Thursday, March 24, 2016

Class Acts Compendium.






There are a lot of bad things in this book. There are also a lot of good things in this book. Its pretty tight and concise making it a pretty dense book in terms of content. It opens up about as much class content as Ultimate Magic or Ultimate Combat. Its a fairly generic and unnecessary book bringing only a few inspired options along with a ton of option bloat. Overall for the price it expands potential list of choices without breaking the game and I see myself selecting quite a few of them so it rounds out at about four stars. Nothing special but nothing to sneeze at either and brings a lot to the table for a decent price.

You can find this over on Paizo.com here.

Retrospective: 

I agree with my previous short words on this. All the classes (Up to Ultimate Combat) get some love and a lot of territory gets opened up. Some of the archetypes are just plain bad and there's nothing groundbreaking that shifts balances or offer incredible new ways to play but it offers heavy amounts of crunch for a lower price than one of Paizo's hardcovers. Each class gets at least two archetypes and each class gets a slew of suboptions. 

However this product does suffer when you have your hands on other third party options. As I have leaned more on third party classes and options that do shift balances and offer new ways to play these options have seen less and less light until the point where its basically gathering dust now. There are just a lot of exciting things going on in Pathfinder for players to go gold digging through ignorable to 'pretty okay' options to get their build just right. 

I can't say that this is bad because really its not. If you have games that focus on Paizo classes and want to open them up as much as Ultimate Magic or Ultimate Combat does then here is your product and for a decent price tag. If you're more into expanding into psionics, spherecasting, martial maneuvers and new ways to resolve magic an fighting abilities then this might be a pass. If you do like the idea then I would recommend that you print this out and bind it at your local print shop and that you get this product rather than the multiple parts that make it up. The stress on printing is very low and isn't broken up by multiple OGL statements. Also even the ones with bad options have material that is very desirable so you'd want to get them all in one shot rather than pick and choose. 

No comments:

Post a Comment