| Saph7 |
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Okay, finally had the chance to look over the Path of War classes for a campaign I'm going to be running. Here's my (very brief) feedback - note that I haven't had the chance to fully read every bit of the files.
Good Stuff
• First off, I'm happy that you're doing a ToB adaption at all. It was one of my favourite 3.5 books and I'd love to be able to use it in Pathfinder.
• Maneuvers and stances look good – I think the basic balance point for damage, effects, etc is in the right place, and many of them look very fun. Some do need a little bit of toning down (Banish to the Beyond is an obvious one) but this is fine-tuning stuff.
• I like the variety in the new disciplines. All look like they'd be fun to try out, and I can't see any obvious turkeys.
Critiques
• Classes feel too pigeonholed. One of the nice things about the Warblade, Swordsage, and Crusader were how flexible they were – since they were defined primarily by their maneuvers, you could build them in more or less any way you like. Warder, Stalker, and Warlord have class features which shoehorn them a bit too heavily into a 'role'.
Example: The first thing I tried to do was to build a Warblade-esque battlefield character who just revolves around directly attacking enemies with maneuvers. Should be easy, right? Well, Warder doesn't fit – that's all about defending allies with aegis and armiger's mark. Don't want that. And Warlord's got a whole bunch of teamwork-related things - don't want that either. Which only leaves the Stalker . . . which is a 3/4 BAB class with lots of skills. That wasn't what I wanted. Already I'm getting dissatisfied – it shouldn't be this difficult to do a concept that basic. Why are two out of the three classes designed around teamwork effects? Teamwork effects are great as an option, but not if they're mandatory. I'd prefer more flexible class features that would fit a variety of concepts. Is there some way to trade away stuff like Aegis, Armiger's Mark, Tactical Flanker, etc for something more generic?
• WAY too many small conditional stacking bonuses. It adds complexity for no real benefit. Obvious example – Warder's Aegis. +1 to CMD, AC, and Will to allies within 10 feet. So now every member of my party has to keep track of exactly how many feet they are away from me before they know what their defensive stats are. Oh, and it only works if they can see/hear me, so they have to check that too. But it doesn't work on me, despite the fact that I'm my own ally. And then the numbers change level by level, and the radius also changes level by level, so as the characters level up the players will have to relearn what the modifiers are . . . gah! That is WAY too much work just to figure out your armour class! Yes, I know 3.5/PF already uses small conditional bonuses, but this is one of the well-known problems with the system. Don't make it worse!
Anyway, that was the major stuff that came to mind.