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I feel it has a very strong class flavor/fantasy.
Through ritual or chance you have bound your life to an entity. This magical phenomenon has granted you magic and a connection that has tied your very essences together.
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Character that bond with a powerful creature and fight alongside it. Very common trope to be honest.
Yes, Summoner as a class doesn't have a defined image and set of expectations like a Ranger, Cleric, Bard, Fighter, good Champion, Rogue, Wizard, and several other classes.
However, Summoner also isn't the only one. Witch, Oracle, Sorcerer, and sometimes Druid can also vary widely from one build to another.
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I see it as the opposite. Compared to the other pick-a-list classes, the Summoner has a much stronger identity compared to Sorcerer/Witch. Eidolons have such a strong mechanical weight that it is impossible to mistake a Summoner for being a variation of another class who shares their selected magical tradition.
As for imagery - the difference between Summoner and someone with an animal companion is that the companion is just an add on, while the Eidolon is part of the main focus (and much more capable as a result). While the ranger pet is there to help them do something else (protect the bear from the traveler), the summoner's eidolon is part of the goal (establish/develop relationship with powerful entity).
Character that bond with a powerful creature and fight alongside it. Very common trope to be honest.Druids, rangers, and cavaliers all use companions as well, but the character, bond, and companion are all part of the identity.
If you added witches and wizards (classes with familiars), you would have the full picture.
Animal companions can fight but are not very smart.
Familiars are intelligent but cannot fight effectively.
Eidolons are intelligent (compared to animals) and can fight effectively.
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Summoners are Stand Users, which is a pretty easy poor of reference for anime fans. And their name is more descriptive than, say, fighter. A person who summons things vs a person who... Fights things.
And it's subclass is basically the type of Eidolon, which goes along way towards filling in the basic concept. "You manifest a spirit beast to fight alongside you," or "you call a magical dragon into existence as a constant companion" are extremely flavorful and easy to parse explanations.
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Idk. I think you are seeing the fluff and not wanting it or are dismissing it.
I am so tethered to this being that our life forces ar entertained and an I gained magical powers.
I am a devout worshipepr and fighter for good and I do that by summoning an Angel that fights along side me, protects me, and guides me on my journey.
I made a pact with a demon who constantly tempts me to go to darker and darker places, to fall into sin.
The spirit of my beloved was so devoted to me that they have stuck by me even through death in order to keep me safe.
The bond that transcends just knowing and working together, but being connected on a metaphysical level and how the eidolon might tempt, guide, or empower you is the fluff of the Summoner. And it is a strong identity.
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The difference is... The Eidolon is the strong one in this relationship. That's the core of it. The Summoner is support. Their contribution to the team is that they bring their big, powerful buddy, and keep them happy/bound/repaired/sane/whatever, and then mostly sit off to the side and cheer and assist while their buddy does the work. The Summoner is the little kid in the iron giant, or in a Gamera film. They're the engineer who lets their construct do most of the fighting. When you fight alongside an animal companion, they're helping you. When you fight alongside an Eidolon, you're helping them.
If "get help from my friend" is the *core thing that you do*, then you're a summoner. If you don't like that idea... then you're not.
Summoners are Stand Users, which is a pretty easy poor of reference for anime fans. And their name is more descriptive than, say, fighter. A person who summons things vs a person who... Fights things.
And it's subclass is basically the type of Eidolon, which goes along way towards filling in the basic concept. "You manifest a spirit beast to fight alongside you," or "you call a magical dragon into existence as a constant companion" are extremely flavorful and easy to parse explanations.
There are a lot of good examples in Japanese media; Carl Clover is 1:1 a construct summoner, he's probably an even better example than stand users since he fits the summon being the real danger very well.
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I guess I don't see what's weak there when compared to
Guy who is good at skills
Guy who swings sword
Guy who tracks
Guy who punches
A summoner is a class about its connections, it's identity is *bonds*, *friendships* etc.
You are asking both for it simple but rejecting spellcaster with mystical bond. When we go more
indepth you say that's too complex.
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Witch has arguably one of the strongest images ("witch hats" are even a thing)
Yeah but that doesn't tell you a lot about how the Witch plays.
It seems like what you're describing is just a natural result of the class not having as large of a cultural footprint as the Witch or Ranger more than anything else. I'm not sure that's a great metric for deciding what's a class and what isn't
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Witch has arguably one of the strongest images ("witch hats" are even a thing)Yeah but that doesn't tell you a lot about how the Witch plays.
It seems like what you're describing is just a natural result of the class not having as large of a cultural footprint as the Witch or Ranger more than anything else. I'm not sure that's a great metric for deciding what's a class and what isn't
I have been thinking EXACTLY this. It doesn't correspond to classic D&D class concept as well... But that's the whole point. It is a new unique thing.
When you look at it in the broader cultural lens though, it has a much stronger identity than... Well, most classes, which are very generic.
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A lot of the competition here has a long RPG legacy, so it may be a little unfair to compare. Let's take Cleric or Fighter as a pair of the OG class names.
Somebody imagining a Cleric would likely dream up their local clergyman, perhaps shifted to a medieval setting dressed in a robe, perhaps at a monastery or chapel. Oh, but an adventuring Cleric...so he's on a pilgramage? Maybe it's a pagan orator? Or maybe it's like a mythical prophet? Yet what the class offered was the second best attack chart, hit dice, and armor. That's not in the name at all.
Nearly fifty years later, PF2 calls that a Cleric-Warpriest, the latter a meaningless word in the real world. (Father Mulcahy?)
And Fighter, that's a boxer. Why wasn't/isn't it called Warrior?
I'd say "Summoner" has a leg up on at least those two class names. And as noted, the trope is strong even if the name hasn't established itself yet.
And to represent that trope, what other name would suit better? Give it time and it will develop that innate RPG imagery the others have, much like "Gish", "Dragon Disciple", and other new terms have accumulated weight while Cleric, Fighter, et al have altered their original sense.
(Yes, old uses of Fighter involved weaponry, but in modern parlance it had shifted to unarmed combatants by the time Gygax reclaimed the word.)
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The vagueness of the eidolon and summoner aid in letting the player go wild with concepts, but is also what makes the class concept weak since it lacks presence.
I guess I just don't understand why that's a bad thing. Certain classes, like the fighter and wizard, are really vague about what conceptual space they fill and give the player a lot of latitude.
Other classes, like the swashbuckler or barbarian, tend to be built to enable really specific ideas.
I wouldn't even put the summoner all that far on the former spectrum, because its core ideas are pretty consistent across builds.
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All of those examples are already at a deeper level than I'm talking about with the class concept itself, and the character concept is still not well defined at that point just the eidolon. Any of those characters could just have a summoner archetype.
If the entire class concept is a strong bond between a person and a mystical being then it is a weak concept, because it is intentionally being vague about nearly all aspects of the class.
(Note; I'm using weak here, not bad. I don't think summoner is bad, just that it is a bit unique among the classes to have such a vague concept.)
Okay, if the things we've said already don't count in your mind as sufficient counterargument to what you're saying, then you really need to be clearer here. What do you even *mean* by that? Do you still even mean anything?
Is it just a matter of you personally? Like, you personally don't get a clear image, because it's not resonating with an icon that has pre-existing importance to you? You don't have an image in your head from this? To me, the imagery is pretty clear. You have some big stompy eidolon thing menacing the foe with physical might while the summoner hangs back, casts supporting spells, and cheers them on. The spells used and the shape of the big stompy thing vary, but the images are still largely the same. Other classes have differences too - in some cases rather more severe. The kobold trapmaster ranger is going to be fighting bandits in a very different way than the axe-wielding half-orc with their beast companion, and the elven ranger up in the trees with a bow isn't going to fight like either one. They're all rangers.
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I can think of plenty of examples of what a summoner could look like, but the only similarity between them is that there are two beings. I'm unable to abstract a strong concept of what a summoner is across examples, because the only shared trait is the fact that there are two beings, which isn't a unique concept even in pathfinder.
All of the other classes are mechanical representations of abstract concepts, sure not all rangers fight the same way, and you can subvert the ranger trope, but tropes themselves are the abstractions.
As far as I'm concerned I'm not even sure why the summoner needs to play support, or is a spellcaster (conceptually, mechanically I understand)
Okay, but in some ways this is sounding like a fact about you, rather than a fact about Summoners. You have an idea of default tropes to associated with each of the other classes. Those tropes aren't necessarily any more core to those classes in any real way than any other way of building the classes, but you at least have those tropes to work with, and you don't have that for the summoner.
I mean, for the ranger... which is the trope, and which the subversion? The kobold traplayer, the half-orc who battles alongside his beast, and the elven archer in the woods are all just as ranger as each other to my eyes. The Paladin, the Liberator, and the Desecrator are all Champions. The only thing that gives the Paladin more tropishness is that it showed up in previous editions. Indeed, in *most* of these cases, the tropes that we might think of as being strongly associated with the class were artifacts of "this showed up in a previous edition of D&D" and nothing more.
So... it sounds like what you're basically saying is "The Summoner is new, and we don't have default assumptions for it yet." That's only mostly true (as there was a somewhat similar summoner in PF1) but if so, what of it?
It looks like a summoner to anyone from the outside watching it summon some big powerful creature.
It doesn't play like a summoner from PF1. I think expectations needed to be tempered from the beginning as far as playing like a PF1 summoner.
I wish they would fix summons to be viable in all battles, so you could use summons effectively in Challenge equal up to +2 to do damage equivalent to similar level spells.
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A lot of the competition here has a long RPG legacy, so it may be a little unfair to compare. Let's take Cleric or Fighter as a pair of the OG class names.
Somebody imagining a Cleric would likely dream up their local clergyman, perhaps shifted to a medieval setting dressed in a robe, perhaps at a monastery or chapel. Oh, but an adventuring Cleric...so he's on a pilgramage? Maybe it's a pagan orator? Or maybe it's like a mythical prophet? Yet what the class offered was the second best attack chart, hit dice, and armor. That's not in the name at all.
Nearly fifty years later, PF2 calls that a Cleric-Warpriest, the latter a meaningless word in the real world. (Father Mulcahy?)And Fighter, that's a boxer. Why wasn't/isn't it called Warrior?
I'd say "Summoner" has a leg up on at least those two class names. And as noted, the trope is strong even if the name hasn't established itself yet.
And to represent that trope, what other name would suit better? Give it time and it will develop that innate RPG imagery the others have, much like "Gish", "Dragon Disciple", and other new terms have accumulated weight while Cleric, Fighter, et al have altered their original sense.(Yes, old uses of Fighter involved weaponry, but in modern parlance it had shifted to unarmed combatants by the time Gygax reclaimed the word.)
Summoner is unlikely to get the kind of cultural recognition because of its name I think, at least the pathfinder version of the summoner.
If the summoner were a class that did focus on summoning things (like a conjuration wizard) it might, but since it isn't and "Summoner" is used with some frequency in other games (final fantasy and fire emblem come to mind) to represent that role it will be tough for the pathfinder summoner to establish itself culturally.
Fighter has a bit of a name issue as well I think, although its still called that because of the d&d legacy.
Were I to rename summoner I would go with something like "bonded", which puts the bond...
Except the summoner class is as good or better at summon spells than the conjuration wizard. They have several feats which support the strategy and their pusedo quickened condition let's them bypass the action economy issues most people run into with summon spells. The conjuration wizard gets a good focus spell but the summoner could place that through multiclassing.
As far as pop culture representation goes, there are:
-Stands. You point out that they are manifestations of psychic energy like that is a counter point. The eidolon is just a a spiritual manifestation through the characters life force, which is Stands to a Tee. Heck, you can even have Occult eidolons that have humanoid appearances.
-Fairy Gone. The bonded fairies are exactly eidolons, essentially.
-Jujutsu Kaizen. Megumi's shikigami.
-Spirit animals in real world mythology spring to mind, though that concept has been so butchered by appropriation already I'm a little hesitant to cite it.
-Various comic books have soul projection powers. Raven and Mr. Negative from DC, that dragon guy from Invincible.
-Calvin and Hobbes.
-Digimon
...A lot of the competition here has a long RPG legacy, so it may be a little unfair to compare. Let's take Cleric or Fighter as a pair of the OG class names.
Somebody imagining a Cleric would likely dream up their local clergyman, perhaps shifted to a medieval setting dressed in a robe, perhaps at a monastery or chapel. Oh, but an adventuring Cleric...so he's on a pilgramage? Maybe it's a pagan orator? Or maybe it's like a mythical prophet? Yet what the class offered was the second best attack chart, hit dice, and armor. That's not in the name at all.
Nearly fifty years later, PF2 calls that a Cleric-Warpriest, the latter a meaningless word in the real world. (Father Mulcahy?)And Fighter, that's a boxer. Why wasn't/isn't it called Warrior?
I'd say "Summoner" has a leg up on at least those two class names. And as noted, the trope is strong even if the name hasn't established itself yet.
And to represent that trope, what other name would suit better? Give it time and it will develop that innate RPG imagery the others have, much like "Gish", "Dragon Disciple", and other new terms have accumulated weight while Cleric, Fighter, et al have altered their original sense.(Yes, old uses of Fighter involved weaponry, but in modern parlance it had shifted to unarmed combatants by the time Gygax reclaimed the word.)
Summoner is unlikely to get the kind of cultural recognition because of its name I think, at least the pathfinder version of the summoner.
If the summoner were a class that did focus on summoning things (like a conjuration wizard) it might, but since it isn't and "Summoner" is used with some frequency in other games (final fantasy and fire emblem come to mind) to represent that role it will be tough for the pathfinder summoner to establish itself culturally.
Fighter has a bit of a name issue as well I think, although its still called that because of the d&d legacy.
Were I to rename summoner I would go with something like
Toss in personas and demons from the shin megami tensei series as well!
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...A lot of the competition here has a long RPG legacy, so it may be a little unfair to compare. Let's take Cleric or Fighter as a pair of the OG class names.
Somebody imagining a Cleric would likely dream up their local clergyman, perhaps shifted to a medieval setting dressed in a robe, perhaps at a monastery or chapel. Oh, but an adventuring Cleric...so he's on a pilgramage? Maybe it's a pagan orator? Or maybe it's like a mythical prophet? Yet what the class offered was the second best attack chart, hit dice, and armor. That's not in the name at all.
Nearly fifty years later, PF2 calls that a Cleric-Warpriest, the latter a meaningless word in the real world. (Father Mulcahy?)And Fighter, that's a boxer. Why wasn't/isn't it called Warrior?
I'd say "Summoner" has a leg up on at least those two class names. And as noted, the trope is strong even if the name hasn't established itself yet.
And to represent that trope, what other name would suit better? Give it time and it will develop that innate RPG imagery the others have, much like "Gish", "Dragon Disciple", and other new terms have accumulated weight while Cleric, Fighter, et al have altered their original sense.(Yes, old uses of Fighter involved weaponry, but in modern parlance it had shifted to unarmed combatants by the time Gygax reclaimed the word.)
Summoner is unlikely to get the kind of cultural recognition because of its name I think, at least the pathfinder version of the summoner.
If the summoner were a class that did focus on summoning things (like a conjuration wizard) it might, but since it isn't and "Summoner" is used with some frequency in other games (final fantasy and fire emblem come to mind) to represent that role it will be tough for the pathfinder summoner to establish itself culturally.
Fighter has a bit of a name issue as well I think, although its still called that because of the d&d legacy.
Were I to rename summoner I
I can't believe I forgot Personas.
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As a more concrete example of what I mean by a strong identity:
"A ranger battles a bear to protect a wounded traveller"
"A summoner and their eidolon battle a bandit to protect a merchant"You can imagine the scene of the ranger against the bear, since ranger has a strong class identity (people's imagined rangers may differ a bit, but there will be a lot of similarities), but the same is absolutely not true of the example of the summoner against the bandit.
Eidolon doesn't evoke anything on its own, sure. But that's because it's a stand-in for something more specific.
"A summoner calls an angel to battle a demon and protect a child" is plenty evocative. (Talking about a summoner battling somebody is directly counter to the class identity- they summon something.) "A summoner and their dragon", "a summoner and their demon", "a summoner and their construct", "a summoner and their fairy", "a summoner and their phantom"- all of those give you more of an image. Eventually, we'll get "a summoner and their genie", "a summoner and their devil", and "a summoner and their otherworldly mass of tentacles".
I don't really think of summoner as being vague at all. Then again, my rotted, weeby brain is full of persona, jojo, final fantasy, blue dragon, shaman king and other such properties. I guess it's a matter of different media exposures.
I would say its identify is in part affected by what you've vbeen exposed to in previous history.
For me? It screams the 90s "Puppeteer" characters. Fluffing all their spells, edolon and actual attacks as "puppet string controlled"
As well as influences later on like Persona series.I think for me the one detail that makes it more wishy for me is that they can't stealth due to the tattoo activation. So they can basically can't be full prepped compared to every other character who could predraw weaponry or some such.
Well, you can stealth using the skill just fine, with the possible exception of "it's totally dark, so having any sort of glow gives you away". I get that there are arguments over whether invisibility works given the wording regarding "obfuscating magic", but it's got nothing that stops stealth.
Hmmm... suggests a potentially useful feat - free action to summon your eidolon as long as it's the first action you take after rolling initiative.
A strong identity for a class comes from three possible sources: (1) myths and folklore about the class, (2) solid mechanics that define the class as unique, and (3) a tradition of being played in roleplaying games.
There are a lot of good examples in Japanese media; Carl Clover is 1:1 a construct summoner, he's probably an even better example than stand users since he fits the summon being the real danger very well.Summoners are Stand Users, which is a pretty easy poor of reference for anime fans. And their name is more descriptive than, say, fighter. A person who summons things vs a person who... Fights things.
And it's subclass is basically the type of Eidolon, which goes along way towards filling in the basic concept. "You manifest a spirit beast to fight alongside you," or "you call a magical dragon into existence as a constant companion" are extremely flavorful and easy to parse explanations.
The Japanese shinto religion envisions a world full of spirits with god-like roles. Having a helpful and powerfuls spirit aid a person is part of its folklore and included in many anime stories. We also have some Western superheroes who summon a superpowered servant to aid them. One such Golden Age superhero, Johnny Thunder, could summon a genie. That character was inspired by the 1001 Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin, who could summon genies from a magic lamp and a magic ring. The Christian religion has tales of angels, such as the apocryphal book of Tobit where the angel in human form accompanies and aids a human.
The main distinction between these tales and the tales of heroes with trusty animal companions is that the divine servant was more powerful than the human.
For summoners the only thing that defines them is having a bond to a creature. It doesn't evoke any imagery of what the character is, the eidolon types do start to create an identity for the eidolon (but again we're already diving deeper than the other classes to get an identity), but then this is a class whose identity is entirely defined by the eidolon, the character is just along for the ride.
The folklore often had the human very ordinary. He or she might have been worthy due to piety, but otherwise had no special powers. With a recurring story, such as an anime or comic book, the human would train up to become a useful sidekick to the divine servant, because a helpless dependent is boring. The human often had martial or detective skills while the divine servant had magical abilities.
The PF1 summoner broke that mold. It build upon the spellcasting mechanics already in Pathfinder. They could summon creatures through spells, so the divine servant was modeled as a summons and the human became a spellcaster. This gave the human magical abilties and the eidolon filled the martial role.
Thus, we move into whether the class has an identity through its mechanics.
The PF2 summoner has an additional mechanic that throws a monkey wrench into the folklore: the eidolon and summoner share their actions. The servant is no longer an independent entity helping the mortal. Instead they were conjoined. It was an outgrowth of PF2's method of limited the effectiveness of animal companions: the animal companions and other minions had only two actions per turn and their boss had to spend an action to command them. For the summoner and eidolon, they are treated as equals. Neither commands the other. Thus, Paizo invented a shared-action mechanic for them for balance, with Act Together and other tandem actions to fix some awkwardness.
That is a unique mechanic but it is built around a limitation. Limitations feel lackluster.
Finally, we address whether the summoner has a tradition in roleplaying. Several science-fictional roleplaying games have an engineer with a powerful robotic companion, but the tradition really tapped for the summoner is the wizard from fantasy roleplaying games. Wizards would temporarily summon monsters to serve them. (I used summons more often while playing a cleric, but the ability nevertheless feels wizardly.) The summoner does not rely on arcane study and a spellbook, so the class feels more like a 2nd-rate sorcerer with one good spell and no bloodline.
I have roleplaying experience with only two summoners. In one PF1 campaign, another player had a summoner and his large flying panther eidolon was a killing machine. The GM later said that the player had misunderstood the rules and given his eidolon too many evolutions. The summoner character himself seems as useless as the humans from folklore. The player was essentially playing the eidolon with the summoner as the social face of the eidolon.
My other summoner experience was with my PF2 playtest summoner, Cirieo Thessaddin. I converted an existing ranger NPC's class to summoner and a new player ran him for a few sessions. I built Cirieo like a ranger, with Armor Proficiency general feat to give him light armor and Halfling Weapon Proficiency ancestry feat to give him a few martial weapons. His beast eidolon, Fluffy Goat, was like an animal companion, but with a lot more personality since Fluffy could talk.
Yesterday, I converted Cirieo to the Secrets of Magic summoner rules and raised him to 7th level, because he was back with the party temporarily. Tomorrow I will post the conversion to my playtest thread. Three of his new summoner class feats--Expanded Senses, Alacritous Action, and Magical Understudy--defined Fluffy more than Cirieo. The 4th summoner feat--Steed Form--is about Cirieo, because he is missing a leg and has to ride Fluffy. The ancestry feats, general feats, and skill feats are about Cirieo, since Fluffy does not get them.
In this case, Ganigumo is right. The feats that give the summoner individuality are not from the class. The summoner's ability scores are not from the class, either, except for a boost to Charisma. The summoner is left as a generic spontaneous spellcaster of a tradition defined by the eidolon. Non-class feats and archetypes can define the summoner character more, independently of the summoner class.