I’ve mentioned in a couple of places on this site that I’m primarily a D&D 3.5/Pathfinder fiend. I’ve played and GM’d other editions and other games on occasion, such as 5e and Savage Worlds, but I seem to always come back to Pathfinder. I think one of the main reasons for that is the fact that 3.5e, and Pathfinder in particular, really promotes planning out a character build and figuring out how various class options and feats can mix together to carry out a particular concept. Some players I’ve talked to really dislike this or get easily confused by the wide range of options available, but personally, I really enjoy character creation. To the point where I’ll often throw together a character concept or two whenever I have idle time, just for fun and for the challenge of trying to mechanically execute a given character concept.
The problem with this is, of course, that I don’t have enough games to run these characters in. Sometimes they might be well-suited to an NPC role in a game I GM, but more frequently, then end up getting locked away in in the Vault of Unused Character Concepts, always promised to one day see the light of day on a gaming table that never actually happens.
The idea behind Idle Rolling is to create a place where I can give some of these concepts the light of day. Not only can this series possibly provide some players and GMs out there some inspiration for characters and NPCs, but it can also help me demonstrate the thinking process I go through whenever I create a character, and some of the problems and pitfalls with character creation that I think many players and GMs overlook.
The Concept
The concept I started with for this week’s character, as you can in the title, was “The Hand of God.” For any given deity, there are countless numbers priests, clerics, and other followers, each of which might have their own degree of divine abilities granted by their chosen god. The Hand of God, though, is not your typical priest or cleric. He is not a follower of his god, but a vessel. He may wield divine abilities, but they are not abilities gifted to him by his deity to use as he sees fit – rather, they are the abilities of the deity itself, using the Hand as an avatar through which they carry out their will upon the mortal world.
At first appearance, the Hand of God appears to be but a humble priest, spreading the teachings of his deity as any follower of his god would. Surrounding him, though, is an aura that just barely borders on unnerving, a sense that gives others the feeling that another presence is walking the world alongside him. This presence of his deity doesn’t manifest itself fully, however, unless the Hand is forced to resort to combat. When things turn to battle, the divine fury of his deity takes over, and he becomes a fearsome warrior capable of crippling opponents with a single blow. Despite this terrifying might, however, some element of his human side remains, and in most cases, the priest’s vow of peace holds back his god’s vengeance to show mercy to his opponents.
From a roleplaying perspective, the contrast between humble, mild-mannered priest and fearsome divine avatar is at the center of this character. The Hand has set aside his human life and his past to answer the call of his deity, but a part of his human side always remains, and he often must reconcile his gentler human nature and the vow of peace he once took as a priest with the fury of the deity that acts through him. If challenged to combat by someone he sees as innocent or at least undeserving of his god’s wrath, he will tell them, calmly, that he will accept their surrender whenever they are ready to yield, and he will make every attempt to show them mercy when he can do so.
Mechanically, the Hand of God fills a sort of battlefield control and secondary DPS role. His “vow of peace” leads to him primarily dealing nonlethal damage whenever possible, which we will use with the Enforcer feat to make free Intimidate checks on each hit. Combined with a couple of other feats and a heavy focus on the Intimidate skill, these fear effects can become extremely powerful later in the game, and we will also later use Dazing/Stunning Assault to help us further improve our ability to disable and lock down foes.
I very much hate the generally accepted definition of a “tank” in D&D/Pathfinder (a topic I’ll likely discuss more in the future), but effectively, the Hand of God is what most players would describe as a tank, using his control abilities and good survivability to keep enemies off the rest of the party and potentially remove them from the fight though his fear effects for the majority of the encounter.
The Build
This build in starts to really come together between levels 5-7 with Signature Skill (Intimidate) and Vital Strike and begins to reach peak effectiveness at level 11, when he gains access to Dazing Assault for much better lockdown capabilities. Levels 15, 17, and 20 see some big boosts as well between Intimidate skill unlocks and Stunning Assault, but this is somewhat countered by the increased difficulty of successfully applying stronger fear effects and daze/stun effects on stronger enemies and the potential of seeing more enemies immune to nonlethal damage, so his damage-dealing capabilites start to see more of a focus in the late game to help him in situations where his control/lockdown is less effective.
Lothar, the Hand of God
Paladin (Tempered Champion) 20
Race:
Human is preferred, especially in games that start at low levels. The bonus feat lets us grab both Bludgeoner and Enforcer at level 1, letting us make our free Intimidate checks on successful hits from the very beginning of the game. As a paladin with no real reason to focus on Intelligence and with our heavy focus on Intimidate, skill ranks will be in short supply, which Skilled will help mitigate, and the human’s favored class bonus for paladin is fantastic, letting us grab one point of energy resistance against a particular type each level, boosting our survivability.
Half-orc can also be a reasonable option for the +2 bonus to Intimidate – Intimidate isn’t a class skill for the paladin, so anything we can do to boost it will make us more likely to apply higher-level fear effects late game. The half-orc can also grab Skilled as an optional racial trait in place of darkvision if you’re concerned about skill ranks, though darkvision is a tough ability to let go of.
Ability Scores:
Strength is our single most important skill – in addition to pumping our melee attack bonus and damage, we can also add it to our Intimidate bonus through the Intimidating Prowess feat. Charisma is also important, both because we are a paladin and because it pumps our Intimdiate further, as is Constitution for our survivability. We’ll be using heavy armor, so Dexterity is less important for us, and we can leave both that and Intelligence in the 10-12 range. Wisdom isn’t hugely important for us since we have a good base Will save, so that ability can be dumped.
20-point buy: Str 16, Dex 12, Con 14, Int 10, Wis 8, Cha 14
Feats:
Level 1: Bludgeoner, Enforcer
Level 3: Intimidating Prowess
Level 4: Weapon Focus (deity’s favored weapon)
Level 5: Signature Skill (Intimidate)
Early game is all about starting to get our control abilities online. With the human bonus feat we can start applying free Intimidate checks at level 1; if running a different race without the bonus feat, Intimidating Prowess will need to be passed over in favor of Enforcer. Weapon Focus is our only real option for the Tempered Champion’s bonus feat at level 4. Level 5 is the earliest we can access Signature Skill, and it should be grabbed immediately if it’s available in your game – this will let us apply some powerful fear effects late game as we put more ranks into Intimidate.
Level 7: Vital Strike
Level 8: Disruptive
Level 9: Power Attack
Level 11: Dazing Assault
As things start to progress into the mid-game, we start grabbing some more damage-focused feats and grab Disruptive with our second Tempered Champion bonus feat to give us some more battlefield control when fighting casters. Vital Strike works nicely with our high weapon damage die from sacred weapon and lets us output decent damage each round while on the move, letting us move to switch between targets once we have applied enough rounds of fear to one without losing too much damage. Level 11 brings us one of our most powerful control abilities in Dazing Assault, which gives us the potential to effectively stunlock a particularly bothersome foe so long as we keep our focus on it each round.
Level 12: Weapon Specialization (deity’s favored weapon)
Level 13: Improved Vital Strike
Level 15: Skill Focus (Intimidate)
Level 16: Greater Weapon Focus
Level 17: Stunning Assault
Level 19: Greater Vital Strike
Level 20: Greater Weapon Specialization
Once in the mid to late-game, we mainly start filling out our damage capabilities by finishing the Vital Strike Tree and grabbing the rest of the Weapon Focus/Specialization line with our Tempered Champion bonus feats. The two notable exceptions to this is Stunning Assault at level 17, which makes any targets we lock down easy prey for the rest of the party, and Skill Focus at 15, which gives us a +6 Intimidate bonus that makes it easier for us to hit the high Intimidate rolls needed to apply better fear effects from our skill unlocks.
Alternate Feats:
Dazzling Display and some of the other feats in that line are interesting with an Intimidate focused build with skill unlocks. Intimidating Prowess and Skill Focus are probably the easiest feats to drop if you want to go in that sort of direction – I would recommend dropping Skill Focus of the two, since with ability score increases from leveling up and magic items, we can easily tie break a +6 Strength bonus by mid/late-game. The downside with Dazzling Display is that you aren’t making any attacks, so you don’t get the chance to lockdown a foe with Dazing/Stunning Assault, and some of the best feats from the Dazzling Display line, such as Gory Finish, won’t work with nonlethal damage.
In games where Signature Skill/skill unlocks are not available or if you want more of a focus on damage than control, many of the Intimidate-boosting feats can be delayed or swapped for combat feats. Furious Focus and Devastating Strike are the two I’d most recommend – the former lets you stack Power Attack and Dazing/Stunning Assault for only a single -5 penalty, while the latter gives a decent boost to Vital Strike. That said, the strength of this build really lies in the control aspect, so if I was in a game where Signature Skill wasn’t available, I probably wouldn’t run this build and instead go with something focused more on Dazing/Stunning Assault and Whirlwind Attack.
Skills:
Intimidate gets a skill rank every level, both to eventually get the 20 ranks skill unlock and to make it easier to apply more powerful and longer duration fear effects. Since we will likely be moving between targets in battle on occasion once we have stacked enough fear effects on them to cripple them for the rest of the encounter, a mount will be useful for better mobility with our heavy armor – if you choose to go this route, you will obviously want some investment in Ride. After those, I would probably put some investment in Perception to help counter our bad Wisdom score, followed by ranks in Heal and Knowledge (religion) to help fit the priest theme and perhaps one or two ranks in a smattering of other class skills for flexibility.
Favored Class Bonus:
If you’re running a human, the energy resistance favored class bonus for paladin is great for giving our build some extra survivability and I would grab it every level.
Weapons/Armor:
With Tempered Champion, our primary weapon is going to be our deity’s favored weapon. Since this weapon will need to be bludgeoning to work with Bludgeoner, you will need to keep this in mind when choosing a deity or find another way to remove the nonlethal penalty for your chosen weapon. Since we’re focusing on nonlethal anyway, the merciful weapon ability is great for us, adding 1d6 of untyped damage on our nonlethal attacks. You can also use this ability to deal nonlethal damage with a weapon without penalty, but relying on equipment to give you a major part of your build like this is a dangerous game and you likely won’t be able to find of one of these weapons in the early levels.
In the Golarion setting, Torag is an easy option for the paladin as a Lawful Good deity with the warhammer as his favored weapon. If your GM is using an “oaths and vows” type system like the one I brought up in a previous article, Milani is also an option with the morningstar as her favored weapon, and Lothar’s “vow of peace” is a good base to build an oath around. The warhammer is the stronger of those two options, since it has a x3 critical modifier instead of a x2. Since both of these are one-handed weapons, you can either wield the weapon two-handed for extra damage or get a heavy shield for your off hand to boost your AC and survivability.
With our low Dexterity and proficiency, heavy armor is the natural choice here. If you want more mobility to better be able to switch targets in battle, Celestial Armor is a worthwhile alternative once you can afford it, or stick with heavy armor and get a mount.
Magic Items:
As with most melee characters, you will want to grab a Belt of Strength as soon as possible and upgrade it whenever you can. Since survivability is a big part of our build, you will likely want to look at upgrading this into a Str/Con Belt of Physical Might eventually. A Headband of Charisma is also good to increase the number of uses of your paladin abilities and to further boost your Intimidate bonus. A Cloak of Resistance is good on any character, but in our case, it really helps boost our survivability further and helps compensate for our bad Reflex save, so it’s also a worthwhile addition. After these, Bracers of the Merciful Knight is always good for any paladin with Lay on Hands.
Playstyle
As mentioned previously, Lothar focuses battlefield control first and damage second. Our control abilities essentially boil down to two things: fear effects applied by our free demoralize checks whenever we hit, and our ability to lockdown a single foe with Dazing/Stunning Assault. There is one very important difference to note between these two effects: we can attempt to apply demoralize/fear effects once on every attack, regardless of the target, while Dazing/Stunning Assault, depending on your GM’s interpretation can only be applied once per enemy per round (at least, that is how I would rule it at my table). This means that at times we will often have some strategic decisions to make regarding when we want to use Vital Strike, Power Attack, and Dazing/Stunning Assault.
Whenever we attack, we need to consider whether our primary goal is to disable/debuff the foe, lockdown the foe, or damage the foe. If we only care about stacking as many rounds of fear effects as possible, we will want to full attack without Dazing/Stunning Assault or Power Attack to maximize our chances at getting multiple hits and demoralize checks. If we want to lockdown a foe and keep them from taking any actions for the next round, we will want to full attack with Dazing/Stunning Assault. If we only care about dealing damage, we will want to either full attack or Vital Strike with Power Attack, depending on how many iteratives you think you can land. If we want to try to balance high damage with lockdown, Vital Strike with Dazing/Stunning Assault may be worth consideration (again, depends on how many iteratives you think you can land at a -5 penalty). Obviously, if we can’t make a full attack, we’ll likely be using Vital Strike, plus Dazing/Stunning Assault or Power Attack depending on whether we want lockdown or more damage.
It’s important to keep in mind that the DC of a demoralize check increases by 5 every time you try to demoralize the same creature within a 1 hour period – thus, every demoralize check you make against the same target will have diminishing returns. Our Intimidate bonus will most likely be well above +30 by level 20 and potentially cracking +40 with magic items factored in, so unless we roll terribly, we should still get some solid successes on our first few attempts against a foe even with the increasing DC. Against most average opponents, a single full attack or a couple of Vital Strikes should stack enough fear effects to disable or cripple them for the remainder of the encounter, freeing you to move on to another target who will likely have less resistance to your demoralize checks.
Against a foe that might be particularly dangerous to the party, we can switch to “lockdown mode” and keep our focus on them with Dazing/Stunning Assault each turn. Since Dazing/Stunning Assault doesn’t get progressively more difficult to apply each subsequent time it’s used on the same foe, we can essentially try to stunlock them until the party can bring them down. Even if we fail in dazing/stunning the foe, our high survivability means we can most likely tank anything it can dish out as long as we can keep its focus on us. If we succeed in applying stun or manage to apply cowering from our demoralize checks, the foe will suffer a -2 AC penalty and lose its Dex to AC, making it a prime target for the party to focus fire on for the next round (particularly for the party rogue or anybody else with sneak attack).
Roleplaying
For reasons I will explain more in a future article on the basics of effective roleplaying, I have recently moved away from writing long, drawn-out backstories for my characters. Instead, I try to just have a basic idea of my character’s background and his/her moral code and beliefs, which is sufficient to provide a basic framework to work off of when making in-character decisions while leaving room for the character to organically grow and change during play.
Background:
Lothar is a man of humble beginnings. Though originally born to a peasant family, he became orphaned at some point during his childhood and was eventually taken in by a church dedicated to the goddess Milani. Lothar would soon decide to train within the church to become one of Milani’s clerics. Part of this training included combat training, and during his first bout of training, he felt a divine presence guiding his attacks, and came to realize that the goddess had chosen him as one of her vessels.
Embracing his destiny, Lothar cast aside his past life, including his original family and surname, and came to wander the world, carrying out Milani’s will. Despite this, some element of the gentle, mild-mannered man he had once been remained. After one encounter with the tyrannical ruler of a small kingdom, where he lost himself fully to Milani’s wrath and ended up killing the other man, he came to greatly regret his actions, and swore a vow to never again take the life of a being that was capable of redemption.
Beliefs:
As a holy paladin, Lothar has codified many of his strongest beliefs into an unbreakable vow. If using the “oaths and vows” system to replace alignment restrictions in your game, this code also serves as his paladin’s oath.
- Never take the life a being that is capable of redemption.
- Always fight tyranny and oppression wherever it is found.
- Always defend and protect the freedoms of the innocent.
What Build to do Next?
Have a particular idea for a build you want to see in a future edition of Idle Rolling? Shoot me an e-mail at thegm@chaoticneutralgm.com.