Critical Hits and Critical Failures

That would eliminate the entire point of taking 20, which is to cut down on players simply rolling the die over and over fishing for a nat 20. If you make taking 20 any different from actually rolling the 20, then you might as well eliminate the rule entirely and prepare yourself for a player wasting game time physically rerolling until the desired number comes up.

I mean, the rule for when a player can take 20 basically boils down to, "if you would let the player keep trying over and over until they roll a 20, just say it happened and move on with the game."

I suppose. Though, frankly, a 20 plus your bonus will often be a crit anyway, so this situation is super specific. Assuming there's something keeping you from making DC 50 checks with a +5 bonus (which I suspect there is) you could probably have it auto-succeed with normal effects of a 20 and it still wouldn't be a huge deal.

Of course, all this assumes such rolls will even exist. It might instead be explicit that you can just auto-succeed at some things by taking sufficient time.

I love the new system as described - though I do agree with 20 and 1 nudging the results 1 step, instead of auto hit/miss. Something that a lot of the skill based questions in this thread may be missing, is that not every action/skill/spell/etc even has a crit success or crit fail result.

Like some of the folks were saying, I don't think it would be good to add auto success for skills. "Hey, GM. I'm going to jump to the moooooon!" *20*
But I think this system opens up a lot. Makes playing a caster way more useful. No more wasting your turn entirely on a spell everyone saved and resisted.

I don't see in the blog post where it says anything is an autosuccess. What it does say is:

If you exceeded the target DC by 10 or more, or if you rolled a natural 20 and met or exceeded the target DC, then you critically succeeded.

So that DC10000 jump check would still fail on a 20. The only mention of the natural 20 is if you also met or exceeded the target DC.

Even the discussed 'nudge one step' rule would be a CRITICAL FAILURE on the dice, the natural 20 nudging it to a FAILURE.

I’m hoping the need for the Take 10/20 rule will be resolved by a combination of the Exploration mode system and the degrees of success system, so that infinite retries are no longer a thing and rolls actually matter for things like Opening locks and searching rooms.

For example:

The door is locked with an average lock (DC 15) and requires training and thieves tools to open if the party doesn’t have the key (see area B3). Thievery Skill (1 Action): Critical Success: You unlock the door immediately. Success: You make progress at picking the lock. Your next success counts as a Critical Success. Failure: You make no progress towards picking the lock. Critical Failure: You Dent your Thieves’ Tools (they gain a -2 to all Thievery checks; if they you Dent them again, they become broken and you fail all checks using those tools).

There is a secret alcove behind a hidden panel in the wall that contains a collection of scrolls. PCs can attempt a Perception check (DC 23) to search the room. Thoroughly Search the Room (Exploration Only): Critical Success: You find the alcove in less than a minute. Success: You find the alcove after a few minutes of searching. Failure: You spend up to 10 minutes searching but don’t find anything. Your next Failure counts as a Critical Failure. Critical Failure: You spent 10 minutes searching the room top to bottom, but found nothing. You can spend another hour scouring over the entire room to uncover any and all secrets but gain Exhaustion 1 in addition to anything you find. You gain this effect even if the room has nothing to find.

Rules text like the above mean that every roll matters and the players can’t simply to decide to continually roll until they get the result that they want when confronted with skill checks with little to no time pressure.

I'm not sure on how I feel about this yet. Making save or sucks stronger is not a way to decrease M/CD. I think this only goes to increase it. Of course, this is only one subsystem and other changes could be incoming but it is worrying. The loss of an action was always the gamble with save or suck and balanced them out. Giving them an effect even on a successful save only increases their power and thus casters. Not sure if this has been covered or not, because 10 pages is a lot to go through.

I don't see in the blog post where it says anything is an autosuccess. What it does say is:

Quote:

If you exceeded the target DC by 10 or more, or if you rolled a natural 20 and met or exceeded the target DC, then you critically succeeded.

So that DC10000 jump check would still fail on a 20. The only mention of the natural 20 is if you also met or exceeded the target DC.

Even the discussed 'nudge one step' rule would be a CRITICAL FAILURE on the dice, the natural 20 nudging it to a FAILURE.

Because Mark (one of the developers) mentioned upthread that nat 20 is always a success and nat 1 is always a failure.

I'm not sure on how I feel about this yet. Making save or sucks stronger is not a way to decrease M/CD. I think this only goes to increase it. Of course, this is only one subsystem and other changes could be incoming but it is worrying. The loss of an action was always the gamble with save or suck and balanced them out. Giving them an effect even on a successful save only increases their power and thus casters. Not sure if this has been covered or not, because 10 pages is a lot to go through.

Many of the worst effects of old SOS spells now only happen on a critical failure of the save, with simple failure being a lesser penalty. And critical failure won't happen often. So this was a means to balance that out and still let the SOS caster usually achieve something with their turn even when the target saves.

Madclaw wrote:

I'm not sure on how I feel about this yet. Making save or sucks stronger is not a way to decrease M/CD. I think this only goes to increase it. Of course, this is only one subsystem and other changes could be incoming but it is worrying. The loss of an action was always the gamble with save or suck and balanced them out. Giving them an effect even on a successful save only increases their power and thus casters. Not sure if this has been covered or not, because 10 pages is a lot to go through.

Many of the worst effects of old SOS spells now only happen on a critical failure of the save, with simple failure being a lesser penalty. And critical failure won't happen often. So this was a means to balance that out and still let the SOS caster usually achieve something with their turn even when the target saves.

I suppose. Without seeing the effects of failure and critical failure on the SOS it still has me leary.

Because Mark (one of the developers) mentioned upthread that nat 20 is always a success and nat 1 is always a failure.

In fairness, he also stated that issues like jumping to the moon were dealt with by the full system.

Deranged Stabby-Man wrote:

Guarantee you that'll be the first thing folks houserule in.

Why?

Expanded crit range for everyone is interesting and fun.

You see expanded crit range for everyone.

I see reduced crit chances for my favorite characters. (My magus threatened 30% of the time, with a 95% chance of confirmation.)

One reason to not do the “nudge” rule for 1s/20s is that it rarely comes up in the way that people care about, but I can see GMs using it to make a 1 that would be a crit fail as a super crit fail of the sword-flinging variety.

Deadmanwalking wrote:

Deranged Stabby-Man wrote:

Guarantee you that'll be the first thing folks houserule in.

Why?

Expanded crit range for everyone is interesting and fun.

You see expanded crit range for everyone.

I see reduced crit chances for my favorite characters. (My magus threatened 30% of the time, with a 95% chance of confirmation.)

Well, it's 100% confirmation chance in PF2. And all you need to have a 30% crit rate is a 75% chance to hit. That's probably doable most of the time with maximal accuracy.

Heck, in PF2e if you build your fighter-type to hit on a 2+ then you crit on a 12+. I've played martial characters in 1e that would crit on a 6+ in the new system, all else being equal. This is an aspect of the new system where I am wholly on board with the changes. Good martials will have huge crit range, at least on their first attack. Mathematically, your chance of hitting on your third attack in a round(at -10) is identical to your chance of critting on your first attack. They've said that for martials that third attack often won't be a wasted action, so it must have decent chances of landing, which implies by math that your first attack has a decent chance of critting.

And that’s how we get 4e.

The one-save-or-lose is a uniquely Caster thing, and making it so that all spells do basically the same thing, with only really cosmetic variation, is how to alienate a lot of people who like that Casters operate on a different plane than martials- they might not be able to do as much damage, or certain things as well (at least in theory) but they can do things that martial can’t even begin to emulate.

If PF2 dropped SoS completely, or made it key off of ‘alternate hitpointd’ it would lose a ton of its players.

Do you just say that anything you don't like is 4E or something?

The fact that I can lose control of my character and sit there doing nothing for an hour or more of real world time because I rolled low on one save in the first round of a combat is bad game design. It's that simple.

Running off a "will points" pool, or otherwise requiring multiple success for an incredibly powerful game altering effect like Dominate Person to fully take hold does not take away the caster's ability to do things that martials can't. It just means that they have to actually work for it and not just hit their, LOL auto-win button in the first round of each combat.

I'd like to think that any player who isn't a selfish spotlight hog isn't going to quit the game because it takes their wizard 2 or 3 rounds to take complete mental control of the Barbarian instead of just 1.

Heck, in PF2e if you build your fighter-type to hit on a 2+ then you crit on a 12+.

I suspect that ACs and attack values will not have that wide a variance when facing monsters of your own CR range. We have been told that Armor and Weapons use the new proficiency system and that bakes in level as part of it.

Dαedαlus wrote:

And that’s how we get 4e.

The one-save-or-lose is a uniquely Caster thing, and making it so that all spells do basically the same thing, with only really cosmetic variation, is how to alienate a lot of people who like that Casters operate on a different plane than martials- they might not be able to do as much damage, or certain things as well (at least in theory) but they can do things that martial can’t even begin to emulate.

If PF2 dropped SoS completely, or made it key off of ‘alternate hitpointd’ it would lose a ton of its players.

Do you just say that anything you don't like is 4E or something?

The fact that I can lose control of my character and sit there doing nothing for an hour or more of real world time because I rolled low on one save in the first round of a combat is bad game design. It's that simple.

Running off a "will points" pool, or otherwise requiring multiple success for an incredibly powerful game altering effect like Dominate Person to fully take hold does not take away the caster's ability to do things that martials can't. It just means that they have to actually work for it and not just hit their, LOL auto-win button in the first round of each combat.

I'd like to think that any player who isn't a selfish spotlight hog isn't going to quit the game because it takes their wizard 2 or 3 rounds to take complete mental control of the Barbarian instead of just 1.

What? No. This is the first time I've made the comparison, actually. It's just that this is quite similar to what people don't like about 4e (only cosmetic differences between classes) that it seems like a fair comparison to make.

The problem with 'it takes 2-3 castings of a spell to do anything' is that, often times, Casters don't have that many spells to spare. If they got an at-will, "attack a different pool of not-HP than the rest of your teammates" that would be another story (still not one that I would like, but still a story- if the caster can't do anything to directly help their teammates take down a foe, what's the point of playing one?) but when I, playing a caster, gets a only one or two Dominates a day, there's no way I'd blow them on trying to take down a single encounter that likely won't even matter because after 2-3 rounds of being attacked by the martial characters, there's likely not going to be enough of them left to control. An at-will power would start to solve the problem, but then any encounter in which you spend trying to Dominate your foe is one where you effectively contribute nothing, unless everyone is attacking the same pool, which at that point, may as well be HP. It then breaks narrative if you can spend 20 seconds and have anybody you meet under your absolute control.

Do you just say that anything you don't like is 4E or something?

The fact that I can lose control of my character and sit there doing nothing for an hour or more of real world time because I rolled low on one save in the first round of a combat is bad game design. It's that simple.

Running off a "will points" pool, or otherwise requiring multiple success for an incredibly powerful game altering effect like Dominate Person to fully take hold does not take away the caster's ability to do things that martials can't. It just means that they have to actually work for it and not just hit their, LOL auto-win button in the first round of each combat.

I'd like to think that any player who isn't a selfish spotlight hog isn't going to quit the game because it takes their wizard 2 or 3 rounds to take complete mental control of the Barbarian instead of just 1.

Then allow me to directly tell you that you are thinking wrong, cause i barely ever play full casters and still expect save or die to be just that, save or die. I will drop the game faster than hot potatos if i dont think it feels like PF1.

Not even saying the system itself couldnt take place, in some other game, but that isnt what pathfinder stands for to me.

If anything i already, like many others in this thread alone, question if this change wont make a great many deal of effects that should be feared by all at all times, like you fail a save against a medusa you become stone and so on, wont then become weak by comparison.

Hoping the ways to boost DCs this time around are enough to keep up with the many save boosts i expect to also see in the game.

You guys haven't seen a single description of a Save or Suck spell and yet are judging it weak. If you have please link it.
The example in the post was literally:
Crit fail, dominated.
Fail, dominated but can make saves to stop the effect (how it works on 5e).
Success, lose action.
Crit success, Nothing.

So... is it safe to assume that the "Take 10"/"Take 20" rules are gone now? or did I miss something?

I assume that the ability to take 10 or 20 is tied to level of proficiency. At the very least it's likely that one won't be allowed to take 10 on an untrained skill check.

We have been told that sufficient investment in proficiencies allow you to auto-pass less extreme skill checks, and "taking 10 is tied to proficiency" is a way to do this.

I think this system sounds really cool. I think it will make the game more fun overall. It seems like it will keep an element of danger always around, which is great, and save-or-suck abilites get a much-needed change.

I'm excited to playtest this.

Bringing back some of the save or die mechanic is a good thing. I think removing it from PF 1e as it was actually hurt the game to some degree. This might be happy medium. Some of those spells that were thrown to the wayside may now be useful again.

On paper the 4 Degrees of Success sound cool, but of course the playtest will tell.

Am I reading correctly that nat 1's on skill checks will be a failure on the 4 degrees of success, too?

I'm assuming the x2 damage on success crits can be modified by different weapons (x3 with a bigger one)?

I'm wondering how much combat will be slowed down by trying to figure out whether a hit becomes a crit success and the subsequent damage dealt; same for failures. Seems like the invention of the 3 action system might be slowed down by the 4 degrees of success math, that a failure and a miss are two different things...I think Mark has a high linguistics and bluff check.

I do have some worry for low-level encounters with a boss caster of level 3 or 4. A fireball with crit fail could mean death in one hit. One D&D 5e game I played in, my bard was literally killed in one shot with e fireball, even after I saved. I don't know if this mechanic is similar to that?

Am I also correct that a if a fighter misses, he still does damage? I hope this is a high level feat or choice, otherwise this seems absurd. For those fighter-lovers complaining about spell damage and successful saving throws: that's exactly how PF 1e is. On fireball-type spells, a successful save got you half damage (barring any other benefit like evasion). This tended towards area of effect spells which makes sense.

I do have some worry for low-level encounters with a boss caster of level 3 or 4. A fireball with crit fail could mean death in one hit. One D&D 5e game I played in, my bard was literally killed in one shot with e fireball, even after I saved.

I think the new Dying rules, which don't use negative hit points, ought to mitigate this factor. Although they haven't been fully featured yet, it seems that damage can't take you below 0 hp; instead, you gain the Dying condition and have a few rounds to make saves before you're dead.

If +10 >= to hit is a critical, then what about different weapon do they all have an equal chance to crit now?

Does a two-handed sword have the same crit chance as a scimitar, or will some weapons have a improved critical chance?

Does a Scimitar needs a +8 >= tohit for a crit? (Seems to mess with the simple +10 crit rule.)

If +10 >= to hit is a critical, then what about different weapon do they all have an equal chance to crit now?

Does a two-handed sword have the same crit chance as a scimitar, or will some weapons have a improved critical chance?

Does a Scimitar needs a +8 >= tohit for a crit? (Seems to mess with the simple +10 crit rule.)

Not sure on crit ranges in general, but we do know that the Scimitar has unique to hit bonuses making its iterative less painful.

Ninja in the Rye wrote:

Dαedαlus wrote:

And that’s how we get 4e.

The one-save-or-lose is a uniquely Caster thing, and making it so that all spells do basically the same thing, with only really cosmetic variation, is how to alienate a lot of people who like that Casters operate on a different plane than martials- they might not be able to do as much damage, or certain things as well (at least in theory) but they can do things that martial can’t even begin to emulate.

If PF2 dropped SoS completely, or made it key off of ‘alternate hitpointd’ it would lose a ton of its players.

Do you just say that anything you don't like is 4E or something?

The fact that I can lose control of my character and sit there doing nothing for an hour or more of real world time because I rolled low on one save in the first round of a combat is bad game design. It's that simple.

Running off a "will points" pool, or otherwise requiring multiple success for an incredibly powerful game altering effect like Dominate Person to fully take hold does not take away the caster's ability to do things that martials can't. It just means that they have to actually work for it and not just hit their, LOL auto-win button in the first round of each combat.

I'd like to think that any player who isn't a selfish spotlight hog isn't going to quit the game because it takes their wizard 2 or 3 rounds to take complete mental control of the Barbarian instead of just 1.

What? No. This is the first time I've made the comparison, actually. It's just that this is quite similar to what people don't like about 4e (only cosmetic differences between classes) that it seems like a fair comparison to make.

Unless you think I'm suggesting they give Fighters the ability to take control of their enemy's mind by hitting them over the head with a stick a couple of times or instantly travel great distances by swinging a sword about, I'm struggling to see how it's a cosmetic difference.

The problem with 'it takes 2-3 castings of a spell to do anything' is that, often times, Casters don't have that many spells to spare.

If they've actually done something to put a meaningful limit on the available spell slots of a high level caster in 2E, then you could simply have such multi-round battles of will between the caster and their target trigger off a concentration mechanic in rounds after the initial casting of the spell instead of requiring a new casting each round.

Or require that some other condition be in place before you can dominate someone, and have that condition available from a lower level spell.

Deadmanwalking wrote:

Thewms wrote:

So... is it safe to assume that the "Take 10"/"Take 20" rules are gone now? or did I miss something?

We have no idea.

Taking 10 is easily compatible with this system, and Taking 20 would be easy enough just by noting that it isn't a 'natural' 20 and doesn't trigger auto-success/crits.

That would eliminate the entire point of taking 20, which is to cut down on players simply rolling the die over and over fishing for a nat 20. If you make taking 20 any different from actually rolling the 20, then you might as well eliminate the rule entirely and prepare yourself for a player wasting game time physically rerolling until the desired number comes up.

I mean, the rule for when a player can take 20 basically boils down to, "if you would let the player keep trying over and over until they roll a 20, just say it happened and move on with the game."

Pretty sure taking 20 in PF1 is 20+ your mods, you don't get any special effect.

You guys haven't seen a single description of a Save or Suck spell and yet are judging it weak. If you have please link it.

The example in the post was literally:
Crit fail, dominated.
Fail, dominated but can make saves to stop the effect (how it works on 5e).
Success, lose action.
Crit success, Nothing.

To be fair, within a few posts of each other we have one person complaining this makes SoD too strong and another complaining it makes SoD too weak. Knees gonna jerk.

We know the rapier does +1d8 on a crit, so I guess that’s how they’re going to handle high-crit weapons.

Somebody mentioned critting 50% of the time with a Fighter “built to hit on a 2”. I very much doubt that’s possible in 2E mechanics. I figure their game math probably remains robust throughout all levels, like in 4E. No more rampantly diverging hit chances for different classes! Remember, every +1 is valuable.

CraziFuzzy wrote:

I don't see in the blog post where it says anything is an autosuccess. What it does say is:

Quote:

If you exceeded the target DC by 10 or more, or if you rolled a natural 20 and met or exceeded the target DC, then you critically succeeded.

So that DC10000 jump check would still fail on a 20. The only mention of the natural 20 is if you also met or exceeded the target DC.

Even the discussed 'nudge one step' rule would be a CRITICAL FAILURE on the dice, the natural 20 nudging it to a FAILURE.

Because Mark (one of the developers) mentioned upthread that nat 20 is always a success and nat 1 is always a failure.

Ah, well that's a shame, and sort of complicated the >10 <10 rule.

Invictus Novo wrote:

I like nearly everything in this post, except one thing. When I read "if you rolled a natural 20 and met or exceeded the target DC" and "if you rolled a natural 1 and didn't meet the target DC" it sounds like a natural 1 is not an auto-fail and a natural 20 is not an auto-success any longer. Would love a confirmation or correction on this.

If this is the case I'm extremely disappointed. There are any number of times where nothing but a natural 1/20 will fail/succeed and that slight chance makes things extremely fun and interesting. If a goblin attacks a paladin and the paladin has his AC maxed, the goblin has no chance to hit, except on that natural 20 which at least gives the little guy a slight chance to find that one seam in the paladins armor. This is but a single example of hundreds.

As mentioned earlier in the comments, the 20 that isn't a critical success is still a success, and the 1 that is not a critical failure is still a failure.

Is there an actual design basis for keeping the nat 20 nat 1 rule? The ability to get rid of that and move things to the sliding scale seems too good to pass up. The concern is with everything (skills, saves and attacks) moving to the same system, it seems overly complicated to keep the nat rules. I think I'd much rather the nat 20 nat 1 nudge the result one step, as otherwise described here.

The biggest problem I see is that with always a 5% change of failure (on a 1), then pretty much every skill check needs to be rolled, to ensure that. With the nudge method, however, than there are plenty of opportunities for success or failure to be guaranteed and the roll could be skipped entirely.

Removed a post and some posts quoting it. If you feel like a word or phrase is inaccurate you can discuss, criticize, or provide constructive feedback it without making personal attacks.

Like some of the folks were saying, I don't think it would be good to add auto success for skills. "Hey, GM. I'm going to jump to the moooooon!" *20*

But I think this system opens up a lot. Makes playing a caster way more useful. No more wasting your turn entirely on a spell everyone saved and resisted.

Beside the little problem "even if you succeed you will move at your base movement speed so I hope you will enjoy your jump lasting 30,000,000 rounds." every failure will be a critical failure. Depending on the effects of a critical failure with that kind of margin it would be interesting to see what happen to your character for trying that. Repeatedly.

Vidmaster7 wrote:

Malk_Content wrote:

Old World of Darkness (don't know about new) fairly commonly had the spending of willpower to resist mental effects, with the difficulty of those effects for the user being based on your total cap.

Still true for the new one too I believe.

Wasn't sure, never really looked into the mechanics of them because they went (fluff and mechanics wise) of Magic being both amazingly open ended but also constrained by your innately ego-centric world view, to coming from Atlantis.

That's actually one of the things I really like. I /hated/ the idea of consensual reality and the whole "You need to have a paradigm that you fully believe is the reason you have magic. This is objectively wrong and every other mage in existence is a counter-example, but you have to believe it fully and without question." And then the silly comic villains who use magic but don't believe in magic so set out to kill all magic users because they can't exist. Seers of the Throne are a much better antagonist than the Technocracy.

[/tangent]

But back to PF, I guess that does show one of the problems in new editions. There are always going to be people who hate any given change, and people who are cheering it on. I guess the trick is to maximize the later and minimize the former. Good luck with that.

In short, no, WoD games (either New or Old) very rarely do this, and it's certainly not the baseline of those systems. Nor of any other popular games I've seen that I can recall.

Would the Sanity system from Call of Cthulhu fit the bill? I've never played sadly. I know Eclipse Phase has a mental trauma system that works similar to physical damage. But I don't think it's usually something that's attacked directly.

Dαedαlus wrote:

And that’s how we get 4e.

The one-save-or-lose is a uniquely Caster thing, and making it so that all spells do basically the same thing, with only really cosmetic variation, is how to alienate a lot of people who like that Casters operate on a different plane than martials- they might not be able to do as much damage, or certain things as well (at least in theory) but they can do things that martial can’t even begin to emulate.

If PF2 dropped SoS completely, or made it key off of ‘alternate hitpointd’ it would lose a ton of its players.

Do you just say that anything you don't like is 4E or something?

The fact that I can lose control of my character and sit there doing nothing for an hour or more of real world time because I rolled low on one save in the first round of a combat is bad game design. It's that simple.

Running off a "will points" pool, or otherwise requiring multiple success for an incredibly powerful game altering effect like Dominate Person to fully take hold does not take away the caster's ability to do things that martials can't. It just means that they have to actually work for it and not just hit their, LOL auto-win button in the first round of each combat.

I'd like to think that any player who isn't a selfish spotlight hog isn't going to quit the game because it takes their wizard 2 or 3 rounds to take complete mental control of the Barbarian instead of just 1.

You see it that way, I see it "well, we can remove lichs, enemy casters and spell using monsters in general from the game unless they have a huge mob of minions slowing down the opponents so that they have the time to inconvenience 1 enemy".

WWhat? No. This is the first time I've made the comparison, actually. It's just that this is quite similar to what people don't like about 4e (only cosmetic differences between classes) that it seems like a fair comparison to make.

The problem with 'it takes 2-3 castings of a spell to do anything' is that, often times, Casters don't have that many spells to spare. If they got an at-will, "attack a different pool of not-HP than the rest of your teammates" that would be another story (still not one that I would like, but still a story- if the caster can't do anything to directly help their teammates take down a foe, what's the point of playing one?) but when I, playing a caster, gets a only one or two Dominates a day, there's no way I'd blow them on trying to take down a single encounter that likely won't even matter because after 2-3 rounds of being attacked by the martial characters, there's likely not going to be enough of them left to control. An at-will power would start to solve the problem, but then any encounter in which you spend trying to Dominate your foe is one where you effectively contribute nothing, unless everyone is attacking the same pool, which at that point, may as well be HP. It then breaks narrative if you can spend 20 seconds and have anybody you meet under your absolute control.

Well, it seem exactly what he want. Caster (even those in his party) as NPC that are fearsome in theory, but, in reality, powerless in direct combat. Essentially support character that will give him utilities to be faster, stronger and so on, but not annoying him downing enemies.

Thats not really how the Technocracy is. They aren't that comic booky in my eyes and are essentially the victims of their own reality reinforcing itself in a repeated feedback loop. The Seers/Exarchs are way more comic booky to me. But yeah sorry seriously out of topic.

I only hope they find away to make the 1/20 rule natural and non hiccup causing. I'd be pro removing it for everything.

Bringing back some of the save or die mechanic is a good thing. I think removing it from PF 1e as it was actually hurt the game to some degree. This might be happy medium. Some of those spells that were thrown to the wayside may now be useful again.

On paper the 4 Degrees of Success sound cool, but of course the playtest will tell.

Am I reading correctly that nat 1's on skill checks will be a failure on the 4 degrees of success, too?

I'm assuming the x2 damage on success crits can be modified by different weapons (x3 with a bigger one)?

I'm wondering how much combat will be slowed down by trying to figure out whether a hit becomes a crit success and the subsequent damage dealt; same for failures. Seems like the invention of the 3 action system might be slowed down by the 4 degrees of success math, that a failure and a miss are two different things...I think Mark has a high linguistics and bluff check.

I do have some worry for low-level encounters with a boss caster of level 3 or 4. A fireball with crit fail could mean death in one hit. One D&D 5e game I played in, my bard was literally killed in one shot with e fireball, even after I saved. I don't know if this mechanic is similar to that?

Am I also correct that a if a fighter misses, he still does damage? I hope this is a high level feat or choice, otherwise this seems absurd. For those fighter-lovers complaining about spell damage and successful saving throws: that's exactly how PF 1e is. On fireball-type spells, a successful save got you half damage (barring any other benefit like evasion). This tended towards area of effect spells which makes sense.

We still don't know how the DC of the saves will be calculated, but we can try a bit of math with a mix of PF1 rules and what we know of how a critical failure work:

I think that you will have to change some paradigm in character creation, caring more about your chance of survival, but it don't seem bad.

- * -

4 tiers of success and slowing down game. + or - 10 is easy, as least on par with "I have rolled a nat 18 and a total to hit of 25, I have hit?" "Yes" "Them my confirmation hit is 12, it is enough?"

Deadmanwalking wrote:

In short, no, WoD games (either New or Old) very rarely do this, and it's certainly not the baseline of those systems. Nor of any other popular games I've seen that I can recall.

Would the Sanity system from Call of Cthulhu fit the bill? I've never played sadly. I know Eclipse Phase has a mental trauma system that works similar to physical damage. But I don't think it's usually something that's attacked directly.

Well, Sanity is a mental damage system...but not in a 'save or suck effects reduce this' way. Save or Suck stuff does exist in Call of Cthulhu, too, and while it may effect Sanity that isn't always all it does by any mean.

As for Eclipse Phase, mind control and the like don't interact with the mental trauma system directly at all, they very much remain direct 'if the roll goes the psychic's way you are effected by the power' kinda things.

Khudzlin wrote:

@BryonD Goblins have high AC for a low-CR creature, so Fighters won't be critting them often at low-level.

Please release the version of the playtest document you have access to, since you can make this statement.

If you don't have it, we don't know if things will have the same stats, so you can't assume that they will have a high AC for their CR.

A blog post about Goblins came out. They are small and have a bonus to DEX, both of which boost their AC (and fit what Goblins evoke in Pathfinder). It seems my guess was correct.

We know the rapier does +1d8 on a crit, so I guess that’s how they’re going to handle high-crit weapons.

Somebody mentioned critting 50% of the time with a Fighter “built to hit on a 2”. I very much doubt that’s possible in 2E mechanics. I figure their game math probably remains robust throughout all levels, like in 4E. No more rampantly diverging hit chances for different classes! Remember, every +1 is valuable.

I really hope it's possible. 4e's "treadmill" effect where your bonuses basically didn't matter because they were constantly matched by enemy defenses is not what I want in Pathfinder.

Besides, we've been told that taking a third attack at -10 isn't a waste of an action. If attacking at -10 has any sort of reasonable chance to hit, then your primary attack has to at least be somewhere down in the 3-5 to hit range.

From a balance POV, if a spellcaster's spell only has no effect on a crit success on a save, then a martial character should have roughly equivalent odds of doing something useful with their round, which will often involve hitting things.

What? No. This is the first time I've made the comparison, actually. It's just that this is quite similar to what people don't like about 4e (only cosmetic differences between classes) that it seems like a fair comparison to make.

If that was anywhere close to true, it might be. But it is not true remotely of D&D 4e, and it is fairly unlikely to be true of PF2 either.

_
glass.

Hmm, this would appear to make critical results more common. My preference would be, if a change is made, for them to be less common. I'm also not really fond of the idea of extending them to the skill system.

I get that they're trying to open up room for a wider realm of possible results. I can see where many folks might find that appealing. As near as I can tell, folks like the Savage Worlds game mostly because the system ensures characters are never competent enough to get reliable results, making the game less predictable. Extreme results are more memorable, so it is likely to feel like an improvement.

I can also see some players bogging down in the +10/-10 math, as crazy as that sounds. Never the less, there are folks at the table that struggle with the math for applying -5 penalties for iterative attacks.

Hmm, this would appear to make critical results more common. My preference would be, if a change is made, for them to be less common. I'm also not really fond of the idea of extending them to the skill system.

I get that they're trying to open up room for a wider realm of possible results. I can see where many folks might find that appealing. As near as I can tell, folks like the Savage Worlds game mostly because the system ensures characters are never competent enough to get reliable results, making the game less predictable. Extreme results are more memorable, so it is likely to feel like an improvement.

I can also see some players bogging down in the +10/-10 math, as crazy as that sounds. Never the less, there are folks at the table that struggle with the math for applying -5 penalties for iterative attacks.

If you max out a skill in Savage Worlds, you have a 1/120 chance of a critical failure (d12+2 skill, d10 wild die; both must roll a 1), which you can then reroll in most settings using one of Savage World's dice manipulation mechanics. Your chance of rolling a crit fail twice in a row are 1 in 14,400. Similarly, your chance of succeeding at a standard task is 39/40, or 97.5%; about 99.94% with a reroll. Those odds are fine with me for a true master of skill looking like an fool. That's much, much less than 5% of the time.

Although I think typing this post has convinced me that if there is a session-refreshed reroll system in PF2e I'll have much less of a problem with skills autofailing on a 1. Having to roll a nat 1 twice in a row is much more acceptable to my sense of odds.

Stone Dog wrote:

I like the reminder up thread that "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose."

To pull another Star Trek reference, there is a podcast of the new Star Trek Adventures RPG that I saw a couple of episodes of. In that game the helmsman rolled results that, in other games, would be critical failures. In that game though, rolls on the extreme end of the failure side (20s in this case. weird, I know.) could simply indicate misfortune. The helmsman didn't fail the piloting task, but the ship was hit by ion discharges.

Maybe the degrees of success work out like that for some things?

Failures and Critical failures could be set up as no particular mistakes made, but still something didn't go quite right.

This is how I tend to roll with higher level characters, myself! If someone with a high skill bonus fails a non-opposed check due to simple bad luck on the dice, it's not so much that the character failed but rather that there was bad luck in-game. Maybe that surface they're climbing on is just soft and crumbly and part of it falls away, maybe the actions you were taking to try to calm a wild animal were ones that a hunter previously used to try to trick and kill it so now it has a bad reaction to them.

All this requires is a little willingness to improv on the GM's part. I hope this is explicitly described in the published rules.

And outside of encounter time, it wouldn't even be a concern anyway due to taking 10, unless the player is voluntarily rolling to try to get a higher degree of success.

TiwazBlackhand wrote:

Why are they adding the 1 20 Auto-Fail/Success mechanic to skill checks?

Why, when it is not the rule in PF1, Not in 5e, specifically called out in the rules of 3.5 as not the way skill checks work, are they putting this into the PF2 playtest?

I think it's because they pay attention to how people play. You listen to D&D podcasts? Most of them do it. Most game groups do it. It even happens, INCORRECTLY, at

...

My issue is not really with the <10> system. Yes, people can add ten, no problem. It's with the complication with the levels of success. Four levels of success, but only sometimes. Different things have different levels of success. It is NOT intuitive. It may work on paper, but I know for a fact many groups will say, "screw it, let's use the old system."

There are already some things in PF1 that include levels of success. Beating DCs by 5 or more, or failing DCs by 5 or more, etc. Standardizing everything to 10 or more, and making that the expectation (but with exceptions) makes it much easier to remember for things that do have levels of success and isn't any more difficult for things that omit them.

I've long had a system where critically failing against a mind-affecting effect could lead to insanity. Any chance insanity is going to be part of the main rules?

I dont mind sanity rules, but im hoping they are not a core feature.

Ninja in the Rye wrote:

Dαedαlus wrote:

And that’s how we get 4e.

The one-save-or-lose is a uniquely Caster thing, and making it so that all spells do basically the same thing, with only really cosmetic variation, is how to alienate a lot of people who like that Casters operate on a different plane than martials- they might not be able to do as much damage, or certain things as well (at least in theory) but they can do things that martial can’t even begin to emulate.

If PF2 dropped SoS completely, or made it key off of ‘alternate hitpointd’ it would lose a ton of its players.

Do you just say that anything you don't like is 4E or something?

The fact that I can lose control of my character and sit there doing nothing for an hour or more of real world time because I rolled low on one save in the first round of a combat is bad game design. It's that simple.

Running off a "will points" pool, or otherwise requiring multiple success for an incredibly powerful game altering effect like Dominate Person to fully take hold does not take away the caster's ability to do things that martials can't. It just means that they have to actually work for it and not just hit their, LOL auto-win button in the first round of each combat.

I'd like to think that any player who isn't a selfish spotlight hog isn't going to quit the game because it takes their wizard 2 or 3 rounds to take complete mental control of the Barbarian instead of just 1.

You see it that way, I see it "well, we can remove lichs, enemy casters and spell using monsters in general from the game unless they have a huge mob of minions slowing down the opponents so that they have the time to inconvenience 1 enemy".

"Inconvenience" LOL. If all casters did was inconvenience that would be fine. Spells, however, have absolutely catastrophic effects. It starts at level 1 where a failed save makes everyone in a large area unconscious and helpless, being permanently blinded or deafened, or causes the Fighter to drop his weapon and flee in terror and moves up to things like losing control of your character as it becomes an NPC for a year or however long the duration on that spell is.

Maybe it's fun for you when your character fails a save in the first round of combat and is then completely removed, and can do, literally, nothing for 30 minutes to an hour while the combat plays out for everyone else. It's never been fun for me, and I've seen several times where something like this happened to a new player and they simply stopped showing up for games afterwards. So I imagine that I'm not alone in finding it unfun.

I've long had a system where critically failing against a mind-affecting effect could lead to insanity. Any chance insanity is going to be part of the main rules?

I doubt it'll be in the main rules, but the standardization of the rules will probably make it easier to implement. This may be a bit harsh if it surface that crit fails happen more often (I wouldn't be surprised) so you might need to fiddle a bit (maybe add a second save to withstand it? It only happen if it's a natural one? It only happen if you miss by 15 or more?)