Ryan Marshall's page

Question for any devs: My reading is that the damage from the feat Bear Hug is specifically damage that is equivalent a characters natural unarmed attack damage and not the damage of something they are wielding that can be used to make an unarmed attack. Is this correct? The case I'm envisioning here being a Vanguard's shield being used as an unarmed attack, which is then used to deliver Entropic Strike.

Got my pdf, still waiting on physical book. So far, really impressed with how much the psychic has been reworked/refined from the playtest, and the effort put into the rest of the book really shows, with great art and great story. The only bit of rule weirdness is the rule for what is essentially the pyro/cryokinetic 'school', as you have to bounce between fire and cold damage/resistance every ability, and it overwrites the damage type. We're gonna need some errata or FAQ here, because it leads to questions with both one of their cantrips (it gives resistance to both fire and cold), and one of the school spells (As written, you get Resistance to Cold and Weakness to Cold from the spell). Overall though, does a much better job of being the 'cantrip based spellcaster' class.

The layout of the book overall is kind of weird, but I don't hate it. It starts with the classes, then each chapter is based around a theme, so you have character options mixed with DM stuff for each chapter. It's going to make finding stuff for reference a bit more difficult, but it makes the book a lot more interesting to read cover to cover, as well as for a DM looking for ideas.

There is an optional variant that gives immunity instead of the +1 bonuses but that is GM opt in.

I missed that, where was it?

And I agree that its powerful, but I thought all the content in that section was considered 'Rare', thus required GM permission inherently.

That said, as written, they should probably consider adding in some language to the monster dedications that give them immunity to specific conditions that would make no sense for them to be subject to, like stating Ghouls are immune to Ghoul Fever.

So, unless I'm missing something, reading the rules as written, a character with the Ghoul Archetype can catch, and die of, Ghoul Fever. They can also technically catch any disease from a corpse they eat. And a Skeleton can be poisoned.

I get that the decision was made for balance sake, but I just cannot get on board with the decision that Undead characters don't get poison and disease immunity. Its immersion breaking to me, honestly.

I like the monster archetypes concept, and think they'll work great on many other monsters, but I don't think it really works with undead if this was the balance trade off.

If we're going outside the box here, like way outside the box, I think the 2x spells issue could be fixed by having the feats grant a menu of amps for their standard spells in addition to cantrips. I'm talking like an amp that lets you make any mental spell have an enemy treat a successful save as a failure, and a failure as a critical failure, recover a spell slot for a single target spell that failed to affect the creature, maybe add a spell from your repertoire to your signature list for the fight, things like that. You can balance this pretty effectively by placing amps at the right feat levels, setting spell level caps specific amps can affect, or having some of them require additional actions.

I get that the big flashing red danger sign with this kind of openness is future-proofing, but if you look at what people like most about the class conceptually, it's the Amps. Amps really feel like the core of what they want in 2nd ed: more choices, less rote attack patterns, so extend it to the whole class.

Not whats on Page 59? Cause I feel like things escalated quickly on that table.