Meme Builds: El Kabong

"KABONG!"

WHAM!

"OLE!"


This is one I've wanted to put together for a while, and it meshes with a certain guitar wielding maniac horse so well that I had to marry the two. I wanted so fucking bad to do this with Vigilante, but it doesn't work. Hidden Strike doesn't count as sneak attack for purposes of feats, and the feats in this build are key to its success. Ah well, it's not as though Unchained Rogue is a bad class.

El Kabong
Class: Unchained Rogue

Feats
1 Bludgeoner
3 Sap Adept
5 Sap Master
7 Catch Off Guard
9
11 Quiet Death
13 Improvised Weapon Mastery
15
17
19

Rogue Talents
2 Underhanded
4 Deft Palm
6
8
10 Knock-Out Blow
12
14
16
18
20


The basic idea of this build is that, like El Kabong himself, you come out of fucking nowhere and knock someone to shit with your guitar. Thanks to Catch Off Guard, it doesn't even matter if they see you coming: they're going to be flat footed. Sap Adept improves your damage in open combat, but Sap Master(along with Quiet Death) is your real boost, letting you ambush people and ruin their day. Underhanded works well along with Deft Palm, letting you maximize your already enormous "ambush" damage a few times a day. Yelling KABONG is optional, but recommended.

A small word of caution is that Deft Palm is very poorly worded. As it is, it just lets you conceal weapons you're holding. Yes that includes things like guitars or greatswords. Yes, it means while attacking. Your GM might not cotton to that idea and put limits on the ability. You'll still need it to use with Underhanded, though, since that requires a concealed weapon. Only drop it if your GM's ruling makes it too situational to activate reliably with Underhanded.

Pros. You'll still do okay in regular combat, but you're the master of sneaking ahead and making an upcoming encounter easier by KO'ing a few enemies, or avoiding an encounter entirely. This sort of thing will always require your party to cater toward it, or at least be patient. There is nobody better at this kind of facilitation, though. Catching someone off guard who's close to your CR can easily put them down, and even if your party doesn't wait, you can rush forward to create a surprise round while they're charging frothy-mouthed toward the enemy.

Cons. You have five feats wrapped up in making you better at ambushing people, meaning you're almost(but not quite) on the level of a "non-combat" rogue when it comes to open fights. You won't do badly by any means, but you're not going to rival the fighter's damage like the combat rogues do. You're locked into using bludgeoning weapons and nonlethal damage if you want to use any of your feats. There are also things immune to nonlethal damage, like undead. Finally, with your party dealing mixed damage, you may end up forgetting to kill an enemy(and creating problems later) or having conflicts over whether it's okay to coup de grace an essentially helpless opponent.

Finishing the Character. You don't have a whole lot of room until level 12 or so. Anything works because your ambush capabilities are done: This isn't just a "core" of a build, there's also just...nothing else that helps. the Enforcer feat would give a pretty decent combat debuff. You can take some combat feats or rogue talents to shore up your open combat capabilities, and rogue talents like Opportunist or Crippling Strike work pretty well there. You could also completely throw in with being the noncombat guy and accept that your role is outside of it. Anything works.


For Full Memery. If your GM argues that a guitar isn't a light weapon, or if you just want to use something a little better, there's a spell called Refine Improvised Weapon. You can buy a "permanent" version for cheap to improve your guitar into counting as a sap. Strongly consider taking a few levels of Vigilante for the secret identity. If you want to fight exclusively with your guitar, you can buy Gloves of Improvised Might to avoid having to enchant it as a weapon.

If You Hate Fun. You can keep the improvised weapon stuff around to sneak into buildings while being completely unarmed, or you can just remove it from the build and conceal a sap somewhere on your body. You could also take Improved Unarmed Combat, which would open up taking Knockout Artist for extra pain. Other than that, nothing about how you play this character is going to change. You're just not swinging majestically past your target yelling KABONG and hitting them with a guitar.