Min/Max Boards

I'm working on an elven Cleric/Shadowcraft Mage for an upcoming game, with a bit of a lithomancer/stone magic motif. 

The thing I can't figure out is what to add onto it after SCM.  We'll be capping the "reality" of the illusions at 100%, so there's not a huge incentive to go into the Shadowcrafter, at least not for more than a couple of levels.  And, beyond that nothing has jumped out at me.

It doesn't need to be particularly powerful -- the SCM is already so badass that it doesn't need much help.  Although obviously I wouldn't want to lose much spellcasting.  Even something with a solid chasis would work fine.  Or, is there something that makes divine casters better at buffing?  He's also got an ancient wise person vibe, going, so something that plays into knowledge and Cloistered Cleric would work, too. 

Thanks in advance.

What it says up there.  I'd love to get Pathfinder's Sap Master type of stuff on-line, and it seems like it'd be a fun surprise.  But, I worry that the game I would use it in is full of Undead, Constructs, etc. 

tl;dr:

• gestalt Magus|Alchemist with a melee focus or gestalt Magus|Syntehsist Summoner?
• is there any way to get the Alchemist's Mutagen to be "always on"?
• with the Magus' Broad Study arcana, is there a better class pairing than either Alchemist or Synthesist?  Is there a good full caster substitute?

I've been invited to play a Shackled City PF game.  They are at 3rd level, gestalt, with a favorable stat roll system.  The other people playing are a Dragonborn Paladin|Draconic Sorcerer (going into Grey Guard|Dragon Disciple) and a Warmage|Skald.  The Warmage is, I believe, a 3E port. 

I had a kind of heavy Path of War idea -- Warlord|Stalker/Monk, but I think I might table that for the time being -- and go with a Magus, as that class seems intriguing.  My original idea was a Magus|Alchemist, exploiting the Potion Glutton feat for quick Alchemist buffing and going for a melee Mr. Hyde type approach, possibly with either the Grenadier or Vivisectionist archetypes.  That nets me great buffing from the Alchemist extracts and all the usual Magus gishy spell channeling alongside a pile of natural attacks. 

The thing that gives me a little bit of pause is the relatively short duration of the mutagen.  10 minutes per level is a long time, but if it's the centerpiece of the build -- as the Feral Mutagen is for Hyde -- then that's not great.  Although, just looking at it again, I guess nothing stops me from spending an hour in between encounters brewing another one?  Still, that's kind of annoying, isn't it?  I can mitigate the annoyance a bit by playing a Skinwalker, I think, giving me a solid set of natural attacks when the mutagen is on downtime.

That doesn't strike me as a bad build, especially if I can find some way to circumvent the mutagen duration thing.  And, given what others are playing, that may be plenty optimized.  The Hunter I made for another game is dominating the Tier 1 casters.

Given gestalt, though, isn't the Hyde approach really a low-rent version of the Summoner's Synthesist archetype?  Wouldn't that be way more badass, especially if I take the Magus' Broad Study arcana?  Then, I could "hit" myself with Spellstrike and apply Summoner buffs to myself, keeping more or less the same action economy advantage.  I am not that familiar with the spell lists, but I assume the Summoner has at least as much buffing on it as the Alchemist does.  I even think I can be a Skinwalker, too, though I have no idea how that would interact with the Eidolon's max natural attacks.  My natural reading is that the max natural attacks is a limitation on what the Eidolon can do, without any other intervention, but others may differ. 

What do you think?  Alchemist or Synthesist?  Or, is there an even better option that hasn't occurred to me yet?  I know I'm taking 2 half casters, there, which seems like a major waste, especially given that everyone else is playing full casters.  Although it also does prevent me from being too powerful relative to the game. 

If there were a full caster with a long duration buff on par with the Eidolon I'd hop on that.  The only thing that occurs to me is perhaps a wildshape focused Druid, but my knowledge/research of Pathfinder runs out about there. 

There's a chance that I'll be playing in my first Pathfinder game sometime soon.  I don't have the details, yet, I'm set to meet with the gaming group next week. 

Pathfinder is one of those things I've looked at a little bit, but I'm not really familiar with.  I usually just look to steal a mechanic here or there.  So, I'm looking for some advice to at least winnow down potential character concepts.

Ideally, I'd like to find something that is distinctly Pathfinder-esque (in a good way).  For example, I'm pretty sure the God Wizard archetype rocks in PF.  But, it's not substantially different from the way it rocks in 3E, so I'd rather avoid that.  If that makes sense.

Based on my very limited knowledge, the Summoner, Alchemist, and stuff from Path of War jumped out me (which seems sufficiently different from Tome of Battle to be interesting to me).  So, what's the coolest stuff in Pathfinder that is done differently than the way 3E D&D would do it?  This could be a class, prestige class, feat combo, whatever.

For a vaguely Time of Troubles inspired game, my wife is interested in playing a Paladin-type character associated with Helm.  The goals are some knightliness and some heavy armor, and to eschew primary spellcasting (e.g., melee cleric isn't an option).  She also probably doesn't want to play anything with Inspire Courage as she plays a fair number of Bards. 

I've directed her to the usual suspects, Crusader and Hellreaver.  Other approaches to the concept?  It doesn't need to be super-optimized, but it does need to do its job -- take hits, dish them them out, etc. 

Pretty much all 3E is open.  And, we'd be willing to look into using Pathfinder stuff as well.  For instance, I could see us using the PF Paladin, and making whatever tweaks we'd like to it, though the handful of smites per day is pretty annoying.  The game will be around 8th level. 

I'm working on a build for a friend in a game where concept is especially important.  Part of the concept is for caster-focused, herbalist Druid.  That's pretty straightforward -- Druid works well for like everything.

But, I'm a bit stumped as to how to sell the whole Herbalist thing.  Any ideas?  All I've got now is stuff like Brew Potion and maybe even a refluffed Scribe Scroll.  The campaign is set at 13th level and pretty much anything but homebrew is allowed, with a slight bias against Dragon Magazine. 

I'm considering playing something like a Malconvoker in an upcoming game (well, vacillating between that and a Mystic Ranger Swift Hunter).  I'm curious if people have any good ways to streamline summoning.  I would prefer to avoid statting up dozens of different monsters to summon over the course of my levels.  But, I also don't want to bleed out the most interesting parts of playing a summoner.  Psionics (and Trailblazer and maybe Pathfinder) take the "build your own monster" route, but I find that leads to less unique creatures than pure summoning does. 

My current idea was to stat up about 4 monsters, each with different roles.  And, then I would apply a penalty to them if I didn't use my highest spell levels to summon them.  So, I'd summon an X with Summon Monster 4, but if I used a Summon Monster 3 slot then I'd inflict 2 negative levels on it or something.

Anyone have any ideas?  I could maybe avoid a lot of the issue by just using Versatile Spellcaster and try and always use my highest level slots for summoning. 

Also, if anyone has any ideas of how to streamline them during gameplay, I'm open to suggestions, but, again, I don't want to take away what is the most fun parts of playing a summoner. 

I feel like there was a feat that did this.  The closest I found was a 3.0 feat from the Rokugan Campaign Setting -- Hand of Osano-Wo.  Was this reprinted or updated anywhere?  My search-fu could not find it. 

Thanks

I use my ipad for my character sheets nowadays.  Usually I've just been using MSWord and pdfs.  But, I've been thinking about trying to use html character sheets, mostly b/c I think spoiler blocks would be insanely handy.

Does anyone know a good, user-friendly website to use for that?  I recall there was a great-looking set of custom, easy to design ones that someone had posted for one of their campaigns.  But, for the life of me I can't find it.  Thanks. 

Ok, so I notice that several threads are now being derailed by this concept.  It's not my theory, so I don't know if what I am hearing is a bastardization of it or not.  But, what I am hearing is either deeply mistaken or based on some deeply mistaken hidden premises.  I want to take a few minutes and lay out its flaws. 

What's IP-proofing?
Note that this isn't my theory, so I will be doing my best to characterize it.  If I am mistaken, please correct me.  The term is "Iterative Probability proofing."  And, the idea is that in D&D (really, any RPG, I'd suppose) your character is going to be subject to a number of threats, which can effectively kill you.  So, with some probability a "catastrophic event" will occur -- you will fail the crucial save, get crit on by the crucial attack, and so on.  Over the course of your adventuring career, this probability will occur:  if there's only a 5% chance of suffering a catastrophic event in each encounter, over enough encounters that's going to converge to 100%.

Ok, so as a basic idea goes, that's totally fine.  It simply means that, if you're interested in making it over the long haul, you need some sort of defense against such things.  That defense could be rerolls, immunities, or the ability to recover from the failure.

Example 1:  suppose you will fail a save or die 10% of the time.  That means eventually you will fail one.  If you have a reroll, though, from one of any various magic items, so long as you're not subject to too many saving throws over the course of the day or what have you then you're fine.  It essentially resets your "IP counter" till you fail again.  Even the humble Fighter can take advantage of this.  At higher levels you might need more investment, as the frequency of such effects will increase, so you'll have to get more in the way of defenses. 

Example 2:  in the course of the fight, bad rolls, etc. have claimed the lives on one of the party.  One characters casts revivify on him, or delay death, or some similar effect so he can continue adventuring. 

As these examples indicate, I think IP-proofing is pretty straightforward, and not hard to attain.  It is a pretty subtle charopp concept, though, and one that I spend a little bit of time teaching new players.  It may be the case that some classes have more of it built in than others, but it's readily available in troupe play.  Arguably, a correctly optimized healbot cleric's job is something along those lines.  I mention this b/c it seems one vehement complaint about weaker classes is that they cannot do so. 

Basket Burner's Death Spiral
I don't like to call out people by name, but he's (assumed pronoun, sorry if it's mistaken) obsessed with this idea and it colors all his posts.  The idea, I take it, is that every time one of the members of the party fails against a catastrophic event it does one or both of the following.  First, it weakens the party for the rest of that encounter, increasing their probability of failure.  Second, it weakens that character in the long run due to level loss for raise dead or other wastes of resources. 

However, I also think this is not true, and missing some crucial premises.  Two obvious responses, and then I'll get to the more subtle one.  First, it assumes that every encounter is on the knife-edge of life and death.  That's probably not the case, even in other people's campaigns.  Second, this isn't Gygaxian AD&D -- revivify, delay death, and so on allow for people to come back to life without level loss.  Also, it's unclear to me how big a deal level loss is.  If catastrophic events are relatively rare (e.g., 10%), then the increased XP gains will lead the lower level guy to catch right back up before another catastrophic event occurs.  Even if he's facing an increased probability of doing so (e.g., 12%). 

Now, I anticipate that BB will say something to the effect of:  "all the resources you just spent raising that jackass just cost the party something, making it weaker."  So, that revivify the cleric cast could, in the absence of a jackass (a basket weaver?) could have used that slot for something more meaningful.  The problem I have with that logic is that it artificially divides out resources spent to ex ante IP proof and those spent ex post to IP proof. 

Here's what I mean, I think no one is going to say that a wizard casting Greater Mirror Image is wasting his resources.  It's a great spell that keeps you alive.  What, then, is the difference between that and Delay Death?  The only relevant difference, depending on the ability we're talking about, is whether that character is still in the fight or not.  That, in turn, depends on (1) how much fight there is left, and (2) whether you're on that knife-edge described above. 

Now, it may be the case that ex ante IP proofing is generally speaking more effective than ex post.  I'm not sure.  It might be true when it comes to character death, less so with other conditions. 

My real point, though, is that I don't see how there is any clear mapping from a character not being able to IP-proof themselves and relying on someone else in the party to do it, or on magic items to do it, and the supposed IP-proofed idea.

P.S.:  it occurs to me that there is also some ellision in the knife-edge scenario.  I've never played the most powerful character I can in a game.  That's not what I'm out for, I usually want to play a character of some sort.  The knife-edge cases would be charitably read as an encounter where for that given party it's nearly a matter of life and death.  But, I think it often colors character creation discussions as well.  If that's the case, though, then the implication is that everyone should be playing Pun-Pun or equivalents.