help making some characters

[Somensjev]

i'm going to be running a quick level ten campaign in two weeks, and i need to create 10 characters, for eight players (so they have more of a choice)

i want tier's 1-5, but i want everyone to be approximately equal :smallsigh:
and the characters have to be relatively easy to use :smallannoyed:

i was hoping the playground would be able to help me with this, only one character is set in stone (class/race/gender) a half-elf male beguiler, everything else can be changed

i'm not allowed to make personalities, or assign genders (unless needed), and i cant say what alignment they are, unless the class requires me to

i dont want to use houserules/fixes, so i was hoping for ways to buff monks, fighters, etc into tier three, and somehow nerf the full-casters, so that they're tier three (while still being playable)

i get to spend all gold (bar 500gp per character), choose the feats, skills, spells, etc

thank you for any and all contributions.. and sorry for the long post :smalleek:

[Oko and Qailee]

Pauli Fwiskers:

Lvl 9 Druid5/Beastmaster3/PrestigeRanger1

http://www.thetangledweb.net/forums/profiler/view_char.php?cid=74075

Pauli Fwiskers is an animal companion build (which would be reaaaaally good) whose animal companion is the dreaded... HOUSE CAT

Pauli Fwiskers has 3 house cats each with the HD equivalent of a level 12 Druid Animal Companion. The cats do very little damage per attack, but including Pauli's ability to Rapid Shot his cats, he can get a total of 12 attacks a round:

1) Pauli full attacks, throwing his cats
2) Each cat full attacks since they didn't use move actions.

After Pauli has deployed his cats he then buffs them, every +1 Damage is an equivalent of +9 with his cats full attacking. With Greater Magic Fang, Bull Strength (remember, share spell works on ALL your cats up to 30ft), and Helm Tactics all of Pauli's cats get +7 DMG (+21 dmg fo each cat full attack).

"People are running from my cats!"
FEAR NOT! Novice Crown of the White Raven gives your allies, including cats, +4 DMG on charges (+1DMG/2lvls).

"Do I get more cats!?"
YES, next level you can take a level of beast master, giving you another cat (but at 3 Effective Druid levels than his other cats, this will go up by 3 again if you take Natural Bond)

What is Pauli bad against?
High DR, otherwise his cats wreck since they're kinda tanky (25 AC, 40HP, +15 Reflex, Evasion, Devotion, and they have +18 to hit!)

How can I make Pauli BETTER?!
-If using Pathfinder, give your cats PIRHANA STRIKE, boosting their damage to TEH MAXIMUM LEVELS.

Edit: realized this build has Pathfinder feat progression.... you can still do it with 3.5, just remove a feat you don't want as much, like rapid shot

[Oko and Qailee]

Here is a rapier duelist that makes extensive use of Devotion feats (air, knowledge, travel), really good early but scales awfully.

http://www.thetangledweb.net/forums/profiler/view_char.php?cid=71043

[Somensjev]

two very interesting builds, the first one is good, because my players want a comedic campaign, and also want it to be finish-able within an hour

besides, when is someone throwing their cats at enemies not hilarious? :smallamused:

edit: i wonder if there's a way to give the cats the returning enchantment... :smallwink:

[eggynack]

Just use tier three (and sometimes four) classes. Instead of a wizard or sorcerer, use a beguiler, dread necromancer, or warmage. Instead of a cleric, use an adept. Instead of a rogue, use a factotum, unarmed swordsage, or maybe beguiler again. Instead of a druid, how about a wild shape ranger, regular ranger, or totemist. Consider a warblade over fighters and barbarians, a crusader over paladins, and an unarmed swordsage over monks. You can go pretty deep with this stuff, cause tier three and four are so broad.

[Somensjev]

Just use tier three (and sometimes four) classes. Instead of a wizard or sorcerer, use a beguiler, dread necromancer, or warmage. Instead of a cleric, use an adept. Instead of a rogue, use a factotum, unarmed swordsage, or maybe beguiler again. Instead of a druid, how about a wild shape ranger, regular ranger, or totemist. Consider a warblade over fighters and barbarians, a crusader over paladins, and an unarmed swordsage over monks. You can go pretty deep with this stuff, cause tier three and four are so broad.

i considered this, but my players love the classes themselves, not what the classes do, so i thought it might be simpler to just buff the weak and nerf the strong, but i may make two sets of characters, the first one all tier 3 (or maybe 4) and the other one would have characters from all tiers

(also, is there a list of which classes are where, or are most of them not listed?)

[Oko and Qailee]

A lot of them are here:
http://www.brilliantgameologists.com/boards/?topic=1002.0

The druid build is hilarious, it basically asks as a pseudo-bard with okayish damage.

I like the second build a lot because it's a not-TOB melee that has a decent amount of options. It's not as simply as the Druid to play though.

I'd give you more characters, but most of my sheets aren't at the level range you want. The only other one I got close to that is a not-used Edward Elric build.
http://www.thetangledweb.net/forums/profiler/view_char.php?cid=73322

The problem with this build is that it's a Spell to Power Erudite, at any moment the play can be like "I don't ant to limit myself to Edward Elrics capabilities" and then proceed to destroy the universe.

The awesome thing about it is that it has Metal arms and legs, so you can mimic the anime and turn your arms into weapons. Since you're a monk you can technically ENCHANT them as well (since they're part of your body), giving you any weapon you want attached to your arms.

[eggynack]

It's much much harder to design a fixed version of these classes from scratch, or to otherwise nerf the classes with build decisions. As for book locations, beguiler is PHB II, dread necromancer is heroes of horror, warmage is complete arcane, factotum is dungeonscape, warblade, swordsage, and crusader are tome of battle, totemist is magic of incarnum, and the rest can be found in your local d20SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/). I think that's all of them. Also, I think bards can make decent healers, so that could work for clerics. Cleric stuff is one of the big lapses in mid-tier play.

[Somensjev]

would a party with characters of tiers 2-4 be ok, or is the gap still too big?

[Oko and Qailee]

I would either go with what Eggynack is saying and just use T3 BTW, or make sure the builds you present are at levels of optimization corresponding to their Tier.

If you do a wizard build, make it an evoker or something, make a cleric a healer build, and then make the Barbarian an uber charger. If you and your players are good with complexity throw in some ToB classes in there since theyre overall better than most martials.

Also Eggy suggested factotum, I double suggest it. Factotum X is stupidly easy to build, just spam Font of Inspiration for feats, it makes this easier on you.

[Oko and Qailee]

would a party with characters of tiers 2-4 be ok, or is the gap still too big?

Thats pretty good. Just don't do a crazy Sorcerer build and then a crappy rogue build. How good you make each build makes a big difference. T2 is game breaking depending on the build

[eggynack]

would a party with characters of tiers 2-4 be ok, or is the gap still too big?
It'd probably be alright, as JaronK places a two tier distance as a relatively stable state for a game, but it's teetering on the edge. You do get more direct parallels to tier one characters, though that's a problematic thing in and of itself. Still, tier two characters can often be regulated by build decisions like spell choice, so if you're either choosing the spells or monitoring the choices being made, then you won't end up with that tier one issue where the party druid recognizes his potential, and becomes utterly broken overnight. In other words, it's trivial to make a tier two act like a tier three.

[Somensjev]

i think i'll just go for tiers 2 and 3, it'll be simpler, and i wont have as much of a gap to close

so far, i'm going to make a factotum (what race and feats would be really good?) and a half elf beguiler (what feats/spells would be good)

i hate making more than two characters at once :smallsigh:

[eggynack]

i think i'll just go for tiers 2 and 3, it'll be simpler, and i wont have as much of a gap to close
Sounds workable. I was mostly using tier four to cover things that can already be covered by two anyway. For example instead of an adept cleric, you can use a favored soul (CDiv, 6), and instead of a ranger as the druid, you get the spirit shaman (CDiv, 14).


so far, i'm going to make a factotum (what race and feats would be really good?) and a half elf beguiler (what feats/spells would be good)
For the factotum, the race should probably either be an intelligence boosting race, like gray elf, or one of the universally good ones, like human, strongheart halfling, or whisper gnome. As feats, you can just spam font of inspiration from hereabouts (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/frcc/20070606) and end up with a competent build. As for the beguiler, the spell list is completely fixed, so you don't have to touch it. I'm not as sure for feats, but metamagic is always reasonable.

[Somensjev]

if you take font of inspiration twice do you get two or three inspiration points total?

[eggynack]

Three. Hence the spamming.

[Somensjev]

ok, so, at level ten if you were human you could have the feat about 5 times?

giving you a total 15 points?

[eggynack]

Indeed so. Font of inspiration builds up pretty fast.

[Somensjev]

one of my players wants to play a support class (buffs, healing, debuffs, etc) what's a good tier 2 or 3 one?

[eggynack]

Bards are pretty classic for that stuff, and crusaders can generally pull it off a bit as well. Favored soul will definitely work too, as they have access to cleric stuff, and healing, buffing, and debuffing is a set of stuff that's totally in the cleric wheelhouse. In fact, according to Person_Man's niche ranking guide (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314701), which I'm now officially using for all the things, gives the favored soul the maximum rank in healing and buffing, as well as the second best rank in debuffing. Similarly, bards get the second highest ranking in all three.

[Somensjev]

so far, for the party, i have

a half elf beguiler

a crusader

a favoured soul

a element based sorcerer

and a telepath

does this seem ok? (and what would e good feats and equipment for them? how can i keep them all equal?)