Level 12 Analysis
Your AC is very low. At level 12, AC 18 is essentially a death sentence. I'm going to assume you have a source of Mage Armour from a party spellcaster, giving you an AC of 22, and a further Ring of Protection or Amulet of Natural Armour or Barkskin or something to up that by +2 to 24. 24 AC is still incredibly low.
The lowest attack bonus I found with a quick peruse of CR 12 monsters is +18, the secondary Bite of an Athach. That hits you on a roll of 6. The most common number I found was +23, which would hit you on a 2. I saw lots of +26, +28 and even a +33. Those all hit you on everything but a natural 1.
In other words, your AC is too low if anything targets you for you to survive. The DM will have to pull punches not to kill you.
Valiant Stand improves this. By not by enough. Enemies are still going to autohit you. Best case is +4 stat boosters on dex and wis, mage armour, nat armour/deflection bonuses, and valiant stand - 18 base, +4 from enhancement to stats, +4 armour, +2-+3 nat armour/def, +3 valiant stand = 32. That's a hit on a 9 from the lowest common attack bonus I found on CR 12 monsters.
Your Attack Bonus Is Pretty Decent, For a Monk. You have +16 to hit without Smite. With Amulet of Mighty Fists +2, that's +18ish to hit. With Belt of giant Strength +4 or Bull's Strength, that's +20 to hit. Everything that has AC that is supposed to be a defense has 26+, which is good - you hit most of the time. Power Attack and Flurry are counterbalanced by Valiant Stand, which you should be endeavouring to have always active by use of Stealth, which you don't have maxed out, uh, why? Popping up out of nowhere for a flatfooted smiting power attacking flurry should be your opening round action in every combat. Even your iteratives have a decent chance to hit, with this hit bonus. Only decent, though.
Your Damage Isn't Great. 1d10+1d4+5 (where is that errant +1 damage coming from?) averages out to 13 points of damage per strike. With Power Attack, that's 19 damage. With Smite, against evil or chaotic outsiders/dragons, you get /+18/, so 34 damage per strike, which is actually level 12-worthy. Too bad you get 3 total attacks per day with that damage. Sweeping Smite carries the Cha-to-hit bonus, but not the damage from the 'first hit'. It's kind of like a really terrible whirlwind attack that way.
Most of the time you'll be attacking for 19, on average. Some stuff is immune to bleed, or has DR/cold iron and good, etc, so it might be less. If you move, you only have one attack, so your first round barring stealth will nearly always be one attack at best. Rounds after that, you can flurry for four attacks, each which might hit for 19 damage.
So a max damage on an ideal round of around 34+19+19+19 damage, or 91 damage in 4 hits. That's not terrible. It relies on getting a full round action, though. It also relies on hitting with iteratives, DR of the kind you can get past, no miss chances etc. Most monsters at this level have at least 150hp, so you won't be winning in hp races. But you will be able to contribute a bit at least to the usual team of four on one beatdowns.
Your HP gets eaten in a round. With your AC, most CR9+ melee monsters are going to kill you to dead in a round. 11 Constitution on a melee combatant isn't a great idea, but then, you're a monk and need wis and and dex and str and also cha for being a paladin, so eh.
Your Saves are decent. They could be better, but they could also be worse. Most DCs seem to hover around DC 23 at this level, going up as high as 28 but also as low as 21. With your +11/+11/+13, you should have a 50% shot at most saving throws, and although fear and poison aren't exactly the most common life-threatening things to save against, it's still nice.
Power Level: Fighter.
This character can be relied upon to be roughly as good as an unoptimized fighter. The DM will have to pull some punches, and tough encounters (CR +2 or greater) will have a good chance of one-shotting this character by accident. In a party with Rogue or better power levels, this character will feel notably weaker than the rest of the group.
Note
Evaluating something without gear is hard, because at the lower end of the scale, gear can have more effect on your ultimate spread of numbers than the classes chosen. If your gear is random stuff, you will be weaker. If you plug it all into boosters for your FOUR necessary stats (dex, wis, str, cha), rings of deflection and other stuff that helps boost your melee stats to make you 'great' at that rather than 'mediocre to good', which includes buffs from friendly spellcasters, you will be stronger.
Note
This build is stronger at lower levels, where a handy Mage Armour plus your defensive stats can put you out of reach of opponents attack bonuses, and things are easier to hit and easier to kill. Level 12 is definitely where things are starting to go 'downhill', and they will likely get worse as enemy AC and AB increase and every enemy has flying or spells and abilities.
Note
The build has no movement capability other than skills-based climbing, swimming, jumping. I'm assuming again allied spellcasters will be patching that hole with buffs, especially since with the other gear i've assumed in your build you don't have the money to buy gear to get flight or teleport or whatnot.
Suggestions
Your main problem is that you're playing a monk. Without serious optimization, monks are very weak. You've done a bit of optimization here, and pushed it up to unoptimized fighter level, but fighter is still not great if you're planning to be in a party with casters. Or if you're fighting caster-style enemies like many demons are.
Most of the tricks I know to make melee characters more competitive are in 3.5e. I'm assuming there's no backward compatibility in your group. So that's all out the window.
Paladin isn't giving you much other than flavour, either. You've got a decent Flurry and Attack Bonus, but you're way too fragile to make good use of it, unless your enemies come in the 'always attack the guy using the full defense action with the tower shield' variety.
In this case, i'd recommend Summoner. Synthesist Summoner. It slices, it dices, it buffs, it has level appropriate abilities, natural attacks, the works. It is, in fact, so good that you could mix it with a Paladin dip and still be relatively awesome.
Evangelist lets you keep advancing as a Summoner while also adding a divine feel to the class. It's also the only prestige I can find that advances your eidolon aka living armour, so.
Other. than. that... there's a good rogue-based fear build, but I don't know how relevant that is to your concept.
I feel like there's some way, between Fighter archetypes and the Hungry Ghost Monk monk archetype, to create kama-wielder who reaps ki from his opponents and uses it to chain-stun them with a huge Wisdom and Dex, just whittles them away with flurries of weak, ki-reaping attacks and then spends the ki on stuns. There's too many damned archetypes though.
Even if you're taking summoner, it's kind of worth dipping monk as well. You have to be unarmoured to use your synthesism, so you could benefit from a high wisdom score to your AC. Not worth going Hungry Ghost, because the ki-drain only comes at level 5. Just a one, or at max 2-level dip. Probably after you have 1 or 3 levels of synth summoner.
Yeah I cannot find anything that is about punching people that isn't just a Fighter or Barbarian with a 2-hander sword that is any good. There's some rogue stuff that is nice, there's an alchemist archetype that gets sneak attack and would make a murderously effective hand to hand combatant with the mutagen and the buffs. But nothing based around jumping on things and punching people except synth summoner. Yeah. That's my advice.
Synthesist Summoner 20.
Optional; Monk 1.
Optional; Evangelist.
There is only one thing scarier than a farmer with her flock of chickens... a sainted farmer, worshiper of the colonel with a flock of undead, flesh-eating chickens, here to sell you delicious chicken flesh.
This idead inspired from this thread where:
... you are going to be playing a very different character than the cleric of a death god who has to build her (usually individually less powerful) undead from available corpses but gets a multitude of them
The thing about chicken-infested is... you'll never run out of corpses.
The theory:
The build: Commoner 1/Cleric 6 (suggestions courtesy of Cirdec)
The cleric, with access to the spell Blood Money via Dreamed Secrets can cast Animate Dead for so long as her Lesser Restoration spells hold out.
Given that you could be a normal cleric animating the dinosaurs you're fighting, the DM should be OK with these 3rd party feats, so long as you agree not to reanimate the corpses of the enemies: the blessings of The Colonel are to be reserved for the blessed beasts only.
Purchase a staff of command undead for 6,400 gp, basic enchanted armor and weapons, and keep the rest in onyx. When you get low, swap your burning skeleton swarms out for bloody skeleton swarms, which allows them to respawn. (They're less effective, but present a good way of conserving cash.)
Rulings needed:
- How do multiple fiery auras interact? How much damage should a swarm's firey aura do?
- How many HD does a burning chicken skeleton have? Does the swarm's HD "feel right?"
- Is it OK to take saint, in exchange for restricting its animate dead to only chicken you produce (providing you worship the undead chicken god named Colonel Five Spices?)
- What attacks and capabilities the "swarm of undead burning chicken" have.
A hypothetical burning undead chicken swarm:
A raven to raven swarm upgrades from one raven to 1000 ravens and uses the swarm rules for attacks. For undead chickens, since they're kinda-sorta flying, I would assert that an undead burning chicken swarm has 300 members (not a problem for you), which does "Swarm: 1d6" damage:
Swarm Attack: creatures with the swarm subtype don’t make standard melee attacks. Instead, they deal automatic damage to any creature whose space they occupy at the end of their move, with no attack roll needed.
Which significantly reduces the dice rolls needed.
Adding the burning skeleton template turns the attack into Swarm: 1d6+1d6 fire, some adjudication of how fiery death works when destroying swarm creatures, and turns the entire setup into a 4 HD (+1 from burning) creature. Of which you can have 3 (24 HD effective) on the table from your animate dead bucket, and 1 non-burning swarm from your command undead feat bucket (if you can figure out how to take it as a saint -- see if some adaptation of the grace rules is appropriate.)
As a swarm, it'll take half damage from piercing and slashing weapons, as well as DR/5 bludgeoning. I honestly don't know how to calculate how many HP the swarm has. but i would assume (4d8+4 = 22), which does not a huge amount of good when a t-rex chomps on them (as the t-rex has bite which counts as all three types for purposes of overcoming damage reduction), but will at the very least provide an excellent distraction, and the 3 swarms working together can take one down in 5 rounds (due to burning aura, the fact that every bite it takes does some damage to it) or less, assuming it is a little unlucky. Which means that you plus three swarms makes for a decent but not overwhelmingly powerful party member.
Nominal build:
Captain Cayenne
Human Commoner 1/Cleric 6
Motto: "Original... OR EXTRA CRISPY?!"
Happily, we worship the outer god, known as "The Colonel." His white beard and unspeakable chicken practices force us to acknowledge him as a Great Old One. Therefore, we have the simpler build.
Feats:
- Human Bonus: Quick Draw (needed to ... not just waste time)
- 1: Skill Focus: Diplomacy
- Traits: Chicken Infested, Magical Knack
- 3: Spell Focus (Necromancy)
- 5: Diabolical Negotiator (wisdom to diplomacy, increase more than two steps. All the better for selling "delicious, cooked from the inside, boneless chicken wings".)
- 7: Undead Master
With undead master, we have CL11 with regards to animate dead. Giving us 5 to 11 burning chicken skeleton swarms. In combat, stick close to someone so you can use bodyguard. (If you find yourself using it more frequently to better effect, trade out diabolical negotiator for combat reflexes).
An discussion on blood money
As per Cirdec's answer, the spell Blood Money may be used instead of the saint shenanigans. Unfortunately, Blood Money is magus 1, sor/wis 1, witch 1. And the best swarm-chicken casters are clerics. Therefore, we must class the cleric as an outer god.
Best Answer
Well, you seem to have already narrowed it down yourself. To say it clearly...
Your party already fill most of the roles you need to have
You have two faces, damages (the blaster), more damage and some tanking (summoners).
What I don't see (though it may be present, just not pointed out in the question) is some skill monkey, heal and support.
In this list, a Skald with low Int won't be a skill monkey, but your player can effectively be decent in the remaining spots. Bards are excellent supports and can handle some healing. The avantage here is your summoner will make its invocation do the tanking, allowing your healer to be less focused on that role. (Namely, you don't need a cleric like some groups crave for).
Hence...
Making him go Librarian is a good option in this case, but it could be double edged, from a playing point of view. Your character will be useful (lots of players underestimate the importance of knowledge checks) but your player might not feel the same.
Some players enjoy lore and reading the bestiary over and over, and as a player that fall in this category, I love to play knowledge character. I'm not often restricted by my character knowledge on topics and the GM fills in the blank when I'm the one lacking.
But if your player do not care about lore, or is hesitant as a new player (I've seen it happens), he/she might block when the time to share knowledge will come. Moreover, just repeating what the GM just said can seems pretty pointless after a while.
Advice
I'd follow your build (but pick Irori instead of Shelyn, since being the 3rd face is really redundant) and spew knowledges around. Being able to try all knowledge checks is invaluable and if Skald have the same kind of bonus than Bards (can't remember at the moment), investing only a few points could go a long way.
Then, does your player wants to deal a lot of damages using a bow, or just use a bow? If it is the former, go for a classic archery build centered on what the player likes to do and your party dynamic (who goes where and what is useful for a ranged character).
But I'd suggest to focus your spellcasting on healing. First, you don't seem to have that in excess. Second, it's easier to heal people than to kill things, and it is just as useful. You already have supporting abilities as a Skald, put a few common buffs in your spell list and you should be good to go. (Select according to what your party lacks). So Skald's Vigor (normal and greater) and Battle Cry are great options, if you want that player to feel useful and actually bring something to the group.