>>3558
Magus can fulfill a lot of fantasies for a spellsword or battlemage but requires a lot of mechanical understanding, lateral thinking and is preferably in a high point buy game. Pathfinder fixed a lot of gish issues but Magus can be quite rough. The best overall usage of a Magus is a kind of novaspiker that gets insane value out of spellstriking something like intensified shocking grasp for insane value multiplied on crits with extra hit on heavy armored opponents. This is because spellstrike hits on your weapon attack dice rather than purely off touch attack requirements, so you can dish out ridiculous nova damage at the cost of being neither a full caster or a full babby martial, while using spells that don't focus on on save DCs as part of the spell. For action economy utility, a different class feat, Spell Combat has incredible value as it let's you cast a spell AND full round attack, as long as you either cast the spell first or after your full round attacks. So you could ping a scorching ray into a full combo or do a touch attack spike into fra. Or self buff into fra, such as true strike or haste, etc. The other cool kind of build is to focus on delivering debuffs or CCs into fras, such as taking extra arcana class feat into Spell Blending to take spells from the wizard spell list. Good example is ghoul touch but there are many others. With Myrmidarch, if you reach metamagic ghoul touch, you can ranged spellstrike a ghoul touch at say, a wizard, and paralyze them. At 11 on Myrm, you get to fire off multi hits on a ranged touch like say scorching ray, per arrow on top of your arcana pool clas feat or say arcane strike feat to do ranged nova spike damage. The Magus also eventually is able to spellcast in medium and heavy armor without arcane spell failure so you can play a proper spell sword or battlemage build. A neat trick you can use that paizo confirmed with Maguses is utilizing the arcane mark orison to give yourself early game two-weapon fighting for an extra attack per round, with both attacks being at a -2 by Spellstriking arcane mark and treating arcane mark as your spell as if off-hand for Spell Combat's purposes. Couple these tricks with a spell drinker weapon and you can deliver a lot of damage, debuffs or CCs in melee or at range with certain archetypes. It's super fun but definitely skews on the complex side of classes.
Also I agree with you completely! It would be so good for her to run something beginner friendly but with great RP potential like WoD. She'd probably also struggle teaching a more complex system like 3.5 or Pf1e... One can still dream though. I just see the serious rp potential in the livers I listed if they get into it, provided she can give them the proper support, and really wonder what it'd be like if she gets more confident in her writing to the point of making a homebrew setting that is not just there for the sillies. I wish her luck since she expressed interest in that, but would also be happy to see her run some adventure paths of length.
My party is a blessing because everyone is both mechanically minded but really loves RPing their characters to their full potential. Someday in the future I hope to unironically be a DM Vtuber so I can run campaigns for multiple groups of people and get them into deeper fantasy systems with my own settings or try out systems I never got the chance to DM but only play like WoD or Dark Heresy.