Relatively new player building a Samurai/ Weretiger character looking for advice :)

[SXSWestvelt]

Hi there long time lurker first time poster here :), sorry in advance for the blocks of text.

So i started playing DND 3.5 last year with a group of almost all beginners, and the way our DM has been running it has been that once we get more experienced in the roleplaying and use of our characters, we end up having a big finale and killing our characters and starting a new campaign with new characters at a higher level.

Now he has encouraged us to look into using monster races allowing us to take 10 levels total but only 7 of those are allowed to be in a class.

I picked samurai because from experience i tend to do a lot of the talking in towns and such and i was looking at the intimidate fear build as a way to make it charismatically combat viable

Now i asked him if he would allow a natural weretiger/samurai and he said that hed allow it at level 7 samurai and take off a couple of tiger levels to make it a 3 level adjustment.

/preamble


I was just wondering a couple of things and I would love to have all your input;

Is it worth losing the tiger levels or does it ruin me?

What is the best way to make this a viable combat character maximising the effectiveness of the samurai and the weretiger classes?


Thank you so much for reading all of that :)

[Darrin]

I picked samurai because from experience i tend to do a lot of the talking in towns and such and i was looking at the intimidate fear build as a way to make it charismatically combat viable


This is the Complete Warrior Samurai? Ok, well... word of warning. That is one of the most despised classes on this forum. So outside of Takahashi no Onisan (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html?id=529142), you're not going to find much love here. Here's why:

Samurai 1. Bonus Feat: Exotic Weapon Proficiency Bastard Sword.
Samurai 2. Bonus Feat: TWF but only with Bastard Sword and Wakizashi.
Samurai 3. 1/day add Cha bonus to attack/damage on next attack.
Samurai 4.
Samurai 5. Bonus Feat: Quickdraw, but only with Bastard Sword/Wakizashi.
Samurai 6. +4 on Intimidate checks.
Samurai 7.

Or:

Fighter 1. Bonus Feat: Exotic Weapon Proficiency Bastard Sword. Or something else.
Fighter 2. Bonus Feat: TWF but with any weapons he likes.
Fighter 3.
Fighter 4. Bonus Feat: Weapon Focus/Specialization. +1 attack and +2 damage. On every attack.
Fighter 5.
Fighter 6. Bonus Feat: Quickdraw.
Fighter 7.

All a fighter needs to do is take Skill Focus: Intimidate as one of his non-Fighter feats, and he's doing pretty much everything a Samurai can do, but he's doing it better and more often.



Now i asked him if he would allow a natural weretiger/samurai and he said that hed allow it at level 7 samurai and take off a couple of tiger levels to make it a 3 level adjustment.


Ok, well... here's the problem with Lycanthropes: all those animal HD count against your Effective Character Level (ECL). That's on top of the LA +3 for a natural lycanthrope. So Weretiger (6 HD w/ LA +3) + Samurai 7 = 16 ECL. When he says "take off a couple", does he mean all 6 of the tiger HD? If so... that sounds somewhat manageable.



Is it worth losing the tiger levels or does it ruin me?


Taking 6 levels of animal HD would probably hurt worse, mostly because you'd be missing 6 class levels with abilities that are more appropriate to a character of that ECL. (Although if they were Samurai levels... that's kind of a toss-up.)

As it is, you're gaining all the advantages of the Lycanthrope template for LA +3 but not taking any animal levels... ok, here's what you get from the Lycanthrope template:

Natural Armor +2

Curse of Lycanthropy (Su). May be useful for RP purposes... and probably a safe bet for a +2 circumstance bonus on Intimidate checks.

Alternate Form (Su). Access to the hybrid form for claw/claw/bite, and in tiger form you've got claw/claw/bite along with Pounce, Improved Grab, and Rake. This would be somewhat interesting if your class levels were in something other than Samurai, which doesn't have a lot of synergy with natural attacks.

DR 10/Silver. This makes you almost immune to mundane weapons, which sorta helps make up for not having three class levels worth of HP. It's difficult to tell exactly how good it is, because we don't know how often your DM is going to equip all of his NPCs/monsters/villagers/housecats with silver weapons... that tends to be proportional to how often you're untouchable in combat, so I'm tempted to call it a wash.

Lycanthropic Empathy. +4 bonus when dealing with other tigers or weretigers. How often is this going to happen? Probably not very often.

Low Light Vision. Torches are cheap.

Scent. Another situational ability, this depends on how often the DM uses invisible enemies.

Saves: It's not clear if you get the saves from 6 HD of animal added to your base saves. Probably not.

Ability Scores: +2 Wisdom... not all that useful for either e meatbag or intimidate build. Getting the physical stats of a tiger in hybrid/animal form, though... that's pretty darned nifty: Str +14, Dex +4, Con +6. That along with the DR might be worth the LA +3 on a melee-focused build.



What is the best way to make this a viable combat character maximising the effectiveness of the samurai and the weretiger classes?


I would consider Warblade 5/Totemist 2.

What sourcebooks do you have available? Is Tome of Battle among them? Online content? Dragon Magazine?

[thoroughlyS]

Seconding the request for books available.

The most important question when building your character is: What do you want to do? You mentioned that you did/will do a lot of the talking, and from the choice of Samurai, I'm assuming you want to be a martial character. Are there other factors that pushed you towards that class?

Another question is: How much prep do you want to put into creating your character? The Samurai can seem appealing because it is very straight forward, with few decisions needing to be made during the creation process. If that's what you're looking for, maybe a Barbarian (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/classes/barbarian.htm) could be a better fit. If you feel like having more choices available, such as feat selection, Fighter (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/classes/fighter.htm) could also fit nicely. If you really want to make a martial character with diverse array of abilities, Psychic Warrior (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/classes/psychicWarrior.htm) or a Tome of Battle class (like the previously mentioned Warblade (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060802a&page=2)) can really let you add a level of strategy to your play (at the cost of putting more thought into your "build").

Any of these classes can be good at doing the talking (acting as the party "face"), with just a little bit of work.

[KillingAScarab]

Well, it depends on how your DM handles "always" alignments. Weretigers are listed as Neutral, while the Complete Warrior samurai class requires a Lawful alignment. Afflicted lycanthropes can be forced to take the listed alignment, natural seem more flexible.

[SXSWestvelt]

first off thanks for replying it means a lot :)

So in terms of books our DM is fairly lenient as long as its 3.5 and we can show that we didn't just make it up, he's okay with it. So Tome of battle is absolutely allowed(we had a swordsage in the last campaign)

so first off I am going to be honest not super married to the samurai build, we got told to think of monster races and i went off and found lycanthropes then samurai pizza cats got in my head( i know idiotic) but we were drinking and a samurai weretiger seemed hilarious and practical. saying that upon further inspection the samurai did seem more straightforward then my last character which was a duskblade which I thoroughly enjoyed but having to buff and prebuff all the time was frustrating and not really practical with our encounters.

How much prep do you want to put into creating your character?

So what i was hoping to build on top of the lycanthrope monster base was a charismatic warrior kind of class, so I could be both useful in towns and conversations as well as not be a glass cannon in the field. This in turn has led me into looking into fear builds for the samurai with the base abilities such as mass staredown as well as the feats like imperius command and never outnumbered both of which could lend to some entertaining fight scenarios.

When he says "take off a couple", does he mean all 6 of the tiger HD?

As far as i can tell from what he has said, that's what he means.

In short I'm happy to put a lot of thought into the character our sessions usually run for 8 or so hours once a fortnight and having a more solid character that has versatility and some synergy with the monster side of things would be a nice little cherry on top.


Also the DM is reasonably flexible with the neutral side of things in terms of alignment as long as its not obviously running counter to what the book says

[Segev]

I would suggest a Warblade going for Tiger Claw and White Raven, then. Maybe Swordsage if it works better.

Tiger Claw should synergize well with Weretiger, and White Raven will let you do some "leader"ish things, which would complement efforts to be a face.

You might also look at the Marshal from Miniatures Handbook. It isn't the best class in the world, but it does a lot with Charisma to buff allies.

[NomGarret]

Yeah, count me in agreement as well. Warblade does the best job at what people typically look for in a *samurai. There is an additional level of complexity in play, and certainly in build, but it's well worth it, IMO. As illustrated above, fighter does as good a job as the CW samurai while allowing you a lot more flexibility in how you want to accomplish your build. This is where it matters what books are available.

As for the weretiger levels, there's a few ways the DM could houserule this down to 3 levels.

1 - Just take the LA+3 lycanthrope template and none of the animal levels. This is what Darrin described above, though arguably without the ability bonuses in animal and hybrid forms as those are typically connected to the animal HD.

2 - Squish it into 3 levels of racial hit dice with no LA. This is preferable to the above as it gives you a few more hp, and increases your BAB, saves, and skills, and continues your base feat progression. Animal HD don't do much of anything aside from keep you from slipping too far behind the curve.

3 - Take the whole thing and pretend it only counts as 3 levels. This is a stretch both in necessity and likelihood on the part of your DM.

*Lengthy history arguments notwithstanding.

[thoroughlyS]

For reference, the weretiger savage progression (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/sp/20031212a). You have to take at least 1 level of Weretiger first before any levels of Tiger. However, you can take them at any time, and don't have to finish them, just like a normal class. Depending on the DM, if you want to avoid rolling for alignment changes or changing forms, you'll need to take all 3 levels of Weretiger to become a Natural Lycanthrope.