Hung Over Review: Magic of Incarnum

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Hung Over Review: Magic of Incarnum

Post by Username17 »

Magic of Incarnum
A New Source of Power for Your D&D Game

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This will be in the style of an OSSR or drunken review, but I started it while hung over. So this will be a “hung over review.” Having spent 16 hours drinking all the beer and all the Jameson and Coke, I don't think I intend to drink any more during this reading. We're setting the wayback machine to 2005, which means we aren't quite doing something “old school,” but are instead drinking and ranting about a transitional fossil: something that served as a waypost on the way to the catastrophe that was 4th edition D&D. In 2005, we now know, the WotC design team had begun working on a ground-up redesign of Dungeons & Dragons, codenamed Orcus. And while it is historical reality that Orcus appears to have been kind of cool, Mike Mearls convinced them to scrap it in favor of making a new new ground up redesign that had daily power use limits front and center. Ironically, Mearls then grabbed some of the stuff they had been working on with Orcus, converted it in a half-assed manner to 3rd edition rules, and released it as Tome of Battle, which got rave reviews and is the most popular book Mearls ever worked on.

But in 2005, that hadn't happened yet and WotC had just come up with the idea of focus grouping ideas for 4th edition by making books with more radical ideas in them and then selling them for real money. Essentially, they were charging people to give them 4th edition feedback. And this manifested as three books: Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and the first release of the series: Magic of Incarnum. Magic of Incarnum did terribly enough that it probably was used as ammunition by Mearls when arguing that the entire project should be scrapped and they should start working on a system that was much more “Vancian” to be more “D&D like.” So by the time Tome of Battle actually got released, they were in essence charging people money to playtest an idea they had already decided that they weren't going to use – which made their marketing really weird in 2008 after it was clear that the Book of Nine Swords stuff they had shit canned was actually relatively popular. The double-think message of the day then was that they had learned from Tome of Battle – although apparently “learning from” in this case meant that they had fired the main designer and allowed Mearls to sell off pieces as unfinished hack work.

Magic of Incarnum itself is probably the most radical of the alternate system idea books. It's not actually clear if they just started with the craziest one, or if they self censored on the others because Incarnum had faired so poorly. The core idea is that they were going to make an underlying association between magic item slots, magical buffs, and character level. And that they were going to make a relationship between item & buff power and character level as well. In short: that they were going to fix “wealth by level” by making the amount of power you get from magic tongue studs and buff spells at any level be a hard coded thing. In abstract, that sounds really cool and I can see how someone would have approved this book based on the one paragraph pitch. However, in actual reality it had James Wyatt at the head of the design team, Andy Collins at the head of the development team, and seemingly no one anywhere who really had any idea of how to fit a mathematical progression.

Magic of Incarnum credits sixteen people on the writing side. There are Designers, Additional Design, Development Team, Editors, Editing Manager, Design Manager, Development Manager, Director of RPG R&D, and Production Managers. Not a single person is actually credited with writing any of this fucking thing. I assume the three guys on “design” and one guy on “additional design” actually wrote it (their names are on the front cover, after all), but I have no idea why they would need six people who were managers or directors for a book hacked out by only four people – nor do I know what the “development team” was supposed to be doing other than drawing a paycheck.

The credits page gives thanks to past editions of D&D and also says they are using some stuff from Bastion of Broken Souls, Planar Handbook, Manual of the Planes, Monster Manual II, Fiend Folio, Miniatures Handbook, and Frostburn. That list probably seems pretty eclectic to you, but it basically means they name checked a bunch of monsters from books you may or may not have heard of. The book is 221 pages long, so I guess we'd better get started.

Introduction

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Shit just got weird.

The introduction is three pages and tries to set the tone for the fluff of the book and get across the core concepts of Incarnum. This is really bad. From a game mechanical standpoint, the concept is really just that higher level people can use more magic items, and also that they get more juice out of the magic items they have, and finally that they can trade their magic item slots for level appropriate buffs. I just stated the whole mission statement in one sentence, and it probably sounds like a pretty good idea because it's a pretty good fucking idea. Unfortunately, this book came with some really wonky fluff and more importantly it had far too many moving parts and was flat designed poorly. So it never really caught on.

The first part of the introduction is a third of a page story about Lidda and Tordek running into a guy who is a “Pentifex Monolith” who then tells them that there is Incarnum going on. The story ends with Tordek asking “What in the Nine Hells is incarnum?” which basically means that there was literally no purpose whatsoever to the vignette. You start not knowing what the hell incarnum is, and you end still not knowing what it is. On the next page, they have a picture of the dude from the story and assure you in the caption that they will bother to tell you what the fuck a Pentifex Monolith is on page two hundred and fucking nine. I will try to not ruin the suspense.

The introduction then spends a page and a half defining the terms they intend to use in this book. There is Incarnum, Soulmelds, Essentia, Chakras, and Chakrabinds. That's five new terms they are asking you to memorize, and all of them sound like they mean the same thing. In fact, “soulmeld” and “chakrabind” literally mean the same thing, so people had a lot of problems trying to learn this system. Much more problems than they would have if there were any linguistic clues at all as to what was a slot and what was a thing that went into a slot. There are of course additional extremely important terms that they don't bother to give headings or even definitions for in the introduction. It casually mentions that you have ten different chakras and can access them for binding purposes in some order based on your level – but the terminology of what that is actually called is not mentioned here. We are assured that the full rules for using this shit will be in Chapter 4 or perhaps Chapter 5. I'll try not to ruin the surprise.

While we're on the subject of the ten different fucking chakras, I just want to emphasize how fucking terrible it is that you have ten different fucking chakras. That is not OK. Ten slots to keep track of would be kind of much to deal with at a real table. Ten numbered slots would be a total pain in the ass. Ten slots where one of them is specifically a “crown” slot and another is a “brow” slot and it's supposedly extremely important which is which? Fuck that. I am a god damned doctor and I couldn't tell you what the difference between glowing blue energy coalescing around your crown and glowing blue energy coalescing around your brow is. Those really sound pretty similar to me. Although as you read this book, you do realize that the glowing power energy in this book is very definitely always blue. They only hint at this a little bit in the introduction, which is weird because it's so ingrained into the rest of the book that people call the book “magic of blue.”

The last page or so of the introduction is a bit on using “as much or as little” of the book as you wanted. Which is to say that rather than nutting up and actually putting down some hard and fast rules about how the game was supposed to work (like say, the “eight item limit” that K and I championed), they try to make the book be a dim sum menu that you can pick and choose things off of. This is a catastrophe. What it ends up meaning is that the only way this book ever got used by anyone is to cherry pick some really tiny part of it and graft it onto a character. I mean, did you know you even had a “brow slot” or a “heart slot?” If not, would you like to trade one of them for real and measurable power?

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So Magic of Incarnum was already telling you pretty much straight up that it was over two hundred and twenty pages of obscure crap to sift through in order to dumpster dive yourself real but probably minor power upgrades even before you were done with the intro. It made lots of DMs reject this book out of hand. Between the vast complexity and the fact that it was essentially billed as pointless power creep (hell, even the front cover says it is a “new source of power”) meant that few DMs were tempted to learn how the system was supposed to work. But how did it work? The answer was really “not very well,” but I guess we should wait for the chapters that actually explain that shit.
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Re: Hung Over Review: Magic of Incarnum

Post by Ancient History »

FrankTrollman wrote: Magic of Incarnum credits sixteen people on the writing side. There are Designers, Additional Design, Development Team, Editors, Editing Manager, Design Manager, Development Manager, Director of RPG R&D, and Production Managers. Not a single person is actually credited with writing any of this fucking thing. I assume the three guys on “design” and one guy on “additional design” actually wrote it (their names are on the front cover, after all), but I have no idea why they would need six people who were managers or directors for a book hacked out by only four people – nor do I know what the “development team” was supposed to be doing other than drawing a paycheck.
Same-same withe Bastions. I think maybe they started calling all their writers Designers so that they could sound more important and professional to their lords and masters at Hasbro.

It might also just be a matter of scale: Wizards of the Coast has a couple hundred employees, and even one-tenth of those are dedicated to D&D, that's still more than five times the employees at Catalyst Game Labs.
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Post by icyshadowlord »

I tried to read this book a few times, and never got the rules into my head due to way the everything was written.
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Post by Voss »

Ah. I borrowed this one from someone in the gaming group at the time and gave it a read. Some interesting ideas, and a whole lot of extraneous shit to pack sideways into D&D. Some of it was too weird to fit, and some of it was made so bland that it was impossible to tell why someone would want to. And unfortunately, the latter happened with the classes, the most memorable of which was Not-a-Paladin-Honest and Yet-Another-Nature-Guy.

There just wasn't room for more of the same crap, except blue. And often mechanically worse, and also sacrificing the ability to use magic items, and not having stuff that really matters, like spells.
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Post by OgreBattle »

So is every Tome class that mentions the color blue a bunch of times an improved version of an Incarnum class written in a playable manner so I never actually need to read Incarnum?
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Post by RobbyPants »

This should be a fun read. I always wondered about MoI. I had heard of it, and eventually gleaned the context through reading threads here and there, but I've never seen a physical copy of the book.

OgreBattle wrote:So is every Tome class that mentions the color blue a bunch of times an improved version of an Incarnum class written in a playable manner so I never actually need to read Incarnum?
Well, Frank flat-out rewrote one of the classes from MoI when he made the Tome Totemist.
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Post by Kaelik »

@RobbyPants

He also did the Soulborn and Incarnate. Which is why Ogre brought up "every class" that has blue. Because unlike you, he has seen all three.
OgreBattle wrote:So is every Tome class that mentions the color blue a bunch of times an improved version of an Incarnum class written in a playable manner so I never actually need to read Incarnum?
Yes
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Post by Cyberzombie »

This book failed on all fronts.

There just aren't many players that want to be some freaky blue-glowing dude that looks like some freaky genetic experiment gone wrong. So that more or less loses anyone who care about what their characters look like. And even if your group had that rare PC who was overjoyed he now had a way to simulate the inbred offspring of two incestuous chimeras, even he probably got too confused by the complicated mechanics and never used the book.

Powergamers gained little from the book because the incarnum powers were too weak to produce any power builds of note. If you were looking for a power boost for your character, there were better ways.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Kaelik wrote:@RobbyPants

He also did the Soulborn and Incarnate. Which is why Ogre brought up "every class" that has blue. Because unlike you, he has seen all three.
Nice. He wrote those all around the same time, and somehow, I only saw one of the classes. That, or I only remembered one.

Thanks.
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Post by Kaelik »

Cyberzombie wrote:Powergamers gained little from the book because the incarnum powers were too weak to produce any power builds of note. If you were looking for a power boost for your character, there were better ways.
They were relatively decent ways to make a minimal investment of feats to shore up specific weird defenses.

IE, you could get see invisibility all the time for feat or two, uncanny dodge, or improved evasion, or get out of grapples free for a feat. Not useful for all characters by any means, but each of those was exceedingly useful for some specific characters to just negate whatever they were most worried about.
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Post by Antariuk »

Count me to the "curious, but never read it" crowd. I always thought MoI was meant as an alternative for people who wanted new subsystems for magic but didn't like Psionics - I never knew it belonged to the experimental designs for Orcus.

What I'm interested in is if and how MoI interacts with existing magic and abilities, if at all.
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Post by Mistborn »

Kaelik wrote:They were relatively decent ways to make a minimal investment of feats to shore up specific weird defenses.

IE, you could get see invisibility all the time for feat or two, uncanny dodge, or improved evasion, or get out of grapples free for a feat. Not useful for all characters by any means, but each of those was exceedingly useful for some specific characters to just negate whatever they were most worried about.
The only MoI thing I remember of the top of my head is that Strongheart Vest letting you use Hellfire Warlock powers infinitely, I think there was free metamagic in the book but I don't remember if it was worth using.
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Post by Username17 »

Chapter One: Races

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Incarnum will apparently put you into strange anatomical positions.

This book gets off on the wrong foot by providing new humanoid races before it gets down to any of the nutty gritty of explaining what the fucking hell is going on. This follows the “Player's Handbook” style of giving players the options they need in the order they think you'll be doing character generation in (Race, Class, Skills, Feats, Powers), but that's a really terrible way to deliver information for supplement. First of all, experienced players do not actually design characters that way. They decide what they want their character to do, and then they work backwards to what classes, races, and options they need to accomplish that. Secondly, you're trying to sell people on a new system, you have to tell people what the system fucking does. Spoiler alert: this book doesn't even try to tell you what the fucking hell this system does until page 50. Even in Psionics you could probably guess after the first couple pages that characters were going to be using telepathy and telekinesis and shit, but for Incarnum it is so far completely about discussing whether sculpting the blue misty parts of your soul into a shinier bit of blue soulfire and binding it to one of your lesser chakras damages your soul in any permanent fashion (apparently it does not). What blue soulfire actually does or why you would care whether it was bound to one of your chakras (or how your chakra is different from your essentia or soul in any case) is still anyone's guess.

So this first chapter introduces four different and incredibly uninspiring races that you can play. They are the Azurin, the Duskling, the Rilkan, and the Skarn. Each of them has an affinity for Incarnum, and is otherwise basically the same as some more standard race. The Azurin, for example, is essentially a Human who traded their extra skill point for having more “Essentia.” That's the power points you have for making your Incarnum stuff advance as you go up in level. From a flavor standpoint, they are humans who specifically have blue eyes and care a lot about stuff. That's the first fucking thing you read when you start reading this book, and it is terrible. From the DM's side, you don't even know how good having more Essentia actually is, but you've already been told that players can be a standard human only trade skill points for what is literally “more raw power.” DMs who were even a little bit concerned by game balance and didn't feel that they wanted to read a 221 page coffee table book about blue power lines just for fun put this fucking book down right here. Players who wanted to make flavorful characters just put the damn book down as well – fetishizing blue eyed humans is a little bit creepy but in no way interesting. Page fucking eight and we've already convinced most players and most DMs to put the book down and never read it again.

Each of the races gets three pages, with little subheadings for things like “Duskling Beliefs” and “Power Groups” and you'd think there might be some interesting shit in there. But there fucking isn't. Not a single one of these fucking races has an ethos, creed, or major religion. All four of them feature on both the good and evil sides of the fence and the book tries to tell you that it is somehow meaningful that one race favors LG, LE, CG, and CE while another favors NG, CN, NE, and LN. Seriously. There's supposed to be some sort of profound point where some groups favor the edges of the alignment square while others favor the corners of the alignment square. But since no one can tell me what the difference between the corners and the edges of the alignment square even fucking are, that is bullshit.

Fully three of the four races presented are literally Star Trek forehead aliens. Skarn are humans with little frills on their arms and back, Rilkan are humans with scaly patches on their wrists and neck, Azurins are humans with bright blue contact lens. That's fucking it. The Duskling is a blue skinned Elf/Goblin crossover. I don't think we needed more kinds of Elf or more kinds of blue Goblin, but there you go. It's an Elf with a Con bonus, if you care. Which you don't.

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There is no way to make the Rilkan not look ridiculous, and this book didn't even really try.

The final bit in this chapter is where they try to give you racial attitudes towards Incarnum for races you might actually play. But this is basically filler text. It tells you that Dwarves might want to take the Ironsoul somethingwhatsit prestige class to be found on page 126. But it doesn't tell you what Dwarven people might think if you popped your glowing blue power lines in a Dwarven city. And it only mentions the PHB races, no discussion about what a Hobgoblin or Sahuagin Incarnum user might be all about.

And that's the whole chapter. 18 pages and a whole chapter in and they haven't told us fuck or what the about the book's actual nominal topic.

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Post by NineInchNall »

FrankTrollman wrote:This follows the “Player's Handbook” style of giving players the options they need in the order they think you'll be doing character generation in (Race, Class, Skills, Feats, Powers), but that's a really terrible way to deliver information for supplement. First of all, experienced players do not actually design characters that way. They decide what they want their character to do, and then they work backwards to what classes, races, and options they need to accomplish that.
This has always bothered me. It might merely be yet more evidence that the people involved in writing D&D are not what anyone would really call experienced players. This would go along with the whole "magic missile is the best spell" stuff in D&D for Dummies.


It's similar to all those character creation guideline sections that instruct you to come up with a character concept before you do anything else. Like before you even look at what's possible in the system.
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Post by Kaelik »

Lord Mistborn wrote:
Kaelik wrote:They were relatively decent ways to make a minimal investment of feats to shore up specific weird defenses.

IE, you could get see invisibility all the time for feat or two, uncanny dodge, or improved evasion, or get out of grapples free for a feat. Not useful for all characters by any means, but each of those was exceedingly useful for some specific characters to just negate whatever they were most worried about.
The only MoI thing I remember of the top of my head is that Strongheart Vest letting you use Hellfire Warlock powers infinitely, I think there was free metamagic in the book but I don't remember if it was worth using.
Like I said, you could spend a feat for uncanny dodge if you were worried about Rogues fucking you, or you could spend a feat for Evasion if you had a really low HP pool and no way to manufacture resistances. You could spend a feat to gain 10ft teleport as a move action, which is in some ways better than the feat you can now spend in Martial Study to grab a teleport from Shadow Hand and some ways worse, but at the time was the only thing that you could get for a feat that instantly negated all grapple enemies.

There was free metamagic, but it was stupid, and you didn't want it, but if you pretended the free metamagic from incarunm also applies as free psionicic modification it could let you bestow power yourself for more points than you spent and effectively gave you recharge. There was also something about lighting like two levels of caster progression on fire in exchange for +20 bonuses to spell DC, which is of course, fucking broken as fuck, but also never ever allowed by your GM.
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Post by John Magnum »

Is it remotely common for people to choose Race before choosing Class? Like, even if you have a very low level of system mastery and aren't thinking of a particular schtick that you'll want to multiclass your way toward, who picks the race first and then tries to figure out what class would work?

(Admittedly, I actually have done this once, because I really wanted to play a crowperson. But still!)
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Post by Maxus »

I read Incarnum and thought 'Someone was a David Eddings fan'.

Because everyone who read his stuff knew what his favorite color was.

I applaud his good taste, of course. I like blues and greens.
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Post by DSMatticus »

John Magnum wrote:Is it remotely common for people to choose Race before choosing Class? Like, even if you have a very low level of system mastery and aren't thinking of a particular schtick that you'll want to multiclass your way toward, who picks the race first and then tries to figure out what class would work?

(Admittedly, I actually have done this once, because I really wanted to play a crowperson. But still!)
People will pick on the basis of race if the races are mechanically and flavorfully interesting. People will use things like tengu and warforged and tiefling as starting points because bird-people, robot-people, and demon-people still have novelty in a way pointy-eared-people don't. But usually, your class brings so much more to the table that that's the thing you end up caring about first and foremost. Not too surprising.
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Post by nockermensch »

I think I already said this here before, but once I did a hindu epics inspired campaign where there were no bullshit magical items. People gained wealth by level as "aura", which they could spend in Dravya (it's sanskrit for Jewels, IIRC).

Since I'm lazy, the system was incredibly half-assed: Aura Points were an exact match for Wealth by Level, and Dravya were simply all the magical items in the DMG, only that instead a real item, it manifested as glowing auras or whatever on the character when activated. As such, they could not be broken or stolen.

On gaining a new level, PCs could meditate to create or improve their dravya (characters could modify 1/4 of their total aura points per day of meditation).

Our group never bought MoI, but from the little I read, I found it more complex and confusing and less efficient than my system. Which is something sad, because I literally spent 2 hours coming with the idea and typing it for my players.
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Post by Starmaker »

nockermensch wrote:Our group never bought MoI, but from the little I read, I found it more complex and confusing and less efficient than my system. Which is something sad, because I literally spent 2 hours coming with the idea and typing it for my players.
Sure, but could you have packaged it into a hardcover book and sold it? Thought so.

Oh, and "Magic of Incarnum is so good it needs its own forum!"
(Yes, it's a real line that people really had in their sigs. The old wotc forums were an endless source of entertainment.)
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Post by Antariuk »

John Magnum wrote:Is it remotely common for people to choose Race before choosing Class? Like, even if you have a very low level of system mastery and aren't thinking of a particular schtick that you'll want to multiclass your way toward, who picks the race first and then tries to figure out what class would work?

(Admittedly, I actually have done this once, because I really wanted to play a crowperson. But still!)
My very first game of D&D started with the MC firing up his laptop to show me the SRD classes, saying: "Read the descriptions and pick the one you like most, we'll work down from there." Every D&D game ever since has been this way, first class, then race, then the rest. A friend of mine once really wanted to play a goliath, but that is the only incident I can remember.
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Post by Voss »

John Magnum wrote:Is it remotely common for people to choose Race before choosing Class? Like, even if you have a very low level of system mastery and aren't thinking of a particular schtick that you'll want to multiclass your way toward, who picks the race first and then tries to figure out what class would work?

(Admittedly, I actually have done this once, because I really wanted to play a crowperson. But still!)
I've met enough elf fetishists to sort of think this is a thing, but not exactly. They just outright refuse to play anything that isn't elf, so in most ways that part of character generation is essentially skipped. And usually they just pick from the subset of classes that isn't fucked by writing 'elf' down first.
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Post by Username17 »

Chapter Two: Classes

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Yes, really.

There are three classes in Magic of Incarnum. They are the Incarnate, the Soulborn, and the Totemist. Of these, only the Totemist has any flavor you might possibly give a fuck about. The Incarnate and the Soulborn try to make you care about the difference between the edges of the alignment square and the corners. Soulborns are dedicate to the corners of the square, while the four flavors of Incarnate are dedicated to the edges. Again and still, you don't know or care what the difference between Chaotic Good and Neutral Good is, so this distinction is meaningless. The last class, the Totemist, is based on having the soul forms of magical beasts and duplicating their powers. So that's basically a Final Fantasy style Blue Mage. That actually has some traction, even if it is weird as fuck.

The classes themselves mostly serve as pointers to powers that are on lists that haven't appeared in the book yet. So it's really hard to evaluate the classes while reading this chapter. Starting at 4th level, a Soulborn gets to have Soulmelds off the Soulborn Soulmeld list. And starting at 8th level, they get to start binding them to crown or foot chakras. Is that good? Fuck, what flavor does it have? What are Soulborn Soulmelds even for? At this point in the book, you have no idea. You know that as a Chaotic Good Soulborn, you aren't allowed to take Soulmelds that have the Law or Evil tags, but you have no idea what Soulmelds are for, or whether ones with the Law tag are meaningfully different from the ones with the Chaos tag. I'd say it was all a black box, but the box (like everything in this book) is in fact blue.

As it happens, the Soulborn is based on the 3.5 Paladin, which is a terrible class. So it's extremely underpowered. The Totemist is based on the 3.5 Druid, which is an overpowered class. So you could actually do some stuff that's level appropriate as a Totemist. No one fucking cares about the Incarnate, because it's a medium BAB class that supposedly specializes in hitting people with a sword. I think it's based on the Psychic Warrior, but honestly no one gives a shit. It's biggest problem is that it's actually four classes and none of them really have enough material to be playable. For the Soulborn and the Incarnate, they made an alignment list for each alignment (Good, Evil, Law & Chaos), and said you could only pick off the alignment subtype for your alignment(s). But then the Incarnate only has one alignment because it's on an edge, and the Soulborn has two because it's on a corner. So the Soulborn can play with half their list, and the Incarnate can only play with a quarter of theirs. It's stupid. Now, guess who has more soulmelds to pick? That's right, the class that has more soulmelds to pick (ostensibly because he's a sword user who doesn't even have an inherently decent attack bonus), is also the one with a shorter list.

Also, they fucking forgot to give Incarnates martial weapon proficiency, despite instructing them to go fight in melee combat. It's just a non-functional class from beginning to end.

Image
This asshole is the iconic Incarnate. He is not proficient with that sword.

Now yes, I did make Tome versions of these classes. The Totemist, the Soul Born, and the Incarnate. Now I'll be perfectly honest: I never finished the Incarnate. There's just no meat there. The Soulborn and the Totemist at least have something to describe themselves with in a sentence or two. Terrible mechanics yes, but “basically a Jedi” or “a shamanically themed blue mage” is something that you could describe quickly and people might actually want to care. Incarnates... I don't even know what they were supposed to do. Their only really defining characteristic is that they are supposed to really care about alignment. D&D fucking alignment, which is the worst thing about D&D.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that when you're reading the book, you can get all the way through the second chapter and still have really no idea what the book is actually about. Only the Totemist even gives you a vague idea of what their powers fucking do, and you would be justified in being somewhat skeptical because the first class has artwork that is totally at odds with their actual proficiencies in the text. So what little rules you have at your fingertips are clearly at odd with what little flavor they have deigned to hand out. But while we're now on page 32, the next chapter still isn't going to tell us about the nominal subject matter of this book. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
Seerow
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Post by Seerow »

The classes themselves mostly serve as pointers to powers that are on lists that haven't appeared in the book yet. So it's really hard to evaluate the classes while reading this chapter. Starting at 4th level, a Soulborn gets to have Soulmelds off the Soulborn Soulmeld list. And starting at 8th level, they get to start binding them to crown or foot chakras. Is that good? Fuck, what flavor does it have? What are Soulborn Soulmelds even for? At this point in the book, you have no idea. You know that as a Chaotic Good Soulborn, you aren't allowed to take Soulmelds that have the Law or Evil tags, but you have no idea what Soulmelds are for, or whether ones with the Law tag are meaningfully different from the ones with the Chaos tag. I'd say it was all a black box, but the box (like everything in this book) is in fact blue.
Doesn't this same argument apply to basically every class in core?

I mean replace "What is a soulmeld" with "What is a spell" and the exact same arguments write themselves.

I can understand the statement that having the races section at the beginning is bullshit, since this is a splat book and we have other races already...but the classes appearing before the powers that they access is pretty much standard. Not sure why that got so much flak here.
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NineInchNall
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Post by NineInchNall »

Except that spell is kind of something people have an intuitive handle on, since people in literature, myth, movies, and the corner new age wiccan bullshit shoppe claim as something they do. The details of how spellcasting works and what spells can actually do can be left for later, because people have a general idea what a spell is in those other contexts (which isn't all that different, even if significantly weaker, than what D&D wizards can do).

WTF do soulmelds do? There aren't any intuitions or folk notions to fall back on.
Last edited by NineInchNall on Fri Dec 20, 2013 9:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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