New Rule: Revised Action Economy

Pathfinder Unchained has been out for a while now and while the unchained classes get a lot of talk, the most facilitating part of the book for me was the Revised Action Economy. Pathfinder is not a perfect game, and the way that in combat actions work is often seen as the root of plenty of it's problems. It favors casters, its very complicated and it makes combat messier as you rise in levels. Despite the RAE claiming to clean up quite a bit I've seen it be very divisive as to whether or not its better to use. Even in my own groups its hard to get people to convert unless you force it at the beginning of the campaign and if it is explicitly an option even the players who would greatly benefit from it don't even try to use it so I have way less experience with it than I would actually like. Now there are several reasons for this. There are plenty of things that the RAE does not account for to make you be able to do everything that you could previously do. The change of Swift actions to be one action means that one turn swift action effects like arcane strike are basically dead in the water.

It is a drastic turn but I have a few defenses of it. The more I see it in action the more I think that it is easier to convert to than the normal action economy is to execute. So here are my reasons why I think you should use the Revised Action Economy.

1. Initiative Order Doesn't Change

This one is rather subtle but it makes a big impact when in play. In the normal action economy you can ready an action or delay which allows you to interrupt and act out of turn. This moves your initiative order to occur before the person that you are interrupting. And this is a huge pain in the butt for anyone keeping track of this. Sure you can take one of those magnetic initiative trackers or even an electronic one to keep things clean but when you get to the point where you peripherals just to keep track its still a pain in the butt even if it's a small one. You still have to make adjustments to shuffle that character around in the initiative order. With the RAE your readied action eats up your reaction instead of moving you around in the initiative order so doing so does not come with the added bonus of having to complicate combat more than it needs to. This sounds really minor but the difference is astounding. You don't need a shuffleboard of magnets to keep track of who's where in initiative and where they go when they do something like readying or holding or interrupting. You just go top to bottom and leave it alone.

2. You Can Move More

The RAE breaks up most instances of full attacks so something had to be done with options like two weapon fighting and flurry of blows. What winds up happening is that they add extra attacks to your first, second and then third attacks as you advance in that option. This is absolutely huge for any combatant that wants to move more while using these options. Lets take a look at the numbers here: If you are using TWF (Full BAB at lvl 20, two light weapons)with the normal action economy if you do nothing but attack you get seven attacks at +18/+18/+13/+13/+8/+8/+3. If you make a move action you get one attack at +20. With the Revised Action Economy under the same circumstances if you do nothing but attack you get six attacks at +18/+18/+13/+13/+8/+8, but if you make a move action you get four attacks at +18/+18/+13/+13. So with the normal action economy moving once makes you lose over 80% of your attacks while with the RAE you lose a little over 33%. This is true even for regular iterative attacks where you lose 75% of your attacks normally but with the RAE you only lose a little over 33%. And this is just for moving more than a 5ft step.

3. There Are Way Less Actions.

RAE is three actions and a reaction and that's it. The sheer amount that needed to be converted makes this seem a bit daunting but it all amounts to everything having a cost. Most things have similar costs with the normal action economy but not with the same currencies. You have full round actions that cost a move and and standard action, a 5ft step that will cost you your move action but not any part of a full round action, an attack of opportunity that does not encompass your immediate action, but your immediate action does take your swift action, that is a short action but only has a currency of one per round without move or standard actions being able to pay for them. And because of all these staggered currencies we can take advantage with classes that have a reason to benefit from a swift action, full round action, and 5ft step but if you miss out on the swift/immediate action and 5ft step you can't use those actions to pay for anything else. This is too many categories and too many false equivalencies and it just mucks up combat. With the RAE you do three points worth of stuff and you're done. The only reason why you need a dozen pages to define them in Pathfinder Unchained is because of the damage already done by the normal action economy which goes all over the place.

4. Fighter and Rogue Start Looking Good

This is a disputed point but its a popular opinion that spellcasters have a leg up on classes without spells with Rogues and Fighters being at the bottom of the barrel. And part of that is because of how the normal action economy works. With movement taking away attacks the Fighter suffers because that's the main thing that he does and Rogues because movement will kill sneak attack potential, meanwhile a caster can move and cast a powerful spell, basically losing nothing. But with the RAE Fighters can chase down casters and actually do something crippling and Rogues can move and get off more than one sneak attack. Add to that, both classes have relatively fewer opportunities to use all the actions from my third point. A typical fighter doesn't have too many ways to use a swift action but in the hands of other classes a swift action can be insanely powerful.

5. Converting is easier than it looks.

Pathfinder Unchained divides the RAE actions into Simple and Complex actions, then to what number of acts it takes with a couple of subtypes and most of the things in the game redefined. This doesn't encompass third party material or really weird splat book options but the logic is clear. 3 acts are full round actions. 2 acts are standard actions, and 1 act are move or swift actions. Reactions are immediate actions and attacks of opportunity, and the only awkward position is the new status of full attack which is still easy to understand or capable of just re-entering the new action economy as 3 acts. I think the only thing that gets awkward to convert is that the conversion guide states that Standard action attack actions would be 1 act. This makes martial characters go from better to insane really fast as that can include the likes of Vital Strike. Imagine doing that three times in a row. It also kind of flies in the face of the logic behind how combat maneuvers work where if they can sub an attack in a full attack then it's 1 act and if not it's 2 acts, which is drastically more sane and more in line with what the game normally does. But that all boils down to whether or not the attack action equates to 1 or 2 acts because both action economies don't equate attacks and the attack actions, something that is confusing and insane about the normal action economy that is often the source of confusion.

And there you have it. Those are my main arguments in favor of Pathfinder Unchained's revised action economy. Its not perfect, not by a long shot, but I do think that it is way better than the complex monstrocity that the normal action economy is.

Horror Adventures: Drunken Overview Part 1

So when Ultimate Intrigue came out I decided to get my opinions out there early and read the pdf while typing out my general impressions on what I read. Reading a 300+ page book that’s mostly rules left me tired and staring at a screen for so long made my eyes burn so halfway through I started drinking a bottle of wine my sister recommended and finished off the overview pretty drunk That overview was actually a pretty popular post so I decided to have a go again, now that Horror Adventures is out, only this time I’m not messing around by getting drunk halfway through. I’m starting drunk.

Here’s how this is going to work; as I type the introduction out I’ll be nursing a mix of rum and coke. Eventually I’ll be switching to Everclear and fruit punch. I’ll read a significant section or chapter, and then I’ll type up my assessment. I held off reading the book when it first became available to download so all of my first thoughts and impressions are from an inebriated state of mind. This does mean that this is not much of a review and more of an overview since I don’t think alcohol is going to make my judgement on rules more precise. I have my phone set to deliver an alarm every hour so I can pace myself with pre-measured shot classes of what I’m mixing with my soda and fruit juice so that I don’t die. My wife will be spotting me to further prevent my from dying. My computer is still broken so I’ll be using my tablet. Luckily I got myself a bluetooth keyboard to make this easier but this still means that I’ll be typing without a great ability to edit on the fly so I’ll be getting to that when I’m sober. I’m through my first glass so I’ll start up now…

We’re skipping the introduction and table of contents because I don’t care. I will say that the cover is kind of fun. We have the iconic Wizard, Paladin and Cavalier getting mobbed by zombies. If this was anything but a 3.X game I’d be worried but if they’re high enough level this will be easy to get out of. The Wizard is probably fucked though if he needs to make some Fort saves. I’m always playing games where arcane casters are complete chumps against undead. Especially witches.

The first chapter opens up with the Paladin turning evil and now the Monk has to fight her. The Monk is probably dead by now. Unless he’s unchained, then he might stand a chance I guess. Or he’s a really sick build, but I saw his stats in the NPC Codex and he’s not so great.

The book then tells us how to make a character for a horror game, although I’m pretty sure all of these are ways to play any game. It tells you to ask yourself things like what your character’s motivations and fears are so I thought to myself, you know, like every character should whether they’re in a horror game or stabbing ponies in Sparkleland. I shouldn’t criticise it that much though. It's not like this happens as frequently as I’d like. And I enjoy that about pathfinder. some games try to tell you how to role play to the point where you might as well not play after character creation, the game just plays itself. Anyways, blah blah, teach us how to roleplay like rollplayers, moving on.

We get some rules on fear. This initially seems overly convoluted for something we already have status effects for, but for the most part it's just adding some extra severities on fear effects by dividing the stages that exist into more steps. Also you get some variant rules about replacing fear immunity. Then there’s sanity. Basically your highest mental stat becomes your sanity AC and different stuff will attack you with brain menacingness when you fail saves and stuff and if you lose, depending on the severity, you get some kind of insanity. So if you’re pissed off that you couldn’t stab things more often in Call of Cthulhu, there you go.

Corruption gets a pretty deep subsystem. Basically you get some corruption that scales like spell levels that give you feat-like powers based on how much corruption you have. The powers differ based on the nature of your corruption. But these powers have some kind of downside and many of them are pretty harsh. Your level of corruption also starts messing with your alignment and can also lead to occasional loss of control over your character. This is kind of a  wet dream for anyone that likes to roleplay significant weaknesses and purity struggles, and a literal wet dream for anyone that’s into Corruption of Champions. if you’re into werewolves then, this is a great fun way to handle lycanthropy curses. speaking of which, I just agreed to play an 5th edition game and made a character along those lines and my list of options made me miss Pathfinder so bad for options like this. Currently my character is forced to half-ass my concept.

The core races get some new alternate racial traits and favored class bonuses, which disappoints me because I barely use Core races outside of humans at this point. Who want’s to play a horror game with an elf. That’s is super weak. I want to play with a mud monster man, or a ratfolk or something else spooky. In Frankenstein the monster’s plan was for his dad to make him a woman and go off somewhere but Frankenstein didn’t want to because that would make a race of Frankenstein monsters. I want to play that. Some half constructs that are born with bolts in their necks and get healed with lightning damage. Do we have that already? a Flesh golem race? Or just zombie people? I’m pretty sure I have some third party thing about it.

So the cult leader at the intro for chapter 2 has awesome facial hair. I’m also still endlessly amused that the iconic Occultist is more portly. The cosplay potential for Pathfinder ever increases and now I really feel like ‘I’ could be an adventurer with my own fat ass. Anyways this is the real meat of the book, the class options. As much as the subsystems so far are pretty nice and the corruption bit more than a bit nice, that part is awesome, people are mostly going to look through this book for options so this is the real important part. It’s where everyone is going to open the book and judge it because the GM can already do whatever he wants so nobody cares.  And with no classes introduced in the book we have a lot of room for everyone to get in on the party. It looks like everyone gets two pages of archetypes and options. I’m not looking to see what class is missing.

Alchemist gets two archetypes. One that lets you turn people in kool aide and one that lets you cast extracts above your level at the expense of it being random. It's handy how they did that, you’re limited to the APG list and they tell you the number of possibilities so you can roll some dice without counting. Still kind of a bookeeping nightmare if you aren’t using an app that has all the spells on it.

Barbarian gets some gnarly rage powers and four fun looking archetypes. One is a murder trance guy and one is a werebeast one.

Cleric gets a Cthulhu cultist archetype and two new domains, Stars and Void. Wait a minute. don’t we have those already? I’m pretty sure we did. I’m not that drunk. Okay I’m a little dizzy at this point but seriously I was pretty sure there was alrady a void and star domain. Fuck it I’m tired, i’m not fact checking so these are new domains. Even though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the Dark Tapestry subdomain before.

Okay so I notice Bard is missing so I guess not everyone is on board the Horror train.

Druid gets a couple of archetypes. I’m noticing one gets a spirit, a la  the Spiritualist class. Seems weird to me. Also weird is the devolutionist Druid that can make animals feral and has a creepy devolved human as an animal companion. I’m not getting the horror theme on that one. Maybe it's a reference to some gross black and white era movie that will give me nightmares when I find it on the criterion collection. I will say that it's creepy but in a gross kind of way.

Page 52, I love that guy. Since he's in the Inquisitor section I guess he’s one of those. Probably the archetype that gets special eyes that are spookier than normal. naw, that’s the hex archetypes He’s probably the bookwork archetype that has Int as a main stat. Because he has a book you see.

Investigator gets three archetypes. I don't’ like most of them but I do like the one that is kind of an occultist but even then I’m not that enthused.  I have to say, so far these options are way different from Ultimate Intrigue, in the sense that in that book the archetypes seem to be for roleplaying first at the expense of being actually useful but for the most part I don’t feel harshly crippled with little payoff with these archetypes. Sure there are exceptions but for the most part I feel like I’d pick these up more readily.

Kineticist gets two archetypes. Psycho and Dark. Both let you use Wis and Int respectively for your powers instead of Con, with different things happening in place of burn, or in the case of the Dark Kineticist, you can burn souls instead. . Its nice to have options like this because I was never that big on Burn. I’m especially happy that I can make myself an M Bison build now.

Good luck using the new Medium Legendary spirits. They’re all psychopaths that get you to do things that wouldn’t fly in most games.

I like the Mesmerist archetypes but really they aren’t making me too excited. I do like the prospect of being a freddy kreuger mesmerist even though in a lot of campaigns it's not exactly useful.

I absolutely adore the Occultist archetypes. One lets you have haunted implements with types chosen among the medium’s spirits, and the other makes for a fun japanese flavored paper talisman mage although the talismans aren’t by default paper.

Paladin Takes a weird turn by jacking class features from the Bard of all things. It's flavored as an effect cause by stigmata. The other two are more ‘normal’ but one switches charisma for wisdom so there's some interesting things to do with that.

Slayer gets two interesting archetypes and one that’s only useful in very specific campaigns.

Spiritualist starts off aping the bloodrager. Here is where I realize that I’ve been seeing a lot of class feature poaching in this book. More interesting is the other archetype that allows your phantom to be an undead creature as opposed to an outsider. Makes sense to me but I’ve seen so many arguments about the nature of undead and how they interact with class features and alignment to know that this will make some people’s head explode due to the way we think about ghosts and the undead in a non planar logic. Hell I’m on my… I don’t know what drink. I had two sodas worth of rum coke and another of vanilla coke rum, and I’m on black cherry soda and peach sake now, but anyways even now I get the difference between dead ghost and undead ghost.

Vigilante gets three new archetypes. They aren’t blatantly going superhero this time but still cover some iconic tropes of having a dual identity, like Serial Killer.

Witch gets a hefty slew of Patrons, mostly cthulhu mythos flavored. I couldn’t even read the second archetype because of Gingerbread Witch. FINALLY we get a proper fairy tale witch archetype. This will be my next witch. I’ll name her Totenkinder.  You even get a gingerbread familiar. Mine will smoke cigars and swear and drink a lot with a scottish accent.

Wizard gets some cthulhu stuff. Lots of Cthulhu stuff in this book by the way. We get it. Cosmic horror in a horror book. If we get a Modern book then we’re all set to play Call of Cthulhu conversions I guess,  but also two whole archetypes  based on necromancy.

And that's it for the archetypes. lots of elder god/dark tapestry kind of things and a few stinkers but overall I feel like I’ve found plenty that I really want to play and not much is hampered by the feeling that the options are limited to very specific kinds of games. also lots of casting ability score swapping which is always nice to play with.

Next section is feats. since I don’t want to type about these all day i’ll just note the highlights. Nothing exciting. Some clarification occurs with the availability of monster feats because there’s some of those here. roughly half the style feats are interesting enough where I want to build around them. Story feats are back. Otherwise they are kind of mid ranged feats that you might take for flavor or when you’re running out of feats you need to fight or cast spells but not many actual trap options or anything that will become staples of the game except maybe fleshwarping but I don’t even know what that is yet.

Okay, I’ve been doing this for a while and I just burped up something that tastes like vomit so I’m going to call this Part 1 and finish this later. My general opinion so far, since I’m not even halfway through and we’re already done with feats, is that this book is a bit backed into a corner. If we didn’t have so much spooky crap in the game already, like zombies and occult stuff and all that jazz, then we’d have somewhere to go but right now I’m not exactly feeling the ‘horror’ of the book aside for re-teaching us how to roleplay with some actual consequences. I mean I like the archetypes for the most part but I’m not coming across much that seems drastically necessary. And the general themes seem to lean heavy on the Cthulhu corner since we’ve only really gotten bestiary stuff from that front. Out of the things that are worth the whole book no matter what the rest of it looks like is the Corruptions. That crap is awesome. I kind of wish it had been a class though but there’s more ways to play around with the concept as it is so there’s that. So far its the best part of the book. Of course the fear and sanity stuff is neat and i’ll use them but I’ve been doing something along the lines of sanity using third party stuff so i’m not that excited. And it’s got nothing on Corruptions. I love that subsystem so much. Although its probably a soothing a sore spot because 5e has given me nothing but crap in terms of making my concept actually work. I know people like the game and all and it is a cool game but this stuff constantly makes me feel like I have to play with my balls at home and I have nothing to rely on but DM fiat to do anything. People complain about the flavor options in Pathfinder being trap options but I love stuff like story quests and corruptions. It makes my weird whims and random ways for my character to suffer have some kind of mechanical relevance.

Sober me talking now; That was fun. I’ll find some time to review the rest of the book when I have some more extended drinking time. Please forgive the typos I missed and I’ll see you next time.

Ultimate Intrigue: First Glance.

Subscribers started getting their shipment confirmations so I got my hands on Paizo's Ultimate Intrigue. Here are my first impressions as I read through the book. Because these are just thoughts based on what I read there isn't a real structure or anything so you'll have to bear with me. I also won't be given specifics unless they are asked of me and I won't quote verbatim whats in the book.

Chapter one kicks off with the Vigilante himself after a very Batman like scene for the chapter cover. Only this guy seems to kill so it's more like Frank Miller's Batman. The Vigilante himself still has his dual identity and it works similarly to the playtest. He gets two identities that can have two alignments, scrying only works on one identity unless both identities are known to the scryer and certain abilities only work with either the social identity or the vigilante identity. The specializations Avenger and Stalker from the playtest remain in the class with the Avenger getting full BAB and the Stalker getting a pseudo sneak attack. From there the Vigilante has two tracks of talents. One for his social identity and one for his vigilante identity. He gets an ability that makes it virtually impossible to intimidate. The 'Appearance' line of abilities are still there where the vigilante causes enemies to become flat-footed, then shaken, then stunned when the Vigilante gets the drop on them. Lastly there is a mega punch that gets more powerful the longer the target was studied before getting jumped. Because the 'Appearance' abilities seem kind of useless in most scenarios I find myself in as an adventurer I'm not a big fan but they are nice and flavorful for the class and can be said about the whole class itself. Overall the structure is nice and simple. For the most part its two tracks for two identities without a lot of mumbo jumbo in between. Its a simple and clean design with a lot of little parts to move around.

But what about those parts? Like the entire class the social talents have limited usefulness in a typical adventuring day but they are all pretty appropriate and pretty powerful int he context of inner city intrigue, especially if downtime is involved. One interesting thing about the vigilante talents is that there is a backdoor to using them in the social identity by making a disguise checks, which is pretty cool. The vigilante talents themselves are mostly pretty neat. Some of the abilities I wish were a normal thing, like the ones that grant a feat but give some kind of extra ability to it. Like one that lets you make vital strikes on attacks of opportunity.

Then we go on to archetypes. Lots and lots of archetypes.

Alchemist gets the Alchemical Sapper(kind of a saboteur with more explosions), Interrogator(Injects people with mind control), and Metamorph (Actually a pretty interesting dirty mutie archetype but the cost is REALLY high. You lose bombs and extracts.).

Bards get the Impervious Messenger(photographic memory is now a class feature), Masked Performer(A little bit Factotum but not as interesting), Ringleader (A bard with a bit of mesmerist-envy) and Sorrowsoul(Emo Bard. I swear, I need to make a Bard/Skald party with each one representing a genre of music.).

Cavaliers get the Courtly Knight(I like these abilities more than the forced Mount. Its basically a more social cavalier.  It also interacts with social dueling), Daring General(gets a non-broken version of Leadership with multiple cohorts and can buff them with knight stuff. This goes back into 'broken' territory when I remember how good Tactician is when you have a group full of martials. ), and Hussar(faster and more skilled mount rider).

Druids get the Feyspeaker(gets 8 enchantment or illusion wizard spells and casts with charisma), Skinshaper(Mystique druid?) and Urushiol(druid with poison goo skin and a hard time getting intimate).

The Inquisitor sure got some love. 6 archetypes and two new inquisitions. Notable abilities include; Filling a guys head with criminal thoughts, the ability to hate one particular alignment to a ridiculous degree, a lot of  'detect' abilities (What is the Inquisitor like the Anti-Vigilante?), an Inquisitor that gets Tactician, two more sneaky Inquisitors, and a social buffer. 

Of course the Investigator gets 5 archetypes. One uses drugs for power. Much like the Inquisitor is an Anti-Vigilante in a counter subterfuge way, the Investigator seems like a natural advesary in both discovering secrets and hiding them.

The Mesmerist also gets six archetypes. Notable abilities include; Having a motherloving EYEBALL FAMILIAR?!?! That's just weird, another fey themed archetype that gains druid/ranger spells, identity theft, and a Mesmerist that's more like a Bard.

Ranger gets more Combat Styles. The archetype that draws my eye was the Dandy. It casts bard spells and has favored community instead of favored enemy.

The Rogue gets a whopping 7 new archetypes and some new talents. I can't help but to look at the archetypes as supervillains given the presence of Vigilante.  Overall I see abilities that make me like the Rogue better but nothing groundbreaking.

The Skald gets four new archetypes. Nothing too new here but they give me some insight as to what the Skald is and how it's different from a Bard in theme.

Spiritualist gets two archetypes. One gets a shadow monster instead of a ghost and the other gets a location-based ghost that's tied to some aspect of the city it's from. Its a nerf in a lot of situations but it's pretty neat and I like that Paizo is playing around with their past subsystems.

Swashbuckler gets three archetypes, the Guiding Blade(the team player), Noble Fencer(The social one) and Veiled Blade(can hide weapons inside her body?).

The Vigilante, playing catch up, of course has a ton of new archetypes. Each of the superheroes. I'll name them.

Brute = Hulk
Cabalist =  Daimon Hellstrom
Gunmaster = Lone Ranger
Magical Child = Every magical girl ever. (c'mon she even has a mascot animal)
Mounted Fury = Shining Knight
Psychometrist = Constantine
Warlock = Too many
Wildsoul = Spider-Man, Falcon and Wolverine.
Zealot =  Too many

After that everyone that didn't get two or more pages of archetypes gets something or another. Antipaladin gets an evil ruler archetype, Cleric gets to have more skills at the price of a domain, spontaneous casting and BAB, Gunslinger gets some fancy gun twirling and not so fancy face punching, Hunter gets to be lamer for better downtime and social skills as well as get an archetype that can run around a city-scape like a spider monkey, Kineticist gets some wild talents that are hit and miss, there's a poison monk and a feint monk, a court occultist and a secret occultist, an intrigue mystery for the oracle (I guess they didn't want to call it a Mystery Mystery), a Paladin that can be any good (Which, in all honesty, isn't that great of an archetype in terms of what you gain,), a more social Slayer archetype and an Unchained specific fey Summoner.

First chapter is of course exciting. Mostly its the new class and it's archetypes letting us live out some nice super power fantasies. There are a lot more social archetypes, allowing some classes to more likely be a face, as well as themes of keeping or discovering secrets and of course intrigue. There is a very strong fey sub-theme going on. Many of the archetypes give up exciting and powerful things for interesting but considerably less useful things. At first I saw this as skill part of the martial/magic/skill trinity that would make the Ultimate series complete but it is far from that. It's more of an urban book so far with many of the archetypes being basically useless unless you're fairly stationary in a big city. In a game with a lot of travel and no home base or politics I have a hard time finding used for some of these. But there are also more sneaky archetypes that are more in line with what's useful in a generic adventure and some social aspects that will be useful when you have to deal with people but not for intrigue.

Next chapter is about feats. The first immediately notable thing is that fencing grace is reprinted.

There's a feat that applies Bravery to all mind affecting effects. Too bad so many archetypes replace bravery. I've noticed that there's a slight increase in vanilla Fighter love lately.

I'm seeing a few feats that do things that I already allow people to do using skills. My current count is 3.

Now it's 4.

Now it's 6.

Oh, another bravery feat.

Starknives get dex to damage. It looks like we burned that bridge already but why not just one dex to damage on finesse weapons? At this point it looks like Paizo is pretty okay with it. We don't need a feat for EVERY weapon. Lets just cut some corners. Maybe they don't want Monowhips to get super insane or something.

At first glance the feat section is kind of meh. perhaps I'll find some gold as I pay more attention to the specific entries but there isn't anything jumping out as particularly exciting. There's feats that I would use of course but it looks like I'll only pay attention to about a third of them.

Next chapter is Mastering Intrigue, the subsystem chapter for this book as well as discussing in general how to run intrigue based games and scenarios.

Influence seems simple at first. Basically you have several kinds of skill checks to make to influence an NPC but you can find out what they are and they work better if you make a check to figure out something about them that will make them easy to influence. As you gain more influence over them the better their attitude will be towards you. Its like a relationship score. Organizations work similarly but have different kinds of ranks. This gets all kinds of complicated with new kinds of stat blocks involved so I think people are more likely to just shove an influence tab on NPCs and make up stuff as they go along.  Overall it is way more interesting to resolve influence than simply rolling single skills. so I'll probably use it in conjunction with Relationships/leadership and simplify it so that it's just one notch on the NPC stat block and some extra words rather than a whole new extra stat block.

The heist section is more like advice on how to smooth over those aspects of the game rather than hard rules, while the leadership section does have some more interesting rules to add to leadership. I've gotten to banning leadership and combining it with a mixture of relationships and leadership as described by a third party product so this is an interesting addition. There are even rules for monstrous followers and other more interesting forms of the leadership feat.

The nemesis section has rules but the feel less like rules and more like guidelines to build a proper Lex Luthor enemy in a campaign that slowly escalates the situation.

Yay, chase rules.

Library rules.

Sorry I'm not that useful here. My eyes are starting to burn staring at this book for so long, and a lot of these are just really big complications one things that used to be abstract and simplified. As a whole I think you can avoid all this and be happy so I think its for the people that want to play certain kinds of games but don't want to switch systems so they just have random tools to play Pathfinder drastically differently by hanging on subsystems. In fact that's what this entire book is about. Fitting characters in non-Pathfinder games because roughly half the class options are playing the flavor game rather than the 'actually useful' game. Depending on how you run games, or at this point what kind of game you want to run, your milage may vary. My eyes are glazing over but I know at some point I'll need some 'action research rules' for when we decide to play fantasy Phoenix Wright and need some ammunition for when we pull off but at this point there is bound to be a lot of complaining about how unhelpful a lot of this book is for a typical campaign.

Seriously, library research rules? And there's pages of the stuff.

Spells of Intrigue gives you advice and specific spells that can be useful in an intrigue game.


Next chapter is about social combat, and I've started drinking because it's night time now and I'm bored.  That's right, a review where I am, I'm not going to say drunk but I'm getting there. I'll tell you when I'm there. I'll fix typos in the morning.

Like the Heist rules the social combat these are less of rules and more of directions on how to plan a game.

Oh snap! They pointed out that duels have been consistent things. There's sword duels, magic duels, psychic duels and now verbal duels. We could just complete the game without any of this combat system. there's a whole other system now.

By the way, I love the pictures in between everything. I think the Investigator is accusing the Magus of something at a Chelaxian court. Oh and Lem and Mel get to hang out but they still don't like each other. Well Mel doesn't like Lem. but in some pictures Lem looks like he's being a turd to Mel.

Verbal duels aren't that complicated but are about as useful as the other kinds of duels. You don't really need them unless that's the kind of campaign you're rolling with. You get a more simple set up in Carrion Crown but this is actually more interesting in addition to being more involved.

I'm there.

The inquisitor and the summoner traded hats. This is funnier than it should be.

There some further clarification on how certain social skills work and some rules about getting rid of opposed rolls

Spells is the next chapter.

I'm only going to lightly skim the spell lists to see if something interesting pops up.
meh. but there are some curiosities. Like I noticed that there's a 'Greater Detect Magic' and a 'Controlled Fireball'. This left me digging around for other spells that were other spells as I moved forward.

I notice a lack of zero level spells.

There are a lot of behavior spells that can probably cause some weirdness. I'm guessing will saves will be extra important after this or you're going to fall in love with a bugbear.

There is a spell that's literally a can of snakes.

Last chapter is about items. Interestingly there are new weapons and alchemical stuff.

Notable among the weapons is a wrist mounted dart launcher.

There are two new abilities attached to alchemical items. Alchemical burn, an kineticist-like burn condition that some items can give you, and alchemical inspiration which gives you a pool of alchemical points that lets you do something. Inspiration mostly includes using it to add dice to skill rolls.

Nothing estremely notable in the rest of the items. There are new weapon abilities and wondrous items. A bit lacking on the armor department. Mostly things that support some new options running around. Overarching theme of skill enabling.

Overall I like this book. I wasn't looking hard but I didn't really find it typoo-ridden like the Advanced Class Guide. But I can see where the online community can ride on it. As I said before, in a campaign where you're mostly traveling from town to town to kick in the local dungeon this book is mostly unhelpful. The archetypes are basically 2/3rds intrigue and flavor focused which means that the trade off for the new abilities is way off unless you're in a specific kind of game. For example: one cleric archetype loses a domain, medium armor and BAB for 4 extra skill ranks per level and more class skills. In most cases that is too many things lost for the skill ranks, but if you're in a campaign where you really can't afford having 2 ranks per level and no value from Int because you'll be twiddling your thumbs during any investigation scene then it's pretty desirable. This book takes the intrigue them very seriously.

The extra rules and subsystems are always valuable to home games but you probably aren't going to get much out of them in typical adventures. All this culminates into the majority of the book being useless for PFS. But for home games that need a bit of direction and some subsystems for inner city campaigns this book is extremely useful. Basically it's as game changing as Pathfinder Unchained in the sense that it opens up playing a whole new kind of game. Investigations become worthwhile and exciting, arguments and court battles have more give and take, going to the fracking library becomes an epic quest. Pathfinder is at it's core a game that can wear a lot of hats but no matter what it's mostly about stabbing a monster in the face. This book makes it very possible to run sessions upon sessions without any physical altercations. It can make Call of Cthulu investigations a real thing rather than some dice rolls in between stabbing an abberation.

If you're not into that, then that's fine. I understand. I'm not that keen on mass combat and downtime (Because I want to play "Lets slay dragons and explore dungeons!" not Civilizations). But there are some neat tools for playing more urban, social or smart characters, and a good chunk of the Vigilante stuff allows for some fun superhero builds.

Speaking of the Vigilante, the class is pretty okay. Like most of the book, having a social identity is useful in limited amounts of games. In normal circumstances I can see people not really using their social identity and therefore playing with two thirds of a class.  I cannot see this guy in a PFS game and I know from experience (three different games with three different characters) that party members can see secret identities as a challenge and will spend half the campaign being Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane during the silver age of comics where they are constantly doing petty schemes to find out your identity. Then there are tons of abilities that require planning and schmoozing and downtime when some players want to just rest for the day and kick the door down in the next dungeon. On the plus side there are many ways to make changing identities quicker, both in and out of the class itself so it's not that burdened.

I certainly love the book. as much as I've been ripping on it, I was already working on a campaign where it's beyond useful.

My first glance rating is at 5 out of 5 stars. I'll read it deeper later so this may be subject to change. It's flaws are inherent in what it is rather than what it does and I appreciate what it does. I probably won't be playing Vigilante soon but I know what kind of campaigns I will want to use it for and at that point it will be awesome. In the meantime it has some archetypes that can fit in a normal campaign that may be useful.