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View Full Version : Crazy Alchemist / Construct Class, Help Brainstorming!



Delandel
2009-09-02, 04:19 PM
Ever since I heard of D&D I always wanted to play a crazy gnome that was a sort of fantasy engineer, constructing an army of wierd and fantastic gizmos to serve him. An image of a cackling mad gnome chucking robotic sheep that explode upon impact with the target pops into my head and makes me smile.

But looking at how D&D treats crafting constructs makes me sad. Long construction time, exp penalty, bleh! What if there was a class devoted to doing this instead? The closest thing I could find was the effigy master in CA, but that's not what I'm looking for really.

I want a base class whose main focus is constructs in general, and perhaps throwing in alchemy fun in there too for good measure.

As a base to work off of I was thinking perhaps sorcerer. I'm choosing that class at the moment because I want to copy how the developers struck a balance between it and the highly praised beguiler.
A short write up of how I see it, the Beguiler is a Sorcerer that:
- loses familiar
- loses spell variety, barred access to the most powerful and broken sorc/wiz spells
+ gains all the spells of a certain level as soon as he has access to them
+ more hp
+ light armor
+ way more skill pts, and skills known
+ trapfinding
+ 2 free feats
+ situational +DC and overcome SR

From this I believe alot can be added to a "spellcaster" class if you severely neuter their spells.

I don't know a good class name yet so I'll just temp call it "Mad Scientist."

This is what I was thinking so far, based off sorcerer class:
- premade spell list as Beguiler, more limited, no advanced learning
+ familiar swapped for a construct companion, basically stronger than a druid animal companion, it does most of the fighting for the scientist
+ gizmos n' gadgets, extra class abilities the scientist picks up as he levels that augment himself, his construct companion, or are just plain cool, the exploding mechanical sheep ability would fall here
+ perhaps these gizmos would be prepared ahead of time via "scientist points" that replenish each day, each ability requires X amount of points to make, and it takes 1hr uninterrupted to get everything crafted
+ "scientist's pocket," like a bag of holding that only scientist can access, can only keep gizmos in it, easy to retrieve things

Example: Bob the gnome scientist is travelling with his party members in a dungeon. They just rested, so Bob got his limited spells back and his 8 scientist points for the day. He's accompanied by his large mechanical companion, which acts as his personal bodyguard. Before heading out, Bob decides to craft some gizmos to replenish his stock from a big battle yesterday. He spends his 8 points crafting a mechanical exploding sheep (1d6/CL + INT mod), an alchemical flamethrower (whatever damage, but has charges), adds light armor reinforcement to his construct (+2 AC for a day) and a lightning capacitator (+1d6 electricity damage on construct's attacks for a day). With magic and his impressive devotion to all things mechanical, he crafts all these things in about an hour, and the team is ready to head off for adventure.


What do you guys think of the concept? Any help fleshing it out would be appreciated.

Lappy9000
2009-09-02, 04:40 PM
Many homebrewers have felt the impact of the lack of construct-building. But we have picked up the slack!

Clockworker (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122360) (Pathfinderized construct builder
Engineer (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6332557&postcount=33) (Customizable scientist with crafting prowess)
Spark Scientos (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38331) (Girl-Genius style glass-lamp class)

There's plenty of ideas to be had from those three alone, if'n you wanna go about making your own class.

DracoDei
2009-09-02, 04:51 PM
Not to mentione the "Clock and Steam" splat-book for the 3.X Blackmoor setting.

Delandel
2009-09-02, 04:54 PM
Wow! Those are some incredibly helpful links, thank you! They're all quite relevant to what I was looking for. I'll read up on them.

vampire2948
2009-09-02, 06:08 PM
There is a prestige class dedicated to Gnomes of that sort in Complete Adventurer.

Oddly, despite the class only being available to gnomes, the illustration shows a human. :smallconfused:

It is called Maester, I believe.