Alt paths social characters is the 6th entry in little reds alt path series. This time around they’re focusing on adding more social elements to the game, in much the same manner as paizo’s ultimate intrigue book. That book is called out in the introduction as another book that readers should consider picking up. That’s a nice little touch that most 3rd party books don’t bother with.

Content wise the book starts off with a bit of introduction, telling the reader what sort of games the content in the book is useful for, namely politics, money, social influence that sort of thing. These are traditionally areas that Pathfinder underperforms in.

Next it delves into civilized vs. primal a method of classifying a character that’s sort of akin to alignment. Declaring a character as primal or civilized gives them access to an additional option for their favored class bonus, this is a list of options available to all classes. While that’s certainly a novel design space, the primal options seem to be significantly better than their civilized counterparts. In addition to providing bonuses to more valuable things like initiative and spell damage rolls, all but one of the primal options can be used in any situation. However, the civilized options are all restricted to urban environments.

The next entry gives a series of archetypes for deities, roles that are more fitting for the sorts of gods worshiped by people in cities. Towards the end of the introduction it also talks about divine classes that worship these deities often don’t have a proper church but are instead unknowing vessels for divine power. That sort of works if you treat the deities that use those archetypes as vague-ill defined concepts, unknown to mortals I recommend ignoring that last bit if you give those deities names and history. Otherwise you’re just making it harder for your players to explore your setting. There’s also another much shorter section about making regional deities. After that the book goes on to introduce a social cast system, which lets you make characters with a more distinct place in the world. This is similar to the 5e background system. Social castes are tiered based on character level this is done by progressing in a prestige class, progressing in a social class from this book or taking a feat that has different benefits based on when you took it. I’m not that big of a fan of tying social roles to what is essentially a character’s capacity for violence, but it’s functional.

All of the social castes have a set of bonuses, sort of sub roles to help validate your character. So not every member of the upper class is a landed noble and not every member of the lower class is a pauper. In addition to the benefits of having a certain social bonus characters also have a responsibility that they need to fulfill in order to maintain the benefit of their social bonus. The usefulness of these bonuses vary drastically, most of the upper class bonuses amount to free money of varying amounts and bonuses to skill checks. Most of the middle class bonuses just give you skill check bonus, two notable exceptions include the academic, who gives you two extra skill ranks (that you can lose…) and the merchant prince who buys stuff for 20% less. They also have the ability to buy basically anything given enough time. The example provided is for the deck of many things. This is an artifact and the game takes great pains to make it clear that only the GM can choose to dole those out on a case by case basis. In return they need to move down right comical levels of money (2000 gp per level) every month. Most of the lower class bonuses are a bit more reasonable, the champion has easy access to master work weapons and armor and the wheeler and dealer can pretend to be a member of the higher castes. One notable exception is the ascetic; they gain a small ki pool like a monk. This is more useful for the monk class features it gives you (extra attack, +4 AC, +20 foot move speed) then anything that’s listed in the bonus, so I’m assuming this is unintentional on little reds part.

Next we come to the social combat rules, a lighter version of the verbal duel rules presented in paizo’s Ultimate Intrigue. Unfortunately these rules are aggressively terrible and I can’t recommend you use them.

Making a social attack is a standard action where you roll 1d20 + the ranks you have in a social combat skill and that skills modifier. The DC for this check is 10 + your 1/2 Opponent’s HD + Their highest mental ability score modifier. Math savvy readers might recognize this as the formula for determining a save DC. An odd choice as a character’s “social attack” is about twice as high as what characters add to their best saves. Beating that DC means that you inflict 1d6 points of non-lethal damage per two ranks you have in the skill you used to attack with. If you inflict more damage than your targets determination (1/2 their HD + their highest mental ability score modifier) over the course of the fight they yield, meaning they stop being a factor on the battlefield. Social combat is explicitly a mind effecting affect.

So this has a whole slew of issues, the math is half-handed. HD, and by extension skill ranks scale faster than CR does so opponents are going to hit harder and more frequently than players do. This is the exact opposite of how pathfinder’s combat meta normally works. Furthermore players can’t even use this system at 1st level because they can’t have two ranks in a skill yet. Because social combat deals nonlethal damage it interacts with defensive abilities in a bunch of weird ways. Damage reduction is the most effective defense against social combat, and if you wanted to social combat a vampire, too bad they’re immune to non-lethal damage (and mind effecting effects to boot). And when social combat does work, creatures have so little determination that if everybody does it then creatures yield within a round.

Next we get into the classes section of the book, starting with the noble. The noble has 1d8 hit die, 3/4ths BAB, 8+int skills per level and a good will save. Nobles start as a member of the upper caste and get a social path bonus from that list. Nobles start any sort of encounter with a number of edges equal to their charisma modifier +1/4th their level. For one of ultimate intrigues verbal duels, this is way too many as the most basic function of edges in that system is to roll a check one additional time per edge spent.

These edges can only be used when it furthers the nobles ideology class feature, but those are robust enough that you’ll be able to use them most of the time. The noble also gains renown as the vigilante talent of the same name. Nobles have a few other class features, social graces a rouge talent-esque pseudo feat system, they can spend edge to add their charisma modifier to attack and damage rolls and a will save equivalent to the monk’s evasion ability. The only other ability they have that’s problematic is their push buttons class feature. This class feature expands the nobles options when they successfully use social combat on a creature. This has several options but the worst offenders include a calm emotions spell, rage and suggestion none of which allow for a saving throw and two of which usually mandate that the caster stop to concentrate on the effect I cannot tell if the noble is bound by those rules as well. Special mention also goes to the befuddle option, which gives the target a penalty on will saves equal to 2+1/2 the nobles level. That’s how you calculate a will save, which means that the Noble can completely take the teeth out of the will save of anything he fights. At 20th level they gain their “a king uncrowned” class feature. This renders them completely immune to mind affecting effects, thus they are immune to social combat, which means that I as a GM can no longer use those rules in any fashion.

After the class features proper we get a two page dissertation on how to play a noble, this mostly states information that was obvious when reading through the class, I guess that could be useful for a new player, but it did take me out of the experience a bit. The last paragraph also mentions that you can only make a social attack on one creature at a time; something that I did not feel was made very obvious in the actual social combat section. After that, then we move on to the list of social graces, the classes’ equivalent of rouge or vigilante talents. These are mostly fine, but most of them are rogue and vigilante talents anyway.

The next class is the legionary, a d10, full BaB, with 6+int skills per level and a good will save. The class is a teamwork oriented martial character, much like the cavalier. As they progress in level they can choose to improve their social caste or take a few other types of benefits. They also gain a unit type, class feature that allows them to specialize in a specific form of combat. The legionary can swap their unit type at the start of each day, as long as they fit into that unit type’s social caste. This is unusual as you lose access to some class features as you progress. None of these are too egregious, there’s one for throwing stuff, one for hitting stuff, one for blocking stuff, one for buffing their allies and one for riding horses. Each of these roles has a few talents that are associated with it that give you a bonus while you have that role. These talents can be swapped out once per day. They also have some bonus teamwork feats, the ability to retroactively decide they had a particular type of weapon all along, and the ability to pick up skill focus or some of the nobles social graces. Their capstone is a massive bonus to social combat checks against citizens and auto confirming critical hits against soldiers. Most of this class looks ok, but I do note that they have three different class features that can add 1/3rd their level to their AC, all of which could apply simultaneously. That and the lack of a good fort save as a martial character is fairly crippling.

And last in the class line up we have the showman. A 1d8 3/4ths BaB class with 4+int skills and good reflex and will saves. The Showman is an illusion wielding thespian that can conjure a phantom blade, an illusionary shadow weapon to strike down his foes. They gain up to 6th level spell casting, which is charisma biased. The bulk of their class features revolve around improving their shadow weapon, adding effects to it by lowering the DC required to disbelieve it. I’m not a big fan of this dynamic, most of the things you can do to a phantom blade are pretty savage (confusion, stacking dexterity penalties, convicting a creature that you lopped off its limbs, ect – you can do all of these simultaneously). Some of of the penalties they take from this can be canceled out by taking things that make their phantom blade less useful (taking the average for damage or having the blade only work on one creature). However they also have other class features that boost the save DC of their blade to ridiculous levels, like adding the level of a sacrificed spell slot to the save DC or forcing a flatfooted creature to take a penalty on the save against their phantom blade. These abilities are completely independent of lowering the phantom blades save DC. You can apply all of the penalties to a creature that I listed before and not decrease the save DC at all.

The showman also has a variety of carnival tricks, ways to bamboozle his foes that don’t use his phantom blade. Most of these abilities are fine, save that they use that infuriatingly low social combat DC and are fully fledged skill checks, meaning that they’re even more likely to succeed. The ones that do this are also crippling debuffs many of which can effectively take creatures out of a fight for multiple rounds.

The showman has a single archetype that trades spellcasting for the ability to make duplicates of itself.

The book also features a few new spells, including the ability to make other people look or act like you. There’s also a magic item that lets you pretend to be someone important. These are all actually pretty cool.

The book also has some class support feats and some feats for interacting with the social rules, the social combat stuff is particularly problematic. There’s a feat that keeps characters from making social combat checks if you inflict social damage on them, a feat that gives you even more bonus on social attack rolls. There are also some social styles which are cool, except for using that DC that’s too low. There’s also a feat that lets you add your base will save to the DC of checks to influence you with social combat which makes the system almost useable.

The book wraps up with a collection of services that you can buy, there’s an impressive array of services listed, everything from assassinations, to bribes, to economically destabilizing a region. Most of these services are comically expensive, but the book spends about a half a page saying that the prices can very significantly based on who’s doing them and that using services to pay for other services is totally acceptable.

All and all alt paths social is the weakest entry in the alt paths series, it has some neat subsystems in it, but all of the serious crunch is basically worthless.