Working on New/Tweaked Classes

I'm going to start earnest work on developing the new classes that I see fulfill system niches in Pathfinder RPG. These include the filch, priest, lord, knight, shaper, and warlock. At the same time the following classes will need to be tweaked: cleric, wizard, sorcerer, and bard. The largest piece of this update is the brand new class based on Charisma - lord. I'm thinking its abilities will be based on the Star Wars noble but more useful, and based around spheres. Each sphere would be associated with a Charisma-based skill, giving each lord a focus.

Here are the specific tweaks to the existing classes I'm thinking about right now:

* The paladin goes away and the cleric steps up to replace it more or less. The cleric would have the good base attack bonus progression and higher hit dice, and fewer spells. I'm thinking a progression of every three levels instead of every other level. So 1st level spells from 1st through 3rd level, 2nd level spells from 4th to 6th, etc. This caps out at 7th level spells at 19th level. Also looking at the domains and building special abilities based off of those - Pathfinder RPG already started down this path.

* The wizard will be tweaked to include the overcast ability we played around with in the Age of Worms campaign along with the abilities from Pathfinder RPG. Not too much change, actually.

* The sorcerer is almost a new class. It'll be a wizard/fighter combo class, sort of, but I'll look at the other variants already presented in existing splatbooks - duskblade comes to mind out of the PHB2, but I know there were others (spellsword out of Complete Warrior?). Something along those lines.

* I'm thinking the bard loses arcane spellcasting abilities, and instead gains something similar to the lord's sphere focus. Not sure at this point, I think the details will fall out from the work done on the lord class.

Some of the new classes already exist in one form or another and I'll just be tweaking them to work with the Pathfinder RPG. This includes the knight, which appears in PHB2 - that might be a straight conversion to be honest. I'll need to give the class an overview to check.

Warlock is going to be pretty different from what's presented in Complete Arcane, and will be based more on the 4E warlock. Someone who trafficks in otherwordly powers, and gains their powers from pacts. Emphasis on summoning? Probably, maybe.

The shaper is going to be an interesting class, and will be more or less a flexi-class based on the polymorph spell and the psionic powers contained within the biokinesis discipline. More details to follow.