Kerney Williams's page

The Half-Races are essentially humans with a few speciAl abilities. Not interesting enough to justify including them as core races.

I'm a fan of half races because being not completely part of whatever community they grew up in seems to be built-in to who they are from an RP perspective.

This requires some thinking and no built-in stereotypes like dwarves with Scottish accents.

For example, my half orc is very protective of his little sisters because, growing up in a mixed race family meant you could have vigilantes at your doorstep at any night. He also works for his own respectability as protection for his loved ones.

My half elf saw all her friends outgrow her and her human father become an old man. In response her closest friend was her eidolon. The fact that her half blood contrasted with her family's high social status to the point she knew that she knew she wouldn't be accepted as her father's heir forces her to become an adventurer.

But in both cases their race has played a big role in how I play them and is MORE central to their character than it is for other races. When someone describes or plays them as humans with a few special abilities, my reaction is that this is not well thought out.

Basically, it's a missed opportunity. While I can see some reasons why you wouldn't have half races, the idea of them just being variant humans just seems incredibly not well thought out.

So if you dump them, just don't do it for this reason.

If the eidolon was going to be tweaked at all, instead of changing it, I'd rather see new evolutions added, and options for tweaking your eidolons stats a bit. Adding some SLAs and/or supernatural ability options that were keyed to mental statistics and perhaps giving them the ability to tweak their ability scores slightly.

Honestly, allowing you to build one with 3 PB (NPC stats) + a set of modifiers based on form / type would be pretty cool. Doubly so if you could give them some magical abilities.

It feels like you're more upset that eidolons are generally just slobberknockers, when you'd rather have a hovering planar being doing cool ascended stuff like outsiders often do.

Best suggestions of the thread. Particularly the idea of using npc stats.

As for your comments on my attitude, I think I'm frustrated that slobberknockers are the only option with much support from paizo and it's so easy for me to picture all these cool options that should be supported but aren't.

It's very much like the 3.5 sorcerer was lacking flavor and sorcerer specific options (at least for a long time). Then paizo came and turned the sorcerer into God's hot sister with lots of cool bloodlines. Summoners I feel, could use a simular makeover with lots of cool options.

This is different and separate argument from just how much Summoner should be nerfed.