Why The Vigilante Is A Useless, Ridiculous Fucking Class: A Humble Opinion

In March of 2016, Paizo released the Pathfinder sourcebook Ultimate Intrigue, a book of optional rules and features to turn social interaction into a mini-game.  In addition to new feats, items, and archetypes, it added the Vigilante, a class which splits its by-level features between customisable social and practical abilities, and so splits its general actions between a mundane, NPC-style character and the FUCKING CHARACTER YOU BUILT.  I'd hope no one needs my opinion, but clearly this worthless piece of shit made it through countless editors, so I'll break it down with as much vitriol as it deserves:

When a person plays a game like Pathfinder, or D&D, or whatever tabletop character-building role-playing thing, they're setting time aside to enter a heady world of mystery and magic and adventure, where they can project a lil avatar to dynamically affect a fiction.  It's like jamming yourself into a media and interacting with the characters, with someone else playing a metagod that keeps everything moving while you act and react and exist inside a story.

Know what it's not for?  PRETENDING YOU HAVE A FUCKING JOB, LIKE YOU HAVE TO DOUBLE-PRETEND YOUR LAME-ASS CHARACTER HAS A LIFE OUTSIDE THE LIFE YOU'VE CREATED FOR IT.  IT IS LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE OF PLAYING A GAME.  WHY THE FUCK WOULD WHOEVER INVENTED THIS DUMBASS BULLSHIT CLASS THINK ANYONE WOULD WANT TO PLAY BRUCE WAYNE IN ADDITION TO BATMAN?  Actually hey lemme back up a little and ask IF SOMEONE WANTED TO PLAY BRUCE WAYNE IN ADDITION TO BATMAN, AREN'T WE OBJECTIVELY MAKING THINGS WORSE BY GIVING THEM FUCKING RULES FOR DOING IT?

Listen, Pathfinder's already a game of near-infinite possibility, full of rules and errata and structure and function.  Personally, I find it best to start at what you CAN do and work it into what's the most effective- that's how my mind likes to work and that's the entire point of this fucking blog.  So I want the dumbass who thought this was a good idea, and the dumbasses who signed off on it to feel bad about the stupid fucking decision to take ROLEPLAYING and make it into a series of STUPID DIE(+X)-BASED MINI-GAMES.  That's so fucking stupid!  If someone wants to roleplay, they do it!  If someone fucks up the words they're trying to say, amazing!  That's the ENTIRE POINT.  To turn talking to an NPC into some kind of two-person performance should be a black fucking mark of shame in the mind of whoever conceptualized it.  Verbal fucking duels are lame as shit and supremely unnecessary in a world where you and your characters are already allowed to say whatever the fuck they want!

So, the Vigilante specifically is a class that has two kinds of feat options based on the theme of your character- it can be a pretend fighter or a pretend rogue, either of which coming with a bunch of horrendously thematic lamefuck goddamn social talents like "People know who you are in one town!  You get +4 Intimidate in that town after you spend ONE WEEK TALKING YOURSELF UP IN THAT ONE TOWN!" or the upgraded, "People know who you are in two towns!  You get +6 Intimidate in those two towns, but you have to be LEVEL 7 AND HAVE ALREADY BOTH PURCHASED THE FIRST FEAT AND SPENT THE WEEK TALKING YOURSELF UP IN BOTH THOSE TOWNS."  Don't forget the "celebrity" version, where, "People consider you a celeb!  You can spend up to ten minutes haggling with a stranger to get an item worth 1 GP!  IF YOU SELL THIS ITEM YOU CAN NEVER DO THIS AGAIN.  YOU HAVE TO BE LEVEL FUCKING FIVE."  That's best-case worthless.  I want the person who wrote this and all their editors fired and I want to be offered their collective job so I can take it, call a meeting my first day, and shit on the table in the conference room just to raise the bar over Ultimate Intrigue.

Okay, to be fair, a bunch of the general vigilante talents are actually kind of neat.  There's stuff like charging short distances without incurring AoO and adding 1/2 level to unarmed attacks and a really good no-requisite replacement for two-weapon feint and 8th-level Hide In Plain Sight.  This class could be worth taking if maybe like the archetypes let you trade out, say, two social talents for one regular talent.  But all the fucking archetypes are campy goddamn garbage!!  There's one that turns you into Spiderman, but each web shot(obtained at level 6)'s a 10'-increment standard-action and can only be used 3+CON times per day(doesn't increase with level).  Swingin' around as Spiderman's a possibility, though, at LEVEL FUCKING EIGHTEEN, and you're not any faster than you are when you walk.  Why the fuck would someone spend time putting this together?  It's not clever, not effective, and not even cute because a fucking fifth-level wizard can fly and throw high-DC tanglefoot bags WITHOUT SACRIFICING CLASS FEATURES TO PAIZO'S DUMBASS ARBITRARY CLASS FUNCTIONS.

The vigilante is terrible.  It's one of the worst parts of RPGs- giving people rules for talking to other people in a way that excludes all the other people involved.  They don't need that, and the people that DO need that ought to be fine coming up with their own dumb bogged-down chumpwad version of talking to fictional fucking villains to embarrass them in front of other fictional fucking people.  If you want your character to be a fucking vigilante, play a VIABLE CHARACTER and just waste some skill points on Craft (Mediocrity) and Disguise, then say out loud, "Hey, my character changed their name in our downtime so they could covertly make horseshoes!" so everyone else can say, "Hey, nobody fucking cares!"