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Board Discussion / Re: Request what you need!
« Last post by Garryl on July 02, 2017, 06:54:32 PM »
Glad the backup boards are still here. We can still communicate with the staff in case bugs drop the main boards for a bit.

I'm getting "Unable to load the 'main_above' template." when I try to load the main boards. I'm sure you've noticed already and are working on fixing it, but I figure mentioning it can't hurt in the off chance you didn't.
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Dak-Tharsh: The primarily-goblinoid nation of Dak-Tharsh has a history of butting heads with its neighbors. The expansionist Dragon Party has been growing in popularity in recent years after the ruling Manticore Party refused to involve Dak-Tharsh in the Second Dawnstar War on Antares. This unstable political climate has made its neighbors uneasy.

And now I want to play a goblin again.

It's still on the table. Just find a link with strongheart halfling stats if you want to refluff the race like you were talking about before.
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Dak-Tharsh: The primarily-goblinoid nation of Dak-Tharsh has a history of butting heads with its neighbors. The expansionist Dragon Party has been growing in popularity in recent years after the ruling Manticore Party refused to involve Dak-Tharsh in the Second Dawnstar War on Antares. This unstable political climate has made its neighbors uneasy.

And now I want to play a goblin again.
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Non-Arhosan Material / Re: Commander [Base]
« Last post by Stratovarius on July 02, 2017, 01:58:00 PM »
Updated the lead post. I should probably update my PC for your campaign now.
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Non-Arhosan Material / Re: Commander [Base]
« Last post by Garryl on July 02, 2017, 01:42:06 PM »
This is going to be kind of in the order my brain responds:

The reason I'm a little worried about giving a commoner nothing is that if he dies (easy at 1st level and even more so at 2nd and 3rd), that class feature (i.e. half of the Commander class in many ways) is gone for a minimum of a week. It's very easy for a DM who wants (or even one who doesn't) to clobber the cohort and his max 4 hp (barring racial modifiers). One hit from the aforementioned orc barbarian and he evaporates. On the other hand... I see where you're coming from in as much as a well designed commoner (I'm not going as far as Troll-blooded, even) is a useful party contributor at 1st level. What would you say to the foci being applied at commander level 2 instead of level 1?

For the Presence aura, what about adding a save against fascinate for anyone who views a creature under the effect? It's a fairly minor debuff that doesn't work in combat, but is good in social situations.

For the Senses aura, I don't really want to get into adding things like darkvision and up, so... what about cannot be dazzled, blinded, or deafened?

I don't want to get away from basing the aura on Charisma, because otherwise the commander has precisely nothing valuable that's based off of any ability score, and can instead choose to focus entirely on being whatever he wants to be, knowing the chassis just sort of appears around him as he levels.

I agree with all of these ideas. Maybe toning down the immunity to dazzle/blind/deafen to just a bonus on saves against them, though? I dunno.
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Non-Arhosan Material / Re: Commander [Base]
« Last post by Stratovarius on July 02, 2017, 01:33:52 PM »
This is going to be kind of in the order my brain responds:

The reason I'm a little worried about giving a commoner nothing is that if he dies (easy at 1st level and even more so at 2nd and 3rd), that class feature (i.e. half of the Commander class in many ways) is gone for a minimum of a week. It's very easy for a DM who wants (or even one who doesn't) to clobber the cohort and his max 4 hp (barring racial modifiers). One hit from the aforementioned orc barbarian and he evaporates. On the other hand... I see where you're coming from in as much as a well designed commoner (I'm not going as far as Troll-blooded, even) is a useful party contributor at 1st level. What would you say to the foci being applied at commander level 2 instead of level 1?

For the Presence aura, what about adding a save against fascinate for anyone who views a creature under the effect? It's a fairly minor debuff that doesn't work in combat, but is good in social situations.

For the Senses aura, I don't really want to get into adding things like darkvision and up, so... what about cannot be dazzled, blinded, or deafened?

I don't want to get away from basing the aura on Charisma, because otherwise the commander has precisely nothing valuable that's based off of any ability score, and can instead choose to focus entirely on being whatever he wants to be, knowing the chassis just sort of appears around him as he levels.
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Non-Arhosan Material / Re: Commander [Base]
« Last post by Garryl on July 02, 2017, 12:25:14 PM »
I would disagree that the Marshal got it right in terms of major aura scaling for the very reason you mentioned earlier in your post - it's too weak. By later levels of the game, +5 attack to those party members that need it is so easily reproduceable in a decent party that the focus shifts from "can I hit" to "what non-combat defenses do I need to overcome". And when it comes to coping with battlefield control, flying, etherealness, etc., the Marshal's bonuses are too small to make an impact. The game does not scale in a linear fashion, so making abilities that do almost always results in a falling behind the power curve unless there's other class abilities that jump off of it.

Oh, the marshal still messed up the numbers, and the lack of anything else in the class is an even more extreme problem for the class as a whole. I'm just pointing out what it did get right, the concept of dividing these different sets of numbers into a fast, automatic scaling group and a slow, deliberate scaling group.

Quote
There are two ways around that: attempting to scale the bonus manually (Rage is an example, getting both more and bigger bonuses as the game goes on), or letting the player scale the bonus as appropriate for the game that he is in. The easiest way to do the latter is to tie it to an ability score, in this case Charisma. I would not claim it is a perfect solution, but the only one that immediately comes to mind is a kind of "point buy for auras", where every level the commander gets a number of points that he can expend to increase the bonus from one or more auras, but that involves both more bookkeeping and less flexibility for the class.

Do what the original marshal did, but with more reasonable numbers and not relying on it for 100% of the class's capabilities. Start off the aura bonus at +1 at 1st level, then scale it directly with class levels, +1 every few levels. This would require a bit of revision to the rest of the commander's class features, though, since aside from the auras only seal the breach relies on Charisma.

Quote
Based on discussions we've had elsewhere, the Commander starts out at tier 1 at lower levels, but slowly slides down the ranking system to tier 3 as other classes get more of their abilities. So there's too much "pop" at first level, especially, because the Cha bonus does not increase gradually, but rather starts out high for the level and then tails off to where it's quite possibly only one higher four levels later at 5th. The solution proposed, and one I think is quite effective, is to limit the aura bonus to min(class level or charisma modifier). It puts the Commander at a maximum of +2 at 1st level (due to the feat), which is in the right range to give the RNG a bit of a nudge but without overbalancing it. Without the feat, it looks better, so one item that might be necessary is to limit that feat to 3rd or 6th level Commanders, not 1st level ones, since it's such an obvious benefit to take.

Now, as to the equality of bonuses from auras: you are correct that the scaling between different benefits is not accurate. Looking at it again, I'd switch over to this (comments in bold):
(click to show/hide)

The combined changes should beat the Commander back down to a sane level at 1st from the Aura side.

With the initial spike removed, the auras as a whole are a lot more reasonable. Once you figure out what scaling options you're ultimately going with, you can reevaluate how each individual aura applies it.

One thing I really want is for something extra to be added to Presence. It's just skills, while every single other aura has a combat application. Senses, too, has room for a little more since it's pretty much only useful at the moment battle starts and not afterwards, but initiative is very important so I'd be careful about adding too much.

Please note (just for the arcane side) that this class is heavily restricted - he has to buy and utilize a spellbook and spells like a wizard does, which makes that particlar foci even weaker. I might consider switching it to Sorcerer casting in order to stop the fussing in that area.

Yeah, I kinda figured that if you were using the arcane focus at all in the first few levels, it would be by borrowing the party wizard's spellbook.

Quote
The issue with the cohort is that there's a floor below which it physically can't go - it has to have at least one hit dice, and all the attendant benefits of being a creature such as actions, regardless of everything else on top of it such as abilities. Those alone carry a fair bit of worth at 1st level, which is a problem I simply can't resolve if I want to have clean scaling of having a cohort.

As I said, one of the options is also to just drop the bonuses you're actually giving your cohort at the lowest of levels. A CR 1/3 commoner, lacking the benefits and abilities of the various foci, fits the scaling (in theory) of 2 levels below 1st, for example.

Quote
What I can do is this (Since Combat Foci is the problem child):
  • Combat Focus: The chosen cohort gains proficiency with all martial and exotic weapons, increases his maximum hit points by +3 per cohort level, and increases his base attack bonus to that of a fighter. He gains a +2 bonus on Fortitude saves, and chooses one of the following: a +2 bonus on attack rolls, a +2 bonus on weapon damage rolls, or damage reduction 2/-. All of these bonuses (including the damage reduction) improve by +2 every 4 cohort levels (at 4th, 8th, 12th, and 16th). He then chooses one of the following:
    Combatant: At 1st level, he gains a bonus feat, chosen from the list of fighter bonus feats. He must meet the prerequisites for this feat. At 4th, 8th, 12th, and 16th level, he gains an additional bonus feat.
    Initiator: He gains access to a single martial discipline (See Tome of Battle). His initiator level is equal to his cohort level, while his maneuvers known, readied, and the maximum level known are all given on Table 4. He recovers maneuvers as a Warblade does.
Thoughts?

Better. I still want to run some numbers, but I might be a while getting to it, if at all, at this point.
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If you want to draw on anything in the setting outside of the the Valley of Obelisks, I finally got some of the greater worldbuilding stuff put together. Most of it's for the other continents on the planet, since the game I originally wrote this for (which used a different system entirely) was based there. You can use or ignore as much as you want, since the valleys are relatively isolated.

The game takes place in the Valley of Obelisks, located in the kingdom of Marrilach, located on the continent of Anshar on the planet Solak.



Anshar
Anshar is ringed by large mountain ranges, and most of the interior is divided into large valleys. The continent is inherently isolating, possibly accounting for why it has, by far, the greatest diversity of both species and cultures across all of Solak. It is not unheard of even in this day and age to find two adjacent valleys without any shared fauna, whose inhabitants speak entirely different languages.

The kingdom of Marrilach: One of the many kingdoms of Anshar. Marrilach consists of the three connected valleys through which the Marrilach River flows, from the Valley of Obelisks in the north-east, through the Sivar Lowlands, and finally into Elsir Vale in the south. The river keeps the three valleys connected, and trade both between them and with the kingdom's neighbors keeps them reasonably prosperous.

Dak-Tharsh: The primarily-goblinoid nation of Dak-Tharsh has a history of butting heads with its neighbors. The expansionist Dragon Party has been growing in popularity in recent years after the ruling Manticore Party refused to involve Dak-Tharsh in the Second Dawnstar War on Antares. This unstable political climate has made its neighbors uneasy.

Irim Dwegsho-in-exile: Once a mighty interstellar nation composing dozens of species across seven star systems, Irim Dwegsho was conquered by the Vandan Empire. Some three centuries or so ago, the survivors of Irim Dwegsho ended their decades-long trek across the stars and settled on Solak. In that time, much of their knowledge and technology was lost. While some remains, it pales in comparison to the stories told about the glorious homeworlds of old.

The Underdark: The Underdark is a network of natural caves and tunnel systems that criss-crosses beneath the surface of Anshar. Home to a bewildering variety of creatures and filled with twists, dead ends, and all manner of natural hazards, the Underdark is not a place to travel lightly. The only civilization to truly thrive in the Underdark is that of the drow, who connected the isolated valleys of Anshar in ages past as guides and traders. The past century or so has seen them become insular and xenophobic, however, and the shorter lived races have begun to forget the once-friendly face of a drow in the night.



Antares
The "mainland continent", all of the land of Antares has been claimed by one nation or another for roughly the past 300 years. The nations of Antares are still recovering from the aftermath of the Second Dawnstar War, which ended only last year. The last major war on Antares before that was the original Dawnstar Conflict 211 years ago. For two centuries, while border skirmishes occurred from time to time, no significant wars were fought. Most of any real fighting took place through political machinations and proxy wars among the various colonies on Arnos.

Eldrath: Once the largest naval power on Antares, Eldrath is situated at the closest point on the mainland to the continent of Arnos, directly across the Deserted Sea. When the sea's magic suddenly started swallowing ships beneath its waves, much of Eldrath's navy was lost and many of its colonies on Arnos were cut off from their patron nation. Eldrath never quite re-secured its original influence and power before the Second Dawnstar War, and it fell even further behind when Thrann's armies marched through it.

Menthyl Vare: Arguably the most powerful nation on Antares. Most Menthyl citizens have a relatively high quality of life compared to those of other nations. Magic is common in Menthyl Vare, and most of the educated members of the upper class can cast at least a few cantrips. The nation boasts the best magical college on the continent, bar none. Mages from across Antares come to study and research there.

Norion: Norion is a chain of islands off the south coast of Antares. While small, Norion accounted for almost a third of all colonies on Arnos before the Second Dawnstar Conflict. Norion's navy is very modest for an island nation of its size. However, it employs large numbers of privateers among its merchant fleets. Many a pirate has had the tables turned when attempting to plunder a merchanter flying Norion colors.

Iberius: Officially split between the Holy Iberian Monarchy and the Unholy Iberian Republic, the two countries are for all practical purposes one and the same, two sides of the same coin. Both nations, known collectively as Iberius, are united as theocratic nations following Iber. Iber preaches the importance of opposites and how they are necessary for the continuity of existence. The religion was founded, so the texts say, by a group of angels and demons who realized both the futility and necessity of their eternal divine war, and turned towards the planet of Solak to spread their newfound understanding. Both parts of Iberius follow these tenets, and as such, even though they claim to be separate nations, they work as closely with each other as would two branches of the same government.

Tanar: Tanar was built from an amalgamation of laguz clans. Tanar was suffered among the most losses of all countries involved in the the original Dawnstar Conflict, when they were invaded by Dylandt. In the Second Dawnstar War, Tanar sent its forces to the forefront of the fighting against Thrann, despite the empire not directly invading Tanar until later in the war.

Dylandt: 211 years ago, Dylandt's armies invaded Tanar, sparking the war known as the Dawnstar Conflict that eventually enveloped nearly half of Antares. Their immortal Scriveners proved instrumental to their success in the war, even though they were ultimately defeated. Dylandt never recovered from its loss in the original Dawnstar Conflict, and it only fared worse after its failed alliance with the Thrann Empire during the Second Dawnstar War.



Arnos
This continent has only been settled within the last 400 years. Its extensive natural resources enticed most of the nations on Antares and the other civilized continents to colonize Arnos. It lies to the west of Antares, directly across the Deserted Sea.

Thrann Empire: 3 years ago, one of the colonies on Arnos decided to declare independence. Calling itself the Thrann Empire, its armies grew strong and swept across the entirety of Arnos in the opening salvos of the Second Dawnstar War. Unsatisfied, Thrann then turned its sights to the nations of Antares, invading Eldrath, Menthyl Vare, and Dylandt. Thrann was ultimately defeated, but the two continents are still recovering.

The Turak Desert: While much of Arnos is temperate and filled with life, Turak is an arid desert. The mountain chains that bracket it on the east and west hold back most of the rainclouds, and the still-active volcanoes among them periodically spew ash and magma across the edges of the desert, leaving no place safe for permanent civilization, yet providing nourishing soil for the desert plants that regrow afterwards. Despite the harsh conditions, several tribes of nomads eke out a life upon the sands, following the oases of rich plant life that spring up in the volcanoes' wake.

Unsettled Lands: Deep in Arnos, creatures of myth and legend still stir. Some places unclaimed by civilization stay unclaimed for good reason. Here there be dragons, and worse.

Karrius: The Karrius valley houses ancient ruins have existed upon Arnos for longer than recorded history. The ruins' walls are covered in mysterious writings, only a fraction of which has yet been translated. No creatures live within the valley, and few traps that were ever set within the ruins still function. Despite this, it is extremely dangerous to explore Karrius at length. Each nightfall, all beings that have ever been within the valley for a full week of their lives disappear, never to be seen again. Not even the greatest sages who have studied the valley for their lifetimes yet know what happens to these poor, lost souls.
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Non-Arhosan Material / Re: Commander [Base]
« Last post by Stratovarius on July 02, 2017, 08:13:49 AM »
This division of bonus categories is an important thing to note, and was one thing that the original marshal did mostly right. There's a huge difference between +4 to all saves and +4 to a few skill checks. Presently, all of the commander's auras are lumped into a single pile. With the exception of a couple that scale at reduced rates (fast healing, caster level) a couple that don't scale at all (alliance, dogpile), and a few that provide bonuses that are inherently on different scales and are adjusted appropriately (reflective damage, SR, resistances, and movement speed), all of the auras give a straight bonus equal to the commander's Charisma modifier. Everything acts on the same scale. This means that +1 damage is valued as highly a +1 on attack rolls, +1 AC, +1 to all saves, +1 to a trio of skills, and +1 max AoO/round. Some of those comparisons are quite reasonable. Others, not so much. There needs to be an adjustment in the scaling between the various auras.

Back to the ability score-based scaling. Remember, these auras are applying party-wide. Taking the +all saves aura means that not only do you get divine grace, but everyone in the party gets it, too. Worse, they get to use your optimized Charisma score, rather than their own. Getting +Cha to all saves is fine. Giving a small to moderate bonus to all saves to the party is fine. Giving a big bonus to the whole party in a limited set of circumstances is fine. Combining the best of all of those is problematic. I'm just using saves as an example because it's easy to understand, easy to break down (all vs. Fort or Reflex or Will), and has a solid comparison point (divine grace @ paladin 2nd), but the same principle holds true to most of the other bonuses that auras can grant.

Now, one last thing about auras before I try to move on to cohorts. Some of the auras just produce way too big numbers at 1st level. This is strongly related to what I just talked about, but there are a few specific nuances to it I need to address. I've already discussed how +Cha can give bonuses across a party that are much larger than they should be, but most of what I've talked about have been about bonuses on a d20 roll. Some types of numbers, especially at the lowest of levels, have a much narrower band of reasonability. In this case, I'll have to dissect the specific auras that relate to this.
- Energy Shield: Reflective damage is cool. A little bit is neat and useful. Unfortunately, at 1st level, hit points are on a much narrower band than a d20s 1-20 range. Typically, hp goes from 6 up to about 15 at 1st level. You get a few outliers at CR 1 like the 29 hp sack of meat that is a 4 HD zombie, but on average you get 12-13 hp for CR 1 enemies (according to Optimization by the Numbers, and level 1 encounters generally deal with larger quantities of weaker, lower CR enemies, too. 18 Charisma deals 8 damage when hit, enough to take down the average CR 1/2 creature (6.6 hp) and takes off half the hp of the strongest one (16 hp). Your typical CR 1 enemy loses after hitting you twice, too. Your typical CR 1 enemy is doing noticeably less damage than that on each of its hits, too. Most enemies will only be averaging 4-7 damage per hit at CR 1. Even the 18 Str elite array orc fighter with a greatsword, sitting at the top of the damage curve, only deals 13 damage per hit, just over 50% more than you do reactively. If he doesn't drop you in that single hit, he's still going down to the second burst of reactive damage, so at best he gets a pyrrhic victory as you both bleed out. One of the deadliest enemies for the level has a non-zero chance of losing if you stand there and do nothing. Most any enemy that needs 2+ hits to drop you loses automatically.
- Toughness: Damage reduction is a difficult thing to evaluate. It comes up so rarely on the players' side, but even then usually in very small quantities. It has a similar issue of quantity as energy shield, being very potent at level 1 but losing that potency as higher level enemies come with higher amounts of damage. Small amounts of DR have very little effect, but the defensive benefits become more and more pronounced the higher DR rises until all or nearly all of the damage is prevented. It's similar to AC in this regard, except that instead of working on a 20-point scale, at 1st level DR typically works on a 4-7-point scale, (although outliers can go as high as the low 10s). Having DR 4 will halve or negate the damage that most CR 1/2 and CR 1 enemies deal. Even our 13 avg. damage orc from before loses significant enough chunk of damage to guarantee that he'll need at least 2 hits to drop your party's barbarian or warblade, and give very good odds for even the squishier commander with only a d8 for hp.

I would disagree that the Marshal got it right in terms of major aura scaling for the very reason you mentioned earlier in your post - it's too weak. By later levels of the game, +5 attack to those party members that need it is so easily reproduceable in a decent party that the focus shifts from "can I hit" to "what non-combat defenses do I need to overcome". And when it comes to coping with battlefield control, flying, etherealness, etc., the Marshal's bonuses are too small to make an impact. The game does not scale in a linear fashion, so making abilities that do almost always results in a falling behind the power curve unless there's other class abilities that jump off of it.

There are two ways around that: attempting to scale the bonus manually (Rage is an example, getting both more and bigger bonuses as the game goes on), or letting the player scale the bonus as appropriate for the game that he is in. The easiest way to do the latter is to tie it to an ability score, in this case Charisma. I would not claim it is a perfect solution, but the only one that immediately comes to mind is a kind of "point buy for auras", where every level the commander gets a number of points that he can expend to increase the bonus from one or more auras, but that involves both more bookkeeping and less flexibility for the class.

Based on discussions we've had elsewhere, the Commander starts out at tier 1 at lower levels, but slowly slides down the ranking system to tier 3 as other classes get more of their abilities. So there's too much "pop" at first level, especially, because the Cha bonus does not increase gradually, but rather starts out high for the level and then tails off to where it's quite possibly only one higher four levels later at 5th. The solution proposed, and one I think is quite effective, is to limit the aura bonus to min(class level or charisma modifier). It puts the Commander at a maximum of +2 at 1st level (due to the feat), which is in the right range to give the RNG a bit of a nudge but without overbalancing it. Without the feat, it looks better, so one item that might be necessary is to limit that feat to 3rd or 6th level Commanders, not 1st level ones, since it's such an obvious benefit to take.

Now, as to the equality of bonuses from auras: you are correct that the scaling between different benefits is not accurate. Looking at it again, I'd switch over to this (comments in bold):
(click to show/hide)

The combined changes should beat the Commander back down to a sane level at 1st from the Aura side.

The exact effect of a cohort at 1st level is much harder to analyze, as it has numerous factors that must be taken into account. The numbers, too, are less intuitive. At 1st level, the arcane, divine, and psionic foci pretty much amount to 1 spell/power per day. It's not a direct thing, but we do kind of know at this point roughly how effective one casting of a wizard or cleric spell or a psion power is (roughly 50% chance to win one of the 4 encounters in a day is what I typically estimate it as). Not unreasonable for a companion-type class feature if the rest of the class is comparably potent (which it would be once 1st-level auras get addressed). Stealth and wild foci are mostly about skills, and since wild's wild shape doesn't show up at the level range we're evaluating, it can be safely ignored. A commoner 1 with +2 damage or 2/day invisibility is very reasonable as a 1st-level companion, so those actually seem quite fine at first glance.

Combat focus is where the numbers really start to come in. It adds a pile of them. Hit points, attack, damage, DR, a feat, and a maneuver. There's a lot to look at here, and I don't think I can do an effective, accurate analysis for this sort of thing without actually statting some things out. I'm getting a bit tired, and generating those numbers is a lot of work, so I'll come back to this later.

Before I go, though, I don't want to forget about some of the front-loading scaling I mentioned earlier. At higher levels, the cohort keeps to 2 levels behind the commander. That's fine. At 2nd-level, the cohort is 1 level behind the commander... warning signs, but not necessarily wrong. At 1st level, however, the cohort is right at the commander's level. Alert! With combat focus, you've got a 1st-level fighter for a pet at level 1. If the commander stays home and reads a book in bed, he's already contributed his share to the party at level 1, just with the cohort tagging along. It's similar to the druid with its animal companion. The commander has the same class chassis, even, just with auras instead of spells.

I'm not sure what the fix is, especially since a major part of the premise of the commander is having cohorts. My gut ideas are either to remove the cohort at levels 1 and 2, or to remove the focus entirely until level 2 or 3, leaving the cohort just as a CR 1/3 commoner at 1st level. I'm not sure how well those would work, and I suspect I'll know more and/or have other, better ideas once I get the deeper stats analysis done.

Also, the cohort level/effectiveness just scales unevenly at low levels. That's just off-putting. It's 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, .... Those three levels sitting at level 1 just don't work. As a creature unto itself, it's virtually impossible to make it appropriately powered at all three levels (commander levels 1, 2, and 3) despite the cohort staying identical across them.

Please note (just for the arcane side) that this class is heavily restricted - he has to buy and utilize a spellbook and spells like a wizard does, which makes that particlar foci even weaker. I might consider switching it to Sorcerer casting in order to stop the fussing in that area.

The issue with the cohort is that there's a floor below which it physically can't go - it has to have at least one hit dice, and all the attendant benefits of being a creature such as actions, regardless of everything else on top of it such as abilities. Those alone carry a fair bit of worth at 1st level, which is a problem I simply can't resolve if I want to have clean scaling of having a cohort.

What I can do is this (Since Combat Foci is the problem child):
  • Combat Focus: The chosen cohort gains proficiency with all martial and exotic weapons, increases his maximum hit points by +3 per cohort level, and increases his base attack bonus to that of a fighter. He gains a +2 bonus on Fortitude saves, and chooses one of the following: a +2 bonus on attack rolls, a +2 bonus on weapon damage rolls, or damage reduction 2/-. All of these bonuses (including the damage reduction) improve by +2 every 4 cohort levels (at 4th, 8th, 12th, and 16th). He then chooses one of the following:
    Combatant: At 1st level, he gains a bonus feat, chosen from the list of fighter bonus feats. He must meet the prerequisites for this feat. At 4th, 8th, 12th, and 16th level, he gains an additional bonus feat.
    Initiator: He gains access to a single martial discipline (See Tome of Battle). His initiator level is equal to his cohort level, while his maneuvers known, readied, and the maximum level known are all given on Table 4. He recovers maneuvers as a Warblade does.

    Thoughts?
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I haven't worked out a full backstory yet (need to read a bit more of the campaign setting info), but Janks is proud, fiercely individual, and a bit reckless. He's in favor of the idea of redemption, but if evil things die along the way he's not going to lose too much sleep over it. However, he will debate philosophy until the end of time, especially re: dragons.
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