A thread about Binders (And maybe a fix to them)

[WiserOdin032402]

So, it's no secret that I play D&D 3.5 with a group that wants to fix 3.5, but also skittish that any TOME-level suggestions get shot down. Really, it's frustrating, because we're all on the same page about a lot of subjects (Knights and Fighters not being 20 levels worth of class, full BAB really not being all that valuable, prepared casters have a whole bunch of single-use class features that far outstrip all other class features). Recently I've been playing a Binder (Tome of Magic) and having an...interesting time, and seeing the lack of talk about the class on here (and what little I did was a little dismissive) so let's talk.

Binder does feel like a weird playtest class, but it's very interesting mechanically speaking. While vestiges are very grab-bag once you have two of them (which takes until level 8 for some god-awful reason) it starts to get crazy, as you can suddenly voltron together some crazy combos, but nobody cares because the game is going to be over soon. Some vestiges give out feats, some give proficiency, some give spells, some give stat boosts. And the problem I've encountered so far is that the Binder lacks the ability to really get access to them during the standard adventuring day until they start buying Vestige Phylacteries, which are 15,000 GP cubes of 'This should have literally been a class feature'.

Now, my DM is already on-board with making custom vestiges based off of characters from previous campaigns, and he has a whole list written down that he's working on. But I think the base class itself needs some changes. I'd like to hear the opinions of others on the subject of the Binder, maybe what some potential fixes are or what problems the class or the concept of the class itself has.

[Username17]

Well, we did do a review of Tome of Magic.

Each of the vestiges provides power sets that are basically lol-random. And the drawbacks on each vestige are equally lol-random. Keep in mind that the original concept was probably something relatively simple and clean like “people prepare spells and associated reserve feat effects at the same time so they have fewer spells to prepare and at-will access to their weaker powers.” But for reasons that I absolutely don't understand, someone thought it would produce reasonable player feedback to drop every single possible change on that into the class and ability lists so that the playtesters (that is, the people who bought this book for actual money) could comb through it and tell them which ideas were good and which were bad. So you got vestiges that give you use-limited powers, you have vestiges that only give you passive powers. The use limited powers might be on a 5 round cool-down, others have limited uses per day or other timeframe restrictions. Some are on continuously, others require an action to benefit from. You have vestiges that have costs to prepare and you have ones that don't. You have vestiges that have role playing limitations on being able to prepare them, and ones that don't. You have vestiges that screw you hard if you fail the level check to have that not happen, and ones that don't. The DC mostly scales by the power level of the vestige, but in some cases it doesn't. Some vestiges scale to your level, and others don't.

The power level on these fucking things is all over the place. So is the theme. But of course, no one fucking cared about the theme or the power level of this class, because the only relevant information was which of the variant usage restrictions people actually liked. The goal was to find out whether people would rather prepare a daily super move, a passive, and two at-wills; or a once-per-battle supermove, two passives, and a single at-will; or what. However, real people cherry pick vestiges that do good things, rather than pick what their favorite assortment of resource management systems and role playing limitations are. People weren't picking or not picking vestiges because of the resource management systems they come with, just as they obviously weren't going to, so the actual mechanism by which WotC hoped to refine their development through fan feedback seems rather opaque.

So the Binder class is almost wholly empty, being mostly a pointer to vestiges and pact augmentations. The vestiges and pact augmentations actually made are gormless and crappy.

Conceptually the Binder is a character that selects a package of abilities each day that are a thematic set of at-will and use-limited powers. That's a reasonable sales pitch: rather than having to prepare a bunch of spells you prepare an entire 4e character. But none of the ability packages actually written do the job.

-Username17

[WiserOdin032402]

So the Binder class is almost wholly empty, being mostly a pointer to vestiges and pact augmentations. The vestiges and pact augmentations actually made are gormless and crappy.

Conceptually the Binder is a character that selects a package of abilities each day that are a thematic set of at-will and use-limited powers. That's a reasonable sales pitch: rather than having to prepare a bunch of spells you prepare an entire 4e character. But none of the ability packages actually written do the job.

-Username17

So a revision would do best to start at the Vestiges and the Pact Augmentations, then tackle things like the Vestige Phylactery. The Pact Augmentations would be the easiest, as they'd just involve some number tweaking and maybe increasing the amount of augmentations you get, with maybe an upper limit to how many of what augmentation you can have.

The big problem comes down to the Vestiges. They need to be changed to have more coherent ability sets, be less of a hassle to bind (Looking at you, Ahazu. I refuse to go down to the 73rd layer of the abyss, down to the bottom of a well of darkness, to draw your seal on a pool of darkness, just for a 3rd-level bind), and need to have more coherent flavor. This would require reverse-engineering the vestiges to see which powers are considered at what level and what features can safely be discarded as flat garbage.

Even if we do revise them I think getting only three (Level 20 doesn't exist) is a little too limited, especially considering how long it takes to get your second Vestige. And when you get it it's a massive jump in power level for the class.

[Username17]

Pact Augmentations are just buff spell slots. The name is bad because it implies that they are somehow related to the vestiges when they simply are not. And the individual writeups are also bad in that none of the authors had a firm idea of what one of these buff slots was supposed to be worth, or how that value was supposed to change across levels.

The core design concept is actually pretty good. Rather than giving the player a large number of spell slots to dynamically assign to all-day buffs like Endure Elements or combat effects like Color Spray you made the player choose what their suite of combat actions was going to look like with the Vestige choice and they get a small set of buff slots to assign from a separate list entirely. That's fine. You just have to make coherent choices about what those buff slots do and how much they are bringing to the party, and the Tome of Magic authors didn't actually do that part at all.

The Binder could be made to be a real class with the addition of new Vestiges and Pact Augmentations. You make a set of at-will and use-limited abilities that present you with a minimally playable character, then you make a couple more of them that are playable but noticeably different and then the Binder's shtick becomes "the character who switches between different minimally functional character ability sets each day." Which is fine.

But the larger issue is why you'd want to do that instead of making new Fire Mage style classes that have playable ability sets and don't require so much content bloat that you probably won't interact with. Because let's face it: even if you make eight fully functional vestigial power sets, actual players are mostly just going to pick one and prepare it every day. Outside of weird downtime events or extreme adventure planning all the vestiges other than a player's favorites are just going to get ignored.

-Username17

[Krusk]

if you like the "bind a pact to get special powers" aspect of it, why not just take spheres and use those. https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_of_Fiend ... sh_Spheres

Rename them to be "satan pact" or "lucifer pact" or "odins old PC pact" or whathave you.

My 0 effort foundation would be
Level 1 - You know 3 spheres. Each morning you bind one sphere and gain advanced access to it. The other two you get at basic access.
Level 2 - Every even level from here on, you gain a new sphere known. You still only prep 1 advanced and 2 basic.
Level 4 - You can prep an additional basic sphere each morning. Increase at every 4 levels.
Level 5 - You can prep an additional advance sphere each morning. Increase at every 5th level.
Level 8 - You gain expert sphere access in one sphere each day. Increase the number of expert spheres you can prep every 8 levels.

Or better yet, someone probably built a tome class that does this. You should just find and re-fluff that.

[WiserOdin032402]

Frank, Krusk, you both make excellent points. I had completely forgotten about the TOME sphere system and that's actually an excellent place to start. Augmentations, spheres and a sprinkle of defensive abilities...And as to why I'd not just make another fire mage it's because I like the weird ability-package swapping mechanic, rather than just swapping spell slots (I know that sounds fucking stupid but I'm actually not a big fan of having 36+ interchangeable 1/day or more abilities)

[Koumei]

I mean you really could just take one fixed hit die and 2+Int skills and then take a list of maybe ten classes that work well enough for this (ones with relatively narrow roles, and that don't then have "sit down and prepare a list" as one of their tasks, and you likely want to draw the line at some point of power and flexibility - also nothing that gets a sort-of-permanent second character like a cohort, but animal companions and summoning should be fine - the former wanders off when you un-bind, the latter returns to its realm or vanishes completely). Then the actual class feature is "Every day, select one of these classes. You are that class. Don't re-roll your hit points. Add new temporary skill points to make up the difference but don't re-allocate your 2+Int ones".

My suggestion for classes they can Dress-Sphere into would be something like:
-PHB: Rogue, Barbarian, Non-Caster variant of Paladin/Ranger?
-Complete Series: Scout, Warlock, probably anything from C:War if anybody actually wants to be those for a day?
-Tome: the Elemental Mages

[Username17]

Dress Spheres is the best thing to compare the Binder to, yeah. The concept is essentially the same. What you want Vestiges or Augments to do is simply what classes you think should be available as Dress Spheres.

-Username17

[amethal]

Radiance House did their own version of the binder for 3rd edition, and updated it for Pathfinder i.e. gave it some more fiddly bonuses to keep track of. Their vestiges seemed to me to be a lot more flavourful than the WotC ones (and you can bind two at once at 4th level, not 8th).

The pathfinder version is called Grimoire of Lost Souls but it is expensive on Drivethru (I backed it on kickstarter). The authors seem very, very enthusiastic about spirit binding, which I find a bit unsettling.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Dress Spheres is the best thing to compare the Binder to, yeah. The concept is essentially the same. What you want Vestiges or Augments to do is simply what classes you think should be available as Dress Spheres.

-Username17

But if they were really Dress Spheres, you'd be able to switch them in combat, otherwise it's more similar to an FF5 Job. You wouldn't want a Binder to change vestiges every round, but being able to do it once a fight/hour/day/whatever might be appreciated by the players in the event they need a hard course correction. If I remember right, you needed a feat just to get rid of a vestige, and you still had to do an entire ritual to get another - it's too slow to be Dress Sphere-y. I wouldn't sit through a 10 minute long anime girl transformation scene.

[Ancient History]

I've been trying to think of the best way to say this, but the default is basically: the Binder was designed to suck. It's literally a way to trying to sell you on why having fewer options is a good thing. D&D never walked through all of the steps of the process, which is maybe why some people don't see it.

Start off with a wizard. You have a bunch of spell slots you have to fill every morning, and they are basically infinitely customizable with whatever spells you have. You are the swiss army knife of arcane magic users.

Now, let's say that all of this choice is getting to you, so a player comes up with a great idea: he'll come up with spell sets, which are collections of spells, themed together. So instead of picking out a dozen spells individually, he just writes down "Fire Magic" and he knows he's memorized so many fire balls and fire bolts and so forth.

At this point, the character is actually being limited, although in an entirely voluntary way - they have given up some of their general utility of picking whatever spells they want for the ease of picking up a themed selection of magical effects. If the gamemaster wanted to incentivize that, they might give the player some minor ability like a reserve feat - as long as one spell in Fire Magic is still unused, the PC gains some small bonus or at-will fire-related ability. That encourages the player to take the spell set because it feels like they're gaining something, even as it encourages them not to use it all up so they keep their small unlimited benefit.

Or maybe the gamemaster encourages further specialization, by providing extra benefits but severely restricting the character's options - like specialist wizards in general, who have more spell slots but have fewer spells to put them in there. So maybe you can't take Fire Magic or Ice Magic, you can cast more fireballs or iceballs than an unspecialiazed wizard, but you can't take Fire Magic and Ice Magic together.

Of course, at that level of abstraction, where you're focusing on the effects more than the mechanics of preparation, it might be easier to write down "Fire Magic" as "3 fireballs/day" or something like that. And if someone wanted to simplify things, they just do away with the spell-slot economy entirely.

Which is a very radical change from the perspective of the wizard, but from a player-experience level, if they're just picking spell sets anyway, it's effectively no difference at all. If all you use your Swiss army knife for is tightening screws, you don't differentiate it from a screwdriver.

So now instead of a wizard preparing a dozen unique spells in the morning, you're a binder picking a couple of sets of themed abilities which you can use on a given resource schedule. You've gone from being a Swiss army knife to being one of those screwdrivers where you can flip the handle to be either Phillips or flathead. The whole point of the class is to lead the player away from a character that can do more things, just as well if not better, in exchange for...what? Convenience?

Like I said, D&D never went through all those steps explicitly, and definitely not with that level of determination and rationality. Spell sets were never a thing, although damn near everything else was. But that's sort of the problem with Binders as a concept: they're bad money that exists to drive out good money. The only reason why they would be viable in a game with wizards is if they did something that wizards could not do, which they largely can't - by design.

If you had Binders from the get go, and no wizards, this would not be a huge issue. There is definitely something to be said for the Binders as a concept, in that smaller bundles of themed effects are a lot more manageable and easier to balance than one class that can make everyone feel small in the pants. But the execution was shit and it's hard to see how the execution could not be shit when wizards are still in the picture.

[SeekritLurker]

Just a tiny fluff bit from this corner:

Binder flavor would definitely work better as a shaman, because your ability package from binding the spirit would be written on the wrapper. You get stealth, entangle, and wild empathy from a forest spirit; you get fire powers from a fire spirit.

It's the spheres idea, but it's easier for everyone at the table to know what the package is, rather than saying "I've bound Naberius and Halifax."

[Emerald]

The whole point of the class is to lead the player away from a character that can do more things, just as well if not better, in exchange for...what? Convenience?

While the late-3e pseudo-4e-playtest books kind of had "make people like shittier wizards" as an overarching goal, I get the impression that the intention behind the binder's specific mechanics was more the other way around, actually.

Rather than starting with players who like wizards and try to convince them that wizard-with-both-hands-tied-behind-its-back is a better class, it feels like they wanted to start with players who find all the spell selection involved with playing a wizard (both choosing spells to learn in downtime and choosing spells to prepare each day) intimidating and try to convince them to try out a class with no downtime "spell" selection and some daily "spell" preparation to ease them into more resource-management-heavy classes.

Things were trending in that direction already in mid-3e, given that any new caster classes were either "core caster with spell list and/or casting mechanic tweaks plus minor flavor class features" (Favored Soul, Archivist, Wu Jen, Healer, etc.) or "class themed after a core caster but with the complicated resource management stripped out" (Warmage, Warlock, Spirit Shaman, etc.). You never really saw any 2e-style attempts to increase complexity/granularity anywhere--alternate spell schools, dramatically different spell management, extra resources on top of slots, etc.--just "the same but slightly different" or "the same but simpler."

You see something similar with the Shadowcaster. Superficially, it's a wizard that chooses spells known and has daily spell slots, but you have fewer spells known so you have fewer effects to learn as a player, the process of choosing spells known is more restrictive so you don't feel compelled to (and in fact can't) dumpster-dive, your "spell slots" are fixed per mystery so you don't have to choose what to prepare every day, and so forth. Low power level and somewhat wonky mechanics aside, it's a fairly reasonable approach to a Wizard Lite class to get people used to dealing with spells.

Just a tiny fluff bit from this corner:

Binder flavor would definitely work better as a shaman, because your ability package from binding the spirit would be written on the wrapper. You get stealth, entangle, and wild empathy from a forest spirit; you get fire powers from a fire spirit.

It's the spheres idea, but it's easier for everyone at the table to know what the package is, rather than saying "I've bound Naberius and Halifax."

Someone on another forum actually did write up an alternate druid with binder-style mechanics, found here. Worth a look for refluffing ideas, if nothing else.

[Username17]

Radiance House did their own version of the binder for 3rd edition, and updated it for Pathfinder i.e. gave it some more fiddly bonuses to keep track of. Their vestiges seemed to me to be a lot more flavourful than the WotC ones (and you can bind two at once at 4th level, not 8th).

The pathfinder version is called Grimoire of Lost Souls but it is expensive on Drivethru (I backed it on kickstarter). The authors seem very, very enthusiastic about spirit binding, which I find a bit unsettling.

I'll be honest, I am not sold on the logic of Binders getting extra simultaneous vestiges ever.

If your theory is that binding one vestige gets you as many abilities as a player character of an appropriately themed dress sphere should have, what is the justification for giving out a second one? And if your theory of class balance is that having two vestige lists is what it takes to represent a full dress sphere of appropriately themed level appropriate abilities, what's the justification for ever restricting a player character to having only one?

It would be one thing if the player had five dress spheres and they unlocked a sixth one at some point, but I really don't see how it's ever going to be reasonable to go from one dress sphere to two.

Essentially, it calls out for some weird bullshit like "major and minor access" to vestiges or something. Because you're getting into Multiclassing or Cohort math, and that's very hard to do when the second term is entering co-equal to where the first term is. Although you could also do something that was more literally based on multi-classing where double vestiging was an option where both bindings were restricted or lower level or something as compared to where the single vestige would be if you only bound one.

In any case however, the choice to allow people to select two vestiges at once is necessarily to roughly square the number of dress sphere combinations with all the attendant chance of fucking something up and creating option paralysis for the players. If there are only 10 vestiges and you ask a player to select two each day, you've created 45 choices, none of which are explicitly written down. Obviously you're going to want more than 10 vestiges, because otherwise why even fucking bother?

-Username17

[WiserOdin032402]

Dress Spheres is the best thing to compare the Binder to, yeah. The concept is essentially the same. What you want Vestiges or Augments to do is simply what classes you think should be available as Dress Spheres.

-Username17

But if they were really Dress Spheres, you'd be able to switch them in combat, otherwise it's more similar to an FF5 Job. You wouldn't want a Binder to change vestiges every round, but being able to do it once a fight/hour/day/whatever might be appreciated by the players in the event they need a hard course correction. If I remember right, you needed a feat just to get rid of a vestige, and you still had to do an entire ritual to get another - it's too slow to be Dress Sphere-y. I wouldn't sit through a 10 minute long anime girl transformation scene.

Really, Dress Spheres is an adequate way to view it. Granted, the binding ritual normally takes one minute but you have to spend a feat to get a 1/day vestige change, and then another feat that lets you bind a new vestige as a full round action. Then you spend 15,000 GP per Cube getting Cubes that let you change as a full round action that you prepare at the beginning of the day, so at higher levels Binders can just hotswap if they buy the right item, it's just that they can't prepare multiple of the same vestige.

Ideally, this ability would have just been built right into the class, but nobody was thinking about that so they made it two feats to do it 1/day as a full round and then a magic item.

a bunch of interesting points

The problem I think is that not many people actually play a wizard like that, and I'm of the opinion that the wizard shouldn't work like that. I know that makes me sound like a crazy person but I don't think the wizard should have that many choices in the first place, so it's less 'bad money pushing out good money' and more 'something manageable and less insane pushing out literal game-breaking cancer'. No one class should have the power Wizard/Cleric/Druid has while also having versatility. It's partly why I view the Beguiler/Dread Necro/Warmage setup as a solution to this. The Wizard shouldn't have been in the picture in the first place, and I'd prefer to split it up as much as possible and remove its presence entirely in favor of more manageable classes. Today's flavor of 'Wiser wants to see how to fix a thing' just happened to fall on Binder instead of something infinitely less productive and hashed out to death, like Fighter.

[SeekritLurker]

Someone on another forum actually did write up an alternate druid with binder-style mechanics, found here. Worth a look for refluffing ideas, if nothing else.

I only gave that a cursory glance, but I did like two parts - one being the power breakdown (at-will, encounter, daily, passive) and the other being the "call out the spirit you have bound as a summon" - the second primarily because that was one of the concepts that crawled across my brain when I said "make it a shaman" in the first place.

Concept is thematic, not far from what I was thinking. But I'm not going to go deep into the spirit list at the moment and see how those work out/compare to what I think the balance point ought to be.

Still, +1 for theme and being what I was envisioning at least in framework, if requiring more reading (I have no idea what +4 prowess per level even means.)

[jt]

I always assumed that most people who liked the binder just wanted to be doing some dark bargains with potential consequences, and whatever game mechanics came along for the ride were accepted. Binder/warlock hybrids were popular back in the day, despite the total lack of natural synergy, because they both served the same under-explored part of the flavor pie.

I'll be honest, I am not sold on the logic of Binders getting extra simultaneous vestiges ever.

If your theory is that binding one vestige gets you as many abilities as a player character of an appropriately themed dress sphere should have, what is the justification for giving out a second one? And if your theory of class balance is that having two vestige lists is what it takes to represent a full dress sphere of appropriately themed level appropriate abilities, what's the justification for ever restricting a player character to having only one?

I've went down very similar rabbit holes multiple times, so I can answer.

If you're picking something from a pool of options, it's always more interesting to pick two of those options. You get a radical increase in number of potential flavors for very little cost, nearly squaring the number of different characters. It also gives players a greatly increased sense of ownership - when you pick one thing, you're always picking something the designers made for you, but when you pick two, you're combining elements of your own.

(Digression: Increasing the number of options you can choose more doesn't give you this benefit. Technically, the way binomial coefficients work, you have more options until you get to pick half the things in the pool. But when you get that many choices, all of the options become undifferentiated soup. It's too much to keep track of for people to care. The third option is a stretch but potentially interesting, and everything beyond gets lost in the soup.)

So you want to balance your dress spheres so that it makes sense for the binder to have two active. But each of those spheres needs to be a thematically complete sub-concept on its own. Each of those spheres needs enough abilities that it feels like its own cohesive package, and that's actually a rather large number of abilities, enough that doubling it is enough that it'd take a while to wrap your head around in play. So maybe you want to do some sort of tutorial where you have one for one level, and then you get your second one later.

Additionally, this is D&D 3E, so "enough abilities that it feels like its own cohesive package" is the entirety of what passes for level 1 balance. Twice that sounds overpowered. There's also no coherent theory of how fast characters gain power in this game, but there must be some level that's as powerful as a level one binder with double the number of available options, so you eyeball it and give them their second dress sphere there.

[Ancient History]

a bunch of interesting points

The problem I think is that not many people actually play a wizard like that, and I'm of the opinion that the wizard shouldn't work like that. I know that makes me sound like a crazy person but I don't think the wizard should have that many choices in the first place, so it's less 'bad money pushing out good money' and more 'something manageable and less insane pushing out literal game-breaking cancer'. No one class should have the power Wizard/Cleric/Druid has while also having versatility. It's partly why I view the Beguiler/Dread Necro/Warmage setup as a solution to this. The Wizard shouldn't have been in the picture in the first place, and I'd prefer to split it up as much as possible and remove its presence entirely in favor of more manageable classes. Today's flavor of 'Wiser wants to see how to fix a thing' just happened to fall on Binder instead of something infinitely less productive and hashed out to death, like Fighter.

If you want to design Dungeons & Dragons with Training Wheels, there is nothing wrong with that. But what you're doing is presenting players with tricycles and putting them next to 10-speed mountain bikes and telling them that these things are both viable wheeled vehicles for transport. While this is not a lie, one option clearly has a mechanical advantage, and this imbalance is generally seen as bad game design.

Now, if the wizard didn't exist - if you were remaking D&D from scratch without that as an option - then you're looking at a different balance of abilities entirely. But in D&D3.x, wizards are at core. Any attempt to fuck with that, be in Psionics, Incarnum, Binding, Warlocks, etc. are measured against that particular stick because that is your default.

Now, if the game didn't have generalist wizards, then the whole dynamic changes. And there's a good argument to be made that what the designers were struggling with all through third edition was how to deal with the quadratic wizard/linear warrior problem, but they couldn't find an option that gimped wizards or gave nice things to fighters sufficient to address the imbalance that was the basis of the whole game.

When you look at damn near every option that WOTC introduced in their 3e products, they were warring between the ease of generating shovelware material for existing classes - more spells! more feats! more prestige classes! - versus a desire to restrict and rechannel class options into fewer powers and alternative action economies. Dragon Shamans had their aura, Incarnum had their essentia, psychic characters had "psionic focus", warlocks had their blast, etc.

[jt]

Now, if the wizard didn't exist - if you were remaking D&D from scratch without that as an option - then you're looking at a different balance of abilities entirely. But in D&D3.x, wizards are at core. Any attempt to fuck with that, be in Psionics, Incarnum, Binding, Warlocks, etc. are measured against that particular stick because that is your default.

Why are they measured against that stick, instead of measured against any of the other measuring sticks in core?

[Mord]

Why are they measured against that stick, instead of measured against any of the other measuring sticks in core?

Because it's the longest stick by such a margin that it makes all the other sticks embarrassed to use the same locker room.

[Foxwarrior]

I thought you were supposed to arbitrarily discard outliers, not hold them up as your standard.

But actually it's because the other classes are lame, the wizard might have twice as many cool super powers as an entire party needs for a gonzo adventure into player-directed crazy town, but a party of most of those other classes won't have enough powers between them. And without cool super powers, you might as well be playing 5e

[Koumei]

If you definitely want multiple Vestiges, then you would bind X number of Dress Spheres at the start of the day, then write out your character sheet for each one. Keep in mind that ability increases and feats are fixed based on you gaining levels so you're not re-selecting all of those for each Dress Sphere, the majority of stuff is actually locked in based on the Sphere and not a selected thing.

Then you don't go around having both full sets, but you can spend a Full Round Action undergoing a magical girl transformation pushing one vestige to the back of your mind/soul as you let another one take control. It's probably like talking to One of Many in Mask of the Betrayer and saying "Yeah sure, let The Brute come out to play."

Special magic items (or feats?) for you would be actual spheregrids, where you select the placement of your vestiges when choosing them for the day, and if you swap along the right order you pick up weird side benefits like "Immune to itchiness" or "all of my attacks deal added Fire damage even though I just changed from Berserker to Frost Mage" or "I can cast Cure Light Wounds once per costume change".

Then at level seventeen you unlock your final Dress Sphere which requires going through an entire sphere grid in order, opening all the gates on it, and instead of a class it's something like "Turn into a Hydra".

[Username17]

If you want to pop the vestiges out as summons, it kinda screams that you only have one dress sphere active at a time. If the dress sphere is "on" you can shoot level appropriate firebolts and if the dress sphere is "out" you get a level appropriate fire snake and your literal character's actions are nearly useless as you're now a Medium BAB Light Armor wearer with a Morningstar. That would be a fine balance point, but clearly you can't have a second dress sphere "on" while one of your dress spheres is "out." Otherwise you'd keep the fire snake out at all times and fight with level appropriate frost beams from the other dress sphere. So even if you have it set up so that you choose two dress spheres for the day and dynamically switch between them - if you pop out your dress sphere as a summon you can't activate or pop out your second dress sphere for the duration.

The main issue with the Binder as a whole is that it's a very large amount of design work for a single character. Let's say that I'm making a new edition and I have a character concept such as the Berserker. I need to write up enough Berserker abilities that the Berserker player feels like they have real choices in character development for each level. Let's say that's ten levels and we want to give three meaningful ability packs per level to choose from. That requires me to design 30 ability packs, and that creates fifty-nine thousand and forty nine different ways to be a tenth level Berserker. And now we design the Binder and let's say that they are selecting two dress spheres off a list of 10 - that's one hundred ability packs to design over ten levels, and there's only forty five ways to be a Binder. You've just done more than three times the ability writing and created a thousand times less character facing options.

And recall that with the core concept of being able to hot swap your available dress spheres each day that all forty five of the character facing options you made are still just one character. You have made zero means to make one 7th level Binder different from another 7th level Binder and your Binder class description is already more than three times the length of the Berserker's or the Assassin's.

Binder is simply a very low priority for design work, because it's a very bad return on design work. Every collection of dress spheres could in theory just be a character class. So instead of making a Water sphere and a Shadow sphere you could spend the same design energy and make a stand alone Pirate class. Instead of making a Wind sphere and a Thunder sphere you could make a stand alone Storm Shaman and so on and so on. Do you have so much design time on your hands that it makes sense to make one "Dial H For Hero" class instead of making five or more stand alone character classes. Because functionally, that is the tradeoff we're talking about.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Being Rockman X and switching between X busters would be cool

[Username17]

Being Rockman X and switching between X busters would be cool

Sure. The point is that it's only slightly less work to make a functional Rockman class than it is to make a Metalman class, a Woodman class, a Bubbleman class, a Flashman class, a Heatman class, a Quickman class, an Airman class and a Crashman class.

The return on "number of functional player characters" for "amount of writing" is just really small with characters that have radical multiform as their primary selling point.

-Username17