[3.5] Adapting the Tome Ninja

[Totema]

In my long search for a Ninja base class that doesn't gargle balls, I felt satisfied when I stumbled upon the Ninja designed for the homebrew "Tome of Prowess" rules, on dnd-wiki.org. (note: not the godawful dandwiki site) I made a few adjustments that I thought sensible; for instance, I replaced Sudden Strike with Sneak Attack because Sudden Strike is a huge pain to activate, reduced their class skill set and skill points per level a bit, added a ki power that granted temporary trap finding, and added a few minor clauses to some of the class abilities. And since I'm not ready to introduce my players to Tome of Prowess rules, I used the alternate abilities the page suggests. It looked to me like I had a nice stealth-based T3 class on my hands.

But when I tried a bit of play testing I noticed one very troubling thing. Given everything that this ninja can do, it not only totally obsoletes the rogue in combat situations but also the assassin as well. Supplanting a base class (an important one at that) is bad enough, but outperforming a prestige class is totally unacceptable.

I'm not good at trimming the fat from homebrew classes, especially ones I hadn't built myself. It occurred to me that it was designed with Tome of Prowess in mind, while it's probably well balanced with those rules; in fact I noticed that their rules set doesn't even include a rogue or assassin, so I'd reckon this is meant to replace both of them. So, it's a much different story with regular old kitchen sink D&D. I first thought of nerfing all the bonuses to Death Attack it gets, but I'm not sure what to replace it with. Can the Playground offer any help?

[andreichekov]

It is meant to do that.
If you look around, the same group redid the rogue also.
Also, the Assassin is a terrible prestige class, in that you could start it at level 1, and it wouldn't cause any problems.

And the fighter, and the barbarian, and the samurai.

And, you know what? Their fighter out does EVERY melee class in 3.5. All of them. Base classes, prestige classes, even the Tome of Battle classes.

[Totema]

Well, you know, if it works well in its own system I'm glad they made it, because that shows good internal synergy. But, like I said, I'm not ready to suddenly change my games; my players are barely fluent with 3.5 as it is, and I'd like to keep the base mechanics in place until we all decide it's time for something new. And while I agree that Assassin doesn't offer much as a prestige class, I'd at least like to keep it relevant as an option. Even if I end up offering better options overall, I don't want players to feel like they would get nothing out of taking it.

At this point I'm mainly interested in bringing the T5 and T4 classes up to at least low-end T3. I've worked on Fighter, Monk and Paladin fixes that my players and I are happy with, and I was asked to take a crack at Ninja. I like Tome's Ninja because it doesn't introduce any complicated new systems, unlike pretty much every single other Ninja fix I found, but I think we can both agree that, as-is, it's not suitable for regular old 3.5.

I did take a shot at bringing the power level down myself. Though my version still gets sneak attack, it only gets 6 dice instead of 10. It also gets death attack at 12th level and none of the shiny improvements to it. (I think, if anything the Assassin itself should get those kinds of improvements, but that's for another time.) Now there are a bunch of dead levels, and I'm currently looking to other Ninja fixes, and even other ninja-like published WotC classes, for inspiration on filling those in.

[ngilop]

I think an easier thing to do would be to just find a rouge fix or you can say there IS no ninja class THIS is the rouge/ninja. Not every concept needs a full on class.

I did an Ninja fix but if you are going to compare it to core rogue.. yeah its going to be completely overpowered... but then again ANY fix is going to blow core non full casters out of the water so that is something you really really need to understand


an easy fix is to semi gestalt the rogue swashbuckler in that you take the core rogue and slap on the class abilities of the swashbuckler it does a nice job of combinng the 'elusiveness' of a lightly armored combabnt and it gives you INT synergy to an extent.

[Temotei]

Our group likes T.G. Oskar's ninja.

Swordsage (Tome of Battle) also works.

EDIT: Oh, and the assassin gets a lot better outside of core, andreichekov. Mostly because of spell list expansions, but yeah. Kind of like the ranger in that regard, I guess.