Impossible Playtest Debrief

I was waiting for this to drop and thought it might be today.

I like the things discussed here and can not wait to learn more about the Impossible book and the official Necromancer and Runesmith as well as their Iconics.

Glad to hear the Runesmith's getting more options, but I'm a little surprised to not hear anything about having trouble with their hands being full.

I understand the move away from a gishy necromancer, but osteo armaments is one of my favorite feats ever. Having a scaling, disposable weapon you can create with an action is extremely cool and I really hope it finds a home somewhere. It is what I hoped for in things like mindsmith, soulforger, etc.

My genuine primary criticism of runesmith might honestly just be that it uses the term Rune when that is already a core term in the system.

I understand the move away from a gishy necromancer, but osteo armaments is one of my favorite feats ever. Having a scaling, disposable weapon you can create with an action is extremely cool and I really hope it finds a home somewhere. It is what I hoped for in things like mindsmith, soulforger, etc.

Maybe include it as some sort of necromancer-adjacent archetype, Bonemoulder or something. Then you could be a Kholo barbarian who uses their bone collection to summon weapons and bone armor. Summon bone barricades, throw skulls, etc.

While we intend to keep the necromancer firmly as a spellcaster rather than pushing it to “gish” territory, we will be looking into ways to make the occasional scythe attack more engaging.

Excited to hear this. Melee necromancer stuff seems kinda fun, if troubled in the playtest.

... Remember the necromancer is godawful at melee, not only are they full casters but they're already designed to spend MAP on attacks. So there's room to make internal melee support kind of strong and still end up with it not being very good or problematic overall.

No mention of the lacking number of thralls at the lowest levels is disappointing. :(

I’m still curious on if there’s any internal talk about the “unholiness” of the necromancer regarding the implication that they’re utilizing undead, which are very frequently unholy, but none of the abilities are unholy, which seems like a giant lore discrepancy to me.

And I’m curious about how you’ll be able to open this up to be able to have, say, a Pharasmin necromancer without any weird flavor contrivances.

Wasn't one of the big criticisms of Necromancer is that there was no way for the thralls to help with flying enemies as levels got higher and that became more common? Or being a completely dead feature in an underwater campaign? Surprised that wasn't mentioned at all.

Did not participate in the playtest but as far as necromancer in martial combat go, I'd kinda expect them to be tanky but not particularly hard hitting. 8 hp class with up to medium armor and a lot of extra temp hp or damage reduction via bone armor and general control over the forces of life and death sounds appropriate. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Thanks for those informations.

The only thing that disturbed me was the fact that the Necromancer had an automatic access to Vitality damage and the fact that this energy is banned by law in Geb.

I wish it wouldn't be the case.

>While we intend to keep the necromancer firmly as a spellcaster rather than pushing it to “gish” territory,

well i am unfathomably disappointed, literally all i wanted from Necromancer was to gish with it, I do not want to do a "occasional scythe strike" that is not only boring but is unfulfilling as all hell, i do not see why their cannot just be a subclass that gives it martial proficiencies and martial focused feats that are good instead of being a glorified ancestry feat, a poorly scaling strike and a focus spell that is way to late into progression to be useful (which is also just heroism made into a focus spell)
why can it not be? clearly their was an outpour of requests for it
its sad to see a class i was so exited for completely kill my desire to play it before its even out

also no mention of Runesmiths forced need for a free hand?

Glad to hear there's going to be some undead familiar options for the Necromancer in the full release. Was one thing I felt was really missing.

Good read! I'm excited for the reveal of this book at Paizocon or Gencon

Do wish Necromancer had something to push into a melee direction, ala Warpriest or Battle-Harbinger. A Death Knight type character is pretty awkward to do right now even with those.

My biggest issue was the immobile, cardboard cut-out thralls. I'm glad to see there's going to be more thought about injecting some more "life" into them.

Gaulin wrote:

I understand the move away from a gishy necromancer, but osteo armaments is one of my favorite feats ever. Having a scaling, disposable weapon you can create with an action is extremely cool and I really hope it finds a home somewhere. It is what I hoped for in things like mindsmith, soulforger, etc.

Maybe include it as some sort of necromancer-adjacent archetype, Bonemoulder or something. Then you could be a Kholo barbarian who uses their bone collection to summon weapons and bone armor. Summon bone barricades, throw skulls, etc.

Most levels had a gish/Strike/melee feat option, so I wonder if he's just talking about proficiencies, the emphasis on Focus Spells, or what. I'm not holding Necromancer to a Warpriest or Magus standard, but that of a melee Bard or Druid where a Strike adds to one's action arsenal rather than defines it. Hopefully w/ some macabre oomph.

And yeah, transplanting all those feats over to an Archetype that martials could enjoy would solve a lot! Then one can play a "necromancer" by taking the Necromancer-adjacent Archetype to fully explore all those options (and w/o the 2x cost of an MCD.)

Hopefully, the Runesmith will also be able to set up faster in combat.

Really appreciate getting the writeup! It's good to have a gist of what to expect. I'm hoping some of the clunky mechanical issues will also be addressed (Necromancer anywhere but the ground, Runesmith having hands issues), but I understand that's usually not the thing these blogs cover. Looking forward to seeing what the final versions bring, and from the blog writeup, both classes will end up closer to my personal ideal than the playtest versions. That means more fun playing them as-is, and less work doing a tweak here or there.

My thoughts;

1) Please address Mastery of Life and Death not actually working due to many void spells having a "non-undead" clause or an undead only spells. This is part of a wider issue that Bones Oracles and Dhampyr's face, but it's particularly problematic for Necromancer

2) Please address the hand economy problem for Runesmith. This was incredibly frustrating during the playtest and pointlessly limited fighting styles if you were trying to play by RAW.

3) Would you consider a class archetype to give the Gish feel some people are clamoring for? Something sort of like battle harbinger but with key attributes and weapon specialization scaling properly.

4) Necromancer also had some noticable problems with range and dealing with flight, please make sure to address those.

Both Diacritic Runes & Composite Invocations were seen as "very interesting"? Huh, that's curious. Wouldn't have guessed from the forums.

The former was seen as only worthwhile outside combat w/ all the better options w/ one action; and thus not so worthwhile w/ so few slots available. And I read zero appreciation of the latter, even though I'd posted a thread asking explicitly for feedback about them. I mean conceptually they sound cool in light of "written magic", but balancing them as is seems impossible given how its foundation is already difficult w/ its action-investment-future-reward mechanics (which composites compound by asking for even more patience and more variety of runes, some of which kinda have to be sub-par as it's impossible for all to be equally effective against all opponents).

Anyway, I don't feel debriefed about the direction Runesmiths are going, while I do feel Necromancer's heading in at least two good directions.

Wasn't one of the big criticisms of Necromancer is that there was no way for the thralls to help with flying enemies as levels got higher and that became more common? Or being a completely dead feature in an underwater campaign? Surprised that wasn't mentioned at all.

They don't usually drill down too deeply in these sorts of debriefs, they mostly give the "here's the big questions we were wondering about at the start of the playtest" resolutions. Like I'm sure they're going to do something about the borderline game-breaking damage a runesmith can do on a two-round loop if they're able to get off a bunch of one action traces, but they don't need to admit that here.

I still have hope that we will eventually get class archetypes for necromancers of other traditions. Occult will always be the least fitting and least interesting tradition for necromancy for me, but the class looks already great otherwise.

I still have hope that we will eventually get class archetypes for necromancers of other traditions. Occult will always be the least fitting and least interesting tradition for necromancy for me, but the class looks already great otherwise.

While I don't agree with you, I would like to point out that they said in the briefing that they'll be making it so Necromancers have access to the Necromancy themed spells that AREN'T on the Occult list, so that should satisfy most of your itch.

My biggest issue was the immobile, cardboard cut-out thralls. I'm glad to see there's going to be more thought about injecting some more "life" into them.

Agreed. If there's one thing I wanna do as a necromancer, it's inject stuff into other stuff.

I'm loving everything I'm seeing here. Looking forward to hearing more about this im-possible book at Paizocon/Gencon!

Will you address the naming problem of "runes" for upgrading equipment and the "runes" of the runesmith?

2026 is just .. so far off still!
Can't you just release this in summer instead?
I have a group wanting to run Tyrant's Grasp in pf2e, we want the necromancer class now :P