As it came up in another thread, I realized today: Mesmerizing Gaze, an 8th level Feat from the Psychic Playtest that clearly evoked the 1e Mesmerist class, didn't end up making it into Dark Archive! I spent so much time with the playtest that I missed its absence in the final release.
There was some fretting about Mesmerizing Gaze during the playtest, but I don't know that I've seen much talk about it not making the cut, or indeed about a 2e Mesmerist class at all. I came in as a new fan with 2e, for the most part - do folks think it has legs as a full class in this edition? Would you be upset with a more robust Class Archetype for the Psychic that imitated its abilities and flavor? Did the Mesmerist even have 1e fans?
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I think a class archetype would work better honestly.
On the one hand, a lot of people get skeeved out with mind control stuff, rightfully so, and on the other, it's a very niche set of abilities and thematics, similar to mounted combat not fitting in a lot of times.
I only saw it played once, I believe, and a lot of archetypes and support released for it felt like it was for NPCs more than player use.
I think a class archetype would work better honestly.
On the one hand, a lot of people get skeeved out with mind control stuff, rightfully so, and on the other, it's a very niche set of abilities and thematics, similar to mounted combat not fitting in a lot of times.
I only saw it played once, I believe, and a lot of archetypes and support released for it felt like it was for NPCs more than player use.
The 1e Archetype that let your eyeballs fly out of your head seemed fun.
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The 1e Archetype that let your eyeballs fly out of your head seemed fun.I think a class archetype would work better honestly.
On the one hand, a lot of people get skeeved out with mind control stuff, rightfully so, and on the other, it's a very niche set of abilities and thematics, similar to mounted combat not fitting in a lot of times.
I only saw it played once, I believe, and a lot of archetypes and support released for it felt like it was for NPCs more than player use.
I had forgotten about that, let the Fleshwarp Ancestry steal it XD
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If you're interested, there's also the Legendary Games version by Luigi Lizza. I think it was really impressive.
(I did an early read on the product, so have a small credit in it. Luigi did all the writing and IMO knocked it out of the park as a conversion from the 1e version.)
I'd agree that it's probably more an archetype than a full class, just based on the breadth remaining to it, but I don't think it needs to be a class archetype. Like, I'm not seeing anything that you couldn't just build out of feats?
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like what people want from the mesmerist is more about the flavor, and wanting some satisfying crunch that evokes the flavor, rather than being necessarily tied heavily to any particular crunch effects. It also seems like the sort of thing you could have as a side gig... which archetypes are basically perfect for. Why shouldn't your Rogue be allowed to hypnotize people? Or your Tyrant? Or your Witch?
Now, it might be a while in coming, because the obvious book to put such an archetype in would have been Dark Archives itself, but archetypes can fit in a lot of places, you know? They put those things in APs sometimes.
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Captivator does plenty of what mesmerist would do, honestly.
Agreed. Could use another feat to cover Touch Healing, but otherwise that’s solid.
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A lot of the iconic stuff (Charm, Suggestion, Dominate) has the Incapacitation trait, meaning Captivator is pretty bad at it. Unless a new Mesmerist has a way to improve on Incapacitation or gets extra top-level slots, it's going to be worse at its shtick than Enchanter Wizard or any occult/arcane Sorcerer getting an extra top level slot. I think Psychic lost the playtest feat partly for space and partly because it's particularly bad at filling the Mesmerist's role.
It was definitely one of my favorite PF1 classes (in part thanks to Reflexive Trick). A lot of what the class was doing was making a 6/9 caster charm/compel as effectively as a full caster, with automatic debuffs helping offset the difference in DCs and various stare improvements to affect immune creatures giving them a niche that other enchantment builds didn't have. Tricks provided a lot of illusion and enchantment shenanigans.
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Anything short of an optional rule set that unshackles directive effects that impose the will of the caster on the target from the Incap Trait and softens the restrictions of what you can force others to do against their will is 100% going to fail to do ANYTHING to meaningfully bring the concept of the Mesmerist back in any appreciable way.
Overriding free will without multiple layers of protections and safeguards creates some quite sticky ethical quandaries that I do NOT think Paizo wants to come within an ICBMs reach of touching, for PCs and NPCs alike as it tramples all over the subject of consent and self determination that is core to the safe RPG experience they want to create.
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Anything short of an optional rule set that unshackles directive effects that impose the will of the caster on the target from the Incap Trait and softens the restrictions of what you can force others to do against their will is 100% going to fail to do ANYTHING to meaningfully bring the concept of the Mesmerist back in any appreciable way.
Overriding free will without multiple layers of protections and safeguards creates some quite sticky ethical quandaries that I do NOT think Paizo wants to come within an ICBMs reach of touching, for PCs and NPCs alike as it tramples all over the subject of consent and self determination that is core to the safe RPG experience they want to create.
That, to me, sounds like the sort of issue that can be solved with a Rare tag, and perhaps a warning comment or two to make sure that people understand the implications. "This is not for most people. Be sure you want this before you enable it." largely handles that kind of problem.
The bigger issue is that Save Or Lose/Save or Suck spells are costed quite a bit higher in PF2, for obvious reasons. (All you have to do is look at how utterly dominant they were in 3.x and PF1.) If the concept of the mesmerist is that of someone who can take control of higher-level creatures with even marginal consistency, then that concept is in and of itself unbalanced in the current space. Before we can have a mesmerist that fits the underlying fantasy, we need an underlying fantasy for them that won't just break the game.
So... what does a non-gamebreaking mesmerist even look like? Would those who want a mesmerist be satisfied with the kind of compromises that would require?
I'm starting to be concerned that even if it is implementable, it's going to wind up being an archetype's worth of flavor that's needs a class's worth of build points to make viable. That's not a particularly good place to be.
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I think the Incapacitation rule is the way it is for a reason, and the Mesmerist wasn't all about mind control anyway. If you wanted to bring forth the Mesmerist to 2e, I think the thing to do would be to design it as an anti-bard- where the bard buffs the party, the Mesmerist debuffs the opposition.
People love Inspire Courage, so they'd also love handing out a -1 status penalty to attack rolls, damage, and saves to the enemies.
I don't really think a Mesmerist should bypass the upper limits of of the Incapacitation trait (hitting creatures at your level or sometimes one level higher). That's a pretty clear balance line of the system. But what I do think it needs is a solid pool of relevant slots. Wizards and Sorcerers bring three slots to the table when it's level + 1, and four when it's at-level.
If Psychic treated every slot as one higher for Incapacitation, to a max of their max spell level, they'd have the same 3 or 4 relevant slots. Or, you could give a class two auto-heightening Charm spells every day on a regular casting chassis.
Mesmerist disregarding the boss is a problem, but they shouldn't just be worse than a Wizard when it comes to influencing on-level enemies.
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I mean... I don't see how Rare solves it in any way... otherwise, they could have just made Slave companions/minions Rare and brushed the ethical concerns under the rug because it would involve GM/Group consent which was absolutely not how it was handled when that subject was addressed due to community feedback.
In many ways, a magical/forceful takeover of another person's free will is FAR more problematic the forced labor/slavery given that there is absolutely no out for those thusly enchanted to do the bidding of another whereas compulsion via threats of violence involves a choice made to either submit or suffer consequences knowingly... in short, I can't fathom any universe where this concept is anything but a giant red flagged industrial size can of worms that represents the kind of thing this publisher is doing everything possible to avoid.
For the record: I'm not saying that I don't think there is no proper or acceptable place for this in RPGs but simply expressing that including this as part of their printed/published rules is antithetical to the direction the company has chosen to take their RPG.
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In many ways, a magical/forceful takeover of another person's free will is FAR more problematic the forced labor/slavery given that there is absolutely no out for those thusly enchanted to do the bidding of another whereas compulsion via threats of violence involves a choice made to either submit or suffer consequences knowingly... in short, I can't fathom any universe where this concept is anything but a giant red flagged industrial size can of worms that represents the kind of thing this publisher is doing everything possible to avoid.
The fundamental difference here is that there is not, in our real world, a sizeable population of people who were, historically, oppressed via mind control. We also don't have, in the real world, any established groups of people who suggest that the world would be a better place if mind control were still being used (by them and people like them) as a tool of oppression (of said previously oppressed group), or who use references to mind control as a deliberate method of harassing those from aforementioned historically oppressed groups. We do not have current-day cases of mind control being used to exploit people for unpaid prostitution. Our world has a lot of ugly past (and at least a bit of ugly present) around slavery that just doesn't exist around mind control, because mind control of that variety isn't real.
Also, mind control is, for the most part, a lot more temporary.
...but I don't really need to make those arguments to prove you wrong. There's a far simpler method. Dominate is a level 6 arcane/occult spell. Your assertions here about what Paizo is and is not willing to do are simply incorrect.
First, my apologies for the double-post. I am responding after some thought to a post that I did not see until after posting my previous.
In the case of Mesmerist people are talking as if the only thing it did was mind control and charm person when it fact it could:
* Apply debuffs on enemies as a Gaze attack, Bon Mot without language component.
* Apply single use buff on allies that could be triggered as a reaction.
* Excellent bluffs and feints.
* Target more creatures with Enchantment/Illusion.
* Affect things that are normally immune to enchantment/illusion.
* Make enemies take bonus damage when hit while hypnotized.And all of that is just the base class without considering what the tricks they can implant are, what penalties their gaze attacks give, any feats that modify their stare attack, any feats that modify how their tricks work, or any of the abilities from the 21 archetypes that were previously available for that class.
Okay. So it sounds like what we're looking at is a class that's mostly about debuffing, some buffing, and mind control. In particular, the debuff and mind control combo winds up working pretty well together for coherent effects. When your'e facing off against larger numbers of weaker creatures, then debuffing them individually is kind of a waste, but mind control can be very effective. When you're against smaller numbers of more powerful creatures, then incapacitation rules are going to cut off access to your mind control powers, but debuffing is far more useful... and buffs are, as always, evergreen.
From the sounds of things, I'm thinking that this would be a wave caster occult class with a heavy helping of focus spells, focus cantrips, and inherent abilities, on a generally caster-like chassis... and, yeah, this would be its own class.
I do see a few potential issues with the class, though.
- It's kind of hard to fit incapacitation-tier mind control into anything other than a spell slot or a focus spell. If that's meant to be your default answer to "lots of little things", then as a wave caster, you're going to run out of that kind of juice fairly quickly. Alternately... it might be interesting to have away built into the class to apply certain debuffs in a multitarget way, but where doing so would apply penalties to the attack and/or give them incapacitation.
- By nature, they're *really* dependent on mind-affecting effects. Yeah, the original got around this by declaring that its tricks worked anyway, but it can be kind of hard to justify that, sometimes.
- Damage is a bit of a trick. I suppose that as a wave caster, they'd always have TK Projectile, but it's bothersome that their default damage-dealer should be out-of-theme. At the same time, i have a hard time justifying anything other than psychic dmamage as being in-theme.
Side thought: I have an image in my head, of a sort of mental grapple. You have to assault their will in order to get a grasp on them, and you have to keep putting in effort to do it every turn. They can spend actions to try to escape. It limits both what you can do and what they can do, and if you manage to crit on the will-war, you not only maintain your grip, you can also spend one of their actions that round as you see fit. Something like that. I'm sure it would be a mess to balance, but I see the space that branches off of it, and I think that somewhere in there is something that could wind up really cool.
Possibly some rule where you could ignore the incapacitation flag on certain spells if you already had advantage in a will-war over the target. Of course, getting that kind of advantage against a target powerful enough to make incapacitation a problem would be its own issue.
I must ask because I am honestly confused at this point, why the heck do people keep minimizing what old classes used to do and to then say "oh that class doesn't have enough space for a full class"? Of course is not going to have space when you describe a very diverse class with a very simple premise by its lowest common denominator.
Its like saying fighter should just be an archetype because all it does is fight and monk is good at fighting. The logic doesn't track.
For me personally, it comes out of not knowing anything about these classes other than what people are telling me in the threads. I have essentially no experience with PF1. I've also spent this life's ration of enthusiasm for 3.x, so I'm not feeling particularly inclined to go back and learn. Thus, I'm mostly riffing off of what other folks are saying.
I think it's also... well, you seem to be really into the exact bits of what previous classes did. You seem to want those specific classes back again, and when they show up changed, that makes you unhappy. For most of us, even those who did know the old classes, it's not like that. Instead of "I want this specific class", it's "These are the things from this class that I crave and cannot get." 3.x classes tended to have lots of little bits and bobs on them, and most folks don't care about most of those. So when you take only the parts that they care about, sometimes it is limited enough to fit easily into an archetype... and we don't want to bloat it back out to a class unnecessarily because the throughput for classes is limited, and should be spent judiciously. By my read, we're not going to see nearly as many classes in PF2 as we did in PF1. That means striving for a degree of efficiency.
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Enchantment magic is definitely something that makes me uncomfortable, so much so that my own efforts towards game design have focused mostly on asking the question "how can we design a world where it was impossible to accomplish one's goals by forcing your will over someone." I take this issue very seriously at my table and in general discussions about game design.
My problem with hating on enchantment magic in a system like PF2, beyond just talking about how uncomfortable the idea of it makes me, is that, in this game system, it barely operates any differently than social skills do in actual practice. Yeah, at higher levels there are spells that can completely remove the concept of agency in very problematic ways beyond what can be done instantly with skills, and maybe it is the "instantness" of it that makes it extra creepy for some folks, but getting people to do what they don't want to do is a very big part of many adventures' encounter design, which is a problematic part of our hobby that has a certain creepiness just baked into it.
When an adventure hook is "there is a young child picking up the weapon of their dead guardian to rush head long into a situation where they will get themselves killed," why do we look at convincing the child not to pursue this course of action with an intimidation check, or a diplomacy check or a deception check differently than casting a low level charm spell on them to accomplish the same thing? The whole idea of NPCs having attitudes that can be manipulated by characters based upon die rolls already bakes a lot of potential creepiness into the game that doesn't hinge on this manipulation being magical.
I think there is this weird space in RPGS where talking someone into doing something they really don't want to do is succeeding at a skill challenge, but magicking them into doing it is crossing a line, and I don't think that is being looked at critically enough.
This is a massively larger issue than whether to bring the mesmerist back as a class or how, but I think there is a certain disingenuity to pretending like the issue is just in the magic, and not in the nature of having a game system where most NPCs are only going to really get motivations after the PCs begin interacting with them, so the NPCs desires and goals only exist in relationship to those of the players. I guess the magic makes these issue vastly more transparent and could turn people off from the game itself? In that regard, I think the class space of the Mesmerist might just be too close to enabling a play style that can bring down the whole game. "I am the master manipulator of people, regardless of their will," is incredibly creepy design space, whether it is leaning on magic or skill mechanics to get there.
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I could see it going either way.
Theres a lot of classes I'd like to play with a "with mind tricks!" archetype, and there's certainly an audience for such an option. Rogue, Swashbuckler and Thaumaturge all look like they'd be really fun with a mesmerist style debuffing gaze and sneaky combat tricks.
That said, by making it a seperate class, the devs would be able to dive a lot deeper into their abilities. In 1e, I liked the flavor of the class, but the execution left me wanting when compared to the bard as a combat capable support class with mind magic. With how 2e's math works, I can very much see room for a mesmerist to thrive if they take a Thaumaturge-esque approach to making the class; where it's built using a martial chassis, but has mystical abilities. Mesmerist Gaze could be a really cool debuff action that inflicts conditions on the target, and maybe even provide bonuses to influence skills on the target to give it in and out of combat utility; tricks could be fun reactions and actions, etc. You wouldn't get full mind control (or at least mind control with good saves) from this approach, but the class was more about tricking and manipulating the mind rather than dominating it anyways (although it could do that via spells).
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The whole idea of NPCs having attitudes that can be manipulated by characters based upon die rolls already bakes a lot of potential creepiness into the game that doesn't hinge on this manipulation being magical.
I feel like once you start heading into "all forms of communication are inherently manipulative" territory, you're entering a very misanthropic space and all you can really do at that point is board yourself up in your room. There might be some strictly technical argument that that's true, but it's ultimately a very negative and toxic perspective.
For the record: I'm not saying that I don't think there is no proper or acceptable place for this in RPGs but simply expressing that including this as part of their printed/published rules is antithetical to the direction the company has chosen to take their RPG.
I mean, charm and dominate are literally spells that exist in 2e? Enchantment wizards and occult spellcasters are things that already exist.
Besides, as others have said, that wasn't really the core of the mesmerist anyways. The mesmerist was a mixed character (partial spellcasting and decent BAB) who specialized in applying debuffs to enemies with a pseudo-sneak attack like ability.
In practice, it was sort of one-part swashbuckler or rogue and one-part anti-bard, with innate debuffs instead of buffs. In PF2 it'd probably be a low-damage occult wave caster that gets some innate debuffing power. Nothing outlandish or taboo, but not something you can comfortably make in game either.
Whether or not it's likely to be a class is another question entirely, but both the arguments that there's nothing there and that it crosses some thematic rubicon are kinda off base.
The whole idea of NPCs having attitudes that can be manipulated by characters based upon die rolls already bakes a lot of potential creepiness into the game that doesn't hinge on this manipulation being magical.I feel like once you start heading into "all forms of communication are inherently manipulative" territory, you're entering a very misanthropic space and all you can really do at that point is board yourself up in your room. There might be some strictly technical argument that that's true, but it's ultimately a very negative and toxic perspective.
For the record: I'm not saying that I don't think there is no proper or acceptable place for this in RPGs but simply expressing that including this as part of their printed/published rules is antithetical to the direction the company has chosen to take their RPG.I mean, charm and dominate are literally spells that exist in 2e? Enchantment wizards and occult spellcasters are things that already exist.
Besides, as others have said, that wasn't really the core of the mesmerist anyways. The mesmerist was a mixed character (partial spellcasting and decent BAB) who specialized in applying debuffs to enemies with a pseudo-sneak attack like ability.
In practice, it was sort of one-part swashbuckler or rogue and one-part anti-bard, with innate debuffs instead of buffs. In PF2 it'd probably be a low-damage occult wave caster that gets some innate debuffing power. Nothing outlandish or taboo, but not something you can comfortably make in game either.
Whether or not it's likely to be a class is another question entirely, but both the arguments that there's nothing there and that it crosses some thematic rubicon are kinda off base.
The point isn’t whether communication can be manipulative. The point is whether the ability to manipulate the motives and desires of NPCs should be seen as design space worth dedicating a whole class to, because that was the core narrative of the mesmerize class.
The larger issue is certainly larger than the scope of a class and more focused on NPCs generally not having strong enough motivations and purpose in the game for GMs to really decide what being friendly towards PCs means and what is crossing lines of behavior for them, whether that is magical or not. Generally, Paizo does a pretty good job of creating ecologies and webs of interconnection for NPCs with their adventure writing, so that even guards and undead creatures have motivation that GMs can work with in their stories. But RPGs generally have a bad track record with exploring the power fantasy of characters who are so super powerful that they essentially become gods, and few people want to have fun watching one of five other players test out what that can mean.
Again, I don’t think the magic really makes this problem any worse than the general mechanics, but it probably makes the issue more transparent for some players.
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But, again, that's not the core of the mesmerist class. Their core mechanic was debuffing will saves, dealing precision damage, penalizing attack rolls, curing conditions on allies. None of these things are really that provocative.
And underdeveloped NPCs, or overwrought power fantasies is more of a table thing than anything to do with any class, or system for that matter.
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Those are the mechanics, not the narrative of the class. The narrative of the class was very creepy.
Experts at charm and deceit, mesmerists compel others to heed their words and bend to their will. Psychic powers, primarily those of enchantment and illusion, give mesmerists the tools they need to manipulate others—usually for their own personal gain. The very gaze of a mesmerist can hypnotize someone into following his whims. Mesmerists frequently form cults of personality around themselves, and they develop skills and contingency plans in case their ploys are discovered.
Narrative design space is important to take into consideration when asking if a class is a good idea.
Well, the whole Occult Adventures book was supposed to be creepy. I imagine some of those trappings won't survive the edition switch. Like there was stuff about Kineticists being empowered through trauma in OA that is almost certainly not making it into Rage of the Elements.
I don’t fundamentally object to mesmerists in PF2, but a lawful good Mesmerist doesn’t seem feasible if the class comes back with features like consummate liar (which did just become its own skill feat). Some alignment/anathema restrictions seem justified for a class defined by believing other people’s minds are (at best) tools to be manipulated and controlled.
I can also understand why that wouldn’t be high up on the list of material to being back into Golarion as quickly as possible. I think there was a conscious effort not to push the dark archive too far down the “evils that people do to each other” and maintaining more of a cosmic horror focus.
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Hm. Was P.T. Barnum creepy? After all, he was "an expert at charm and deceit".
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Hm. Was P.T. Barnum creepy? After all, he was "an expert at charm and deceit".
At the age of 64, mere months after his first wife died, he married a daughter of one of his friends who was 40 years his junior. He did not bother to attend his first wife's funeral. So... at least a little creepy.
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Some alignment/anathema restrictions seem justified for a class defined by believing other people’s minds are (at best) tools to be manipulated and controlled.
Sure, definitely worse than a class defined by hacking people while raging, or another one defined by stabbing people in the right spot.
Most classes can be painted evil.|
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P.T. Barnum was absolutely an exploitative, racist, ableist, xenophobic capitalist that very much belonged to the time in which he lived and by nearly every modern standard yardstick we have to measure the ethics and morality of the man he'd be considered an absolute monster of a human being.
I would not lump that last "ist" in with the rest. Capitalism is not the evil that the socialists have been trying to convince us for the last century that it is.
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I would not lump that last "ist" in with the rest. Capitalism is not the evil that the socialists have been trying to convince us for the last century that it is.
It kills hundreds of thousands of people yearly and is threatening to take most of the species on the planet down with us, but that's a little beyond the scope of an elf game forum.
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Not going to argue with you here, keftiu, though I do not agree with you.
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Well hope you agree at least that its at least behind lot of modern toxic corporate mentalities, such as "Everything has to be more efficient, workers have to do more work for less pay, less breaks, use work time efficiently, replace them with automation whenever possible"
The attempt to optimize profit vs cost to max is one of things that is causing more and more workers to burn out.
(Fly Free or Die! is pretty much about corporate screwing employers, but not sure if it addressed that topic)
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Please keep it relevant to the game or suggest another forum to take such discussions to. We don't need politics on this one.
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This entire conversation is getting a little heated over largely tangential issues. However, reading the class description of the Mesmerist, it is pretty clear that “psychotherapist” medical doctor looking to help others recover from traumatic experiences was not the cornerstone original source material for the class.
Yes enchantment magic is already part of the game and several classes, magical and no magical already have subclasses with narratives and mechanics centered around deceiving and manipulating others (scoundrel rogue and enchanter wizard, for example), but we don’t have a whole class just dedicated to the concept yet, and there could be good reasons for hesitancy in embracing that as a full class identity on the part of developers and the branding that Paizo is looking for with PF2 right now.
Personally, I think it could have a place down the line, but it might not, and that doesn’t seem like too big of a loss. It is not like playable classes are necessary for NPCs to exist in world and it is not like “force your will over others” character is not already mechanical and narrative space you can build a character into now if that is what you, your GM and your table want. Making a full class dedicated to the thematic space of manipulating others is something with a lot of potential for backlash. I do think it could be done well, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy to do so and it is probably more complicated than other fun classes that are waiting to get developed. In another darker themed book, and with possibly an uncommon or even rare tag to encourage important conversations as a table before someone builds into it, I think it could work, but I don’t know how worth it it is to dive down that rabbit hole yet.
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a lawful good Mesmerist doesn’t seem feasible if the class comes back with features like consummate liar
In a genre where good undead are acceptable and summoning demons is routine?
I think the various groups out there are capable of working it out ourselves. Like they do with everything else.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I don't think a LG mesmerist who is a consummate liar is a contradiction in any way. You can have someone who is so talented at prevarication, equivocation, and obfuscation that they are able to spin tales where the literal meaning is absolutely one hundred percent truthful but are so misleading that almost nobody is going to be able to parse the literal meaning without close examination. Then you use this skill for good.
Like I used to roleplay Paladins like this all the time.
I don't think a LG mesmerist who is a consummate liar is a contradiction in any way. You can have someone who is so talented at prevarication, equivocation, and obfuscation that they are able to spin tales where the literal meaning is absolutely one hundred percent truthful but are so misleading that almost nobody is going to be able to parse the literal meaning without close examination. Then you use this skill for good.
Like I used to roleplay Paladins like this all the time.
I could easily imagine a LG Mesmerist working as a heroic spy.
Experts at charm and deceit, mesmerists compel others to heed their words and bend to their will. Psychic powers, primarily those of enchantment and illusion, give mesmerists the tools they need to manipulate others—usually for their own personal gain. The very gaze of a mesmerist can hypnotize someone into following his whims. Mesmerists frequently form cults of personality around themselves, and they develop skills and contingency plans in case their ploys are discovered.
There is more questionable behavior in the class narrative here than just a little dishonesty. The core narrative of the class is manipulating others and forcing your will over them. Releasing this class with no concern for the alignment implications of manipulating others is asking for problems PF2 does not need.
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No, it's begging the question.
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Manipulating people isn't a priori more ethically compromised than hitting them with axes.
Maybe I am totally wrong, but I strongly suspect that there are more players who are going to feel creeped out by having a player in the party that is manipulating NPCs regularly to get what they want, than there are players objecting to the use of violent force in the game. Also, players generally have a pretty good idea that many encounters are written to presume a violent resolution. Players who have reasons to be uncomfortable with depictions of violence would be well advised to talk to their friends about wether PF2 is the right game for them, or at least whether any of the published material is a good fit for their group.
Players who have reasons to be uncomfortable with depictions of emotional manipulation and violations of consent might not be expecting a table top RPG to push mind control and loss of personal autonomy to the “now it’s a playable class!” level.
I can understand where you are coming from Squiggit in being comfortable and even interested in having games that explore this space and the ethical questions around avoiding violence by removing agency. But the removal of other’s agency is a very sensitive topic for a whole lot of people and making a class out of it is inviting a lot more of it into the game, including into PFS and online games with strangers. I play fairly often with people I don’t know and probably about 90% of the time that a player starts casting a charm spell, I see, or directly hear at least one player get nervous or uncomfortable when the spell is getting cast, and have seen players storm out in frustration when other players express discomfort when they feel like that player is really trying to manipulate an NPC into something that doesn’t feel authentic to the purpose of that character.
This is an issue that is very commonly tied to gender dynamics at the table that have uncomfortable real life consequences for people as well. Like seriously, in 25 years of gaming, this has happened a lot at tables I have seen. “19+4! That means I score!” Is not yet some unimaginable player attitude, I don’t think. (A reference to an old D&D inspired cartoon that often talked about toxic player behavior).
The Mesmerist as a playable class with “cool, fun mechanics to play with” has a lot of potential to invite behavior that PF2 really doesn’t need or want if it is not handled carefully.
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Players who have reasons to be uncomfortable with depictions of emotional manipulation and violations of consent might not be expecting a table top RPG to push mind control and loss of personal autonomy to the “now it’s a playable class!” level.
I just think that for all intents and purposes, this is already true.
I can understand where you are coming from Squiggit in being comfortable and even interested in having games that explore this space and the ethical questions around avoiding violence by removing agency.
I actually generally don't like this topic either. Maybe in a very particular context with a group one trusts a lot, but even if social comfort and anxiety aren't issues, mechanics like that can be problematic just from a pacing perspective, which is generally why spells that enable this tend to be incapacitation spells.
Where we differ is that I genuinely do not see this to be a particularly important aspect of the class. Bards, Wizards, Psychics, occult Witches and Sorcerers, all generally hit this design space hard enough already, and would do it better than any non-fullcasting version of the hypothetical mesmerist.
From seeing the class in play, people were drawn to the mesmerist because they wanted a sort of debuffing swashbuckler or anti-bard. It played more like a support martial than anything else, applying conditions to enemies and sometimes removing them from allies, while dealing some moderate damage in the process.
The flavor blurb is not great, but what the class actually represented in play was both fairly interesting and not particularly egregious (I'm sure someone has a build on hand of a mesmerist going all in on mind control but, again, that's just generally not how I saw it ever played and that's not where many of its basic mechanics lead).
As for whether the class gets into PF2, I don't really know. Probably not? It wasn't popular, hasn't been in high-demand post release, and I'm not sure 'debuff specialist' is really something they want a class to lean into outside some novel options like rogue debilitations or dirge of doom.
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I think more of an issue of "some of the 1e Mesmerist's flavor isn't great" is that I'm not sure there's enough of a thematic space covered here to justify a whole class. Like I think you could probably do Mesmerist as Class Archetype+Muse for a Bard for just specializing in prevarication and debuffing.
A bard class archetype would cover debuffing, but you'd lose some of the more martial stuff, which imo was a big part of what set its identity apart from just being an enchantment wizard or psychic.
TBH I think a rogue that could get more mileage out of debilitations and pick up some magical options would probably feel closer.
That or it could be some component of an occult martial wave caster, which is a design space that feels missing to me.