Editing Factotum (section)

==Breaking Good (aka the Chameleon Build)==
So in [[Races of Destiny]], there's this little [[Prestige Class]] called [[Prestige Class#Chameleon|Chameleon]]. TL;DR: They were created by a master assassin who was tired of working so hard at faking being in other classes to get close to a target. UMD is great in a dungeon, but trying to use wands and staves all the time when you're trying to pretend to be a cleric or wizard or something doesn't work forever. Someone will realize you aren't casting from memory and figure you out.

Mr. Assassin hit upon the perfect solution. He didn't have to do "everything" better than other classes; he just needed to "fake it until you make it" with them. So he visited a monk developing this ability to take on those abilities slightly and change them daily. Assassin murders the monk after learning everything he could, then goes home to create a whole school devoted to this new trick.

The Chameleon isn't correctly named because you don't just appear to be another class; you ARE another class. You can only be human or doppleganger (or a changeling, ala Eberron, who is descended from both), and you need some pretty stiff skill requirements to get in (because few classes have all four of them as class skills). But once you meet those requirements, you can access what is often considered a potentially broken class.

Chameleons can cast up to 6th-level spells from any arcane and/or divine list. Yes, any of them. This allows a chameleon with time, patience, and resources to cobble together a spellbook that looks like the ravings of a lunatic wizard, using cherry-picked spells from lists like bard and trapsmith to do shit like cast ''haste'' as a 1st-level spell, or even ''cure'' spells as arcane spells. The divine spell choices are slightly less good, because you have to pick a specific list for those spells; you can't mix cleric and druid, you have to pick one. Another slight drawback is that you have to meet normal spellcasting requirements, meaning you need at least a 16 in your casting stat, but since skill monkey usually already have such stats pretty high (party face requires Cha, all your scouting stuff needs Wis and/or Int, etc.), this is usually a non-issue for you. You also can do per-day class abilities like actual rage, paladin smites, even turning.

But the best part is, you can boost a single ability score all day long. Yeah, you can do this to shore up a bad stat you need to mimic. But when your chassis if factotum, this makes Intelligence the natural choice. You can jump in early with factotum 5, go full chameleon 10, and come back to finish off to factotum 10 (to get cunning surge, more Inspiration, and better SLAs and lay on hands).

Oh, also, at chameleon 2 you get a bonus feat that you can change from day to day, and at chameleon 7 you can get two "class" types at once (which means you can pseudo-theurge by taking divine and wizard casting at once).

There are drawbacks to chameleon. You can't use any of the abilities in that class, including spellcasting, to qualify for any-fucking-thing. No metamagic feats, nothing based on use of rage or smite, nothing. You CAN qualify for feats with any non-chameleon class, and your chameleon BAB, saves, etc. do still count for those sorts of requirements. But, for example, you can't take Arcane Strike because you have arcane spells as a chameleon; you only qualify for it if you get 3rd-level spells from elsewhere. (Factotum gets there at 8th level, FYI.) If you do qualify for Arcane Strike, however, you can use your chameleon arcane spell slots to fuel it; you just have to qualify for it elsewhere.

DMM cheese is similarly difficult to get without dipping cleric or something somewhere, because chameleon turning won't count to qualify for the feat... but once you do qualify, you CAN use chameleon turn attempts to fuel it.

As some of you really conniving fuckers may be guessing by now, yes, chameleon can lead to nine kinds of abuse. Shit, the free changing bonus feat per day alone is a reason some folks dip into chameleon anyway: wizards who don't want to blow feats on item creation, or who just want access to additional metamagic feats, may actually get more mileage from chameleon than loremaster or even archmage.

But for factotums, chameleon is basically a must-have. It's Factoum On Steroids, and it makes you infinitely better at your job. No, you don't get quite as much power as a Tier 1 or 0 caster, but Christ, you can still do a lot. Use action economy spells on the arcane side and cleric buff spells like ''divine power'' on the divine side, and you can truly lay waste to enemies a few times a day without breaking a sweat. You can save your wizard and cleric/druid from even needing to cast a spell for the first half of the dungeon, so when they get to the BBEG, they can just pop off everything they've got while you're backstabbing minions and worming your way up to the boss. Plus, if you were smart and took ''mental pinnacle'', now you're also kind of a psion for a short time, and with UPD you can use all kinds of spiffy items like power stones and dorje.

Built properly, a factotum/chameleon is pretty much the perfect jack-of-all-trades character. In a party with a sublime chord bard, an [[Eldritch Theurge]], and an STP erudite, a min-maxed chameleon will basically fit in so good that you won't need much else to conquer the world.

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