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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kerrick" data-source="post: 2965949" data-attributes="member: 4722">I agree with Nifft - badass idea, but it should be a PrC - 10, maybe even 15 levels.That said, a few nitpicks: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).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.</blockquote>

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