I mean, I also watched the video. I just didn’t understand why he would feel the need to emphasise that stuff “just happens” when you cast spells. Why wouldn’t it?

Finally coming back to this after having it open in a tab for months, lol

I have two bits of feedback. One is that some sounds might be better as one-offs that automatically just play once, rather than being a continuous loop. The rainstorm and forest sounds are good loops, but a lightning strike or gunshot might make more sense as single presses.

Kinda related, I can’t imagine it makes much sense to play two music tracks at once. Switching between them might make more sense as a radio button type experience rather than a checkbox.

Other than that though, this is great. Really simple to use and very clear, but with a great range of options.

Ok first, awesome username.

But uhh, doesn’t that same logic apply to a bunch of things? You don’t roll to speak, you just do it (and roll to see if it was convincing). You don’t roll to loose an arrow, you just do it (and roll to see if you hit).

And a lot of typos

Some of which are so bad they completely flip the presumed meaning of the text.

There’s anything wrong with the style of play

There’s not anything wrong? It’s not like there’s anything wrong?

I’m not too sure why he keeps reinforcing the idea that “spells just happen”. It feels like it’s trying to dispel a common misconception, but I have absolutely no idea what that misconception would be.

Re: Blue Mage, I actually meant more the final fantasy blue mages, who piece together their spell list by defeating monsters and learning their moves

Oh, right! Yes I think I’ve heard of those before. But yeah, haven’t played an FF either lol

Illrigger is at least fully third-party with no official WotC involvement (though yeah, same…no interest, as much as I like Colville’s other stuff). It was the WotC-supported Mercer stuff that bugged me. Especially since (unlike 2024 Paizo, as you say) there is so much room for more agnostic content that could be really cool.

Personally, I’m really not a fan of when Pathfinder hard codes in its lore into the mechanics, so classes like those would not be welcome to me. I don’t play in their world and it’s not nearly generic enough for me to be comfortable using in my own world without either altering some mechanics or altering my world. In the CRB, dwarven clan daggers spring to mind as something I wish wasn’t a core assumption of the dwarf ancestry. (Though at least it’s little more than a ribbon unless you first choose to take a feat related to it.)

I’m reminded of when D&D added gravity- and time-mages based on the lore of that famous live stream group. Newer classes are easy enough to ignore, thankfully, so it’s not a huge deal to add and I don’t exactly resent them being there for people who do like it. But they were such dumb concepts in my mind it was annoying to see development effort spent on them rather than something more usable.

Yeah, Harm’s one that I feel should probably be in both divine and occult traditions. You could even make a case for primal, if you think of it more like a natural disease, though that’s more of a stretch.

So I’ll admit, I’ve never actually played Pathfinder 2e. I’ve been GMing it for over a year now, but I’ve never seen it from in front of the GM’s screen. So my knowledge of things that primarily affect players, like what spells are on which spell list, is not as strong. But I did look up the official descriptions, which are:

Divine The power of the divine is steeped in faith, the unseen, and belief in a power source from beyond the Material Plane. Clerics are the most iconic divine spellcasters, beseeching the gods to grant them their magic. Divine sorcerers can use the blood of their celestial or fiendish ancestors as a divine conduit, and champions call upon their gods to grant them martial prowess through divine guidance.

Occult The practitioners of occult traditions seek to understand the unexplainable, categorize the bizarre, and otherwise access the ephemeral in a systematic way. Bards are the most iconic occult spellcasters, collecting strange esoterica and using their performances to influence the mind or elevate the soul, and occult sorcerers strive to understand the mysterious power in their blood.

Which definitely reinforces my belief that a necromancer should be occult. They don’t beseech the gods anything, they learn to manipulate magic to do their bidding in strange ways.

I don’t put much stock in tradition with spell schools/traditions. I have never liked that raising undead is so often treated as the same type of magic as bringing your allies back to life.

Conjuring up the dead has nothing to do with what I want from a necromancer

Ok, that’s wild to me. To me that is, like, the core of the necromancer.

I want a necromancer to be closer to a blue mage than a conjurer

I’m afraid I’ve never played Magic, nor had any interest in doing so. So I don’t really know what the different colours represent.

pulling up a frankenstein of a minion from the component pieces of what they find on their adventure

Oh that’s interesting. It sounds to me more like a kind of magi-tech character that might fit something like an artificer. Because it seems like an interesting idea, but it’s not the core of a necromancer to me, and even though it does technically involve reanimating the dead, it’s an almost mutually-exclusive concept with what I think of as a necromancer.

I find this fascinating overall, because it sounds like there are two entirely distinct concepts of what it means to be a “necromancer”.

I kinda hate that the thralls explicitly can never take actions

Yeah ngl I agree with this 100%. Definitely want to be able to use those temporarily-raised undead to actually do things.

Interesting. I wonder if you could elaborate on both of those points?

To me, them being temporary is actually really good for the fantasy. You’re not a cleric reviving people, you’re a necromancer reanimated dead bodies to perform a job. I could see a place for more permanency at very high levels (to be able to do something like this story from !rpggreentext@ttrpg.network, but for what’s actually useful over an adventuring campaign, a more utility-focused summon makes a lot of sense to me.

And occult works for me exceptionally well. Divine would be real resurrection, but raising undead is like the definition of the occult, to me.

The psychic provides the different casting mechanics

Oh yes, I see. It has the “lower level spell slots drop off as you gain higher ones” thing that the oracle and magus also have, which is actually pretty similar to how 5e’s warlock works. I like that mechanic, but to be clear I’m not suggesting that specifically is what warlocks should have. It’s one option, for sure, but my main concern is that despite casting the same types of spells as wizards, the spells be different in some way.

Interestingly, looking at it again the psychic’s conscious and unconscious mind being essentially 2 subclass choices reminds me a lot of the 5e warlock’s dual-subclass choices in the patron and pact boon. Personally I don’t think the pact boon is an essential part of the class (that aspect could just as easily be a feat), but that is an amusing parallel.

The 5e Warlock is just much, much too 5e at this point. Paizo can’t out 5e the Warlock, and as played most Warlock builds will not work in PF2

I mean, I’m not suggesting you just take a 5e warlock and play it in Pathfinder. That would be absurd.

I’m not particularly convinced “it would invite negative comparisons” is a strong argument against anything in Pathfinder. The entire system by its very existence has, since 1e, invited comparison to D&D. The warlock is, to my knowledge, the only class in 5e D&D that doesn’t have a direct equivalent in Pathfinder. And that’s a shame, because in 5e it was my favourite both mechanically* and thematically.

* something I haven’t bothered talking about here at all because fundamentally the reason I like it is because of how much it feels like any Pathfinder class, with Invocations being basically like class feats. Something no other class has.

Ooh yeah. Seems like the necromancer could be a good test bed for a style of class design that would also work for that summoner idea.

The tomb as shield becomes a little less silly when you factor in magic

It does if you’re trying to look at it as something that is literally possible in that world. But it doesn’t look less silly from a conceptual standpoint. Because wandering into combat with the intention of holding a book up as a shield is still silly even if that book is magic.

Yeah the two new most recently announced were a big surprise, and that’s definitely part of what triggered me to post this. With as many as they’ve got, it’s kind of surprising that they’re still adding more. What more do you think they could add?

I know the bladelock was extremely popular with the Reddit D&D community, but to be honest it’s never super interested me. I like it existing as an option, but the magus is far too focused on that niche to work as a warlock. And using the tomb as a shield strikes me as just silly.

The problem is that, as mentioned, the witch is just a really, really bad class to use for the warlock fantasy. Aside from the fuzzy claim that warlocks are just male witches, and the fact that the witch has a thing it calls a “patron”, there’s basically no upside to using the witch class to play out the warlock fantasy.

And if I’m being honest, I don’t really see how the psychic helps with the warlock fantasy at all.

why your conception of a warlock must be able to be confused with a wizard or sorcerer from an outside perspective

To me those three classes form a little triangle of being the “main” arcane spellcasting classes. Wizards cast through study. Sorcerers are just naturally magical. And warlocks get their spells through a patron. But all are general spellcasters, unlike, say, the nature flavour of a druid, religious flavour of a cleric, or the martial side of the magus.

The oracle is, in terms of its subclasses and feats, really good for this (with some reflavouring of the Mysteries to be applied to a specific individual patron, which is explicitly not what Mysteries are in the text). Its biggest problem mechanically is the core class using the divine spell list rather than arcane. And unfortunately that’s a pretty big drawback to making the warlock fantasy work. But the bigger problem is the whole design of the Mysteries.

The fantasy of having a patron is not something that must be expressed mechanically

I just fundamentally disagree with this view. The patron of a warlock is critical to the warlock fantasy for me. It’s like suggesting you could play a rogue fantasy by being a fighter with high dex and a finesse weapon. Like, yeah…you could. But having a proper class that more accurately represents the fantasy would be so much better.

My answer, and one that occurred to me because of comments by @Kichae@lemmy.ca in this thread is the warlock.

In my view, the key aspects of the warlock are:

• It must have a patron which controls its access to magic
• Its magic must be of a sort that, to an outsider, could easily be confused for a wizard or sorcerer
• Nevertheless, the mechanics of its magic must feel very different to play from a wizard or sorcerer

D&D 5th edition does this well with its spell slots being short rest based and always at maximum level, but far more limited in number than typical slot casters. It casts many of the same spells as a wizard rather than having an entirely different system like Pathfinder’s Kineticist or (presumably) runesmith, but by preparing and casting in completely different degrees to the wizard. Whether Pathfinder did it “slotless”.

The Witch is probably the “best” option for a warlock-like experience so far, and the description of the witch as having a patron is probably the biggest reason I think we’ll never actually get a warlock. But the witch does a very poor job of feeling like a warlock. I don’t want a pet, or to cast spells through a familiar. The actual spell progression is too vanilla. And way too many of the feats are too explicitly “witchy”, like cackle, cauldron, living hair, and eldritch nails.