Neuroglyph
First Post
While at GenCon 2011 a couple of weekends ago, I happened to have spent a considerable amount of time wandering through the Exhibition Hall, and marveling at how diverse our gaming hobby has become. It’s easy to get focused on the one game system which is your favorite, and a stroll through the GenCon Exhibition Hall can be a real eye-opener as to just how massive the gaming industry has gotten. Not to mention, of course, what a real trial it is to keep hold of your money when presented with so many new games and game systems.
Admittedly, I did not spend as much as I could have spent that weekend… but I probably spent more than I should!
And in an effort to add a bit more parity to the games I review here on EN World, I made some great contacts with some well-known publishers, who have graciously offered to send me products for this column. So keep an eye out over the subsequent weeks for reviews of a wide range of gaming products, novels, and even one highly anticipated computer game based upon a certain very well-known miniatures wargame!
Several of the big releases to hit the shelves at this year’s GenCon came from Paizo Publishing for their Pathfinder RPG. Pathfinder: Ultimate Combat is a new supplement for the popular fantasy role-playing game, which sets out to offer martial characters “new ways to customize their combat abilities” with a wide range of player content!
Ultimate Combat
The supplement also includes more than 250 new Feats, including a new category of feat for the gunslinger, called Grit Feats. Ultimate Combat includes new armor and weapons types, including eastern style gear for the samurai and ninja as well as new firearms for the gunslinger, new rules for handling alternative combats such as duels and siege warfare, a host of new vehicles, variant rules for adding wounds and other combat effects, new spells, and more!
Production Quality
The production quality of Pathfinder: Ultimate Combat is absolutely exceptional, with superb writing and a beautiful layout for presenting the new material. The book itself is tightly bound and of good heft, with glossy finish pages and a pleasure to handle. The material is presented in a logical format, which coincidentally matches the way that player content was presented in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook: classes, feats, weapons and armor, alternative gear, combat rules, and spells.
The illustrations within the book are simply gorgeous to look at, and really enhance the reading experience of this supplement. Many of the new weapons, armor, and alternative gear have unique illustrations which make it easy for players to imagine what their characters are wielding. I was a bit disappointed with the lack of illustrations depicting the fantasy vehicles proposed in the book and the spell section was a bit scanty, but overall, most sections of the book were amply supplied with quality art.
Chapter 1: Classes
Base Classes
The new base classes introduced by Ultimate Combat are the gunslinger, the samurai, and the ninja, and are all long on crunch.
The first class is a completely unique new base class, and offers players a chance to portray characters such as a Dumas-inspired musketeer or even a, well, gunslinger as inspired by King’s famous series of the same name. In fact, one of the Paladin archetypes, the Holy Gun, would fit in pretty nicely with the character of Roland in some ways – but I am getting a bit ahead of myself talking about archetypes already. Needless to say, the gunslinger base class offers a very different style of martial combat than the typical sword-and-sorcery character.
The gunslinger also comes with a very interesting new combat mechanic called grit. Grit is a dynamic fate point system which allows a gunslinger to perform unique combat maneuvers, called deeds, and range from special attacks like pistol-whips, aimed shots targeting specific hit locations (called targeting), or causing combat conditions such as bleeding shot, to utility maneuvers like blowing out a lock in a door (blast lock), cause a wound to stop bleeding by pressing a hot barrel against it, or even reload a gun with preternatural speed (lightning reload). Grit points increase by administering the killing blow to a monster, or hitting with a critical roll, but can also be awarded, at GM discretion, by doing amazingly dangerous stunts. Overall, the authors created a very “visual” class, and one which I think will inspire many players to consider for a character.
The ninja is an alternative class to a rogue character, but with an eastern theme, and offers many powers and abilities one would expect from this iconic assassin. The ninja uses a ki-pool mechanic to gain extra attacks in combat, and has special maneuvers called ninja tricks which simulate nearly every amazing feat ever attributed to ninjas in literature, anime, or asian cinema. From smoke bombs to the ability to deflect arrows with their bare hands, from throwing a flurry of stars to disappearing in the blink of an eye with a vanishing trick, all the legendary and mythical powers of the ninja are here in this class.
The samurai is an alternative to the cavalier class, and like the ninja, offers an array of powers and abilities for this eastern themed class which are evocative of portrayals of samurai in literature and asian cinema. Samurai can either serve a specific master or a militant order, or can be ronin, with each option offering different abilities to the samurai character. Issuing challenges against foes to focus their might, withstanding terrible wounds and the threat of dying with resolve, and learning the art of mounted archery are all part of being a samurai, and the authors created solid rules for handling these powers and more.
There is also some decent fluff with each of these classes to allow players to create some very interesting characters with these new base classes.
The Archetypes
The new Archetypes featured in Ultimate Combat offer a nifty way to create a variant character class with little effort. The archetypes presented in the supplement are designed for a specific base class, and there are between around a four or five archetypes listed for each class – although a few have as many as a half dozen archetypes or more. The archetypes list new class features which are substituted for a particular class in order to make it into the variant.
For example, there is a Monk archetype called the Flowing Monk, which has attacks and defenses which invoke the wind and a river. They replace the standard first level ability of stunning fist with a new ability called redirect. Each archetype has a couple of these class feature substitutions, and sometimes bonus feats and other minor changes to the base class.
Overall, I think this mechanic is a smart way to allow for a lot of variance to class building, where a new full class would not make sense, because there are only a few changes from the base class. And with nearly 80 new archetypes in this supplement, there is a whole lot of interesting variants to experiment with, although I would consider some of the variants more appealing than others. For instance, archetypes like the Urban Barbarian, Musketeer Cavalier, and Driver Rogue seem a bit lackluster and even counter to their native base class. But the vast majority of these archetypes add a new dimension to the base character classes, and many of them are quite vivid, like the Holy Gun Paladin and the Beastmorph Alchemist, that they will likely have a certain appeal to many Pathfinder players.
Along with the new archetypes, the authors have also added additional class power options for many existing base classes. Alchemists have several new discoveries to encounter, barbarians can benefit from new rage powers, there are several new orders for cavaliers, weapon groupshave been expanded for fighters, new arcana are available for magus characters, and the rogues have new talents and advanced talents.
There is certainly a considerable amount of new content packed into the character class section of this book!
Chapter 2: Feats
While much of the contents of Chapter 1 impressed and enticed me, Chapter 2 left me feeling somewhat ambivalent towards the new player content. Ever since the concept of feats was introduced into Dungeons & Dragons, the tendency of designers to feel that “more is better” has become almost an obsession. And this book shows that Pathfinder developers are just as susceptible to the obsession as their brethren over at WotC.
I would certainly have expected new feats for the new base classes, and there is some clear support for the gunslinger, ninja, and samurai. And there are new grit feats, as well as 14 new martial arts styles consisting of several feats which add flavor to both ninjas as well as monks. But there are also a large number of new feats that seem to be added to give new variations on existing themes, and adding nearly 300 new feats to a game already steeped in feats and advanced feats seems a bit overwhelming.
But regardless of my personal feelings on feat overkill, the feats are well written, and do offer some interesting customization options for martial characters. The teamwork feats were quite intriguing, offering potent bonuses for characters which opt to take these feats among themselves. Introduced in the Advanced Players Guide, the authors continue to expand the option for this type of feat in Ultimate Combat. And asian cinema fans will certainly enjoy the addition of the style feats, such as Tiger, Crane, and Mantis – which have supplemented with additional fantasy ones such as Kirin, Efreeti, and Shaitan styles.
Chapter 3: Mastering Combat
This chapter delves mainly into a wide range of new weapon and armor options for characters, and provides considerable support for the new base classes introduced in the first chapter. Eastern armor, and eastern style weapons, both standard and exotic, are presented by the authors with both statistics and descriptions, as well as with some very nice illustrations to help in the outfitting process for samurai and ninja characters.
Following that is some suggestions on how to implement firearms into a Pathfinder campaign, and a wide range of historical and fantasy style guns for gunslinger characters to use. Like the previous section, the authors provide both statistics and flavor descriptions, accompanied by illustrations of the new weapons. There is also new firearm gear, alchemical rounds, and enchanted ammunition to complete a gunslingers kit and have them ready to start shooting up a campaign in no time.
Additionally, there are some entries for new gladiatorial weapons, and for more primitive campaigns, there are options for Stone and Bronze Age weapons and armor. Great stuff for primitive NPCs or time-traveling campaigns.
There are also some new variant rules introduced here in this chapter covering Duels (both martial and arcane), and for Performance Combat. The latter is similar to what went on in gladiatorial arenas, where the main purpose of the duel was to incapacitate a foe, but to do it in the most exciting way to tantalize the crowd. The authors offer some extensive rules for affecting a crowds’ attitude and feelings toward a combatant, and offer a different combat experience for GMs to give to their players.
The chapter wraps up with rules on siege warfare, including statistics and illustrations of a range of siege equipment. Most of the equipment is familiar to history buffs, but Ultimate Combat offers new twists on siege engines with special alchemical shots, cannons, and magical flame throwers. The rules presented for siege warfare are fairly easy to understand and run, and I should mention that there were feats in the previous section to enhance a characters’ ability to operate siege engines.
Chapter 4: Vehicles
The chapter on Vehicles opens with a big chunk of new rules for use with vehicle operation and combat. Covering about a dozen pages, these rules cover everything from vehicle movement, to turns, controls, fighting from, and everything else one could do in, or to, a vehicle. The rules are well-written, however, and one can get the basics of vehicle combat down fairly well with a careful reading.
Personally, as a GM, I’d sit down with my players and spend an hour going over the rules in a hypothetical way at least once before dropping vehicle combat into my game without warning!
The authors also include about a score of different vehicle statistics in Ultimate Combat, both mundane and magical, and for land, sea, and air! This provides a good selection of vehicles, from carts to chariots, rowboats to galleys, and even airships and gliders. Steampunk-fantasy fans might be a little disappointed to learn that an airship costs around 50,000 gold… not something that low level characters are likely to own any time soon!
Chapter 5: Variant Rules
This chapter of Ultimate Combat offers four new sets of variant rules which can be used with the Pathfinder RPG. They are completely optional, and change the overall “flavor” of combat for players and monsters alike. The variants cover having Armor as Damage Reduction, using Called Shots to target specific body locations, how to handle wearing Piecemeal Armor, and an alternative system of Wounds and Vigor instead of using hit points.
Sadly, these rules are fairly extensive changes to the mechanics of the game, and far more than can be discussed in detail in even a lengthy review. Suffice it to say that many of these systems have been toyed with in the past, in previous editions of D&D and in other game systems, but the authors have done a good job of adapting them to the Pathfinder ruleset. Clearly, there are some gaming groups that would welcome a change from the abstract quality of AC and Hit points, and these rules offer an alternative approach to combats without those statistics.
Chapter 6: Spells
The final chapter of Ultimate Combat seemed a bit out of place to me, offering new spells for classes that were not only hybrids of melee and caster, but also spells for pure casters as well. I would have thought that such an extensive spell list would have been more appropriate with the earlier release of Ultimate Magic.
Some of the spells, however, do seem appropriate for the book, dealing with creating phantom vehicles, enchanting ammunition and bombs, or igniting shuriken. But there are just as many, if not more, spells which don’t seem all that appropriate for this type of book – one that is focused on physical and melee combat of all types – and I think somewhat detract from the focus of the contents.
Overall Score: 4.25 out of 5
Conclusions
Ultimate Combat is one heck of an impressive piece of work for the Pathfinder RPG, and overall I was very impressed with the new options and character classes provided in this book. While on one hand I do think that Ultimate Combat could have added a bit more “fluff” to assist players in designing their characters, and the feat chapter felt a bit like a “carpet-bombing” of character options, the book still accomplished its goal of providing a lot of new content to the Pathfinder game which will give martial type characters a fun and rewarding play experience. And consider the huge amount of content provided in this supplement, Ultimate Combat is an excellent candidate for a “must-have” book for any Pathfinder or 3.5 gamer!
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Editor’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of this product from which the review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
Admittedly, I did not spend as much as I could have spent that weekend… but I probably spent more than I should!And in an effort to add a bit more parity to the games I review here on EN World, I made some great contacts with some well-known publishers, who have graciously offered to send me products for this column. So keep an eye out over the subsequent weeks for reviews of a wide range of gaming products, novels, and even one highly anticipated computer game based upon a certain very well-known miniatures wargame!
Several of the big releases to hit the shelves at this year’s GenCon came from Paizo Publishing for their Pathfinder RPG. Pathfinder: Ultimate Combat is a new supplement for the popular fantasy role-playing game, which sets out to offer martial characters “new ways to customize their combat abilities” with a wide range of player content!
Ultimate Combat
- Lead Designer: John Bulmahn
- Illustrations: Wayne Reynolds (covers)
- Publisher: Paizo Publishing
- Year: 2011
- Media: Hardcover (255 pages)
- Price: $39.99 (on sale from [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Pathfinder-Roleplaying-Game-Ultimate-Combat/dp/1601253591?&camp=212361&linkCode=wey&tag=neurogames-20&creative=380725"]Amazon.com[/ame] for $26.39)
The supplement also includes more than 250 new Feats, including a new category of feat for the gunslinger, called Grit Feats. Ultimate Combat includes new armor and weapons types, including eastern style gear for the samurai and ninja as well as new firearms for the gunslinger, new rules for handling alternative combats such as duels and siege warfare, a host of new vehicles, variant rules for adding wounds and other combat effects, new spells, and more!
Production Quality
The production quality of Pathfinder: Ultimate Combat is absolutely exceptional, with superb writing and a beautiful layout for presenting the new material. The book itself is tightly bound and of good heft, with glossy finish pages and a pleasure to handle. The material is presented in a logical format, which coincidentally matches the way that player content was presented in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook: classes, feats, weapons and armor, alternative gear, combat rules, and spells.
The illustrations within the book are simply gorgeous to look at, and really enhance the reading experience of this supplement. Many of the new weapons, armor, and alternative gear have unique illustrations which make it easy for players to imagine what their characters are wielding. I was a bit disappointed with the lack of illustrations depicting the fantasy vehicles proposed in the book and the spell section was a bit scanty, but overall, most sections of the book were amply supplied with quality art.
Chapter 1: Classes
Base Classes
The new base classes introduced by Ultimate Combat are the gunslinger, the samurai, and the ninja, and are all long on crunch.
The first class is a completely unique new base class, and offers players a chance to portray characters such as a Dumas-inspired musketeer or even a, well, gunslinger as inspired by King’s famous series of the same name. In fact, one of the Paladin archetypes, the Holy Gun, would fit in pretty nicely with the character of Roland in some ways – but I am getting a bit ahead of myself talking about archetypes already. Needless to say, the gunslinger base class offers a very different style of martial combat than the typical sword-and-sorcery character.The gunslinger also comes with a very interesting new combat mechanic called grit. Grit is a dynamic fate point system which allows a gunslinger to perform unique combat maneuvers, called deeds, and range from special attacks like pistol-whips, aimed shots targeting specific hit locations (called targeting), or causing combat conditions such as bleeding shot, to utility maneuvers like blowing out a lock in a door (blast lock), cause a wound to stop bleeding by pressing a hot barrel against it, or even reload a gun with preternatural speed (lightning reload). Grit points increase by administering the killing blow to a monster, or hitting with a critical roll, but can also be awarded, at GM discretion, by doing amazingly dangerous stunts. Overall, the authors created a very “visual” class, and one which I think will inspire many players to consider for a character.
The ninja is an alternative class to a rogue character, but with an eastern theme, and offers many powers and abilities one would expect from this iconic assassin. The ninja uses a ki-pool mechanic to gain extra attacks in combat, and has special maneuvers called ninja tricks which simulate nearly every amazing feat ever attributed to ninjas in literature, anime, or asian cinema. From smoke bombs to the ability to deflect arrows with their bare hands, from throwing a flurry of stars to disappearing in the blink of an eye with a vanishing trick, all the legendary and mythical powers of the ninja are here in this class.
The samurai is an alternative to the cavalier class, and like the ninja, offers an array of powers and abilities for this eastern themed class which are evocative of portrayals of samurai in literature and asian cinema. Samurai can either serve a specific master or a militant order, or can be ronin, with each option offering different abilities to the samurai character. Issuing challenges against foes to focus their might, withstanding terrible wounds and the threat of dying with resolve, and learning the art of mounted archery are all part of being a samurai, and the authors created solid rules for handling these powers and more.
There is also some decent fluff with each of these classes to allow players to create some very interesting characters with these new base classes.
The Archetypes
The new Archetypes featured in Ultimate Combat offer a nifty way to create a variant character class with little effort. The archetypes presented in the supplement are designed for a specific base class, and there are between around a four or five archetypes listed for each class – although a few have as many as a half dozen archetypes or more. The archetypes list new class features which are substituted for a particular class in order to make it into the variant.
For example, there is a Monk archetype called the Flowing Monk, which has attacks and defenses which invoke the wind and a river. They replace the standard first level ability of stunning fist with a new ability called redirect. Each archetype has a couple of these class feature substitutions, and sometimes bonus feats and other minor changes to the base class.
Overall, I think this mechanic is a smart way to allow for a lot of variance to class building, where a new full class would not make sense, because there are only a few changes from the base class. And with nearly 80 new archetypes in this supplement, there is a whole lot of interesting variants to experiment with, although I would consider some of the variants more appealing than others. For instance, archetypes like the Urban Barbarian, Musketeer Cavalier, and Driver Rogue seem a bit lackluster and even counter to their native base class. But the vast majority of these archetypes add a new dimension to the base character classes, and many of them are quite vivid, like the Holy Gun Paladin and the Beastmorph Alchemist, that they will likely have a certain appeal to many Pathfinder players.
Along with the new archetypes, the authors have also added additional class power options for many existing base classes. Alchemists have several new discoveries to encounter, barbarians can benefit from new rage powers, there are several new orders for cavaliers, weapon groupshave been expanded for fighters, new arcana are available for magus characters, and the rogues have new talents and advanced talents.
There is certainly a considerable amount of new content packed into the character class section of this book!
Chapter 2: Feats
While much of the contents of Chapter 1 impressed and enticed me, Chapter 2 left me feeling somewhat ambivalent towards the new player content. Ever since the concept of feats was introduced into Dungeons & Dragons, the tendency of designers to feel that “more is better” has become almost an obsession. And this book shows that Pathfinder developers are just as susceptible to the obsession as their brethren over at WotC.
I would certainly have expected new feats for the new base classes, and there is some clear support for the gunslinger, ninja, and samurai. And there are new grit feats, as well as 14 new martial arts styles consisting of several feats which add flavor to both ninjas as well as monks. But there are also a large number of new feats that seem to be added to give new variations on existing themes, and adding nearly 300 new feats to a game already steeped in feats and advanced feats seems a bit overwhelming.
But regardless of my personal feelings on feat overkill, the feats are well written, and do offer some interesting customization options for martial characters. The teamwork feats were quite intriguing, offering potent bonuses for characters which opt to take these feats among themselves. Introduced in the Advanced Players Guide, the authors continue to expand the option for this type of feat in Ultimate Combat. And asian cinema fans will certainly enjoy the addition of the style feats, such as Tiger, Crane, and Mantis – which have supplemented with additional fantasy ones such as Kirin, Efreeti, and Shaitan styles.
Chapter 3: Mastering Combat
This chapter delves mainly into a wide range of new weapon and armor options for characters, and provides considerable support for the new base classes introduced in the first chapter. Eastern armor, and eastern style weapons, both standard and exotic, are presented by the authors with both statistics and descriptions, as well as with some very nice illustrations to help in the outfitting process for samurai and ninja characters.
Following that is some suggestions on how to implement firearms into a Pathfinder campaign, and a wide range of historical and fantasy style guns for gunslinger characters to use. Like the previous section, the authors provide both statistics and flavor descriptions, accompanied by illustrations of the new weapons. There is also new firearm gear, alchemical rounds, and enchanted ammunition to complete a gunslingers kit and have them ready to start shooting up a campaign in no time.
Additionally, there are some entries for new gladiatorial weapons, and for more primitive campaigns, there are options for Stone and Bronze Age weapons and armor. Great stuff for primitive NPCs or time-traveling campaigns.
There are also some new variant rules introduced here in this chapter covering Duels (both martial and arcane), and for Performance Combat. The latter is similar to what went on in gladiatorial arenas, where the main purpose of the duel was to incapacitate a foe, but to do it in the most exciting way to tantalize the crowd. The authors offer some extensive rules for affecting a crowds’ attitude and feelings toward a combatant, and offer a different combat experience for GMs to give to their players.
The chapter wraps up with rules on siege warfare, including statistics and illustrations of a range of siege equipment. Most of the equipment is familiar to history buffs, but Ultimate Combat offers new twists on siege engines with special alchemical shots, cannons, and magical flame throwers. The rules presented for siege warfare are fairly easy to understand and run, and I should mention that there were feats in the previous section to enhance a characters’ ability to operate siege engines.
Chapter 4: Vehicles
The chapter on Vehicles opens with a big chunk of new rules for use with vehicle operation and combat. Covering about a dozen pages, these rules cover everything from vehicle movement, to turns, controls, fighting from, and everything else one could do in, or to, a vehicle. The rules are well-written, however, and one can get the basics of vehicle combat down fairly well with a careful reading.
Personally, as a GM, I’d sit down with my players and spend an hour going over the rules in a hypothetical way at least once before dropping vehicle combat into my game without warning!The authors also include about a score of different vehicle statistics in Ultimate Combat, both mundane and magical, and for land, sea, and air! This provides a good selection of vehicles, from carts to chariots, rowboats to galleys, and even airships and gliders. Steampunk-fantasy fans might be a little disappointed to learn that an airship costs around 50,000 gold… not something that low level characters are likely to own any time soon!
Chapter 5: Variant Rules
This chapter of Ultimate Combat offers four new sets of variant rules which can be used with the Pathfinder RPG. They are completely optional, and change the overall “flavor” of combat for players and monsters alike. The variants cover having Armor as Damage Reduction, using Called Shots to target specific body locations, how to handle wearing Piecemeal Armor, and an alternative system of Wounds and Vigor instead of using hit points.
Sadly, these rules are fairly extensive changes to the mechanics of the game, and far more than can be discussed in detail in even a lengthy review. Suffice it to say that many of these systems have been toyed with in the past, in previous editions of D&D and in other game systems, but the authors have done a good job of adapting them to the Pathfinder ruleset. Clearly, there are some gaming groups that would welcome a change from the abstract quality of AC and Hit points, and these rules offer an alternative approach to combats without those statistics.
Chapter 6: Spells
The final chapter of Ultimate Combat seemed a bit out of place to me, offering new spells for classes that were not only hybrids of melee and caster, but also spells for pure casters as well. I would have thought that such an extensive spell list would have been more appropriate with the earlier release of Ultimate Magic.
Some of the spells, however, do seem appropriate for the book, dealing with creating phantom vehicles, enchanting ammunition and bombs, or igniting shuriken. But there are just as many, if not more, spells which don’t seem all that appropriate for this type of book – one that is focused on physical and melee combat of all types – and I think somewhat detract from the focus of the contents.
Overall Score: 4.25 out of 5
Conclusions
Ultimate Combat is one heck of an impressive piece of work for the Pathfinder RPG, and overall I was very impressed with the new options and character classes provided in this book. While on one hand I do think that Ultimate Combat could have added a bit more “fluff” to assist players in designing their characters, and the feat chapter felt a bit like a “carpet-bombing” of character options, the book still accomplished its goal of providing a lot of new content to the Pathfinder game which will give martial type characters a fun and rewarding play experience. And consider the huge amount of content provided in this supplement, Ultimate Combat is an excellent candidate for a “must-have” book for any Pathfinder or 3.5 gamer!
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Editor’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of this product from which the review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
- Presentation: 4.5
- - Design: 4.5
- - Illustrations: 4.5
- Content: 3.75
- - Crunch: 4
- - Fluff: 3.5
- Value: 4.5
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