Class Concept - Apothecary?

[Malapterus]

I really don't know what to call this class, but it's a crafty class.

The idea is that it will allow you to craft items, without the XP cost, and without as much investment of time and money.

The catch is, you need some specific materials you can't just go out and purchase - you have to collect them, and the things you collect from aren't so willing to give up their treasures as dungeons are. You must hunt monsters!

The class would mostly revolve around consumable items & gear with middle-of-the-road stuff like wands not really being an option.

By taking a piece of a monster, you can make an elixir or an item that has the qualities of said monster. You select one of the special abilities or special qualities of the monster and use its parts to replicate that for a humanoid user.

For example, if you collected the tissues of a Phantom Fungus you could brew them into an elixer that temporarily replicates the fungus's purge-proof greater invisibility - for no XP and a fraction of the cost and time of a Greater Invisibility potion, without even needing to know Greater Invisibility or be able to cast spells at all.

Maybe you can drain some ogre blood for an elixir of Bull's Strength, or boil some troll skin into an elixir of Cure Moderate Wounds.

At higher levels, you can start making actual gear. Skin that ogre and tan its hide into a Belt of Giant's Strength. Make some Dragonhide Armor that also grants natural armor based on the dragon it came from, or perhaps resistance to that dragon's energy type. Work those troll bones and sinews into some Bracers of Regeneration.

Off the top of my head, I think the caster level & craft DC would both be reliant on the HD of the host organism, and the cost and time would be based on the spell or enhancement it most closely reproduces.

Before you know it you'll be spiking your Barbarian teammate's Greatclub with blue dragon teeth to make it a +1 Shocking Burst weapon & he can save his money to buy some pants.

I've always wanted to be a crafter in a game but the XP, time, and money costs are very prohibitive if you want to supply gear to your whole team. I think that the trade-off of needing to find a source for your effect, one that often bites back, would be a fair trade-off for being allowed to do this.

One immediate problem is that you'd need to be sure the DM is running a monster-heavy game & will allow your party a minute here and there to hunt down a monster you need.

I also don't know if this should be a base class, or if it should be something that a Ranger, Druid, or Wizard would PrC into at a low level.

Right now I'm thinking it's be a base class with 2 good saves & a 3/4th BaB with these crafting abilities as class features & some other features to allow for the stalking, slaying, and skinning of monsters.

What do you guys think of this? Is XP-free quick crafting of potion-like items and gear going to unbalance the game? Is the flow of monster parts going to satisfy this class for the average game? I value your input & may try to write this up if need be.

note: Possible additional item type; harvest the stored breath weapons of monsters to make splash weapons.

note 2: contact elixirs you can throw at your allies for instant potion effects!

note 3: extract & handle monster poison as an optional class feature?

[aimlessPolymath]

Hm.

The main issue with this class, designwise, is that it's an entire subsystem onto itself; in order to design it, you need to write up an additional set of requirements for almost every item in the game (which gets pretty silly when you consider potions). For example, what kind of creature goes into a potion of "protection from evil"? A potion of jump? A set of boots of the winterlands?

Other issues:
-Drastically more/less powerful depending on the ratio of monsters to NPCs you fight
-A more generic open ended system is often abusable, especially when some specific creatures might have unbalanced abilities for what their CR indicates (consider a CR 1 parasite that can control people- very killable, but very powerful).


On the other hand, huge benefits:
-Ends the treasure disparity between monsters and NPCs- monsters now have "treasure" in the form of crafting materials
-The system creates plot hooks for itself, in that players intentionally seek out monsters to slay for equipment
-Possibility of unusual/unique items
-Ability for players to intentionally seek out items for their build, reducing the need for the DM to dole out specific items
-Making crafting viable but not unbalanced is something I've always wanted. Always.

For reference, observe this class (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?205119-Must-Affix-Everything-to-Everything!-(Grafts-That-Don-t-Make-Me-Cry-Myself-To-Sleep)), which went the opposite direction; rather than assigning monsters to magic items, Kellus created magic items for monsters; this comes at the cost of extensibility; new monsters won't have abilities set up for them.

[Malapterus]

It should actually be a lot simpler than it sounds. What creature goes into a ring of Jumping? Any creature with a racial Jump bonus, amount of creature HD worth of parts you need based on the effect you want to get.

Step 1) Find the ability you want
Step 2) Find the creature that has it
Step 3) Find the closest approximation of an existing spell you can

and then from there the price and crafting time are probably a set fraction of 'normal'

[aimlessPolymath]

Okay, but that comes into reverse-engineering issues with freeform assignment, and you may end up building a system that runs much more on "DM says" than anything else. If that's something you're OK with, then that's OK, but it makes it more difficult to design a general system, IMO.

Consider that a potion of jump doesn't technically provide a bonus to Jump checks, but actually provides the benefit of a specific spell. Logically, anything that provides a bonus to Jump checks should also let you make it, but it's determined by DM fiat(or a giant table of spells and their prerequisite creatures) to say that it does, because the rules just consider it as another spell (and practically nothing has jump as a spell-like ability).

You could have the system for doing so being relatively freeform and DM dependent, I suppose, but I'm not 100% comfortable with making a class whose central feature works primarily by DM fiat.

Other than that, other thoughts:
-This works much better as a PrC or feat than as a base class; having fallback options from your original class is important when you're getting started.
-Maybe magic item cost reduction based on the CR of the creature? This makes maximum advantage of the expected-treasure-per-encounter, making monster-hunting more valuable. If so, suggest basing it on 1/2 the expected treasure of the creature- commensurate with what you'd expect out of selling an NPC's stuff of equivalent level. Crafting time reduction follows naturally from the 1000 gp/day measurement. As a side-effect, this gives you expected value for selling stuff to a wizard.
-