Know Direction Podcast featuring Jason Bulmahn - Notes

[Stephen Radney-MacFarland]

RJGrady wrote:

Well, a hunter is a person in your neighborhood, a person that you meet each day.

We live in the Pacific Northwest. In some neighborhoods, the same can be said for "druid." And I've know a number of clerics, monks, and even rogues in my time. Some of them even gamed. :)

[ecw1701]

Do we know where the updated playtest document will show up when it's out? Another Paizo Blog post, I assume?

Spell Fury or Sanguine Fury would get the idea of a bloodrager across, but might be too flowery for the concept.

[Xaratherus]

I have to echo the person who mentioned writing for a World of Warcraft blog: I have no problem with Hunter.

Honestly, they could call the classes Bob, Jill, and Franklin as far as I care; if I dislike the name of a class, I just change it at my table anyway. :P

[Zombie Ninja]

I like conqueror, even if it doesn't describe what a bloodrager does, so I'll just call myself a conqueror when I play one.

[Virgil Firecask]

I think we're looking at Bloodrager from the wrong viewpoint. Everything is based on their "bloodline"... They inherited these abilities. We could go for a name angle more along the lines of "Scion"

[Aelfborn]

Tels wrote:

The point is, there was an overwhelming ridiculousness in 3.5 that, in order to play an effective character, you needed to multiclass in the extreme.

1. Effective character is, often, relative to the group and style. I have run games up to level 12 and had gone fine. No body min-maxed or multiclassed and everyone played nice. A lot of other people have run higher level games without problems (I don't run past level 12, because I have never liked those levels in any edition). This is not to say the potential for problems and/or abuse are not there just that requirements are often not absolute, but dependent on the people at the table.

2. As others have said, the big 4 spellcasters don't multiclass to be effective.

[Rynjin]

Virgil Firecask wrote:

I think we're looking at Bloodrager from the wrong viewpoint. Everything is based on their "bloodline"... They inherited these abilities. We could go for a name angle more along the lines of "Scion"

I thought about this a few times over the last few days but then I figured I'd not mention it because then we'd have introduced cars into a mostly medieval setting all willy-nilly.

[Virgil Firecask]

Rynjin wrote:

Virgil Firecask wrote:

I think we're looking at Bloodrager from the wrong viewpoint. Everything is based on their "bloodline"... They inherited these abilities. We could go for a name angle more along the lines of "Scion"

I thought about this a few times over the last few days but then I figured I'd not mention it because then we'd have introduced cars into a mostly medieval setting all willy-nilly.

Yeah, because there aren't any cars named "Pathfinder" ...

[RJGrady]

Oy. And I was just going to point out that Scion is a homophone of psion.

[Ernest Mueller]

On the naming... The best classes are ones that hit an iconic note (witch! cavalier!). So with that in mind, I think the most obvious for Warpriest is Crusader. Sure, it's a cleric archetype already, but that ship already sailed with these class names anyway. You can try to go with something like Templar which was just a specific subtype of crusading knight but that gets a little too specific and real-world.

Similarly on the Bloodrager - just call it Berserker, done, ship it. Sure, normally if we were to develop a berserker class from scratch it would look more like the barbarian - but that's called the barbarian. And the shape-changing/taking on animal attributes is part of the berserker legend.

IMO it's better to pick an iconic niche and say "here's our mechanical definition of that which might be different than you would have done it" than to pick made-up names. Everyone can get what an alchemist, witch, cavalier, etc. is. Inquisitor - not really mechanically on point for the name, it's more of a monster hunter class, but screw it, "Inquisitor" is a good name and niche. Do the same thing here.