What's your opinion on the truenamer class? How would you optimize a character of that class to be playable?

Ack, Truenamers.

I want them to work. Or rather, I want the concept of True Names to be baked into the D&D system across the board, because it’s just such a cool concept (as seen in the Dresden Files, for example), and it has simple rules that make it fit in a good game setting.

But the class is just broken. Not in the way that people usually mean the word, as in that it’s overpowered or works in an unintended way, but broken in the sense that it just doesn’t work.

The fundamental mechanic for the Truenamer is simple in and of itself: you need to make a skill check with a DC of 15 + (2x target creature’s CR), or 15 + (2xCL) for a magic item.

And that right there is where the class just completely falls apart. It’s simple math, and nobody at WotC bothered to do it. (There’s a whole nother line of argument that says that targetting the DC based on the creature’s makes no in-universe sense, as CR is supposed to be a tool for the GM, while HD is supposed to be the in-universe measure of power—as used by every other ability in the game).

For those who don’t know, CR is a measurement of how powerful a monster is, and therefore what level PCs are supposed to fight them. A reasonable encounter pits a creature with a CR equal to the PC’s level against each other.

At level 1, say you’re fighting a CR 1 gnoll. The DC to Truename it is 15+2=17. Let’s be generous and say your Int bonus is +3, you have 4 ranks in Truenamer and you took Skill Focus (Truespeak) for +3. This makes your bonus +10, so you have to roll 7+ to use your ability on the Troglodyte. That’s a 70% chance of success—not too shabby. Let’s be really generous and say you have +4 Int and somehow convinced your DM that you could get a 50gp Masterwork Tool of Truespeak (Let’s say it’s a Kazoo of Truespeak). This puts your bonus up to +13 total, so you need to roll 4+, or 85%. Sounds good.

At level 2, things are looking rosy. You put 5 ranks in Knowledge Arcana, so you get another +2 for synergy, and +1 for more ranks. Your bonus is (at most) +16, now. A CR 2 Skum has a DC of 19 to beat, so your odds of success have increased to 3+.

At level 3, things are still going pretty well. You put another rank in Truespeak and bump your bonus up to +17, and you need to hit 21 to target a level-appropriate monster. That means you need to roll 4+.

By level 7, you’re probably starting to notice a concerning trend. You keep putting ranks into Truespeak, but you’re starting to fail more and more. Your bonus is up to +20 now, but the DC you need to roll to hit the monsters that are being thrown at you is 15+(2*7)=29, and you need to roll 9+. This gives you a success rate of only 60%, a far cry from the 85% you were getting at level 1.

And it only gets worse from there. If you put a point in Intelligence every level, you can get another +1 to your skill check every eight levels. If you throw all of your money at Headbands of Intelligence, you can keep up for longer, but the cost increase of those are nonlinear. You can scrounge about for feats to give you minor bonuses to skill checks, but the core mechanic—that the DC you need to beat goes up by 2 every level and your bonus goes up by 1 most levels (more with great expense) means you’re pretty much screwed. Note that all of this is before the Saving Throw that your enemies generally get from your attacks. Casters usually either have to make a check (like a touch attack) or their targets make a save, but if you’re a Truenamer you have the unique “privilege” of both. Huzzah?

Many of your abilities don’t allow saves, though, and you should focus on those. For some reason, your save DC is based on Charisma, instead of Intelligence, like every other Truenamer ability (seriously, wth? Charisma?), so your DC will likely be crap, anyway.

On top of that, for inexplicable reasons, every time you use the same Utterance (a Truenamer spell) again in a day, the DC increases by a cumulative +2.

In short, this class sucks. But, if you had to play it, there are things you can do to make it work. Complete Champion introduces an organization called the Paragnostic Assembly, and if you beg and plead your DM to introduce it in your world, you can join it and do some trickery and get +10 to any skill. To do that, you basically have to dedicate the entire party to doing quests for the assembly to get affiliation points, until higher level when you can do some of the solo ones (like having 10 ranks in any knowledge skill). The other thing is you can get Knowledge Devotion, an amazing skill that can get you +5 to pretty much every attack and damage roll, if you can make some pretty easy knowledge checks. And you can’t do anything else, so you may as well optimize for knowledge (Truenamers get some class bonuses that play to that as well).Other than that… okay. You have one ability that you can use that nobody else can: Quicken Utterance. It increases the DC of your Truename check by an absurd +20, but let’s you cast as a Swift Action. The real kicker? That means it’s just as hard to cast a quickened utterance of your highest level as it is of your lowest level. So if you can hit the skill DC, you can Quicken everything. You can quicken every spell as soon as you learn it. Wizards can only quicken spells they could cast eight levels ago.

The real beauty is that, as Quicken Utterance uses your Swift action, and you don’t have a spell/day limit, there is no cost in trying. Every single round, even if you only succeed on a 20, cast a quickened utterance in addition to your regular one. It probably won’t work, but if it does? Holy carp, you just got two turns in one.

You can get the Amulet of Silver Tongue for a +5 or +10 bonus to Truespeak, and you can talk to your DM about a custom magic item giving a competence bonus using the guidelines in the DMG. From there, you’re on your own. Best of luck!