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The antics continue with Zanzeti, the "let's see what I can do with a jack-of-all-trades" build medium (male human medium; The Demon's Lantern primary; 14/14/12/13/10/16 for stats). He's comfortable jumping into melee with a heavy mace or longspear, but his prefered tactic involves trickery; he packs a solid low-teens Bluff bonus and does a very solid job with other social skills. In a meta sense, Zanzeti hopes that he can be an effective non-melee contributer in combat. I'm hoping to keep
It sounds like there was some trouble in Ustalav, so the Society told Zanzeti to take a break from that rascally Emerald Spire and go take care of things. He joined a kitsune fighter 2/rogue 3 (feint and slash specialist), a human aerokineticist 3, a kitsune bard 4, a human gunslinger 3, and an aasimar paladin 3. Outclassed by the kitsunes' level advantage and raw Charisma focus, Zanzeti found himself taking the back seat on a lot of the social scenes, with the exception of a pretty good bluff that I had going before I accidentally gave away too much information.
As you know may know, the scenario involves a bit of everything: investigation, combat, social, and a chase. The generalist medium was okay at all of it but rarely shined at any of it. Trancing to channel The Cricket provided a slight advantage during the chase at the cost of my first turn, which ultimately turned out to be an even trade of minor bonuses vs. action economy.
I still find myself longing for The Demon Lantern to have some form of "provoking" ability or debuff irritating enough to warrant attacking it. Providing flanking (perhaps with a scaling bonus similar to that of The Unicorn based on the spirit bonus) or causing illuminated creatures (in the 10-ft. radius) to suffer penalties on attacks/skills would be great. I hope that the penalty scales somewhat with level to keep the threat viable, as even though flanking is lovely, the bonus part of it becomes less relevant to non-rogues the higher one's level is. In this adventure, I don't believe I summoned the Fool's Lantern even once.
This playtest also reinforced my concerns about the medium not having enough going on before 4th level, for despite being able to go toe-to-toe with things and hit occassionally, I don't feel I'm actively using my class features during combat (passively, sure). As this was a PFS game, I was not able to use the Beseech ability. I'm really excited about hitting level 4, but until then I sometimes feel like that character build that just doesn't function until level 2-5-ish when I might pick up that key feat or ability (e.g. Dervish Dancer on a scimitar magus or Precise Shot on many ranged builds).
Trance is going to get a bit more exciting as I go up in levels, but right now I rarely use it. While wielding an evil Dexterity spirit, I find myself wanting to combine my powers with those of non-evil, non-Dexterity spirits. Moreover, getting a static spirit bonus while trancing is not as exciting to me as getting new powers, so I'm limited to choosing another Dexterity spirit if I want something other than a bonus to saves or attack rolls. Combining abilities is what gets my curiosity and excitement fired up. Part of me hopes that there might be some way to elect to take powers rather than spirit bonuses when getting additional spirits not tied to the same ability score.
Overall, this game didn't do a lot to highlight the medium's abilities. Ah well, there's always the next time (that same weekend, actually, when Zanzeti did much better).
getting a static spirit bonus while trancing is not as exciting to me as getting new powers, so I'm limited to choosing another Dexterity spirit if I want something other than a bonus to saves or attack rolls.
Actually, when you trance a non-active spirit, you get the lesser spirit power either way. And no unlocks this time.