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If I might speculate, the fact that they won't yet tell us the title of the book these classes will be in, unlike the playtests for Battlecry or War of Immortals or Dark Archive etc. suggests that the title of the book itself is some sort of spoiler to a metaplot event.
The fact that "Impossible" is in the title suggests that whatever happens will take place in the "Impossible Lands", which is where Nex and Geb are. Since the playtest document does say the unannounced book "will push the possibilities of magic itself" that probably suggests "Archmages are gonna do a thing" Since it's Geb who has been around and Nex who has been absent for a while, you can bet we're going to hear quite a lot about the nature of necromancy in the book, so the Paizo authors are going to justify whatever it is they want to justify about how magic works (it is, after all, magic.)
So I don't really think that preconceived notions of "how necromancy worked in Pathfinder" are especially relevant, except possibly stuff from the Book of the Dead since they probably want to keep that lore canonical.
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It's tough to see the 4 traditions of magic as a good pillars of design when we're having this much debate about an iconic type of spellcaster with a very easy-to-assign list of spells. A Necromancer's spell list should be an easy slam dunk, but the inability to narrow down a caster's list of spells has led to debate and discord and will surely lead to friction for the entirety of this class's existence.
I have to agree with this to at least some extent: I think the idea of the four traditions is excellent, and the four essences even more so, but in my opinion Paizo only followed through halfway and ended up still cleaving to 1e-style design, where they basically wrote four class-specific spell lists and then decided to assign those same spell lists to every subsequent caster. Each tradition's spell list as we know it now was visibly designed around each of the four tradition-specific CRB classes, which is why the arcane and occult lists are overloaded with plenty of spells that affect vital essence (because Wizards had to wield the eight OGL schools of magic, and Bards had to be able to do a little bit of everything), and the primal list has poor access to void damage or undead healing (because Druids can't be allowed to create or manipulate undead, or do anything that goes against nature).
Even beyond iffy delineation, part of the discourse around the Necromancer is that spell lists are too broad: the occult list of course has lots of spells that don't fit a necromancer at all, because it's got tons of mental effects and other stuff tailored around the Bard, but even the divine list has lots of spells that wouldn't really fit the class, to say nothing of the other two traditions. Even if the class were given divine spells, which in my opinion would have been a better fit, that would not have been fully satisfactory either, which is presumably also why the Necromancer's feat lists gives us tons of focus spells to really dig into their specific flavor through spellcasting.
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Class feats, and by extension focus spells, are also not unlike class specific spell lists in posing the same problem of needing to be continually updated...
I really don't want this class to be pick-a-list and will grit my teeth at occult to avoid that. Pick-a-list is such a thematic void
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It's tough to see the 4 traditions of magic as a good pillars of design when we're having this much debate about an iconic type of spellcaster with a very easy-to-assign list of spells. A Necromancer's spell list should be an easy slam dunk, but the inability to narrow down a caster's list of spells has led to debate and discord and will surely lead to friction for the entirety of this class's existence.
Yep. The fact that there exist the focus spells as a workaround proves to me that this isn’t a slam dunk.
Each tradition's spell list as we know it now was visibly designed around each of the four tradition-specific CRB classes, which is why the arcane and occult lists are overloaded with plenty of spells that affect vital essence (because Wizards had to wield the eight OGL schools of magic, and Bards had to be able to do a little bit of everything), and the primal list has poor access to void damage or undead healing (because Druids can't be allowed to create or manipulate undead, or do anything that goes against nature).
Ah. Thanks for pointing that out so eloquently. I just don’t like the tradition approach, and now I know a little more why it feels unhelpful.
Even beyond iffy delineation, part of the discourse around the Necromancer is that spell lists are too broad: the occult list of course has lots of spells that don't fit a necromancer at all, because it's got tons of mental effects and other stuff tailored around the Bard, but even the divine list has lots of spells that wouldn't really fit the class, to say nothing of the other two traditions. Even if the class were given divine spells, which in my opinion would have been a better fit, that would not have been fully satisfactory either, which is presumably also why the Necromancer's feat lists gives us tons of focus spells to really dig into their specific flavor through spellcasting.
Yep. It really has to straddle list-and-focus-spells just to be a Tigger.
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Class feats, and by extension focus spells, are also not unlike class specific spell lists in posing the same problem of needing to be continually updated...
I really don't want this class to be pick-a-list and will grit my teeth at occult to avoid that. Pick-a-list is such a thematic void
Yep. I see that. I agree, pick-a-list can be seen as a thematic void, but given that there are folks like me that see the traditions as a thematic fail through being a poor fit, and pick-a-list as a thematic possibility, I’d prefer pick-a-list on a Thrallmaster. For a Necromancer….I guess I see Occult working, but it still is a thematic kludge.
We are playtesting the Necromancer. I get it. I just think that this selection of a class to be in this playtest is a conceptual missed opportunity - the mechanics, though familiar, are interesting, and I would actually loved to have seen Paizo’s take on a Golarionic “placer of turrets/thrallmancer” rather than what I see as a “Necromancer that doesn’t”. So it kinda burns both ways. Even before you get to spell-lists.