Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
Hello
I can't sleep *at all* so I might as well do something vaguely useful.
So I'm running this large dungeon that is fairly dangerous, and the party will not have the chance to replace lost party members (not good). I don't want to be forced to pull punches, so the party has 2 NPCs that could be promoted. One is a rogue (pretty straightforward) and the other is some old scholar/linguist (he's the translator/servant of one of the PCs, Mr Zang).
I thought it would be fun if Mr Zang turned out to be an alchemist, from unearthed arcana (who, for some reason, was keeping his powers secret). But now I have to stat him out, aaaand I have a bit of a problem. See, I don't like the Mechanical Servant feature in general, and it's an awkward one to bring in the game at one point. However, the alchemist is not a very powerful class/subclass and it derives a fair amount of its power from this mechanical servant, who serves as a meatshield at the very least. (the possibly promoted to PC-hood NPC would be level 6, so this is relevant).
So, how do I buff the alchemist? One thing that I noted is how *weak* they are as spellcasters. Something that could help would be to change their "1/3" spell progression to a 1/2 spell progression (a la paladin/ranger) or even a 2/3 spell progression (like the 3.X bard or the pathfinder alchemist).
Now this can be a bit tricky to do because the base class doesn't have spells at level 1-2 and it could require expanding the spell list to level 5 or 6, but *since* the play level is 6, it wouldn't be a problem in this specific circumstance. The result would be an alchemist without a mechanical servant but with a few more spell slots, and access to higher level spells sooner.
So... would that be enough?
I can't sleep *at all* so I might as well do something vaguely useful.
So I'm running this large dungeon that is fairly dangerous, and the party will not have the chance to replace lost party members (not good). I don't want to be forced to pull punches, so the party has 2 NPCs that could be promoted. One is a rogue (pretty straightforward) and the other is some old scholar/linguist (he's the translator/servant of one of the PCs, Mr Zang).
I thought it would be fun if Mr Zang turned out to be an alchemist, from unearthed arcana (who, for some reason, was keeping his powers secret). But now I have to stat him out, aaaand I have a bit of a problem. See, I don't like the Mechanical Servant feature in general, and it's an awkward one to bring in the game at one point. However, the alchemist is not a very powerful class/subclass and it derives a fair amount of its power from this mechanical servant, who serves as a meatshield at the very least. (the possibly promoted to PC-hood NPC would be level 6, so this is relevant).
So, how do I buff the alchemist? One thing that I noted is how *weak* they are as spellcasters. Something that could help would be to change their "1/3" spell progression to a 1/2 spell progression (a la paladin/ranger) or even a 2/3 spell progression (like the 3.X bard or the pathfinder alchemist).
Now this can be a bit tricky to do because the base class doesn't have spells at level 1-2 and it could require expanding the spell list to level 5 or 6, but *since* the play level is 6, it wouldn't be a problem in this specific circumstance. The result would be an alchemist without a mechanical servant but with a few more spell slots, and access to higher level spells sooner.
So... would that be enough?