 Do you want to see something scary? Whoa! Alright, okay. You handled that pretty well. But what about? Wow. Alright. That's fine. That's fine. You think I'm not that good at that? I'll tell you what. How about this? All right, Matt. Just post that picture of old Bilbo seeing the ring again for the first time. Yeah, yeah. Just like right now. Yeah. That's what I thought. Huh? Can't handle it. Well, tell you what. Do you want to be scary like me? Well, then you're in luck because in Pathfinder, there's rules for that. So this spooky season, we thought it'd be fun to give you a couple of builds that would work well for an evil campaign. I mean, hey, maybe you can make them work for a less nefarious stuff too, but for now, evil. The first build up today is going to be Intimidate Focused Rogue, built to leave your opponents shaking. Very literally. But first, let's have a nice sit-down conversation about what it means to be in or run an evil campaign. And to do that, let's look at what it means to be evil. What over 3,000 years of philosophy tell us is that there are a lot of people who have a lot of different opinions on that. What over 3,000 different forum posts regarding evil and tabletop gaming tell us is that no matter what opinion you have, it's trash, garbage, awful, and you should feel bad about it. That is to say, most forums are dark, unhappy places. But no. Obviously how each table defines evil is going to be different, and the very first thing you should do as a group when deciding to do an evil campaign is hash out what that means to you. That said, here's my take on what it means vis-a-vis TTRPGs. A good alignment means that you'll go out of your way to consider the welfare of others, even to your own detriment. A neutral alignment means that you have a very normal concern for the welfare of others. And an evil alignment means that you couldn't care less about anybody's welfare but your own. So, how do we square that with a game where cooperation is paramount? Haha, simple. We just screw over our table mates and leave them to know. Bad. Wrong. That's the easy way to play evil. But we are better than that. Here's the trick. Purpose. Evil will keep things around if they're useful to them. If they serve a purpose. So make sure the rest of the party is one of those things. As long as you're united in purpose against something, like say a powerful necromancer that has reanimated you all back to life to dispatch on various tasks as he rises to power but that you are all scheming to eventually overthrow and take the empire up for your very own, you can work with others for the promotion of your own welfare. And there's dozens of excuses and ways to make working together with purpose work. Just know that since this is a cooperative game, it's your responsibility to play your character in a way that benefits the enjoyment of everyone. Now does your table like backstabbing, doing each other dirty and generally causing chaos and misery for everyone? I mean, by all means, go for it. Might I suggest that you all open up a tabletop gaming forum? But realistically, that's not what most groups are interested in. Alright, alright, enough moralizing. I hear you. On to the build. To successfully build an Intimidate Rogue, the first thing we need to do is check out how fear effects work in Pathfinder. Cause wouldn't you know it, there are some fiddly bits to work out. Now, there are a bunch of different fear effects, like free other all over the place. But we're specifically going to be talking about the conditions shaken, frightened and panicked. First question, are those related to fear effects somehow? And the answer is yes. They are the result of being afeared in certain circumstances, such as surprise, surprise, the demoralized feature of the Intimidate skill. Which also means that things that protect from fear, like an aura of courage, will protect from this build as well. But hey, that's where the benefit of leaving your party members alive and unbackstabbing comes in, right? Moreover, they are cumulative fear effects. If you get shaken, and you get shaken again, you get frightened. And if you get shaken or frightened from there, you get panicked. Well, most of the time. But we'll get to that later. So shaken, what's that do? A creature that is shaken gets minus two for attacks, saves, skill checks, and just flat ability checks. This is what I always refer to as everything important. Kind of like ordering something with the works. Is it actually everything? No, but pretty much everything you're going to care about regularly. Further up the chain, what about frightened? It's a more severe version of shaken, and it adds in that the affected creature must flee. Even using special abilities or spells to do so if necessary. And what about panicked? The same thing, but this same poor, poor creature also drops whatever they're holding. Rude, right? Good. That's what we want, because we're evil. Okay, so how are we planning on inflicting these conditions? For sure, the easiest way to get a creature shaken is with the Intimidate skill. Yep, the same one that lets you stick up unsuspecting grade school age street urchins and halflings on the street. What's the difference? Am I right? In combat, we can use a standard action to demoralize an opponent by rolling Intimidate versus a DC of 10, plus the target's hit dice, plus the target's wisdom modifier. Well, I mean, easy enough, right? We just do that a couple of times. We've got our enemies fling for the hills, right? Well, no. See what I said most of the time before? Turns out that demoralize has an annoying nuh-uh-uh clause when it comes to stacking shaken effects. Well, whatever are we to do? Enter the Rogue, and specifically the Unchained Rogue because why play any other variant now that this exists? Plus, we are going to use a little bit of that Unchaining in just a minute to start with stats. We're going to do something a little strange here and spec primarily into strength instead of dexterity. After that, we'll favor Charisma as a close secondary. Why? You may ask? Well, we'll see. Oh, yes. You'll all see. Because, you know, that's the purpose of an informational vid. Anyway, so stats sorted, what next? There are two crucial parts of this build, and the first important thing is that we're going to be taking the Thug archetype. Now, you may be thinking that as a Thug, we've got to speak in a thick Brooklyn accent, but you know what? That is a harmful stereotype. And all my henchmen speak in a boisterous Fargo accent, don't you know? Now the only thing that's offensive is my skill at accents. Whoop-dah! So anyway, the purpose here is simple. As a Thug, whenever we demoralize, we can add rounds of shaken together. And anytime we can add a fifth round, we can add one round of frightened instead. Hey, away around that problem we had before! Thanks, rules! Okay, now the second crucial bit of the build, the enforcer feat. This feat says that anytime we deal non-lethal damage with a melee weapon, we get a demoralized check as a free action. Hey, already pretty cool, right? Ah, but then, if that demoralized check is successful, it shakens the target for a number of rounds equal to damage. So as long as you can deal five damage, boom! Instant frightened. Pretty neat, right? I mean, uh, evil. Pretty evil, right? So yes, this largely locks us into non-lethal damage. But since we're just trying to scare people into fleeing anyway, that's not the biggest deal. If you end up not going to strength for the benefits I'm going to mention in a second, you can stick to decks, taking advantage of the unchained rogue's finesse training and go to weapon fighting with two saps to great effect here. The other prime use of the unchained rogue is using rogue's edge for the Intimidate Skill Unlock, which adds yet another way to turn demoralized into frightened. Now, just to finish out, there are a few more feats that can make us both build and to be smashed by. First, intimidating prowess is that strength-focused payoff I've been mentioning. It doesn't replace your charisma modifier with strength for the purposes of intimidating. It adds both of them together. That is very cool, and in my opinion, why it's better than going for agile maneuvers in a dex build. Next up, the feat, Cornigan Smash! This lets you use a free action to intimidate when you hit with a power attack. Now, does that stack with the free demoralized from the enforcer feat? Hmm, the number of free actions you're allowed to use in a given moment is up to GM discretion, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of them tend towards, yeah, not so much. But at least it gives you a way to get in that free check if you need to use legal damage. And lastly, dazzling display. So this one straight up does not interact with enforcer, because it doesn't deal damage at all, but it does work with the thug bonuses and everything else you've got going for intimidate. So it's still gonna come in handy. Hey, even just one round of AoE shaken ain't nothing to... Well, you know. And there you have it. A spooky, scary skel- skel- skel- skeleroog? A spooky, scary skeleroog. If that doesn't knock your block off, come back next time and we'll be creating a lab-perfect slasher villain in 5e. Bye-bye. No? Still no? Well, I can't say I didn't try. Hey, do you like dice? I bet you like dice because you're watching a D&D channel. You know who has the best dice? It's dice dungeons. They've got acrylic dice. They've got metal dice. They've got super cool gemstone dice. They've also got battle mats that are washable. They've got super cool little metal coins you can flip and then go, oh no, it's a tail. You all die and you have to make new characters. They aren't as annoying. Oh, that's terrible. And that's all thanks to the sponsor of this video, Dice Dungeons. And you can use checkout code Dormonster for 10% off your order. How about that?