Lucky Scoundrel (Starfinder Archetype)
Welcome to a brand new year here at Necromancers of the Northwest! As we stride boldly into the future with our new article line-up, we decided to start the year off with our first article providing new content for the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Today’s Best in Class provides a new archetype for Starfinder characters, the lucky scoundrel.
Lucky Scoundrel (Starfinder Archetype)
Good or bad, luck is a force that touches everyone’s lives, but most people don’t spend too much time thinking about it. For a small handful, though, luck is an almost tangible force that, for some reason or another, comes through for them over and over again, almost as though the universe itself were somehow complicit in their misadventures. These blessed few come to rely on luck over skill, much to the constant frustrations of their foes, who always find victory snatched away from them at the last second by a series of unlikely circumstances. Being a lucky scoundrel isn’t usually the best way to make friends, but when luck is on your side, how many other friends do you need, really?
Alternate Class Features
The lucky scoundrel grants alternate class features at 2nd, 4th, 6th, 9th, 12th, and 18th levels.
Luck Pool (Su) 2nd Level
You gain a luck pool, which you can draw upon in order to influence the hand of fate. You begin each day with a number of points in your luck pool equal to 1/2 your class level + your Charisma modifier. Whenever you fail an ability check or skill check, you can expend 1 point from your luck pool in order to reroll that ability check or skill check.
Additionally, when you gain this class feature, choose a number between 1 and 20 to be your lucky number, and a different number between 1 and 20 to be your unlucky number. Whenever you roll a d20 during combat with a serious foe or in another situation with consequences for failure, if the natural result of the roll (the result without adding any modifiers) is your lucky number, you immediately gain 1 luck point. Whenever you roll a d20 and the natural result of the roll is your unlucky number, you lose 1 luck point from your luck pool. If this would result in your luck pool having a negative number of points, you instead suffer a –4 penalty on your next ability check, attack roll, saving throw, or skill check.
Lucky Swing (Su) 4th Level
Beginning at 2nd level, you can apply your incredible luck to your attacks. You can expend 2 luck points to reroll an attack roll. Alternatively, you can expend 2 luck points after making a successful attack roll. If you do, the attack deals maximum damage. You cannot use this ability to cause an attack to inflict maximum damage if you used this ability to reroll the attack roll for that attack.
Glancing Blow (Su) 6th Level
By 6th level, your luck can protect you from physical harm, causing potentially devastating attacks to miss you by millimeters, or ensuring that they miraculously miss all your vital organs. Whenever you are successfully hit by an attack roll, but before damage is dealt, you can expend 2 luck points in order to achieve one of the following two effects. You can either force the target to reroll the attack, using whichever result is worse, or you can cause the attack to deal the minimum possible damage.
Certain Luck (Su) 9th Level
At 9th level, your luck is so extreme that you can count on nearly certain success when luck is with you. Whenever you make an ability check or skill check, before making the roll, you can declare that you are using this ability and expend 3 points from your luck pool in order to treat the roll as though it were a natural 20. This does not count as rolling a 20 on the die if your lucky number or unlucky number is 20.
Additionally, whenever you would roll initiative, you can draw upon luck in order to avoid finding yourself caught by surprise. After initiative order is rolled, but before any actions are taken, you can use this ability to move to the top of initiative order. This costs a number of points from your luck pool equal to the number of creatures that were ahead of you in initiative order (if a group of creatures all uses the same initiative roll, treat them as a single creature for this purpose). You can only use this ability to move to the top of initiative order; you cannot spend a lesser number of points from your luck pool in order to only move ahead of some creatures. Whenever you use this ability, you are always considered aware of combat for the purposes of a surprise round, if there is one.
Lucky to be Alive (Su) 12th Level
At 12th level, you can rely on your luck to save you even from deadly circumstances. Whenever you would die, if you have at least 4 points left in your luck pool, you can expend all remaining points from your luck pool to instead be left alive with 0 hit points. This applies regardless of whether the effect that would kill you is a death effect, or if the death would be a result of damage. This ability applies only to a single attack, ability, or effect, and does not offer any protection from subsequent attacks or abilities, or from future ongoing damage from the same effect.
Lucky Break (Su) 18th Level
At 18th level, you have a tendency to make things simply go the way you want. By expending 5 points from your luck pool, you can attempt to influence fate in subtle ways. This might include causing a particular NPC to take an innocuous-seeming action that they wouldn’t otherwise make, or for a particular type of item to be available and on hand when it generally wouldn’t be, or so on. Generally speaking, this ability can only cause things to occur which are plausible, even if they are unlikely. The GM is the final arbiter of what is and is not an acceptable use of this ability, and can deny any such attempts (in which case the luck points remain unspent). Once per day, you can use this ability to instead replicate the effects of a wish spell.