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Ok, I was looking at the medium. At first I was pretty underwhelmed. I mean sure it can switch roles daily. But how often does that really come up. If your group has no face character, you're going to need a face character most of the time. A lot of things will make a better face than a medium if you are doing it all the time. If you don't have knowledge specialist, then you need a knowledge specialist most of the time. Etc...
But then I thought of PFS. I'm sure you've all set the table full of players with some glaring lack of capability. I was at one just last weekend. We had plenty of melee capability, decent ranged functionality, plenty of healing. But we had almost zero skill ranks in any knowledge skills, spellcraft, sense motive, etc... And they were coming up a lot. Made some parts of it pretty difficult.
In comes my theoretical medium. He could have functioned for those knowledge skills. The week before he could have been the face character, when the best we had was a PC with a charisma of 14 but no ranks. Last month when we had all casters but no martial capability, he could have been that meat shield.
No he won't be nearly as good as the sage for those knowledge skills, the bard for face time, or the barbarian for melee work - but I think it could be quite good enough to serve for a scenario.
No, I would never suggest it to a neophyte player. However, for us experienced players it seems almost perfectly designed for PFS play. Admittedly, I haven't tried it yet, so I could be wrong. But I plan to start at least one in the very near future.
Thoughts, comments, questions?
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I looked at it, and I just don't see it working. The class is just too underwhelming at anything other than champion spirit as a martial build. I really want to like this class, because I love the concept, but the execution is terrible.
That said, 2 of my 3 occult characters are mediums. One is an unchained rogue with a single level dip in medium, to always channel the champion and add those spirit and seance bonuses to two weapon fighting. The other is a grippli with the Fiend Keeper archetype from Blood of the Beasts, because I just couldn't resist. He also only channels the champion spirit and focuses on combat, but with some social skills, UMD, etc.
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I basically second Fromper's take. In theory the medium could be amazing... however, the implementation doesn't really let it do what it needs to do.
One of the challenges with building a flexible medium vs. a flexible something else is the amount of time it takes to change to another spirit. Say you need to open a lock and nobody has disable device. Traditionally, you have three options. You can have a prepared (arcane?) spellcaster spend a minute to prepare a spell that opens the lock directly, or provides the capability to open the lock. You can sunder the lock and whatever thing the lock is built into. Or third, you can go around it.
Medium, as a fourth option, lets you... come back tomorrow? It is essentially worse than all of the options you already had.
Opening a lock is not a perfect example, but it is a pretty good proxy for "any task you didn't know you needed to perform at the start of the scenario." A medium gets one shot at guessing right each morning, and if you guess wrong, you have to try again tomorrow. In PFS, you almost never have the opportunity to try again tomorrow.
I have two mediums. Both are Champion channelers. They're actually pretty good at that! But the theoretical flexibility they provide is a promise as-of-yet undelivered in practice.
I have two PFS mediums, and I'm loving both; one usually switches between Champion, Marshal, and Trickster spirits (with a good 75% of his play experience so far being in Champion or Marshal spirit) and a Spirit Dancer medium who has the advantage of being able to swap into a healer role for a few rounds to heal an NPC or into an skill monkey role to get a few "rogue-like" skills. The problem with the Spirit Dancer is that you're limited to rounds of channeling, but the plus side is with only a minute between spirit swaps. Since you're limited to rounds of channeling, be sure to build a fairly competent character without the spirit bonuses!
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One of the challenges with building a flexible medium vs. a flexible something else is the amount of time it takes to change to another spirit. Say you need to open a lock and nobody has disable device. Traditionally, you have three options. You can have a prepared (arcane?) spellcaster spend a minute to prepare a spell that opens the lock directly, or provides the capability to open the lock. You can sunder the lock and whatever thing the lock is built into. Or third, you can go around it.Medium, as a fourth option, lets you... come back tomorrow? It is essentially worse than all of the options you already had.
Opening a lock is not a perfect example, but it is a pretty good proxy for "any task you didn't know you needed to perform at the start of the scenario." A medium gets one shot at guessing right each morning, and if you guess wrong, you have to try again tomorrow. In PFS, you almost never have the opportunity to try again tomorrow.
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There are some scenarios that go over multiple game days, but I get what you are saying, most do not. I guess my thought is to look at the party makeup at the start of the scenario rather than wait until a particular ability is needed.
We don't have a scout with disable device? Well then I will channel the trickster for today.We don't have anyone with offensive magics? Well then I will channel the archmage on this mission.
Etc...
I know it is not always true, but usually you can look around the table and tell right away, "Hmm... We're likely going to have trouble with X today."
Anyway, I think I will give it a try and see how it goes.
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One of the challenges with building a flexible medium vs. a flexible something else is the amount of time it takes to change to another spirit. Say you need to open a lock and nobody has disable device. Traditionally, you have three options. You can have a prepared (arcane?) spellcaster spend a minute to prepare a spell that opens the lock directly, or provides the capability to open the lock. You can sunder the lock and whatever thing the lock is built into. Or third, you can go around it.Medium, as a fourth option, lets you... come back tomorrow? It is essentially worse than all of the options you already had.
Opening a lock is not a perfect example, but it is a pretty good proxy for "any task you didn't know you needed to perform at the start of the scenario." A medium gets one shot at guessing right each morning, and if you guess wrong, you have to try again tomorrow. In PFS, you almost never have the opportunity to try again tomorrow.
...There are some scenarios that go over multiple game days, but I get what you are saying, most do not. I guess my thought is to look at the party makeup at the start of the scenario rather than wait until a particular ability is needed.
We don't have a scout with disable device? Well then I will channel the trickster for today.
We don't have anyone with offensive magics? Well then I will channel the archmage on this mission.
Etc...I know it is not always true, but usually you can look around the table and tell right away, "Hmm... We're likely going to have trouble with X today."
Anyway, I think I will give it a try and see how it goes.
I know what you mean and wish you luck! To quote a webcomic, "We try things. Sometimes they even work."
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After throwing together a test build for the Spirit Dancer, it seems surprisingly capable. Hierophant on one round to cast a buff, maybe Trickster on one round just to have monster identification skills, Arcmage when you need to deal with swarms, and Champion as your workhorse.
My only concern is that I'm a little confused on where you need to be to channel your spirit(s) at the start of the day.
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Ok, I was looking at the medium. At first I was pretty underwhelmed. I mean sure it can switch roles daily. But how often does that really come up. If your group has no face character, you're going to need a face character most of the time. A lot of things will make a better face than a medium if you are doing it all the time. If you don't have knowledge specialist, then you need a knowledge specialist most of the time. Etc...
But then I thought of PFS. I'm sure you've all set the table full of players with some glaring lack of capability. I was at one just last weekend. We had plenty of melee capability, decent ranged functionality, plenty of healing. But we had almost zero skill ranks in any knowledge skills, spellcraft, sense motive, etc... And they were coming up a lot. Made some parts of it pretty difficult.
In comes my theoretical medium. He could have functioned for those knowledge skills. The week before he could have been the face character, when the best we had was a PC with a charisma of 14 but no ranks. Last month when we had all casters but no martial capability, he could have been that meat shield.
No he won't be nearly as good as the sage for those knowledge skills, the bard for face time, or the barbarian for melee work - but I think it could be quite good enough to serve for a scenario.
No, I would never suggest it to a neophyte player. However, for us experienced players it seems almost perfectly designed for PFS play. Admittedly, I haven't tried it yet, so I could be wrong. But I plan to start at least one in the very near future.
Thoughts, comments, questions?
I love the idea of the medium for PFS. The class seems designed with PFS in mind. That said, PFS really needs some tweaks if Mediums are to be allowed to be functional in PFS.
For example, I'm told that abilities gained via channeled spirits don't qualify for feat prerequisites. So if you go with a heirophant, you can't take any channel prerequisite feats, like the almost mandatory Selective Channel feat. So you'd have to multi-class into a class with channel, in order to get selective channel on your medium (which defeats the whole point).
Honestly, seems like a multiple-multi-class character that just uses scrolls and wands, is more practical for PFS than the medium. Sad to me, since I think this is one of the better class concepts for PFS play that Paizo has ever produced - the PFS rules just aren't very compatible with this concept.
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I have a spirit dancer medium I use in PFS, primarily for PbP. It's fun, I really enjoy the theme of the class, and the versatility to change roles at the start of a fight has let me really help my party in a tight pinch.
It really adds to the versatile feel of the medium, but you do lose any out of combat benefit could you could bring from say, rolling as the trickster all day to be the trap monkey. Burning a round to heal the party, or 1d4 for a particular trap can be worth it, but even with the huge pool of dance rounds from accepting influence, you only have so much.
I think the spirit dancer would maintain a lot more viability if it got the ability to switch between spirits every round at level 8 or 10 instead of 18, where it will get almost no use.
Or you could take the Spirit Ridden feat to gain miximum ranks in any skill (in addition to treating it as a class skill) for one hour per character level after a one hour seabce -- of course, any character who wants to can take that feat.
Channel Spirit could give you longer access to a single spirit than a Spirit Dancer normally gets, but of course PFS bans taking options that cause you to deliberately lose control of your character.
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Ok, I was looking at the medium. At first I was pretty underwhelmed. I mean sure it can switch roles daily. But how often does that really come up. If your group has no face character, you're going to need a face character most of the time. A lot of things will make a better face than a medium if you are doing it all the time. If you don't have knowledge specialist, then you need a knowledge specialist most of the time. Etc...
But then I thought of PFS. I'm sure you've all set the table full of players with some glaring lack of capability. I was at one just last weekend. We had plenty of melee capability, decent ranged functionality, plenty of healing. But we had almost zero skill ranks in any knowledge skills, spellcraft, sense motive, etc... And they were coming up a lot. Made some parts of it pretty difficult.
In comes my theoretical medium. He could have functioned for those knowledge skills. The week before he could have been the face character, when the best we had was a PC with a charisma of 14 but no ranks. Last month when we had all casters but no martial capability, he could have been that meat shield.
No he won't be nearly as good as the sage for those knowledge skills, the bard for face time, or the barbarian for melee work - but I think it could be quite good enough to serve for a scenario.
No, I would never suggest it to a neophyte player. However, for us experienced players it seems almost perfectly designed for PFS play. Admittedly, I haven't tried it yet, so I could be wrong. But I plan to start at least one in the very near future.
Thoughts, comments, questions?
I love the idea of the medium for PFS. The class seems designed with PFS in mind. That said, PFS really needs some tweaks if Mediums are to be allowed to be functional in PFS.
For example, I'm told that abilities gained via channeled spirits don't qualify for feat prerequisites. So if you go with a heirophant, you can't take any channel prerequisite feats, like the almost...
The legendary influence feat from ultimate intrigue might work.
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It really adds to the versatile feel of the medium, but you do lose any out of combat benefit could you could bring from say, rolling as the trickster all day to be the trap monkey. Burning a round to heal the party, or 1d4 for a particular trap can be worth it, but even with the huge pool of dance rounds from accepting influence, you only have so much.
That's why I figure it's best formonster related Knowledges. If you've only got a few rounds, out of combat skills are too dicey.
Channel Spirit could give you longer access to a single spirit than a Spirit Dancer normally gets, but of course PFS bans taking options that cause you to deliberately lose control of your character.
*insert joke about low Will save classes here*
While I expected this from the Medium, it still makes me sad.