How Do I Rate "Perfectly Reasonably Powered Classes," for Pathfinder 1st edition? (Patreon)

When I ran a poll to see what content you Patrons most wanted to see as a free weekly article, by far the most popular answer was "Anything, as long as it's for 1st edition Pathfinder." One Patron specifically suggested they'd like to see updates to some early third-party content, similar in scope to my "Perfectly Reasonably Powered Shifter" article. They specifically called out the Time Thief.

As the author of the Time Thief, I feel well-positioned to do that. And such an article is going to hit within the next week or two. But if I am going to do another article under that tagline, I think it behooves me to talk about how I rate what "Perfectly Reasonably Powered" means in Pathfinder 1st ed.

So not to bury the lede: To me, if you make a rules option that seems on par with the totality of existing content of the same type--better than existing options in some ways, worse in others, but not universally superior to all existing rules of the same type nor so good that players will choose it more than half the time over all similar choices--that is perfectly reasonably powered.

And it's often hard to know that conclusively (or at least not be able to prove it) until the perfectly reasonably powered option has been in the play environment for several years.

For example, when the Mystic Theurge first entered the OGL-d20-fantasy space, there was a HUGE outcry from a large segment of the game's fanbase that it was massively overpowered. I know this was 20 years ago, and many players of PF1 have never played in a world without the mystic theurge, but I assure you that in some spaces the hue and cry was loud and vehement. Professional game designers weighed in. It was proposed as proof of 3.5 being "over-powered" compared to 3.0.

But mystic theurges never took over the spellcaster play space. Yes, a mystic theurge is unquestionably more powerful than any straight-multiclassed cleric/wizard build. But it was not, in the fullness of a campaign, universally more useful than the majority of other spellcaster concepts. There are two core reasons for that. The first is that there's nothing about being a mystic theurge that inherently lets you cast spells more quickly. So even if you have many, many more options, you can still only do one of them each round. (Yeas, there are ways to do more than that, but none of them are unique to the mystic theurge, and equally useful to other spellcasters.) The second reason is that a mystic theurge has more lower-level spells, but a lower caster level (and thus lower save DC for their best spells) and lower max spell level than any single-class spellcaster build.

Not all of those factors were necessarily obvious when the class first came out. In Pathfinder, there's also the fact that since the mystic theurge is already a prestige class, it's not likely to benefit from the growing number of other prestige classes or archetypes the core spellcasting classes received over a decade of the game's development. When the Pathfinder Core Rulebook came out, a wizard had no archetypes, few options for bonus feats, no alternate class features, and so on. A mystic theurge didn't give up as much compared to a wizard as they do now that wizards can draw from the APG, UC, UM, ACG, and so on.

And that applies directly to why some early character classes published by third-party publishers (3pp) seem underpowered compared to official Pathfinder classes. As the designer of the Time Thief, I happen to know that it was written in a different play environment than currently exists for Pathfinder 1st edition. I released in July 2010, one month BEFORE the Advanced Player's Guide came out. The game had just 11 character classes. There was no inquisitor, no magus, no gunslinger, no investigator. And just as with the mystic theurge one game system and many years before, every one of those additional classes was decried by a significant percentage of Pathfinder's fanbase as overpowered when they first came out.

The Time Thief has had more ongoing support than many 3pp classes, but nowhere near the support the wizard, or even the investigator, has gotten. If you compare the original Time Thief to Pathfinder characters built from just the Core Rulebook, it seems Perfectly Reasonable. But the Pathfinder 1e play environment has changed and expanded. Some of that expansion certainly resulted in the dreaded "power creep" games often get as new rules and options are added. But also, just having so many different ways of doing things removes some of the power of a class that takes a nonstandard approach, and players, GMs, and designers all have access to a lot more data about how the game actually plays with options that were once seen by some as overpowered.

Also, I'm better at this than I was 15 years ago. I have 26 years playing, designing, developing, producing, and even critiquing things for the core engine that runs Pathfinder 1st edition. I'm likely not the designer with the MOST total experience with that engine, but I bet I'm in the top 5 worldwide. And while not all of my experience is with Pathfinder 1e, the fact that I've been on the ground floor in creating and launching six different d20 ttRPG core rulebooks for six different takes on d20, for four different companies, means I have a lot of familiarity with how d20 rpg rules are created, tweaked, interconnected, and can be balanced against each other.

So, as I crack open dusty and venerable design files, I'll be looking at the totality of Pathfinder 1e as I consider what's Perfectly Reasonably Powered in the current play space.