harpy
2010-03-26, 02:23 PM
Having played systems like Star Wars Saga, which was pretty much built from the ground up to be a dip-friendly d20 system, I find Pathfinder's dipableness is kind of... meh.
I understand that Paizo was moving away from that, changing the multiclass penalty into a multiclass bonus, and giving capstone powers, but if you find the modular element of the game fun there just seems to be something lacking.
This isn't as big of an issue with spellcasters since they have always been geared towards rewarding deeper investment, but for the martial classes things can feel really constrained when your trying to create certain character concepts. Because the martial classes have much less flexibility than spellcasters you tend to have to invest in several levels to grab enough different class features that help round out the character concept.
I guess I feel like rather than playing with legos, I'm playing with an erector set. They both have a lot of modular parts, but the erector set isn't as fine grained in delivering certain effects, or you have to scale up the model (with characters it means needing to reach upper mid levels) to get the details you want.
Perhaps the APG will fix some of this feeling I have, perhaps we'll have some alternative class features that will make dips into various classes more worthewhile. Unfortunately the new base classes don't seem to tickle my dipable mood. A lot of those concepts seem to be coming into their own at higher levels rather than at first level.
It would be great to see some "limited base classes" which would be kind of an inversion of prestige classes. Rather than being a class with prerequisites, these are base classes that only go for 3 to 5 levels, designed to jump you into a concept and then let you branch out.
I understand that Paizo was moving away from that, changing the multiclass penalty into a multiclass bonus, and giving capstone powers, but if you find the modular element of the game fun there just seems to be something lacking.
This isn't as big of an issue with spellcasters since they have always been geared towards rewarding deeper investment, but for the martial classes things can feel really constrained when your trying to create certain character concepts. Because the martial classes have much less flexibility than spellcasters you tend to have to invest in several levels to grab enough different class features that help round out the character concept.
I guess I feel like rather than playing with legos, I'm playing with an erector set. They both have a lot of modular parts, but the erector set isn't as fine grained in delivering certain effects, or you have to scale up the model (with characters it means needing to reach upper mid levels) to get the details you want.
Perhaps the APG will fix some of this feeling I have, perhaps we'll have some alternative class features that will make dips into various classes more worthewhile. Unfortunately the new base classes don't seem to tickle my dipable mood. A lot of those concepts seem to be coming into their own at higher levels rather than at first level.
It would be great to see some "limited base classes" which would be kind of an inversion of prestige classes. Rather than being a class with prerequisites, these are base classes that only go for 3 to 5 levels, designed to jump you into a concept and then let you branch out.