D&D General The 3.5 Binder was a really cool class

[Necropolitan]

The main lore issue with playing a Binder in a campaign is it required the DM to either just go with the mechanics of Binding each day or they had to roleplay through the PC Binding each Vestige.

It'd be like if Cleric PCs were expected to have a conversation to convince their god to grant them spells every single day.

 

[Kurotowa]

You know the joke about old eras of gaming books that were more for reading than for playing? I can't help but feel that the 3e Binder fell under that heading. On a read, it was incredibly cool and flavorful. Lots of people have memories of reading it and being impressed. But there's comparatively fewer stories about people playing it, much less playing it and being impressed.

I'm sure that there's people out there who played it and enjoyed it. But there's good reason that Warlocks got promoted from supplement to core PHB and Binders didn't. A lot of the late 3e books were just too wildly experimental. They were like entire sub-games built into a class. Incarnum, anyone?

 

[Alzrius]

A lot of the late 3e books were just too wildly experimental. They were like entire sub-games built into a class. Incarnum, anyone?

You do realize that the Incarnum system got reinvented (since it wasn't Open Game Content) as "akashic magic" for PF1, right? And that it was popular enough that people are still making content for it?

 

[Ulfgeir]

In the 3.5 campaign /Savages Tides) that I am playing in, we have a Binder. He has been outed as a Binder, but insists that he is a paladin of Olidammara. And he had managesd to convince a bunch of pirates to become Paladins of Olidammara as a means of repentence for their earlier actions.

 

[BrokenTwin]

Binder and Totemist were two of my favourite late-era 3.5 classes. Played both, and while they weren't A-tier, they were both so full of flavour and mechanically fun to mess around with.

 

[GMMichael]

It'd be like if Cleric PCs were expected to have a conversation to convince their god to grant them spells every single day.

Missed opportunities.

So are the truenamer and shadow caster like Bruno? We don't talk about them?

 

[CandyLaser]

Missed opportunities.

So are the truenamer and shadow caster like Bruno? We don't talk about them?

The truenamer had a host of mechanical problems that made it not work well; notably, using truenamer abilities required a skill check, but the DC increased at a faster rate than the skill bonus did, so by default it became harder to do anything as you advanced. What's more, the DCs would increase rapidly if you attempted to reuse the same utterance during the same day, and the rewards for successfully performing an utterance were generally unimpressive—and the targets sometimes got saves too. For instance, at level 8 you could learn Fog From the Void... which was just the fog cloud spell, available to most casters at level 3. Except it wasn't the same as fog cloud, because in 3.5 that spell would last for 10 minutes/level, with a range of 100 ft plus 10 ft/level, while the truenamer version lasted only 1 minute and had a fixed 100 foot range.

If I remember correctly the rules were also incomplete. All that stuff I mentioned about skill checks? The rules just said that the DC for performing an utterance is 15 + (the target's CR x 2). But Fog From the Void doesn't have any targets, and the rules don't say how to set the DC in that case.

Shadowcaster was better; it's playable, at least, and moderately effective. They're a bit underwhelming and the least flavorful of the classes in Tome of Magic. I found them to effectively be spellcasters working off a very limited list, but they weren't bad per se.

 

[Necropolitan]

Missed opportunities.

Some people take it as a personal offense that they're expected to roleplay the Class they picked.

 

[Alzrius]

It'd be like if Cleric PCs were expected to have a conversation to convince their god to grant them spells every single day.

I liked the idea that clerics would petition for spells, instead of simply taking them for granted. The problem (as I saw it) was that everyone treated this like it was at best a chore and at worst an invitation for the DM to screw you over under the auspices of your god punishing you for some religious infraction (something that shouldn't be done unless you were going out of your way to be heretical, i.e. your cleric of a healing god kept executing prisoners).

The way it should have worked (again, to me) is that your god trusted you enough to grant you the spells you wanted, but made sure to tailor your spell selection when they thought you might need a bit of a helping hand. So if the GM asked to see the player's character sheet, and then informed you that you didn't get those anti-undead spells you wanted, instead granting spells meant to fight demons, you were getting a helping hand from on high.

 

[Necropolitan]

I liked the idea that clerics would petition for spells, instead of simply taking them for granted. The problem (as I saw it) was that everyone treated this like it was at best a chore and at worst an invitation for the DM to screw you over under the auspices of your god punishing you for some religious infraction (something that shouldn't be done unless you were going out of your way to be heretical, i.e. your cleric of a healing god kept executing prisoners).

The way it should have worked (again, to me) is that your god trusted you enough to grant you the spells you wanted, but made sure to tailor your spell selection when they thought you might need a bit of a helping hand. So if the GM asked to see the player's character sheet, and then informed you that you didn't get those anti-undead spells you wanted, instead granting spells meant to fight demons, you were getting a helping hand from on high.

It's arguably worse in the Binder's case because the Vestiges need to be convinced to let your character Bind them, with the Binding check determining how well it went in terms of them affecting your character's appearance and personality.

At least with Deities they chose your character to be a Cleric and are generally inclined to give them the spells they pray for.

I really want to play a Binder, but it's a lot to ask of a DM.