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

[Avoraciopoctules]

My favorite Binder-adjacent class in Pathfinder was probably the Shaman, especially when the Spirit Binder Oracle archetype stole its cool stuff.

You're a divine spontaneous caster, and you basically pick a set of extra spells known and a few non-spell powers every day. There's some work up front, but you don't have to track prepared spells, so the bookkeeping isn't worse than regular wizard or cleric.

There was a lot of fun to be had in guaranteeing you had all the adventuring essentials built into your base spells, and then grabbing some wind control, divination, or fire blasts. Making persistent undead with Bones or cherry picking off the Wizard list at no cost with Lore did have some game-breaking potential, though.

[OgreBattle]

I was expecting the PF shaman to be more summoning oriented so haven't looked into it

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

"This one class takes up more space than 10 other classes" describes full casters already. So it seems like binders never had a place to begin with because Clerics have all the vestiges and Druids sift through hundreds of pages to select a monster form and Wizards switch them on a spell by spell basis. The binder's mechanics has been discussed, but the fluff hasn't been brought up at all... as D&D doesn't really have a coherent cosmology.

Vestiges being a thing separate from existing demons, spirits, ghosts, and so on in the monster manual was dumb. D&D devils and the binder were both inspired by bible solomon summoning demon stuff.

The things I mechanically, balance, and cosmologically dislike about D&D all revolve around the PHB full casters existing.

[Emerald]

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.)

Prowess is part of the homebrew system that druid is part of; it was written when scaling feats a la Tome were all the rage, and prowess points are basically like if 3e feat trees were condensed into one uber-feat and you spent skill points to buy individual effects. It's a cool idea but definitely overly complicated in execution, and you can ignore that part entirely if you're just borrowing the class for your own game.

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.

That, plus the fact that nearly all of the vestige powers with cooldowns have a 5-round timer and very few vestige powers are straight-up attacks, so even with multiple vestiges bound it was nice to have eldritch blast and some other invocations to use while those powers recharged.

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.

I could see two vestiges working in that case, actually, where it's expected that at any given time you use one as a summon and one for personal powers and can swap between them Pokemon-style--kinda like how a a druid balances its companion/summons and its spellcasting in combat, but without the "being worth 3 classes at once" thing.

You could even get cute with it and do things like have certain powers recharge only when you swap your vestiges, transfer a personal vestige power to the summoned vestige, and similar.

But more than two would definitely get into "impossible to balance and probably pretty annoying to play" territory, yeah.

The binder's mechanics has been discussed, but the fluff hasn't been brought up at all... as D&D doesn't really have a coherent cosmology.

Vestiges being a thing separate from existing demons, spirits, ghosts, and so on in the monster manual was dumb. D&D devils and the binder were both inspired by bible solomon summoning demon stuff.

Vestiges were a separate thing specifically so they could throw in iconic and powerful characters like Acererak and Karsus without having them having to physically still exist somewhere to potentially show up and wreck your day. D&D can definitely support a place for a special category of beings that didn't end up in the appropriate afterlife plane for whatever reason (the fanon Ordial Plane and Near Realm are good fits for that, and D&D isn't shy about throwing new demiplanes and dimensions and such around), but then you could go there and chat with Tenebrous and Geryon in person and that just wouldn't do.

But you're right, having the binder just bind specific devils and demons one step down from Archdevils and Demon Princes would have been an easier add-on (and much less self-referential), and given how much 4e pushed tieflings and warlocks into the spotlight I'm kinda surprised they didn't lay that groundwork in ToM.