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****** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden 15,582 posts (16,603 including aliases). 171 reviews. 4 lists. 1 wishlist. 45 Organized Play characters. 5 aliases.


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Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

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Pirate Rob wrote:

No intention. You're not supposed to know the specifics before applying.

You're supposed to apply where you want the xp, not have to carefully boon plan. If you do want the boon rewards somewhere specifically you can always move around with Bequeathal later.

I think that's exaggerated.

For PFS scenarios you're not supposed to boon-hunt to try to play a specific scenario with a specific character because you know the reward.

But these are APs we're talking about, you don't play them with a PFS character anyway, so that reason isn't relevant.

I think this is more a side effect of just habit/technical limitations, than the result of a specific intention.

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They should all work the same.

Keep in mind that hardness is quite rare on monsters. Hardness is something objects have, monsters would usually have resistance. There is one monster that does have hardness that you run into in quite a few adventures, and that's the Animated Object. But you can imagine why that one has hardness.

You can sort of see behind the curtain that the devs were trying to balance all these abilities. They all focus on characters that hit often, for smaller amounts of damage. As compared to someone with for example a greatsword or a polearm that hits fewer times, but for more damage at once. For both of those kinds of characters, weakness and resistance should matter, but not be too good or too awful. So if you hit more often, you don't get to trigger weakness more often; but you also don't get punished by resistance more often.

So you can draw that RAI forward to hardness: it makes sense that for hardness they'd want things to work the same.

Also of course, hardness is done all the way at the end of the damage process, after the damage had already been merged. It would be extra work to un-merge it for hardness, and what would be the point of doing so? Punish some classes for no reason?

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Yeah, shield block happens very late in the damage sequence, after the damage has already been merged for processing weaknesses and resistances. At that point it makes no sense to split it up again into separate pools to use shield block against one or the other or both.

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It's a bit more niche than the others, true. You need to actually have a plan to exploit the debuff, such as:

- You want to Feint and the lower Perception helps. I'm not sold on it because Feint is okay but there are just so many even easier ways to achieve flat-footed.

- You or a teammate is gonna target their Will save, probably with spells or Intimidate. This can be good especially against mooks. If you have an enemy where Will wasn't their best save to begin with, you debuff it, then it becomes quite likely that a spell like Fear or Calm Emotions can really wreck them. Given how quickly mook HP goes up at higher level, Will spells can be the fastest way to remove them from the fight for a while.

Another point is that it's relatively cheap. It's just a skill feat, it doesn't commit you to a class or archetype. And Diplomacy is one of the more useful skills to have for other things already. And Bon Mot doesn't require a free hand or a particular kind of weapon. So it doesn't really interfere with the rest of your build very much.

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I like the champion reaction and Bon Mot as "taunt" options because they don't prevent the GM from making choices, but you do get to put weight on the scales.

AoO/Reactive Strike can also be one of those. "Walk past me and I'll hit you."

Another one is tripping/grabbing. "First you have to get away from me before you can hit my friends."

Notice that with the right polearm, you can do most of these.

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A big difference between PF1 and PF2 monster design is that PF2 design is really focused on the end result, while PF1 design is more concerned with the process of how you get there.

---

In PF1, you'd take a base creature, add templates, add levels, and calculate where you end up.

Then you could compare that to a table of "what numbers should a creature of this level actually have?" and you were probably off from that by a lot. So then you could invent some "special abilities" to give you a bonus or penalty of some kind to get closer to the table.

---

PF2 monster design is much more to the point. "My party is level 14, I want a Moderate difficulty challenge here, so the XP table says I can do that with a level 16 solo creature. Okay so now I want a level 16 ogre/warrior flavored monster". You look in the creature design tables and they give you the numbers you need. You add a couple more abilities. And done.

The numbers are pretty much automatic. They're just the numbers that are appropriate for a monster of that level, with the kind of style you asked for (bruiser, soldier, ambusher etc.) The abilities is where you do most of the creative work.

That also means that a lot of the boring work of looking up numbers can be automated, and it has been. I like to use this website to do that for me: monster tools. You start out by telling it:
- the level of the monster
- creature type
- roadmap (soldier, spellcaster etc.)

From that, it can fill in a lot of numbers for you with "typical" values. Saves a lot of work, and the result is pretty good. You get a monster that is exactly as powerful as you asked for.

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ComradeCanuck wrote:

I'm going to be starting my first Pathfinder 2e campaign sometime next month, and I was looking for some input/advice from people more familiar with pf2e than I am. I'm heavily leaning toward the Kingmaker AP right now (though I haven't made a final decision) but I think my question would apply to a lot of APs.

Specifically, one of my players wants to run a Champion character. I'm concerned how well that will work with the current state of the champion in the Remaster rules- while I don't have the Kingmaker material to read though yet, my understanding from what I have read online is that it doesn't really have a lot of Unholy enemies. (I know we're getting the remastered champion in July, but that's well after the campaign is going to start, so we're stuck with it as-is for now)

So good on you for trying to handle trouble ahead of time.

As you've seen in other responses, there's a lot to the champion that should work fine in a campaign without many unholy enemies. Of course you'd want to warn the player that "super specializing in fighting demons isn't gonna do that much in this storyline". But champions have some other mechanical options to take that work fine with fairly neutralish enemies.

With all that in mind, you could also agree that once the remaster lands, some rebuilding is on the table for everyone. And you don't necessarily have to do it exactly according to the downtime rules or such. You could just say "hey, we've had time to read the new book, next week I want to switch over the rules, so let's see if there's things you would want different in your character based on that".

I've found that campaigns can run a lot smoother if you allow some "under the hood" rebuilding from time to time. The essential theme of the character might be "I punish bad people". You could do that as a paladin, but also as a fighter who just happens to single out those people that deserve it. So if the new champion rules turn out to be a big disappointment for the player, maybe retroactively they've been a fighter all along?

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The manipulate trait is weird, actually. It's defined as:

Manipulate wrote:
You must physically manipulate an item or make gestures to use an action with this trait. Creatures without a suitable appendage can’t perform actions with this trait. Manipulate actions often trigger reactions.

It does sound like raising a shield would have the manipulate trait, doesn't it? You're physically manipulating an item. You can't really use a shield without some kind of suitable appendage.

But the same goes for making a Strike with a sword, doesn't it?

It's one of those logic snags. All manipulate actions involve using "hands" to handle something. But not all actions involving handling something have the manipulate trait.

Actually, in the first printing of the PF2 CRB, the Parry trait used Interact action to use a weapon to provide a bonus to AC. Which is sorta reasonable - you're using an item, right, so that's Interact? But Interact has the manipulate trait, which means you might provoke an attack of opportunity by trying to gain an AC bonus. Like the current question.

In the second printing this "bug" had been fixed; the Parry trait no longer mentioned Interact. Similarly, Raise a Shield has never used Interact or had the manipulate trait.

So the better way to understand Manipulate is actually that you're trying to do some kind of complicated chancy handwork that potentially leaves you distracted for people to exploit. Which is different from more combat-minded handwork like Strike, Raise Shield, Parry, and combat maneuvers like Grab, Trip, Shove and so on which all require a free hand but don't have Manipulate.

---

Also, was this the first "don't take high stakes financial or medical (or tactical) advice from ChatGPT" question we've had here?

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Yeah they're d20 checks, no problem using fortune on them.

I believe it was really intentional, many of these used to be d100% dice checks in 1E, they standardized them all to d20 checks in 2E so they'd connect smoothly with the rest of the game system.

The section you quote talks about DCs. You never have bonuses or penalties to flat checks; then they wouldn't be flat. But they are sometimes harder or easier, so the DC can be changed.

But a fortune reroll isn't any of those things, so not bothered by the restriction. Using hero points to reroll a flat check is pretty common at my table.

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Errenor wrote:
Ascalaphus wrote:

This came up before and we do have a fairly official answer (at the time, Mark Seifter was still a Paizo game designer). Note also my earlier analysis in that thread.

Long and short of it is: you decide to use a hero point after learning if the roll was a crit/success/failure/critfailure.

Which thread though? I can't find it (quickly) even searching your posts for 'hero point'...

D'oh! I thought I'd put in the link.

here it is.

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This came up before and we do have a fairly official answer (at the time, Mark Seifter was still a Paizo game designer). Note also my earlier analysis in that thread.

Long and short of it is: you decide to use a hero point after learning if the roll was a crit/success/failure/critfailure.

However, no later than that. Once you decide not to reroll a failure, you can't listen to the effect and decide "gosh, that's a lot of damage, I'm going to reroll after all".

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I don't really worry about Strike so much. I think most people can agree during actual play when it's reasonable to Strike objects (effectively) and when not. Try to take down a castle with a dagger? No. Hack your way through a door with an axe? Sure.

Spells are a bit different. For some spells it clearly makes no sense to target objects (Daze) but for others it could make a lot of sense (Ignition, set something on fire). And for some it makes sense that they would affect objects, but actually tracking it for all the objects in the room would be tedious (Fireball) so we don't always do it.

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If you only run into material-resistant/weak enemies very rarely, you could also go for the alloy orb. It's a new talisman from the GM Core, which you can activate for 1 action to make the weapon count as cold iron/silver for a minute. So it's a bit less juggling held items than the silversalve etc, and it works for both metal types (and adamantine at level 12+).

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A nuance: the Strike rules describe using it on creatures.

They don't say you can't Strike objects, they just don't mention it. Not mentioning how to do it shouldn't be stretched into "the rules forbid it". Especially since there are quite a few abilities that actually relate to Striking objects, such as the Razing weapon trait, wall spells with AC and HP, and traps often having an AC.

Lacking a central and formal description of how attacking objects works, the best general rule I can boil down from all the individual cases would be this:

- If you want to Strike something with an AC, you can just use the same procedure as when striking a creature with AC.

- Many objects are easy to hit (like a whole wall). These have AC 10, often some hardness, have a HP total. They're immune to critical hits and precision damage. Of course since they have low AC you'll crit them often. And because of how critical hit immunity works, fatal still gives you a bigger damage die, just not doubling the damage. Which means that picks are pretty good against walls. That seems like it's working as intended.

- Some objects are hard to hit, such as hazards with high AC. I would not afford these critical hit immunity. If the statblock doesn't list immunity to precision damage then they're not immune, however...

- Objects don't use creature conditions, such as off-guard/flat-footed. So you're not often going to be able to deal precision damage to them.

- Check the object's description (or for the category of object, such as structures/hazards/traps) to see if you need to deal enough damage to destroy it, or if just enough damage to make it Broken is already enough to achieve what you want.

- Not all objects have saving throws listed. Attended objects use the attender's saving throw, if they can even be targeted. Unattended objects with their own saving throw bonus listed would use those.

- For objects without saving throws listed, consider that most Will and Fortitude based effects don't apply to them anyway (charm, disease), or specify what would happen (disintegrate). The object can't move out of the way, but also can't stumble extra into the way. So for reflex saves, if the object has no stats for it, I'd rule it always has a normal failure, but not a critical failure. That seems most in line with how walls tend to have low AC but immunity to critical hits.

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For those low levels when skeletons are getting you down, remember two things:
- undead are not automatically immune to nonlethal damage anymore. It seems like only constructs get that by default.
- everyone is proficient with punch

Punching a skeleton for 1d4+STR can be more efficient than stabbing or slicing them for 1d8+STR but running into 5 resistance.

In other words: at low level, you already have your backup weapon. By level 6-7 or so, you can easily afford to get a +1 striking weapon just as backup for damage types. I often combine it with also going for cold iron or silver, in case I need that.

(I tend to rate silver slightly higher - it always feels like devils and such that resist non-silver attacks are more problematic than demons that can be hurt with any weapon but take extra from cold iron.)

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There's a fair amount of creatures where bludgeoning is a better damage type. At low level, skeletons that resist piercing and slashing. At later levels, oozes that don't take damage from piercing or slashing (but instead split, double trouble). And some constructs with various resistances to non-bludgeoning (-non-adamantine) damage.

There's also some creatures that take extra damage from slashing, like zombies and various plant monsters.

There's only one group of monsters where piercing is the best way to handle them (rakshasas, and they're not seen very often).

On the other hand, piercing weapons are better underwater.

Also, piercing weapons seem to do pretty well with base stats. Just look at ranged weapons, most of the serious ones are piercing. Also some choice melee weapons are piercing (rapier, picks). So maybe against standard enemies, piercing is slightly better because it has good weapons, but against some enemies it's a lot worse.

I think it's fine to have a piercing primary weapon, but I would make very sure I also had a secondary weapon.

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To talk about the original topic then: there have been various dev statements that anathemas are supposed to be an RPG tool.

If your character has to choose between two anathemas, RPing your character agonizing over the choice is certainly working as intended. But I think they don't really love the idea of trying to mechanistically determine the objectively correct thing to do based on anathema order.

We don't know how remastered paladins will work yet. So that rules question can't be answered. For cleric though we do have remastered rules:

PC1 p. 110 wrote:

If you perform enough acts that are anathema to your

deity, you lose the magical abilities that come from your
connection to your deity. The class features that you lose are
determined by the GM, but they likely include your divine
font and all cleric spellcasting. These abilities can be regained
only if you repent by conducting an atone ritual (page 390).

As you can see, it's actually pretty loose. "Enough" violations result in punishments fully determined by the GM, with some likely ones listed, but the GM is not compelled to stick to that.

If your cleric had to choose between two anathema and did the best they could, a kind deity might understand that and just not punish at al. A vengeful or unreasonable deity on the other hand might lay down the law severely. A more balanced one might not punish heavily (and let the party finish the current quest at full power) but afterwards demand that the cleric make things right (post-adventure sidequest).

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I like SuperBidi's analysis. But I think there's a few more points to consider.

Encounters per day is like adding salt to a dish;
- too few, it tastes flat
- too much, it ruins the dish, and you can't really get it out again
- not everyone like the same amount
- prepackaged food has more salt in it than health authorities would recommend
- even with all those caveats, we want recipes to give an indication of what is sort of the normal amount of salt to add

As you get more GMing experience you also get a better feeling for how much salt/acid slime monsters you want in your adventuring day, and how that'll vary depending on what kind of adventure you're running and who you're running it for.

I think there's an element SuperBidi didn't cover so much though - encounters per in-game day, and encounters per game session. Of course if your game session represents one in-game day then that's the same. That happens in a lot of PFS scenarios. But not always.

Sometimes the party is moving a 1000km to a different country for a different adventure, and that trip is going to take weeks of in-game time but only one game session. You do want some encounters along the way, to kind of paint the scenery the party is traveling through with blooooood.

Sometimes the party is exploring a dungeon, which has more than 4-5 encounters, but it does make sense to do it all at once. Actually, maybe the party can even guess there's more encounters to come. For example, there's all these claw marks and soot stains, but so far the party hasn't encountered any creature capable of doing that. So they'll be holding back some spells for a dragon or something. They don't expect the dungeon is done until the fat lizard sings. But this might be a two-session escapade that takes only one in-game day.

Encounter difficulty has to be balanced with encounter quantity. If you're doing eight encounters in a day, they can't all be hard things that burn through your spells. If you have one encounter during a week of travel, maybe it should be a bit on the spicier side, but not quite dip into boss-fight XP budgets. In both cases, the players have a bit of a ballpark idea about how many encounters they're likely to face that day. That's fine - informed players get to have the fun of trying to make good choices, instead of pure gambles.

I do think, comparing published adventures to these analytical figures, that they're kinda heavy on the salt. I'd rather see adventures have more obvious midway breakpoints, than dungeon floors with 11ish encounters that XP you a whole level.

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I disagree. I think captivated is not a generic condition, but that doesn't mean it isn't anything at all. It's a specific effect, caused by this ability.

Note that the failure effect doesn't mention breaking the Fascinated effect at all:

Quote:
Failure: The creature is 'Fascinated', and it must spend each of its actions to move closer to the harpy as expediently as possible, while avoiding obvious dangers. If a captivated creature is adjacent to the harpy, it stays still and doesn't act. If attacked by the harpy, the creature is freed from captivation at the end of the harpy's turn.

If the harpy attacks, going by this, when does the fascination break? There's nothing in there saying the fascinated condition works different than normal. So it would break immediately on attack. But the captivation effect explicitly lasts for the rest of the turn when the harpy attacks. So there's two possibilities here:

- Fascinated and captivated are chained together. You have to infer that the harpy attacking doesn't break fascinated immediately, so fascinated doesn't work the way it normally does.

- Fascinated and captivated are separate effects, fascinated breaks normally and immediately, but the captivated doesn't break until it says it does.

So if "captivated" is some kind of condition, what really "is" it? Well it definitely meets the definition for "effect":

PC1, p. 455 wrote:
effect An effect is the result of an ability, though an ability’s exact effect is sometimes contingent on the result of a check or other roll.

Is it a "condition"? It could be, by the definition:

PC1, p. 454 wrote:
condition An ongoing effect that changes how a character can act or alters some of their statistics.

Looking at the general rules for conditions (p. 426-427) the category of "effects" is totally open-ended. For conditions, there's a list of them. It doesn't quite say if that list is final, and no other conditions could exist. But it also isn't really important because there aren't really any abilities saying "remove any condition". They always give you a specific list of conditions they can remove. So just like a Sound Body spell isn't going to fix your Frightened or Fascinated condition, it's not going to fix Captivated either.

It doesn't really matter if Captivated is a "condition".

It's clearly an effect, because it's the result of an ability. It has a duration, traits, consequences for affected creatures, and defines other ways it could be ended. "Captivated" is just a shorthand name for "affected by the effect of the Captivating Song ability" which is a really big mouthful.

I think the Fascinated ability is mostly a side issue, which might matter a little bit because it causes a Perception penalty. So if another creature tried a Feint it'd be a little easier, because you're only paying attention to the harpy.

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I think this issue pairs with the "how many encounters in an AP dungeon before long rest" question.

APs often have long sequences where mechanically, the party really needs a break. To regain daily spells/powers, to go up a level if you don't like doing that mid-dungeon, or to change equipment (purchasing stuff, moving runes). But the story often sounds like all the trouble is happening right now, it doesn't make sense to put things on hold like that.

I think APs should include more explicit guidance to the GM on how to see these pacing needs, and how to handle them.

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You can look at this issue in two ways:

"It's weird that your initiative changes if you go down"

"It's normal that it always takes the same time from when you go down, to when you need to roll a Recovery check"

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yellowpete wrote:

There is a bit of a problem with the rule, and that is what happens when you have a large encounter with many players and multiple monsters. Since it takes so long to reach your next turn (as the downed PC), it is not unlikely that you will be healed and then dropped again before you get to act, force-delaying you even further. You could feasibly go for 3 or so rounds without ever having a turn. That's especially frustrating if you've got fast healing running but it never does anything because your turn keeps getting 'skipped' by your initiative moving back.

For this reason, I think it's fine to give players the choice of where they want to be in initiative after being dropped. Essentially, not forcefully moving them at all, but letting them Delay without having to make recovery checks or triggering any other ongoing effects, though at most until right before the foe that dropped them.

Well, that would be a problem, but I think it's a very rare problem. While the current rule helps you out with a much more common problem.

Why your scenario is rare:
- The typical party is 3-6 players, with 4-5 being more common. Going far beyond that in either direction is going to warp lots of rules. We can't balance the normal 4-5 player game for problems that mostly happen for 7+ player parties.
- Each time you go down, Wounded goes up by 1. It's really hard to get healed and knocked down three times in a row without ending up at Dying 4 and exit.
- Basically, if you keep getting healed up and knocked down rightaway, then something weird is going on. Is there environmental damage happening? Okay, then if you didn't get healed up, you would have gone down the Dying track further, due to taking damage while already knocked out. Also not good. Is it because enemies are targeting you because you just got healed up? Then maybe the rest of the party needs to do their teamwork differently, first clear away enemies from your body a bit before healing you. Or use the Delay action to heal you just before your turn.

The other, I think more common scenario:

- A monster crits you to 0 HP (Dying 2), and also inflicts some persistent damage effect. Quite a few monsters do persistent damage effects, some of them all the time, some only on a crit. Or maybe you already had some persistent damage from some other effect, which got you low on HP, and then a crit took you to 0. All in all, the chance of this happening is quite real.

- On your next turn, you're at Dying 2, need to make a recovery check which has 10% chance of just killing you, %45 chance of making you Dying 3, 45% chance of improving. Then at the end of your turn you're going to take persistent damage, which will increase your Dying value. So actually, you only survive in the 45% chance case that you succeed at Recovery; Failure that drops you to Dying 3 is already more than you can afford.

In this scenario it's really important that you get help before your turn.

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Secrets of Magic p. 170 wrote:
Spellhearts are permanent items that work similarly to talismans.
GM Core p. 263 wrote:

You must be wielding or wearing an item to activate a

talisman attached to it.

I think the "wearing" is intended to refer to talismans on armor, not to a weapon you're "wearing" in a scabbard. Otherwise you could get a whole lot of lightweight weapons and have as many talismans/spellhearts as you want. The design intent seems to be that you have just a few of them, but could switch them out with 10m of work.

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The notation in PF2 is a bit weird. I mean, it's obvious that you're supposed to be unable to use the breath weapon for at least one round. And that shouldn't count the current round - notice that almost all breath weapons take 2 actions.

But the way effects with durations are defined, that's not how it works. So I'm confused why they didn't keep using the PF1 notation style, "1d4+1 rounds" which got exactly the desired cooldown time.

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I've seen a barbarian with wizard dedication put Jump to good use. Extra mobility to get past all kinds of obstacles and get to archers and casters trying to stay on high platforms and all that.

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ElementalofCuteness wrote:
How does it benefit Arcane casters if I may ask?

There are pros and cons.

Con: a small spell list. Only elemental spells and a few support spells.
Pro: that small list doesn't care about original tradition.

But the most interesting one is the curriculum: with the remaster most wizard curriculae are 2-3 spells per level, but the elementalists has all spells from their favorite element in their curriculum. Potentially that means you get more mileage out of your bonus slots.

I dunno if that really outweighs the cons of the narrow scope of the overall spell list, but it's a thing at least.

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So I did a quick ctrl+f through books to see what I could find.

The PF2 Highhelm book mentions the empire of Tar Kharudurrm once or twice. The old PF1 Dwarves of Golarion book mentions two dwarven empires:

Tar Targaadt as being the main subterranean empire, played a big role in the Quest for Sky.

Tar Khadurrm, as their big above-ground empire during their golden age after the Quest for Sky. Eventually things fell apart, and five new kingdoms sprang up, which is why it's now called the Five Kings Mountains.

You can find a bit in the PathfinderWiki but those two books are the main source to look to. Keep in mind though that the old book is really really old.

If you're interested in dwarven history, I'm pretty confident there's also going to be a lot in the Sky King's Tomb adventure path.

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I think the "correct" interpretation is #1, just going by how the text is written. However, I agree with your analysis of why that's a badly balanced ability.

It was just as bad in PF1 by the way.

It should be noted though that the ability has the auditory tag. If you can somehow deafen your fellow PCs, the harpy shouldn't be able to renew the effect next round. Something I've resorted to before when running up against this scenario in PF1 was to just clap my hands over my ally's ears so he wouldn't be able to hear the song. It's of course a bit up to the GM to decide how well that works.

As a GM I'd consider widening the "if attacked" clause to not be limited to the harpy. If serious aggression by anyone can break the captivation, then this becomes a more fair ability.

But that does require careful wording. Stock bestiary harpies pretty much only have attacks, but you might want something else like a fireball to also work to get the PC's attention. However, it'd be a bit cheesy if you could use a third action with high MAP to try to Shove your teammate. That would be a bit too easy. So something kinda balanced in the middle.

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SuperBidi wrote:
Red Griffyn wrote:
So diverse lore means you are at best -2 behind on the leading recall knowledge rolls of an INT/WIS based class.

Thanks for trying to invalidate my experience.

But you forget the Tome in your calculation, so the Thaumaturge is at most at -1 behind the specialized INT/WIS class and very quickly at the same level. And then you can add the fact that the Thaumaturge progresses automatically at level 3/7/15 when the specialized class needs to invest their skill points and as such will progress slower (outside their main skill). So the Thaumaturge is actually +2 ahead the specialized class most of the time, which is quite sad for the said "specialized class".

As for the other uses of the RK skills, well, they are RK skills for something: Their main use is RK, the rest happens once in a blue moon.

If you were supposed to be the party's main knowledge person, why was the magus playing a Tome thaum?

It feels a bit like two people who accidentally actually picked the same niche to be the best at. One of them is going to be unhappy.

Kinda like if one person made a life oracle and the other a cleric with lots of healing feats. They're also gonna feel like they're in each others' spotlight.

Someone playing a Tome thaum is also kinda laying claim to the niche of being the RK guy.

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Atalius wrote:
1) are evil enemies "unholy" like the previous Good damage and Evil dmg?

For most creature types, no. Most creatures in the remaster are just folks who are neither fully good or bad.

Holy and Unholy means that you're really heavily aligned with this cosmic struggle. You've taken (un)holy vows, or you're actually directly made out of good or evil.

So a goblin that kills puppies is maybe not your ideal neighbor, but isn't unholy. However a mindless zombie brought into motion by dark forces, that's unholy.

Almost all fiends are unholy, almost all celestials are holy, almost all undead are unholy. A zombie, even though it's mindless, would be unholy, because it's brought into unlife by unholy forces. The typical example of an undead that wouldn't be unholy, is a ghost who pre-remaster wouldn't be evil.

For other creatures, I'd look at things like:
- did it do evil or good damage?
- did it have a weakness to evil or good?
- did it have abilities with good or evil traits?

I wouldn't set the threshold toooo high to declare a creature holy or unholy, but it's a bit higher than just having an alignment.

---

As an aside to this, many things that previously did good or evil damage, now do spirit damage, usually with a holy or unholy trait.

If you're neither holy nor unholy, you still take damage from that. So a devil that deals some unholy spirit damage with its strikes, will deal damage to someone who's not particularly aligned one way or the other. That's different from before, when having a good alignment seemed like it was actually a bad idea because neutral characters took no damage from those things.

It also means cleric spells like divine lance now work on most creatures. You can kill puppies with holy spirit damage, because holy spirit damage is still spirit damage and puppies have spirits.

However, holy and unholy creatures should also often have a weakness to the opposite trait. A devil is going to have weakness to holy damage, so a divine lance with a holy trait is going to hurt it extra.

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Golarion's geology is a bit outré, because at the core of the planet isn't a core of hot molten goodness, but an eldritch horror from beyond this plane (Rovagug). If it shudders in its slumber, the earth quakes.

I'm fairly sure there's no official map of Golarion tectonics, never been published. Of course none of this unusual geology means there couldn't be tectonic plates either, just that the mechanism below them is a bit different.

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A lot of good things happened for war priests. I'd say they went from awkward but doable, to being quite nice. With the caveat that you have to know what to expect: not a full martial, but about as close as you can get to it with that much casting ability.

* Less MAD because divine font doesn't require Cha anymore
* Somewhat improved proficiencies
* Feats run smoother, both on numbers and action economy
* Some spells got significant improvements (Bless!)

I don't think war priest is the "I'm THE frontliner for this party" class. You want a full martial for that. They're okay for the second one in the front line, but I think they're gonna be absolutely great as the third sort of half-front-line character. Like, a party of Fighter+Rogue+War Priest+Wizard would run quite smoothly. (Rogues need to get over it and admit that they're frontline menaces.)

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I can imagine that at some point a GM is gonna say "well 95% of what was in the old CRB has been reprinted in PC1, PC2 and GMC. If Synesthesia isn't in there, it was probably taken out deliberately".

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I think they had to pick something. How long does it take to bind someone's wounds? 10m seems more plausible than 1m. How long does it take to repair a shield? 10m seems pretty fast actually. How long does it take to pray and get some focus points back? Well that one's completely arbitrary. How long does it take to examine a suspected magic item and figure out what it is? 1m does seem rather short.

10m is a bit of a compromise, doesn't make anyone 100% happy but it's not completely without grounds either.

There might also be an element of tradition at work; 2E D&D ran its version of exploration mode in "turns" of 10 minutes. With the probability of random encounters being based on how many turns the party spent loitering in a part of the dungeon.

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I like that most of the time attrition isn't a big thing, but that sometimes it is. When it's an uncommon "oh we're really in trouble this time" thing it becomes more interesting.

I don't think consumables are always a lame way to play.

One of the most memorable fights I've had was a raid during Agents of Edgewatch where the point was to get into a gang compound and secure everything. But quietly taking out the sentries is hard (enemies have tons of HP so they don't drop that quickly). And it kinda rolled on into a fight in the common room and then into the boss' office where he was starting to burn incriminating papers.

That kind of story doesn't really make sense if you take leisurely 10-30m rests in between. However, this was a sanctioned police raid so we were issued a lot of extra healing elixirs so we wouldn't have to take it slow.

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Yeah, storywise pausing for three hours instead of 30m does feel like a real difference. At that point it makes more sense to head home for the day.

There's also a difference of course between:
- the party has to hang around for hours to heal
- the party wants to hand around for 20m to heal twice, but gets interrupted

There's also the case where you interrupt the first 10m rest. But then it's possible some buffs are still running from the previous fight. That's actually a technique you could try to use as GM, where the added difficulty from back to back fights is compensated a bit from getting more effectiveness from your buff spells.

While attrition isn't really the main encounter balancing model in PF2 anymore, I think encounter timing became even more interesting. You have the base situation of each encounter is nicely separate and starts at full HP and full focus. But it doesn't always have to go like that. Maybe due to time pressure you can only really afford a single 10m rest. Or maybe enemies show up after five minutes already.

If you do any of those things as GM, your work gets a bit harder because you have to balance encounters seen together, not separately. But if you do it sometimes, it does make your adventures a lot more dynamic and spicy.

I'd say knowing how to do that and having a feel for how it changes balance is really one of the signs of a GM that takes the "mastery" part serious :P

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Talking about healing, I like that HP attrition across multiple encounters is now a rare thing, not the default way of designing a series of encounters.

I've played plenty of campaigns where there would be one combat encounter per session and perhaps two weeks of in-game time would pass. The PF2 combat engine supports that very well because it's not as nova-heavy and it also doesn't need the PCs to already be under attrition for the fight to be tense.

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Calliope5431 wrote:

Mmm, but the traps I described work just as well when anyone triggers them.

"Snap this tripwire and unleash a hound of Tindalos" isn't dependent on using a summon. It's just that if you send a summon down the hallway where the tripwire is to trigger any traps there, it doesn't actually matter that a summon set the trap off instead of a PC. You still have to deal with the monster now. If you'd actually bothered to check the hallway for traps and disarmed the tripwire, you'd have been fine.

Ditto "step on this pressure plate and set off an alarm". Just because a summon set it off doesn't mean that the guards are going to ignore the alarm. Or "steal this stone idol and collapse the entire dungeon". It's not selectively screwing the party over - it's just teaching them that setting off traps and disarming them are very different things.

Those sound like entertaining things that most people would describe as "triggering a trap" for sure. But they're pretty different from the simple hazards that just do a single burst of damage.

I think it's also good to keep an open mind for other outcomes for a trap. Yes, the default outcomes are the players making checks to Disable or triggering it with their face. But the bigger picture is that you want your players to have an entertaining interaction with it. If they spend some time examining it and coming up with a different workaround, that's also fine.

(Although if they just used the same method every time, I too would probably put in a few traps where that particular method is not the wisest.)

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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
...and Starlit Span basically has no reason to ever utilize Arcane Cascade (unless they Switch-hit, which isn't really a smart way to build Starlit Span IMO).

I've had the opposite experience. I took a monk dedication, attack of opportunity at level 6 and flurry at 10.

It's true: magi are martials. You can just cast some buffs, trigger arcane cascade, and just punch people in melee. It isn't always the best plan, sometimes standing still and doing the turret thing is optimal. But there were also a lot of times when it was valuable to mix it up in melee, such as:
- flank with the fighter
- prevent the fighter from getting completely mobbed by all enemies
- prevent enemies from getting to the true back row casters behind me
- harass enemy casters

When talking about how wonderful it is to stand still and turret, I think we risk talking a bit much about optimal situations. Where we ignore inconvenient things such as:
- You're leaving the front row duties to other characters, and they might need help. PF2 is set up so that you need more than one front row character. Monsters simply hit too hard by design, for a single character to tank alone.
- The fight might move around a corner, and you need to move to catch up after all. Battlefields with a lot of obstructions, or battles that move from room to room, undo your action economy advantage.
- If you're not careful, you might end up being less prepared for when an enemy with AoO does manage to get close to you.

These aren't total showstoppers but they do leave a gap between theoretical and practical efficiency.

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Wzrd wrote:
SuperParkourio wrote:

How about an email?

customer.service@paizo.com

Done, though I wish there was somewhere on the forum where we could see all the errata that has been submitted so that we don't double up.

There is, here: errata thread but it seems that it sank off the top page for a moment

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Since you're starting at level 3 and the game is expected to run to level 10, an option is to go Dragon Disciple and take Scales of the Dragon as your level 4 feat. That allows you to have very good AC without having to max out Dex.

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Sanityfaerie wrote:
Is it really that much better than using the time to earn income and using the income to buy the stuff? I hadn't been under the impression that it was, but I could very well be missing something.

There's a definite advantage to crafting items specifically of lower level than your own.

If you use skills to Earn Income, you make a skill check based on the DC for the task level, and then earn money appropriately. So a level 6 task is DC 22 and earns money appropriate to a level 6 task.

For crafting to make items it's a bit different. First there is some setup which is detailed in the crafting rules. But the important part is when you spend extra time to work on the items. The DC to craft the items is based on the level of the items. But the amount of value you generate per day of work is based on YOUR level. So if a level 6 character is making a level 1 item, the DC is only 15 while you produce value at the level 6 rate.

So compared to Earn Income, you could be realizing the same value, but at a much lower DC. Which makes it more likely that you get critical successes which improve the value per day.

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I wouldn't be completely shocked if they eventually reprint Eldritch Trickster, but do it in the same book where they remaster the Magus. Because the magus also needs some kind of intervention with regards to spell attack spells. There's just a lot fewer of them - Ray of Frost, Acid Splash, Acid Arrow and Shocking Grasp are all replaced by basic save spells.

Yeah, you could reach for the legacy spells. But I do think the aim is that you don't have to do that. So maybe they put more spell attack cantrips in that book, or maybe they bake Expansive Spellstrike straight into the magus chassis. But that's a good time to also look at how to make these work well for magical rogues.

For a long time I've seen people promote Mastermind as the preferred way to do a Magical Trickster rogue, because it has a way to get enemies flat-footed at range. Compared to flanking/melee, all ranged rogues have it rough. So that might also be something they want to polish a bit.

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I think one really useful for the party to learn (so, all the players) is to use the Delay action for fun and profit.

The Delay rules aren't super complicated, but they enable some neat tricks, such as:

* The martials delay until after the bard has used Inspire Courage/Courageous Anthem or Dirge of Doom, or the cleric has cast bless, or Haste has been cast, so that they benefit rightaway.
* If someone is going to use Demoralize or a Fear spell, other characters delay so that they can benefit from the debuffed enemy.
* The rogue delays until the other martial has moved in, so they can always get a flank.
* If the fighter likes to use Knockdown or Combat Grab to debuff enemies, the sorcerer who wants to use a ranged spell attacks waits until the fighter has gone. So that the spell can be cast against a flat-footed target.
* If the wizard is in melee being threatened by a monster with Reactive Strike, maybe the wizard delays so the fighter can first provoke it but take the hit on his shield. Then the wizard is free to walk away and cast.
* If the enemy's too smart for that, maybe wait until the bard has cast Hideous Laughter.

It's all pretty obvious when you think about it. Know what your teammates can do; should you wait until they've done it?

But how long should you wait? The other part of understanding the Delay rules is knowing that you shouldn't be waiting until after the enemy has had a turn.

I think the broader lesson here is to really talk with your friends about what each character can do and what they others can do that really helps you. PF2 classes have a lot of hidden synergies for this kind of cooperation. For example, rogues can take the Dread Striker feat, but after someone's been Demoralized with Intimidate, they become immune to that person for a minute. However, fighters can take Intimidating Strike which doesn't make monsters immune. The fighter can make enemies scared every round.

The fighter class is actually a really good teamwork class with feats like Snagging Strike, Combat Grab, Knockdown and Intimidating Strike. All of those require the fighter to hit, but they're good at that. And then the enemy becomes easier for the rest of the party to attack. Fighters are can openers in this edition. If you look at things like ranged rogues, that looks really difficult. Getting sneak attack on ranged attacks means the enemy needs to be flat-footed for a reason other than flanking. But fighters can make that happen.

Champions are also a teamwork class. A lone champion doing the front line of the party on their own isn't that great. They can shield block, but they have difficulty preventing enemies from just walking past them to attack the back row characters. And if their allies are standing too far back, they also can't use their special reaction. So a champion tanking alone is not really getting to use some of their most powerful class abilities.

But put a champion and a fighter next to each other and you have magic. The fighter punishes anyone who tries to walk past or walk away. Hitting the champion is just going to run into a shield block. Hitting the fighter is going to be punished by a champion reaction. So no matter what the enemy tries, you're punishing them.

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I've come to the same math conclusion, that scrolls are very good. The remaster also includes a lot more useful talismans, including cheap low level ones.

I'm also thinking that in a way, staves feel a little bit easier just in cognitive load. PF1 had a bad habit of having these really long lists of must-have equipment. PF2 feels a bit more condensed, until you start trying to think what kind of scrolls of what spells heightened to what level you want to pack.

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Regarding the original question; let's look at the text as a whole.

PC1, p. 414 wrote:

Actions with Triggers > Limitations on Triggers

The triggers listed in the stat blocks of reactions and some
free actions limit when you can use those actions. You
can use only one action in response to a given trigger.
For example, if you had a reaction and a free action that
both had a trigger of “your turn begins,” you could use
either of them at the start of your turn—but not both.
If two triggers are similar, but not identical, the GM
determines whether you can use one action in response
to each or whether they’re effectively the same thing.
Usually, this decision will be based on what’s happening
in the narrative.
This limitation of one action per trigger is per creature;
more than one creature can use a reaction or free action
in response to a given trigger. If multiple actions would
be occurring at the same time, and it’s unclear in what
order they happen, the GM determines the order based
on the narrative.

The text is not talking about multiple actions of any kind at all; it's talking about the timing of multiple actions that are all triggered by the same trigger, for example, if you needed to know who makes a Reactive Strike first. It doesn't talk about the timing of whether you should resolve the triggered action before or after the triggering action.

For that we need to look to the sidebar right next to it:

PC1 p. 415 wrote:

Simultaneous Actions

You can use only one single action, activity, or free action
that doesn’t have a trigger at a time. You must complete
one before beginning another. For example, the Sudden
Charge activity states you must Stride twice and then
Strike, so you couldn’t use an Interact action to open
a door in the middle of the movement, nor could you
perform part of the move, make your attack, and then
finish the move.
Free actions with triggers and reactions work
differently. You can use these whenever the trigger
occurs, even if the trigger occurs in the middle of
another action.

So the order of actions without triggers should never be unclear, since you can't start a new one until you've concluded the previous one.

For triggered actions it just says that you "use" them when the trigger occurs, and that this can happen in the middle of another action.

I don't see anything there about triggering an action, putting it in a queue, and getting back to it later and then applying its effects retroactively. It says use the triggering action, even in the middle of another action. It doesn't give any qualifiers to that.

So a Reactive Strike would be used immediately when someone provokes it, like by Interact/manipulating a lever. And there's nothing about only executing part of the Reactive Strike, say just far enough to know if you disrupted the original triggering action. It just doesn't say anything about that. I would argue that the sidebar overall wants you to not split up actions more than absolutely necessary, so don't split up Reactive Strike unless you need to. (It might be interrupted too, for example by a Shield Block.)

However, I do think there's another question: what happens to an action if you met the requirements for the action when you started it, but then some reactions happen and you no longer meet the requirements after that? Can you finish the action? Is it different between a single action and an activity with subordinate actions?

For example, if you try to throw a dagger and a Reactive Strike crits, it clearly disrupts the attack. But if it doesn't crit but does take you to 0 HP, do you still make the attack (with your dying breath)? You no longer meet the requirement of being at 1+ HP and being able to act.

Similarly, you walk up to someone and are about to Strike them, but then a readied action triggers with "if the PC tries to Strike me, I take a Step back". Can you finish your Strike? You met the requirements of them being in reach when you started it. If you can't finish your Strike, do you still incur MAP?

I don't like such chicanery and I think I'd rule that it mattered whether you met the requirements at the start of the action. If you wanted to use Ready Action not to be attacked, you could/should specify as a trigger instead "when an enemy comes close enough to attack me" or something like that - that would give the aggressor a far chance to spend another action to keep moving and keep up.

However, for activities with multiple subordinate actions, I'd judge that action by action. If you used Sudden Charge and got killed with a Reactive Strike during the first Stride, your corpse wouldn't do another Stride and a Strike against someone.

So coming back to the question of the lever: you met the requirements to pull the level when you started to Interact. A Reactive Strike crit that disrupts that clearly prevents you from completing it. A mere hit that takes you to 0HP would be another case of asking when the requirements are checked. Are they rechecked after the reaction?

I feel like you can run a pretty consistent game checking requirements only at the start of each action. Consistent in both GM and player direction. It does mean that crits and hits are not the same, but impartially.

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Regarding Stand Still: the obvious intention of the feat is to stop people from moving from space to space, since that's in the name and the mechanics can clearly do that. It's not called "stay down" and there's nothing explicit in there that would allow it to get around the rule for triggering reactions with move actions.

I think that was also the point: they didn't want 1E style prone-locking to come back into the game.

The RAW (CRB) rules cause Stand Still to disrupt a move action to Stand too late to be effective. That RAW matches their intent.

They confirmed that in the video. Yes, videos aren't RAW. But a video saying "yeah, the RAW is saying exactly what we meant it to say, we don't want prone-locking" is pretty solid to me.

However, that same rule about executing the reaction after the Stand completes, caused hammer and flail critical specialization effects on attacks of opportunity to be able to knock people back down. Which was not supposed to be so easy. But they hammered the point home by drastically weakening those critical specialization effects in the remaster.

The new rogue feat "Stay Down!" is weird. It technically wouldn't work - it would trigger after someone has already finished standing up, and then time travel to disrupt it after all. But I think that this is a case of specific overriding general. The feat is crystal clear in its intent. So even though it does something that's not normally possible, it's possible in this case because it specifically and explicitly lets you do that.

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The way I view it, the CRB has had 4 print runs already each with errata. At some point they either had to do fifth print run, or pull the trigger on the remaster.

Now I haven't seen a lot of people ask "should I buy a new CRB on the second, third, fourth printing?" even though those also had some changes in them. People can live with their paper book not being 100% up to the new thing.

The remaster is a bigger than usual change but 90% of the game engine is still the same, just on a different page now. The major changes (alignment removal and spell refurbishing) are not that hard to port over "manually".

The GMG / GM Core is an interesting change. They wanted to make the CRB smaller and less intimidating, so all the mainly GM stuff from that got pushed into the GM Core. On the other hand, beforehand at first glance it might seem that the GMG was entirely optional, but it does have some stuff in it that I find hard to live without, like creature design rules and victory point minigames. So people new to the game who get the GM Core don't accidentally miss out on half of the GM stuff being in an "optional" book.

All in all, if you already had CRB and GMG you don't need to get the remaster. Although it can be convenient to be reading from the most up to date rules. But if you didn't have those books yet, it makes more sense to start with the remaster straightaway.

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The subtle trait feels a bit unfinished-design to me. It's good that we have some spells now marked as "this spell is less noticeable, which is necessary for its purpose". But I kinda don't really expect it to stay exactly as-is because it's just a bit too total. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets some more errata in the next print run.

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Jacob Jett wrote:

Interesting distinction. If the OP wants to take the rules lawyer approach then they should interpret the RAW you have there.

If they want to lean into a modicum of realism and build up some player good will; they might consider making a RAI* interpretation and substitute the word "Attack" for the word "Strike" in your bit of quoted rules.

After 36-years of tinkering with game mechanics and DMing, I find that either approach is valid and beneficial and should ultimately be up to the DM and their table.

Personally, I like award novel uses of game systems that support role-play-adjacent activities and feels so I'm inclined to RAI* here.

*And, in this instance the "intention" portion of RAI really means the DM's intention. As the game runner, they have the often thankless task of ensuring everyone's having a good time. IMO, any DM has warrant to twist around the a TTRPG's rules as needed to achieve that goal. No one should feel that anyone's being a jerk because some text on paper says "X."

I think you're going a little fast here.

The general idea of what the player wants to do is already available in the game system: hitting with weapons and grabbing enemies. There's multiple ways to do it. What the player is asking for is an extra way with more advantageous numbers.

Now you can say, give the player what he wants, get some goodwill. But what about the other players who aren't playing fighters? They're seeing one player get a bonus. While the fighter is already considered one of the strongest classes to begin with. So the average amount of goodwill around the table might actually go down...

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