Zaq
2019-03-23, 01:36 PM
This is an extremely incomplete nucleus of a goofy idea that’s probably gonna go nowhere, but whatever.
I love the scout class from CAdv more than is probably appropriate. It strikes me as a very elegant concept married to an interesting party niche married to an extremely bad design flaw. But despite its problems, I like it, and I like thinking of ways to work around the limitations it has, the big obvious one being that it doesn’t have a class-native way to trigger Skirmish on a full attack. This is an attempt to use a nonconventional method to address that weakness. (I’m well aware of the traditional ways to solve the problem, including but not limited to Pounce, Travel Devotion, and Greater Manyshot. I’m not trying to make a strong scout. I’m trying to make a weird scout.)
A question in the Simple RAW thread reminded me that grappling can involve “free” movement into the target’s space. Scouts love free movement. The core of the idea, then, would be to cobble together a scout with enough reach and enough grapple juice* to reach out and touch someone with their first attack of the round, move in to maintain the grapple, and then get skirmish dice on their remaining attacks, which would probably be those weird grapple-based attempts to damage an opponent. Optimal? Clearly not—there's so much that can go wrong. Amusing? I think so!
So there’s a few prongs to this. We need crazy high reach, we need good grapple mods, we need as many levels in a class that advances skirmish dice as possible, and we need something that clearly counts as an attack when used as a way of damaging an opponent in a grapple. And I’m 100% freestyling and thinking on the fly at this point, so I’m totally looking forward to hearing how you suggest to improve this.
Getting really big is generally a good way to both increase reach and increase grappling ability, so do we have a good way to accomplish getting big on essentially a scout chassis? Swift Hunter means scout mixes well with ranger, but WS ranger’s wild shape can’t usually get above Medium. Is there an easy way to break that cap with perhaps a clever dip or two into a WS-based PrC? Daggerspell shaper can be qualified for by a Swift Hunter using scout and WS ranger as the base and does grant Large WS at level 4, but it advances sneak attack regardless of whether you qualified with sneak attack or skirmish. Master of many forms gets Large WS just at level 2, though. Huge takes more levels than we're likely to be able to spare. Warshaper gets extra reach at level 3.
If we stay in humanoid shape, there’s always the old reach-increasing standbys of Willing Deformity (Tall) and Inhuman Reach, each of which costs two feats. Expensive, and it only gets us to 15’, which isn't enough for Improved Skirmish to trigger. Might stack with some other options, though, and those two feats do work all day every day with no activation, which helps.
Goliath barbarians become Large while raging. Being a goliath costs a level and kind of hurts that way, though, and it's not fully compatible with everything else we're trying to do, but I guess it can be thought of as basically a two-level investment. (Probably plus a feat to do it more than once a day.)
Psychic warriors are pretty good at grappling. Expansion and grip of iron alone count for a heck of a lot. Don't think there's a way to progress psychic warrior manifesting while advancing skirmish dice, though, is there? (As a spin-off idea, maybe it'd be amusing to turn the build into more of a controller by using the "you can sacrifice skirmish dice for ambush feats" clause and loading up on debuff-style effects on folks you grapple. Could perhaps combine well with daggerspell shaper and the Savage Grapple feat?)
Is there a way to get an attack to count as initiating a true grapple (that follows all the normal grapple rules, including moving) while at range? Perhaps the blood wind spell? Blood wind should work if you have a way to trigger a grapple after hitting with an arbitrary unarmed strike or natural weapon, as many forms of improved grab do. What's the best way to get this style of improved grab on a PC, and how can we get a good number of castings of blood wind for minimal level investment (or while advancing our other goals)? Damn shame that blood wind isn't Persistable without getting Ocular Spell involved. That's a lot of feats if we wanted to use DMM shenanigans, unless someone can think of an easier way to get it a whole bunch of times. Can a naenhoon illumian first spontaneously slap Ocular onto a spell and then spontaneously slap Persist on it when actually releasing the Ocularized spell? You need to have two separate swift actions to apply two separate metamagics via naenhoon, but the wording of Ocular kind of seems like you cast it twice: you first "cast" it into your eyes, and then you later "cast" it as eye beams.
In a similar "grapple at range" vein, bloodstorm blade is the gold standard for this flavor of rules-bending shenanigans, but it seems to move in the wrong direction for this particular task unless someone can offer another perspective. We don't want to start with thrown weapons and turn them into melee attacks (unless there's a game element that triggers a grapple off of hitting with an arbitrary melee attack that isn't an unarmed strike/natural weapon), but rather the reverse. I think. Like I said, I'm freestyling on the fly.
Oriental Adventures has two bizarre weapons that let you grapple: the sasumata and the sodegarami. Book of Exalted Deeds has the entangling pole and the grasping pole, which are clearly based off of the sasumata and the sodegarami.
The sasumata and the grasping pole have reach, but they only work on Small or Medium opponents, which is annoying. The sasumata deals nonlethal damage and the grasping pole does lethal damage, which is somewhat amusing considering that the grasping pole is in the section of BoED devoted to "nonlethal weapons."
The sodegarami has no baked-in size limitations but only works against characters who are wearing clothing but who are not wearing heavy armor, and that's a remarkably small subset of opponents in many games. It says you "do not have to" move into your target's space, but "do not have to" is very different from "cannot." It also doesn't have reach but explicitly does hold your foe up to 10 ft away from you. It's a rules mess from start to finish.
The entangling pole appears to be almost exactly the same as the sodegarami, but it has reach.
I don't think these weapons are the answer to this problem, but eh, you never know.
Let's sum up a bit! Seeing a few possible paths to go down, and I'm not sure which is the closest to being practical.
Shapeshifty route! Swift Hunter to mix scout with ranger, WS ranger to get WS, some game element to break WS ranger's size cap. The advantage here is that if we can get past the size limit, levels in ranger both advance shapeshiftery (which makes grappling easier) and skirmish dice, which are, after all, the entire point.
Blood wind route! Get some method of accessing blood wind a meaningful number of times per day (or Persist it), get an improved grab ability to tack a grapple onto an arbitrary unarmed strike hit or natural weapon hit, and follow your flung punches across the battlefield. The advantage is that you're less limited by reach, and the image is hilarious. The disadvantage is that I'm not sure how to get blood wind a useful number of times per day without being a full caster with a ton of spell slots unless we're diving into Persistomancy, and I've still got a fudge factor in there for how to get improved grab. And we need ways to actually succeed at grapple checks.
Weapon route? I dunno, something involving those goofy weapons? Reach increases work better with reach weapons, but those weapons have obnoxious limitations. Any way to force an opponent to wear clothes without spending major actions?
Size-increasing route! Simply become really big without actually turning into another critter by means of goliath barbarian, psychic warrior, or some similar combination. Advantage is that you aren't fending off as many questions about why you aren't using your shapeshifting more optimally (and it might stack with things like Willing Deformity); disadvantage is that I don't think it's easy to progress skirmish dice at the same time as the other things we're talking about here.
Something else?
I'm pretty sure I'm in full ramble mode by this point. Might be best to leave off here. Again, I know that this is far and away not even close to the most efficient way to get skirmish on a full attack (technically a full attack minus one), but the goal is to solve a well-known problem in a new and kooky (but hopefully at least minimally viable!) way. Anyone got anything to add? Ever looked at this kind of interaction before? See a combo I'm missing? Feel like slapping together a skeletal build that sees how many levels it actually takes to cram together all these build elements I'm cavalierly tossing around? Floor's open!
*(Grapple juice, of course, is what you get by mixing together grape juice and apple juice. It’s surprisingly complex. Just describing it takes up like a full page and a half.)
I love the scout class from CAdv more than is probably appropriate. It strikes me as a very elegant concept married to an interesting party niche married to an extremely bad design flaw. But despite its problems, I like it, and I like thinking of ways to work around the limitations it has, the big obvious one being that it doesn’t have a class-native way to trigger Skirmish on a full attack. This is an attempt to use a nonconventional method to address that weakness. (I’m well aware of the traditional ways to solve the problem, including but not limited to Pounce, Travel Devotion, and Greater Manyshot. I’m not trying to make a strong scout. I’m trying to make a weird scout.)
A question in the Simple RAW thread reminded me that grappling can involve “free” movement into the target’s space. Scouts love free movement. The core of the idea, then, would be to cobble together a scout with enough reach and enough grapple juice* to reach out and touch someone with their first attack of the round, move in to maintain the grapple, and then get skirmish dice on their remaining attacks, which would probably be those weird grapple-based attempts to damage an opponent. Optimal? Clearly not—there's so much that can go wrong. Amusing? I think so!
So there’s a few prongs to this. We need crazy high reach, we need good grapple mods, we need as many levels in a class that advances skirmish dice as possible, and we need something that clearly counts as an attack when used as a way of damaging an opponent in a grapple. And I’m 100% freestyling and thinking on the fly at this point, so I’m totally looking forward to hearing how you suggest to improve this.
Getting really big is generally a good way to both increase reach and increase grappling ability, so do we have a good way to accomplish getting big on essentially a scout chassis? Swift Hunter means scout mixes well with ranger, but WS ranger’s wild shape can’t usually get above Medium. Is there an easy way to break that cap with perhaps a clever dip or two into a WS-based PrC? Daggerspell shaper can be qualified for by a Swift Hunter using scout and WS ranger as the base and does grant Large WS at level 4, but it advances sneak attack regardless of whether you qualified with sneak attack or skirmish. Master of many forms gets Large WS just at level 2, though. Huge takes more levels than we're likely to be able to spare. Warshaper gets extra reach at level 3.
If we stay in humanoid shape, there’s always the old reach-increasing standbys of Willing Deformity (Tall) and Inhuman Reach, each of which costs two feats. Expensive, and it only gets us to 15’, which isn't enough for Improved Skirmish to trigger. Might stack with some other options, though, and those two feats do work all day every day with no activation, which helps.
Goliath barbarians become Large while raging. Being a goliath costs a level and kind of hurts that way, though, and it's not fully compatible with everything else we're trying to do, but I guess it can be thought of as basically a two-level investment. (Probably plus a feat to do it more than once a day.)
Psychic warriors are pretty good at grappling. Expansion and grip of iron alone count for a heck of a lot. Don't think there's a way to progress psychic warrior manifesting while advancing skirmish dice, though, is there? (As a spin-off idea, maybe it'd be amusing to turn the build into more of a controller by using the "you can sacrifice skirmish dice for ambush feats" clause and loading up on debuff-style effects on folks you grapple. Could perhaps combine well with daggerspell shaper and the Savage Grapple feat?)
Is there a way to get an attack to count as initiating a true grapple (that follows all the normal grapple rules, including moving) while at range? Perhaps the blood wind spell? Blood wind should work if you have a way to trigger a grapple after hitting with an arbitrary unarmed strike or natural weapon, as many forms of improved grab do. What's the best way to get this style of improved grab on a PC, and how can we get a good number of castings of blood wind for minimal level investment (or while advancing our other goals)? Damn shame that blood wind isn't Persistable without getting Ocular Spell involved. That's a lot of feats if we wanted to use DMM shenanigans, unless someone can think of an easier way to get it a whole bunch of times. Can a naenhoon illumian first spontaneously slap Ocular onto a spell and then spontaneously slap Persist on it when actually releasing the Ocularized spell? You need to have two separate swift actions to apply two separate metamagics via naenhoon, but the wording of Ocular kind of seems like you cast it twice: you first "cast" it into your eyes, and then you later "cast" it as eye beams.
In a similar "grapple at range" vein, bloodstorm blade is the gold standard for this flavor of rules-bending shenanigans, but it seems to move in the wrong direction for this particular task unless someone can offer another perspective. We don't want to start with thrown weapons and turn them into melee attacks (unless there's a game element that triggers a grapple off of hitting with an arbitrary melee attack that isn't an unarmed strike/natural weapon), but rather the reverse. I think. Like I said, I'm freestyling on the fly.
Oriental Adventures has two bizarre weapons that let you grapple: the sasumata and the sodegarami. Book of Exalted Deeds has the entangling pole and the grasping pole, which are clearly based off of the sasumata and the sodegarami.
The sasumata and the grasping pole have reach, but they only work on Small or Medium opponents, which is annoying. The sasumata deals nonlethal damage and the grasping pole does lethal damage, which is somewhat amusing considering that the grasping pole is in the section of BoED devoted to "nonlethal weapons."
The sodegarami has no baked-in size limitations but only works against characters who are wearing clothing but who are not wearing heavy armor, and that's a remarkably small subset of opponents in many games. It says you "do not have to" move into your target's space, but "do not have to" is very different from "cannot." It also doesn't have reach but explicitly does hold your foe up to 10 ft away from you. It's a rules mess from start to finish.
The entangling pole appears to be almost exactly the same as the sodegarami, but it has reach.
I don't think these weapons are the answer to this problem, but eh, you never know.
Let's sum up a bit! Seeing a few possible paths to go down, and I'm not sure which is the closest to being practical.
Shapeshifty route! Swift Hunter to mix scout with ranger, WS ranger to get WS, some game element to break WS ranger's size cap. The advantage here is that if we can get past the size limit, levels in ranger both advance shapeshiftery (which makes grappling easier) and skirmish dice, which are, after all, the entire point.
Blood wind route! Get some method of accessing blood wind a meaningful number of times per day (or Persist it), get an improved grab ability to tack a grapple onto an arbitrary unarmed strike hit or natural weapon hit, and follow your flung punches across the battlefield. The advantage is that you're less limited by reach, and the image is hilarious. The disadvantage is that I'm not sure how to get blood wind a useful number of times per day without being a full caster with a ton of spell slots unless we're diving into Persistomancy, and I've still got a fudge factor in there for how to get improved grab. And we need ways to actually succeed at grapple checks.
Weapon route? I dunno, something involving those goofy weapons? Reach increases work better with reach weapons, but those weapons have obnoxious limitations. Any way to force an opponent to wear clothes without spending major actions?
Size-increasing route! Simply become really big without actually turning into another critter by means of goliath barbarian, psychic warrior, or some similar combination. Advantage is that you aren't fending off as many questions about why you aren't using your shapeshifting more optimally (and it might stack with things like Willing Deformity); disadvantage is that I don't think it's easy to progress skirmish dice at the same time as the other things we're talking about here.
Something else?
I'm pretty sure I'm in full ramble mode by this point. Might be best to leave off here. Again, I know that this is far and away not even close to the most efficient way to get skirmish on a full attack (technically a full attack minus one), but the goal is to solve a well-known problem in a new and kooky (but hopefully at least minimally viable!) way. Anyone got anything to add? Ever looked at this kind of interaction before? See a combo I'm missing? Feel like slapping together a skeletal build that sees how many levels it actually takes to cram together all these build elements I'm cavalierly tossing around? Floor's open!
*(Grapple juice, of course, is what you get by mixing together grape juice and apple juice. It’s surprisingly complex. Just describing it takes up like a full page and a half.)