Pathfinder 1E Designing Archetypes- how much is to much.

[Naoki00_]

This is something as a class homebrewer that I always have as a headscratcher. When creating archetypes for a class, I have really no idea how far to take it. A lot of existing archetypes I don't feel go far enough in defining the differences, or take away things that make that archetype almost not worth taking.

So how far is it ok to change a class just through an archetype alone until it becomes an entirely new class or a prestige? and while I have seen many archetypes I admit i don't know THAT many, so what are some that would be good guidelines for "do" and "don't"?

 

[gamerprinter]

When I design archetypes, I replace/alter whatever I need to in order to best achieve my design goal. Sometimes that means replacing practically everything, though usually only half or less of a class's abilities are replaced. I just try my best to replace existing abilities with new abilities that are equivalent in balance of power. This can be the hardest to do, especially if your replacement ability does a completely different thing, that isn't similar mechanically to what it replaces. As long as you keep that in mind, I see no problem with replacing as much as you need to in order to get what you want.

While I definitely do design custom archetypes for my home games, I've also had a hand a designing some published archetypes for the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (my published homebrew), however, I've had more experienced designers tweak these designs, or overhaul them completely to meet my development goals: Yojimbo (ranger archetype), Nitojutsu Sensei (samurai archetype), Onmyoji (wizard archetype). As you can see the ranger archetype has lots of changes, where as the onmyoji has very little, with only thematic differences in some cases.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Take a look at the Bard Archetype Archeologist - it completely strips out bardic music. Keeps magic and skills, and give access to Rogue talents. To me that is about as far as an archetype goes.

 

[gamerprinter]

I recently created a Starship Pilot, new base class, based on a PF ranger chassis for a sci-fi setting using the rules from EN Publishing Santiago setting. Although not an archetype, since I only wanted to match the power levels of various ranger abilities to be comparable to what I wanted to replace them with, however in no other way, is this build anything like a ranger. I figured the ranger's DPR is significantly less than other builds, so if I got more powerful on any of the new abilities, it wouldn't be too much of a problem - as long as I used some common sense. I posted the Starship Pilot base class on the second page of my technologist thread. As you can see every ability of the ranger chassis is replaced - in some cases significantly.

 

[Starfox]

If you have a concept, stay true to that concept. Trade out less conceptually needed abilities as required. But not to excess. Change for change's sake is bad.

Also, all classes have a certain amount of "siloing", that is abilities devoted to different fields such as attack, defense, utility. Don't overload any one of these. If you want to add an offensive ability, take out an offensive ability, not a utility or defense (unless the idea of the class is to be a variant that leans towards another silo, such as a higher-utility fighter). If a class is leaning very heavily in one direction, this becomes even more important. Adding more offense to the barbarian is unlikely to work well, for example.