Outsider is a horribly overloaded creature type. Would anything awful happen if there was just a Devil type, a Demon type, a Genie type, and so on? And allowing designers to create new full-on types instead of just subtypes when making new monsters?
It just seems so awkward to me that humanoid-bane and outsider-bane (or favored enemy types), work so completely differently (new humanoids do require new bane types, but outsiders don't).
And that creatures as so astoundingly different as Aasimar and Qlippoth share a type. And that a ranger can't specialize in hunting Demons without also being good at hunting Efreet (but not Djinni) and Devils (or alternatively being good at hunting Proteans and Azata).
It would seem to leave certain 'one off' outsiders like Couatl out in the cold, but a Couatl could easily be a Magical Beast. And that problem already basically occurs with 'rare' humanoid types like wayang, in that you'll probably meet one all campaign, making it practically immune to bane weapons or favored enemy.
The main problem I see with this is that it would even further splinter Favored Enemy and make it more situational (unless the Ranger was given more types to choose from or kept broader classifications), which is a pretty hard hit to the class IMO.
Personally, I think more creature types could be consolidated, rather than the classifications and subtypes multiplying and getting out of hand.
I don't see a reason why, for Bane and FE, there are 12 different types of humanoids (well, 11 and "Other" which encompasses a bunch I would guess), and you need to specifically say "I specialize in hunting Humans" when physiology and such between Humanoids tends to be very similar. I thought that was the whole point of them all being Humanoids in the first place, core similarities.
If your "Special Favored Enemy tactic" for killing a Human is "Stab him in the heart or other vital organs, or decapitate him, or..." and other Humanoids carry the same weakness...why do these fighting styles no longer work as effectively?
Though I can see that same logic being reversed for Outsiders as well ("Demons and Efreet are completely different! Why am I great at fighting both?"), so perhaps the solution is not to make new categories for each, but to rearrange them and then concretely explain WHY they're so similar and would thus be weak to the same things.
Get rid of the current categories (Alignment + Element) and replace them with what is currently their larger classification.
Rather than having to pick "Outsider (Air/Water/Fire/Earth)" (and then basically only getting to fight Genie + Elemental of that kind), make a blanket "Geniekind" category, "Elemental" category, and so on.
I can't see a way to break down Evil vs Good (and Lawful vs Chaotic) outsiders that way though, and making it a blanket "Outsiders" thing would be pretty darn powerful.
I think it works just fine given the previous change though, keeping a solid 4 category (with some overlap) system based on the alignment of their plane (on one axis).
That's my 2 cents. Hope I didn't misunderstand what you were saying (sounded like you were saying the categories should be narrower and there should be more of them, based on the line about Humanoids vs Outsider banes).
Outsiders, like humanoids are often defined by subtype.
If you want a ranger who focuses on demons, but not devils and efreet. Give him favored enemy(outsider[demon]). Outsider[evil] is just better because it covers more potential foes.
Aberration is weirder in my book; "I'm great at defeating things that very different from anything."
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Actually, I think that problem is with indiscriminate addition of species-based humanoid subtypes instead of using more general humanoid subtypes like reptilian and goblinoid. For example there should be single Humanoid (avian) instead of Humanodi (tengu), Humanoid (strix) and Humanoid (syrinx).
Another problem is making planetouched races Outsiders instead of humanoids with (planetouched) subtype. It seems that designers of third edition didn't exactly considered all the ramifications and meaning of Outsider type* when they introduced it and to which creatures it should apply and which should not.
Speaking of which, never was a fan of tieflings, aasimar, and the other planetouched being full blown outsiders. It's just a touch of planes after all! ;)
That's why I houseruled all the planetouched races to be Humanoids with (planetouched) and their parent(s) subtype. Gith/yanki/zerai are just Humanoid (gith).
Vanaras became humanoid (simian); I intend to add at least one or two more monkey/ape races sharing that subtype.
Catfolk became humanoid (feline) together with a few 3.0/3.5 feline races.
Nagaji and vishkanyas will either end as humanoid (reptilian) or will get separate (serpentine) subtype shared with serpentfolk.
To bad you can't pick Bazatu and Tanari anymore.
It's the exact same thing as Devil and Demon respectively.
Speaking of which, never was a fan of tieflings, aasimar, and the other planetouched being full blown outsiders. It's just a touch of planes after all! ;)
Humanoid [Planetouched]?
What about the extraplanar subtype on the planetouched humanoids?
One possible solution is to group creatures by origin as well as kind, similar, in some ways, to 4E:
* plane: astral v. <elemental> v. <specific> plane v. material v. etc
* kind: humanoid v. demon v. devil v. etc
Note, I'm not recommending either of those things, but putting them out there as points to ponder.
From what I can figure, the reason outsiders exist as, well, outsiders, is to consolidate most of the rules for them all under a singular heading - in otherwords, because demons, devil, angels, and the like are all relatively balanced at a given HD, they follow similar rules... sharing HD kinds.
But yeah, I would tend to say if humanoid needs a specific kind, outsider most certainly does.
Most of planetouched humanoids are native to material plane anyway so [extraplanar] subtype does not apply to them.
I liked the direction 4th edition took with type but I think that plane of origins should be replaced with essential nature type (which usually but not always overlaps with planar origins: githyanki are living in astral sea but not immortal materialized spirits): mortal, fey, elemental, immortal, undead. This could be combined with a body type (beast, humanoid, hybrid, animate for shapeless entities and possibly abomination for some truly bizarre entities) and a expanded series of subtypes/keywords.
I think part of my beef is the conflation of Outsider and Extraplanar - both mean basically the same thing, from outside of material reality. But then you get weird corner cases, like First World fey. They're a highly magical immortal that is not from the material plane. Why fey and not Outsider? And I have a hard time associating 'aligned' beings like Angels and Demons to be quite the same as elemental beings like genies and, well, elementals. And on top of both of those you have things like Celestial and Fiendish animals, which are more of a 'planar ecology' thing than 'manifestation of evil' thing.
Also, the game introduces new sub-types all the time. Why can't it introduce new creature types?
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I think part of my beef is the conflation of Outsider and Extraplanar - both mean basically the same thing, from outside of material reality. But then you get weird corner cases, like First World fey. They're a highly magical immortal that is not from the material plane. Why fey and not Outsider? And I have a hard time associating 'aligned' beings like Angels and Demons to be quite the same as elemental beings like genies and, well, elementals. And on top of both of those you have things like Celestial and Fiendish animals, which are more of a 'planar ecology' thing than 'manifestation of evil' thing.
Also, the game introduces new sub-types all the time. Why can't it introduce new creature types?
In addition to fey, which should probably also have been folded into outsiders along with elementals, there's the issue with planar ally / planar binding spells being limited to calling outsider type creatures, when so many of the gods have non-outsiders serving them.
Abadar's two Planar Allies, as of Curse of the Crimson Throne 2, are a celestial template hippogriff (which, per the celestial template, retains it's type) and a ghost cleric, neither of which are outsiders, and therefore can't be summoned with planar ally, which makes their positioning under a big black boldfaced 'Planar Allies' header somewhat ironic.
The planes are *loaded* with template animals, vermin and even humanoids and magical beats, and yet when one writes up a new creature that exists on the planes, there's an assumption that it should have the Outsider type, even if all those skill ranks are utterly at odds with the role and nature of the beastie in question.
A fair amount of Type / subtype consolidation could be a good thing for monster-crafters, as well as a bit more flexibility being shown off in monster design, with monsters that may be of Type A but explicitly don't have every feature of Type A, so that the Types aren't regarded as straightjackets quite so much.
Vermin is my pet peeve. It should be a subtype of animal, not a type unto itself. I'm not convinced that Monstrous Humanoid needs to be a separate type from Humanoid, for that matter.
Still, things are tightening up. Elementals being folded into Outsiders, and 'Beasts' being folded into Animal or Magical Beast, as appropriate, seem to be steps in the right direction.
There's a lot about monster design that I wish had been done differently. One set of rules for the 'monsters' and another for the 'PCs' leads to some oddness, like associated levels and level adjustment and racial HD and monster levels that could have been avoided at the outset by using the same set of rules and guidelines and balancing metrics when designing both the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' rather than distinct sub-systems. Even if a GM never allows a player to actually *play* a 'monster' race, the game has had, since day one spells that allow them to summon or charm or polymorph into those monsters, and developed options to magic jar into them or take them as cohorts or use diplomacy to convince them to use their monster abilities, totally not balanced for use by PCs, because they use different balancing metrics, willy nilly.
Everything from 'what happens to my racial HD when I play a gnoll or lizardfolk?' to 'if I command a shadow can I shadow-pocalypse the world in a single night, village by village?' to 'how many wishes can I get out of an efreeti with a diplomacy roll of 45?' hinges on the disparities between the character creation and monster advancement rules.
I think part of my beef the the conflation of Outsider and Extraplanar - both mean basically the same thing, from outside of material reality.
This is what I referred to earlier - designers of third edition seemed to intend it to merely mean extraplanar...
A slain outsider cannot be raised or resurrected, although a wish or miracle spell can restore it to life.
But the addition of the last sentence and later attempts to explain why it is so didn't followed it.
Note that the meaning of outsider changed with the shift to 3.5.
The primary problem with this change was that despite the change of definition, no one thought to change type of some creatures that were just extraplanar beings.
But then you get weird corner cases, like First World fey. They're a highly magical immortal that is not from the material plane. Why fey and not Outsider?
This is a Golarion-specific. Before PF the Fey origins were rather vague and not often associated with outside of material plane.
And I have a hard time associating 'aligned' beings like Angels and Demons to be quite the same as elemental beings like genies and, well, elementals.
Elementals are being who are living embodiment of elements. Angels/fiends are living embodiment of good and evil, respectively (which, aside from specific settings, are tangible forces in most D&D cosmologies) making them belonging to the same general order of entities. Think of both angels and fiends as elementals of particular alignment.
Genies are debatable cause. Are they living embodiment of particular elements? Are they immortal beings associated with elements but being more than their living embodiment? The same problem with defining them could apply to some of the fiendish-like genera such as Rakshasa. Are they still living embodiment or something more?
Following that line of thought, with equating Outsider = Manifested Spirit/Living Embodiment of something we could go to the conclusion that fey could be "outsiders" as embodiment of nature/genius loci of particular landmark. However it does not apply to all fey, only some of them (e.g. yes for nymph, dryad but not for satyrs).
Of course with such definition the very name of the type would be obsolete and could be replaced with something like Incarnate, Spirit or Immortal.
And on top of both of those you have likes like Celestial and Fiendish animals, which are more of a 'planar ecology' thing than 'manifestation of evil'
Yes, and that's why they aren't Outsiders in Pathfidner. They are not living embodiment of alignment(s), elements or other aspects of the universe. They are just planar counterparts of regular beasts and people.
Also, the game introduces new sub-types all the time. Why can't it introduce new creature types?
One of the changes made in 3.0->3.5 and 3.5->Pathfinder I applauded was removal of some types and changing them into subtypes (beasts, elementals, giants, shapechangers). I would go even further and I would change monstrous humanoids to humanoid subtype like it was done with giants and change humanoid racial BAB/HD to high/d10.
EDIT: Epic kobold and the misunderstood desert god ninja'd me on some points due to my slowness.
EDIT 2: Also I got oracle-ninja'd by those two on some things I wanted to write in the future post...
If you broke outsider into dozens of creature types, you're going to have to devote wordcount in each new Bestiary to multiple copies of the following:
That's true, but it's not like those things would have to be identical - Maybe Demons have good Fortitude saves instead of Will.
And wordcount in every new bestiary is already used with Demon subtype, devil subtype, and so on. Moving those words to type blocks woulnd't be that big of a change (and would let you fix things like Devils having Darkvision (as Outsiders) and See in Darkness (as Devils), which are redundant.)
Maybeout Outsider just needs to become a Sub-type. Humanoid(ish) devils and demons become Monstrous Humanoids, while more monstrous ones become Magical Beasts, and they all get the Devil subtype (for racial stuff), Outsider subtype (for the immortal eating-optional stuff), and [Extraplanar] because of their origin.
For that matter, [native] kind of sucks as a subtype for Teiflings and Rakshasa, because it implies weird things happen to demons in the abyss or devils in hell that aren't true, while Aasimar get weird if they beome Extraplanar by casting plane shift.
Maybe Outsider just needs to become a Sub-type. Humanoid(ish) devils and demons become Monstrous Humanoids, while more monstrous ones become Magical Beasts, and they all get the Devil subtype (for racial stuff), Outsider subtype (for the immortal eating-optional stuff), and [Extraplanar] because of their origin.That's what I do in my home games, except I drop the extraplanar subtype altogether; every creature native to a non-Material plane has that plane listed in the "Environment" section of its stat block, so when you think about it, the extraplanar subtype is completely redundant.
It's a slightly simpler marker when using banishmment or dismissal (or the aligned spells with those as side effects) than examining the Environment line, but I agree with the sentiment.
I'm not convinced that Monstrous Humanoid needs to be a separate type from Humanoid, for that matter.
Humanoid (Monstrous)? (Like how Giants ended up.)
Which brings up another thing: charm/hold/dominate person/monster are stupid. Humanoids are not (or shouldn't be) innately easier to mind control than other creatures, especially when the caster might not even be humanoid.
It would be great to see the entry-level <x> person spells actually have the hideous laughter outlet of dropping the DC if creature types don't match. Or something like that.
And we are back to solutions from D&D 4th edition.
Demons, Devils, Angels, and such are alignment outsiders. Feathered Serpents are magical beasts with the Alignment outsider subtype. A fiendish rat is an animal with the alignment outsider subtype. An Effretti is an elemental humanoid with the alignment outsider subtype.
I'm going to treat the only one subtype rule as unworkable.