4th Level death/re-roll, could use help filling the needs of the party

[druidgreeneyes]

Hello all,

tl;dr: I need race suggestions for a Beguiler or other battlefield controller. Druid/Cleric/Wizard not allowed b/c don't want to outshine low-powered, low-op party. Ideally is amphibious, vaguely core-adjacent, and bombastic enough to compare favorably with a loud, fire-breathing goblin. Two out of three wouldn't be bad.
TIA; druid

Full Text:
I've been around for awhile as a casual observer of some of the optimization handbooks. I find this place and minmaxforums a highly useful resource when going through character gen. This time around, I've hit a snag from which I've been unable to find an easy out in the handbooks and existing guides, so I figured I'd put it out there for the community and see what you all thought.

I've been playing a DFA as part of a 3(recently 4)-person party; myself, a Monk, and a Marshall 1/Bard N, where our current ECL is 4, so N is 3. I say it that way because based on the Bard's behavior, I suspect she has a build in mind, though I don't know what it is.

Anyway, it's a fairly underpowered party thus far. We recently acquired a Favored Soul as fourth player, which is nice, but our tactical cohesion is basically nil, so we've been getting beat up a lot.

Last session, my obnoxious, irish, goblin DFA (I do a truly appalling irish accent, if I do say so myself) allowed the rest of the party to escape a cave by standing in the way of a hydra and taking four heads worth of damage to the face; I have high con, so I had 3hp at the end of it, but I went down to an AoO when I tried to get the hell out of there. It was 4 damage, and a worthy risk. We cut before resolving bleed-out or rescue, so I've been asked to roll up a new character in the mean time to A) take part in the rescue, if there is one, and/or B) become my new character if my DFA bites the dust.

I've been having trouble.

What I -think- I see is that we don't have any way of putting/keeping enemies where we want them, so generally whoever is dishing out the most damage or being the most annoying takes the most hits. The monk dishes out a little more damage than I do with flurry of blows, but because I can set things on fire, and because I'm a goblin, and because of my aforementioned atrocious irish accent, I am pretty reliably the most annoying character in any given room; this is fine with me, because I've had high hp and a breastplate to soak damage with, but when other people (read: the bard, and sometimes the monk) get out of position I can't really do anything to stop them getting beaten to a pulp.

Note that I have not taken Entangling Exhalation because in the interests of party balance the dm requested that I save it for lvl 6.

Note also that I have proposed a number of different multi-classing builds to get more utility out of the Monk, but her player has so far not been interested because all of them trade Flurry of Blows for spell-casting, and really all she wants to do is hit people as many times per round as possible, and I just don't have the encyclopedic depth of D&D knowledge to develop a build for this.

Anyway, as much as I enjoyed playing a bombastic fire-breathing goblin, I -think- what we need right now is a solid battlefield controller. I proposed Druid, but that got shot down, again in the name of party balance; I'm not super disappointed about this because, even though it would be useful to have, I was not looking forward to all that book-keeping. My fallback so far has been Beguiler, which seems fine enough in the immediate term, but is really going to suffer if we go up against undead or other mind-immune things. But whatever, the class is focused, which I like, and seems like it will provide some fun opportunities for roleplaying shenanigans, which I also like.

But I'm just coming up totally dry for race options. To be fair, it's not like they aren't out there, but there are a couple of finicky criteria I want to satisfy.

First; we're in a seafaring campaign, which thus far has seen a fair amount of just traveling underwater. (the party accidentally acquired aquatic animal templates when we fell into a trap and died, and a terrible wizard tried to turn us into zombies. Instead we grappled him, asked if he would be good, didn't believe him, and stabbed him in the neck.) So I would very much prefer to be comfortably amphibious.

Second; we've never used LA buyoff before, and though we both think it's interesting, I am constantly at odds with my dm about adding additional rulesets to our games (Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic are both banned, for example, as are BoED, BoVD, and psionics. Eberron is questionable. I haven't felt like attempting Forgotten Realms stuff yet. Homebrew has been done but requires very careful consideration.) so I can't bank on having them available and really don't want to deny myself access to level 20.

Third; Humans, Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves, etc, the typical hero races...are boring af. Just like typical heroes. Goblin has just been so damned much fun, I'd -like- to be something else bombastic and weird. It should come as no surprise at this point that I like power metal. Before you say it, I don't really want to go Kobold; too obvious. I liked the idea of a Half-Orc Druid, but don't find a Half-Orc Beguiler nearly so compelling.

I'm currently at Air Gnome as a fallback; gnomes are a bit dull for me, but they make good beguilers, and the Air Gnome doesn't have a swim speed, but at least doesn't have to breathe, so will at least pass convincingly as amphibious.

But I'm hoping you all can come up with some suggestions I haven't already looked at; I have been through the Crystalkeep Race Index (ck is down but I grabbed copies of the indices somewhere a number of years ago), which is admittedly not exhaustive, but seems to be within throwing distance.

I would also be willing to entertain alternative class/build suggestions; I enjoyed the hell out of DFA because (I think) of how focused it is and how well-designed the core mechanic is. I used fire and frost breath constantly, both in and out of combat, in all kinds of creative ways. It was great! But the upper power limit is fairly low (see above re: party balance) and the book list is somewhat limited, and I've now been reading classes and handbooks for like five solid days. So, if you're going to suggest some other class/build, go weird or go home, basically.

That's a wall of text, so I'll put a tl;dr at the top. Looking forward to some outlandish suggestions.

Thanks in advance,
druid

[Crow_Nightfeath]

So.. are you looking for races that get good dexterity intelligence and charisma? Or are you thinking more intelligence and charisma, or more Dex and intelligence? Or charisma and Dex? What sort of character are you wanting to build with the beguiler?

[Elkad]

If you can get by with holding your breath a really long time instead of actually water-breathing, Darfellen.

Depends how much time the party spends underwater. Minutes is fine, hours is a problem. If you need to reset your 10 minutes of breath holding, Amulet of Aquatic Salvation (500gp - MiC) or the Deep Breath spell (SpC) are your likely low-level/cheap options. Plus that alchemy mask somewhere (50 gold for 10 minutes? - or 20 in your case)

What's not to love about an scholarly Orca-man who tries to be charming (often by way of magic), but secretly longs to bite people's faces off?
Make fish jokes. Get offended when people call you a fish or a whale or a dolphin. Have a long unpronounceable name that sounds like something Flipper or R2D2 would say.

Yeah, no useful stats (+str/-dex). Optimize your way out of it.

[druidgreeneyes]

So.. are you looking for races that get good dexterity intelligence and charisma? Or are you thinking more intelligence and charisma, or more Dex and intelligence? Or charisma and Dex? What sort of character are you wanting to build with the beguiler?

*shrug* I'm not super concerned about the base stats; good int would be ideal for overcoming will-saves, but it isn't -that- important. I'd like to be unsubtle; I'm quite terrible at subtlety, and being loud and goofy and having a stupid accent tend to be the most fun for me. I realize that criteria conceivably applies to any race, but eh, what can you do? It's more a question of finding one that gives me an obvious excuse to do those things, than of finding one for which those things could possibly be made to fit.

Thanks for asking!

If you can get by with holding your breath a really long time instead of actually water-breathing, Darfellen.

Depends how much time the party spends underwater. Minutes is fine, hours is a problem. If you need to reset your 10 minutes of breath holding, Amulet of Aquatic Salvation (500gp - MiC) or the Deep Breath spell (SpC) are your likely low-level/cheap options. Plus that alchemy mask somewhere (50 gold for 10 minutes? - or 20 in your case)

What's not to love about an scholarly Orca-man who tries to be charming (often by way of magic), but secretly longs to bite people's faces off?
Make fish jokes. Get offended when people call you a fish or a whale or a dolphin. Have a long unpronounceable name that sounds like something Flipper or R2D2 would say.

Yeah, no useful stats (+str/-dex). Optimize your way out of it.

I like your thinking :p

Our last big adventure involved something on the order of a solid week on the sea floor, saving indifferent merfolk from a minor annoyance. I can't speak to what we're likely to do in the future, but it seems foolish to rule such a thing out?

I did consider the Aquatic race variants from Unearthed Arcana, and am willing to be persuaded (they do get hours instead of minutes out of water), but since the rest of the party has sort of become amphibious by accident, it seems like I'd become the bottleneck if I picked one side or the other (above or below the sea, I mean).

I'm checking with my DM to see if I can get the same amphibious template applied to a new character, so that may open up the options a bit.

Thanks guys, keep 'em coming!
druid

ps; I -am- open to other class options, but I'm not sure I can see what else ideally fills the bfc slot. I considered Ranger, Paladin, and Barbarian, but they don't appear to have good bfc build options by 4th level. I could maybe go for a spiked-chain/trip fighter...?...and then just stand around and loom in the background whenever the party had to actually talk to people? I dunno, how would that stack up?