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Cedric, not likely considered 'cool' by anyone's standards, stands and watches the explosion with a rapidly-shifting mixture of emotions. First comes the excitement and adrenaline of a job executed well. Then comes the fright and surprise at just how big and hot the fireball turns out to be. Then comes the shock and horror on behalf of those caught in the blast and the aftermath.

The thing that snaps him out of it is the realization that this was only step one, and there's yet more work to do. He can worry about ethics when there isn't an army trying to kill him and his community. He turns and takes off after Thorek, hustling and panting in his armor.

"Let's get this show on the road," says Cedric, nodding.

Since we have a good idea of where the camp is in relation to everything else, Cedric will wait until we're about half an hour before go time, then cast shield other on Thorek since it lasts for 3 hours.

"I see no way this carefully laid plan can possibly fail," says Cedric without any hint of irony, or indeed any knowledge of the normally-sarcastic usage of that phrase.

When it comes to the nitty gritty of planning an ambush, Cedric isn't much help. He's more of a big-picture kinda guy, so he lets the others plan as they see fit. With everything else seemingly resolved until then, he spends what time they aren't scouting continuing to minister to the needs of the camp.

Sorry I've kind of disappeared for a bit, there. Getting down to the last days of buying a house, and that's been eating a lot of my time lately. Should be back to normal by the end of next week.

Start exploring, for me!

Cedric sees the rough shape that the bugbear is in, and wants to put it down. But he also doesn't want to ignore the more active threat right in front of him. It's a tough question of priorities for a moment, then he remembers that he prepared a sound burst for this encounter and this is the perfect time to use it. He steps back and invokes the power of Erastil to bombard both of his foes with intense sound.

grey radius on map
Sonic Damage: 1d8 ⇒ 7
plus DC 14 Fortitude save, targets are stunned on failure

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Oh, one thing I forgot to put into my survey:

Can we have rituals which are not 8+ hours in length? Ultimate Wilderness had a ritual for basically "Secure your Campsite" that my players love, and things like this (which happen on a timescale that makes them impractical in combat, but are still not full-day commitments) would be nice.

I'm a huge advocate for shorter rituals of 1, 10 or 60 minutes that don't all require multiple people to perform. And they would go a very long way to helping make up for the much reduced spell slots if most general out of combat utility magic was ritualized.

I remember when the previews were coming out, I was under the impression that there would simply be no spells at all which had a casting time that couldn't be completed in one round's worth of actions, and that all of the spells that are normally longer than that would be rituals of their usual length - which therefore didn't count against your spell slots. Your spell slots simply represented your combat magic capability, because of the time scale, and a magic person (or a person particularly invested in the skill associated with a magic tradition) could always have access to magic solutions they know for solving problems on an exploration mode or longer timescale. Then there would be the massive rituals, like occult rituals, that aren't exactly normal spells which function on the basis of skill checks and have a downtime-based time scale.

I recently looked back at those early blogs and I'm pretty sure that was just a mistaken impression on my part even then, but man did I think that was a fantastic idea, and would still think so if it were made to be the case.

My PCs are about to go into the Illusion wing. I'm down for the Mirrors of Opposition, that seems like good illusion-based defense.

But the Vraxeris simulacra rely almost entirely on evocation and enchantment spells, which seems odd for illusionists. Then I went and read every illusion spell on the sorcerer/wizard list up to 5th level, which reveals the problem: there are precious few illusion spells that they *could* use offensively. I mean, there's Phantasmal Killer, but that's about it.

I'm toying with the notion of using a custom effect that blacks out the room, shakes everyone up to change their positions, and then when the lights come back on everyone looks like Vraxeris and there are six new Vraxerises in the mix. Ideally, the PCs would wind up fighting one another under false pretenses.

But it'd be difficult to pull off. I could replace everyone's minis (I have a ton of Vraxeris minis, I bought a case of the Runelords minis way back when). But each player has to know which mini is theirs, and as soon as they move the mini, that reveals (in a metagame way) that that one is a PC, not an enemy. It'd be hard to avoid metagame knowledge influencing player actions.

I don't know, this encounter bugs me, I guess. Maybe I should ditch it and put in something else entirely.

You've got a cool kernel of an idea there. I think it could work if you took it just a step further. Instead of one blackout-shuffle, make it like a strobe light. Essentially, the board is getting reshuffled after every turn. That way players may gain some very short-term useful meta-knowledge, but it doesn't remain useful for long enough to spoil the effect you're going for.

It would be a lot of work to keep track of for the GM, but it sure sounds fun enough to try. If I ever run Runelords again I might steal this :D

In many significant ways, I'm a huge fan of the dedication feat concept and the PF2 style multi-class system. I don't get to play much (Constant GM), but when I do I'm a compulsive multi-classer. I have 7 memorable characters over my years of playing Pathfinder (most of them before I started to GM), of which 5 of them are multi-classed (and with prestige classes to boot).

Of those multi-class characters, many of them (the Mystic Theurge, Holy Vindicator and Arcane Trickster) strongly prefer the PF 2 method that lets you continue progressing your first class as though you never left it. The others (the Eldritch Knight and the Battle Herald) approached multi-classing more like a sudden career change, and not only appreciated that they stopped progressing their original class, but actively didn't want some of the features (The Battle Herald in particular wanted out of Cavalier before the Standard Bearer archetype game him the mount).

So, while I very much like the style of PF2 multi-classing with dedication feats and so on, I do also wish there was a parallel but separate option to "traditionally multi-class" where you simply stop gaining class features from your first class (permanently treating your level in that class as whatever you reached and no better, unless you later return to it) and started gaining class features from another (starting as though you were level 1). Is such a thing balanced or optimized? Probably not, but I didn't play a Battle Herald because I wanted to dominate the table.

As posters before above me mentioned, this traditional style of multiclass has weird, potentially laggy interactions with the proficiency system. It works just fine if you treat any given proficiency bump as "increase to this rank," meaning that if you're already at that rank it does nothing for you, but you're going to get the better ones much later than many others in your group might. If the concept is important to you, you might not care so much (I'm a weirdo who actually enjoyed playing a pre-Mystic Theurge cleric/wizard), but it can be frustrating if your concept relies on good proficiency to work (like a replication of my Battle Herald might).

But both systems work equally well if the proficiency system were to be changed such that it was more of an a-la cart improvement after your initial proficiencies. For my comprehensive house rules, I've been implementing the system discussed in another thread where, following your initial proficiencies, every so often you get a free proficiency increase that you can choose to spend on one of the esoteric aspects of your character (armor category, weapon group, saving throw, spellcasting tradition, perception), with some classes that used to grant faster proficiency tracks instead having a class feature that reduces the minimum level required to select master and legendary proficiency (so Fighter/Paladin can become a master of [weapon group]/[armor category] respectively at level 3 instead of 7 (if they want to) and a rogue can become a master in a skill at level 5 (skills are still their own thing for skill boosts in this system, I'm just explaining for thoroughness).

In a system like this, your proficiency is never going to lag if you stop gaining class feats and features from your original class because, beyond level 1, your proficiency was never a function of your class, but of yourself. So if you started as a Wizard, but decided to give up on wizardry after a couple levels and then did a full stop and started over fresh as a full-fledged fighter, you wouldn't change your proficiency with weapons any (because you're well past your initial proficiencies) but you'd get the class feature that allows you to select master proficiency in a weapon group early. Getting that only helps if you first invest your training in improving to expert, so it avoids those sorts of sudden ability spikes that multi-classing in PF1 got a reputation for. It's simply a different advancement path than dedication multi-classing, one that caters to the career-changer as opposed to the hybridizer. I would like it very much if both paths were possible, but while I care enough to ramble on about it at length here, it's not one of those things that will make or break the system for me since I do like where it's already going - I just wish that it could go both ways without having to house rule it.

The thing that I'm personally wondering is: Barbarians get Rage, Paladins get Smite... why can't the Fighter have AoOs as his thing.

I agree that the fighter should have a thing that sets it apart from all the other classes... I just don't think AOO is, in and of itself, an interesting choice for a class to have as its "thing."

The thing that frustrates me the most, is that they already had a fantastic idea in their pocket for what to make as the fighter's "thing" - Combat Stamina from Unchained.

They had the perfect opportunity to include something along those lines as part of the base assumption. Make 'em something like "Martial Spell Points" (Stamina Points even have the same initials as Spell Points, so they can occupy the same space on a character sheet) and let them be spent to dig deep and push one's self beyond the normal limits of martial combat.

Essentially make the Fighter the "Martial Wizard," like the Ranger is the "Martial Druid" and the Paladin is the "Martial Cleric." It practically writes itself.

This is how I've been approaching my alteration to the Fighter for my comprehensive rewrites set of house rules.

The more I think about this, the more I start to think that it's actually worse than resonance used to be. Now instead of your magic items competing with other items, they're competing with your class features instead. I really, strongly dislike that. In my mind, magic items have always been and should always be a supplement to your character's innate abilities, not a consideration against which to balance them.

The more I think about it, the more I think the best solution is to keep the way Focus interacts with magic items, it's exactly what I wanted resonance to be, and keep it as its own, separate pool. Why does bonus magic item activation (or bonus effects from doing so) need to compete with anything other than itself? There are still interesting choices deciding whether you want to buff this potion now or use your wand an extra time later. You don't need to dilute the pool by throwing everything together, and I strongly believe the only things that class features should have to compete with are other class features.

Honestly, the more I think about it, I prefer the previous incarnation of Resonance, but with the changes applied to the options as though they worked with Focus, to this new iteration of Resonance/Focus. At least that way your magic items are competing with magic items. Apples vs Apples and Oranges vs Oranges, instead of Apples vs Oranges with a separate set of bananas.

What I'd like to see is a hybridization of the new Focus rules with the Spell Point rules, especially with respect with what happens when you mix two different Spell Point pools that are based on different stats: You simply use the better stat to determine the size of your pool.

It's simple, effective and there's precedent for it already in the design.

I would also prefer to keep the notion that each time you gain a new power, it adds to your pool. It just feels right.

EDIT: Well, actually, my highest-level preference is to keep them separate pools altogether, but if they must be condensed, this is how I'd rather it.

There's a lot to like here. I love the split between Resonance and Focus, and I love that you can spend your Focus to amplify the effects of magic items (or in some cases use them more frequently) so freaking much.

As for wrapping up Focus and Spell points together, I'm a little leery of making the quantities of all of the Spell Point powers in the game based on charisma as a stat. But this:

You might be asking what happens to a wizard, who typically doesn’t have a high Charisma score, but still might have school powers. Since we don’t have a pregenerated wizard in here, we’d like to clarify our intent. Our current thinking is that a wizard might get extra Focus Points by preparing his arcane focus (in addition to the extra spells gained from the arcane focus). In short, classes that have powers will get an ability from the class that allows them to use their powers, but they also still have the option to increase their Charisma so they have an interesting choice in what ability scores they take.

This gives me hope. If it winds up working out that most characters that used Spell Points can still wind up having more-or-less the same amount of Spell Points, then I think this will probably work out okay. But I do worry about the level of scaling somewhat, especially for classes like the Paladin and Monk which currently only cast spells through Spell Points.

The other thing I like very much is unhooking the Alchemist from either Resonance or Focus and just giving them their own pool to power their class features. That was something that has been in my "potential house rules" document for a long while, now, and it's definitely a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

So call me cautiously optimistic! In fact, one non-obvious thing about this change that the efficiency-lover in me likes is the fact that, if all characters start with a Focus pool of some size, then you don't need to introduce the concept of Spell Points in every class which has them, and every time someone gets picks them up.

I've been struggling to come to a final decision in what I think is best for this area, but I've narrowed it down to one of two basic scenarios. Keep in mind that, regardless of which it is, I would leave the NPCs and bestiaries where there are in terms of AOO ubiquity. I do very much think it helps out the feel of combat for a monster AOO to not be a given.

1) Attack of Opportunity as a level 1 General Feat: I do somewhat like that the fighter is better at controlling the battlefield by default, but I don't like the hoops that other classes have to go to in order to also be good at controlling the battlefield. I don't think anyone should have to multiclass fighter in order to patrol an area with a reach weapon or provide disincentives to enemies just going past you to get to the squishiest party members. A level 1 General Feat (especially if the General Feats are expanded to every odd level, like I'd prefer) feels like the right amount of opportunity cost to me.

2) AOOs for everyone, and the fighter gets Combat Reflexes for free instead: The idea is that everyone can control the battlefield a little if they want, but fighters get to control the battlefield more and better by default. Ideally, if there were more ubiquitous and attractive reactions provided by the other classes, then wanting to save your reactions for those would be the balancing factor to whether or not everyone is actually using their ability to AOO all the time. Do I want to swipe at this guy now? Or save my reaction to Nimble Dodge the big guy going next? Etc.

I started by leaning toward the first option, but as I think about it more and more I think the second option is a bit more attractive to me.

As I've been tinkering with this concept to incorporate it into the comprehensive tweaks I've been creating for PF2, this is how I've approached the weapon and armor proficiency increases with respect to initial proficiency:

I've basically left initial proficiency alone. This is the only place where something might give you all simple or martial or specific weapons for your proficiency. This is your starting position, and you get to your own individual starting position based on your choice of class, and then possibly modified by your ancestry and background choices.

For weapons, once you are applying your proficiency increases, you always apply the proficiency increase to a weapon group as a whole. So, through continued training, you've gotten better at, say, clubs. Your proficiency rank with all clubs increases. Any clubs you were already expert in become master, any you were trained in become expert, any you were untrained in become trained, and so on, whether the weapons are simple, martial or exotic. Past the point of initial proficiency the simple-martial-exotic distinction is basically meaningless. I then adjusted the Weapon Proficiency general feat so that it "standardizes" your proficiency within a weapon group, so it increases your proficiency with any weapon of a weapon group that isn't your highest proficiency with a weapon of that weapon group by 1 step, to a maximum of your highest proficiency with a weapon of that weapon group. So it generalizes your training instead of improving it vertically, because improving it is solely the province of the level-up proficiency increases.

Then, with armors, I intend to incorporate additional benefits for armor categories that unlock once you achieve higher proficiency in them, different benefits for unarmored vs light armor vs medium armor vs heavy armor. I haven't gotten around to creating those, yet. But I can say that for a class like the paladin or fighter, their class feats or abilities that have a prerequisite or provide bonuses for things like "master in heavy armor" instead have a prerequisite or provides that benefit for any armor category in which you have the requisite proficiency rank. So your bastion of defense is a bastion of defense regardless of what equipment choices you make - so an elven paladin in light armor for speed and stealth would be just as supported as a traditional heavy armor knight as an Iroran paladin that eschews armor altogether, without taking any more effort than a few wording tweaks.

I think this approach will greatly diversify characters as soon as they start getting their proficiency increases, while still providing a common and easy-to-learn starting point.

Dunno, after all having DCs not keep up means they're more likely to be used up quickly. I always liked the idea of consumables being quick use stuff rather than long term stockup... Raise your hand if you ever played a MMORPG where you had a whole inventory page dedicated to elixirs. And never used them.

I've never played an MMO, but every Pathfinder campaign I've had a similar outcome with every Pathfinder campaign I've completed by the end. And, while I've never asked specifically, I do very much suspect that there are a lot of those sorts of things that would have been used if they could be made to have competitive DCs... but on the other hand a lot of those were found, so the DCs wouldn't be competitive by this change anyway.

This could probably stand to be accompanied by more abilities that let you buff the DC of something that has its DC already set. Perhaps that's a perfect interaction of resonance with consumables. So when some classes get one of these abilities that just works, it's valuable because you're no longer spending a resource to get the effect, which means you can instead spend that resource elsewhere.

That's an issue with spells in general. It would be better if TAC doesn't exist at all, and casters just use their casting modifier and attack AC like everyone else.

I always liked touch AC, but the more I think about it as time goes on, if we're going to have bother a spell roll modifier, then I think this approach is just the best way to handle it, both for rules simplicity as a whole and for option efficacy. For those things (like shocking grasp) where it's appropriate, providing a bonus to the spell roll vs regular AC is pretty much the same as providing the bonus to a non-spell roll vs TAC. The more I look at it, the more it feels entirely redundant.

And for the occasional effect that uses TAC where you don't particularly care what part of the enemy you touch, or whether you actually touch them or their armor, the current system can model that adequately by having some amount of effect on a failed (but not critically failed) spell roll.

It looks to me like the spell roll is vastly underutilized, and I strongly suspect that TAC is to blame for that.

I completely agree with the OP. The one some change would make so many things useful that are almost useless now.

As for feats that do something similar I would suggest just the feat just add a +1 or +2 to DCs.

This is not directed at you, personally, your post just brought up the topic. I would strongly prefer that there were fewer feats along the lines of "you get slightly bigger numbers for option X," and more along the lines of "you can now use option X in a way that you couldn't before!"

I really love this concept, to the point where it's one of those things that is not just definitely a house rule if it's not already part of the rules when PF2 comes out for real, but I'm certainly using it as the basis for a house rule for PF1 immediately. Now that I've seen it, I can't un-see it.

I think the only consideration that would need to be given is for the few places where there already exists a feat that allows one to use their class DC in place of the regular DC for one of these items. I'm of two minds about what to do about this. First, a class DC is often different from the craft DC (for example a rogue's class DC is based on their Dex, whereas craft is Int-based). That's a different enough distinction that I think you could get away with leaving those options in the game with additional wording of "if it's better." So it still allows for the niche of buying these items instead of making them and still getting the best you can get out of them, and other potential interactions along similar lines.

The second view on it is that these options are largely considered taxes on the concept of being good at item-usage. They could be allowed to be obsoleted by this concept, and then replaced in their classes by something else entirely that provides new and interesting ways of using the types of items they would have applied to instead of "keep up with the bare minimum of effectiveness."

So here's my two cents on the categories of bonuses and how they should stack:

1) Items
I think item bonuses are working perfectly well right now. "Items don't stack with each other, but do stack with everything else" is a simple and intuitive general rule.

2) Class
These would be bonuses from your own class features and class feats. You can never give class bonuses to another character; you can only ever gain class bonuses from your own abilities. This would help prevent "class clash" such as what barbarian and bard have going. Barbarian rage would be a class bonus, while bardic inspire would not be (since it's buffing other characters). Class bonuses are always bonuses and never penalties, to limit the number of stackable debuff categories. This bonus type is very intuitive: "the bonus is from my class feature, therefor it is a class bonus"

3) Magic
Typically from spellcasting, but could also come from more magical class features like a bard's inspire. This is again very intuitive: "the bonus came from a spell, therefor it is a magic bonus"

4) Circumstance
Circumstance bonuses and penalties apply to situations like flanking, screening, prone, etc. They are the circumstances you're in. Because there are a defined list of conditions (no matter how many spells are published that knock you prone, there is only ever going to be one prone condition) these can be allowed to stack within a +4 to -4 range.

5) Afflictions
Poisons, diseases, or conditions such as drained or enfeebled, are afflictions. Afflictions are always penalties. Afflictions never grant bonuses.

Along with this change, you'd split the circumstances (flanking, prone, etc) from the afflictions (enfeebled, drained, etc), and other miscellaneous (friendly, hostile, seen, unseen, etc) into three separate lists. This would mean that you'd know based on which list you're looking at which type of bonus or penalty you're looking it.

I think this is a fair balance for stacking, as well as making...

I like this organization structure a whole heck of a lot.

The only thing I would add is that for those conditions which do many different things at once, perhaps listing everything affected by the condition in a bullet point format would be more effective at getting the information across clearly, and with less possibility of something critical being overlooked.

Don't they already have a Skill Feat that allows for a character with Survival to provide Food/Shelter for more people? I'm pretty sure it also scales up with proficiency as well.

Forager
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While Surviving in the Wilderness during downtime, you can always find enough food and water to provide yourself a subsistence living (provided you aren’t in an area that’s completely lacking in appropriate resources). If you are trained but not better, finding food and water for another or providing a comfortable living still requires you to attempt Survival checks and hope for a critical success; onany other successful result, you still find only enough for your own subsistence.

If you’re an expert, even without rolling you can always find enough food and water for your own comfortable living or subsistence living for yourself and one other creature that eats roughly as much as a human, and on a critical success you find enough for a second additional creature.

If you’re a master, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and one other or subsistence living for yourself and two others without rolling, and you can provide for twice as many others on a critical success.

If you’re legendary, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and four others or subsistence living for yourself and eight others without rolling, but a critical success provides no additional benefit.

Multiple smaller creatures or creatures with significantly smaller appetites than a human are counted as a single creature for this feat, and larger creatures or those with significantly greater appetite each count as multiple creatures. The GM determines how much a particular non-human creature needs to eat.

You know, I overlooked that feat. If I had remembered it I probably would have chosen a different example for my first one. I have other thoughts about skills and proficiency and, if I were to have my way with them, the benefits of the Forager feat would simply be the way that using your survival skill gets better with your improved proficiency rather than a skill feat, much like how several of the existing Diplomacy skill feats got wrapped up as just part of how the skill operates when I made my revisions there. The things I want to tweak with PF2 are becoming so systemic that it's hard to remember what is and isn't actually PF2 anymore.

But Regardless of any of that, I still think that there are many benefits to be had from unchaining the degrees of success from +/- 10. It makes a good default position, and a great starting point, but cleaving to it dogmatically is, in my opinion, one of the things holding the game as a whole back.

I think there's probably room to have a note for GMs in the Running The Game chapters that suggests that +/- 10 is a good starting point for consideration when coming up with DCs and schemes on the fly, since it makes for easy math and has a good range that makes it special. I included this style of skill writing in my example reworking of the Diplomacy skill, so anyone can check out how I think this would end up looking in more detail. Credit to Tholomyes for the formatting suggestion I used in some places.

I've mentioned a little bit of what I think about this topic elsewhere, but I'll use this thread to go into some more detail about it. Using your scheme, it's somewhere between #2 and #3. Basically, things that you can do with a skill have some combination of gate-keeping and scaling based on proficiency. And then skill feats come in and allow you to do things with that skill that are unusual or mind-blowing. This system also greatly benefits from an unchaining of results from the +/- 10 system, but still works even when chained.

For a clear example of what I mean, I'll take a look at the Diplomacy skill, and how I would adjust it to fit my vision.

Unrestricted Uses of Diplomacy

Gather Information: You canvass local markets, taverns and gathering places in an attempt to learn about a specific individual or topic. The GM determines the DC of the check and the amount of time each check takes. Success: You collect information about the individual or topic, per GM discretion; Critical Failure: You collect incorrect information about the individual or topic, per GM discretion. Alternate: Failure (-10): You collect incorrect information about the individual or topic, per GM discretion.
- Untrained: You can attempt to gather information up to 3 times per day.
- Trained: You can attempt gather information up to 6 times per day. (Hobnobber benefit)
- Expert: You can attempt to gather information up to 6 times per day. Treat a result of Critical Failure as a reslt of failure instead.
- Master: You can attempt to gather information up to 6 times per day. Treat a result of Failure as a result of success instead.
- Legendary: You can attempt to gather information any number of times per day. You always succeed at your attempt, and it never takes you more than an hour.

Make an Impression: With at least 1 minute of conversation consisting of charismatic overtures, flattery, and other acts of goodwill, you seek to make an impression on someone to make them temporarily agreeable. At the end of the conversation, attempt a diplomacy check against the target's Will DC, modified by any circustances per GM discretion. Success: The target's attitude toward you improves by 1 step; Critical Success: The target's attitude toward you improves by 2 steps; Alternate: Success (+10): the target's attitude toward you improves by 1 additional step; Critical Failure: The target's attitude decreases by 1 step. Alternate: Failure (-10): The target's attitude decreases by 1 step.
- Trained: When you Make an Impression, you can compare your Diplomacy result to the Will DCs of up to 2 targets. Group Impression benefits from here on out
- Expert: When you Make an Impression, you can compare your Diplomacy result to the Will DCs of up to 4 targets.
- Master: When you Make an Impression, you can compare your Diplomacy result to the Will DCs of up to 10 targets. Treat the result of a Critical Failure as a result of Failure instead.
- Legendary: When you Make an Impression, you can compare your Diplomacy result to the Will DCs of up to 25 targets. Treat the result of a Critical Failure as a result of Failure instead.

{A} Request: You can make a request of a creature that's friendly or helpful to you. You must couch the request in terms that the target would accept given their current attitude toward you. Some requests are unsavory or impossible, and even a helpful NPC would never agree to them. Success: The target agrees to your request, but might demand added provisions or alterations to the request; Critical Success: The target agrees to your request without qualifications or agrees to a request that would ordinarily require it to have an attitude toward you one step better than it has; Alternate: Success (+10): The target agrees to your request without qualifications or agrees to a request that would ordinarily require it to have an attitude toward you up to 1 additional step better than it has; Failure: The target refuses the request, but may be open to further negotiation or other requests; Critical Failure: The target refuses the request, and its attitude toward you decreases by 1 step. Alternate: Failure (-10): The target refuses the request, and its attitude toward you decreases by 1 step.
- Trained: You can make the same request of up to 2 targets at once.
- Expert: You can make the same request of up to 4 targets at once.
- Master: You can make the same request of up to 10 targets at once. Treat the result of a Critical Failure as a result of Failure instead. Shameless Request benefit
- Legendary: You can make the same request of up to 25 targets at once. Treat the result of a Critical Failure as a result of Failure instead.

{A} Call the Guards: Calling for the guard requires a Diplomacy check modified by the settlement’s law modifier. It’s only a DC 5 check to call for the guard. Success: The guard arrives in 6 minutes. Success (+5): Reduce the time it takes for the guard to arrive by 1 minute. If the time was already reduced to 1 minute, reduce the time by 1 round instead.

Trained+ Uses of Diplomacy

{AAA} Direct a Crowd: You attempt to convince a crowd to move in a particular direction. The crowd must be able to see and hear you in order to be influenced. Success: The crowd moves slowly in the direction you indicate. If you are in encounter mode, it moves at a rate of 10 feet at the end of every round.
- Success (+15; Trained): Increase the speed the crowd moves by an additional 5 feet per round.
- Success (+10; Expert): Increase the speed the crowd moves by an additional 5 feet per round.
- Success (+10; Master): Increase the speed the crowd moves by an additional 10 feet per round.
- Success (+10; Legendary): Increase the speed the crowd moves by an additional 20 feet per round.

Bargain Hunter: You can gather information specifically about deals on items rather than other information. Name an item or a general category of items (such as "magic weapons") you're looking for and then roll your Diplomacy check. Any bonuses you have when Gathering Information apply. Success: You find a deal on the item you were looking for. You can purchase it at a discount equal to the value of a successful Practice a Trade check for a task of your level; Critical Success: You find a deal on the item you were looking for. You can purchase it at a discount equal to the value of a successful Practice a Trade check for a task of one level higher than your level. Alternate: Success (+10): You find a deal on the item you were looking for. You can purchase it at a discount equal to the value of a successful Practice a Trade check for a task of one additional level higher than your level.
- Expert: You can Practice a Trade with Diplomacy, representing spending your days hunting bargains and reselling for profit.
- Master: When you Practice a Trade with Diplomacy, treat any result of a Critical Failure as a Failure instead.
- Legendary: When you Practice a Trade with Diplomacy, treat any result of Failure as a Success instead.

Skill Feats:

Glad-Hand (Expert): First impressions are your strong suit. When you meet someone, you can immediately attempt a Diplomacy check to Make and Impression with a -5 penalty rather than needing to converse for 1 minute. On any Failure result, you can continue spending 1 minute of conversation to attempt a new check rather than accept the Failure result. You may not use this ability in encounter mode.
- Master: Reduce the penalty to -4.
- Legendary: Reduce the penalty to -2.

{AAA} Legendary Negotiator (Legendary): You use your incredible skill at persuasion to negotiate quickly in adverse situations. You attempt to Make and Impression and then immediately Request that your opponents cease their current activities and engage in negotiations.

Hypnotism (Expert): You use the power of suggestion and subtle psychic influence to alter a subject’s mind and dredge up repressed memories. Hypnotizing a creature requires 1 minute inducing a trance-like state in the subject, who must be willing to be hypnotized. Hypnotism can be used to either Recall Memories or Implant Suggestions.

Recall Memory: You can draw out forgotten memories from a willing subject. Make a Diplomacy check against the target's will DC. Once completed, the trance ends. Success: The target immediately attempts to Recall Knowledge about a topic they might possibly have once known or been exposed to.
- Success (+10; Expert): The number of topics you can cause the target to Recall Knowledge about increases by 1.
- Success (+5; Master): The number of topics you can cause the target to Recall Knowledge about increases by 1.
- Success (+5; Legendary): The number of topics you can cause the target to Recall Knowledge about increases by 1. You can attempt to hypnotize an unwilling creature as well. An unwilling creature must be restrained or fascinated for the duration of the check.

Implant Suggestion: You can implant a suggested course of reasonable action in the mind of creature, along with a defined trigger. Make a Diplomacy check against the target's Will DC. Success: You implant the course of action, as a suggestion spell with a duration of 10 minutes from when the triggering condition applies
- Success (+10; Expert): The duration of the suggestion increases by 10 minutes.
- Success (+5; Master): The duration of the suggestion increases by 10 minutes.
- Success (+5; Legendary): The duration of the suggestion increases by 10 minutes. You can also attempt to hypnotize an unwilling creature. An unwilling creature must be restrained or fascinated for the duration of the check, and receives a Will save to resist the suggestion (use the spell results for the saving throw) once the triggering condition applies, using your Diplomacy DC as the save DC.

-----------------------------------

And there can be other, interesting and oddball uses for Diplomacy - but I think I've gone on long enough. I would generalize this pattern to all of the skills. So some things you get access to just by increasing your proficiency. And things you can already do automatically get better for you as you increase in proficiency beyond where you acquired them. Always forwards, never stagnant. Is this more complicated to design? Possibly. I went through this off the top of my head without too much difficulty - the hardest part was sorting out how good each reward for a new tier of proficiency should be (whether I did a good job of balancing it is another matter entirely). I think the benefits of embracing this structure in terms of both fun and a definite feeling of progression are worth the additional thought required.

I like this concept a whole heck of a lot. It elegantly puts a finger on something that had been bothering me for a while, but I wasn't sure what it was. ::tips cap::

I like +10/-10 triggering a critical success/failure. I know it's a major factor in the system's tight math but I'm still a fan largely due to how my players have embraced it. It's intuitive, dynamic, and - at least for my groups - fun.

But I'm mixed on the four degrees of success. I, generally, like them for spells, attacks (noting that Strikes got off easy), and saving throws. I don't like that certain Skill based actions now only have four outcomes - scaling results need to return for certain Skill usages. It's also a bit silly that a warrior can never critically fail a Strike (barring another ability in play) but a Legendary Healer can still critically fail Medicine.

One of the benefits of unchaining the degrees of success from the +/- 10 is that it still lets you use 10 as that number where appropriate - it's just not codified as the Always Threshold, which means that in places where a smaller (or larger!) number would work better you don't have to futz with the math or the sizes of the results in order to get the balance you want.

And consider the case of the attack roll, one could make it a single degree of success for +10, or you could go really crazy and add another critical for each 10 by which you beat the AC. The point is that one part of the system doesn't care what degrees of success any other part of the system does or doesn't have and what sizes they're based on.

I like it. There are a lot of skills that don't really feel like the critical success is tuned quite right, and skills overall being designed around critical success causes issues. One thing I'm wondering though:

Leedwashere wrote:

Legendary survivalist leading a whole army through the hidden path in the swamp to encircle the enemy? Check.

Are you suggesting something like:

Success: Effect X
Success (+Y): Effect X, plus bonus.
Success (+Z, Legendary): Effect X, plus bigger bonus.

Because I think I like it, though I wonder how big skill usage blocks would be, if you have multiple degrees of success, in addition to different success conditions based on proficiency. I still think I like it, but it feels like it could get a bit overwhelming for some.

I wasn't suggesting that specifically, but such a thing would be simple to implement in the places where it would be appropriate - whether through natural inclusion or by way of feat somewhere. But it's a great example of the versatility of the overall idea in that it can easily expand to encompass that idea, where the +/- 10 system would require much more explanation along the lines of, "replace the existing critical success result with this critical success result," or something like it.

The actual thought in my head at time of writing was that the DC to navigate the hidden path in the swamp was fixed at whatever number, but the Legendary survivalist being high-level and having a large bonus would beat that DC by many more increments than another character might. But I do like what you proposed as an auxiliary way to further reward specialization, either through feat or just virtue of having the higher proficiency.

At first I liked the +/- 10 success system. I thought it was cool, and there is a pleasant, natural consequence of beating (or failing) a DC by such a large margin. It feels like something ought to happen for managing that, and I do very much like that it does.

But over time I've come to realize that PF1 did it better. In the places where it matters (because even with the PF2 system not every check has a result for all 4 tiers of success) I think that codifying everything to +/- 10 turns out to actually be unnecessarily limiting at best. Allow me to explain a little more in-depth.

Let's look at survival as a prime example. PF2 survival has the following results: Success: You survive with enough to sustain yourself; Critical Success: you survive with enough to sustain yourself and 1 other, or make your own survival comfortable; Failure: You don't get enough to survive; Critical Failure: Not only did you suck, but you also broke your legs and an owlbear came by an urinated on you (paraphrase).

Now let's look at PF1 survival. It still has a DC you must achieve in order to sustain yourself, but it has the ability to assist in the survival of others for every increment by which you beat the DC. If you are a survivalist, you can reasonably expect to use your skills to help your whole party and (pulling a little from Ironfang Invasion) if you have a party of survivalists, you can reasonably expect to use your combined skills to feed and shelter yourselves plus a gaggle of refugees. But consider that same situation converted into PF2. At best you can provide food and shelter for N*2 creatures, where N is the number of survivalists in the group.

There are several other places where one can make a similar comparison between PF1 degrees of success and PF2 degrees of success, and in many cases the PF2 crit success having only one, and fixed, increment turns out to be more limiting in terms of over-success threshold and what reaching that threshold allows. Sure, the math is easy - adding +/- 10 is trivial for most people, I think.

But what if, instead, we made the system a hybrid of the PF1 degrees of success and the spell heightening mechanics?

Let's take a look at survival again and I can give you an example of what I mean:

Success: You forage for enough food for yourself and your shelter gives you basic protection from the elements, providing a subsistence living.
Success (+X): You also provide basic food and shelter for 1 additional person, or provide comfortable subsistence living for 1 creature for which you are already providing basic food and shelter.
Failure: You are exposed to the elements and don't get enough food, becoming fatigued until you get enough food and shelter. (The skill text can provide the stipulation that if you don't attempt the check yourself, you automatically receive a result of failure unless another creature includes you in their success).

Now let's take a look at some other, less obvious areas where the 4 degrees of success are partially applied and see how this change might interact with them. Let's look at the Nalfeshnee (Boar Demon) and its Greedy Grab reaction ability.

PF2 Current Version:

Trigger: A creature critically fails a weapon Strike against the boar demon.
Effect: The boar demon tries to snatch the weapon used in the triggering Strike by attempting an Athletics check to Disarm the boar demon(?) at a –2 penalty. On a success or critical success, the boar demon takes the weapon into one of its hands instead of the normal success effect.

Revised Version:

Trigger: A creature fails a weapon Strike against the boar demon by X or more.
Effect The boar demon tries to snatch the weapon used in the triggering Strike by attempting an Athletics check to Disarm at a –2 penalty. If successful, the boar demon takes the weapon into one of its hands instead of the normal effect.

Or how about pick a lock?

PF2 Current Version:

Success: You gain 1 success toward opening the lock.
Critical Success: You gain 2 successes toward opening the lock.
(Bonus) Quick Unlock Skill Feat: When you succeed at a check to pick a lock, you gain 2 successes instead of 1. When you critically succeed at such a check, you gain 3 successes instead of 2.

Revised Version:

Success: You gain 1 success toward opening the lock.
Success (+X): You gain 1 additional success toward opening the lock.
(Bonus) Quick Unlock Skill Feat: Add 1 success to any successful result when you pick a lock.

------------------------

I could go on, but I'd like to think that this is enough to show that not only is this revision often more concise, but it's more versatile in practice. It gives the freedom to make that "+X" whatever is most appropriate for the situation instead of one blanket number, but it also now opens up the design space for potentially unlimited degrees of success where appropriate. Legendary survivalist leading a whole army through the hidden path in the swamp to encircle the enemy? Check. Master lock-picker getting the vault open in the time it takes for another character to wonder aloud about the combination? Check. With less reliance on specific numbers and specific categories, the whole thing has the room to breathe and be more robust, and there should also less need to so tightly control the size of the numbers that characters are allowed to have.

EDIT: Forgot to include, if you still only want there to be 1 degree of success you can still use the spell heightening convention. So a DC 15 check that has only one additional success result at +10 might look like this:

Success: Text
Success (25): moar text

I would also like that class feat for any classes have some kind of auto scaling (less than Powers of course because they don't use ressources) mainly to avoid the "You pick that feat at level 1 so now you MUST pick this one at higher level, then this one, then this one" because they are chained together and making another choice is crippling your character

I think animal companions are the worst offenders at this, hands-down. The game asks every few levels "do you want a feat, or would you like to keep your companion relevant?" I think the structure is fine, with the progression from "young" to specialized, etc, because it allows different animal companions to grow at different rates: the ranger's feats are available levels behind the druid... but you can get that same effect just by stating at which levels they gain their steps.

And then, to make up for the "options" you just took away, you add feats which instead alter how the animal companion plays. Things like allowing your companion to continue spending 1 action each turn to continue following your last command if you stop commanding it (no net change in number of actions/turn). Or give your animal companion the AOO feature (and ability to use it) while it is commanded to defend, and so on.

To prevent this tangent from becoming a true digression: I think it would be interesting if some of the bloodlines (like Fey, especially) had the option of getting an animal companion as a bloodline feat.

Gorbacz wrote:

A lot of things look "fun" on paper but aren't that "fun" in practice.

Take the classic 3.5/PF situation, where I have +15 to a skill with my Slayer, which makes me feel that the math is fun because double digits and I hit high numbers and I got rewarded for being specialised. And I'm better than the Cleric, because with her crap skill point count and ACP and whatanot she's at +5 to that skill.

BUT

it also means that the GM has a very hard time making a challenge for a group when one person is at +15 and the other are at +5. Such challenge is either impossible for them or trivial for me. If it's trivial, well, where's the challenge, if it's impossible - woe be to the party if I don't turn up for the game, or if my PC gets kidnapped by the bad guys, or if for any other reason my super-specialised ability is unavilable. Bummer.

I think this is an aspect that gets overlooked or at least not talked about enough: The math also needs to be fun for the GM. The PF1 math-discrepancy has led to quite a lot of frustration on my end as a GM and has made the game not fun on my end, especially since quite a few unexperienced players have joined our group over the years. I know quite a few GMs who had similar problems and it made designing encounters quite difficult and tedious, which led to no one running any Pathfinder games anymore in my area, even though the hobby has grown quite a bit over the last couple of years.

Gorbacz wrote:

With PF2 math, most common challenges (eg. sneaking among sleepy orcs, climbing a cliff, swimming upstream) can be attempted by the entire party, not just by one or two super-specialised PCs. Does that take away some fun out of hyperspecialisation? Sure it does. But on the other hand, it allows more challenges where the entire party can succeed, leaving them less dependant on hyper-specialist, discourages gamey character advancement ("OK we need everybody to max Perception and now we need to split Knowledges, Sense Motive, Stealth,

...

Speaking as my group's Constant GM, I find the PC success rate frustratingly low. There's a definite hit to player morale that I've seen across my playtest games. And, for me, if my players are feeling frustrated then I'm not really having fun either.

But I also know the pain of nothing ever being a challenge for the party. So I do like the math being tightened - I just think that it's been tightened too much. I would rather my players who specialize and put effort into an area feel confident of success - not be guaranteed it, just not approach each skill check with the defeatist attitude that multiple playtest sessions have instilled in them.

EDIT: for clarity, I have not yet gotten a chance to play since 1.3. So whether or not that makes a difference for my group yet I can't say.

At random intervals, the overall mass of divinity spawns a paladin and an anti-paladin simultaneously. This reduces the overall mass of divinity by an infinitesimal amount. Given enough time, this will cause all divinity to evaporate from a setting.

This is called "Greyhawking Radiation"

I, too, think it would make a lot of sense as an Int skill. Then maybe make natural medicine somewhat more relevant (but not necessarily as good (like the difference between heal and soothe) so there is also an option for wisdom type skill-healers. One uses your knowledge of anatomy, the other uses your ability to notice the useful things around you. It's a good dichotomy to set up.

Gaterie wrote:

This is how you make a player feels legendary while keeping him on the same RNG as the other players: by having him roll to see how awesome he is instead of just checking if he fails miserably. And then you can balance the game around that; eg, a failure in Stealth could just trigger a warning for team monster (they heard something, but they're not sure it's a PC) while a crit success could allow to remove a warning. Legendary Rogue Boy could never fail, and still be on the same RNG as anyone.

My wife insisted on a system like this, where experts can prevent critical failures, for her expert climber barbarian described in Expert Climber Aiding Trained Climbers. Her main argument was that climbers apply these techniques in the real world.

I am thinking of generalizing it to a SAVE OTHER reaction, restricted to experts, based on the AID reaction on page 306.

[[R]] AID
Trigger An ally is about to use an action, activity, free action, or
reaction that requires a skill check.
Requirements The ally is willing to accept your aid, and you have
prepared to help (see below).
You try to aid your ally’s check in some way. To use this reaction,
you must first prepare to help, usually by using an action during
your turn. You must explain to the GM exactly how you’re trying
to help, and she determines whether you can Aid your ally.
When you use your Aid reaction, attempt a skill check of a
type decided by the GM. The typical DC for Aid is 15, but at the
GM’s discretion this might change to DC 20 for particularly hard
tasks or DC 10 for particularly easy tasks. The GM can add any
relevant traits to your Aid reaction or to your preparatory action
depending on the situation.
Success You grant your ally a +2 circumstance bonus to the
triggering skill check.
Critical Success You grant your ally a +4 circumstance bonus
to the triggering skill check....

I regret that I only have 1 favorite to give this post.

These sorts of interactions with the proficiency system are the sorts of things that I was hoping/expecting more of based on the previews we were getting before the actual rules dropped.

One topic of discussion I see pop up frequently is the overwhelming tendency for the sorcerer and wizard to multiclass. I believe this is strongly correlated with the overall lackluster class features and abilities that they get. There just isn't a strong incentive to pick your own class options, because others prove to be better with just a little math. I think the best way to approach this problem is not to further deconstruct the other multiclass options, not to place limits on how many feats you can take from outside your primary class, and certainly not to reduce the number of class feats that these classes get to pick from.

Rather, I posit that the best and most effective solution is to make the class options better, so that there's more of an incentive to stay within your class. Ideally, any given multiclass character should be pursuing that path because they wanted those other features, not because they didn't want their own features, as we see so frequently at this stage in the game.

I'm not one to propose a problem and solution without offering up some specifics of how I think this could be accomplished. In this thread I'll be focusing on the Sorcerer specifically. And for the Sorcerer, I think the biggest avenue for improving their class features revolves around their biggest draw: the bloodlines. Currently, each bloodline gives you three bloodline abilities (until 1.3 these were not optional). To go along with giving Sorcerers the same number of class feats as everyone else (a topic I discussed HERE) I would propose expanding the amount of bloodline abilities to 7. In this scenario, each bloodline is providing some sort of class feat option at levels 1, 2, 6, 10, 12, 16, and 18. I will give examples of these expanded bloodline options, as well as make some points about some of the other Sorcerer class feats which could be made into more usable and/or attractive options.

Additional Notes

I tried to balance these options theoretically against other, similar options where they existed, but have not gotten a chance to rigorously test them. Additionally, these suggestions are not exhaustive - there's absolutely still room to make other adjustments to Sorcerer class feats to make them more attractive options. Finally, while I provided some specific options here, they are intended to be examples rather than demands - as in I think the Sorcerer would benefit from changes like these rather than necessarily these specific changes and only these specific changes

I'd love to hear other thoughts on what can be done to improve the bloodlines, and just generally make the Sorcerer a more attractive class in general. I think the design space of a class that alters itself so dramatically based on your choices is so fascinating to explore, and I started thinking about this because I want to explore it more - the playtest version feels like a timid dipping of a toe in these waters, and I'd love for it to do a full-on cannonball instead. This has been a fun exercise to go through, even if nothing ever comes out of it but house rules, and I'd like to thank everyone who stuck with me through the whole thing!

I would love to see more classes start with some sort of path, and I think the alchemist would really benefit from a reorganization and expansion along the lines of the Bard or Druid - where you can freely grab abilities from other paths, but possibly some function better if they're from your chosen path.

I think the biggest hurdle is that some of these paths would require additional content that has not been currently presented, and I'm not sure how (or if) the overhaul to resonance will affect things. Hopefully not largely.

If I had to pick my top for for the PF2CRB:

• Chirurgeon: Focused on health and welfare (empowered elixirs of life, condition removal, etc.)
• Grenadier: Focused on empowering bombs and using them in strange ways
• Mixologist: Focuses on mutagens and combining multiple effects into new and custom combinations
• Toxicologist: Focuses on creating, using, harvesting, combining and empowering poisons.

Some notable runners-up that I would either also be happy to see instead, or think are interesting enough to come in early rules supplements:

• Blood Alchemist
• Ectochymist
• Mind Chemist
• Promethean Alchemist
• Psychonaut
• Vivisectionist

ENHenry wrote:

doubt we'll see many Tuba-playing Bards, anyway.

I dunno, it feels like in this edition it's wholly possible to play a bard who never puts down their instrument to pick up a weapon, so I can see people who want to do this choosing to play whichever instrument conjures the most amusing mental image- sousaphone, marching glockenspeil, tenor drum kit, etc.

Can you use a didgeridoo as a staff?

I'm asking for a friend <.<

Unfortunately, this is a question where there can never really be a definitive solution as to what is best. The closest I can come to an absolute is to suggest that playing every kind of monster the same way as every other monster, every time, is probably a poor choice. Fighting a horde of goblins should play out differently from fighting a revenant, or a hungry animal, or a rival adventuring party, or the city guard, and so on, and so on.

The problem becomes how much of that difference should be up to intangibles like GM tactics and how much of it should be baked into the mechanics of the game system? Consider the newbie or last-minute GM. Should anyone be able to pick up a revenant and use it properly without a good understanding of what it is and how it's motivated? Is that even possible? How much or how little GM preparation should we assume as the baseline?

I think published adventures including suggested tactics has been a great thing. Maybe that should be a section of a creature's bestiary entry as well. Just make sure that, in such a general format, it's clear that these are "typical" tactics, and that there's always room for circumstances and specifics to alter them.

Leedwashere wrote:

I do think that there's definitely room to have some class-specific metamagic feats, that represent ways one magical tradition might handle situations differently than others.

You could make these Class Specific feats simply modify General Feats of a certain type instead of being a separate mechanic itself.

I.E.

Fierce Bloodline Altering - Sorcerer 8
Requirements: At least one general Metamagic feat
Benefits: Whenever you apply a Metamagic feat to a spell specifically granted by your bloodline and that spell targets a single enemy creature you may include the following in the failure and critical failures for the spell:

Divine Spell: target is Sluggish 1 until the end of your next turn
Primal Spell: target takes 1d8 + level elemental damage of your choice
Arcane Spell: target is Enfeebled 1 until the end of your next turn
Occult Spell: target is Stupified 2 until the end of your next turn

Indeed. I think we can use this structure to adjust the general and specific relationships between classes, characters, and mechanical concepts as a whole.

It appears to me like the way classes, etc., are constructed in second edition as currently presented is like a paint by numbers kit. The general structure is provided in a fairly coherent manner, while the individual making choices generally only has the freedom to choose the colors they want to use.

The general thrust of what I would like this reorganization to accomplish is to treat the mechanical concepts of the game more like legos instead. There are lots of legos, and you can snap them together in interesting and immensely varied combinations. General, Ancestry and Skill feats represent the most basic pieces, while Class Feats/Features represent the more specialized pieces that you might find in one of the special sets. They build upon the basic tools to create a finished product, rather than always being an entirely separate sphere of character options by themselves.

In my opinion, the structure of first edition (where there was basically a feat for everything) lent itself very well to this lego-based character generation system. The biggest problem was that every kind of feat was competing with every other kind of feat, and therefore there were too few feats overall. I think the nominal setup of feat types in second edition can be a fantastic fix for that, but segregating them so harshly like they are, for me, starts to lose the feeling that Pathfinder gave me: that no matter what concept I had in mind, there was some interesting way to combine the pieces to make that concept work, or at least come close enough to it.

I guess my point is that it's hard to define what exactly entails a "class feature" and what doesn't.

That's fair, and it can be a pretty fuzzy area sometimes. I would like to offer what I think are 2 very good rules of thumb to consider when deciding what basket of feats an option should be placed into.

1) Conversion Clues

In first edition, we had only one type of feat, which led to a whole host of feats that had additional, sometimes very specific prerequisites. I think that these prerequisites therefore make for a good guideline on where any given mechanical concept that could be replicated in first edition wants to belong.

- Skill Prerequisites: If the mechanical concept had a skill prerequisite (so many ranks, trained in, etc.) then this concept should probably be a Skill Feat if/when it is included in second edition.

- Class Prerequisites: If the mechanical concept had a class prerequisite (or class feature prerequisite) then this concept should probably be a Class Feat if/when it is included in second edition.

- Racial Prerequisites: If the mechanical concept had a racial prerequisite, then this concept should probably be an Ancestry Feat if/when it is included in second edition.

- No Prerequisites: If the mechanical concept had no prerequisites (or only ability score or level prerequisites) then this concept was something that was freely available to basically everybody. It should probably be a General Feat if/when it is included in second edition.

2) Ubiquity Clues

If a mechanical concept unique to PF2 is something that some number of classes all get (2+? 3+?), then it should probably be converted to a General Feat. Clearly there's a reason why so many classes are already getting it, and it may be reasonable to conclude that even more classes might want it. It also allows you to reproduce the mechanical option once instead of multiple times.

A Wrinkle

An interesting consequence of laying out these rules of thumb is that it caused me to consider another group of feats that probably should (usually) be General Feats instead of Class Feats: Metamagic. Something like Reach Spell is pretty ubiquitous, and making it so that any caster can take it now and forever without having to reprint it for each one of them is probably a worthwhile goal. Much like with other mechanical concepts, though, I do think that there's definitely room to have some class-specific metamagic feats, that represent ways one magical tradition might handle situations differently than others. But some metamagics (like Reach Spell) function a lot more like basic building blocks than as the indelible imprint of class flavor.

General Feats

Now here's where I don't agree. Combat style is apart of the class. If you make two weapon stuff general feats then why isn't sneak attack? Or Hunt Target? In a game with classes such as Pathfinder it makes more sense for weapon styles to be apart of the class structure then just general. Everyone CAN TWF or 2-hand or shoot a bow but the Rogue shouldn't be able to be as good as the Fighter unless he wants to train like the Fighter, so take the Fighter Archetype.

I would argue that things like sneak attack and hunt target are already an instance of what I'm talking about: a class ability that alters existing mechanics to put the class's unique flavor on it.

I would also argue that the combat style is a feature of a character rather than a feature of the class, or at least I think it should be. And with those being a general feat to reflect that, there's still an opportunity cost associated with developing a combat style in its most vanilla form, while a class like the fighter would instead have something that they could do to maintain their supremacy over the vanilla version - whether that be through a class feat which alters and empowers that style, the ability to grab more styles faster than anyone else, or use their class-given flexibility to temporarily pick them up on the fly, or whatever else can be dreamed of in heaven or on earth, in rules supplements now and forever.

I don't think that making the basic building blocks more freely available in any way contradicts the possibility of making some classes able to be better at building off those blocks or use them in different and flavorful ways. It lowers the floor with the barrier to entry, but has no effect on the potential ceiling of customization.

Possible solution:

Let's NOT go unconscious to Dying 1.

Let's JUST get a Wounded condition that might apply modifiers or limit actions or something else that makes the heroes feel limited by their wounds...

...BUT THEY STAY ON THEIR FEET AND KEEP BEING HEROIC!

They shrug it off John McClane style. They may be limping around, bleeding, gasping and wheezing, slower and squishier than they were at the start of the day, but they're still going and still killing bad guys.

If enough wounds pile up, sure, let em finally drop. Even McClane dropped at the end of Die Hard. He'd earned it.

I really, really like this idea. Have "wounded" replace dying entirely. NPCs already generally die when reduced to 0 with lethal damage, so dying was really only a PC condition anyway unless the GM wants to track it separately for NPCs. (I generally don't. If my players want to take an enemy alive, I think they should reasonably be expected to put effort into achieving that during the fight.)

Conscious, but with a penalty. And keep the conditions with which the condition goes away, too. So even if you get healed mid-fight, grievous wounds you may have already suffered can still potentially be your undoing, so there's still a definite incentive to not let yourself or your allies get to 0 in the first place.

I think I will steal this regardless of what happens with the rules coming out of the playtest.

Recently, I've been thinking very long and hard about the organization structure of the feats and the rates of acquisition for the various kinds of feats. I've seen a lot of ideas that I've liked, and have helped me to form my own synthesis of others' ideas and my own. The purposes of these suggestions are to better match my own internal expectations of what should be parceled where, and to most accurately replicate the intangible (and admittedly subjective) "feeling of Pathfinder" - which has been the major driving force of why I've preferred Paizo's iteration of the game to any other that I've tried.

I'll go in alphabetical order.

Ancestry Feats

One common complaint that I've seen, and one which I've come to share after a great deal of thought, is that the ancestries feel like they've been unnaturally stretched out over a character's career. You don't get enough at the beginning to feel satisfied, and then you feel like you get to slowly "buy back" all of the things that these ancestries used to have as a given. Now, I really like that many of those things are optional. I really like it. But the current implementation feels like too little butter for too much bread. There's alse a frustrating inelegance to heritage feats. Nowhere else in the game is there such a stipulation that this feat may only be taken now, and if you pass it up you are S.O.L.

So I would suggest that we stop trying to spread the butter so thinly. Instead of giving 5 acnestry feats over the course of the whole gamut of levels, instead give those 5 ancestry feats right away at level 1. It's not even like many of the ancestry feats have a level greater than 1 anyway. Now make "Adopted Ancestry" a universal ancestry feat, allowing you to take any non-heritage feat (although I would change the name of the trait from "heritage" to "biological," that's what it really means to say). For those ancestry feats that were level 5, each and every one of them was a variant of "if you have your ancestry's weapon familiarity, you now get access to critical specializations for those weapons." Giving that at level 1 is probably too strong, but since they're all basically identical feats, you can wrap all those up together as a level 5 general feat with the prerequisite that you must have your ancestry's weapon familiary feat.

I also suggest that more of these feats could then stand to have benefits that scale with level, so you can continue to get "more dwarfy" in the areas of dwarfiness that you chose as you get higher in level, without the weirdness some have a hard time accepting like Half-Orcs developing darkvision at level 5.

Class Feats

Class feats are presented as your way of customizing your class. I like this concept a lot. It has a lot of benefits, not the least of which is striving to make each class have meaningful choices throughout a character's career, and to notionally prevent cookie-cutter characters. There could stand to be a great deal of balancing for power level of class feats throughout characters, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

The thing I want to talk about is that not all classes get the same number of class feats. Why are some classes inherently less customizable than others? It doesn't make sense to me. I get that invariably the classes with fewer class feats are the ones that cast spells, but it seems to me that making them less customizable is a poor way of achieving balance. The balance should be achieved by scrutinizing the content of the class, not by saying you get less content overall. You don't even necessarily need to add more feats to the classes for this, since you can always take a lower-level feat you passed up. If the feats are hard choices because they're all good (debatable at present, but that's not the point) then getting a chance to pick the one you didn't give the nod can be something worthwhile.

I would like to see every class get a class feat at level 1 and every even level thereafter. That being said, I'm fine with the structure that some classes have which gives you a specific level 1 class feat depending on other choices you make. As long as everyone is getting access to the same quantity of content, I think that's good enough.

General Feats

This is a big one. As discussed in another thread, I think that the basic mechanics of a combat style should be universally accessible, even to those classes which have nothing interesting to add to them. We shouldn't have to have n different feats for two-weapon fighting, etc., where n is the number of classes in existence. And if you don't have n different feats, then you have characters of classes that can't use a fighting style in any reasonable way because the system was not made adequately future-proof. This is a little insane, and flies in the face of the elegance that this edition has been striving to achieve everywhere else.

So I would prefer the building blocks of combat styles, things like Power Attack and Double Slice and others, be made into general feats. Give them the Combat trait, so that you have the design space for some classes (like the Fighter and its martial ilk, for example) to have different interactions with them (like potentially choosing one instead of a class feat). I would then give a general feat at all odd levels, starting with 1. As I discussed earlier, Class Feats are really "class customization options" - general feats are those things that used to be feats in 1st edition once you remove all of the options that should obviously have been made into class feats instead. I don't think we should get less of them in this new edition.

As far as classes that have something interesting to say about a combat style, those classes should have class feats which alter the way those general feats work instead of reproducing the same feat with slight variations. This system is both future-proof and reduces conceptual workload when designing new classes. You don't have to think how class X does each and every combat style, you only have to think how this class would do any given one differently. If the answer is "it wouldn't," then that's not a problem - they can just use the vanilla feats.

I would also make Attack of Opportunity a general feat. During the previews it was suggested that any character so inclined could invest in being able to do this activity. This is why I felt that it would be okay for only the fighter to get it by default. But until update 1.3 that wasn't true, and now it's sort of true but only if you want to multiclass. If you make it a general feat, you can still give it to fighters for free, but anyone else has to pay some opportunity cost to get it. And then you can give the Paladin something else that's more interesting at level 6 which better competes with the other options of that level.

Skill Feats

I'm going to set aside for the moment my feelings toward the quantity and quality of the skill feats. I understand that it's a playtest and the options are therefore narrower in scope than I would hope for, since there was only so much space in the physical book they were going to print.

The thing I want to talk about here is when you get them. Skill feats are a major source of character customization in the arena of what you can do with your skills, but currently every character (except the rogue) is exactly the same in every trained skill at first level. That's... just really unsatisfying.

I would like to see the acquisition of skill feats stay largely the same, with the exception that every character gets a skill feat at level 1 as well. That still gives the rogue 9 extra skill feats over their career compared to everybody else (still a significant increase) but allows for more diversity among early-level characters. I don't think 1 extra skill feat is going to make or break the balance of the game, but it can make or break how different multiple characters of the same ancestry and class can feel at the level that almost every player starts with, and the level that most newbies have as their first experience. I think the more diverse 1st-level characters can be, the better.

Some Considerations

One difference that this change would make is that characters become a bit more front-loaded. If you're getting a lot of choices at level 1, it would have an impact on how long it takes to make a character - something that it seems that this new edition struggles with. Is that a worthwhile trade? I think so, though your mileage may vary.

Another difference it would make is with potential space savings. If you don't have to repeat some version of a two-weapon fighting feat, and a version of an archery feat, and so on, across every relevant class it gives you space to include some more interesting choices for character customization instead. Or more room for more diverse skill feats. Or any conceivable use for that word count that's better than making sure every class has access to the basic fundamentals of combat over and over again.

Overall, I think these changes would make for a more satisfying character creation and advancement experience than is currently offered in some areas, while improving the resiliency of the rules for future expansion in others. Does it dramatically alter the balance? Beyond level 1 I don't really think so, since that's when most of these changes take effect - and my impression of level 1 characters is that they could really use the help, since it seems a lot of the game's math assumes that an on-level enemy is tuned to be a minor boss battle. But there's only level 0 below level 1, and those monsters are designed so that they can still be a credible adversary for characters higher than level 1. I'm not sure to what extent that has changed as of 1.3 (I've only casually followed the math threads on this) but I think that giving those 1st-level characters some additional benefits can help offset the "monster singularity" in a way that can allow for the math of those level 0 monsters to remain relevant later without being over-tuned at level 1.

Leedwashere wrote:

In PF1, any prepared spellcaster could choose to leave some slots open at the beginning of the day to fill them later. It takes a while, so it's not useful for combat, but it's great for utility, or for reacting to gathered intelligence.

Actually, when I recently went looking for this option in PF1, it was only available to the wizard, not to divine casters. Not quite sure about the magus as it was a year ago.

You freaked me out (this wouldn't be the first and probably wouldn't be the last time I thought something was there turned out not to be) so I checked my copy of the CRB just to be safe. (Note that this is the pocket edition, so I don't know if it's different from previous editions). I found it on page 220.

A Divine spellcaster selects and prepares spells ahead of time through prayer and meditation at a particular time of day. The time required to prepare spells is the same as it is for a wizard (1 hour), as is the requirement for a relatively peaceful environment. When preparing spells for the day, a divine spellcaster can leave some of her spell slots open. Later during that day, she can repeat the preparation process as often as she likes. During these extra sessions of preparation, she can fill these unused spell slots. She cannot, however, abandon a previously prepared spell to replace it with another one or fill a slot that is empty because she has cast a spell in the meantime. Like the first session of the day, this preparation takes at least 15 minutes, and it takes longer if she prepares more than one-quarter of her spells.

EDIT: It is correct that the CRB only specifically says the wizard can do it as far as arcane casters go, but I've always interpreted that as lack of future-proofing, since every CRB prepared caster can do it I felt that the intention was clear. Looking at the magus, it doesn't say anything in the class one way or the other, though it does often make references to how wizards do things throughout the class.

I have many thoughts, and they are hopeful!

Rogues: instead of just Finesse Striker, you can choose one of three different paths (finesse, brute, feinter)

I mostly like this change. I'm very happy that you are no longer required to have dex to damage as a rogue, and I hope that the other two styles make themselves the sort of alternatives that make you really have to think about it, rather than being the sort of options that are there to be skipped over.

I just hope the implementation is more bard- or druid-like than sorcerer-like. To clarify: I hope that the options available to one path can be later picked up or mixed-and-matched with other paths as building blocks, rather than a choice you make once and narrows all further options based on that choice.

Ranger: double slice is dropped for 2 feats: one makes you better with two weapon fighting, one makes you better with ranged (fire twice, if both hit add together)

Okay. Ignoring for the moment that I just within the last couple days finally made up my mind on how I would prefer things relating to combat styles be handled. At least these work better with Hunt Target, I guess? I'm assuming that they'll be 2-actions each, which means that the Ranger is still has incentives to get as many attacks in a round as possible instead of skirmish and keep moving. It's a step in a direction, but is it the right direction? When I was thinking about how I might rewrite the Ranger (and other classes) I partitioned the various 10+ HP classes thusly:

- Barbarian: Many large-damage attacks. Not always the most accurate, but painful if they get you. Probably dishes and takes the most individual damage in a round, toe-to-toe.

- Fighter: Versatility personified. Can switch from trading blows, to skirmishing, to dueling, to tanking. Can be good at all, or supreme at one.

- Monk: Mobile debuff threat. Gets close, applies decent damage and uses training and knowledge of the body and spirit to weaken the opponent, then gets back out of reach. They may not deal the most damage at once, but the more time they get with enemy, the worse that enemy's position becomes.

- Paladin: Defensive expert. Likes the enemy to come to them, and keeps the enemy focus squarely on themselves. Can deal great damage if the enemy falls into a specific category, or persistently ignores the paladin, but generally succeeds by making enemy turns futile through misses and healing and letting action economy win the day.

- Ranger: Mobile skirmisher. Uses terrain, cover and stealth to consistently deal one, large hit and then disappear again. Hard to pin down, doesn't want to stand still and trade blows. Sniper extraordinaire.

Proficiency: untrained is now (lvl - 4). Also, skill DCs are adjusted, and lowered overall. Net result: as you get better and better you get more and more certain of success. Every skill DC in Doomsday Dawn updated to reflect

I don't really have much to say here. I don't think this would be necessary if the skill feats made more of a difference? I find the whole skill feats section a little narrow and underwhelming. You already need to be at least trained to do a lot of what skills let you do, so I'm not sure that making untrained worse is a better direction than making trained+ better. It's that carrot and stick thing all over again. Sometimes I worry that the developers have forget that carrots are a thing, and that horses people like them.

Death and dying: getting much more deadly. New condition, “wounded,” you acquire when you are healed back up from 0 hp. Next time you drop to 0, your wounded value is added on to your dying value. And since you die at dying 4 ... this can mean insta-death if you’re doing too much up-and-down.

This is interesting. What magnitude of effect his has will depend largely on how you can get rid of the wounded condition and how accessible that is. Can either eliminate the yo-yo or just add more steps to it. We'll see!

Mundane Healing: Medicine gets a new function: Treat Wounds. This removes Wounded and also heals damage. Cures (healer’s lvl) * (your con mod) hp. Makes out-of-combat mundane healing very possible, making magical healing more for in-combat, mundane healing for out-of-combat.

Oh god, I really, really, really hope that they made mundane healing useful. All this will depend on one word: bolstered. If the "B" word shows up too quickly, then this will all be an exercise in futility. Please be good. Please be good. PLEASE.

Shields: no multiple dents. One dent and then the rest of the damage goes to you.

This is how I thought it worked all along. Glad to see it clarified as such.

Identifying magic items: doesn’t take as long. I wasn’t clear on how long it will take in new rules, but works with someone else using Medicine to heal everyone.

I think tying the action times for a bunch of common downtime activities together is a great idea. I would offer one suggestion, though: maybe allow for some level of bulk identification? This is a PF1 example, but I just told a group after a boss fight that they detected 28 magic auras. Many of those were duplicates, sure, and that's PF1 so the treasure is probably coming at different rates, but still. It's something to consider. Do the rules specify what happens when you've literally just identified another one of this thing? I don't remember, but it would be cool if you could identify, say, a healing potion and then realize that the other 6 same-colored and sized potions are more of the same thing and you can move on with your life.

ALL 12 MULTICLASS ARCHETYPES. Goal: you can do this class thing, but you can’t just be a better Barbarian than the Barbarian herself. The 4 we have are rebalanced. Biggest change to Fighter, which a *lot* of folks had been grabbing for armor proficiency. Now it will just step up your armor prof to the next level. (If you want more armor proficiency from archetype, try Paladin ... if you meet those restrictions.) They will keep a close eye on this. This is a separate pdf to put all multiclass together, easier to reference.

The Monday blog will have more details.

I await these with great curiosity. Not enough to go on to form an opinion one way or the other.

### RESONANCE ###
*Not* for Monday’s update (1.3), but for future: Working on the update to Resonance. They’ve been meeting every week to talk about it, waiting on data. They’ve been seeing problems in the data. They rethought from “what did we want this to do?” They arrived at a different strategy. It was trying to do too much in one system.

Resonance shifting to just a system to manage permanent magic items, replace slot system. “The moment we tried to tie it to consumable usage and things like that, that’s when we started to have problems. Because those two things were competing with one another in a way that was unsatisfactory.” So resonance will just fix the slot system, which was a big problem. Worn items resonate with each other and don’t work together if you wear too many.

But something else to manage how you use magic items. “But we don’t want that system to be one that cuts you off from magic.” That wasn’t fun. Looking at ways for characters to focus on magic. Stuff about some default baseline and then, if you focus on things, getting more above-and-beyond benefits. (This is kind of unclear to me.) “I want to stress ... that we’re still in the design phase” on this.

They want to thoroughly test by rewriting the PFS module Raiders of the Shrieking Peak as a specific test of this. “This might take us 3 or 4 weeks to get ready.” Still in the process of designing the system, then probably some internal testing.

This sounds like they're making resonance exactly what I hoped and dreamed it would be. I really hope they take all the carrot-and-stick feedback to heart and give us something awesome!

New character sheet. Minor adjustments, including senses line.

Okay. I appreciate that they're tweaking the character sheet to make it more usable, but I have to say that there's probably no amount of tweaking that will make me feel less like barfing when I look at it. There's something about it (the layout? landscape? I dunno) that actually makes me feel something like motion sickness. Fortunately for me and everyone around me, I prefer using excel for character sheets instead anyway. ::shrug::

It took away the convenient healing we were used to from PF1 and didn't provide anything resembling an adequate substitute.

This, absolutely this. This is basically the difference between me shrugging my shoulders about this through all of PF1 (at least you can make it work!) and ranting in the forums about it come PF2.

Things become 'worse' value for money as you level up. That's standard.

I submit that something being standard or "the way it's always been" doesn't make it good or correct. An edition change and a playtest is an opportunity to fix all the things that were broken about the previous version, and establishing one's own identity apart from the franchise from which this game is an offshoot is a perfect time to drop some of those legacy elements which are holding the game, as a whole, back.

It's 65gp to give a weapon a +1, and 53,860gp to increase a legendary weapon from +4 to +5. If each +1 is of roughly equal value, then the value for money gets exponentially worse.

But when you're rich enough, it makes sense to get a +5 weapon rather than 828 +1 weapons, because you don't have 828 hands. Similarly, it makes sense to bring along the expensive healing potion, because you might not have the time/resonance to drink lots of small ones.

In fairness, I do also have a problem with magic weapons and I started a thread about it. That thread is approached more from the angle of real vs false choices, though, because apart from +X weapons, I think PF2's rune system is a really outstanding improvement over the way magic weapons used to be priced. My biggest problem is that the game expects you to have a +X weapon to keep up with its math, but then continues to present it as "optional."

There are some key difference between the two systems, though. Your choice of property rune doesn't usually have as direct of an impact on a group's overall survival than healing items do, and doesn't really have much of an impact on what party compositions are "allowed" by the game. "Thou must have a healer" as a commandment is, in my opinion, an archaic notion that should be excised from the genre. "Thou must need healing," is a much improved version of that commandment, and allows player agency for how to best fulfill that requirement for maximum player enjoyment... assuming, of course, that the options aren't totally broken.

Good and Bad options are meaningless in a vacuum. There are only Better and Worse options in any given situation. Is it better to push on while injured, drink a horribly expensive healing potion, drink multiple cheaper healing potions that consume all your Resonance, or go and find somewhere to rest? The answer will depend on the urgency of the situation, how injured you are, and how much money you have. That has the potential to be an interesting decision, and games thrive on interesting decisions.

(I actually think the healing situation is pretty bad in PF2; I'd just use different arguments to support my case. For example, given the costs of healing by other means, it seems like every party should bring along at least two clerics if they want to make it through a few encounters without having to rest overnight. This is bad class balance.)

On this we mostly agree, especially the part I bolded. I've mentioned before that I don't think this is a silver bullet that will cure all of the game's problems with healing. But if the items have the proper incentives, and the medicine skill works, and more classes have options they can use to be effective at it, and (basically) the game is designed around the commandment of "Thou must have healing" instead of "Thou must have a healer" it will be a better experience for it.

One of my proudest moments as a GM was from one of my campaign session zeroes, when the group was discussing what they wanted to play, and someone asked "what are we going to do about healing" because everybody had a concept that wasn't a very good healer. Someone said "how about we set aside a portion of all the loot we get as a healing fund?" The players all agreed, set a proportion and we got underway. It was much harder for them (as is appropriate) but they made it work.

I want PF2 to support that as a possibility.

You know what also might be cool? Maybe everyone could get a "subclass" or "achetype" automatically at certain levels.

I think I would be alright with something like this if there was also a benefit to doubling-down on your existing class.

Sort of like how the Kineticist works. Every so often you can expand into another element, or achieve extra potency in your existing element(s).

Just as I wouldn't want to be unable to multiclass, I wouldn't want to be forced into it either.

Staffan Johansson wrote:

I'd rather see them do archery differently for each class. Perhaps the archer ranger's focus is a variety of trick shots and debuffs, the fighter is more about barrages, and the paladin makes few shots, but those few hit really hard. Or something like that, I'm just spitballing.

But if you make that Class Feat, then Paladins, Rangers, etc. all have to choose to be good at Archery over being able to use Lay on Hands, Snares, etc.

Now allowing them to take a Class Feat that modifies all ranged attack actions i.e. something niche to that class that they only have to take once that modifies all their standard Archery, then you might have something.

As is, it's "pick your class or pick your combat style, but you can't have both". It's not very "rogue" just to have your own version of Double Slice but slightly different.

Classes are way to Feat starved at the moment to be able to keep a Combat style while also maintaining an identity (at least the non-caster classes, as casters don't really need a lot of combat feats)

This post has made me get off the fence on this one. I was struggling with the conflict between all users of a combat style following the same path regardless of class, classes setting themselves apart by doing a combat style differently than other classes, and the thought of having to reproduce the same combat style across infinite classes in infinite combinations. (Infinite is hyperbole, yes, but we should make the game as future-proof as possible)

And now everything has resolved. Yes, all combat styles should be universally achievable by all classes. There's nothing about archery or two-weapon fighting or sword and board or anything that requires class-gating.

Right now we're trading one absurdity (all characters perform a style the same way) for another, equal absurdity (all members of [class] perform this combat style the same way).

But there are some classes that would naturally want put a different spin on those concepts. And that should, in fact, be modeled by having a class feat that alters the way the combat style works, rather than granting the combat style in a specific way. And the classes which don't have anything particularly interesting to offer a combat style would still be able to effectively use that combat style if they want, they just wouldn't get anything special for doing so.

So under a system like this, if you're a rogue, you can two-weapon fight all you want. Or you can choose to two-weapon fight like a rogue if you're invested in the idea. Similarly any paladin can be an archer, but if they want to they can be an archer in the paladin style. It's not required, but is helpful and provides synergy with other class feats and features if you take it. But it doesn't cripple your concept (by effectively locking you out of being effective an entire combat style) if you don't care enough or have higher priorities than emphasizing it.

The point I was trying to make was that each potion is still a single dose, but it acts over several rounds, much like a poison does. By spreading the healing out over multiple rounds, it would be less unbalancing in combat. Healing 140 hp in a single round of level 9 fight is too much, but to heal 35 hit points a round for 4 rounds is much less so.

The healing could be spread out over multiple minutes instead of rounds if preferred - what I want is a way to make noncombat healing more economical.

If we want to keep resonance around as a buff to items, this larger amount of healing could require that resonance be spent. The first version that actually benefits from this is the level 5 version - by level 5 every character has some resonance.

Ah, I think I get it now. So it's essentially that healing items give you an abnormally large (but very short duration) "fast healing" effect.

I... actually like that quite a bit, now that I think about it like that, especially considering the astronomical numbers that some of the higher level potions would need. 400 HP at once (for the greater elixir of life as an example) is more than almost everyone other than the highest level barbarians could even use at once, but fast healing 80 for 5 rounds (as a round number division example) could be useful to pretty much any level 12+ character, in or out of combat, and alleviates the "what if the BBEG drinks this potion" problem a bit, since the action economy still means players have the opportunity to blast through it if they keep up the pressure.

Wizards (possibly other prepared casters, not entirely sure) can spend a short period(minutes) to exchange a prepared spell for another. They are actually very flexible already.

Only the wizard, and only with a specific class feat. It's a really, really good feat, because it allows you the benefits of essentially leaving open spell slots, without actually having to leave the spell slots open, and it only takes 10 minutes to accomplish per spell swapped.

Nobody else but wizards who take that feat can do anything like this.

In PF1, any prepared spellcaster could choose to leave some slots open at the beginning of the day to fill them later. It takes a while, so it's not useful for combat, but it's great for utility, or for reacting to gathered intelligence.

Why they removed this capability baffles me. It makes prepared casting strictly worse than spontaneous casting by removing any of the flexibility that's supposed to go along with having a huge number or spell choices available. The spontaneous caster only knows a couple, but can choose among them on the fly. The prepared caster has potentially infinite options, but can only have so many of them in play at once. They can be ready for anything given adequate preparation, though.

I don't even care if filling an open spell slot took a half hour or an hour to prepare just one spell at a time. It should be an option, and the wizard feat will still be better, so it's not like this invalidates it.

I am sure healing weak to make sure combat is not prolonged by potions in your belt being "extra health bars". The NPC is near death, he chugs a potion, he is now topped off, party needs to repeat the combat.

There's a term for an option that is intentionally bad. It's called a "trap option," and its only purposes are to make other options seem artificially better and/or to punish those foolish enough to fall for it.

I would rather no options than intentionally bad options. If they don't want something "messing up the balance" of the game, then why make it in the first place? These rules aren't naturalistic, nothing is there without it being placed deliberately.

And as salty as I am about this still being a problem in PF2, I am still optimistic enough to believe that it's not intentionally bad, just so low on their priority list that it's gotten overlooked, or something.

Bad potions and resonance exists to make damage last, and if your enjoyment is tied to your character staying alive, you can never enjoy resonance, because it literally exists to kill your comfort zone.

Again, healing items being limited or not is only tangential to the discussion on making them make sense. If you want to limit them, that's fine. A GM has the right to add or remove options at their discretion. I wouldn't want to play in a game where there's a fundamental distinction between HP healed by spell slots and HP healed by drinking a potion, but some people do.

But making potions intentionally bad ruins them for everyone, whereas adding house rules only affects the people at a given table. It takes a lot more effort and math to get the numbers to make sense than it does to slap a house rule on saying "no potions" or "only so many potions per day" or whatever point on the continuous spectrum of potion usability you want.

And, here's a thought: Paizo likes modes in this edition. They can put a small section offering different difficulty modes. Easy: No resonance to consumables, and all healing items always follow the resonance-boosted numbers; Moderate: Consumables are like they are now, but spending resonance boosts healing items to follow reasonable HP/GP guidelines; Hard: Consumables work as they are now, and cost resonance; Severe: Consumables cost resonance and healing items provide their current values as temporary HP; Iron Man: No healing items allowed.

With a system like this, you print the healing items under the assumption of moderate difficulty, with a resonance amount and a non-resonance amount. The GM tells the players what difficulty this game will be (and/or the group discusses it like adults), and everyone knows what to expect from that game. Heck, this makes it easy for any group to transition between one style and another on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Maybe your one game is a beer-and-pretzels group where everyone just wants to hang out, while your other game is playing through a really gritty horror campaign. You don't require any house rules at all!

EDIT: There are a host of other difficulty- and tone-related common house rules that can be balanced and then sorted along a spectrum like that, not just healing items. Things like access to scrying, or teleportation magic, or frequency of checks for random encounters, or how many HP you get from sleeping, etc., etc., etc.