9 months ago, I decided to run Shattered Star for my group when our Rise of the Runelords campaign ended - which was last week. As the guy who pulled the group together originally and DMed the first game, I was excited to get back to it. Having recently toyed around with creating a base class of my own (the Huntsman - which turned out decent, but still needs work), I put the word out to my group that if anyone wanted to create a custom class, I would help them with it and most likely be willing to let them play it. Well one guy took me up on the offer, and this is the result.
He suggested the idea of making a spell caster based on the Wheel of Time series who utilized "Wild Magic", I was intrigued. There is nothing like it in the Pathfinder game; what a challenge! Less than a week later, he had completed the first draft of what he had in mind and it was FANTASTIC. The concept exploded with flavor, but as you'll see from reading the .pdf file, the explosions don't end with the flavor!
From there, we formatted the class to appear similar to that which you would find in any of Pathfinder's other Core Rulebooks and massaged the mechanics a bit. The goal was to make the class explosive enough to warrant what we wanted it's reputation to be (as powerful as they are unstable) without making it unplayable or so dangerous that even adventurers would shun them immediately.
After a few more iterations of adding flavor, massaging mechanics, and redoing the formatting, we finally got to a class that we could playtest. After 4 playtests (levels 4, 6, 8, and 12) and improvements after each, the class practically fell together. While it is by no means complete, it is ready for it's grand debut!
.
The class seems to be in a good place - it's very flavorful and should line up fairly well with a wizard in regards to capabilities and power. If anything, I think it may be a bit behind a wizard - What the class gets (spell like abilities, ability to recall spells) does not seem to fully make up for what it gives up (wizard's specialization school option, bonus feats, two spell schools it completely cannot access). Ultimately, I feel like the class is a more flavorful, but less powerful wizard. Of course, when I say flavorful, what I really mean is that it has the potential to either (A) go barking mad, (B) blow itself and a small city district to hell, or (C) go barking mad, THEN blow itself and a small city district to hell.
Straight forward - I welcome any and all comments.
Analyzing.
So far I have issue with some of the quirks. Some of them seem really odd like Conspiracy Theorist giving you a penalty to sense motive. If you generally mistrust people that should make it harder for people to lie to you not easier I feel.
So far looks cool though. I loved reading the Wheel of Time.
Minor typo on Unbound Knowledge, change "Staring" to "Starting"
Analyzing.
So far I have issue with some of the quirks. Some of them seem really odd like Conspiracy Theorist giving you a penalty to sense motive. If you generally mistrust people that should make it harder for people to lie to you not easier I feel.
So far looks cool though. I loved reading the Wheel of Time.
Minor typo on Unbound Knowledge, change "Staring" to "Starting"
I fixed the typo.
As for conspiracy theorist giving you a penalty to sense motive, it's not that it makes it easier for people to lie to you, it makes it harder for you to tell when people are lying or not. Try convincing a conspiracy theorist of something they don't already believe in/understand - it's not easy. This is what the penalty is trying to emulate, and it will (obviously) be up to the DM to roleplay that out.
Also, it seems that having one landscape page at the bottom of the file is causing my viewer to really muck up the .pdf file for me. (The whole thing appears landscaped, but page breaks are sometimes in the right place, meaning you only see half of a page sometimes.) I'll try to fix it. In the mean time, if this happens to anyone else, either download the .pdf or go into the print preview as that fixes the issue for me.
I don't read the Wheel of Time series but I rather like a lot of this class's mechanics. I worry that it might actually be more powerful than a standard wizard (at least one who is not specifically focused on gaming the familiar rules). Spell overload seems almost like free metamagic and overcast really increases the class's versatility. It is almost arcanist-like or some half step away from wizard towards arcanist with resource pool and all (which is not so bad, but one of the arcanist's limiting factors is its very low number of readied spells; however, this class's readied spells will increase with its intelligence).
Then again, I am not entirely sure if it is unbalanced. This class essentially has one fewer spell at every level (no school spell), suffers greater penalties for casting forbidden schools, and has all of its extra abilities keying to the same resource pool (where a wizard's school abilities have many resource pools generally).
MechE_ asked me to do a review of this, so let's see...
Transmutation's madness power is pretty easy to game. Just find a way to do 1 non-lethal a turn to yourself, and free +1 caster level.
If I am level 12 and use greater spell overload to cast magic missile, do I cast it at CL 14, or as a 3rd level spell?