare Spinner (he's a fearcaster).

[anacalgion]

The magic of Google. here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=212864) you go.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Swap it and Cunning Strike out for a standard Rogue's sneak attack progression?

[Vhaidara]

I saw the martial progression one, but our DM doesn't want ToB stuff. It would just unbalance the group pretty badly. And that's the only one google gave me.

Grod, we actually got that for free. We (esp my warlock) are pretty big fans of your tweaks :P.

[Crake]

maybe trade it out for bard casting? less powerful list, need to pick spells known, and a slightly lower spell level cap (6 vs 7) but more spells/day?

[Grod_The_Giant]

I saw the martial progression one, but our DM doesn't want ToB stuff. It would just unbalance the group pretty badly. And that's the only one google gave me.

Grod, we actually got that for free. We (esp my warlock) are pretty big fans of your tweaks :P.
Heh heh. Preempted by my own homebrew!


maybe trade it out for bard casting? less powerful list, need to pick spells known, and a slightly lower spell level cap (6 vs 7) but more spells/day?
Eh, if you want to get rid of the wizard casting, you probably don't want to replace it with something equivalent.


I can't really think of anything else appropriate to slot in there, though. Or at least, I can think of a lot of things that could slot in there-- a weakened version of pretty much any class feature would work-- but nothing really leaps out. Maybe full BAB and fighter bonus feats?

[anacalgion]

This may be a dumb idea, but what if you took away spell casting and gave the factotum cunning brilliance a lot earlier, replacing "15th level" with "4 levels lower than your factotum level"? How would that work?

[Eldest]

There are some possibilities.
Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75478) and here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=150664).

[Vhaidara]

I talked to him (btw, feel free to join the conversation if you're reading this) and he wants to play a full mundane (no magic).

Eldest, that's your two suggestions out, since those all involve either maneuvers or casting.

anacalgion, that was actually an idea that the shifter's player had. We'll have to look at details though. One of the more limiting factors there was the 4 inspiration point cost of cunning brilliance.

One of the ideas we are tossing around is to do a semi-gestalt with swashbuckler. To explain the term, my fighter (scout) character traded all but light armor proficiency and all shield proficiencies to gain skirmish and fast movement. For him, it would probably be something like insightful strike, full BAB, Dodge Bonus, and free Weapon Finesse.

Grod posting actually inspired me to check if he had any swashbuckler tweaks. His tweak (play a light armor warblade) made me go look at warblade, and another option is to give factotum full BAB and the warblade class features that aren't maneuvers..

[JaronK]

A big part of the point of the Factotum casting is to let them deal with things like Arcane Lock that Rogues can't touch. So you might want to at least give the ability to use Disable Device to dispel spells, or similar.

JaronK

[Rubik]

Give your factotum the fighter's bonus feats. It won't be nearly as powerful or as useful as Arcane Dilettente, but at least it won't be virtually useless, like the swashbuckler thing.

[Vhaidara]

JaronK: Our DM is new and is making sure that he is fully familiar with our classes. if we can't get past something, we aren't supposed to (yet)

Rubik: No thank you. This is a silly low power group, which includes a character (mine) who is planning on going 20 levels in a variant fighter. Giving him FBFs would literally make him as good at fighting as my character while still filling other roles.

[Rubik]

Rubik: No thank you. This is a silly low power group, which includes a character (mine) who is planning on going 20 levels in a variant fighter. Giving him FBFs would literally make him as good at fighting as my character while still filling other roles.That says more about the fighter than anything else. There's a reason why it's such a low tier.

[Vhaidara]

yes, but we are playing a low tier group so that our first time DM doesn't have to deal with the raw BS that high tiers can do.the factotum is t3, and the only other "good" tiered character we have is our Sor, who is building closer to our power level.

Also, it doesn't really say anything about fighter. What you said was (paraphrased]: Give him [primary (in this case, only) class feature of another class] in place of [one class feature of original class]. Do that for any two classes and the modified one becomes fundamentally stronger, because they have the primary reason why you would take the other class.

[Rubik]

yes, but we are playing a low tier group so that our first time DM doesn't have to deal with the raw BS that high tiers can do.the factotum is t3, and the only other "good" tiered character we have is our Sor, who is building closer to our power level.

Also, it doesn't really say anything about fighter. What you said was (paraphrased]: Give him [primary (in this case, only) class feature of another class] in place of [one class feature of original class]. Do that for any two classes and the modified one becomes fundamentally stronger, because they have the primary reason why you would take the other class.Thing is, fighter feats aren't that good. Yes, they're better than the CW samurai, but what isn't? The entire fighter's roster of class features is still worse than Arcane Dilettante at anything but low levels.

What if you gave the factotum a free (non-exalted) Ancestral Relic feat, without the stipulation of needing an altar. It doesn't count against his WBL, and the factotum has the option of directly augmenting his body to make it unstealable at the expense of one of his item slots (much like a bound soulmeld), but other than that, it still has the limits placed on the feat.