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I can see both sides of Int or Cha. Using a force of will and…spirit (Cha) to control and call forth spirits/undead works perfectly for me, as does long hours of study, reading, rereading, memorising and interpreting musty fungus covered tomes in dank ossuaries and mental gymnastics (Int) required to do same. Anyone decrying that they are absolutely sure that necromancy “is definitely all about study” is as unfortunate as anyone railing that necromancy is all about “awesome force of will being spirits to their power”.
Many of these instances of quests for power and urges to control can be provided for both ways - those that seek to gain knowledge to gain power, and those that seek to bend others will to their own to…gain power. It’s more a innate tension between just what Intelligence and Charisma are - in terms of where does one end and the other begin. Emotional Intelligence. Social Awareness. Locations on certain spectrums.
Apart from all that, it does seem as though it might be better for Necromancers to be Int based given the unfortunate relation between Int and Skills.
As for Dirge: Not sure why people think “dirge” is some odd, uncommon word, but I totally understand it being used here. I can totally get the long quiescent mumblings in the ancient arhythmic tongueless tongue of the abdead or whatever. It’s a little…forced, but I have to admit it totally fits the theme. And I really like the absence of a spellbook. Spellbooks are very twee, and the less said about them the better. For sure, a Necromancer could have had a grimoire, or tome or whatever else, but a memorised litany or connection to a songtrain bubbling below the surface of their febrile mind is perfectly sufficient. And while I’m sure dirges *have* been written down, when I think of a dirge I think of a sad haunting droney dirgey song for the dead, not its written form.
Honestly I really like how the dirge is a bit vague, gives me a lot of wiggle room for how to interpret it. For example for my Necromancer I had it be the notes for the song that played during Urgathoa's last party carved onto her heart that changed her heartbeat into an eerie echo of that melody and lent her necromantic power.
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Dirge is just an internally memorized spellbook.
While I'd be fine with an ancient tome, or tablet or Book of the Dead or whatever, I feel Intelligence is a fine choice for the Necromancer.
Honestly I feel like PF2e could do with divorcing spell mechanics from the class chassis entirely and let players choose whether they are a Studied/Prepared, Repertoire/Spontaneous, Full List/Prepared caster along with what the key ability (Int, Wis, Cha) is.
But that might be just a little too much for some people potentially, especially newer players.
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Honestly I feel like PF2e could do with divorcing spell mechanics from the class chassis entirely and let players choose whether they are a Studied/Prepared, Repertoire/Spontaneous, Full List/Prepared caster along with what the key ability (Int, Wis, Cha) is.
But that might be just a little too much for some people potentially, especially newer players.
I tend to disagree, I don't think the design approach they take to creating classes could absorb that many choices (and so narrative tools) being taken out of the designer's hands.
A lot of us (or maybe just me) tend to think of classes as a sack of mechanics that you can apply narrative on top of. But Sayre, for one, explicitly said he takes the exact opposite approach; he starts narrative concept first and then picks out the basic structure that supports that.
And for casters, there's really not a heck of lot of structure to tinker with, since so much of the chassis is taken up by spells. Key Stat, Casting Style, List Access, and Tradition are the biggest tools in the designer's kit to flesh out their concept and differentiate classes from each other.
I LOATHE that sidebar, and this is why. All the stuff they talk about there, like "Arcane spell casters use logic and rationality..." and so on, they're really describing these 4 tools, which they decide on a class by class basis, not tradition based.
In the case of the necromancer, which is an Int, Prepared, Studious, Occult caster, each of those choices was picked to come together as a specific story the designer is telling.
Int - Approaches magic in a logical, inquisitive fashion. Or, to put it less charitably, their approach to magic is to meticulously dive into random rabbit holes all day and then write up (with citations, that's important) what they figure out. Lends itself to the Studious approach.
Prepared - Their magic is a carefully constructed artifice based (in theory) on their needs of the day. They strategically devise what magic they will cast every day, and hope they guessed correctly. If they don't, they hopefully have a chance tomorrow to iterate better.
Studious - Lends itself to Int, because the magic of these casters is based on the experiences and experiments of the individual caster, not just the full sum of whatever is out there.
Occult - Here we get into the specific rabbit holes our caster prefer to delve. Since we've discussed the traditions in other threads, let's just plug those conversations into here.
Taken as a whole, they describe a spell caster that meticulously experiments with and otherwise studies void energy, as well as the things it effects (namely undead).
If those tools are taken out of the developer's hands and given to the player, I think that would make it a lot harder for a designer to translate their concept into a mechanical class.
If those tools are taken out of the developer's hands and given to the player, I think that would make it a lot harder for a designer to translate their concept into a mechanical class.
I mean they could just do it the other way around. The developer creates their vision and then we add some flexibility onto it at the end.
I really dislike the argument that this is somehow a zero sum game though, that by letting players be more flexible with their character creation we've somehow stolen something from the developers. IDK why you'd want to construct such an antagonistic relationship here.
I also just don't think the premise is real. The witch started out with "it can never be divine" and ended up "of course it has divine options" and its core concept didn't suddenly disintegrate as a result. In fact it didn't really change anything at all, other than open up some new options for people.
I really dislike the argument that this is somehow a zero sum game though, that by letting players be more flexible with their character creation we've somehow stolen something from the developers. IDK why you'd want to construct such an antagonistic relationship here.
I apologize for using the word "taken" there. I meant "moved." I didn't mean to imply an antagonistic relationship. Just, if one person was making a decision, and then it is changed so that another person is making a decision, then that first person is obviously no longer using that decision to shape what the class looks like. Or, more accurately, they are, but as in the case of witches or sorcerers, or cleric doctrines or the expansion of Champion alignments as we headed into PF2, granting that versatility is as much a decision as narrowing it to 1 or a few options.
Further edit: I didn't even intend to imply either way if what Dude-meister suggested was a good suggestion or a bad one. There's been cases like the champion's alignment where opening up what was once a set choice was clearly for the better. And I definitely would like if we got class archetypes that did exactly what he's saying, and even allow more fundamental chassis choices. That's what the archetype and class archetype system is for, after all.
I just don't think it will happen, in that way at the initial class level, for all caster classes.
But in the end, I didn't mean to start a fight, so I'll drop this here before I give further offense. Again, I apologize for my word choice.
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For starters, I really don't see what AnimatedPaper wrote here that could've been even remotely construed as antagonistic or inflammatory, but I also do think there is a sliding scale here: the entire point of PF2e's classes having limitations on what they can do is that those limitations drive sharper identities. The Witch might be fine because of the class's ambiguous power source, but if the Druid were to become a choose-your-own-tradition spellcaster, that would come at the expense of their identity. If the Wizard had the choice between being a prepared or spontaneous spellcaster, or between using Int or Charisma as their spellcasting attribute, that would similarly diminish their own identity as an intellectual caster class that plans ahead every day. We can pine for a system where character customization is this totally freeform space with no limitations, but that system isn't 2e, and there are undoubtedly benefits to defining classes under certain limitations even if that does limit certain players' ability to enact their very specific character fantasy. I therefore do think AnimatedPaper is correct to say that some of the specificities of the Necromancer as implemented in the playtest are valid to have, and drive a sharper identity than if the developers had also decided to enable a spontaneous, force-of-will necromancer alongside the student of the dark arts that we received.