Coidzor
2014-05-24, 08:22 PM
So I was kicking around a couple of ideas today while working on some variant rules for Leadership & one thing I brainstormed up seemed like it might actually have some potential, but there's one glaring hole with it that I feel needs some conceptual patching before going through with actual working it out.
The basic idea is cohorts who are E6 in terms of their class features and character levels but continue to gain Bonus HD of a special cohort type based upon what they do, but that they still get some goodies other than their HD & feats/ability score increases from said HD. So far I touched upon the idea of progressing spellcasting/manifesting/initiating/etc. by a new level every 4 HD after they hit their E6 cap(so when the PCs are level 12, 16, and 20) so that cohorts would get up to 6th level spells when their PCs are 20th level with some progression or another of spells per day/power points/etc.
The hole I have here currently is that I'd have to give something to those that don't have casting to progress.
What, then, could equate to getting up to 3 more spell levels?
So far all I've got is getting the benefits of Vow of Poverty(or even a VoP fix) without any of the baggage of actual poverty along with giving out some bonus feats from a good list & maybe giving a couple of iterations of the Ancestral Relic feat as bonus feats with some fraction, say a quarter or half of the wealth invested per level being gained for free, so that, say a cohort that was equivalent to 12th level would have, say, half of or a quarter of the 44K gp cap already invested in the item.
And that's partially because I don't want to go in and do a custom advancement for each individual mundane class, since if I did that I feel there wouldn't be much point to going with that instead of one of my other plans to make full 1-20 NPC versions of the PC classes(or downgrade some of the existing PC classes to NPC status) and just have an equal level cohort with only NPC classes.
Thoughts on either the "VoP"+free magic items kludge or other thoughts about what could give some kind of rough sense of parity against the 3 levels of spells/powers/maneuvers given the rate of progression and high level of it would be appreciated.
The basic idea is cohorts who are E6 in terms of their class features and character levels but continue to gain Bonus HD of a special cohort type based upon what they do, but that they still get some goodies other than their HD & feats/ability score increases from said HD. So far I touched upon the idea of progressing spellcasting/manifesting/initiating/etc. by a new level every 4 HD after they hit their E6 cap(so when the PCs are level 12, 16, and 20) so that cohorts would get up to 6th level spells when their PCs are 20th level with some progression or another of spells per day/power points/etc.
The hole I have here currently is that I'd have to give something to those that don't have casting to progress.
What, then, could equate to getting up to 3 more spell levels?
So far all I've got is getting the benefits of Vow of Poverty(or even a VoP fix) without any of the baggage of actual poverty along with giving out some bonus feats from a good list & maybe giving a couple of iterations of the Ancestral Relic feat as bonus feats with some fraction, say a quarter or half of the wealth invested per level being gained for free, so that, say a cohort that was equivalent to 12th level would have, say, half of or a quarter of the 44K gp cap already invested in the item.
And that's partially because I don't want to go in and do a custom advancement for each individual mundane class, since if I did that I feel there wouldn't be much point to going with that instead of one of my other plans to make full 1-20 NPC versions of the PC classes(or downgrade some of the existing PC classes to NPC status) and just have an equal level cohort with only NPC classes.
Thoughts on either the "VoP"+free magic items kludge or other thoughts about what could give some kind of rough sense of parity against the 3 levels of spells/powers/maneuvers given the rate of progression and high level of it would be appreciated.