Talk:Vow of Poverty (Pathfinder Archetype)

I loved the Vow of Poverty in Exalted Deeds. It was a great way to play an ascetic character, that allowed them to stay vaguely close, power-wise, with characters that actually used magic items. In my experience, and I've played a character with this Vow, not only is the Vow not overpowered, it's fairly UNDERpowered. I ended up at 18th level (when the campaign died), at about 2/3 the capability of any other party member, and that was ONLY because I was playing a monk, who already has weapons and armor taken care of. I was consistently the easiest to hit, with the lowest buffs, and that included the wizard. When the monk is a softer target for the enemy swordsmen than the wizard, there's a problem here.

The Automatic Bonus progression is a nice place to start, but the way the bonuses accrue is badly skewed. For example, rather than the natural armor bonus accruing at 3rd level and every 4th level after that, It accrues at level 8,14,16,17,18. Nothing until 8th, then a 5 level gap, then a 3 level gap, whereupon the remainder happens at each level. And all of the bonuses on it are the same way. If you are going to use it, you need to rewrite it, and smooth it out, so that they don't get 3/4 of their bonuses in the last 6 levels.

The Automatic bonus chart was made with the assumption that the characters would be starting with non-magical gear. So at first level, it gives no AC bonus to make up for the fact that the ascetic character can't wear armor. At 3rd level, your ascetic fighter, (assuming an 18 Dex) will have a mighty 14 AC, fighting with a club, against an opponent in a chain shirt and shield (AC 20), wielding a +1 battleaxe. He's gonna get massacred. That's why the Exalted Deeds VoP started out with a +4 bonus to AC.

The last piece I'll address is the severe prejudice in favor of fighters. Mages need items just as much as fighters, perhaps even more, since their hit points and BAB suck. Weighting the Vow bonuses this way will assure that only fighters will be taking it, since the benefits are significantly reduced for anyone else. Especially with the Automatic Bonuses chart's unbalanced nature. RedRabbit (talk) 23:57, 6 December 2019 (MST)