New Class: Tailor of Flesh (a work in progress)

[Xereq]

I got this idea for a class late last night. The Tailor is a plastic surgeon of sorts, with a sinister side. He practices surgery, transmutation, and the grafting of flesh. Where a mundane plastic surgeon in our world use an implant, he grafts flesh. Often this flesh comes from fellow sentients, his prefered medium. He sees himself as a career artist of sorts. He travels from place to place, perfecting his craft, his body enhancements, and the bodies of others. Where he goes, people end up missing and his clients end up looking "sexier" or bieng "enhanced" in other ways. Common "enhancements" include muscle grafts, redundant organ grafts or organ transplants, and cosmetic enhancement. There are also more frightening and sinister grafts: Faces contorted in pain or fright with changing expressions grafted all over the skin, monsterous natural armor grafts, arms replaced with succored and barbed tentacles, serrated claws and teeth, eyes on stalks and palms, a bulge in the front of the skull where an additional frontal lobe has been attached...the list goes on and on.

I've got a few ideas for crunch abilities. The ability to deal strength & Con damage as well as paralisis with a touch attack, as the Tailor learns how to make the flesh go slack so he can opperate. Physical changes reflecting surgeries preformed to enhace tailor at no extra cost, a +1 here and there every couple levels. Some warlock-like spell-use would be nice, or perhaps a bard's spell progression. Sneak attack fits thematically...but I am loath to use it as there are already so many classes that do. However, there should be some kind of precision damage ability this class could use.

HD I'm thinking d8, maybe d10 or d6 depending on how balanced the class ends up bieng.

4, maybe 2 +Int modifier skill points.

good fort saves

lvl    BAB          Ref    Fort   Will    TAK     Special
1      +0           +0     +2     +0      1       Master surgeon, Tailor Ability (least)
2      +1           +0     +3     +0      2       
3      +2           +0     +3     +0      2       Crippling Cut (1d6, 1)
4      +3           +1     +4     +1      3       Graft flesh (tailor grafts)
5      +3           +1     +4     +1      4       Tailor Ability (least or lesser)
6      +4           +1     +5     +1      5       Crippling Cut (2d6, 2)
7      +5           +2     +5     +2      6       
8      +6/+1        +2     +6     +2      6       
9      +6/+1        +2     +6     +2      7       Crippling Cut (3d6, 3)
10     +7/+2        +3     +7     +3      8       Tailor Ability (least, lesser, or greater)
11     +8/+3        +3     +7     +3      8       Special Ability
12     +9/+4        +3     +8     +3      9       Crippling Cut (4d6, 4)
13     +9/+4        +4     +8     +4      9             
14     +10/+5       +4     +9     +4      10       Special Ability
15     +11/+6/+1    +4     +9     +5      10       Crippling Cut (5d6, 5)
16     +12/+7/+2    +5     +10    +5      11       Tailor Ability (least lesser greater or 
17     +12/+7/+2    +5     +10    +5      12       Special Ability
18     +13/+8/+3    +6     +11    +6      12       Crippling Cut (6d6, 6)
19     +14/+9/+4    +6     +11    +6      13       
20     +15/+10/+5   +6     +12    +6      14       Perfection of Surgery, Special Ability

Tailor of Flesh Calss Abilities
Fleshcrafting Genius: Tailors make a handsome income off of their surgical genius. They add their Tailor level on profession (cosmetic surgeon) and Heal checks.

Tailor Ability:

Tailor Grafts: These are exemples of tailor grafts

• Grafted muscle: You take extra muscule tissue and graft it to improve your strenth. your strength increaces by two. However, the extra muscle makes fine manipulation difficult, you take a -1 penalty to all dextarity based skills.
• Grafted Sinue: You graft extra sinue into your muscular system to give you faster reaction time. Your dextarity increaces by two. This increace in speed
• Grafted muscle, Arms: you graft addintional muscle into your arms. When using your arms enhanced arms, treat your strength score as if it was two points higher.
• Grafted Sinue, legs: Your base speed increaces by 20ft
• Grafted bones: You graft subtle bones into your skeletal system, increaceing your hardiness. Your constitution increaces by two.
• Grafted bones, Marrow: You fuse the extra grafted bones with your regular bones and add additonal marrow into them. The extra marrow grants you an overwhelming resistance to toxins and deseases. You gain +4 on saves against poison and desease.

 

[Nifft]

I think this idea is super-cool. Here's some suggestions:

1/ Consider making it a Prestige Class. They're shorter, and easier to balance IMHO. Prereqs would be: X ranks in Heal, Sneak Attack, X ranks in Kn(arcana).

2/ Take a look at the Assassin's Paralysis option for Death Attack. That's something a "medical ninja" could use.

3/ POISON!!! He should be able to produce and use poison. That gives you a lot of ability damage options within the current rule set.

4/ Nothing wrong with Sneak Attack, if it does what you want it to do. Nothing wrong with Favored Enemy either ("Favored Anatomy"?).

5/ Where's the grafting coming in? I don't see any graft feats or "graft reserve" points. Have you seen the Fleshwarper in Lords of Madness? If not, I recommend taking a look there. Your class could do many of the same things, but obviously without the spellcasting progression.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Xereq]

Stop reading my mind as I edit my posts! Privacy please
Edit: Thanks Nifft. I just finnished adding the anesthetic ability to the class when I read your post. Grafting will come shortly, I already have grafts that the Tailor preforms on himself, and I will add graft the graft flesh feat as a bonus feat at 4th level. I also plan on making abilities he willl gain pertaining to fleshgrafting and some high level goodies, as soon as I can think of some that aren't overpowering.

Can anybody else think of surgical enhancement Ideas or class abilities for higher levels? Please post any ideas you have.

 

[Nifft]

I think that allowing grafts which are generally equivalent to magic items in terms of gold and xp cost will be generally balanced. You can add some special specifics which are cheaper thanks to their opportunity cost -- if grafts are not removable, you can't swap them out like you would a magic item, so special-situation stuff can be cheaper.

-- N

 

[Kerrick]

I agree with Nifft - badass idea, but it should be a PrC - 10, maybe even 15 levels.

That said, a few nitpicks:

At first level the tailor gains a touch attack to deliver a mild poison (DC 10 + 1/2 Tailor level + Intellegence modifier.)

If this is a naturally-produced poison (i.e., it comes from his body and is not artificially created), it's Con, not Int. Granted most of the characters taking this class will be mages or those with low Con scores, but you might want to add a base Fort save as a prereq if you do this is as a PrC (you can do that - just not very many people do).

Hurl Anesthetic: You have experemented with your own hands, creating a cache of anesthetic you can spray. Your may deliver your anesthetic as a ranged touch attack 3 + Int mod times per day. You must take Anesthetic focus before you take this enhancement.

Why not make it so he can produce the poison through his saliva - then he can spit it (5-foot range) or deliver it with a bite/kiss. Again, the mod should be Con, not Int, IMO.

The surgical procedures should have (possibly temporary) downsides, too - suddenly adding on muscle, sinew, or bone mass is a huge change, and it takes time to get used to it. Added muscle might reduce Dex (having all that extra muscle suddenly added makes it difficult to move properly); added muscle to the arms might impose a penalty to Dex-related skills requiring fine manipulation (pick locks, e.g.) - again, it takes time to get used to the sudden addition of muscle mass. Increased speed would incur an increased chance of falling, etc.


And some comments:

I don't see anything wrong with sneak attack, either - an anatomist would definitely know where to place the knife to get the biggest effect.

As far as grafts, go, you've got a whole monster manual full of them. Literally - you can do undead grafts, fiendish grafts, golem grafts... most of these have been done at one point or another, so it shouldn't be hard to find them and put them all together into one class.

A long time ago, my DM was rambling on about a whole bunch of crap his old group (from the 80s) had, and he told me about this class called the Enhancer. Basically, he enhanced existing attributes like natural armor, HD, stats, etc. I'm not quite suggesting you go that far (that class never got written up, BTW), but you could expand it a little - think outside the box. I don't know if you've ever read the Ruins of Undermountain box set, but one of Halaster's apprentices was (is?) a transmuter - she messes around with existing creatures, adding things, changing things, whatever, to make them "better". She herself has blue scaled skin, dragonfly wings, claws, and elbow/heel spurs. You could add larger teeth (which gives a bite attack, or increases the existing one, but makes the subject look really odd); graft different kinds of skin (increases NA, but imposes a reaction penalty), claws (natural attacks), eyes (grant low-light/darkvision), and on and on.

Now, the way I'd go about this (and this is just a suggestion) is to make up a bunch of possible augmentations, then divide them into rough classes - internal (teeth, muscles, bones, etc.), external (claws, skin, wings, gills), and maybe special (grafted eyes, poison sacs, or things that grant special abilities). Assign them difficulty levels based on the difficulty of the procedure - adding claws is pretty simple; grafting muscles is a little harder, and replacing the entire skin is very hard. Once you get that, you start laying them out, depending on how many levels this class is going to have. Since I'm working off the top of my head here and I don't have all the other class abilities mapped out, I can't really say what levels I would place things at, but I'd probably do the augmentations at every 3 levels, or maybe every other level - minor external (adding claws or webbed fingers/toes); minor internal (teeth), moderate external (wings or lesser limb grafts), moderate internal (muscles or eyes), major external (skin or greater limb grafts), and major internal (bone marrow, replacing/rearranging major organs).

Now, I mentioned lesser and greater limb grafts. I came up with that as I was writing the above. Lesser limb grafts are grafts from things that are fairly close to the subject - a human receiving an arm from another humanoid or monstrous humanoid of the same size, e.g.
A major graft would be adding something that wasn't meant to be part of a living being - undead or construct limbs, or completely changing the subject's anatomy - adding a snake's tail in place of legs. You could even put moderate grafts in there - adding on things that are minor grafts, but a different size, or things that are from a different type of creature than the subject, but not undead or constructs - fiendish would fall into this category, as would a giant's arm on a human.

Finally, you need procedure times. This stuff isn't done with a snap of the fingers - it takes time. Not to mention the patient has to recover from it, which takes more time, and should have to make a Con check/Fort save to survive the procedure (remember the old system shock checks from 1E/2E?).

And another thing I just thought of - you could have a series of benefits for the surgical procedures that the PC could choose - reduced surgery time, increased chance of patient survival, reduced penalties (really good plastic surgeons leave few or no scars), and possibly even increased benefits. These could be like bardic abilities - the PC has to have x ranks in Knowledge (anatomy) and x levels in the class.

Wow. Didn't mean for this to get so long, but I kept coming up with ideas. Like I said, this is a really cool idea for a class - it could lead into an entire subsystem, but it's a little too focused to be a base class, IMO. Make it a 15-tier PrC, and I think you'll have a winner.

 

[Xereq]

@Kerrick - Thank you for your feedback. I envisioned Tailor grafts as requiring a sacrifice for materials (Like vagrants winding up unconcious at the edge of town missing a limb and with swiftly sutured marks where materials were obtained sacrifice.) I had not considered the detrimental impact extra tissue the body wasn't used to controlling would have. This is an exelent balancing factor for a lot of these surgeries.
Also, any noticable graft that made the grafted creature look like an abberation would impose a penalty on diplomacy, bluff, and gather information. The first time you get extra muscles it can be concealed. The second makes people distrust and fear you but not be sure why. The third would make you appear like an abomination. Also extra eyes, claws, armor plating, etc would carry a heavy penalty. I will include a feat to gain a bonus on intimidate checks equal to the penalty to the social skills.

I will get started on writing the grafts tommorrow, as well as revising the class to make it smoother. I think that anesthetic will change from a poison to a bioelectric surge that can be a ranget attack at higher levels, it will also be able to "wire" connections between the new flesh and the grafted creatures nervous system and eventually stabalize patients that go into shock. I want to keep this a base class, but I will also do a PrC version and perhaps a theurgeic Tailor/mage class. I could also give the Tailor an artificier-like capacity to meet the requisits for magic grafts and infusions seem very appropreate.