The Gaming Den

I'm reasonably familiar with most official 3.5 stuff but not with Pathfinder or 3rd party stuff. What spells, classes, feats*, etc do you think are worth bringing into a Tome game, either as a player or MC?

* Assuming these aren't competing with scaling feats

As an MC, often "Whatever specific thing that some player wants". I mean, look over it of course, but it's easier to check individual things as people request them rather than pore through enough words to filibuster the next two presidential terms just for the occasional "this specific thing looks good".

In general, the chances of any particular thing being good or even usable in a Pathfinder expansion product is pretty low. Most of the material is "some dude's bizarrely specific character concept." Like Elothar, Warrior of Bladereach, but presented as if it wasn't a joke. So you get various rules to play Spiderman or whatever the fuck, and the mechanics are mostly pretty awful.

But some of them, not a large amount of course, but some are sufficiently pushed as to be actually playable. And of course, a lot of them just happen to be full casters or close enough to full casters that it doesn't make much difference at the levels you actually play. Pathfinder is particularly fond of handing out casting that caps off at 6th level spells, possibly in the knowledge that you aren't going to be playing the game at a level where players get access to 7th level spells anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Bottom line: if some player really likes the idea of being a hair witch or whatever the fuck, chances are that it's going to be underpowered. But if it's a caster it probably also doesn't matter because differences in spell optimization will matter far more than power of class content. So if some player's imagination gets set on fire by some weird Pathfinder option, it's probably fine to let it into the game. Or at least, it's probably fine if it's a caster. This is Caster Edition, after all.

-Username17

Not really, Pathfinder's new contest has a lot of small fiddly parts that a output "why aren't you a cleric/druid/wizard?" level of power.

Pathfinder does look fine for E6-8 games, especially if you're all partial casters.

The [TOME] Soulbound and Totemist seem like a good template for neat Pathfinder classes like Bomber Alchemist, Hyde Alchemist, Rogue Replacement Alchemist, Synthesis Summoner, Ninja, and so on.

So, basically if a player wants something from Pathfinder it'll probably be fine if it's a full caster, otherwise it's probably better to make an ACF, or feat or scaling feat or something inspired by it and staple it onto something else I suppose.

Well, at least there's a few feats that're easy to drop into a 3.Tome game with regular feats in it, like the feat that lets you use Dex for combat maneuvers, the one that lets you use Int for them or the one that lets you concentrate on illusion spells as a swift action. Anything come to mind that's simple, straightforward and significant (or could be fixed pretty easily)?