Pathfinder Player Companion: "Melee Tactics Toolbox" [RPG]

You don't have to guess what sort of stuff is in the Melee Tactics Toolbox.  If you like mixing it up face-to-face, there's a reasonable chance the assortment of feats, equipment, spells, and more will have something that piques your interest.  The book also contains some general tips on tactics, useful for newer players to the game.  Like most books in the Pathfinder Player Companion line, this is a 32-page, full-colour offering, divided into two-page sections.  The interior artwork is really impressive, and I have to particularly call out the great shot of the Iconic Brawler punching out a troll on page 3.  You can judge the front cover art yourself.  The inside front-cover has capsule descriptions of four fighting schools and war colleges in the Inner Sea region of Golarion: the Aldori Academy, the Crusader War College, the Grand Coliseum, and the Tempering Hall.  I thought it was a useful shortcut for coming up with a background for a character.  Maybe someday I'll do a "graduate students" campaign where every PC has to be a student at a fighting school, wizard's academy, or bardic college!  The inside back cover is a "Combat Options Overview" that has a chart of what type of action various things (like combat maneuvers and combat feats) require, along with basic definitions.  I really should print it out for new players.  Anyway, now onto the content.

The first five pages are the table of contents, a "For Your Character" page that summarizes what sort of stuff you'll find in the book, a "Rules Index," and a two-page Introduction.  I guess this would be useful if I were deciding whether or not to buy the book, but the book is short enough that I would rather have more content than multiple pages describing that content.  The Introduction does contain some reasonably good advice for different types of melee encounters, and a useful sidebar that I haven't seen elsewhere summarising the *seventeen* different types of feats in Pathfinder!  Okay, maybe those PF2 fans have a point about bloat . . .

"Up Close and Personal" contains some good advice on offensive melee tactics along with suggestions of which feats to take to support various builds.  It introduces seven new feats for close-combat, some of which have become pretty common with certain builds, like Artful Dodge and Circling Mongoose.  On the whole, the new feats look pretty well-written and fairly powerful.

"On the Defensive" is the flip-side: advice for protecting yourself in melee combat (such as the benefits of different types of armor, whether or not to use a shield, etc.).  There are three new feats, with one ("Just out of Reach") something that would come in very useful in certain APs like Rise of the Runelords.  There's also a new Cavalier archetype called the Castellan; there aren't a lot of Cavalier archetypes, but this one is really only useful in a very niche sort of campaign centered around fortifying and protecting a castle.

"Mass Melee" contains some advice (again, with specific suggestions for feats and class options) for when the battlefield is crawling with multiple combatants on each side.  When I ran homebrew campaigns, I used to love tossing twenty or thirty low-CR mooks on the battlefield, but a few years of playing exclusively APs and PFS have gotten me used to the PCs outnumbering the enemies.  This section contains five new feats; I used Harrying Partners (making Aid Another last for an entire round) to good effect for one PC, and I know Phalanx Formation (eliminating soft cover for reach weapons) is really useful for a lot of builds.  There's a new bardic masterpiece ("Battle Song of the People's Revolt") that looks pretty great, and a bland Fighter archetype called the "Drill Sergeant" (basically, it gives them the Cavarlier's tactician class feature).

"Unarmed and Dangerous" is really designed for monks and brawlers.  It contains six new Style feats (3 for "Cudgeler Style" and 3 for "Kraken Style") and a very brief Bloodrager archetype ("Bloody-Knuckled Rowdy").  I've never gotten into Style feats so I don't really have an opinion, and the Bloodrager archetype pays a heavy price (one fewer spell known per spell level) to get better at unarmed combat.

"Melee in a Pinch" was a clever idea: what to do when you weren't expecting a fight (or, at least, when a fight slides into a situation you're not ready for--like underwater, while grappled, etc.).  I know I've taken the "Aquatic Combatant" feat (no penalties on melee attacks underwater, and your weapons do full damage), for example.  There are eight more feats in this vein.  There's also a "Makeshift Scrapper" archetype for Rogues that are about improvised weapons, and it looks okay but not amazing.

"Anatomy of Melee Weapons" is something very different: poor drawings of several different types of swords and very basic diagrams of the different parts of an axe, mace, and sword.  For most of this stuff, Wikipedia and Google Image search would be better.

"Melee Weapons" introduces sixteen new weapons.  At this stage in the development of Pathfinder, I'm not really sure they're necessary.  The only new one here I've ever seen someone use was the Elven Branched Spear just because it was an elven weapon that had reach and a x3 Crit modifier.

"Tools and Equipment", on the other hand, contained loads of good stuff.  An armor truss is almost a must-have for solo adventurers who want to wear heavy armor, while "exemplar weapon salve" allows you to turn that story-based background weapon into a masterwork weapon suitable for enchantment.  I would like to scare a player so much that they start regularly using Sunderblock, but it hasn't happened yet.

"Magic Armor" contains a good assortment.  Advocate's Armor is really clever (getting hit by a crit has a chance to put a lesser geas on the attacker), an Alchemist's Suit could be great fun (get hit by a crit and automatically apply the effects of one of eight vials stored within it), and my caveman shaman really needs to get the Mammoth Hide armor.

"Magic Weapons" didn't do as much for me.  I liked the Diplomat's Traveling Stick and could imagine characters it would be perfect for.  One of the weapons, the Pirate's Arm, is just bizarre.

"Armor and Weapon Special Abilities" presents some pretty niche material, but it's an interesting array.

"Wondrous Items" has a mostly unremarkable selection.  I do really like the Anchoring Bracers, and would love to see the surprise on a gamer's face when they try to have their character teleport away from a tough battle.

"Melee Spells" finishes the book, containing ten new spells.  Most spells are assigned to four or five different classes, but I'd guess magus and bloodrager would get the most out of the selection.  Some of the spells are cast by swift actions, which is particularly useful.

Overall, Player Companions like the Melee Tactics Toolbox are just a big grab-bag of stuff.  Some of it's great, some of it's dumb, and most is mediocre.  Having this book is excellent for something like PFS, as sooner or later you'll almost surely want an option that appears somewhere within these pages.  I also think the advice given on melee combat is reasonably useful, even if it's rather concise.