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Gortle is talking about the fact that no matter how good a community is and/or how true a person's comment might be some people will dislike it because it goes against what they think.

And what I'm talking about is that no matter how true a comment is, if it's off-topic, it not only doesn't belong there, but also damages the reputation of the community associated with the comment. Unsolicited advice is off-topic. There are options a community member can take to dilute or remove those comments.

Being different or raising an objection should be fine. Its not.

It's fine to be different or raise an objection. It's not fine to offer unsolicited advice. Ginny Di's issue stems from unsolicited advice. Regardless of which community you reside in, if you care about your community's public reputation, you should know your available tools and what you can do to protect your community's reputation.

There exist healthier online communities that do self-policing. Youtube has a report button for harassment that can be used to silently fight toxic posts. Healthy communities also have a tendency for their non-toxic members to be politely vocal enough to drown out the toxic voice.

Just adding my two cents in case you care about improving the PF community.

Playing Extinction Curse now. I'm having a lot of fun. But one peeve I have is that the party doesn't go anywhere fantastic until the later books. It's farmlands after farmlands after farmlands for a long while, and I do prefer my fantasy experience happen in a magical fantasy setting.

False life and longstrider will realistically be cast much much more than 15 times in a 1~20 campaign.

Regarding the first post, my gut instinct on the aim trait is that it makes crossbows much stronger at level 1 because an extra d10 is worth a lot and very few ranged classes have functional reactions at that level. However, at later levels, the extra reaction eats up a bigger and bigger opportunity cost because many items, class / skill / ancestry feats can grant some pretty good reactions, and a single d10 isn't worth much when enemy hp pools bloat.

Edit: Just a heads up, being able to attack outside your turn doesn't allow you to interrupt spells in this edition. You need specific text, such as one that appears in attack of opportunity, to disrupt manipulate actions.

Highly recommend gunslinger or gunslinger archetype for sniper's reload, unless your other party members are somehow able to give you flat-footed enemies.

I thought the common consensus was to use panache for flat damage against bosses and not use finishers.

Don't skills scale at a faster rate than weapon accuracy? Monster saves (low save) and monster AC should be in the same ballpark regardless of level. If a character has trouble beating a boss monster's saves with skills, then the same character should have as much, if not more trouble bypassing a monster's AC with a weapon.

It could work if everyone at your local community is an experienced GM.

I tried rotating GMs at one table. It went for about 1 cycle, and then when the turn came up for one unenthusiastic person to GM, we got a bunch of delayed / skipped sessions and the group fell apart.

From my understanding, from a mechanical PoV, swashbucklers are power-moderate martials that might be fun to play because their chassis and panache system keeps the player on their toes. There's some built-in complexity that isn't a part of other core martial class chassis, and some players value playing a complex class, even if it doesn't compete with the strongest of martials.

Full disclaimer I haven't seen or played a swashbuckler.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at the numbers for polymorph form spells? They're strong enough to match a martial without damage boosts (ranger, monk, champion, non-sneak attack rogue).

When my group started PF2e with age of ashes, I made an animal druid that purchased a riding dog (4gp) with starting wealth.

In retrospect, I think it was a rules mistake / houserule that I was able to use the dog in battle, but it was fun nontheless using all three actions to command the animal companion and riding dog.

A battle oracle in their curse hits about as often as a barbarian, but instead of rage damage and resistances gets full spellcasting and fast healing. Seems about right as is.

Do they? Oracles are Cha-key and have caster progression weapon proficiency which means they only match weapon proficiency with the barbarian at levels 1~4 and 11~12. They'll always be at least one point behind because of Cha-key vs Str-key attributes, and that also affects their weapon choices. If the oracle picks a Str-weapon, their attribute spread of Str-Cha means they sacrifice either Con / Dex / Wis, which affects their survivability. If they pick a Dex-weapon, they fight with a small weapon dice. And this isn't even accounting for weapon specialization differences or survivability differences due to 8hp vs 12hp per level or save progression differences.

Regarding battle oracle, I don't think there's a problem letting their bonuses being untyped. They won't reach any martial-tier power with those bonuses anyway, and their mystery bonus can't be stolen via archetyping.

A staff of divination probably allows you to interweave multiple castings of true strike for your eidolon:
@ Act together true strike -> eidolon strike
@ true strike
@ eidolon strike

Though I haven't run the numbers, I'd hazard a guess that a primal polymorph summoner using ___ form + tandem movement + AoO and eidolon's opportunity combined with no shared MAP probably dishes out high damage, as both summoner and eidolon can take their first two MAP strikes both with martial tier damage.

For a period of time, I used to allow PCs to choose which info they gained from RK. But from experience, about 95% of the time, useful information is about monster defenses - weak save, resistance, weakness, immunity, etc.

Learning a monster's offense doesn't really help unless you gain the info pre-combat. During combat, I found learning a monster's offense to not be helpful for a few reasons. First, there's a big action opportunity cost to use a defensive buff when you could be dishing out damage. Second, many times, PCs don't have the right defensive tool immediately at hand. If the offense info is gained pre-combat however, PCs can purchase/prepare the right defenses and then spend the buff-action cost pre-combat.

However, I found learning a monster's defense helps a lot in-combat. Many PCs have varied attack options, versatile weapons, backup weapons, spells that target different saves, spells that do different elements of damage, etc. Different attack options are usually available, but the PC doesn't have the info on which one bypasses defenses the best.

Right now, when I GM, I default to giving out defense information on in-combat RK, except once in a blue moon when I think the PCs are helped by some other info.

I've played a level 7~8 construct summoner with ooze form + tandem strike + tandem movement. The build was a temporary placeholder until Guns & Gears became available so I could rebuild it as an inventor, so I played with a house-rule letting the summoner be Int-based instead of Cha. imo it was reasonably effective. Neither overpowered nor underpowered. Polymorphed flanking tandem strike hits hard, but is probably better with the primal spell list.

Imo as long as the creature's low save / weakness / resistance / immunities and level (for the purpose of determining incapacitation) are available after a recall knowledge, then even a normal roll without any rider effects are valuable to a party.

I understand the reasoning of the focus on medicine / diplomacy / intimidate. They're all good 3rd actions on a class that needs good 3rd actions, and visitation / intimidate / bon-mot / one for all doesn't have table variation whereas recall knowledge does.

That said, I personally really dislike these builds - in a four-man party where different PCs cover different attributes and skills, having the Int-key character cover Cha/Wis skills puts pressure on the rest of the party to cover society / arcana / occultism / crafting. Imo, if recall knowledge is so bad that you feel forced going to Cha, what the player should do is to talk to their GM to make sure the payoff of recall knowledge is fair and meaningful.

At my table, it depends on:
- the severity of the loss - If a PC would die / lose a very significant portion of character power / health / resource enough to risk death, I tend to allow it.
- how far back the take-back is - If it's a very recent take-back, such as within the same turn and die-rolls haven't happened, I tend to allow it.
- how inconsequential the take-back is - If it's something minor that doesn't alter the overall flow of battle and that doesn't take time, such as retroactively applying persistent damage + the d20 flat check to recover from it when it's remembered, then I tend to allow it.
- how strongly the player cares - If I sense that a player might feel cheated and upset about a past decision, I tend to allow it.

Some examples of take-backs I don't allow are:
- tactical decisions that were consciously made but later regretted.
- forgetting to apply / use an ability at a significant time later (1 round+ in encounter mode, roughly 10+ in-game minutes in other modes) then when it was needed.
And even then I sometimes offer to allow such take-backs with a hero point.

I want my players to feel safe that they aren't playing a game of forgetful gotchas, and when their character does go down / die, I want it to feel fair.

I let my PCs go at their own pace and return if/when they want to rest for spells. Though none of the fights outside the BBEG were too hard, out the others, the wyrmwraith and xotanis were relatively difficult for my party. That said, at this high level I'd expect there to be table variance in experience.

Beastkin versatile heritage + some homebrew to emphasize the otter flavor?

Synesthesia and flickmaces. The game's balanced really well, which makes these two stick out all the more.

Cool. I agree.

To clarify, it's a thing then, for bow users to spend an action to reload their bow before combat, so their first ranged strike in combat can't be prevented by AoO crit?

If you can reload a reload 0 weapon without firing, then you can simply do it twice in one round, the first one to soak the interrupting critical hit, and the second before you fire your weapon.

If you can't reload a reload 0 weapon without firing, then it follows that you can't reload a repeating crossbow / air repeater pre-combat. To me, this seems too weird to be true.

There's no complication or grey area. It's a Free Interact/Manipulate Action attached to a Strike. It's a free action, but it still is a Interact/Manipulate action.

Citation please. If it's a free action, it should be possible to reload 0 as a free action separately from making the ranged strike, thus preventing the AoO from cancelling the ranged bow attack.

Also I'd like an answer to 1) and 2) preferably with explanations.

I never interpreted these rules as reload 0 taking actual interact actions to load, because, well, there are 0 actions being spent reloading. I imagined that in these set of rules, using a 0-reload weapon meant the weapon was trivial enough to operate that reloading and all the negatives associated with it are non-existent (apart from of course, the AoO triggered from firing a ranged weapon). I guess it's possible to argue from a realism PoV that nocking a bow in combat would provoke, but I thought in this game that sort of opening was abstracted out in favor of gameplay smoothness, much in the same way that swinging around a big heavy greatsword doesn't provoke. I'm not confident my interpretation is correct, but I'm also not entirely convinced by opposition arguments.

Two additional questions:
1) Is it possible to reload a reload 0 weapon without firing it?
2) Would an AoO critical hit interrupt a repeating weapon reload 0?

For reference, the current in-game reload 0 weapons beside bows are air repeaters, shurikens, and repeating crossbows.

Why would reload 2 provoke 2 reactions, reload 1 provoke 1 reaction, but reload 0 provoke 1 reaction?

Imo it's not really a big deal.
1) This is only a level 20 problem, as opposed to level 1~19
2) The reactions given by each of those feats are what those classes will typically use anyway. If hypothetically the swash or the gunslinger got the fighters version of the level 20 reaction feat, their routine will likely not change.

I guess there's a point to be made for champion dedication + champion reaction, but imo it's enough of a fringe case that deciding to keep the feats different in the name of flavor/differentiation is ok.

Opportune backstab doesn't really help for all three reaction feats because the additional reaction given is only available during the opponent's turn, not your ally's. Though I guess it could help if there are two fighters who both have the level 20 reaction feat and both have paladin reaction + opportune backstab.

A number of paizo adventure paths took the route of preparing a couple of skirmish encounters across various scenes throughout the battlefield / castle with some secondary objectives (destroy a siege engine within x rounds, prevent hostiles from attacking y creature, defeat all enemies within z rounds, etc). The result of the battle, or in your case, the number of remaining survivors, depended on how well the PCs succeeded in these secondary objectives.

This gets into advice / house rule territory, but regardless of what RAW interpretation these boards fixate on, what works best for your table might be different. Compared to a PC who gets a familiar without asking for one, a witch + familiar master PC probably spent their class feats on their familiar and wants their familiar to be useful. I'd try to work with the player to rule a more lax interpretation / add houserules like additional familiar abilities that specifically allow exploration activities, possibly some that cost more than 1 familiar ability. Or at the very least offer a free re-spec if they're disillusioned by stricter familiar-exploration RAW rulings.

This sounds like the perfect thread for greystone to go on a rant.

The rules are clear about the eidolon.

Act Together

Single ActiontoThree Actions
SummonerTandem
Source Secrets of Magic pg. 53
Frequency once per round
You and your eidolon act as one. Either you or your eidolon takes an action or activity using the same number of actions as Act Together, and the other takes a single action. For example, if you spent 2 actions to Act Together, you could cast burning hands (2 actions) and your eidolon could Strike (1 action), or your eidolon could use its Breath Weapon (2 actions) and you could Stride (1 action).

This lets you each use separate exploration activities like Avoid Notice as you travel.

Regarding the OP, we used to have the familiar feed elixirs, but that was before the dev clarification that familiars can't activate items. In our current game, the witch generally used the familiar for final sacrifice.

Regarding scouting, though my PCs haven't ever attempted to scout with the familiar, I see no RAW reason to stop them. Familiars are quite obviously intelligent from their capabilities as a familiar as well as various lost omens familiar depictions. They act as they please after 1 minute of issuing no commands, and I assume this is the default state of most out-of-combat familiars and companions. Tasking the familiar to scout is open-ended enough that it's more of a general request than a specific command, so abiding by such a request similarly goes in line with the familiar acting as it pleases. Further assuming that familiars are helpful to their owner, I see no reason why a familiar wouldn't scout if asked. Though I suppose it's not a RAW given that a familiar is helpful, I think it falls under common sense that they are.

I don't think a scouting familiar is stealing anyone's role. Most PCs don't scout with stealth anyway because there's a lot of risk involved by splitting the party + the chance of getting caught. From my experience, stealth based PCs are usually utilizing stealth for an hidden + initiative boost for encounter mode. A scouting familiar's closest roll overlap is prying eyes, not a stealth PC.

Also I don't think a scouting familiar unfairly takes up screen time. Without specific familiar abilities, the familiar's owner doesn't have a way to see through the familiar's eyes. In game, if a familiar owner sends their familiar to scout, the "screen" stays with the PCs. The GM just decides if / when the familiar returns and what information the familiar brings back - there's no need to roll dice or simulate the scouting or choose an exploration strategy. On the other hand, if the familiar owner has a way of seeing through the familiar AND issuing commands from a distance (e.g. Familiar's Eyes / Familiar's Face), then the "screen time" spent is no different than any other case of divination such as prying eyes, which is to say, such screen time can be spent scouting anyway even without a familiar.

In general I agree. One criticism I have of this taxonomy is that it doesn't differentiate areas of expertise that do or don't stack. Protection via action denial doesn't stack if different characters apply stunned + slowed. Setup doesn't stack if multiple characters apply frightened + clumsy (or more frightened), likewise, multiple characters applying different forms of flat-footed don't stack.

If I were subdividing the values of player characters, I would probably add more categories of taxonomy to specify what does or does not stack , such as by dividing out action denial from protection and splitting setup by making status penalties and flat-footed their own categories. The greatest value characters would be those bringing the most stacking taxonomies as action-efficiently as possible. A party shouldn't need to cover all taxonomies, but a party that covers most taxonomies would likely be one that's combat efficient.

In my home games, I only proc golem antimagic for activated magical abilities and spells. Elemental property runes don't proc the weakness. They just add elemental damage that the golem might be immune to (or not). We played once with elemental property runes proc-ing antimagic weakness and martial damage kinda exploded too much for my personal taste.

Well if it's just about shield or no shield, the opportunity cost isn't really about armor innovation, but rather the weapon choice + 2~3 class feats for bastion dedication + the gold cost of a sturdy shield.

Assuming your must-pick inventor feats are megavolt at 6th and gigavolt at 12, and also assuming your must-pick bastion feats are dedication at 2nd and quick shield block at 10th, you still have a few class feats open to play with other stuff (4th and 8th). Going with your earlier post, this could be nimble shield hand (6th) and searing restoration (2nd). This is assuming you don't play with free archetype.

One example of an opportunity cost might be fighter dedication with the feat picks as follows
2nd: bastion dedication -> fighter dedication
4th: searing restoration -> attack of opportunity
6th: megavolt
8th: nimble shield hand -> fighter resiliency
10th: quick shield block -> combat assessment
12th: gigavolt

and also the item swap of level 10 sturdy shield to cold iron or mithral weapon to bypass resistance / proc weakness.

Fighter resiliency is 12 hp which is about the same as one shield block with a sturdy shield. The difference being the sturdy shield can be used multiple times vs the extra HP doesn't cost reactions and works on damage that isn't restricted to melee.

Combat assessment is nice because as an int-class, you want to cover recall lores on arcana / occultism / society / crafting, but strike + megavolt makes you very action starved.

For instance Kovlar, a level 5 settlement has a unique entry that says

"City of Artisans Items of up to 8th level can be found in Kovlar, and armor and weapons of up to 12th level."

Afaik, for the AP in which Kovlar makes an appearance, the PCs enter the city around mid-level 12, which is about one and a half-levels after +2 armor potency runes should normally become available (level 11). Investing in crafting would grant the party access to +2 armor without toughing it out for a few levels.

Also regarding the AP featuring Hermea, the PCs enter that city at level 18, which is a whole level after apex items normally become available (level 17), so this phenomena happens at least twice.

Edit: maybe level 19 for Hermea, so actually two levels late.

What do you mean by "lose some damage"? What weapon is your armor inventor using?

Inventor feat.

Also some APs don't provide level appropriate settlements at key levels for potency rune upgrades, so getting them "easily" mid-adventure is imo questionable.

I haven't had much of a problem with AoOs at my table, both as a GM and a player. They're good, but they can be played around. From a player perspective fighting monsters with AoO, just cast hideous laughter.

In our VTT game we played out the hazard through theatre of the mind. Once we passed the hazard, the GM moved our tokens to the exit.

IMO, even with a one level bump, some of the fights seem unfair. For example, I don’t think a few extra hit points and a +1(or +3) bonus to reflex/fort saves are going to help the party against the wasp swarm, which is grossly under-CRed in my opinion (let’s face it, multiple DC 21 saves per round, able to hit multiple creatures a round, resist 7 to bludgeoning/piercing? And they aren’t going to know enough to buy acid flasks.).

Granted during play, anything could go wrong, if the PCs had a one level bump by the wasp swarm, they would be level 3, and PCs get a lot of stuff at level 3. General feats could offer toughness or canny acumen fortitude. Cloistered clerics and druids get expert fortitude at level 3 whereas bards get expert reflex at level 3. Casters get another spell level or more spells known, which means they're more likely to have area spells in their arsenal. And even if the PCs only get 8 more hp, that's effectively two more rounds of staying up against the wasp swarm's stage 2 poison damage (average 7 damage a turn).

I suggested the alternative with the assumption that saving GM prep time is important to you. It takes 0 work for the GM and makes the AP easier. If you have both time and effort to tweak every encounter by hand, I'm sure you could produce better results.

Regarding the cockatrice, my players never fought it. There's no trail or evidence or anything in-book that points the PCs to investigate the rock outcropping where the cockatrice resides. If they do though, your suggested change seems like it could work. You could also give the cockatrice the basilisk treatment and say its blood can remove petrification. This would allow the petrified PC to still participate in the upcoming druid fight.

Its actually really fair for a GM to rule that even common materials aren't available, or available in the desired quantity in a given location. A small fishing village isn't going to have lots of metal ingots, a desert outpost probably wont have lots of wood, ect, ect, ect.

The difference though is that the rulebook states you can usually find raw materials. In contrast, earn income task selection isn't an automatic given - the rulebook says the available tasks are determined by the GM.

You must supply raw materials worth at least half the item's Price. You always expend at least that amount of raw materials when you Craft successfully. If you're in a settlement, you can usually spend currency to get the amount of raw materials you need, except in the case of rarer precious materials.

You use one of your skills to make money during downtime. The GM assigns a task level representing the most lucrative job available. You can search for lower-level tasks, with the GM determining whether you find any. Sometimes you can attempt to find better work than the initial offerings, though this takes time and requires using the Diplomacy skill to Gather Information, doing some research, or socializing.

There's no guarantee you can find a downtime task of an appropriate level, even if you're in a settlement. At one table, the GM might handwave all downtime tasks and make every skill task available at every level in the settlement (up to the settlement level), but at another table, the GM might specify which tasks are available based on the settlement background, NPC connections, story, etc. and only offer tasks for certain select skills.

Once you have the formula, a crafting station (6 bulk for alchemy), and raw materials, the crafting skill can be used for downtime income anywhere anytime.

My group failed the first show and critically succeeded all following shows. There's nothing much to be lost from failing the first show, so it's not really a problem unless your players are allergic to failure. It's also somewhat reasonable that the first show is the hardest because the members of the circus of wayward wonders just escaped the celestial menagerie, nobody really knows what they're doing, and probably the most experienced veteran gets killed right before the opening act.

An alternative you could try instead of tweaking all encounters is to have the PCs be one level higher than the recommended level. It saves a lot of GM prep time and the AP will definitely be easier. If you later think the PCs can handle tougher fights, you can delay their level-up so their level matches the recommended level.

Teleport / burrow next to the repairers and attack them instead, or throw out a bunch of AoE or ranged attacks. Having legendary repair means you're facing level 13+ opponents, and those tend to have more tools at their disposal than a bunch of brutes who can't walk past a body-blocked corridor.

Edit: alternatively, don't engage the PCs in a 10ft corridor.

Repeating crossbows are advanced weapons and thus are not eligible for weapon innovation.

If you're asking from a game-balance point of view of repairing construct companions, I don't think it's a big issue. Legendary crafting healing via repair heals a lot more than other one-action heals (50 ~ 70 depending on if you have the crafter's eyepiece), but you need adjacency and it's limited to your construct companion, which is kind of a low-priority target anyway.

If hypothetically we get an ancestry that can be repaired, then we might start having balance issues.

Edit: actually 50~70 per action isn't that far off from a level 9 / level 10 heal, which many animal companion classes can get via heal animal, and heal animal is range 30.