I've been wrestling with the concept of a character pairing that puts two technically deficient characters together and through skilful RP and strategy, are able to act as a single unit that is at least as, but hopefully more powerful than a well built PC. Trick is that both characters have to work together in order to pull it off.
My current build centers around two young wizards; their basic storyline is that two young mages struggle to even "get by" at school, and begin to work together obsessively. Through this remarkable synergistic work ethic, are able to excel, but are still as deficient as ever when separated.
The challenge is making this valid in the ruleset, I'm trying to find ways to make them able to pump up, modify, or otherwise improve each others casting, without the ability to do the same to their own. The metamagic feat "Cooperative spell" is an obvious choice, but i'm trying to find ways to make teamwork much more rewarding. Combining or stacking spell effects, combinations of actions that a single character couldn't pull off and a team of individuals couldn't coordinate.
And because I've building a campaign around it, Red wizard!
Drop 3-4 schools of magic each and circle magic power each other
and put incantarix in there too if you can because its
1: Uber
and
2: has some add-metamagic-to-other-peoples-spells-as-they-cast-them ability
Wiz 5/Red Wiz 5/Incantatrix 3, each wizard would be able to apply metamagic to his friend's spells, and they could participate in each other's circle rituals during downtime!
For stacking effects, fear effects stack with each other, so if 1 wizard made an opponent frightened and the other added the shaken effect, the opponent would shoot to panicked.
Normally Spell caster guardian is not particularly useful when its two casters but in the even you absolutely must get a spell off it might be useful to have one take the hit for the other so as not to lose the spell.
Also, I was thinking that it may be easier to RP their dependency rather than make it 100% part of the build.
When one is gone the other loses confidence and therefore doubts his abilities, he still has them but can't see that fact and will not be at his full potential.
I need to do some research on the multi-class build, I'm not versed in spell circle usage so if you could summarize or direct me to the right literature I'd be much obliged
As to the Dvati, I'd never heard of them, but now that I'm looking they have a LOT of appeal for this end, there is quite a bit of controversy over their rules for actions and abilities, but I think there is serious potential for this race given the right tweaking.
My main question about Dvati is what is the "role" of a soul in arcane casting? I can see it being intrisic to divine, but if its not involved in arcane, theoretically two individual but "optionally" bonded minds could cast separately or together?
I've seen some items that make sense for this pair also, a pair of rings that make the wearers immune to the other wearers spell effects.
Gish can dish out the damage, but gets swarmed too easily. Controller can make enemies unable to do anything, but can't dish out the damage.
(Edit: Obviously, normally when you design these, you can overcome these problems, but if you want something where a wizard has problems, you have to make the problems yourself)