Soul Knife

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technomancer
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Soul Knife

Post by technomancer »

Since we all know the soul knife is a special class, because it doesn't actually get class features (OoO! I have a ... weapon!), but I really like the soul knife concept. So the question is thus: How would you re-build the soul knife to not suck?

I've got my own ideas (basically this: shamelessly steal combat techniques from the Frank'n'K Monk, and combine that with psychic warrior powers), but I'd like to see some others ideas.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Actually; I made a really good Soulknife before.

I called it a ranger and pretended, I mean "role-played" that he was a soulknife.

It was pretty easy actually and very effective.

I 'wore' soulknife gauntlets (bought a 16 str min MWK comp long bow; takes a move action to 'activate'; or as part of a move action to activate at +1 and higher BaB).

I fired 'pyschic' bolts from out of a bunch of pouches on my belt (arrows, and a quiver were bought).

I made it a halfling that bought his animal companion in advance (ridng dog) and then fired psychic bolts at enemies while on my doggies back.

I'm sure you could make one as a variant fire mage/monk combination class though.

For people that can't be creative and 'need' to play a soulknife 'class'.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Username17 »

Many of the classes I see thrown around as having good "flavor" are basically just open books that don't really say or do anything at all. The Fighter doesn't do anything, and the Soulknife is not far off from that. Flavor-wise, he's basically just a blank slate.

A Soul Knife really does only one thing for a long long time:
  • Have a Shortsword.


Eventually he gets a second power:
  • Totally molest the rules by having access to mental ability damage which just arbitrarily kills a huge number of enemies like Giants and Dire Tigers.


Neither of those are something you can write a story around. Essentially the Soul Knife is just a skeleton of flavor so marginal (you have a shortsword! It's made out of your soul!) that you could go pretty much anywhere with it by actually writing some flavor text for your character.

So the question comes full circle: I severely doubt that you want to play a character who "has a shortsword" and I further doubt that the flavor you're going for is "bear slayer" even though game mechanically that's what a Soulknife is. What is it that you want to do?

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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Maj »

I wrote up a revised version of the Soulknife back in 3.0 when WotC hadn't yet tried to take 10 levels of stuff and cram it into 20. If you're interested, you can find it here {OK, Nifty}.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Catharz »

Yes, "soul knife" is probably best done as a feat which can be used by anyone. I'd make it a skill feat, probably using Concentration.

You probably want it to combine a morphing weapon with some ghost touch, "deep impact," and status effect abilities. Actually, it could be a lot like a warlock's Eldritch Blast + blast invocations.

[Edit] The reasoning for making it a skill feat is to allow for the (3e) rogue/assassin Soulknife class, but also the fighter soulknife, samurai soulknife, monk soulknife, etc. [/edit]
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by technomancer »

What I want to do:

A class that gives you a spiffy weapon with neat abilities (like the monk).
A class that gives you a weapon that can't really be taken away (disarmed, sundered, ect).
A class that gives low-grade self-support casting (like psychic warrior or ranger).

So I guess, mechanically speaking, it should take either the monk or ranger role.

A few key points:

A 1st level mindblade should be able to form his mindblade into any weapon he has proficiency in, and the class should grant martial weapon proficiency. There's no reason to gimp weapon choices.

I would also like a mindblade to be able to split his blade into to, and morph one of them into a shield (that he has proficiency in).

The mindblade should get some way to break through DR/you don't have it. Using some of the fighting styles from the Monk list lets you do this, but only if you dedicate a fighting style to it, which is fine by me.

--------------

Hmm... It's starting to look more like a cross between a fighter and a monk, only he doesn't actually have to carry around that armory in the portable hole.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Make the Mind Blade do Energy damage. That auto-bypasses any DR.

Make it a Force effect or an effect that does Mind energy damage.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by AlphaNerd »

Here's some stream of thought:

Mindblade [Combat]
Benefit: As an immediate action, you may create any weapon which you are proficient with in your hand. This weapon has all the attributes of the original, except that it deals force damage. You may dismiss this weapon as a free action. If the weapon ever leaves your grasp, it dissipates.
+1: You can throw your mindblade. Woohoo.
+6: Your mindblade is treated as though it has the ghost touch property and deals an additional +2d6 damage.
+11: You can make your mindblade as a free action. Your mindblade has the keen property.
+16: Your mindblade gains the brilliant energy property.

Special: A Samurai may use his mindblade as his ancestral weapon, as long as its form is exalted by the Samurai's warrior culture.

I suppose you could replace one of those with the "dazed" thing, but likely you'll be taking combat school, and as mentioned before, dealing mental ability damage can unbalancing. Strength damage might fit, as might something else. Just thought I'd put it out there for starters.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Brobdingnagian »

What's the point of making it Ghost Touch? It's a force effect. Ghost Touch is a non-issue, unless you're incorporeal and trying to hit something corporeal.

Also, making it brilliant energy kind of makes it useless against undead and contructs... but presumably this is something cool your character does, rather than a main weapon, right?
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Hmm... that actually makes me think of Cyber-Knights out of the Rifts game by Paladium.

I'm gonna re-work it. Remove if from being a 'force' effect, that's a bit much for 1st lvl. Make that a +6 BaB thing.

=========
Mental Weaponry [Skill: Concentration]

Benefit: As an free action action, you may create any melee or thrown weapon or weapons which you are proficient with in your main hand and/or your off hand(s). You may only do create a Mental Weapon once per attack that you make.

This weapon or weapons have all the attributes of the original and deal damage as if they were a normal weapon of it's type. You may dismiss these weapons as a free action. If any weapon ever leaves your grasp or is destroyed, it dissipates until you create a new one.

It has a hardness and hit point value equal to what normal weapon that you are creating would have. A mental weapon cannot be augmented by any spell that affects real weapons, however it may be damaged or destroyed by abilities that would affect an object.

Your Mental Weaponry, or any melee or thrown weapon you wield, counts as it were a Magic weapon, or as if you had cast Greater Magic Weapon with a caster level equal to your character level. The benefits of this feat dissipate if a wielded weapon is wielded by an other creature and do not apply to wielded ranged weapon attacks such as bows or crossbows, unless they are used as melee weapons.

Concentration also becomes a class skill for you at all levels.

This ability is based of of your ranks in the Concentration Skill as noted below.

Ranks: Benefit

4: You can ranged attacks with your Mental Weapons or wielded weapons. If the weapon you wish to attack with does not normally have a range increment, it now has a range increment of 10 feet. The Mental Weapons or wielded weapon never actually leaves your hand, you simply can make ranged attacks with it instead of melee attacks. In addition, your Mental Weapon and wielded weapons deal 1 additional point of damage per 2 ranks you have in the Concentration Skill.

9: Your Mental Weaponry and Wielded weapon is treated as though it were a Force effect and it deal Force damage. [Note: this is now an energy type and thus bypasses DR and Hardness, it can also hit incorporeal targets]

14: With Mental Weaponry and wielded weapons, your range increments with your thrown attacks doubles, your reach with melee attacks increases by 5 feet. In addition your Mental Weaponry deals extra damage per hit equal to your ranks in concentration; this replaces the similar benefit gained at 4 ranks in concentration.

19: Your Mental Weaponry can strike targets with Touch Attacks you only can deal any damage that this feat gives you, plus precision damage of any kind, strength, power attack, blitz, rage dice and similar abilities cannot be used in order to deal damage if you use your Mental Weaponry as a touch attack.

Your wielded weapons may perform touch attacks as well, and while they may still affect attacked creatures with their special effects, they are restricted by with the same restrictions as your Mental Weaponry would have regarding extra damage.

Special: A Samurai may use one set of Mental Weapons as his ancestral weapon, as long as its form is exalted by the Samurai's warrior culture. The Samurai may select more than one weapon to qualify; however all weapons thus chosen must be weapons that he can wield at the same time. Thus a Daisho (Katana and Wakisashi) is permissable for most creatures that can use two weapons. A Glaive and a Greatsword are not, unless the creature can wield both at the same time.

===========

I'm not sure if I did the ranks wrong or not, but I think that mounted combats benefits are availible at one lvl higher than the BaB feats are.

edit:
Okay, shuffled some stuff, added some other stuff.

So, you can fire burrowing blades. and a high lvl fighter can fire 8 Mental 'darts' at a target. Which should screw a wizard.

And it's Force damage, so DR is ignored, and it hits incorporeal targets.

The last bit is a bit clunky, but it's understandable. You lose further attacks for guaranteed damage and you can remain at range to mitigate retaliation from your target.

Took off the burrowing thing.

It was:

"If you successfully strike a target you may choose to 'lose' that attack in subsuquent rounds (also losing the appropriate amount of Attacks of Opportunity and any other benefits that being that you would have been able to attack; if you do so your Mental Weapon continues to deal damage as if you had hit your target. The weapons deal the same amount of damage every round as if you had attacked the target in the same circumstances. You must re-roll any damage dice each round, but all other effects that would have increased your damage will remain in effect (Sneak attack Critical hits etc.). You must remain within the maximum range increment of your mindblade to maintain this effect and you may dismiss it in your round to regain the 'lost' attack. This effect combines it's total damage dealt per round when determening the DC of a caster concentration check for taking damage while casting a spell."


Edit: changed stuff arouund some more.

I'm not really sure about giving it a force effect at lvl 6; since it makes it stronger at hitting ghosts than Ghost hunter is.

Bleh.

Wait, on the other hand, you can't make your mental weapons any 'better' in the same manner that you could 'improve' a normal weapon permanently with magic.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:51 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Prak »

technomancer at [unixtime wrote:1176067092[/unixtime]]What I want to do:

A class that gives you a spiffy weapon with neat abilities (like the monk).
A class that gives you a weapon that can't really be taken away (disarmed, sundered, ect).
A class that gives low-grade self-support casting (like psychic warrior or ranger).

So I guess, mechanically speaking, it should take either the monk or ranger role.

A few key points:

A 1st level mindblade should be able to form his mindblade into any weapon he has proficiency in, and the class should grant martial weapon proficiency. There's no reason to gimp weapon choices.

I would also like a mindblade to be able to split his blade into to, and morph one of them into a shield (that he has proficiency in).

The mindblade should get some way to break through DR/you don't have it. Using some of the fighting styles from the Monk list lets you do this, but only if you dedicate a fighting style to it, which is fine by me.

--------------

Hmm... It's starting to look more like a cross between a fighter and a monk, only he doesn't actually have to carry around that armory in the portable hole.


edit: *reads the first line of the post above him* what he said about cyber-knights and rifts
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

The only thing I didn't do was cover the sheild bit.

That's a different Feat altogether.

Scaling AC. An Armour bonus of 4 + 1/2 your ranks in concentration; and a sheild bonus of 1 + 1/3 your ranks in concentration.

They have an armour check penalty, but no max dex and then give you better stuff as time passes;

uhm, I don't know what to do for 1st lvl actually. ROFL

immunity to crits (75% 10 ranks, lvl 7-ish),

ability to add the armour class granted against touch attacks (15 ranks, lvl 10-ish), but your AC goes down by one until your round starts. [you ejected a small portion of the armour to help absorb/deflect the attack]

ability to layer the armour this feat provides with an other armour, you get the worn armours full AC and 1/2 the AC of what your mental armour would provide gets added to that. Same with sheilds; that's a lvl 15 ability.

It can take on the fighter role easily enough.

The hilarous thing is that a Paladin wouldn't be bad taking these feats.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Maj »

Judging Eagle wrote:I'm not sure if I did the ranks wrong or not


I think you did:

JE wrote:15: You can make your mindblade as a free action.


If you have 15 ranks in Concentration, then you are level 12. If you have a fighter BAB, and are level 12, then you ought to have three attacks. If you are just now gaining the ability to conjure your mindblade as a free action (rather than as an immediate action), then you cannot have spent much time throwing it, since you can only do so once per round.

Conjuring a mind blade as a free action needs to either be something that happens from the get-go, or something that happens at 10 ranks of Concentration (that's pushing it), when the fighting types are level 7 and have two attacks. Alternately, soulknives shouldn't have the ability to throw their mindblades because as written, it's nigh unto useless.

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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Fixed it, a bit.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Catharz »

How about now worrying about 'manifesting' the mindblade with an action, and just saying that you have one ambient, arbitrary 'thing' which alters form as a nonaction?

You never 'throw' your mindblade, for example. This doesn't mesh well with the whole 'dissipation' thing anyway. You 'make a ranged attack' with it, but you're still "wielding" it. I know it kills some of the versatility of the feat, but I still like the idea of making it a finite set of possible weapons. It doesn't mesh with that er...lizard guy from the Dreamcast game with the scary gimp in it...but it does let you make more arbitrary decisions.

Also, wraithstrike and burrowing at the same level is pretty brutal.
You could shift the burrowing to actually require "concentration." A burrowing arrow from 100' away is still quite the assassination weapon. If your target has any idea what's going on they can try to get out of range, but otherwise they're probably screwed.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

At level 15, you better be screwing monsters from 60 feet away.

Besides, rogues are making acid vial touch sneak attacks at roughly the same level.

I was trying to align the power along the lines of what most of the +16 abilities from the [Combat] feats are able to do.

Also, if you are burrowing your weapon; you lose that many AoOs per round, so some builds will be okay with tossing out 6 or 8 burrowing darts (rogues really), while others will simply power-attack and may want to keep their AoOs (fighters with hordebreaker or whirlwind for example).


Hmm, the idea of stripping the throwing and simply saying that you can make ranged attacks with it is a bit cleaner.

I might move wraithstrike to an earlier level and take out the +2d6 damage; replace it with bonus damage based on your concentration.

Brobdingagian could simply give his Pally rebuild Mental Weaponry as a bonus feat instead of using a whole big Pure-Touch blade mechanic.

Warforged Paladin with Mental Weaponry; give it a humanoid looking faceplate and boom, Cyber-Knight!
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Catharz »

I should have expected that Stanislaw Lem was not an unknown here. Awesome.


Anyway, I don't think it's entirely clear how the 'burrow' ability works. I don't understand why it does anything to your AoOs unless you make an AoO attack and then start it burrowing.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Well, in Racees of War, you get an AoO per attack that your BaB gives you. Plus, TWF will double that

So, the 16th lvl full BaB char with TWF and Mental Weaponry would have up to 8 AoOs; if they spend any of their attacks in burrowing mode, they lose that many AoOs until it's their round again.

"Stanislaw Lem"

I have no idea what (who?) that is. I'm gonna have to wikipedia/goggle it.
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Okay, Polish Sci-fi author. What that you saw here reminded you of him?

b/c if you're talking about the Cyber-Knight comment i made; I was reffering to Rifts (although, I don't know much about them, but whatever, I read the books for really well written story and fluff that is internally consistant, I don't know the games mechanics that well, so they could still be silly, but whatever).
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Catharz »

Judging__Eagle at [unixtime wrote:1176415311[/unixtime]]Well, in Racees of War, you get an AoO per attack that your BaB gives you. Plus, TWF will double that

So, the 16th lvl full BaB char with TWF and Mental Weaponry would have up to 8 AoOs; if they spend any of their attacks in burrowing mode, they lose that many AoOs until it's their round again.

Ah. That hadn't occured to me. I thought of it in the sense of 'you've used the attack' rather than 'you aren't granted the attack.'

Oh and Lem writes a damn' fine SciFi story, but got his honorary SFWA membership pulled because he's a critical, pinko commie bastard.

The Cyberiad is basically a set of fables or fairy tales about robotic creatures, including a number of "cyberknights" who ride "cyberhorses" and wield "cyberswords" and "cyberlances" and "thermonuclear missiles."
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Brobdingnagian »

What do I get the idea that "thermonuclear missiles" shouldn't be in quotes?
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Re: Soul Knife

Post by Judging__Eagle »

B/c they're really cyber-peens.

For ... "cybering."

Ah, yeah, I read a refference to the Cyberiad in the wikipedia article; it's a collection of stories involving a time when robots have replaced humans?


In any case; a Blitzing, TWFing, Sniping. Point Blank Shooting, Mental Weaponry Equipped, maxed concentration fighter at level 11 would be doing...

Damage = Dart Damage + BaB (blitz) + Concentration Ranks + BaB (within 60' feet, Point Blank Shot + Sniper) + Other stuff
= 1d4 + 11 + 14 + 11 + Other Stuff
= 1d4 + 36 + Other Stuff about 6 times a round.

6d4 + 216 a round. Up to 150 feet away.

Hmm....

A rogue could deal somewhat the same with sneak attack dice, I think.

They get less BaB, so they'll be doing: 9 + 9 + 5d6 (5-30) + 14 at level 11

Which comes to:

= 1d4 + 32 + {5-30} (5d6)

So, the rogue will do more damage per hit, on average; but even on 5 1's it's 1 point more than the fighter would be doing.

However, they only have 4 attacks

= [1d4 + 32 + {5 to 30} (5d6)] * 4
= 4d4 + 128 + {20 to 150}

Average damage = 4d4 + 128 + 85
= 4d4 + 213 a round

Hmm, 3 less than the fighter would deal. Mostly b/c the fighter's getting 2 more attacks. Which isn't bad, the Rogue will need something like Camoflauge Clothing out of RoW to be able to keep sniping.

So, fighters do more damage, but they need more attacks to do so. Rouges just deal more damage per hit.
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