Which classes and prestige classes should I take? Is there any skills or feats he will need? Should he be stealthy or combat based? Should he have spells? Basically, I don't know how I should go about making my new character. The game is intense and even though we all started at level 20, the average party level is only 21 due to a bunch of weird level and xp draining items. I have to start at level 20, according to my DM.
Any advice, opinions, or builds would be welcome as long as they are on theme and fairly powerful so that I don't have to keep losing all those levels. ( I went down 4 levels!!! Nooooo!!!) If it is game breaking, though, my DM will just go insane and rip up my sheet, so nothing totally broken. He already ripped up two sheets, one was pun pun and the other was some other endless loop build. Optimized is ok, broken is a big fat no
. GP is standard, we are using point buy ( With alot of points, this is one tough game. I don't have the exact value, so expect more on this later.) and we can use any books we want. ( My book library is small, but I have some links that detail just about everything except the details of some prestige classes. If I don't have access to a certain prestige class, I will mention it.)Thanks in advance!!! :D
Rogue1/Wizard1/Human Paragon3/Unseen Seer10/Arcane Trickster5
You can focus on enchantment and illusion to bring opponents down quickly, and still have the skill modifiers to be properly stealthy. Teleportation magic will also help you enormously in retrieving bounties. Also really helps your survivability.
Invest in a magic bag, bottle of air, and some sort of restraints.
Beguiler also does this very well.
Skillful or Spellful? :P
What sort of things should a bounty hunter be good at, though? I mean, in real life a bounty hunter has to be a skilled tracker, an investigator, and a skilled combatant. In a game of Dnd, the target may not be human and the bounty hunter doesn't need to be capable of tracking or investigating. Spells may work just as well. I know that it would be off-theme to use a spellcaster, but some spells thrown in could work.
Skillful or Spellful? :P
It may help to select what type of previous jobs your character may have worked on or what type of environment he is best suited for. After this things can fall into order a lot easier/better.
- How does he track/hunt his bounties?
- How does he fight them?
- What does he fight them with?
- What are some important or vital skills he'd have?
Play a Ghost.
Some sort of Changeling Ghost 5 / Factotum 3 / Ranger 1 / Dungeoncrasher Fighter 6 / Master of the Unseen Hand 5
Ghost gets you absolute perfect stealth - zero noise, on the ethereal dimension, and walking through walls/floors to get to your mark. And between Changeling and Malevolence you could look like anyone or be inside anyone while searching for them. Then, once you find them, use your telekinesis to throw them - and the furniture - around the room (the Bull Rush version of telekinesis combined with Shock Trooper's Domino Rush and Directed Bull Rush, and Dungeoncrasher) before telekinetically dragging them with you to collect the bounty.
I'd probably go with Urban Ranger as I think Gather Information and Urban Tracking are more important, then grab Track as a normal feat if you can fit it in. Able Learner as well (so gets you some Survival), and it lets you maintain your Ranger skills as you level up. The Ghostly Grasp feat from Libris Mortis is well worthwhile, if only to make you a functional character in the world.
Factotum 3 can also be replaced with anything you like - right now it's there for Int to your Bull Rushes and to help with skills. But as other options - Rogue for the cool Changeling sub level, but my recommendation would be Totemist or Incarnate, which can both bring some large skill bonuses (in fact, I'd probably finish it with Totemist 2 / Incarnate 1 - a decent pool of essentia between the two of them and a lot of melds to shift it round into as and when you need particular skills - e.g. shift it all to Silvertongue Mask when in a face situation). Hopefully an allied caster can cast a few Open Chakra spells on you so you can bind a few of them as well and open up all sorts of useful utility abilities.
Also fills the Warrior requirement very well - with the Swift Concentration skill trick and Extraordinary Concentration feat you can maintain multiple telekinesis spells - so you basically become a Dungeoncrasher Fighter with a de facto range of several hundred feet, and you'll be a threat even to fellow flying and incorporeal monsters.
And finally, the backstory virtually writes itself - in life you were a simple Bounty Hunter, but when you died you still had an unfulfilled contract, and your soul clung onto this mortal world. If the uncaught Mark is a lich/vampire/dragon/similar then you could've been wandering the world for centuries seeking them, bringing down the iniquitous and the vile as you pass.
This build will get you a lot of skill points, track, favored enemy (I recommend the arcanists sub from complete mage), ranged smite evil (if you go with elf sub or just take the feat), sneak attack, some spells, hide in plain sight and death attack. So this will make a decent ranged bounty hunter.
If you go with Elf you can get some killer Elf racial substitutions on the ranger and paladin. Also go with the Holy Warrior option from Complete Champion for the extra feat and go with the Divine Spirit option from Dungeonscape since your mount will not gain anything beyond what you get at 5th level paladin.
For feats you'll be focusing on archery, so point blank shot, precise shot are a must. Once you reach Justice levels look into getting Craven for extra sneak attack damage and Darkstalker to really hide from anything when you combine it Hide in Plain Sight and a ring of Darkhidden.
I will spare you the exact details of how awful he is in opt for a funny and true story. In my game, we have "Player Notes" which we can pass around to each other in order to prevent the DM from knowing our plans and such. Basically, he doesn't read anything that says "Player Note" on it when we pass a note around. Well, somebody passed around a note that said:
" Sign if you find it impossible to believe that the sub DM *wasn't* dropped on his head as a kid. Sign if you find it likely that the sub DM probably enjoyed sniffing mercury as a child. Sign if you suspect that he probably eats lead for breakfast. Sign if you think that it is unlikely that he didn't enjoy
."We all signed. ANYWAY, like the idea. Might try it later. That would be so different from anything I have seen played, and I suspect that we will all be making quite afew characters in this campaign :P . BTW, tried to post this about 6 hours ago, but my comp crashed. Luckily, though, I copied this and put it on notepad. When I try to post things here, I have to make a heal ( computer ) check with a DC of 20. Some days, there is a decent mod in my favor, but the only way to ensure something gets posted is to take 20 cause I don't have any ranks in heal ( computer ). :D