Meta memory dragons are awesome, and a fantastic way to bring the concept to the class without requiring some significant shenanigans to result in the binding of proper dragons (which are typically powerful, independent, and most of all arrogant and not prone to being bound).
It lets you have a dragon pet class without compromising the nature of the typical DND dragon, which generally isn't really similar to a lot of the sorts of 'a person and their dragon' stories that inspire the whole dragon pet type dealio.
***********
My favorite narrative 'feature' in the class is the setup for enabling 'pick a list' spellcasting. When 2E launched, I wasn't super sold on Demons getting shoved into the Divine list, because traditionally they had a lot of abilities and effects that in todays spell lists would probably count as 'Occult'.
That said, it makes sense in relation to the setting and the Divine list has grown on me. It also means that if you look at Healing and Harm as just another form of life manipulation going two ways, they end up with some good ability to transfer soul stuff around anyway.
But now, I'm psyched to build different kinds of Summoners other than just my hypothetical never get to play it demon summoners. I can build a dragon summoner who (in addition to having a dramatically different pet from a angel summoner) casts and plays massively differently as well, due to the wildly different spell access. Heck, I can build two massively different Dragon Summoners because I love both the idea of the arcanist dragon summoner running around with his brainy sidekick Science Dragon, and the Dragon-Knight Champion Build that rides into battle and is a terrible PITA to attack.
I've got all sorts of ideas I'd like to do tied to the various spell lists, and the fact that they're tied to the different types of eidolons has me spinning out all sorts of narratives for different summoners.
Its inspirational gold.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It's a small thing but the shared hit points really does seem to undercut a little bit of the concept of the Devotion phantom. For example when I read Devotion strike I saw it as ability for a devoted phantom to protect its summoner.
But then I remember that if the summoner is hurt so is the ediolon so actually it's a ability to protect a devoted phantoms self.
Dead serious suggestion - call this out in your survey, and suggest adjusting the ability in question to resolve this.
For example, its a phantom - "If Devotion Strike deals damage, you heal damage equal to your Charisma modifier as the Phantom recover a portion of your life force."
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
So this is entirely subjective but I feel the coolest thing in the Summoner Playtest is the description of the Dragon Eidolon.
So Dragon Eidiolons are the echoes of powerful Draconic memories trapped in the Astral Sea.
I find this cool for a couple of reasons first it rather neatly frames the Dragon Eidolon as something like an emergent AI. An intelligence born out of a sea of random data, a wonderful unintentional creature born through serendipity.
Secondly this potential sets up some interesting concepts of pre-determination, nature vs nurture because the eidolon isn't the Dragon whose memories it was born off, but there is a bond that could play out in a number of interesting way.
So there it is my favorite thing in the playtest document whats your favorite thing in the playtest document and do you agree with me the meta memory dragons are awesome.
Random trivia: the basic idea for this dates back to the Astral Tear of the Lonely Wyrm, a PF1 wondrous item I submitted to my first RPG Superstar with similar flavor (though it was just after the APG came out and summoners weren't in the zeitgeist yet, a similar item made Top 32 the next year). The original Astral Tear was from the lonely last platinum dragon, as they were wiped out as mentioned in Dragons Revisited, though I know that book has been retconned in a lot of ways since then.
I like that it's open to making a good range of ideas. My dragon Eidolon is a Dragon who became one with the land and entered her final rest. Millions of years later she's brought back, missing much of her memory and tied to a summoner who she has, perhaps artificial, positive feelings for. I like the idea of exploring that sort of memory and time loss.