Combining Dread Necromancer and ranger for Oriental Adventures

[gwyllgi]

my DM who shall be known as awesomee the storierer for ending a campaign with our main bigbad, a religious zealot hugging grazz't to death is returning to a non gestalt game centered in a augmented legend of the 5 rings style campaign.

i couldn't decide which to play as and both have similarities, both also do terrible at what they are ment to do from wizard's stand point.

we already have another player with a created class called Taiyo Shugen-sha a fire and lighting warmage with powers similar to a archivist, i however am like necromancy, although sprouting pontiac firebird wings and raining meteor swarm on people is great too.

i was wondering if i could get some ideas on how to approach the leveling.

The idea is that Dread Necromancers in OA were called Reibai viewed in a similar way as anubis was to egyptians, elder ones (lv 16-20) looked at as celstial psychopomps. when the shadowlands oni invaded the area and the Reibai helped the human armies fight them off they began to become scrutinized for not helping maintain the boarder of the human kingdoms, later a few were caught having resurrected the corpses of powerful and respected Samurai, Sohei, Barbarians, and Ashigaru (fighters) as personal bodyguards for expeditions into the shadowlands.

So they became outsiders and looked down upon. they were accepted in Marsharpa, Ti'chen Bai (a area based on yuan china run by scaly folk of all sorts), Dhurga Jal (goblinoid kingdoms run by sharakim archivists known as Jahgul), and Zan (run by rakasha, peopled by beastfolk), so pretty much anywhere not run by humans or spiritfolk (nezumi and others still respect the Reibai).

This lead to Reibai being known as Reibai Nekomata and being attacked when they were on their own and when at low levels, their organization began instituting physical training and developed a way to create quasi undead known as Karada o arui (almost necropolitans) who are undead at night but are alive with the tomb tainted soul feat during the day.

the idea has become that they gain
ranger combat styles
variant wildshape

but lose
lich transformation (but not lich body)
craft wondrous item
scabrous touch
negative energy resistance

they also swap out their one martial weapon proficiency for a exotic weapon one.

i however would like to know what others think about this idea!

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

You have used many words that I don't understand. Perhaps if I heard your DM's awesome stories, it'd fill in some gaps for me, but until then:

Are you trying to:
1. Make a Gestalt Ranger//Dread Necromancer, or...
2. Pick and choose class features from each class to encorporate into a single class?

Without all the back story details, could you state, in purely game mechanic terms, what it is you're trying to do? For those of us who are more simple minded.

If you're asking #2, it's an art to maintaining balance to swapping class features. Since the Variant Wildshape is already a class ability adjustment to the Ranger, it's tough to balance. Unearthed Arcana (I think) has the guidelines for maintaining this balance.

Hopefully others here would be more knowledgeable on how to swap Class features. Ultimately, it's a DM call.

 

[gwyllgi]

the point without the story is that i need help balancing out creating a dread necro variant that looses a bunch of ok features for 2 okay ones.

also needing help making them fit into oriental adventures style campaign I.E. more flavor and background.

 

[gwyllgi]

okay, update,

In DM or GM's words

"Even though it kinda makes sense that Dread Necromancers would be persecuted and develop things like wildshaping and the combat styles it would over power them and i also plan on wildshaping being rare in rokugan.

The combat styles makes them seem like monks so they'ed have to played like a amoral monk as opposed to the usual death obsessed mage. I know that incorporating monks would take alot more work, and possibly be gamebreaking, as would the increasingly stronger combat styles, so i'll allow you to replace combat styles with a feat list similar to fighters."

does anyone think this is nerfing them?

 

[gwyllgi]

umm hello?