Scarred Witch Doctor NPC

[Draco_Lord]

So, I've been thinking about creating a Scarred Witch Doctor NPC and really make him kind of broken. The basic idea is that he is the son of the village Magic Man(Orc). And in a quest to create the most powerful caster that he can, instead ruined his son, turning him into a fantastic caster, but little more then a feral orc by the end of it. All his stats would be dumped as much as possible, and then pumped right into CON. Literally he'd be too wild to do much, plan much, besides just lashing out at those around him. I'd say the only thing he'd want is to kill his father, but the fear of his father doing worse to him keeps him in line. Would it be too unfair to make a character like this with a stupidly high Con rating? Like 30s or 40s. Part of me wants it even higher, but I fear that would be too much. The rest of his stats would be below 10, if not below 6.

Not entirely sure what I'd do with him, probably depends on how the PCs act around him. If they threaten him, he'd fight. If they try to free him, he could probably be brought around to following them. But he'd still lash out a bit at first, more like a wounded animal then anything else.

[Geddy2112]

What level/point buy are you using? Orcs already take a -2 to all mental stats, so if you lower these to 7 you will have a 5 for all mental stats, which will make for more of an animal than a humanoid. The +4 strength will keep you at 11(assuming you can dump to 7 at lowest) but I would still dump it, max con and put the rest in dex. Physical stats could cause the party to mistake the witchdoctor for a brute at first, particularly if he used magic.

Take the feral alternate race trait to ensure that he won't speak any languages and make it difficult to communicate with the party. Maybe have magic ready to translate or some form of pictographic communication.

Then throw on as much CON boosting and stat boosting you can. Call it a day.

[Draco_Lord]

Well, I'm actually not so familiar with point buy myself, the group usually rolls for their stats, rather then buys them. Is there a certain kind that you think would be best for this kind of thing?

[Grod_The_Giant]

First off, you're the DM. You can make his stats whatever you'd like.

What level/point buy are you using? Orcs already take a -2 to all mental stats, so if you lower these to 7 you will have a 5 for all mental stats, which will make for more of an animal than a humanoid. The +4 strength will keep you at 11(assuming you can dump to 7 at lowest) but I would still dump it, max con and put the rest in dex.
If you use this method with the standard 20-point pointbuy, you wind up with Con 18, Dex 18, Str 12, and 5 in all mental ability scores. The problem is that the rules don't let you raise a score about 18 using PB, so you actually wind up less tough than, say, a Dwarf could get. If you removed that restriction... I can't find rules for extending the point-buy chart, but after dumping everything else, you'd wind up with almost 40 points to spend. So you probably could wind up with a score in the 20s to 30s.

But.

He's a spellcaster. That means his spells will be stupidly stronger than is level appropriate. The PCs will almost certainly fail their saves. Beware.

[Urpriest]

First off, you're the DM. You can make his stats whatever you'd like.


I mean, sure. But generally you want to actually use the rules, since using the rules to build things is generally what makes DMing fun and not just an exercise in random number generation.

I know in 3.5 NPCs defaulted to the Elite Array. I don't know if something similar is true in PF, but it likely is. That said, PF does have a variety of templates designed to modify NPCs, so you'll likely be able to get some more Con from one of them.