Community / Paizo Blog
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
With Pathfinder Player Core 2 releasing at the start of August, we know players are anticipating the remastered versions of some of their favorite classes! In a series of blogs starting right here, we’ll be alternating between talking about the changes to four of the classes and showing off some fun fiction and art starring the iconic characters of Player Core 2.
The champion is the premier divine warrior, with some of the best armor and defenses in the game. They’re devoted to their deity and their tenets. One of the major changes to the remaster was dropping alignment, which the champion has always featured heavily, so we know everyone expects big changes to the class!
We’ve already put basic compatibility rules for the champion in the Pathfinder FAQ—see Pathfinder Core Rulebook Errata (Remaster Compatibility)—but the Player Core 2 version will present a much more thorough overhaul. So what do fans of this class have to look forward to?
Seelah, the iconic champion, battles a tyrant devil. Art by William Liu.
Before the remaster, a champion’s alignment and their choice of champion cause established a strict set of hierarchical rules to be followed. Each good and evil alignment had a cause tied to it, like the lawful good paladin, chaotic good liberator, and neutral evil desecrator. The remastered version still has a cause, but the focus has shifted away from being so strict and static. Now we use edicts and anathema tied to different character choices to guide your roleplaying.
Let’s take the paladin as an example. They used to follow the two tenets of good, two tenets of the lawful good paladin cause, and any edicts and anathema for their deity. A champion under the remastered rules would choose the justice cause. They would follow the edicts and anathema of their deity, plus the following from the cause of justice.
Edicts follow the law, respect legitimate authorities or leadership
Anathema take advantage of another, cheat
More emphasis on edicts rather than an unbendable code loosens some of the restrictions on their roleplaying to allow more well-rounded, nuanced characters. There’s a better balance over “should nots” instead of all “must nots.”
A champion can optionally choose a sanctification. If you’ve read Pathfinder Player Core, you’re familiar with holy and unholy sanctification—a choice based on your deity that lets you commit yourself to the battle for souls between the holy planes and unholy planes. Champions can choose sanctification based on their deity, though unholy sanctification is an uncommon option. Each sanctification gives you another edict and anathema, and adds the holy or unholy trait to all your Strikes.
Some, but not all, champion causes require a certain sanctification. Justice, mentioned above, does not. The Player Core 2 causes are justice, liberation, and obedience (open to all); desecration and iniquity (open only to unholy champions); and redemption and grandeur (open only to holy champions). If you are already playing a champion and want to update them to the new options, you’ll probably be able to keep the core of that character. Though you can always shake things up with the new grandeur cause, which is based on the brilliant splendor of celestials.
Other Changes
This class has seen a huge number of other changes we think will make it more satisfying to play, but we don’t want to keep you here all day with one blog post. So here’s the short version!
- You now have a defined champion’s aura for your reactions, aura feats, and other abilities, which lets other rules alter and refer to the range of your divine abilities more easily.
- The divine ally ability has been changed to blessing of the devoted, and the mount has moved to a 1st-level feat. You can instead choose the blessed swiftness option to move faster—whether you’re mounted or not.
- Feats saw a ton of change, like the new Defensive Advance feat and updated structure for Mercy. We focused on broadly useful feats plus maintaining some backward compatibility, but we did run out of room. You’ll see oath feats moved to Lost Omens Divine Mysteries. We’re hoping to find a book in which it would make sense to remaster litanies at some point, but we don’t have one that can hold them yet.
- You choose a focus spell based on your deity’s divine font options. As before the remaster, you can choose lay on hands if your deity allows the heal divine font or touch of the void (formerly touch of corruption) if they allow the harm divine font. However, there’s also a new option for a deity with any font, specially made for defense-minded characters. Introducing shields of the spirit!
Shields of the Spirit [one-action] Focus 1
Uncommon, Champion, Concentrate, Focus, Sanctified, Spirit
Requirements You are wielding a shield.You Raise your Shield, causing ephemeral spirit shields to float within your champion’s aura. The shields last until the start of your next turn or until you’re no longer raising your shield, whichever comes first. While one of your allies is in your champion’s aura, the shields grant them a +1 status bonus to AC, and each time an enemy makes an attack against the ally, the enemy takes 1d4 spirit damage (even if it misses).
The benefit applies only while an ally is in your aura, ending for any ally that leaves and applying to any that enters later. As normal, you don’t count as your own ally and therefore don’t get the benefits of the spirit shields yourself.
Heightened (+2) The damage increases by 1d4.Logan Bonner (he/him)
Pathfinder Lead Designer
More Paizo Blog.
Tags:PathfinderPathfinder RemasterPathfinder Roleplaying GamePathfinder Second Edition
Link.
172 comments.
| Search Thread |
| 151 to 172 of 172 | |
 The Raven Black | Yesterday, 02:12 am |
Karmagator wrote:
The Raven Black wrote:
Squiggit wrote:
The Raven Black wrote:
Does it? In terms of practical implications, that one protean no longer takes 5 extra damage from certain attacks but otherwise the setting is pretty much the same.And here I thought getting rid of Chaotic and Lawful on the PCs' level was not going to result in Law/Chaos disappearing from the setting.
IMO it makes for a blander, more one-dimensional, setting, if easier to access for newcomers.
How people read the setting certainly seems different to me.
Some see it as fundamentally dissociated from the alignment grid from the get-go.
I think that is just wishful thinking encouraged by the disappearance of alignment in Remaster.
No, I think Squiggit has it mostly right.
Yes, it is different. But if anything, I think the perception of the setting has become more nuanced, rather than less. It certainly has at my table, immediately.
Because before, the discussion and usually even the perception was like 80% about alignment. Now, we still have the vague "good vs evil" thing floating around. But the focus has absolutely shifted to the "commandmends" your character subscribes to. And those are so many times more varied than the old alignment could have ever hoped to be.
So just because there is no longer law/chaos written on a sheet somewhere doesn't mean the ideas behind them are gone. And in my eyes those ideas are what actually matter, not weird supposedly cosmic forces.
I never saw alignment as a straightjacket, as opposed to many. And the planes are still there and still function the same, as do the cosmic entities. So, I'm good with the post-Remaster setting.
But I think the feeling I (and a few others) had that struggles between Law and Chaos would disappear from the scene with the disappearance of mechanics linked to that axis is completely validated IMO.
Except of course for the few remnants we will have in the Champion class.
| Gisher | Yesterday, 03:50 am |
2 people marked this as a favorite.
The Raven Black wrote:
Gisher wrote:
shroudb wrote:
Alignment not being a mechanical thing doesn't impact the fact that morality exists.More precisely, lots of different moralities exist — arguably at least one for each sapient creature.
shroudb wrote:
You can still be an evil bastard or a virtuous paragon without having a tag on your sheet.And you can be an evil bastard under some of those moralities while simultaneously being a virtuous paragon under others. :)
Replacing a singular definition of good and evil with the realism of subjective ethics is the main reason that I'm so happy that alignment was eliminated.
I think the singular definition of good and evil is still there. It is merely hiding behind the Holy/Unholy tags.
There is still a one true way of cosmic morality even if its impact on a PC level has been drastically reduced.
As I read things, Holy and Unholy indicate whether or not one has joined a side in one particular cosmic conflict rather than defining singular, universal definitions of good and evil the way that the alignment system did. It's now possible for people to disagree about which actions they consider good and evil within their own ethical systems just like in real life.
| Sanityfaerie | Yesterday, 07:15 am |
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Gisher wrote:
As I read things, Holy and Unholy indicate whether or not one has joined a side in one particular cosmic conflict rather than defining singular, universal definitions of good and evil the way that the alignment system did. It's now possible for people to disagree about which actions they consider good and evil within their own ethical systems just like in real life.
Agreed here, with the caveat that there's very little space for gray in that particular cosmic conflict. Like, if you're unholy, and you're arguing that you're a good person anyway, then you're lying to yourself. At best you're evil with standards.
At the same time, the fact that someone has that shiny "holy" sanctification doesn't in and of itself mean that they're necessarily more "good" than someone who does not. It just sets a (reasonably high) floor for how good of a person they themselves are.
| exequiel759 | Yesterday, 09:30 am |
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Alignment never was a straightjacket because alignment was descriptive, not prescriptive. If you conceived your character as LG but as the campaign went on you did a ton of evil stuff you'll likely turn to LN and eventually LE, or NG and then CG if you were chaotic instead. If you weren't a class that relied on alignment, this was literally 100% flavor and didn't have any impact in your character and not even in how you RP'ed your character because if your character changed alignment you were already acting as a character of that alignment beforehand.
Meanwhile, edicts and anathema are a straightjacket because those explicitly tell you what you can and you can't do, while alignment was something loose to begin with. For a champion or cleric edicts and anathema make sense, but when you want to force those into a barbarian or even ancestries as a whole then they become really arbritary IMO.
| Sanityfaerie | Yesterday, 09:58 am |
3 people marked this as a favorite.
exequiel759 wrote:
Alignment never was a straightjacket because alignment was descriptive, not prescriptive. If you conceived your character as LG but as the campaign went on you did a ton of evil stuff you'll likely turn to LN and eventually LE, or NG and then CG if you were chaotic instead. If you weren't a class that relied on alignment, this was literally 100% flavor and didn't have any impact in your character and not even in how you RP'ed your character because if your character changed alignment you were already acting as a character of that alignment beforehand.
Meanwhile, edicts and anathema are a straightjacket because those explicitly tell you what you can and you can't do, while alignment was something loose to begin with. For a champion or cleric edicts and anathema make sense, but when you want to force those into a barbarian or even ancestries as a whole then they become really arbritary IMO.
It's not... forced, though? The idea of personal edicts/anathema is that you're literally describing your character's personality. It's not that they're somehow constrained to act that way, it's that this is the way that they naturally act. If they just love teaching kids, and do so whenever the opportunity arises, that's an edict. If they're willing to do anything - literally anything - in order to survive another day, that's... well, honestly, that's probably an edict and an anathema working together, or something like that.
Personal edicts and anathema are supposed to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. If you find yourself violating one, that means that either you were wrong about what your personal edicts and anathema were in the first place (and should change them) or your outlook on life has changed (and you should change them). It's kind of like alignment shifting in that way, except that with edicts/anathema it's a lot more obvious when it has occurred.
Basically, it lets you be a lot more conscious and intentional about all of this stuff, by writing it out more clearly and specifically.
Agonarchy wrote:
Holy/Unholy is just the magically-manifested opinion of a bunch of alien beings. They can be wrong.
Huh. Okay. I could see that working as a take. It would be sort of similar to the way that psychopomps can be wrong sometimes when they assign you to an afterlife. It's not usually going to be what happens, but it's totally possible.
| Agonarchy | Yesterday, 11:06 am |
To put it in Planescape terms, the Holy/Unholy divide is philosophers with clubs with so much belief that they have warped reality to reflect that belief. The divine order is something put into place by deities, not just something that occurs naturally, or else the psychopomps and Pharasma would be unnecessary. There may be some scenario where the deities are staving off an external threat, perhaps making them more like druids struggling against a corrupting influence, but in doing so they are still meddling.
| Arachnofiend | Yesterday, 01:37 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Sanityfaerie wrote:
Huh. Okay. I could see that working as a take. It would be sort of similar to the way that psychopomps can be wrong sometimes when they assign you to an afterlife. It's not usually going to be what happens, but it's totally possible.
It's the Rahadoumi take. The ability to do extra damage against demons does not necessarily lead to objective moral truth.
| Perpdepog | Yesterday, 01:49 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Agonarchy wrote:
To put it in Planescape terms, the Holy/Unholy divide is philosophers with clubs with so much belief that they have warped reality to reflect that belief. The divine order is something put into place by deities, not just something that occurs naturally, or else the psychopomps and Pharasma would be unnecessary.
Small correction, that divide wasn't put in place by deities, or if it was, then we don't know who those deities are. Qlippoth and archons now canonically predate the gods, and the Outer Rifts and Heaven, which are aligned with unholiness and holiness, also existed before the gods got there.
| Sanityfaerie | Yesterday, 02:22 pm |
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Perpdepog wrote:
Agonarchy wrote:
To put it in Planescape terms, the Holy/Unholy divide is philosophers with clubs with so much belief that they have warped reality to reflect that belief. The divine order is something put into place by deities, not just something that occurs naturally, or else the psychopomps and Pharasma would be unnecessary.Small correction, that divide wasn't put in place by deities, or if it was, then we don't know who those deities are. Qlippoth and archons now canonically predate the gods, and the Outer Rifts and Heaven, which are aligned with unholiness and holiness, also existed before the gods got there.
They don't canonically predate Pharasma.
That's more of a nitpick and an implied question than a direct contradiction of your core thesis, though. We can be pretty darned sure that she wasn't the one to create Holy and Unholy sanctifiction.
 Elfteiroh | Yesterday, 03:08 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Also, when asked about a "remaster" of the harrow, they said it wouldn't happen, because the lore still exist, and it still make sense "in-world", to have people splitting things into a grid, even though there's no mechanical rules for that anymore.
| Agonarchy | Yesterday, 04:00 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Sanityfaerie wrote:
Perpdepog wrote:
Agonarchy wrote:
To put it in Planescape terms, the Holy/Unholy divide is philosophers with clubs with so much belief that they have warped reality to reflect that belief. The divine order is something put into place by deities, not just something that occurs naturally, or else the psychopomps and Pharasma would be unnecessary.Small correction, that divide wasn't put in place by deities, or if it was, then we don't know who those deities are. Qlippoth and archons now canonically predate the gods, and the Outer Rifts and Heaven, which are aligned with unholiness and holiness, also existed before the gods got there.They don't canonically predate Pharasma.
That's more of a nitpick and an implied question than a direct contradiction of your core thesis, though. We can be pretty darned sure that she wasn't the one to create Holy and Unholy sanctifiction.
Indeed, my understanding is this isn't her first universe.
| Perpdepog | Yesterday, 04:35 pm |
Agonarchy wrote:
Sanityfaerie wrote:
Indeed, my understanding is this isn't her first universe.Perpdepog wrote:
Agonarchy wrote:
To put it in Planescape terms, the Holy/Unholy divide is philosophers with clubs with so much belief that they have warped reality to reflect that belief. The divine order is something put into place by deities, not just something that occurs naturally, or else the psychopomps and Pharasma would be unnecessary.Small correction, that divide wasn't put in place by deities, or if it was, then we don't know who those deities are. Qlippoth and archons now canonically predate the gods, and the Outer Rifts and Heaven, which are aligned with unholiness and holiness, also existed before the gods got there.They don't canonically predate Pharasma.
That's more of a nitpick and an implied question than a direct contradiction of your core thesis, though. We can be pretty darned sure that she wasn't the one to create Holy and Unholy sanctifiction.
Yep; it's her second.
| Ryangwy | Yesterday, 05:40 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
I mean also all the deities with holy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are broadly agreed to be good and all the deities with unholy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are obviously kinda bad, a lot of people love being the one Lamashtu cultist who only donates to orphanages and help underprivileged people and definitely do nothing to make those orphans and underprivileged people but let's be real, that's you ignoring the reality of what her incentive structures do.
| rimestocke | Yesterday, 07:19 pm |
Ryangwy wrote:
I mean also all the deities with holy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are broadly agreed to be good and all the deities with unholy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are obviously kinda bad, a lot of people love being the one Lamashtu cultist who only donates to orphanages and help underprivileged people and definitely do nothing to make those orphans and underprivileged people but let's be real, that's you ignoring the reality of what her incentive structures do.
There's plenty of deities that allow for both holy and unholy sanctification with value-neutral edicts and anathema though? Granted we don't know yet specifically what the additional edict and anathema Champions get when they sanctify holy or unholy, but for example I don't think there's anything stopping a cleric of Calistria from sanctifying themselves holy just to get revenge on a demon that wronged them or something, and their morality could be pretty dubious otherwise. Or conversely, maybe a decent and upright (for the most part) cleric of Nethys sanctifying unholy because that's their magic research project or something haha.
| Sanityfaerie | 7 hours, 54 minutes ago |
Ryangwy wrote:
I mean also all the deities with holy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are broadly agreed to be good and all the deities with unholy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are obviously kinda bad, a lot of people love being the one Lamashtu cultist who only donates to orphanages and help underprivileged people and definitely do nothing to make those orphans and underprivileged people but let's be real, that's you ignoring the reality of what her incentive structures do.
So... that wasn't the case for Good/Evil in the pre-remaster days. Now, the remaster hasn't yet progressed to the point where we can say that conclusively for Holy/Unholy sanctification, but I'd be surprised if there weren't at least a few like that.
| The Raven Black | 2 hours, 17 minutes ago |
rimestocke wrote:
Ryangwy wrote:
I mean also all the deities with holy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are broadly agreed to be good and all the deities with unholy sanctification have edicts and anathemas that are obviously kinda bad, a lot of people love being the one Lamashtu cultist who only donates to orphanages and help underprivileged people and definitely do nothing to make those orphans and underprivileged people but let's be real, that's you ignoring the reality of what her incentive structures do.There's plenty of deities that allow for both holy and unholy sanctification with value-neutral edicts and anathema though? Granted we don't know yet specifically what the additional edict and anathema Champions get when they sanctify holy or unholy, but for example I don't think there's anything stopping a cleric of Calistria from sanctifying themselves holy just to get revenge on a demon that wronged them or something, and their morality could be pretty dubious otherwise. Or conversely, maybe a decent and upright (for the most part) cleric of Nethys sanctifying unholy because that's their magic research project or something haha.
No.
The very definition of Holy implies devotion to good. Same for Unholy and evil.
| The Raven Black | 2 hours, 15 minutes ago |
Sanityfaerie wrote:
exequiel759 wrote:
Alignment never was a straightjacket because alignment was descriptive, not prescriptive. If you conceived your character as LG but as the campaign went on you did a ton of evil stuff you'll likely turn to LN and eventually LE, or NG and then CG if you were chaotic instead. If you weren't a class that relied on alignment, this was literally 100% flavor and didn't have any impact in your character and not even in how you RP'ed your character because if your character changed alignment you were already acting as a character of that alignment beforehand.
Meanwhile, edicts and anathema are a straightjacket because those explicitly tell you what you can and you can't do, while alignment was something loose to begin with. For a champion or cleric edicts and anathema make sense, but when you want to force those into a barbarian or even ancestries as a whole then they become really arbritary IMO.
It's not... forced, though? The idea of personal edicts/anathema is that you're literally describing your character's personality. It's not that they're somehow constrained to act that way, it's that this is the way that they naturally act. If they just love teaching kids, and do so whenever the opportunity arises, that's an edict. If they're willing to do anything - literally anything - in order to survive another day, that's... well, honestly, that's probably an edict and an anathema working together, or something like that.
Personal edicts and anathema are supposed to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. If you find yourself violating one, that means that either you were wrong about what your personal edicts and anathema were in the first place (and should change them) or your outlook on life has changed (and you should change them). It's kind of like alignment shifting in that way, except that with edicts/anathema it's a lot more obvious when it has occurred.
Basically, it lets you be a lot more conscious and intentional about all of this stuff, by...
What you describe is how I always saw alignment working.
| The Raven Black | 2 hours, 5 minutes ago |
Gisher wrote:
The Raven Black wrote:
As I read things, Holy and Unholy indicate whether or not one has joined a side in one particular cosmic conflict rather than defining singular, universal definitions of good and evil the way that the alignment system did. It's now possible for people to disagree about which actions they consider good and evil within their own ethical systems just like in real life.Gisher wrote:
shroudb wrote:
Alignment not being a mechanical thing doesn't impact the fact that morality exists.More precisely, lots of different moralities exist — arguably at least one for each sapient creature.
shroudb wrote:
You can still be an evil bastard or a virtuous paragon without having a tag on your sheet.And you can be an evil bastard under some of those moralities while simultaneously being a virtuous paragon under others. :)
Replacing a singular definition of good and evil with the realism of subjective ethics is the main reason that I'm so happy that alignment was eliminated.
I think the singular definition of good and evil is still there. It is merely hiding behind the Holy/Unholy tags.
There is still a one true way of cosmic morality even if its impact on a PC level has been drastically reduced.
TBT it was already possible before, but you needed to jump through some hoops that the Remaster did away with.
But what people / PCs consider good and evil have no bearing on the cosmic/divine axis of good vs evil as embodied by the Holy/Unholy tags.
It's just that, unless signing up for the Holy/Unholy cosmic struggle, mortals are almost completely not concerned with what was previously called alignment until they die.
| The Raven Black | 1 hour, 59 minutes ago |
Sanityfaerie wrote:
Perpdepog wrote:
Agonarchy wrote:
To put it in Planescape terms, the Holy/Unholy divide is philosophers with clubs with so much belief that they have warped reality to reflect that belief. The divine order is something put into place by deities, not just something that occurs naturally, or else the psychopomps and Pharasma would be unnecessary.Small correction, that divide wasn't put in place by deities, or if it was, then we don't know who those deities are. Qlippoth and archons now canonically predate the gods, and the Outer Rifts and Heaven, which are aligned with unholiness and holiness, also existed before the gods got there.They don't canonically predate Pharasma.
That's more of a nitpick and an implied question than a direct contradiction of your core thesis, though. We can be pretty darned sure that she wasn't the one to create Holy and Unholy sanctifiction.
Actually, Pharasma is True Neutral because it was her interactions with the new reality that defined the alignment axes including the first deities and the aligned planes. They emerged in relation to her central place in reality.
Note that we do not know what her alignment/values were in the previous reality. Maybe she was what we would have called LG or CE. No one can know that, not even Pharasma herself.
| The Raven Black | 1 hour, 52 minutes ago |
Agonarchy wrote:
Holy/Unholy is just the magically-manifested opinion of a bunch of alien beings. They can be wrong.
Since these beings are the ones who created the current Universe and the mortal beings who populate it, including PCs, I have trouble conceiving who could actually be in a position to judge that they are wrong.
Maybe Yog-Sothoth or some other entity from outside reality.
And now I have the image of the outer entities experimenting throughout the succession of realities for their own purpose, like Marvel's Celestials do with planets.
| 151 to 172 of 172 | |
| Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Second Edition / General Discussion / Paizo Blog: Player Core 2 Preview: The Champion, Remastered | All Messageboards |
| Want to post a reply? Sign in. | |
Recent threads in General Discussion
Thaumaturge Esoterica - What is it? Last post:3 minutes agoby Powers128
Fighter, and the (seemingly) inverse feeling of Mastery. In short: "is it me or is fighter notably worse after level 10?". Last post:1 hour, 31 minutes agoby Tridus
How much healing is too much healing? Last post:1 hour, 39 minutes agoby The Raven Black
Paizo Blog: Player Core 2 Preview: The Champion, Remastered Last post:1 hour, 52 minutes agoby The Raven Black
Are rangers weak? Last post:2 hours, 10 minutes agoby Teridax
How do the rulebooks look on a Kindle? Last post:5 hours, 55 minutes agoby Conscious Meat
Paizo Blog: The Windsong Testaments: Light of the Radiant Prism Last post:6 hours, 10 minutes agoby Sibelius Eos Owm
Downtime Event Ideas Last post:22 minutes agoby Lia Wynn
The most powerful feats Last post:7 hours, 29 minutes agoby Perpdepog
Full Party Optimization Thread Last post:7 hours, 46 minutes agoby The Ronyon
