The Gaming Den

Several things came to me when I saw the Spellthief:

1. As long as you have sneak attack dice to trade, there is no reason why you can't have several of your stealing effects go off at once. So, for example, if you are a 10th level Spellthief and have a 3d6 sneak attack you can trade one each for a stolen spell, a stolen spell-like ability, and a stolen spell effect.

2. Its implied that you can only steal one of each thing per sneak attack. However, given that a spellthief should have at least three sneak attacks a round, he's can steal quite a lot of crap per round.

3. Steal Spell-like Ability does not use up uses of the creature's spell-like ability, even if that ability is a once per day ability.

So here are a few techniques you might like:

Smackin' the Hoe: While you can take spells and spell-likes from a willing target as a standard action, there is no reason to not take them as full attack/sneak attacks. That way, you can grab a bunch of stuff, effectively doing your Pimp-style Power-up animation by slapping around your spellcaster cohort at the beginning of each combat. Since you'll be casting immediate action spells every round, you'll need extra castings from your cohort to have enough for one every round of combat.

In a long combat, you can let your cohort cast a few spells on themselves, then run by, smack them around to pick up all the buffs and more spells, then run back into combat.

Give your cohort the Masoshism feat from BOVD. Its not useful but it is funny.

Pimp attacks: Spellrazor is a feat that lets you combine a free gnome razor attack with a cast touch attack spell. Since BladeWeave gives that, you are getting a free attack once per round if you like. We all know that Pimps like razors....

Dragon Heritage/Draconic Claw from Complete Arcane gives you a free claw attack with a cast spell. Immediate action spells are perfect for that use.

Angel Baby: Get a Half celestial with a lot of HD as a cohort or something else. Since its once per day Spell-likes are not used up by your Steal Ability power, you can steal its SPs over and over and use them. You've now become the new party healer.

Lucky Charms: PAO your enemies into lucky charms, then keep them on a bracelet. Steal spell-likes off them as needed.

Failing that, just Baleful Polymorph/Stone to Flesh them into Fine-sized Animals and keep them in a Bag of Holding or Bind them into a tiny and portable form.

Great uses for an otherwise worthless class!

Oh, and Masochism isn't a feat. Its just the way you are

Infinite Healing with the Spellthief:

1. When you steal a spell-like, you use it just like the creature you stole it from, except you only get one use.

2. Lay on Hands can be used an unlimited number of times.

3. Lay on Hands can be used to heal up to maximum hit points on any particular use.

Heh. So you steal the Lay on Hands ability, the Paladin's (infinite) maximum number of uses per day decreases by one, but his hit point resevoire doesn't go down. Then you use the ability, which then heals up to the Paladin's Level times his Charisma Bonus. Then you steal it again and do it again. Every other round you can heal the Paladin's entire daily alotment of hit points.

Good times.

---

All in all, however, it's a shit class. While there are some admirably broken things that you can with it - it generally can't do any of them until after some other character in the party already has some of that shit wired.

-Username17

Lay On Hands is a Supernatural ability in 3.5. Calling his special mount is Sp, however, which is funny but not useful.

Damn. You're right. Of course, the mount calling ability can be very useful. A Paladin can take as his mount a Bison. Then the Spellthief can multi-summon it. Then, you take a huge pile of summoned bison and trample people. There's no max to the stamede damage. Moooooo!

This of course goes to the heart of th biggest problem with the Spellthief - he's a walking argument. While his benefits are normally pretty sad, his powers are also pretty incomprehensible. His only good trick is moving magic things around - and usually there's no particular reason why you'd want to do that rather than simply being a caster and having magical effects to begin with. And worst of all - it's all based on spell levels, and most of the powers that are relevent don't have a listed spell level.

Almost nowehere in the 3.5 rules are spell-like abilities given an effective spell level. And the spell thief triggers off of those spell levels - that aren't listed. Good luck adjudicating this piece of slag.

-Username17

I took a brief glance at Spellthief yesterday (still don't have the book).

One big problem to me, is that you need to know the *specific* suite of spells that the potential target has on tap. The "Steal Spells" class ability states you specifically need to state the spell you are chosing. Which, you know ... sucks. It seems so much easier to steal spells off your friends/cohorts, or charmed foes. I need to look more in the book though, there may be some game mechanics that help a Spellthief "read" the content of a spellcasters current list of availablespells.

...


The other "stealing" class abilities can at least net you random acquisitions, in the event you are clueless as to what (Sp) or ongoing spell is resident on your target-to-be.