RoninJT's page

I see great potential in the idea of using feats to create half-races. But to fully realize that potential, we need to integrate them into the rules for normal races.

Currently, only humans get access to half-races, and only half-elf and half-orc, and only by spending their one 1st level ancestry feat. It's unnecessarily restrictive, and it turns iconic core races into feat taxes.

So, I suggest a slightly different system: Everyone gets two heritage feats at level 1. One of these feats must come from your ancestry, but one can come from any other ancestry with GM approval. If you pick a heritage feat from another ancestry, you get the corresponding trait and are a half-race.

To balance this, I would also suggest giving those who pick both feats from their own ancestry their choice of some bonus proficiencies (or perhaps even a signature skill) from a list of things associated with their ancestry. The elf who picks a human heritage feat can get access to human stuff, but the one that stays pure elf might get those sweet elven archery skills.

A system like this would make any combination of playable races possible using the same rules as making normal characters. And it would make half-races actually function like half of one thing and half the other. It would also have the added benefit of giving ancestries more impact and flavor right at level 1, something they are currently sorely lacking.

I'm not sure if I agree with your approach of how to handle it, but I completely agree with the base concept. I have always wanted to play a half-dwarf/half-elf character but there's never been an option anywhere close to it before and not many GMs are willing to allow houserules for that kind of thing. I was in a game once that approved a half-dwarf/half-human but it only lasted two sessions before they gave up on the game because he only had three players and one wasn't very reliable.

Wow... I just read the mounted rules. I don't know how, but they made mounted combat even worse and more pointless than before.

Even as a Paladin or Druid the rules are bad (though not abysmal). Way to completely discourage a fun style of play Paizo!

Just to be clear, the developers have addressed your concern about how NPCs get the ability to do things by completely separating PCs from the rest of the world as far a mechanics go. A lot of folks are not happy about that, but it is pretty clear that if a GMs game needs a NPC who has forged a Legendary blade for the sake of the story, the GM only needs to flesh that character out as much as is necessary to make that happen. In this case, probably assigning a level to give a sense of what the DCs would be for dealing with anything they have created.

PF2 is not setting itself up to be easily converted into a video game.

Having rules for capable NPCs makes it more of a video game? NPCs in video games are wholly incapable of doing anything outside the narrative. They have no place in the world or story beyond being periphery filler. Giving rules to them gives them things to do in the world independent of the adventuring PCs which makes it a more deep and engaging world. You'd rather play in a world where it's only inhabitants are those expressly created by the DM for players to interact with. In my experience that creates shallow experiences at the table that players get bored with under the average DM.

You must have been exceptionally lucky with DMs to not see how big a problem it is to put all that work on the DM versus being part of the system. Most of the DMs I know would lose interest in DMing incredibly fast knowing they have to handcraft every NPC their players interact with if they want them to not be completely hollow skill-less shells. Yes it's important for DM fiat and adjudication to be encouraged. To make it necessary for every non-combat social interaction.

Also, separating PCs from the rest of world in terms of mechanics makes it more like video games than anything else. It says both that the rules that apply to PCs don't apply to the rest of the world and vice versa. It makes PCs in a sense not part of the world you're playing them in. I've met a couple of DMs I'd trust to run that sort of game. The majority I've met would be too quick to abuse the 'because I'm DM and I said so' approach because they didn't have rules in place to use for everything. It gives DMs carte blanche to just say 'You can't do X interacting with NPC Y' because they don't want to put in the work to determine how possible it would be so decide it would just be impossible. Or conversely just say 'Yes, you just do X when interacting with NPC Y' so they don't have to determine how easy or likely the task might be. That doesn't feel like fun to me or the vast majority of people I've gamed with over the years but that's exactly what most gaming parties will get if the system doesn't give the DM tools for adjudicating those interactions. I'd much rather the system have those tool and still encourage DM adjudication when they feel it's appropriate than it give us no tools and tells the DM 'just handle this aspect of the game however you think it should work'.

Unicore wrote:

I am asking out of honest ignorance here, but have you read through the whole section about skill checks and proficiencies in the play test? Because the rules call for GM arbitration for what any character can accomplish from a skill check based upon their proficiency. This is very different from PF1. Instead of saying it is a X DC to learn this specific fact, with the new system, the GM is perfectly within her right to decide that that untrained society check to learn something could have a higher DC for the untrained fighter vs the local diplomat. She could also decide that the information the fighter wants can't be determined from an untrained check alone. Maybe that untrained check can find them the person who might know, but that check may be much harder because the person who knows is a criminal who is trying to lay low.

GM Fiat is a bad place to have to hide your systems answers in a game that is historically all about crunch.

It always works, I will grant you. You can handwave the players' into a much more believable world at any time.

But if this is the intention of the system.... to determine what a player or NPC can do by virtue of their proficiencies and NOT their numerical bonus to the Skill Check, then lets see THAT system. Because PF2 is currently NOT that system in the way that it is actually written or expressed.

Of course there will always be an aside that establishes that the GM is the ultimate arbiter of what can or cannot be done, but if you have to rely on that, then you are not relying on the system they created and it begs the question: "Why have the system at all?" or "Why not change the system so that it CAN be relied upon to be the arbiter of what a character can and can't do?"

And this is the crux of this particular argument. The systems, as written, describe the way the world functions. All of the athlete-wizard and poet-laureate-barbarian examples are hyperbolic, but point toward a bad system for describing actions and characters in...

Exactly this! I actually like the concept of a tiered proficiency system a great deal. Level to proficiency unbalances the focus entirely to the point where most common tasks rely far more on the character's level than they do on their level of training or even the roll of the di. Why artificially inflate the bonus if you have to artificially inflate the difficulty to keep it from getting out of hand? Why should the roll the PC needs to make for a specific task be any different than the roll an NPC needs to make for the same task?

My main problems are pretty simple. The numerical difference between someone who is legendary at something is fairly negligible from someone who has never trained at it in their life. I understand the idea is to gate certain more difficult tasks behind the proficiency tiers but the playtest as-is does barely anything to support that. For one, there's a feat tax to do any of those tasks beyond the simple trained level of proficiency. That's fine for PCs since they get a decent number of skill feats as they level. For everyone else in the world though, it requires DM fiat and tinkering to allow them to be capable of anything since there aren't currently rules for NPC skills. The DM is expected to create everything to suit their game world.

I'd propose a different fix from the TC. For starters, define a lot more specific skill uses gated behind proficiency. Put some of them under the skill by default as opposed to locking them all behind skill feats. Second, I'd make it so the level bonus is different if you are trained vs untrained. For untrained things add only half your level to your proficiency. Trained, you add your full level. Personally I'd like to separate them further but it would create too much math for every tier of proficiency to confer a different percentage of your level to your proficiency bonus. It could get too confusing for some to add say, one fifth of your level to untrained and one quarter to trained and one third to expert, etc till you reach +level at legendary.

Unicore, unless the system was designed so that only adventurers and monsters are capable of doing anything then it's not doing what it's designed to do. So my examples weren't specific. I was trying to illustrate a fatal flaw in a direct and understandable way. The point of the matter is, in P2 with the rules as written a high level character will be flat out better at not just the things they've trained with and done repeatedly in their adventures but be better at absolutely every task that isn't expressly gated by proficiency tier. A 20th level wizard will be more athletic than a non-adventuring NPC whose spent their entire life working hard day in and day out in some form of manual labor. More agile and acrobatic than an NPC who was raised and performed on the high-wire since they were a little child. The 20th level fighter more knowledgeable about society than the 60 year old noble whose been educated at the highest level since birth. A 20th level adventurer could pick up a lute and perform better than a minstrel NPC whose made his living performing with one for 20 years.

The only way that's not true is if you adjust the DCs for the exact same task for the NPC for their lower level. If you're adjusting DCs for level like that though, what's the point in adding the level to the check to begin with? All it does is add extra numbers and math for the sake of adding extra numbers and math. This design philosophy complete eschews the sense that you are playing in a living breathing world and boils it down to the only things in the entire world that matter are the actions performed by the PCs. That's putting a very hefty emphasis on the 'game' in RPG and ignoring considerably the 'role' aspect of it.

Now, if you don't care about playing in a complete and functional world in your games then that's fine.

Criticize bounded accuracy all you like, it does have it's flaws and I firmly believe 5e leaned a little too hard into it. The fact of the matter is it works. On a lot of levels it works much better than every version of the game that came before it.

In my opinion, P2's level to everything approach just flat out doesn't work. Especially when combined with such a narrow proficiency range (-2 to +3). So much so that it almost completely trivializes the di roll. Level becomes more important than any other stat in the game the further along you get. More important than the whatever you roll on your d20. The only way it doesn't is if you continually artificially inflate the dc and ac of everything for no logical reason.

I don't care what level you are and how long you've been adventuring. A level 20 fighter shouldn't be better at crafting than the kingdom's royal blacksmith whose devoted their entire life to mastering their trade. In P2, not only is that level 20 fighter better at it but they can churn out masterpieces ten times faster than said royal blacksmith with relative ease and impunity while the royal blacksmith has to meticulously focus on every item.

To add more example, a level 20 wizard whose never trained his body shouldn't be able to beat the kingdom's best athlete in an obstacle course by parkouring his way up the side of a building in a narrow alley. In P2 however he does exactly that because to do that parkour he only needs to not roll a 1 because of his level while that athlete has to consistently roll above a 12+ even though they've been training their body for a decade.

Level to everything is bad but somewhat manageable for combat (AC/attack, etc). It is disastrously horrible for skills and certain saving throws, however. Bounded accuracy definitely needs some improvement and tweaking but at it's base level it is just an infinitely more functional system with considerably less unnecessary rules bloat.

I'm sure Drow will turn up as an ancestry heritage feat eventually. Possibly even in the DMG at launch.

If the barbarian's dragon breath is only once per hour I think the sorcerer will get to use theirs more even though they have a set limit per day and the barbarian doesn't. In most games, encounters are clustered together far more often than they are spread throughout the day. In my experience, this means the barbarian will only get to use it once (maybe twice) in a day since it's once per hour. The sorcerer on the other hand can get all it's uses off in a single encounter or in back to back encounters.

I'm ok with the concept of ancestry but they either went too far (making half-elf/half-orc an ancestry feat rather than their own ancestry) or they didn't go far enough (letting any ancestry take the half-elf/half-orc ancestry feats). It has always bothered me to no end that it's assumed that only humans could sire halfbreed children and then only with elves and orcs. I've been dying to play an official half-dwarf forever. Or a half-elf-half-orc. Or a half-dwarf-half-elf. If this is the concept they are going with for ancestry, they need to lean all the way into it and adjust and add half-race feats for every ancestry.

Some class feats specifically call out they apply for multi-attack penalty, like Double Slice. I think they mention it there because it's two attacks as part of one double action. I'd assume unless the feat says otherwise, each attack as part of a class feat counts towards the multi-attack penalty.

I just had an idea to fix my Monk AC issue. Expand Graceful Expertise. At 1st level in addition to raising unarmored defense to expert it lets you combine you Dex and Wisdom modifiers to a max of +5. At 13th, in addition to increasing the rank to master, it also allows you to combine your Wisdom and Dexterity modifiers for AC to a max of +6. At 17th when it becomes Graceful Legend, in addition to improving the rank to legendary it also improves the other bonus to allow Wisdom and Dex to combine for your AC up to +7. It makes the Monk less dependent on a single stat for defense allowing them to spread their ability boosts more making a wider array of builds viable. It puts them on par with armor wearing melee classes but does so over time.

2. On build versatility... I made a comment specifically about that! Did you check it out? I know you say letting Monks replace DEX with INT/WIS/CHA feels like a feat tax, but it doesn't have to be if you include a minor rider. Then, it feels like something enabling you to keep better skill checks and thematics without endangering build integrity, plus you get a minor bonus down the line. So there are suggestions to fix it.

3. Bracers of Armor is EQUALLY easy to acquire than Heavy Armor. If you see the treasure list, both +1 heavy armor and +2 bracers of armor are listed as equal level treasure (4th level). They are worth roughly the same amount of gold too (100gp vs 95gp, so bracers are even cheaper). If anything, Bracers of Armor are easier to obtain than heavy armor – magic armor +3 is 11th level treasure, while Bracers of Armor +4 is 8th level...?

2) That was someone else. I didn't say the idea was introducing a feat tax. Although, it doesn't address the Monk's issue of being dependent solely on an an ability for defense. It just shifts which ability the Monk is dependent on. Plus, adding a rider actually give the Int/Wis/CHa Monk an advantage over the Dex Monk. Unless you also add a feat with a similar rider for Dex Monk but then Dex Monk is spending a feat to get just a rider while the Int/Wis/Cha Monk is getting added versatility plus the rider. Maybe the feat doesn't replace Dex as the AC stat but simply adds the ability to use whichever stat has the higher bonus and adds a small rider. So if one of the two ability scores is hampered in some way temporarily, the Monk can shift to using the other.

3) At later levels bracer of armor become much more expensive. Around 20k gold at each items respective max. I'll admit I haven't checked the cost of higher quality armor to see how much that offsets the difference.

RoninJT wrote:

This is one of my biggest issues right now. They completely nerfed Monk AC and Monk AC wasn't great to begin with. Before Monk's could have passable AC without investing in items. In this playtest, Monk is wholly dependent on acquiring a specific magic item to not be completely outclassed by a fighter with basic mundane armor.

Monks will be able to, with Max Dex, will have the same AC as a Fighter. But all the Monk's AC is TAC, while the Fighter will have much lower TAC.

This is because Monks have 6 (DEX) + 4 (legendary) AC, and Fighters have 5 (splint armour) + 2 (DEX + 3 (máster) AC. Note the 5 difference.

If you add Magic items, a +2 DEX item gets the Monk one point higher than a Fighter.

So I'm not sure where you are coming from.

OK. Let me look at the real math. For starters, it's +3 for legendary and +2 for master. Same point difference between the examples but different totals for them.

Monk: 6 Dex + 3 (legendary) AC. That's a max of 9 without magic items but it does all apply to TAC

Fighter: 7 (Dex + armor) + 2 (master) AC. At first glance I admit that's not as bad a difference as I thought. The fighter can add a shield which brings them to 11 vs the monk's 9.

I'll admit to being wrong somewhat about end results here. There are still two small issues here though. First, the AC of people who wear armor is slightly more front-loaded than the Monk and the Monk is completely Dex dependent which severely limits build versatility. Second, it's easier and much cheaper to acquire magic armor than bracers of armor. The person who wears armor can also choose what type of armor to wear while the Monk only has a single choice in the bracers of armor. Only compensation is the bracers can go to +6 where magic armor is limited to a +5 bonus. Saving grace, it doesn't look like you can add defensive potency runes to a shield to double dip on magic armor bonuses, which keeps the AC difference minimized.

This is one of my biggest issues right now. They completely nerfed Monk AC and Monk AC wasn't great to begin with. Before Monk's could have passable AC without investing in items. In this playtest, Monk is wholly dependent on acquiring a specific magic item to not be completely outclassed by a fighter with basic mundane armor. A melee class that is dependent on acquiring a magic item to keep pace with other melee characters is just plain bad game design.

Sadly, I don't have any suggestions to fix it. They could add a Monk class feat to let them add their Wis to AC again but then it'd basically be a feat tax to make the monk competitive with other melee classes. Best thing to do I think is rewrite Graceful Expertise to grant more AC somehow. Maybe double or triple the training rank bonus to proficiency for unarmored defense (ie +2-3 for expert, +4-6 for master, and +6-9 for legendary).

Of course, I have a massive problem with the new proficiency system to begin with. I like the idea of tiers of training but the way they're executing it (tied to level) completely and utterly trivializes those tiers. With only a +1 bonus per tier of training the d20 roll becomes dramatically more important than how much you've invested in training a skill. I understand there will be certain tasks gated behind the training ranks but it still just feels inherently wrong to me that on a normal skill check the only thing separating the worst in the world at the task from the best is a 25% difference. Three out of every four rolls on average, an untrained newb of the same level will do just as well at a task as one of the world's best at it.

RoninJT wrote:

On a side note, that makes me very sketchy about the monk class as-is. They are generally supposed to be unarmored but no longer receive a secondary bonus to their AC from Wisdom. Suddenly, a monk played the way they are generally conceived to be played will always have the worst AC in the party. Not good design for a primarily melee class.

Monks get Unarmed Defence proficiency up to legendary, which helps. And then can wear bracers of armour, which (at level 20) goes up to +6AC, +5 saves. So they should be fine. Assuming i've not missed something!

Unarmed defense up to legendary doesn't really help much at all to address the issue. Bracers of armor isn't really an answer either. A fighter can do just fine with a mundane set of armor to boost their AC. Monk is entirely dependent on a specific magic item. That is bad game design. 'Hey, you can play a monk with AC to not get completely outmatched by everyone else. Oh, but you'll need to somehow acquire this specific magic item that gets pretty expensive later on to do it.' Who wants to play a class that is completely dependent on a specific magic item in order to keep pace with the rest of the party defensively?

Yeah..... RAW to me seems to heavily favor AC over attack. It'd be one thing if the weapon quality bonus and any rune bonus stacked on a weapon, so weapons could somewhat keep pace with armor (armor getting both the armor's value AND a rune bonus from magic items). As-is, AC just has more modifiers applying to it than attack does so by default AC will always outpace attack for anyone who wears armor.

On a side note, that makes me very sketchy about the monk class as-is. They are generally supposed to be unarmored but no longer receive a secondary bonus to their AC from Wisdom. Suddenly, a monk played the way they are generally conceived to be played will always have the worst AC in the party. Not good design for a primarily melee class.

I have a related issue with the proficiency rules as well. RAW, there is very little difference between someone who is untrained at something and someone who is legendary at it. Let me give an example.

Two characters both have the same Dexterity score. Character 1 hasn't spent so much as spent a single hour into training themselves how to tumble and use agility to move around their environment and any dangers there-in, leaving them untrained in Acrobatics. Character 2 has spent considerable time and effort to training themselves how to move with grace and agility to navigate the dangers of any given environment to become one of the best in the world making them legendary at Acrobatics. With only a range of 5 between them, the d20 completely trivializes the difference between them. It makes the roll of the dice (and as the TC pointed out the character's level) drastically more important than the character's investment in the skill. So much so there's practically no point whatsoever in investing in any skill beyond trained. Why invest further in one skill/ability to increase it's odds by 5% when you can invest in a different one to increase it's odds by 10%?

A separate issue with the new proficiency system is that from level 1 it scales AC more than it does attack. With AC you add the armor value, your proficiency, your Dex modifier, plus a potential item bonus from magic items. For attack you just add your relevant ability modifier, proficiency bonus, plus a potential item bonus from magic items. It's possible the Dex cap combined with the number of available boosts addresses my concern. I haven't done the math. On the surface though, it looks like AC will always be ahead of attack which gives advantage consistently to the defending opponent.

Under the new rules, Flurry of Blows is rife with potential conflicting issues. It is a single action that specifically tells you to take two actions. That directly conflicts the way the new action economy is structured. As it's a single action in the economy, do the multiple attack penalties apply since they consider each strike as a separate action? It very clearly needs to be more specifically defined in how it interacts with the action economy of the new rules.

Hmmm.... I think there's an easy solution to these issues. Split Lore into two types. General lore and Specialized lore.

General lore is for broad subjects. It would allow you to have basic knowledge on a subject that may or may not be mechanically relevant. It won't help you identify specific weaknesses or facts about a given creature or location but instead provide general or comparative knowledge about a subject. You wouldn't know a specific type of monster is weak to silver or is particularly venomous but you might know what types of environments it and a much wider array of monsters tend to favor. You wouldn't know the best place to eat a certain delicacy in one city or which shops carry a specific item you're looking for but you'd know what the culture of the kingdom it's in is like and types of cuisine and goods/merchandise the kingdom is known for.

Specialized lore is for more focused subjects. For instance, undead lore would let you know specific strengths and weaknesses of just creatures with the undead type. 'City X' lore would function like knowledge (local), letting you know specific things about a specific location, such as which shop to purchase a specific type of magic item, which residents are important or connected, which taverns serve the best ale, etc.

General lore could be created by the player to cover any range of subjects the player might be interested in for their character. It could be adjudicated as necessary by the DM. Specialized lore would be defined by the rules, such as each specific creature type, specific locations, etc. Any narrow subject there is specific and relevant information to learn.