Sajan

While I was in Longmont last week, I picked up the Character Add-On Deck for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. This set includes four new characters (barbarian, druid, monk, and paladin) as well as enough generic cards to expand your party to as many as six players. After poring over the new characters, I came to the conclusion that three of them were demonstrably weaker than comparable characters in the basic set. The barbarian was inferior to the fighter, the paladin was inferior to the cleric (alas!), and the druid was inferior to...basically...everyone. Only the monk, a stern-looking human named Sajan, seemed like a viable choice.

I've been playing Sajan as a solo character for the past few days and he's as frustrating as he is interesting. Like the monks of D&D-based RPGs, he's at his best when he's not using weapons. He also wears no armor and does not use spells. Sajan's character deck, therefore, consists only of allies, items, and blessings...lots of blessings. In a starting Sajan deck, a whopping 8 of the 15 cards are blessings, giving him plenty of opportunity to enhance combat and non-combat checks alike. Better yet, Sajan recharges (rather than discards) blessings used for combat checks, and he's the only character in the game who can apply multiple blessings to a single combat check. So is Sajan an unstoppable beast in combat? Well...not exactly. Fickle fortune plays too much of a role for my liking. Sajan begins play with no static bonuses, so on a typical combat check he's rolling 2D10 (1D10 for Dexterity, and then another 1D10 for the blessing that you'd invariable play on the check unless you had no blessings in your hand at the time). 2D10 or even 3D10 (if you play a second blessing on the check) is, if you'll forgive the pun, extremely "dicey" -- that is, the results are all over the map. With the fighter Valeros, I have enough static bonuses that my minimum roll is nearly enough to defeat some of the weaker monsters; in contrast, Sajan can easily fail (and has!) to get, say, a total of 14, even on a 3D10 check. Such "swingy" results make Sajan unpredictable in combat, leaving him open to crippling wipe-outs against even mediocre foes. I can beef him up with static bonuses as he levels up, but for the time being, every combat encounter is quite a wild ride!