It’s not that obscure, it’s just not something that non-D&D players would have ever heard of. It’s called the Binder, it’s from the 3rd edition supplement “Tome of Magic”, and it’s based around inviting a weird quasi-real entity to inhabit your body for a day, granting you specific powers in exchange for certain limitations. Though it’s writen to be a sort of anti-cleric, nothing else in D&D actually resembles it to any great extent, and unlike most other “weird for the sake of weird” classes, including the other two published in the same book, Binder is actually reasonably high-tier, meaning that it will actually be useful in play (very low-tier classes can’t really do anything, and high-tier classes like Wizard are too powerful to be meaningfully challenged, so the middle tiers are the “sweet spot”, and that’s where Binder goes). The reasons why I love Binder are as follows.
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The flavor! The book contains 32 of the beings that you can “pact” with, and every single one of them has an amazing backstory behind it, from a dwarf queen whose greed allowed her kingdom to burn until her treasure melted around her, to a paladin who fell from good to evil and then one day walked away from both in disgust, to a demon-god’s false identity which persisted as a separate entity after he reclaimed his true name, to a giant ethereal spider which is prophecied to destroy the world someday. They’re AMAZING stories, and the powers that you get from bargaining with them fit beautifully into the theme created by the tale. The only part I don’t care for is that the beings are mostly given the names of Goetic demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon, and I’ve never really approved of using real-world concepts too transparently in a fantasy universe; it’s particularly egregious given that the physical descriptions exactly match those of the Goetia, except most of them have randomly been turned into dwarves or elves for no real reason. That bit is kinda cringe, so I give them all new names and sometimes change their description slightly, but this is much less reskinning than I have to do with certain other things in D&D, such as the other class mentioned below.)
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The mechanics! No other class in D&D functions quite like the Binder; at low levels, forming a Pact with one of these entities is kind of like casting one single spell every day, but it has 3-6 different effects which all persist for the whole duration. Depending on the one you use, you can be the party’s main healer for the day, or a scholar who casts a couple of magic spells, or a frontline fighter who charges the opponent and breathes fire in a wide area, or a tank who changes places with your allies whenever they’re attacked. It’s second only to the Factotum or the Chameleon prestige class in its ability to do a little bit of everything, but instead of having weak magic and mediocre fighting prowess and a little bit of healing all the time, it picks one of these every day and does them really well. (My second-favorite class, the Incarnate, is a similar oddball who likewise picks somewhat-weak but long-lasting abilities with a lot of flavor and then mixes and matches them; that one comes second because the fluff is much less good, and the abilities require a lot of bookkeeping to make them function properly, while Binder is much more of a “fire and forget” kind of deal.)
3: The roleplaying possibilities! Whenever you “pact” with one of these beings, you have to roll a contest to determine whether you’re more or less in charge of the body which the entity is now sharing with you. If you fail this roll, it creates a visible mutation on your body and compels you to obey certain weird restrictions or compulsions related to its personality, and this is obviously RP gold. Just as most of my favorite superheroes are the ones whose powers don’t quite work all of the time (Setback is the ur-example, but nearly all Sentinels characters qualify, with all sorts of things that can go a little wrong at some dramatically appropriate moment; compare and contrast Legacy with Superman for an obvious illustration), likewise the Binder has the ability to sometimes give you perfect control over your abilities, but often to exact a cost which will complicate your life and create interesting scenarios.
Whew, hopefully now you get why I’m so into this class. Sadly I have almost no actual play experience with it, and the complete absence of anything resembling it in 5E is an example of why I prefer to stick to the edition I first cut my teeth on back in 2005 or so.
My go-to is a Hawaiian pizza (Canadian bacon and pineapple, with either regular pizza sauce or Barbecue sauce, and often with American bacon to boot), and there is apparently some sort of national ham shortage affecting all Domino’s stores, so the last couple pizzas I ordered had to use italian sausage or hamburger instead, both of which were suboptimal. Thusly, at least for the moment, my favorite pizza topping is ham, because I can’t have any. (I’m definitely a bit vulnerable to the “once you have it, you won’t want it anymore” effect; whatever I’m currently being denied becomes far more important to me than the many nice things I actually do have. I acknowledge this is a problem, but I can’t help being what I am.)
Medieval-period, I’ve always had a thing for spiked flails (the one wielded by the Witch-King of Angmar is the coolest one I’ve ever seen), but I wouldn’t ever dare try to wield one myself. If actually called on to fight IRL, I’d probably want something like a handaxe or sickle that I could use to hack away at a target, larger than a knife but smaller than a sword. Or for the best of both worlds, practicality and awesomeness, I’d use some sort of halberd or other polearm; if I was rich, I’d own a whole collection of glaives, guisarmes, glaive-guisarmes, guisarme-glaives, and glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaives (if you’re confused, I’ll explain the joke, but of course then it’s not funny anymore).
Modern era, while I hate guns of any variety, my preference would be for a sniper rifle with a silencer, preferably one that magically works on a “hitscan” principle the way they do in video games, firing in a geometrically straight line and hitting instantaneously, rather than having to deal with all the pesky physics that make real-life sniping so much more challenging. I have intensely fond memories of having played Unreal Tournament back in around 2010ish and for several years thereabouts, and while all of the weapons in that game have their charms, most of my favorite experiences involved hiding myself away from all of the carnage, looking out through a scope, and occasionally headshotting someone, so I didn’t have to worry so much about watching my own back.
Man, these are some awesome questions today, keep it up!
Puzzle solving with friends is great.
(And clementines are so much easier to eat than oranges. 