Pathfinder: Summoner Playtest

I’m going to open up that Wayne Reynolds rocks, and needs to compile a D&D art book.

Its been awhile since I’ve looked at anything 3rd Edition, but I was curious to see how Paizo would attempt a summoner class, for better or for worse. At a glance, the paragraphs upon paragraphs that only explain individual functions is a harsh reminder of but one reason I got out of 3E.

For example, Spells alone goes through five paragraphs to explain how many spells a summoner gets and how she trades them out at specific levels. The fucked up thing is that this doesnt actually tell you what spells you can choose from, or how magic even works in 3E. Even worse? Cantrips gets its own section, but at least wraps itself up in a single paragraph.

The main schtick of a summoner is its pet, referred to as an Eidolon. The eidolon class feature ate up four paragraphs, but to sum it up they can be summoned once per day and if they die you lose them for the entire day…which is fucking redundant since you can only use it once per day anyway… >_>

Moving on!

They can look like whatever you want, has stats based on your level like a druid/ranger’s pet, and can be modified via “evolution points”…

So far, pretty ho-hum. Cribbing the pet mechanics from the druid is about what I’d expected, and this doesnt disappoint insofar as I was expecting to be disappointed in this way.

Life Link allows summoners to toss hps at their pet in order to stop it from going back to wherever the hell it lives, which is handy assuming the summoner isnt within reach of something particularly nasty to beat it to death. What I really hate about this class feature is the massive paragraph devoted to telling you how much weaker the pet gets depending on how far away from you it is. You get distances of 100+ feet, 1000+ feet, and 10,000+ feet. Oi.

The rest of the shit can be abridged fairly easily:

• Bond Senses lets you share senses for a limited number of rounds.
• Shield Ally gives you a defense bonus when the pet is close by. Greater Shield Ally lets the pet grant all allies a defense bonus, and the summoner a better defense bonus.
• Maker’s Call lets you use dimension door to recall the pet if its within range. Presumably, you check the range from yourself to your pet, and if you could normally teleport to it, then it appears next to you.
• Transposition lets you swap places with the pet.
• Aspect lets you spend Evo Points on yourself. Greater Aspect lets you spend more Evo Points.
• Life Bond lets you transfer excess damage from yourself to your pet when you would normally be dropped. The paragraph points out that shit like flesh to stone still kills you (a-duuuuh).
• Merge Forms lets you use fusion with your pet, which I guess keeps you safe and still lets you cast spells and stuff. Its three paragraphs long…fuck it.
• Twin Eidolon lets you transform into your eidolon. You get all the shit it does.

So far we’ve got five pages and no stats for the pet, that finally rears its ugly head on page six, and boy its a doozy. See, at this point we’ve seen a lot of stuff for your character. Granted you still dont know what spells you can select yet, but you’ve got your own collection of stats, feats, skills, etc, right?

Eidolons have their own class table and stats for you to track! Yaaaaay…

Eidolons come in three flavors: four legs, two legs, or snakes. Each type gives you a collection of base stats, and from there you get to blow Evo Points to change shit up. Evolutions cost from 1-4 points, and there’s a little over four pages worth. I’m sure many vary considerably in usefulness and power, and frankly I dont give a fuck enough to run through the list.

Have fun with this super-complex character that wont do much except make routine melee attacks over and over again. -.-

Finally, actual spells. The summoner doesnt get a lot, they cap out at six, and can cast summon monster whatever a shitload of times per day. The real kicker is that the duration is measured in minutes instead of rounds, so I suspect that this will grind the game to a halt as the summoner basically gets to play his own goddamned party.

This class is a mechanical nightmare. You need at least two character sheets, and you will want to carefully plan out what summons you will use so that you can have abridged stats on hand (even though they only really exist to make melee attacks and serve as meat shields). I have no idea if Pathfinder has feats that modify summoned monsters, which is only going to make things worse.

I would pity the group that lets a player roll one of these on the fly, but thats 3E for ya: phenomenal, cosmic book-keeping…itty bitty payoff.

Pathfinder Review

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Okay, okay, its finally out, and its huge. Its a good thing that we’re looking at a 3rd Edition re-hash, or I’d have a lot to learn, amirite? Content wise, its basically PH and DMG glued together. It starts out with race, classes, feats, skills, etc before moving on to building adventures and campaigns, dungeon settings, traps, and yadda yadda yadda. Same shit, different look.

I’m not going to pull a “Kurt Wiegel” and just say that Pathfinder is shit, and its not a role-playing game by a self-invented standard. I’m not even going to surmise this entire review by stating that, “I got tired of Pathfinder back when it was called 3rd Edition.” No, oh no. I’m going to give you actual reasons from a game design standpoint as to why it sucks. Mostly, I’m curious as to see if Paizo fixed the flaws. Okay, I’m kidding: we already know by the previews that they didnt, but lets go through the motions anyway and start things out on a positive beat by checking out the good part.

Art! Its got some usually-okay art. The best stuff is whatever recycled Wayne Reynolds bits they threw on as chapter-splashes, and the rest runs from great to good. The downside is that as far as I can tell its all recycled (like the rules, har har). I’d have preferred it if they added more stuff that was more contextually appropriate for the chapters.
For example, Chapter 1: Races, has a picture of the adventurers running through a drow city…which pertains to race because I guess the characters are using races out of the book? Chapter 3 is the cover of “Hook Mountain Massacre”, which makes sense because of…well…I got nothing. There’s a fighter there, and a sorcerer! Those are classes, right?
Anyway, points for generally very good art, even if its as rehashed as the game. Otherwise, there isnt much to say about the physical quality of the book. Its big, its expensive, and its for a game that you already bought almost ten years ago.

Moving on to the bad stuff (and by that I mean the rest of it), starting with the races.

Paizo has elected to keep all of the traditional races, with “traditional” being defined as the ones that were in the initial launch circa 3E (and not OD&D, AD&D, 2E, etc). The races all now get a bonus to a second stat, but keep the penalty. Humans and half-races get to add a +2 to whatever the hell stat they want (so hey, half-orcs dont get an Int dive!). They’re otherwise identical, except the half-orc who gets a few new racial abilities that make it a slightly more worthwhile racial option to play, but still not enough to make it an appealing choice.
This isn’t a problem unique to the half-orc, as many races lug around cumbersome features that are worthless if you play to type (such as an elf archer-type or half-orc melee warrior of any stripe), and if you play outside of the mold they still don’t amount to anything. Oh, I’m an elf wizard so I can use bows…not that I’m going to bother since my attack bonus is so abysmally shitty that I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if a giant threw it at me while I was paralyzed and enlarged.
Some benefits are so retardedly situational that I would be surprised if players bothered to write them down. Dwarves get a bonus on Appraise checks to identify the prices of non-magical items that also contain metals or gems. I…frankly cannot remember ever bothering to use Appraise. Its one of those strange skill that’s tries to add a layer of immersion to the game that just isn’t necessary, except to randomly allow the players to fuck themselves over by botching the list price of an art object (and forcing the DM to just add more shit to make up the difference).
On the other hand, some races gain features that are only useful to a specific class. Elves get a bonus against spell resistance, and with their Int bonus would make better-than-normal wizards, which is good since they were supposed to make good wizards all along, right? Well, kinda. I mean its handy if they play a class that uses caster levels (which is admittedly eventually most of them), but outside its completely, utterly worthless. Players who opt to make a fighter or similar character are going to end up parsing off a good chunk of the elf’s abilities (especially given that their familiarity is also pointless).

What this means is that ultimately we still have quite a few n00b traps. This is where you present a player with a list of choices, but many are underpowered, useless, or so highly circumstantial that they might as well be useless. The best example that comes to mind for me is a halfling fighter. Halflings are a Small race, and in OGL games they have to use smaller weapons, often get a Strength penalty, and take another penalty on many Strength-based applications (grapple, bull rush, disarm, trip, etc). They also tend to move slower and can carry even less than their Strength score would indicate.
See, a fighter is supposed to be about melee combat and “tanking”, where they defend their party from the onslaught of monsters. Aside from the complete lack of scaling and ability to prevent monsters from sidestepping them and mauling anyone they want to death, the halfling’s flaws culminate into a shitty character. They deal about 2 points of damage less overall, but the biggest problems (no pun intended) are realized when you consider that since she is Small and gets a Strength penalty that she takes an effective -5 penalty on her efforts to resist other critters from pushing her around, or just fucking picking her up and throwing her…wherever.
Since she moves slower and her Speed gets reduced even further by heavy armor, it takes her longer to maneuver around the battlefield (and if you are using physical skills, I’m sure that the reduced carrying capacity is going to mess with things even more so).
This is frankly, a trap character. A player might think it is a neat idea and give it a go, only to realize very quickly that you suck. You have no chance in hell of performing the duties that your class cant really do anyway, but even if it mechanically could, you’d still be fucked. Kind of like falling in a pit trap with spikes, only to have ceiling open up and dump acid filled with acid sharks on you: a double-trap! The only people that would get a kick out of this are the mechanic-masochists that think that its “cool” to play a crippled, underpowered character because its somehow more rewarding to succeed when the dice finally fall your way.

Moving on!

Next on the chopping block, classes. Most of the class stuff was picked apart months ago during the previews and tend to follow this trend: cut and paste the old class, add in a few features, and try to pretend the whole time that they dont still suck. For example barbarians can “rage climb/swim” and can pick up a bite attack that wont hit, which isnt that big of a deal since it only deals 1d4 damage anyway.
See, its stuff like that that sounds really badass, but c’mon: -5 to the attack? Half the Strength modifier? Are you fucking serious? I would have allowed the barbarian to make a useful bite attack as a minor swift action. Its not like she can do it all the damned time or its going to overpower her to the point where no one will play other melee classes. Be reasonable, no one plays fighters anyway.
Other classes, particularly spellcasters, get yet more powerful in the transition. You know, the guys that run the show since 5th-level? Yeah. Apparently Paizo thought that they still needed more freebies to further adorn their palanquin that the rest of the party was carrying them around on. Druids can opt to swap out their worthless animal companion to get access to more spells, and wizards and sorcerers get at-will powers and more magical flexibility. Since, you know, they obviously needed more shit to keep track of even if some of its pretty weak-sauce…*cough* hand of the apprentice *cough*.
The only good part I can see about classes is that Paizo made sure that every level has something to gain aside from hit/skill points. I assume that not all are interesting, but at least its there.

Some skills got condensed, just like in 4th Edition, but Paizo didn’t quite have the foresight to get rid of the useless “simulation” skills that don’t really do anything except make money on the off chance that the DM puts the game on hold long enough to make them worthwhile and let you justify to yourself that its “okay” to make the claim that your character is a farmer. I mean, its not like you could just say that that’s what your character did…right? Just like its not okay to say that your character had friends during her childhood without dumping enough points in the right skill.

Between the shitty races, classes, feats, and skills, what all of this does is cater to system mastery, where you play the game enough to realize what choices work, which ones dont, and leave the crap by the wayside. System mastery isn’t good, especially for new players or people wanted to try out classes that promise one thing and deliver nothing (example: halfling fighters, or just fighters in general).
On one hand, I don’t want to blame Paizo for this. They aren’t game designers, and they really want to peddle their wares to the desperate niche that got left behind when 4th Edition was announced. Pathfinder isn’t a new game, its just an old game with a new paint job.
In other words, its just 3E with a shitload of houserules. The problem is that groups that still want to play 3rd Edition have that. With Pathfinder, its now a matter of cross-referencing the original rules with the new rules and figuring out whats changed, whats different, and if the differences arent great enough its going to cause even more confusion. My group ran into this problem when Revised Edition was released, mostly with spells and feats but occasionally with mechanics and some class features. It was a massive pain in the ass, and since Pathfinder maintains much of the flaws of Yester-Year’s Edition, it just compounds the issues I’d have with it. Its quite a bit late to just push out a slightly modified game, charge the full price, and not fix the stuff that needed it.

But hey, its Paizo, and they have their fans that will eat it up no matter what they produce, even if they follow the same business plan as the, “800-pound gorilla,” that they desperately want to emulate (push out books that contain more of the same, just with the same system to boot). I used to be a fan, back when 3rd Edition was still in its heyday. I had a subscription to both of the dead-tree magazines, though I didnt use most of it. Hell, I mostly toughed it out for Dungeon since they were running Savage Tide and I thought it looked awesome.

Now?

Looking at Pathfinder gives me the same emotional conflict that I get when looking at World of WarCraft: the art is pretty, and…thats about it. It starts to draw me in, but I push myself away once I realize that thats the only thing it has going for it: eye candy. I’m not going to buy Pathfinder. Not the Big Book o’ Houserules, not the modules, nothing. If they made an art book I could dig it, because thats the only thing about their stuff that I like. I’d easily pony up $50 or even more for such a collection. Looks good. Looks great. Its something I could easily use for inspiration. I mean, Wizards of the Coast has eye candy, too. The difference is that they have a game that backs it up.
Maybe thats where Paizo went wrong. When they did the open beta, I realized very quickly that they took a lot of the good ideas from 4th Edition and did their best to shoehorn them in and try to pass it off as their own: more hit points, more feats, rogues can SA more things, spellcasters get “at-wills”. Lots of stuff like that.
I find it baffling that Paizo is making their own line of game products, and no one is calling them out on being a bunch of money-grubbing corporate wage-slaves. We got a $50 rulebook that everyone will need to have, since its for both players and DMs, a Bestiary coming out later, and a bunch of other shit specific to Pathfinder. I think that just makes it worse: its all specific to their own little homebrew campaign. It’d be like if Wizards just made nothing but Eberron books, which while super-cool, would cater to too narrow an audience.

Huh.

I guess Paizo is the RPG publisher equivalent of Nintendo. Well, not quite. To be fair, when Nintendo pushes out yet another Mario/Zelda/Metroid game, its usually a mostly different experience aside from the titular character. Not that different is necessarily good.

In closing, Pathfinder is just a 3rd Edition re-hash that tries to take an old, outdated system and shoehorn in some of the mechanics of 4th Edition in order to justify repurchasing a game that you’ve been playing, but not quite enough to make the mechanics work in an elegant manner. The book looks nice, its just too bad that I got tired of Pathfinder back when it was still called 3rd Edition (see, I waited til the end).

Preview(s): Pathfinder RPG

There is a massive, 60+ page thread on RPGnet that talks about the previews Paizo has revealed about the “new look” of Pathfinder‘s equivalent to the fighter. Well, and the sorcerer. If you want to sum it up, fighter’s still suck, spellcasters are still broken, and Paizo is still failing to correctly steal the good parts of Dungeons & Dragons to claim as their own.

According to Jason Bulmahn, the fighter isnt built as an optimized character, but to showcase…something. No one is really sure what, and they sure as hell arent impressed. Its a big-ass stat block of numbers that mean almost nothing to those who are not really, really into PRPGB. One poster compared Valeros to an ice devil, which while one CR point lower, can still kick the fighter’s ass without breaking a sweat…literally.

Compared to Seoni, the preview sorcerer, she can beat the shit out of Valeros even though she is four levels lower. With her magic, she can be untouchable and annihilate him without taking any damage at all. Even if Valeros could somehow reach her, dispel magic fixes all that fiddly balance bullshit that Paizo isnt concerned about.

Valeros sucks ass. He is easy to hit, deals dick damage, cant make a Will save to save his life, and can only compensate for his tiny AC and damage by further crippling his already meager attack bonus. Does Pathfinder add anything interesting to the fighter? In a word, no. There are more feats all around, but since they dont necessarily grow with your level, they end up becoming a rigid feat tree that you need by necessity to still fail to be on par.
Paizo apparently removed a high-level feature that gave you Damage Resistance in heavy armor, which while cute was almost entirely worthless since its better to not get hit at all, than to shave off a measly five points of damage. It wont do a lick of good if that attack also carries on level/ability drain or poison. Whoop. De. DO.

Fighters are boring and repetitive, which is made worse since they do things that other melee-oriented classes can do, just without extra options like raging or useless 4th-level spells. Hell, they do a LOT of things non-melee oriented class can do, and with spells they can do it more reliably and better. Pile all the feats on that you want, but if the end result is allowing your fighter to make a bunch of mundane attacks that probably wont hit, then whats the point? You just wasted half of your career path to be mechanically inferior to the monk. For an encore, they should add in another feat tree that gradually turns you into a bard, which might ironically be more interesting than a fighter.

Pathfinder succeeds at adding many new–if inelegant and unecessarily convoluted–mechanics to an already inelegant and convoluted system. It fails to fix the parts of 3rd Edition that needed it most (ie, interesting options), and instead just scratches the surface of what Wizards of the Coast did for Dungeons & Dragons and pretending that it was their idea all along: increase in hit points, more feats, easier to sneak attack, at-will spells, the list goes on. They claim its backwards compatible with your 3rd Edition swag, but only if you add more features to the races and classes that they dont/cant/wont add in the game later. Sound familiar?

Yep. This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast did with 4th Edition, except they didnt try to pass it off as the same game with a new name. Pathfinder is not D&D. Its kinda-sorta close to 3E, but you cant make a thri-kreen psychic warrior without houseruling the 3E version of both to put them on par with how races and classes are built now. They might add them or something similar in later, which is exactly what Wizards of the Coast has been doing with 4E. The fucked up thing is that I dont hear people going to the Paizo boards and having a bitch-fest over, “those money-grubbing bastards.”

Common theory holds that Erik Mona favores spellcasters, and if the preview iconics are an indication it certainly has merit given that the new sorcerer has a shitload of new stuff and some spells got a power kicker. Its bullshit to think that they couldnt make major changes to the system, since they wanted to cater to the played out copper mine that is the “old school” audience, considering that 3rd Edition released Book of Nine Swords. While still not sufficient to put melee combatants on par with spellcasters, it made a huge leap in progress to making them interesting and useful at levels above five. They could have easily made a similar system with a similar goal, and I have no idea why they didnt.

Spite, perhaps?

Another poster thinks that they are ignoring the best parts of 4E, “out of spite,” and I’m inclined to agree since they blatantly stole the easiest things that anyone could houserule in, but ignored the really good mechanics that would require some actual design experience. Thats really what Pathfinder feels like: a very heavily houseruled version of 3E D&D. The problem is that if I wanted to play 3E, houserules and all, I dont need to pay another company to think up houserules for me. I did that myself over a year ago and I’m more than happy to be done with it.