Pathfinder 1E Vow of Poverty questions

[glass]

One of my players is asking about Vow of Poverty.

The character is a gestalt druid:barbarian, who has to this point role-played a lack of interest in pointless shiny metal et al, so it would be in character for him from that point of view, but the whole exalted thing that comes with it doesn't quite fit. The character is good, but the whole being the pinacle of goodness seems too abstract.

So, the questions are:

What does everybody thing about using VoP in a gestalt game? Any balance issues I should be carefull about?

Does anybody know of any alternatives that achieve a similar thing? Possibly something slightly less far-reaching? (ie, less powerful but less restrictive)

Any other thought? I really want to find a way forward, that doesn't involve just saying 'no', because the character is interesting (and also because the player allowed me a VoP character when he was DMing ).


glass.

 

[Korak]

What kind of flavor are you aiming for? What is your player's alignment?

 

[glass]

What kind of flavor are you aiming for? What is your player's alignment?

Raised by wolves, doesn't really understand the civilised world. I guess as time goes on he'll come to understand it more, and trust it less!

I think the character is NG, off the top of my head.


glass.

 

[Pyrex]

It probably wouldn't be too unbalanced to remove the requirement for exalted behavior and remove all the bonus exalted feats as a balancing factor.

Level by level the mechanical bonuses of VoP are higher than you could achieve by buying items allowable at wealth-by-level, but not hugely so, and they're definately not optimized for most characters; but the particular combo is probably a bit too strong for a gestalt druid/bbn combat monkey; so you may need to reduce/reorder a few of the abilities.

 

[glass]

It probably wouldn't be too unbalanced to remove the requirement for exalted behavior and remove all the bonus exalted feats as a balancing factor.

That was a possibility I was considering. Anyone else have any thoughts on it?


glass.

 

[Korak]

Mechanically, removing the exalted feats and the requirement for exalted behavior is probably roughly balanced. You might even relax the poverty restriction to say, nothing magical, and nothing worth more than 50gp, no more than 500gp in total value of possessions, and no ownership of anything the character can't carry at all times. Call if the Vow of the Nomad.

I was just having trouble coming up with a good flavor reason for the feat. In VoP, good deities are blessing a character for his vow. What is the explanation for those benefits otherwise?

 

[Jack Simth]

Oh, perhaps a good old diety of a tribe somewhere is on it's way out due to a lack of interest now that these new-fangled gizmos are doing things for the tribe that he used to cover... and he wants to show them what he can do even without all those new-fangled things.

Or something.

 

[glass]

Thanks everyone. I'll talk to the player and see what he thinks.


glass.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think you could even just remove the goodness-based roleplay, I don't think it has any balance effect.

If the class requires you to "burn" your share of treasure by donating it to the poor, and that cannot be done smoothly enough in your game, you can simply make an agreement with the players that you'd be "burning" his share beforehand, meaning that you'll reduce the total treasure to take into account that it will go to one PC less than before.