[3.5]Creating a Character that Doesn't Suck

[Archpaladin Zousha]

As most of you know, I'm trying to come up with character ideas for upcoming 3.5 games. I'm sure many of you are familiar with my threads "Building a Spellsword" and my more recent "Building a Dwarf."

I'm writing this mainly because I'm noticing a frustrating pattern in the kinds of characters I like to play. Every time I get an interesting concept in mind, I try to make it work and I get told that the concept is based off poor mechanics. The base classes I pick are weak, the almighty caster level dominates all, and most of the prestige classes I think fit the concept are a load of garbage.

Why is it that the concepts I want to build just don't work well in practice? Why is it that in order to optimize my character, I have to do things or use combos that just seem ridiculous to me? Why do they all involve books I don't have? The list goes on.

I really don't get why the concepts I think are awesome turn out to be weak in terms of actual gameplay. You can't survive in D&D on your cool factor alone, and that's what think I go for when I make a character.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Because 90% of PrCs WotC printed could have appeared in one book, Complete Carp. -some guy on the WotC forums.

Look at the base class tier list sometime. You'll notice that while the tiers are mostly even in number of classes, the distribution is odd. Most of a class's location depends on what mechanics it uses, not the class itself. You get full casters on tier one, limited casters on tier 2, non-casters with a variety of abilities on tier 3, 'pure' martial characters on tier 4, and classes that are nerfed on tier 5.
These boards are actually good with building optimized characters to fit most fluff, as long as you aren't tied to any specific mechanics. If you want to play optimized melee, though, ToB is required. For a Rogue that does more than toss d6s in combat, Factorum or Swordsage. For a divine knight, a warrior for all that is good and pure, pick Crusader, Knight, or Cleric over Paladin. For a front-line tank, Knight, Warblade, Crusader, or such over Fighter. Yeah, it sucks, but there is a lot of cruft in some of the books.

[Keld Denar]

Complete Carp.

Is this the book you turn to to optimize your Profession: Fishing skill?

The trick is to be a little flexible in your concept. As you saw in the Spellsword thread, you can build a "Spellsword" that is decent, without taking any more than one level in the actual "Spellsword" class. As well as in the Paladin that I helped you build, 5 paladin levels were enough, and Divine Crusader helped round out the build to bring it up to a higher level.

So...what is it that you are trying to do? To build?

[Goatman_Ted]

I notice that you ask for optimization advice when you don't seem to care about optimizing.

It also seems the concepts you say can't be portrayed by D&D are often specific D&D prestige classes or rooted in specific D&D objects and abilities. In the Spellsword thread, for instance, you were weakening your character because your concept was very specific about one fictional material in place of another.


You play in a group where 10 levels of Spellsword or Warpriest are the norm.
These forums exist in a vacuum. We don't know the power level accepted in your campaigns.
We can only assume that when you say "Optimize" you mean "optimize."

(Hint: 100% of character concepts can be effectively portrayed with one of these two builds: Rogue 20, Cleric 20)

[Archpaladin Zousha]

The main problem I have is that the concepts that I'm looking for can't really be expressed in 3.5e terms. Here's the concepts I have so far:

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

Here are some other concepts I've been thinking about:

A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has.

A Stormlord who worships Heironeous.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword.

A merchant who can still adventure.

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I notice that you ask for optimization advice when you don't seem to care about optimizing.

I notice you ignore the simple option in favor of the best option, then become upset when it doesn't match your concept exactly (the wrong skill ranks, armor made from the wrong material).


You play in a group where 10 levels of Spellsword or Warpriest are the norm.
These forums exist in a vacuum. We don't know the power level accepted in your campaigns.
We can only assume that when you say "Optimize" you mean "optimize."

(Hint: 100% of character concepts can be effectively portrayed with one of these two builds: Rogue 20, Cleric 20)

Actually I play in a group where virtually no prestige classes at all are the norm. My DM really had to stretch to accomodate me. Virtually everyone else was using the Player's Handbook and the Player's Handbook only.

And that's part of my gripe. That's what optimized doesn't look as cool.

[RTGoodman]

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

Not sure on the first since I don't do much with casters or magic in general. I guess you could be (if you're willing to be Evil) a Hexblade/Paladin of Tyranny (get out before the divine casting) or something, with a focus on debuffing and such.

For the second, that's a Crusader up one side and down the other. Focus on White Raven, but maybe Devoted Spirit for a more "divine" leader version.

Here are some other concepts I've been thinking about:

A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous. Definitely a Warblade.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has. Factotum/Chameleon - you can find build guides online in several places.

A Stormlord who worships Heironeous. Don't know anything particularly, since I don't know anything about Stormlords or Heironeous, really.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword. Not sure, again. You could, of course, just ask for a homebrew discipline switch - trade one or two Crusader disciplines for Iron Heart and maybe a re-touched Desert Wind that focuses on electricity.

A merchant who can still adventure. Factotum - you can use it for all sorts of Average Joes who get by on wits alone. Bonus points for using the Farmer miniature.

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver. Again, Factotum, or maybe even an Artificer from Eberron. Maybe add in Trapsmith or Combat Trapsmith if you want a PrC.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47. Warforged Scout Warlock. Refluff Eldritch Blast as needed. Or maybe even just a Fighter/Rogue with a repeating crossbow.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple. Not sure here, but there's gotta be a CharOp Dragon Disciple thread somewhere.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense. This just SCREAMS Archivist.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray. Not sure on this one either, but defense/HP optimization surely exists.

Suggestions edited in above in bold.

[Myrmex]

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

Any standard gish board on these fora would work. More exotic builds could include phantom knight or swift blade (both on wotc website). A shadowhand swordsage could make a fairly effective mage killer, just reflavor his blade magic as an alternate source.

psychic warrior 20 or psychic warrior 10/illithid slayer 10 are both extremely solid gish builds, as well.

Duskblade works good right out of the box.

A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

Cleric 20, Bard 20, or a martial build could all fit this concept quite well, and be effective.

A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.

Warblade, beguiler, barbarian, factotum, rogue, glaivelock, really anything. Archivist using things like Produce Flame & Holy Sword, along with animate objects on his 2 dozen other swords is a concept I've been kicking around. He likes swords.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has.

Factotum 20 or Factotum10/Chameleon10.

A Stormlord who worships Heironeous.

Sorc/Rainbow Servant using text trumps table (full casting) and reflavored for Heironeous. Wouldn't even have to change the domains!

You would get all cleric spells on your spell list as well as more iconic stuff like lightning bolt.

An alternative would be to talk to your DM, and simply play a sorc that picks spells from ANY list (sorta RAW- in part about sorcs learning new spells). With some metamagic tricks, you could so some really solid blasting. If you wanted more martial, just go gish and reflavor as suited. Or there might be a druid variant out there with better casting and no wildshape.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword.

Burn some feats and go into Master of the Nine (or multi into warblade for a level or two).

A merchant who can still adventure.

Beguiler, wizard, rogue, bard, or factotum.

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver.

Check out the combat trapsmith in Dungeonscape.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47.

Warforged archer cleric with crossbow with the splitting enhancement on it.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple.

Go standard fighter-lockdown build, or perhaps a fear based build. With 6 levels of fighter, you could do both, and get dungeoncrasher, which means mad damage.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense.

Archivist + Knowledge Devotion. Or wizard or bard with Knowledge Devotion. I would go archivist with a dip in lorekeeper.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray.

Dwarven barbarian/fist of the forest? Throw in bear warrior for even more con bonuses.

[edit]
That ninja said almost the same things I said....

I feel your pain, though. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to build certain concepts, and most of the time a caster can do you 10 level build worth of tricks with a single spell.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

Destroying magic items is not cool, but could be doable with a refluffed Vow of Poverty. Gish isn't really great for anti-caster(which is best done via Arcane Archer, pure caster, or lockdown melee), but a Duskblade/Crusader/JPM using Thicket of Blades, Wraithstrike, and a Whipdagger and maybe taking the hit from Mageslayer could do it.

A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

Knight, Crusader, or Cleric. Season to taste.

A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.

Pretty much any Cha-based melee. I'd go Bard, but Crusader works. Bardbarian is pretty nice, as is Bardblade.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has.

Either Factorum 20 or Factorum 8/Chameleon 10/Factorum 2. Font of Inspiration to taste.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword.

Generally you can replace one school of the 9 with another(with DM permission of course), as long as the 2 aren't too far apart on the power scale(the schools are mostly balanced, but there are issues with a couple). I'd recommend swapping Devoted Spirit or White Raven, due to the weakness of Stone Dragon.

A merchant who can still adventure.

Is there any problem that can't be solved by money? Make him an Artificer. Now he has a reason to have massive amounts of magic items, to be able to 'fix up' weak/useless ones, and he only adventures as long as the group is in the black.

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver.

Combat Trapsmith, CWar IIRC. It's good for the levels you're in it, but falls behind fast after you leave(so only really useful levels 5-10), but it sounds like what you want.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47.

No.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple.

Play a Spellscale, Half-Dragon, or essentially anything other than that class. It gives you nothing that you can't get better with the actual Half-Dragon template and, you know, CLASS LEVELS. There's even a template class in RotD that could give you the same thing, but not as sucky, as a progression.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense.

Archivist/Loremater with Knowledge Devotion.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray.

Assuming you're talking about a Stone Giant(the biggest club-wielder of them),one hit deals 21 damage, 4(or 3 with a crit at x2) deals 84. You face them at level 7-8, so we'll say 7 HD, each of which has to grant 12 HP(and the doubling from 1st level will keep you on your feet). Let's say you can afford to put a 16 in Con before you have to sacrifice other stats. The d12 of a Warblade, Barb, or Knight grants 6-7 HP, meaning you would need a +6 Con. But Improved Toughness drops that to a +5. A +2 item drops it to a +4. Meaning that for a Warforged or Dwarf(or almost any Dragonborn of Bahumet), it's doable without undue sacrifices to your other stats. A Raging Barb can do it without needing Imp Toughness or a racial boost. The issue is that surviving 4 hits from any level-appropriate 'massive melee brute' isn't going to be easy. It's generally better to avoid hits in the first place, through AC, miss chance, Flight, or having some idiot take the hits for you while you hit it with spell...oh.

Tell us the concept, most of the time we can make it work.

[RTGoodman]

Assuming you're talking about a Stone Giant(the biggest club-wielder of them),one hit deals 21 damage, 4(or 3 with a crit at x2) deals 84. You face them at level 7-8, so we'll say 7 HD, each of which has to grant 12 HP(and the doubling from 1st level will keep you on your feet). Let's say you can afford to put a 16 in Con before you have to sacrifice other stats. The d12 of a Warblade, Barb, or Knight grants 6-7 HP, meaning you would need a +6 Con. But Improved Toughness drops that to a +5. A +2 item drops it to a +4. Meaning that for a Warforged or Dwarf(or almost any Dragonborn of Bahumet), it's doable without undue sacrifices to your other stats. A Raging Barb can do it without needing Imp Toughness or a racial boost.

Or heck, if you wanna be Con based, a Dragonborn of Bahamut Mongrelfolk. That's what, +6 Con with no LA right off the bat? Start with an 18, so that's a starting Con 24, maybe with a +2 item of Con by that level. That's 8 HP per level, for 56 BEFORE class levels. Even more with level 4 and 8 bumps to Con. For a class, you can still be a Barbarian/Deepwarden/Fist of the Forest melee-type person, or put that Con to use with Dragonfire Adept.

Tell us the concept, most of the time we can make it work.

No kidding - the three of us a;ready came up with WILDLY different builds for most of the above suggestions!


EDI @\/: Mineral Warrior template is +4 Con or so for +1 LA, right? It's cheesy, but it works.

[Myrmex]

Are there any LA 1 templates with +4 con?

[Goatman_Ted]

Are there any LA 1 templates with +4 con?

Underdark's Mineral Warrior springs to mind


(And since everyone else is doing it:
Cleric, Cleric, Rogue, Cloistered Cleric, Hey! that's mechanics, not concept!, Ditto, Rogue, Cloistered Cleric, Rogue, Clostered Cleric, !Concept, Cleric)

[Icewalker]

I'll say that I run into this problem from time to time, but not too often. I think one way to better keep a functional character with a cool idea is not to come up with a fun flavor of build, but to come up with a fun flavor of general character, then you can find useful chains of feats and etc to fill it out. The more baseline of a cool character idea you have, the more variability you have in the build to keep it functional.

Some optimization will always be lost to mechanics chosen for flavor, but if that's a problem, then you just need to play with a less optimizing group.

Another option is to base your interesting character on drawbacks which can be compensated for. For example, a blind character, but you get blindsight, so you aren't playing a hugely nerfed character for the sake of flavor without any compensation to keep them on par with the rest of the party. Flaws often help for this, but they're usually too simple to help develop an interesting character.

[herrhauptmann]

Are there any LA 1 templates with +4 con?

Here's a great source of feats, races, templates etc. Best of all you can save it as a pdf and peruse later.
http://crystalkeep.com/d20/

edit: Copied wrong link into post.

[Animefunkmaster]

Why is it that the concepts I want to build just don't work well in practice? Why is it that in order to optimize my character, I have to do things or use combos that just seem ridiculous to me?

This largely has to do with the term "character". This term can have different meanings for different people. For me, at a very basic level, this can mean either: the sum ranks of level/feats/skills that comprise an imaginary entity that a player plays to enjoy said game, or the backstory, personality, future goals, hopes and aspirations that comprise an imaginary entity for a player to play said game.

Its seems more likely to me that when someone posts looking for help they are not trying to optimize the backstory/hopes/dreams/personality but the ranks/feats/class abilities. So when making your posts you might want to keep that as a starting point or at least explain the elements of your backstory you want represented by feats/skills/class abilities ((Keep in mind: a character who is 'tough' does not mean he should take the toughness feat, but classes that will make him 'tough' as a descriptive word)).

While optimizing skills feats and class abilities to a given backstory/persona you have to keep in mind that this is a game. While many things can be represented, not everything is within level shot to be a viable option at the level of play and some ideas might simply not be in the rule set at all (this is what homebrew is for). Example: I want to play a cautious lumberjack that can explode towns with my little toe, since it is a magical graft that connects me with my real father, baccob. Obviously for most levels of play, optimizing character will focus on the lumberjack rather than the exploding powers of a god.

[Crazy Scot]

Are there any LA 1 templates with +4 con?

The only one that I know of off the top of my head would be Mineral Warrior from Forgotten Realms Underdark (p.97).

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

The main problem I have is that the concepts that I'm looking for can't really be expressed in 3.5e terms. Here's the concepts I have so far:

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

Any 'standard gish' build (9th level spells and +16 BAB at level 20), but include improved sunder, adamantine weapon, rods of cancellation, maybe even take the feat extraordinary spell aim to use with antimagic field (cheese). Be sure to have plenty of (greater) dispel magics prepared, possibly max abjurant champion as early as possible (while still maintaining 9th level spells at 20) to get swift abjuration with dispel magic. A cleric with the inquisition domain, possibly via church inquisitor, or a specialist abjurer/master specialist would also fit this, though not necessarily as a gish.

A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

Crusader 20, or cleric 20, or warblade 20. A dwarf is a dwarf regardless of whether he wields a dwarven waraxe, a warhammer, or a... trident. If he only has simple weapon proficiency, use that to your advantage: There was a volcanic eruption that threatened to flood his clan's caves/mines/etc. with liquid hot magma, though a shaft had been cut to act as a drain for just such an event. However, a large rock had fallen over the opening, and it was flowing in faster than it was draining; the character rushed into action, but didn't have the strength to lift the rock. He grabbed the jagged piece of volcanic glass that was left from a previous eruption, and tightly grasping its razor-sharp edges he pried the rock free and saved his community. He wasn't able to release his grasp without the aid of a surgeon. It now serves as a morningstar which he uses to bludgeon the life out of his clan's enemies, the business end is permanently stained red with his own blood. Much better than the stereotype dwarf-with-an-axe, you just have to get creative.

Here are some other concepts I've been thinking about:

A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.

Just about any decent melee build would fit that, just go crusader 20 if you don't want to put any more thought into it.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has.

That's one class I'm not too familiar with, but I'm pretty sure it's one of those that stays good for all 20 levels.

A Stormlord who worships Heironeous.

"Adaptation: If you do not have the god Talos in your game then this prestige class works well with any god of storms, obviously, but it’s also
appropriate for nature deities or clerics and druids that venerate
nature or weather in the abstract without worshiping a specific deity."
Storms are seen as the embodiment of chaos or simply nature, neither is suited to Heironeous. Maybe pick a good-aligned deity who can grant the storm domain, such as Anhur or Isis in the Mulhorandi pantheon, Acrdric Faenya in the Elven pantheon, or even Istishia in the general FR pantheon. If you pick Isis you can go LG, and her favored weapon is the often neglected punching dagger, which would make for a very unique character.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword.

I just read the entire Kamate entry, only the stance agility ability requires anything from iron heart. The ability itself isn't even impressive, so there's not really any drawback if a single-classed crusader wields it as long as they meet the requirements of BAB +4, EWP: bastard sword, and balance 4 ranks which is a class skill. You didn't see anything that says you need an iron heart maneuver or stance to use Kamate, other than the lackluster stance agility which is easily ignored.

A merchant who can still adventure.

Any decent build that gets appraise as a class skill, maybe get the broken/abusable feat mercantile background, which can only make a character better because you should get every piece of expensive gear at 75% cost.

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver.

Artificer 20 is a tier 1 build.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47.

Make a warforged character, but rather than holding a gun replace one of his hands with a gun-like device. Give him mithral body and make him a warlock, reflavor his eldritch blast to be shots coming out of his built-in weaponry, reflavor all of his invocations to be technological upgrades. Walk unseen is a cloaking device, flee the scene is a short-range teleport that cloaks him and leaves behind a hologram, baleful utterance uses ultrasonic vibrations to destroy things, summon swarm releases nanobots that return to him at the end of the duration, etc. He'd be more than just a robot-turned-sentient with a gun, he'd be a super high-tech master of gadgets.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple.

Use duskblade to qualify, maybe get abjurant champion for the last five levels. Not a spectacular build, but better than using sorcerer.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense.

Archivist 20 is a tier 1 build.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray.

Vow of peace in the Book of Exalted Deeds, maybe even go into apostle of peace. Beguiler would also work rather well with that, they get a lot of nonlethal damage spells, plus a lot of enchantment and illusion spells. Beguiler 20 is a tier 2 build, vow of peace and nonviolence wouldn't give it any meaningful drawbacks.

[Animefunkmaster]

I will try to go through these the best I can:

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

Fighter**1/Wizard*6/Spell Sword1/Abjurant Champion5/Eldritch Knight 7
*Focused specialist (CM variant on the specialist wizard)Abjuration
Drop: Illusion (Or Necromancy if you don't have frost burn), Evocation, Enchantment.
((Use primarily transmutation buffs, buff in brawl tactics))
**You can swap this out for anything full bab with good proficiencies.
PHB: Fighter, Wizard, Eldritch Knight
CW: Spell Sword
CM: Abjurant Champion


A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

You can do just about any melee warrior. If you have ToB, Crusader is great, bloodstorm blade is fun. Recovering ancient relics makes me think a little about dipping some rogue in the mix (always a good thing for UMD skills) to grab some trapfinding.


A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.
Avoid the Knight class like the plague, and paladin for this one. You are looking at a regular melee warrior type, maybe a warblade, mix with some skills.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has.
You are looking for a changling factotum Chameleon
A Stormlord who worships Heironeous.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword.
Have you considered building a master of 9? Or perhaps a paladin/warblade? You can be a crusader for Heironeous without actually taking crusader levels.

A merchant who can still adventure.
Nothing is ever wrong with a bard or a factotum as a merchant.

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver.
Gnome artificer you say? Want to go less magical, Warcraft 3rd edition has a tinkerer which might need some help to bring up to snuff, Dragonmech has the coglayer which is more on the broken end as far as mechanics go.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47.

Well, barring mechanics for the campaign for a moment, this could easily be represented by a warforged, from there you have to decide if you want him to be more in tune with the divine (favored soul sounds reasonable) or with his weapon of choice.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple.
This reads like you want a build, not help optimizing usability of a persona. A dragonborn can easily represent someone who is the disciple of dragons, mix in your favorite divine classes and you have a melee dragon disciple.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense.
Heroes of Horror has the archivist, a brilliant knowledge monkey whose class abilities really pack a punch in the right party (I believe it is also in a WoTC preview if you don't have the book). Otherwise we can look at the Cloistered cleric variant or simply the wizard. You should always be making tons of knowledge checks when the dm allows it, knowledge is the most useful skill in the game, the dm actively tells you how to succeed.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray.
Plenty of things can be optimized for this. Including but not limited to: saves, hp, evasion, mettle.

A quick example could be a: paladin of slaughter2/hexblade2/monk2/blackguard2/yadda yadda
Keep in mind, optimizing defense in actual play is not fun. I have played everything from the warforged who took the vows and was a heal monkey to a warrior with crazy high hp and AC to a hexblade rogue. What you want is a fun way to prevent damage. One way I enjoy playing is through the classic spiked chain AoO tripper. Play through it with either a gish or maybe some psychic warrior, either way fun stuff stopping enemies from moving and messing with some casting (casting will almost always win).

[Decoy Lockbox]

As most of you know, I'm trying to come up with character ideas for upcoming 3.5 games. I'm sure many of you are familiar with my threads "Building a Spellsword" and my more recent "Building a Dwarf."

I'm writing this mainly because I'm noticing a frustrating pattern in the kinds of characters I like to play. Every time I get an interesting concept in mind, I try to make it work and I get told that the concept is based off poor mechanics. The base classes I pick are weak, the almighty caster level dominates all, and most of the prestige classes I think fit the concept are a load of garbage.

Why is it that the concepts I want to build just don't work well in practice? Why is it that in order to optimize my character, I have to do things or use combos that just seem ridiculous to me? Why do they all involve books I don't have? The list goes on.

I really don't get why the concepts I think are awesome turn out to be weak in terms of actual gameplay. You can't survive in D&D on your cool factor alone, and that's what think I go for when I make a character.

You need to figure out what makes a "good" character "good", and implement that or another type of goodness in all the characters you make.

That, or just switch to 4th edition

I noticed a mention to Minimus in your sig -- are you playing in any minimus games right now? If so, has your group had to make any houserules? I'm currently playing in a Steampunk nautical mercenary (think Firefly on a boat) game using minimus, and its going pretty well.

[Behold_the_Void]

The main problem I have is that the concepts that I'm looking for can't really be expressed in 3.5e terms. Here's the concepts I have so far:

An arcane gish who focuses on destroying enemy spellcasters or magic items. "Magic must defeat magic."

Abjuration-focused wizard/fighter/spellsword/eldritch knight/abjurant champion

A dwarven Joan of Arc figure whose goals are to recover ancient relics of his people, restore his people's kingdom and make the dwarves powerful again in Moradin's name.

Dwarf, I don't see what class has to do with this but Crusader works just fine for the religious angle. Done.

A "knight" who adheres to the historical code of chivalry, which according to Terry Jones meant three things: Learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.

Warblade. Fits the inherent fluff of a Warblade to a T.

A factotum that basically fills any gap the party has.

Font of Inspiration intelligence maximized factotum is pretty good at this as I recall.

A Stormlord who worships Heironeous.

Get your DM to change the Stormlord requirements.

A Crusader of Heironeous who can somehow use Iron Heart stuff, enabling him to use the Kamate sword.

I don't recall the exact requirements, but either multi into Warblade or spend some feats for the Maneuvers or go into Master of Nine.

A merchant who can still adventure.

Artificer. Or, alternately, any class with skill points in profession (merchant).

A gnome engineer who can easily dismantle any trap or lock the characters come across and can build technological marvels from scratch, like McGuyver.

Rogue Master Trapsmith, I think the prestige class was. I know there's something there that works.

A robot who recieved a small fragment of a divine spark, endowing him with sentience and a personality all his own (effectively making him a warforged). He'd fight with an AK-47.

Warforged with homebrewed AK-47 weapon, choose whatever class you want. Swift Hunter Ranger/Scout combo might work.

A melee-oriented Dragon Disciple.

Well, OK, got me there. Dragon Disciple sucks. You could just apply the template and use LA buy off to make it hurt less. ToB class of course.

A sagely character, who has as many knowledge skills as is possible and can still be useful to the party in a practical sense.

Wizard/Loremaster.

A character who doesn't die in three hits with one critical from a giant's club, or one martian heat ray.

High-con race with lots of con boosting items and probably some kind of class like a Warblade or Crusader with good defenses/HD. Then be high level.

Done. All reasonably optimal choices within the critieria, and I don't even play 3.5 any more.

Edit: Incredibly Ninja'd

[Darrin]

The only one that I know of off the top of my head would be Mineral Warrior from Forgotten Realms Underdark (p.97).

Try Lolth-Touched in MM4. +6 Str, +6 Con, +1 LA.

[Severedevil]

Actually I play in a group where virtually no prestige classes at all are the norm. My DM really had to stretch to accomodate me. Virtually everyone else was using the Player's Handbook and the Player's Handbook only.

And that's part of my gripe. That's what optimized doesn't look as cool.

Then don't optimize. Problem solved.

Seriously, if your group avoids prestige classes and relies primarily on the PHB without using Clericzilla or Superman Wizard, you do not need to optimize. If you do optimize, you will probably ruin the game.

[kamikasei]

Seriously, if your group avoids prestige classes and relies primarily on the PHB without using Clericzilla or Superman Wizard, you do not need to optimize. If you do optimize, you will probably ruin the game.

You're missing a basic problem with the D&D system, which is: if his character concept is unusual, he has to optimize it just to make it playable at the same level as unoptimized characters that keep more closely within the lines of the system.

[Morty]

I'm writing this mainly because I'm noticing a frustrating pattern in the kinds of characters I like to play. Every time I get an interesting concept in mind, I try to make it work and I get told that the concept is based off poor mechanics. The base classes I pick are weak, the almighty caster level dominates all, and most of the prestige classes I think fit the concept are a load of garbage.

The answer is: you care too much about a bunch of optimization-bent people. Others have been playing "unoptimized" characters before and they will play them until D&D 3.5 is forgotten. They had also been playing core meleers before the Almighty Tome of Battle was released and not owning it became a capital offence and will still play them not matter how hard the ToB fans scream. It doesn't entirely solve the problem with unusual characters, but it does make it easier. Most of PrCs really are garbage, though.

[Gorbash]

Every time I get an interesting concept in mind, I try to make it work and I get told that the concept is based off poor mechanics.

Why don't you try to find a concept that works with a strong class? Do things reverse way. That's how 'optimizers' do it.

[Another_Poet]

Hi Archpaladin.

One thing that might help you, quite a bit actually, is to divorce your concept from your mechanics.

For instance, I play a merchant who adventurers in one PbP game. That's one of the concepts on your character list that you say is hard to optimise. Well, I didn't use any merchant-themed classes. my merchant is a straight sorcerer. He has max ranks in bluff, and is a charm specialist. What could make a more successful merchant than that? Well, wizard obviously, but then I'd want to max both Int and Cha since I want to be able to bluff people even when I'm out of spells. So instead I put everything into Cha, fueling both my sorcerer spells and my main skills. It's awesome. A very effective character, with his own import/export business.

Same thing for your stormlord who worships Heironeous. D&D is polytheistic, remember? Your stormlord can worship multiple gods. She/he can worship whatever god is most beneficial crunch-wise, perhaps out of a sense of duty since that god is the patron of his/her profession. But on a personal level, she/he feels total devotion to Heironeous. She talks all the time about Heironeous, gives to the church of Heironeous, etc. God X maybe the god of stormlords, and she carries out that god's rites faithfully, but Heironeous is her personal tutelary deity. Easy, and plenty of precedents in real world history.

You ask why so many of the PrCs that fit your concepts seem weak, and it's because many PrCs are built only around a cool concept and not around good mechanics. There really are no good pirate classes or PrCs that I know of, for instance. Some have great flavour, but the abilities suck. So what do you do? Talk privately to your DM. "I'm going to use the swordsage class to build my character, but I don't want to be called a swordsage. I'm going to be a pirate, and call myself a pirate, and don't want people mixing me up with swordsages. That cool?" 95% chance your DM says yes, you build an effective character, and you don't even have to tell the other players it's a Swordsage because then they'll start to pigenhole you. Just play your pirate and love it.

Anyway, that's my advice. Most PrCs are ineffective and the 10-20% that are awesome are overused. So use whatever class(es) make a good build and then describe your character any way you want. In other words, reinvent the fluff - put your char concept above everything.

ap

[Curmudgeon]

For a Rogue that does more than toss d6s in combat, Factorum or Swordsage.

No, the base Rogue class is workable; it just requires creativity. I made a level 17 Rogue for a convention game and ended up being the most effective member of the party. But I did use 21 WotC D&D books to get the job done.

[Justin B.]

It seems to me like you've become a slave to the written text Zousha, you need to realize that homebrew is available for you to make these concepts fit in a playable way.

This thread is filled up with perfectly viable characters for what you want. It's all about tweaking the flavor.

As for the "magic killing magic" idea, may I suggest a Battle Sorceror? It gets less spells than the regular sorceror (more than wizard still though, I believe) and still gets some proficiencies and heavy armor. Use a spear, take some AoO feats, (be human) and take all of the Dispel-line that you can. Also, I suggest a nifty little spell called Dispelling Ray from the Spell Compendium, kind of expensive, but very very worth it.

Also, to help ease your book woes, there is an excellent source for feats at realmshelps.dandello.net, combined with the aforementioned Crystalkeep d20, you can find much of the available 3.5 material online.

Good luck. Remember, if you can't find something that you like, invent it!

[Crow]

Maybe you should just make and play your characters how you want to and have fun with it. You don't need to make every character you play be "optimized". Your builds should be optimized for fun, not to measure up to some board's impossible standards of in-game effectiveness.

Seriously dude.

[Telonius]

Why is it that the concepts I want to build just don't work well in practice? Why is it that in order to optimize my character, I have to do things or use combos that just seem ridiculous to me? Why do they all involve books I don't have?

Last question is the easiest: because WOTC wants you to buy more books.

Think of it like a bell curve. For most books, there are a few things that are really mechanically powerful, a whole bunch that are kind of middling, and a few things like the Samurai. If you're going for things that are the most powerful altogether, you're not going to be able to find it in any single book. There are a few books that don't fit the general pattern - most of ToB is on the high end, and the Big Three casters are all in the PHB. But even a ToB class can make use of Complete Warrior; and while Cleric is terrific in Core, Divine Metacheese makes it truly ridiculous.

In my experience optimization only matters relative to the other members of your gaming group (and your DM). If nobody in your group has any idea of what a CharOp forum is, you could probably play basically whatever you want (outside of the "Samurai" range of the curve) and still be able to contribute. You really want to play that Dwarven Defender? As long as you aren't playing with Batman, Codzilla, Factotum and Warblade, go for it.

There are unfortunately some character ideas that really don't match up well to published materials. There really isn't any class or PrC that has "Adventuring Merchant" as its fluff. You could do a couple of things with that. Either find something that's conceptually similar and go with it (Rogue, Bard, or Factotum to Horizon Walker comes to mind), or homebrew it. No matter how many classes and PrCs Wizards puts out, it's impossible for them to exhaustively cover every single archetype or character idea.