The 3.5 duelist has exactly one odd thing, and that is the elaborate defense. Later versions of similar classes turned this into a +4 bonus, but this class has it as a +N, where N is your duelist level.

Here's the compare:

1)- Fight defensively for most everyone:
-4 to hit, +2 to AC
2)- Combat Expertise for most everyone (requires a feat):
-n to hit, +n to AC (max of 5)
3)- Original Elaborate Defense:
-4 to hit, +2+n to AC- up to +12 AC at 10th level.
4)- Paizo Elaborate Defense:
-4 to hit, +2+n to AC- up to +5 AC at 9th level.
5)- Proposed one:
-4 to hit, +2+n to AC- up to +5 AC at 9th level.
-m to hit, +2+n+m to AC- up to +8 AC at 9th level when combat expertising for 5.

You can see that all of these are worse than the +12 AC. The old version really meant that the duelist had a very serious AC advantage over everone not using a +5 shield, but had to take a -4 to hit in order to do it. This version gives you a weaker version of the bonus. In exchange, the rest of the class is much better.

I can work with that.

The real question is, will Alenka be lucky enough to get that one extra point of STR?

Find out this Saturday evening!!!

As we get closer to this being live on the table, I wanted to go over the elaborate defense thing again. First, note that it's several levels away. The Pathfinder Duelist is what we'll be using- this duelist uses leather armor. The 3.5 duelist wears NO armor, but doesn't really gain the trick that makes that work for some time.

I want to point out that you can fight defensively AND use combat expertise, at the same time.

So, here's my proposed version of your prestige class:

1)- Same as Paizo duelist except:
2)- Elaborate Defense applies when you have combat expertise, defensive fighting, or total defense active.
3)- Parry and Riposte both gain a bonus to hit equal to 1/2 your Duelist level.
4)- Riposte can also be a disarm attempt instead of an attack, using all the normal rules for disarming.
5)- You may prepare a parry as a standard action. The parry will occur as if you had given up your first attack in a full attack sequence. This does not change your initiative (if you want to change your initiative, delay your action as per normal, and then do the full attack).
6)- There is no penalty for attempting to parry an attack at an ally.


Edit 20110903: I just added 6. While it looks like a substantial buff, I really don't know what the fuck parry is for if it can't do those things. I'm still worried that trying to parry a huge creature will have a -8, so lemme think about that too. However, that last restriction might be there for a good reason.

I would add that Parry is supposed to be a prime ability of this class. I'll go into detail here.

The ability as it exists in 3.5 or Paizo only works when you take a full attack. I added the ability to ready it with a standard, then realized that would munge with initiative sometimes, so I changed it to being a standard action of "Prepare to parry". My reasoning here is that there are times when you are standing next to an ally and anticipate an obvious attack from someone 10 or 15 feet away. The restriction that you must have something to POKE (versus just fucking waiting) is dumb as shit, and reeks of poor design, especially because a clever asshole can take a full attack at a space in front of him and get the same effect. That is poorly designed!

The idea is that during your full attack cycle, you can take one of your attacks and "bank it". So if your normal cycle would be, +14/+9, you could take either of those and not take them. Lets assume you are serious about actually parrying something, so you opt to save the +14 as a parry. You swing with the +9. Now, the bad guy decides to ignore you and attack your adjacent friend. The bad guy rolls to hit. You roll AGAINST his hit, using your +14. If you roll higher, it is parried.

Normally, this would incur a -4 to hit. That doesn't seem fair, given that you gave up an almost certain hit against him or his friends for a very dubious d20 roll (normally as a fighter type, your +hit and their +hit will be sort of similar- impressive bad guys will have more, especially if they charge). So I have added a house rule where the parry roll gains a + to hit equal to half your duelist level, and I have removed the penalty for defending an ally. I would still recommend that when faced with a big melee monster, that you allow the first attack through, and try to parry the second- while your attack roll will normally be higher than your friend's AC, the initial attack of a brute-type monster will often be above even that. I'm curious to see how this turns out in play.

I've based these buffs on reading what some people think about the class in play. For the most part, players have used the class to get the Int to AC, or to get the Elaborate Defense (which allows an additional AC bonus), and the parry is a bit of a gimmick. I would like it to be a bit better than that, and so it has been improved. The intention of the class is clearly that the parry/riposte mechanic becomes a "melee supremacy" trick- where if someone attacks you in melee, you both can mitigate that and return fire, and since the class is giving up the normal "big damage" mechanics (two handed fighting, two weapon fighting), and the traditional defensive tricks (shield, heavy armor), I would prefer that the ability actually be class defining.

According to Piazo, I would be able to apply one point of intelligence bonus per Duelist level toward my dex to modify AC. Will this also apply?

Canny defense is still there, yes.

This came up in the game, but the big deal is that it's very hard to parry a larger creature. At first I thought this was a double count, but after some reflection, I am convinced it is not.


The first concern is model based: very large creatures are normally implemented with having a few very hard to stop attacks. It seems unrealistic that a much smaller creature would have a fighting chance of stopping these attacks with a rapier (the duelist class works with some other weapons too, but that's probably unnecessary). A set of draconic attacks, for instance, involve natural weaponry similar in size to a entire medium creature, but this bonus is NOT counted in the attack bonus of the dragon. A dragon has a difficult time striking a human, just as a human can have striking a fly, and in fact normally ends up with a massive size based penalty to its ability to, say, claw you. A parry actually models you intercepting the claw with your blade, which doesn't make much sense.

Ex: GW Red Dragon has attack of +49, calculated as +40 base, +17 Strength, -8 size bonus (colossal).
To parry, you have a -16. It is garbage to do so unless you are a god or something. But you can see how the -16 to parry is similar to the -8 the dragon takes to all his attacks, as both model ramifications of size differences.


For this reason, I'm fine with the stacking penalty on size categories.


The second concern is balance based: Larger creatures are normally present in much smaller numbers. Compare the Torgtho fight to the Vix-Thur fight for an excellent comparison. Each draconic attack is far more valuable- this is why dragons are immune to stun and other junk- the monsters just have some abilities tacked on so that a PC team can't have "you spend your round locking him down, then the rest of us will blow him up".

In fact, that is still what PCs do- they just don't cheeseball it. For instance, the fighter often bears the brunt of the attacks, the casters often counter draconic spells and SLAs, etc., but these actions are still based on the action-economy ("turn advantage"), where 1-3 PCs counter the dragon's attacks and 1-2 of them get to the dragonslaying business.

Large creatures, therefore, would be kind of trivialized if a duelist within range could meaningfully take out two of their attacks per round, given that Team Baddie has way less attacks per round (but presumably has a bunch of powerful effects tied to them).




The only downside really is that this thread points to the Duelist instead of copying it with a couple changes into the FID forum. If we had more than one more session, I would do that. It wasn't an issue until Alenka had to be run by others though.