JPL said:
I've thought about this.
- Saves and HP as wizards
- Skills and spell prog as bards [with a somewhat restricted skill list, and a tweaked spell list, and no spontaneous casting]
- Scholarly Lore [as bardic lore]
- Secrets [like a Loremaster --- one every three levels or so?]
- Some of the Smart Hero talents [at higher levels, like a rogue's special abilities]
With the new rules on Knowledge skills revealing monster lore...might be a good guy to have around.
Interesting. We're thinking on similar, but divergent, lines.
I gave some serious thought to giving them the bard's spell progression, but it just didn't sit right with me that they only ever got 6th-level spells. I believe (as I think you do, given what you said) that their secrets and lore abilities are definitely cool--better, I'd argue, than a wizard's bonus feats, in many respects--and thus they need some downside to balance them with wizards. I don't believe, however, that downside should be in having fewer spells per day. I ended up giving them the wizard's progression (which, if you were a wizard and took the loremaster PrC, is exactly what you'd have had anyway). Instead, I gave them a different limit, one not in the PrC at all, but which (I feel) fits the theme/mood of the character.
Of course, this is all tentative. The project's still in early stages, and I could easily decide later on to go a different route. Suffice it to say, the loremaster is made even with the wizard not through spells per day but through selection, and leave it (for now) at that.
(Incidentally, that's part of my design philosophy right there. In most cases, it's not possible to create a 20-level character that's
exactly like a 10-th level PrC but tougher and more spread out. In some cases, I had to make some fairly substantial changes; my objective was to be true to the concept first, and the specific details--though still very important--second.)
