Chameleon as a Base Class (PEACH)

[Draz74]

And yes, in a proper game a rouge will only get to sneak attack VERY little with no magic help. its jest too easy to detect him. (beat him at spot VS hide OR listen VS move silently OR have a magic/extraordinary means of detecting everyone that is even CLOSE to you. and as said, in a normal situation any SMART opponents should have all three damn high and spread to two or three guys.)

Um. Flanking?

[FMArthur]

I really don't have much to say regarding class balance that I haven't already said in my 'comments' section, but here:

1: The chameleon is a high-powered class. It's inherent in the concept: if you take away his coolest and most powerful ability, Double Aptitude, then he becomes a liability for the party. He'll struggle to do anything well, and since he can't dedicate the same resources to a single specialization, he would just plain not be able to contribute on the same level as anything else. The reason I think chameleon should be able to reach 80%-ish of the imitated class's power is that he can't do it all at once like a generalist jack-of-all-trades can. I do not think that he reaches 'tier 1' or even 'tier 2' in terms of power levels, but he's obviously just going to outshine some of the lesser classes; you can't help but beat Samurai. I feel that it's in the same range as ToB and Psionics, which is strong but not enough to make the party redundant or present unique DM challenges.

2: The balance of classes past level 17 is just gone. The stronger characters can do things to help, but the fate of the party is in the hands of the full casters. Don't use examples of power levels at level 30, for instance.

3: Please look at the class in terms of what it can do at one time. Chameleons do not have access to every spell at all times. They do not recieve Ability Boon to every stat at all times. The player is assumed to have not mastered the fine art of rolling an 18 in every ability score. They don't get every feat, they can't continually Sneak Attack, don't get the benefits of every race at character creation, etc etc. The chameleon is not the sum of all his situationally possible abilities.

4: Getting some things early compared to the PrC is important when you don't have any other class's abilities to fall back on. He needs to start with Aptitude Focus at level 1. He'll suffer from mediocre BAB, terrible saves, and MAD like nobody's business until he starts to get Ability Boon, Mimic Class feature, and more than one change of Focus per day. At that point he can actually be a character of decent ability.

[Rei_Jin]

I really like the class, but I also really like the original Chameleon PrC. The only thing I would do more to it, is set it so that he can't use any of his abilities from his aptitudes, etc to qualify for Prestige Classes and feats, same as the PrC. This will severely limit cheese potential.

And whilst I understand the issues that some people may have with the Chameleon PrC and with this class, saying that it can be abused is like arguing that ANYTHING in the game can be abused. Of course it can. It's a game, for goodness sake. That's why we have DMs, to ensure that people aren't allowed to deliberately break the game.



EDIT: I just noticed that you DID already implement what I had suggested. Good on you, you understand how to build classes, unlike many other people I've seen on here.

[FMArthur]

...But you did make me remember that the original PrC said you can't use Aptitude Focus, Ability Boon, or Mimic Class Feature to meet the requirements of PrCs, feats, or 'other options'. I forgot to add that clause in for Ability Boon and Mimic Class Feature, but I think I'll let Mimic Class Feature be used to qualify for things, as it's the one part of the chameleon that is unchangeable, and he wouldn't have anything but skills and mediocre BAB to enter PrCs with and take feats with otherwise.


EDIT: I want to put a picture at the top of the class description, but I don't really know what to look for and don't want to use the one the PrC uses.

[Rei_Jin]

Ah, but the intention is to lock someone into the class for 20 levels, thus ensuring that there is very little they can do that the DM cannot prepare for in advance.

When you've got a character with this much versatility, you want to have some kind of hold on it.

[FMArthur]

Ah, but the intention is to lock someone into the class for 20 levels, thus ensuring that there is very little they can do that the DM cannot prepare for in advance.

When you've got a character with this much versatility, you want to have some kind of hold on it.

I don't think much good can come of PrCing out of chameleon partway through, but I'd like to at least give players the option. I can't see a reason to restrict it other than to force people who used my chameleon to keep playing it. It would be somewhat contradictory to the flavor text I gave to truly and permanently specialize in something, but it's only fluff and should be changed on a character-to-character basis.

[boomwolf]

Um. Flanking?

Are YOU going to turn your back to the easy-to-see-who-he-is rouge so he could deal x10 times more damage then usual? no, you face him so he wont get sneak attacks.

Face it, opponents who are smart won't ALLOW more then a few sneak-attacks. they are easy to predict and prevent. (unless you got too many sneak attackers, but that hardly counts as anything.)

[SilverClawShift]

Are YOU going to turn your back to the easy-to-see-who-he-is rouge so he could deal x10 times more damage then usual? no, you face him so he wont get sneak attacks.

D&D 3.5 doesn't have facing rules. The rogue sneaks if he gets in the flanking position, not if the target says "Oh, I'll turn my back to the rogue exposing my sweet, juicy kidneys"

[Zeta Kai]

D&D 3.5 doesn't have facing rules. The rogue sneaks if he gets in the flanking position, not if the target says "Oh, I'll turn my back to the rogue exposing my sweet, juicy kidneys"

Unearthed Arcana has facing rules that cover sneak attacks. Of course, that's not core, & it's complicated as all hell, but it's in there, & it's fairly well thought out.

[boomwolf]

Any DM can handle a simple facing system, and I was under the impression everyone does.

The UA one is not very good, but a simple grid-based facing system should be within the abilities of EVERY DM and PC. (I mean, if somebody is in front of you, he is obviously not attacking you from behind.)

[thevorpalbunny]

Essentially no one using facing because it's more work and, really, less fun. If they do, the rogue is virtually useless unless disguised (alter self or whatever) as a straight-forward fighter.

Also, any non-UA facing system is not only very nonstandard but also counter to the intention of the rules.

[Zeta Kai]

Essentially no one using facing because it's more work and, really, less fun. If they do, the rogue is virtually useless unless disguised (alter self or whatever) as a straight-forward fighter.

Also, any non-UA facing system is not only very nonstandard but also counter to the intention of the rules.

QFT. Blah, blah, blah...

[TakeV]

I seem to have fallen in love with your class; it's really quite epic.

I have a few questions, though.

1) It says that you can prepare arcane spells from any one arcane class spell list, but you must prepare them as a wizard. Does this mean that you must have, say, bard spells recorded in your spell book in order to prepare those?

2) The martial focus is very nice, but I saw nothing about swapping out maneuvers known at even levels, as a swordsage/warblade does. Do you get the ability to do so?

3) The 20th level feature, to change focus at anytime, has no description. Does this take a full round, standard, move, swift, or immediate action to do?

[FMArthur]

I seem to have fallen in love with your class; it's really quite epic.

I have a few questions, though.

1) It says that you can prepare arcane spells from any one arcane class spell list, but you must prepare them as a wizard. Does this mean that you must have, say, bard spells recorded in your spell book in order to prepare those?

2) The martial focus is very nice, but I saw nothing about swapping out maneuvers known at even levels, as a swordsage/warblade does. Do you get the ability to do so?

3) The 20th level feature, to change focus at anytime, has no description. Does this take a full round, standard, move, swift, or immediate action to do?

1) Yes, that's right. You need to prepare the spells from a spellbook, even if the only normal users of a particular spell list are spontaneous casters.

2) Nope.

3) You're right, that is a little unclear. It just means you can change your aptitude focus any number of times per day. It does not change how you do so in any way.

[thevorpalbunny]

Not being able to swap out maneuvers is a major power cut at medium and high levels. Essentially, they will have only 2 or 3 useful maneuvers at any given point.

[TakeV]

It does kind of hurt the flexibility. Though there would be balance issues.
Perhaps if they could swap, but on more rare occasions? Or limit the types of maneuvers, then allow changing when focus is changed...

[streakster]

I never posted that I loved this class, did I?

I love this class.

[thevorpalbunny]

I would allow switching one per even level, same as normal. There are many maneuvers intended to be swapped out for stronger versions: the Nightmare Blade sequence, the Throw sequence, etc. Not being able to switch them is a pretty big deal.

[FMArthur]

All right, all right. Changed to allow even-levelled maneuver-swapping. In return, and out of spite, he may only select one discipline to learn maneuvers from.




...Nah, I'm kidding. I think he'll still be okay. It's still a sub-par initiator, so I'm not all that worried. I was going to nerf Martial Focus but then I remembered that a Martial-Focus Chameleon recieves no bonus to any saves, sticking with the Chameleon's dirt-poor base saves.

Anyway, I'm posting here because I actually played this class like a month ago and realized I haven't posted about it yet!

Here it is, but be warned, it's long:

Spoiler

Show

We played from levels 4-9, and I survived the whole way through - got knocked into the negatives once and was rescued, though. My party consisted of myself playing as a human of this class, a Sorcerer, a Favored Soul, and a Fighter/Dervish. In our first session, I think I was playing in Stealth Focus the entire time.
I distinctly remember being able to scout exceedingly well, thanks to HiPS, and my skill bonuses provided minor aid in this role. Our Sorcerer got his bird familiar killed very early trying to scout with it, so it was down to me. They were kind of skeptical that I got HiPS so early, and I was a bit worried. When I found a guard, though, everyone waited expectantly for me to attack him out of the shadows and swiftly silence him. Then it was revealed that I couldn't actually do anything, since I'd used up my one sneak attack already, had low HP, no strength bonus, and carried only a scimitar. This relieved a lot of the nervous suspicion that I'd homebrewed a class just to be super-broken and upstage them all.
I kind of felt useless in combat when in Stealth Focus. I have hiding, and skills. Fortunately, I was still really useful in non-combat situations and could still swing a sword to mild effect.
I got to perform a sneaky kill after we'd levelled up to 6th and I had an extra usage of Mimic Class Feature to use, and I felt a bit better about my combat role.

The following session I played Martial Focused and then Divine Focused for a little bit. It was indeed a lot of fun, as ToB always is. This is also one of the aspects of the Chameleon I was most worried about. Anyway, my Tiger Claw/Diamond Mind/Devoted Spirit arrangement worked out pretty well, and my DM knows and plays ToB so he knew what to expect. This session went from level 6 to 8; at that level, I had 4 readied maneuvers total, and they most certainly were not enough to last an encounter, however... My big attack bonus (14 stength thanks to ability boon, and Aptitude Focus(+4) in effect) was able to let me do some consistent damage even when not using maneuvers. An enemy caster killed me, though, because I didn't make a save (big surprise) and didn't work at keeping my HP high enough. But that was at the end of combat, so my party healed me back up and we continued on. I was then inspired to take on a Divine Focus and was a good if unremarkable backup healer/buffer.

Next session we went from 8 to 9 and I played in Arcane Focus. It was fun, and my silly wizard tricks and traps turned out to be a great complement to our mostly-blaster compatriot. We fought a couple of large crowds and some Solid Fog helped enormously. The size of the crowds meant it took most of the session to fight them. The BBEG fight was hilariously short: our fighter wins initiative, runs up to the BBEG, and drops his portable hole into our only bag of holding.

Not much else to say. It was fun; not too powerful, even slightly weak, but almost always had something to do that was useful. I would have liked to test it after level 11 though. That's a rather large power spike for the Chameleon.

[FMArthur]

Update (Dec 8, 2008): I have decided to make a change to Double Aptitude. Below level 11, the chameleon was okay. Sometimes it's underpowered, but it makes up for its individual aptitudes' relative weakness with the unparallelled variety the class offers. At level 11 and beyond, however, it suddenly becomes two classes, and comes close enough to achieving the abilities of both that it really is a little unfair to those other classes that he gets to have two. Two options, two paths to take during any action, and sometimes with no weaknesses at all for an enemy to take advantage of. I've made a small change that could have a significant impact without being world-shattering for chameleon players: Double Aptitude gives half its Aptitude Foci's normal bonuses and spell casters have one fewer spell per day (for each spell level) when used in Double Aptitude. You don't get many spells as a chameleon, so this makes a difference, and for everyone else, you're getting half of the benefits in many areas. Stealth Focus doesn't seem so overpowered now that you can't be ridiculously good at sneakery and use another Focus to exploit it. This doesn't take the power or fun out of Double Aptitude, it just puts it more in line with the rest of the class features - useful and flexible, but with drawbacks. The final capstone was tweaked to not be infinite, but still provides more uses of Aptitude Focus than the other increases. Rapid Refocus maxes at 5 minutes and not 2 minutes. Those two were minor nerfs, especially since nobody even plays at that level.

[FMArthur]

I finally decided on an image to place at the top of the page; it was difficult, because I didn't know what to portray the chameleon as, since they can look like anything. After realizing that picking an image of someone who looks sneaky would actually just be a display of a poor disguise, I finally picked the most extreme role among them - a barbarian. It's amusing to think of him turning around a corner, whipping out a spellbook, and posing as a wizard.

Anyway, I didn't bump this for something as inconsequential as that; I have a small assortment of similarly inconsequential changes:

• Returned the capstone to being unlimited uses of Aptitude Focus
• Made Rapid Refocus's level 16 incarnation yield diminishing returns over the course of the day, but start at 2 minutes
• Fixed some grammatical errors, awkward phrases, etc
• Continued to neglect the preposterously messy 'my comments' section featured at the end

...

I am sorry for wasting your time.

[EdroGrimshell]

I'd love to see an expansion on the foci (incarnum, shadow, pact, truespeach, ect)

[FMArthur]

I'd love to see an expansion on the foci (incarnum, shadow, pact, truespeach, ect)

It depends if those are learned abilities or innate powers. A chameleon isn't gifted with all sorts of weird bloodlines and magic genes, they just learn to use a variety of things. I don't know if any of those function off of innate abilities (you seem to have listed every magic system that I know nothing about ), but the ones that do are automatically out. It's unfortunate, because some innate abilities are really cool, like psionics, but they would smash verisimilitude to pieces because you suddenly wind up with a character who just so happens to be born with every kind of magic (THE KING OF MARY-SUES), which is highly implausible, compared to just a guy who likes to study different things.

That said, I am open to `learned ability`-based foci being added, and I`ll look into those you`ve listed as potential candidates when I get back to where my books are after New Year`s Day. Feel free to add to the list for foci consideration.

For later: If the list of foci gets too large I may wind up having chameleons select a limited number of them to have availible upon character creation, since even learning such vast amounts of knowledge can quickly become ridiculous and verisimilitude-breaking. I want a class that can fit into most gameworlds.

[thevorpalbunny]

All of those except incarnum are strictly learned; I'm not sure about the fluff for what allows someone to use incarnum, but I think that is learned as well. The only problem with them is that Incarnum is considered very easy to break in half and Shadow and Truespeech are horribly underpowered.
Pact is picked each day, granting certain sets of supernatural abilities by forming pacts with vestiges from beyond the multiverse; this might be problematic with the refocus abilities. Also, its fluff implies that it requires no effort whatsoever beyond learning how to bind a vestige; it might be difficult to explain why these binds go away.

Incarnum is in Magic of Incarnum, obviously; the others are the Tome of Magic.

[strawberryman]

The class idea is awesome, but I'd be interested as to your take on the epic progression, as far as which abilities progress and how many/what bonus feats you could choose. Seeing as I'm using it in my Disgaea 3.5 game, and it will of course be going into ridiculously high epic levels.

[FMArthur]

The class idea is awesome, but I'd be interested as to your take on the epic progression, as far as which abilities progress and how many/what bonus feats you could choose. Seeing as I'm using it in my Disgaea 3.5 game, and it will of course be going into ridiculously high epic levels.

I'll give it a shot:

• Caster level increases as normal.
• The bonus listed in brackets beside Aptitude Focus in the normal progression chart increases by 2 at level 21 and every 7 levels thereafter.
• You gain an extra usage of Mimic Class Feature at level 21 and every 3 levels thereafter.
• Your Ability Boon improves by 2 at level 25 and every 6 levels thereafter.
• You gain a bonus feat every four levels after 20th.

Use the epic Eldritch Knight's feat list.

This may in fact be rather crappy at epic levels, since you won't qualify for a good deal of epic magic feats with chameleon alone. I may change this when I'm back with my books, since the only examples I have of epic progressions are from the SRD.

[thevorpalbunny]

How often do you get bonus feats? There's no standard.

[OldTrees]

I really like this class. I have always been a fan of the chameleon concept.

On the topic of balance, the chameleon base class could memorize a list of long duration buffs with their arcane and divine spells and then switch to martial and
stealth aptitudes. The end result might be overpowered. I hope it isn't but it is a concern.

On the topic of teamwork, the chameleon at higher levels can be ready to replace up to two of (controller, defender, healer or striker) in combat. Would it be unbalanced for them to gain an ability that allows them to switch for a longer period of time than Dangerous Unpredictability allows them to but at a greater cost. This would allow it to replace fallen allies more easily but might be inherently unbalanced.

[FMArthur]

How often do you get bonus feats? There's no standard.

Oops, sorry. Every four levels after 20th.

I really like this class. I have always been a fan of the chameleon concept.

On the topic of balance, the chameleon base class could memorize a list of long duration buffs with their arcane and divine spells and then switch to martial and
stealth aptitudes. The end result might be overpowered. I hope it isn't but it is a concern.

Yes, a chameleon can memorize a list of long duration buffs and cast them, then switch to Martial Focus to get some more out of it. But you can also do that and remain in caster focus and actually cast your other spells. If you're using a "cleric-zilla" formula in Divine Focus, how much better are you actually going to be if you switch to another focus? Most of your power will probably be from your spells in that case... just like it would if you stayed spellcaster.

Long-duration buffs are weaker, less useful, or at least less common than short-term ones. I'm happy with just preventing the short-term ones from carrying over. Yes a smart chameleon player with extra usages of Aptitude Focus can use this strategy to be more powerful, but I don't think it actually significantly affects the game balance unless serious cheese is used - the danger all casters present. Your cheese will be levels behind true full casters' cheese, and I don't think a bonus to hit and limited maneuver selection will contribute much to already cheesy spells and effects.

On the topic of teamwork, the chameleon at higher levels can be ready to replace up to two of (controller, defender, healer or striker) in combat. Would it be unbalanced for them to gain an ability that allows them to switch for a longer period of time than Dangerous Unpredictability allows them to but at a greater cost. This would allow it to replace fallen allies more easily but might be inherently unbalanced.

That would actually be very unbalancing. You can only do long-lasting changes with your normal change of Aptitude Focus, which takes minutes at its shortest time (and is therefore unusable in combat). If you could do it in combat, it would be extremely powerful because of the vast array of options it opens up. As all wizards know, options are power; with your idea you could potentially have the solution to every problem, and take over every role. Interesting as that might sound, it would be frustrating to your party, because ordinarily the whole party needs each other to support the party in their own unique way, but you wouldn't need it and could function as a party on your own. It would kill the fun of teamwork and of challenge.

Look at the factotum: it has, in general, weaker abilities than those offered by a chameleon. But the fact that a chameleon can only have a few of its abilities available to him at a time means that it can not be judged as the sum of all its parts, while a factotum (which has access to all its abilities at all times) can. Remove that limitation, and suddenly the chameleon really is the sum of all its parts, which would be ridiculously powerful. Dangerous Unpredictability is already very powerful, since it gives you that power, but after you exercise it you can't use it again for the encounter and sticks you back where you were.

[ivendale]

If you wanted to be a lizard couldn't you just be a Druid and wild shape into one?