No Will Of His Own

[Warchon]

So I was thinking of the now-famous Garg story, where an Ogre gets ahold of an Intelligent, LG greatsword and gradually succumbs to the temptation to become Good himself.
And I started to wonder just how far I could advance a character using these guidelines. Take some vicious brute of a character and give him an item with an Ego score of at least +15 or so (Not hard to do) and then never let him win the daily opposed roll, effectively making him a slave to the item. (Low Wisdom, a Flaw or two, etc, can help push the save down further so that the item need not be legendary) Yes, this would also require house ruling that a natural 20 save is not an automatic success.
This would be an incredibly dangerous character, both because he would by necessity have an garbage Will save for his whole career and be susceptible to mind affecting antics, and because if the party ever DOES decide to "help" by boosting his save or, worse, providing immunities, he could easily revert to his own nature and turn on them of his own newly free will.

So the challenge is this: How high of a level can we get an otherwise VIABLE character without ever letting him get a will save bonus?

It's going to require at least ten synergistic classes to get to L20 this way.
Barbarian 2/Fighter 2/Martial Rogue 2 should be a good place to start, with a ton of free feats to augment any direction we'd like to go.

Currently this is just for fun. I have no plans to play this.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Not including dragon compendium, there are 49 base classes and several hundred prestige classes. Epic save bonus kicks in at 20. There will certainly be some combination of classes that allow you to do something useful up to the maximum of level 22 that the constraint of +0 base will save allows.

Now how many and what kind of characters you can get to 22 in this way could be an interesting question as might be which of them is the most powerful.

Now if you meant actual save bonus of +0, rather than base save bonus, that does limit things a bit more; can't rage, no ninja because of ki powers, etc. No idea how doable that is.

[Warchon]

It's a concept piece, so I think some wiggle room is in order--bonus points for keeping an absolute +0 but not explicitly required.
Heck maybe I should suggest this for an Iron Chef. It'd be an interesting variation from "Use Class X"

[ExLibrisMortis]

Intelligent magic items attempt to influence their wielders/users, but that influence is not mind-affecting. You can easily mind blank Garg and still have the sword control their actions.

The ego score of the weapon is pretty easy to boost by giving it INT/WIS/CHA/enhancement buffs, and a lot of cheap powers. For example:


Large +1 greatsword
2400 gp


base cost of intelligence
(three lesser powers,
two greater powers,
mental stats 18/18/10)
+12 000 gp


3/day bless
+1000 gp


3/day faerie fire
+1100 gp


3/day minor image
+2200 gp


at will detect undead
+7200 gp


at will detect evil
+7200 gp


total
33 100 gp


The item has an ego score of 19: +8 from mental scores, +4 from greater powers, +3 from lesser powers, +3 from telepathy/read magic/reading, and +1 from enhancement bonus. Casting greater magic weapon (from a tooth of Leraje, 21 600 gp) increases the ego score by 4, casting something like chasing perfection adds 6 (from +4 to each ability score). A lesser truedeath crystal makes the weapon ghost touch, a +1 ability that increases the sword's ego score as well, for only 5000 gp (and it's a useful ability). That gives a final ego score of 30, though chasing perfection has a minute/level duration, so that's tricky (I guess a sword can't wear a cloak of charisma). Then again, you shouldn't have too many personality conflicts. Maybe the item could buff itself whenever it feels it needs to set the ogre right.


You could use Weapons of Legacy to create an item with a really high ego score and low gp cost, but the associated penalties are a horror.

[Warchon]

On reflection, I think any Will Save bonuses that -don't- apply to the Ego contest would be a good thing for the build, not bad--they make the resulting character more playable without sacrificing the concept.