My last character just died, bless his soul. It's time to begin anew with a fresh one, and I'm looking at wordcasting.
The wordcasting system seems, for immediate lack of a more descriptive word, cool. The ability to create spells to fit your needs, to play legos with arcane energies, looks powerful and potentially abusable. I wanted to share my thoughts and get some feedback, especially from anyone who might have tried the system already.
The way it seems to me, wordcasting finally gives players a pretty decent reason to run a sorcerer. While sorcs are often (rightly) maligned as just less good than wizards, their strength has always been, in theory, their flexibility. Under standard casting rules, this concept of flexibility falls apart; wizards can know so many more spells and prepare whatever they think they need for a given day. With wordcasting, this theoretical advantage actually looks like it'll hold up; the sorc knows all the target words, and so can learn maximum one or two damage-blasting words and then load up on other effects to push those damage words over the top.
The downside is that wordcasting seems also like a very limited system outside of combat. While it allows a plethora of exciting ways to overwhelm enemies with damage and effects, it doesn't seem like it allows a player to "be Batman". I've only had a perfunctory look at the actual words available, but the vast majority seem to be related to fighting. I hope Paizo continues to support the system with more utility-style words.
What do others think of the system? Worth playing? Powerful? Sacrifices too much? Also, I'll probably post a character build soonish, once I've hammered out its fine points.
