Too much text.
Ask your player what does he like about kitsune?
I like fluffy tails. I'd probably go with "When you gain access to new spell level, you gain Magical Tail feat. You can't take this feat as a regular feat. This replaces Bloodline Feat (class feature)."
Magical Tail is pretty bad. However, if you gain all eight of them for 3-4 feats, they are ok. Also perfect match with kitsune lore, as they are supposed to get more tails as they become stronger.
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Magic in the blood is kind of broken. Being able to cast all your kitsune SLAs up to 7 or 8 times per day? Ew.
I highly recommend the Kitsune Compendium. It's really well done, and with exception to the monk archetype, fairly balanced, too. It also has some content that do what you're trying to do here and better. There's one oracle/sorcerer archetype called the "nine-tailed mystic" where you gain Magical Tail as a bonus feat instead of gaining a bloodline spell.
I personally houseruled that a kitsune has a number of tails equal to the highest spell level they can cast. It's purely cosmetic, but something my kitsune players really appreciate. Yes, I have a lot of friends who play kitsunes.
Magic in the blood is kind of broken. Being able to cast all your kitsune SLAs up to 7 or 8 times per day? Ew.
I highly recommend the Kitsune Compendium. It's really well done, and with exception to the monk archetype, fairly balanced, too. It also has some content that do what you're trying to do here and better. There's one oracle/sorcerer archetype called the "nine-tailed mystic" where you gain Magical Tail as a bonus feat instead of gaining a bloodline spell.
I personally houseruled that a kitsune has a number of tails equal to the highest spell level they can cast. It's purely cosmetic, but something my kitsune players really appreciate. Yes, I have a lot of friends who play kitsunes.
If I might ask, what did you feel was overpowered about the Kyuubi Visionary?
If I might ask, what did you feel was overpowered about the Kyuubi Visionary?Magic in the blood is kind of broken. Being able to cast all your kitsune SLAs up to 7 or 8 times per day? Ew.
I highly recommend the Kitsune Compendium. It's really well done, and with exception to the monk archetype, fairly balanced, too. It also has some content that do what you're trying to do here and better. There's one oracle/sorcerer archetype called the "nine-tailed mystic" where you gain Magical Tail as a bonus feat instead of gaining a bloodline spell.
I personally houseruled that a kitsune has a number of tails equal to the highest spell level they can cast. It's purely cosmetic, but something my kitsune players really appreciate. Yes, I have a lot of friends who play kitsunes.
Sure!
Pretty much every ability the kyuubi visionary receives seems way better than what he loses. And anything he does lose, he can easily get anyway. Getting SLAs instead of stunning fist is a fair yet very decent trade. However, I was surprised to see that the archetype replaces wholeness of body (arguably the monk's worst class feature) with a SLA version of spell combat (one of the most amazing spell economy abilities in the game). Losing abundant step for a pseudo-spell recall is also really good considering a kitsune monk could still get abundant step at 13th level via qinggong monk, which the kyuubi visionary was obviously meant to synergize with. Unless you want to play a zen archer, there's no reason for a kitsune monk to not take this archetype.
Admittedly, monk isn't a great class for a kitsune (due to Strength penalty and lack of Wisdom bonus), but you can offset that. And this archetype struck me as intended to simply provide a cool kitsune monk wielding mystical powers rather than function as a direct buff for kitsunes playing monks. If a player wanted to play a kyuubi visionary, I'd probably say that magical fist replaces another ability, perhaps also replace the monk's ability to have ki strike bypass cold iron and silver. That might make sense considering kitsunes are shapeshifters tied to the fey, so it feels weird their ki has the properties of materials that fey and shapeshifters are vulnerable to.
For a book that had a lot of cool yet balanced content, kyuubi visionary stuck out like a sore thumb to me.
Allow me a gentleman's refute.
1) This FAQ makes it very clear that a monk cannot reclaim any monk class feature she traded with a second archetype with the qinggong monk. You can't get abundant step back.
2) The ability that gives you more spell-like abilities at the cost of Stunning Fist is balanced around the fact that you're trading Stunning Fist AND all of the special monk-only upgrades to Stunning Fist. Furthermore all of the spell-like abilities are restricted in spell level and spell school and they scale slowly. A second-level spell twice per day at 8th level is hardly overpowered. The best you could probably do with it is grab invisibility.
3) Magical Fist (the ability that replaces wholeness of body) doesn't work like spell combat. It actually replaces one of your attacks (the one with the highest attack bonus) whereas spell combat gives you another attack that you use to cast a spell. In short, magical makes your actual economy more flexible, but it doesn't actually add any new "actions" to your arsenal.
4) There's plenty of reason not to take this archetype. Specifically, many archetypes don't stack with it. For instance, because it modifies the monk's feats, it doesn't stack with any archetype that also alters or replaces any of the monk's feats, such as the most powerful monk archetypes: master of many styles and maneuver master.
5) A typical kitsune has 10 feats (one at every odd level). A kitsune monk would normally have 16 feats, plus Improved Unarmed Strike and Stunning Fist (monks have six bonus feats). A kyuubi visionary effectively forces you to take Magical Tail at least six times, as it'll try to replace every monk bonus feat that you get with Magical Tail and you can't take a typical monk bonus feat unless you have Magical Tail 8 times. This means that the kyuubi monk really doesn't get the monk's special "feat without prerequisites" ability and will ultimate leave the following two options:
#1 — I allow the kyuubi mystic to replace all of my monk bonus feats, leaving me with seven tails by 20th level. I have as many feats as a warrior to plan the martial side of my my build with.
#2 — As above, but I also take Magical Tail twice to have all nine tails by 20th level. If I feel like it, I might also take the Nine-Tailed Inheritor alternate racial trait so I get a bonus Magical Tail feat. I ultimately have one to two feats less than a warrior to plan the martial side of my build with.
#3 — I grab all eight of my Magical Tail feats as quickly as possible to unlock the ability to take Monk Feats in the mid-to-end-game. I use all of my character progression feats and all of my monk bonus feats up to 10th level (or 9th if you take the trait) and have my nine tails at that level, but have no other martial combat abilities to speak of during that time.
In short, this is an archetype that is balanced around the package, not the individual trades. This archetype essentially starves you for feats because it forces you to take an unoptimized feat choice for a monk. As a result, other abilities that you get are more powerful as a result.
Side Note: Kitsune have not yet been confirmed to descend from fey creatures in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (that's a misconception that players have because the race synergies well with the fey bloodline) and shapeshifters have no special vulnerability to silver; that's exclusively related to lycanthropes.
1) I did not know of that qinggong monk FAQ. Thank you.
2) I did say getting spell-like abilities instead of stunning fist was a good trade, but a fair one as well. Most of the stunning fist bonus effects are rather lackluster. Up until you're able to stagger someone at 12th level, stunning for 1 round is almost always the best option. I do really like how evoke ki limits the selection to schools of magic
3) Both spell combat and flurry of blows combined with magical fist are TWF-like special attacks that allow a character to cast a spell during a full-attack at the cost of a bonus attack gained by two-weapon fighting or similar abilities. Since a monk receives more than one bonus attack via Improved/Greater Two-Fighting, they have to sacrifice the bonus attack with the highest BAB to make the cost the same as the magus's. So ultimately, magical fist turns flurry of blows into spell combat, except with spell-like abilities. In many ways, it's much more flexible because you can use a two-handed weapon or unarmed strikes -- maybe shurikens as well, but I'm not sure how losing a melee attack works when you can interchange melee and ranged attacks with flurry of blows.
Magical fist is very cool, amazing ability. I'd think most qinggong monks would jump at the chance of losing bonus feats for it.
4) Yes, the archetype does not stack with many archetypes, but kyuubi visionary still feels like an upgrade from a vanilla monk. But admittedly, not as obvious of a choice as I initially thought
5) I concede that losing bonus feats for forced feat decisions with Magical Tail is a pretty big downside. Though, I see it more as a downside at later levels because the 1st and 6th monk bonus feats seem lackluster. The best ones involve combat maneuvers, which isn't favorable for a race with a Strength penalty. Honestly, I believe the most crippling aspect of trading bonus feats for Magical Tail lies with the fact that Magical Tail spell-like abilities scale with Charisma, not Wisdom. I'm not sure if that was intended.
5) I concede that losing bonus feats for forced feat decisions with Magical Tail is a pretty big downside. Though, I see it more as a downside at later levels because the 1st and 6th monk bonus feats seem lackluster. The best ones involve combat maneuvers, which isn't favorable for a race with a Strength penalty. Honestly, I believe the most crippling aspect of trading bonus feats for Magical Tail lies with the fact that Magical Tail spell-like abilities scale with Charisma, not Wisdom. I'm not sure if that was intended.
It was. ;-)
Ultimately, the goal was, "How do I take this class that normally kitsune players wouldn't touch and instead turn it into a viable choice that had a racial restriction that made sense?" That's my biggest criticism of the Advanced Race Guide, that many racially specific options take a perfectly universal idea and slap a racial prerequisite on it. I wanted to do more then that.
I agree that this is a strong archetype. That's because it makes the monk more dependent on multiple ability scores. Even with all of the fun, magical tricks that this class can do you're still looking at needing Wisdom (for monk stuff), Charisma (for kitsune stuff), and some combination of Strength (which is a penalized score for kitsune) or Dexterity (which is going to require that burn one of your valuable feats for Weapon Finesse).
My point in commenting about my design choices wasn't to belittle you or attack you; it was to provide some counterarguments to protect an archetype that doesn't need to be nerved from getting nerved in your home games. I can understand why that would be your gut reaction, however, because its very forest-through-the-trees approach to game design. You don't see that often from Paizo or from other 3PP developers. :-)