Let me start off by saying that I really like the mechanical space of magic that is variable action (1 action to start, second to make ranged) and gives a temporary passive effect and a way to invoke the magic later with more actions for another effect. It is great design space and is incredibly dynamic with PF2’s action economy.
But if runes get class locked into a class ability, few players will get to play with them and we won’t see a ton more support for them later. If “rune” was just a type of spell that had the rune trait, and they worked a little like incarnate spells, with an initial effect that default lasts until the end of the next round, and an invoke ability that cost additional actions, then you could still have a runesmith class that can cast runic spells from any tradition and use class features to do stuff like etch a rune spells to last indefinitely, or use the invoke action for multiple rune spells with one set of actions. This would let this really great mechanical game space be open to way more characters, while still allowing a class to focus on them in a way no one else will be able to. It would also allow for way more runic magic to come into the game later and not be incredibly niche content locked to one class.
There can be runic cantrips to cover the “unlimited use” angle, and the rune smith could be a traditionless wave caster that can’t cast any non runic spells to still get a more martial chassis.
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Disagree. I prefer the runesmith as a martial. Make it a spellcaster and I'm less interested in the class. Sometimes you just don't want to have to worry about resources like spell slots, you know?
How often has a later mechanic been added to the game that interacts with "spells" as a category? Are we anticipating another one after Mythic?
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It's not too late to delete this.
A rune smith knows 4 runes to start. If most of the level 1 runes were balanced to be cantrips, and the rune affecting runes were spell slot spells with day long durations, the class wouldn’t operate like a caster at all.
Things runes have that would be a bad match for cantrips:
- The etching vs. tracing distinction. It's good to have runes that last all day, cantrips don't do that and it would be awkward to bold on "these cantrips can last all day, but you can only have so many of them active at once."
- three different ways to "cast" runes. You have etching that takes 10 minutes, tracing that takes 1-2 actions.
- Two different effects based on usage, with the the second one potentially happening hours after the etching of the rune.
It would be more work to make spells cover this sort of thing instead of creating a new kind of thing. Like there's no need to make cantrips as a class of things more complicated so as to avoid isolating the complexity in a new class.
Like the premise of a Runesmith class is "there exists magic so durable you don't need to be the slightest bit magical in order to make it work, for example, weapon and armor runes. Who comes up with this stuff and what other things are possible within this paradigm" and that doesn't really come across if you are simply bad at casting traditional magic.
The etching process can be a runesmith class feature only. Other casters would only be able to trace, and folks have been clamoring for variable action cantrips forever.
Making new spells that do the same thing as the runes but keeping the runes separate feels like a good way never to get new runes.
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Making new spells that do the same thing as the runes but keeping the runes separate feels like a good way never to get new runes.
Classes generally don't get support after launch anyway. I imagine no matter what they do we're going to get approximately as many new runes as Barbarian instincts, Sorcerer bloodlines, Inventor innovations, or Gunslinger Ways- maybe one or two if they're extremely relevant to the topic matter of an AP or something.
"Classes don't get specific support post-release" is more or less the way PF2 works.
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Kind of guy who only plays spellcaster and alchemists who thinks Paizo regularly provides new class options to everyone.
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Hard pass.
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If you switched this class to one that used spells, you would be killing the entire reason I enjoy it.
I do not want them to be a caster,I want then to use class DC
I do not want them to be squashed into uninteresting turns that magus ended up with.
We need some other solution.
If Runesmith is to be a Caster then by the gods on Golarion make Kineticist one also but because the gods didn't make it a Caster neither should Runesmith, end of discussion, period.
I don’t disagree that kineticist abilities should have just been called spells, even if they work exactly the same way they do know. Working magic is casting spells and I am perfectly fine with many different ways for magic and spell casting to work.
What I see in the runesmith though is a class that is trying to be a Gish, but the way invocations work, pure short range blasting is a stronger build and the framework for runes would work really well for much more dynamic spell casting.
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It was important to me that the Kineticist was not a spellcaster.
It is likewise important to me that the Runesmith is not a spellcaster.
There is no need for whatever book these classes are coming in to have two spellcasters.
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See, I like the idea of condensing runes and spells, but more the other way round: this isn't for 2e, but in a future edition that had room for lots of systemic changes, I'd love to see current spells implemented instead as feats, which would make them easier to share across classes. If we wanted a slot-based caster, it wouldn't be too difficult in my opinion to enable a structure that'd allow turning those at-will feats into limited-use effects with varying levels of power.
On-topic: I think the implementation of runes would make it very difficult to apply a spellcaster framework onto the Runesmith, and right now I wouldn't really want to either. The basic loop of Tracing, then Invoking runes I don't think would work as well with cantrips without some significant rejigging, and the problem of integrating slot spells is that you could easily run into problems similar to the Magus and their ability to combine a Strike and a top-rank spell into one big burst. Looking at the class's 20th-level feat that lets you copy a spell's effect into a rune, if the top range of runes that can be used is about equivalent to a 4th-rank spell, that would mean even a bounded caster framework wouldn't map on smoothly. In a game where everything was just feats and there was a unified structure to begin with, perhaps this integration would be easier, but that's not what we have, and I'm glad the Runesmith works in their own space.