There! Not Another Stroke of the Brush! [3.5 Base Class]

[Primal Fury]

Well crap. I didnt realize I had missed that much. I'll make sure to fix that as soon as I can.

[Debihuman]

Interesting class. Your writing could use a little work. You tend to use single subjects with plural reflexives and possessive.

Shouldn't using a sketchbook with one hand put the Artiste a -2 penalty to his Craft (Sketching) skill? Otherwise, there is no point to even mentioning this fact.

I think you may have hamstrung the Artiste by making Honing the Captured Likeness and Artistic Freedom too difficult to use. When you use a skill ckeck, the modifier is your skill + roll of a d20. Normal DCs are the Target's HD + 10. When you start giving out penalties by 10 and by 20, you are almost guaranteeing that an Artiste cannot succeed. Rather, there should be circumstance penalties. If the target is moviing, if the artiste is moving, etc. These should be up to the DM. If the target is concealed in any way, the DC would be higher. That's the sort of thing that should affect the modifier not the penalties you meted out.

Of course, the first thing any intelligent opponent will do is simply take the sketchbook and render the artiste impotent in battle. The sketchbook is a much more obvious thing than a spellbook because a wizard doesn't have to use his spellbook to cast spells while an artiste would need the sketchbook handy to be effective. It's a liability in battle.

One thing you never mention is how long does it take an Artiste to sketch a likeness of a creature. That is something that needs to be remedied. It takes a wizard 24 hours to copy a spell into his spellbook.

Debby

[Sir Shadow]

Debi hit pretty much everything I was concerned about.

One thing you never mention is how long does it take an Artiste to sketch a likeness of a creature. That is something that needs to be remedied. It takes a wizard 24 hours to copy a spell into his spellbook.

He does say, in Art imitates Life it takes a full-round action that provokes an attack of opportunity to sketch a creature. I think it's perfectly fine considering that you can't just paint ONE goblin and have it effect ALL goblins. You basically have to sketch every creature you ever want to affect with your abilities.

However, certain other abilities are missing time-frames, like Honing. All you say is that it can't be used in combat. Since it only lasts a few minutes, giving us an idea of how long it takes to hone the image will be good.

For Honing, I'd suggest making it a full-round action that provokes AoO and allowing it to be used in combat. Make its duration = rounds/CHA modifier. Right now, it's not very useful at all unless you're planning an ambush, 4-5 minutes pass very quickly outside of combat.

As for the short duration, you could say that the artiste quickly finds imperfections and ways to improve upon the work he had thought complete mere seconds ago (as any artist, you can ALWAYS find ways to nitpick about a piece of work).

[Primal Fury]

Well... now that I think about it, that is a pretty crippling weakness. So how would you suggest I fix the whole... "useless without sketchbook" part?