Quote Originally Posted by Cartigan View Post
Which I think several people also took...
Charging is cool and all but it's really a secondary thing to do - I mean, you can't charge every round. And you'd have to come at the Dread Pirate a different direction, which isn't really encouraged by the class. I charge you with my... finesse weapon...
Actually, it's not a bad idea. It's only one of the ways to deal with charging.

There are two schools of charging: the Shocktrooper Leaping Charge (using Leap Attack, Power Attack, Battle Jump to nearly quadruple your damage, and Shock Trooper to shift BAB penalties to AC) and the Pouncer (basically, anything that adds pounce). Without any of the two, Dread Pirate indeed looks grim, but do consider that Acrobatic Charge is mostly a Swashbuckler ability, of which the Dread Pirate draws a bit.

However, you can do well with finessable charging weapons. The idea is to deal as much damage on every blow you might do with the charge. Obviously, unless you're going with Elven Courtblade, you can't use the first school of charging, but as you can see on two of the builds, a Pouncer really doesn't care much whether the weapon can be Finessed or not, so as long as it gets lots of attacks and a solid amount of damage on each. With TWF, and advancing TWF alongside it, you can make sure to counter the whole output that a PA/Leap/BattleJump/Shock Trooper charger can do (which is a heck of a lot!) with smaller but deadlier moves. In that case, you can combine charge, TWF and Weapon Finesse on a simple and easy tactic. Furthermore, there is no actual requisite to use Finessable weapons; if the Dread Pirate has more Strength than Dexterity (and gets Weapon Finesse to enter the class), it can use stronger weapons and still take advantage of Acrobatic Charge.

Though, I do find Quick Draw harder to explain. Quick Draw would make for some wonderful throwing builds (and with Master Thrower and some of the Miniatures Handbook feats, you could charge and hurl a weapon using Quick Draw at its finest), but aside from that it's less useful than Weapon Finesse (which, if you get Dexterity higher than Strength at any moment, allows you to take advantage of).