Learning Takes a Lifetime

Monday, June 04, 2018

While the kind of armor you wear, weapon you wield, and spells you know can be important measures of your character's power, your choice in skills is indicative of your character's depth. Is your character good at feats of acrobatics? Can they recall knowledge with scholastic effortlessness? Are they the sneakiest sneaker in the sneakerverse? Your skills may aid you in the thick of a fight, but they also enhance your effect on the world when the ringing of steel and the whizzing of spells subside.

The Pathfinder Playtest deals with skills a bit differently than the first edition did. First and foremost, we have cut down the skill list to 17 base skills (down from 35 base skills in Pathfinder First Edition). Now, I say "base skills" because the Lore skill can be split into numerous different lores, but for many purposes, like for this blog post, we can describe it as being a single skill.

Much of the reduction came from consolidation; for instance, we put the general functions of Use Magic Device into each of the various knowledge skills that focus on magical traditions, and we wrapped up a bunch of Strength-based skills into a general Athletics skill. In most cases, we coupled the consolidation with being a tad more generous in the number of skills you can be trained in (for instance, the fighter has 3 + Intelligence modifier trained skills in the playtest rather than 2 + Int in Pathfinder First Edition), making it easier to have a well-rounded character.

So what exactly are these 17 skills? They (and their key ability scores) are: Acrobatics (Dex), Arcana (Int), Athletics (Str), Crafting (Int), Deception (Cha), Diplomacy (Cha), Intimidation (Cha), Lore (Int), Medicine (Wis), Nature (Wis), Occultism (Int), Performance (Cha), Religion (Wis), Society (Int), Stealth (Dex), Survival (Wis), and Thievery (Dex).

Skill Proficiency

Like many things in the Pathfinder Playtest, skills interact with the proficiency system. While a detailed description of the system can be found here, here's the nitty-gritty. Your character can be untrained, trained, an expert, a master, or legendary in a skill. Being untrained grants you a modifier of your level - 2, while being trained grants you a bonus equal to your level, expert a bonus equal to your level + 1, master a bonus equal to your level + 2, and legendary a bonus equal to your level + 3. Then, of course, you add your ability modifier in the key ability for that skill, and apply any other bonuses or penalties. But the new skill system is more than just the bonus you gain. Each level of proficiency unlocks skill uses that are either intrinsic to the skill itself or that are uses you select as your character advances.

Skill Uses

To give you an idea of what this means, let's take a quick look at the Medicine skill. Whether you are trained in Medicine or not, you can Administer First Aid.

[[A]] Administer First Aid

Manipulate

Requirements You must have healer's tools.

You perform first aid on an adjacent creature that is at 0 Hit Points in an attempt to stabilize or revive it. You can also perform first aid on an adjacent creature taking persistent bleed damage. The DC for either is 15. If a creature is both dying and bleeding, choose which one you're trying to end before you roll. You can Administer First Aid again to attempt to remedy the other.

Success The creature at 0 Hit Points gains 1 Hit Point, or you end the persistent bleed damage.

Critical Failure A creature with 0 Hit Points has its dying condition increased by 1. A creature with persistent bleed damage takes damage equal to the amount of its persistent bleed damage.

Basically, this skill use allows anyone who has a healing kit to treat another creature who is dying or suffering from bleed damage, which is super useful. Of course, being untrained reduces your chances to save your friend and increases your chances to hurt them accidentally, but it's worth trying in a pinch. If you are trained in the skill, not only do your chances to help a friend by Administering First Aid increase, but you also gain the ability to use the skill to Treat Disease and Treat Poison, something that someone untrained in the skill cannot do.

Skill Feats

These default uses are just the beginning. As you increase in level, you periodically gain skill feats, usually at even-numbered levels (unless you're a rogue—they gain skill feats every level instead). Skill feats are a subsection of general feats, which means that any character can take them as long as they meet the prerequisites. Moving forward with the example of the Medicine skill, as long as you are at least trained in Medicine, you can take the Battle Medic skill feat. This feat allows you to apply straight-up healing to an ally through nonmagical means, which is nice when your cleric is knocked to the ground or has run out of uses of channel energy.

For a higher-level example, Robust Recovery is a Medicine skill feat you can take after becoming an expert in that skill, and increases the bonus to saving throws against poison and diseases when you treat creatures with those trained skill uses. When you become legendary in Medicine, you can gain this skill feat:

Legendary Medic Feat 15

General, Skill

Prerequisites legendary in Medicine

You've invented new medical procedures or discovered ancient techniques that can achieve nearly miraculous results. Once per day for each target, you can spend 1 hour treating the target and attempt a Medicine check to remove a disease or the blinded, deafened, drained, or enervated condition. Use the DC of the disease or of the spell or effect that created the condition. If the effect's source is an artifact, a creature above 20th level, or other similarly powerful source, increase the DC by 5.

The more powerful or useful the skill feat, the higher the proficiency required to take it. Legendary Medic grants you the ability to perform amazing feats of healing through skill and experience rather than magic, but you must gain that skill and experience first. Of course, the Medicine skill is just the tip of the iceberg. This structure is replicated with every skill, including nearly every rogue's favorite—Stealth.

Stealth is a bit of an outlier in that all of its initial uses can be attempted untrained, but training and later proficiency in the skill yields some very subversive results. The Quiet Allies skill feat allows you to use your expertise in Stealth to reduce those pesky armor check penalties on allies' skill checks, while Swift Sneak allows a master in Stealth to move at their full speed when they Sneak. Upon becoming legendary, you further enhance your skill by no longer needing to specifically declare the sneaking exploration tactic when you are in exploration mode, allowing you to sneak everywhere. You're just that good.

But this is all just the start. Mark will take up more aspects of what you can do with skill feats this Friday!

Constant Progress

Like many aspects of the Pathfinder Playtest, the goal of skills is not only to gain the greatest bonus, but also for you to expand outward and create a unique character who uses skills the way you want them to be used. Much like how ancestry feats allow you to choose the type of human, dwarf, elf, or whatever you want to play, the proficiency and skill feat system will enable you to determine what kind of knowledgeable, athletic, or sneaky character you want to play. Over time, this system gives us the opportunity to add more skill uses by way of skill feats, which will allow the game to become more dynamic as we add options. This also allows you to continue to grow your skills in new and surprising ways without us having to pull out the wires of the underlying skill, which is something we are always loath to do. In this way, as the game progresses, we can expand skill options in an open-ended way, without invalidating the gateway mechanics.

Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Senior Designer

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3 people marked this as a favorite.
Leedwashere wrote:
Lucas Yew wrote:
Not bad, the legendary feats are. But seriously, fighters and other non-casters should have above average skill points compared to casters; +1 compared to PF1 is a bit meh...

It's not just +1 compared to PF1. The maximum number of skills has been reduced by nearly half, and many useful ones are rolled together. Perception isn't something that takes your skill ranks at all anymore. It looks like just +1 over PF1 at first glance, but that ignores all of the changes which make it more significant. In PF1 if you wanted your fighter to be good at climbing, swimming, noticing things, and reading people, that took 4 skill ranks. In PF2 that requires just 1. (EDIT: that is, of course, assuming that sense motive has been rolled into perception and not deception. Sense motive may not have had the same publicity as a "necessary skill" in PF1 as perception did, but it should have)

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

Overall I really like where this is going. It's good to know that skills have things that anyone can do, and it's great to know that a bunch of different people who are all of the same proficiency level in the same skill might still have vastly different abilities. That ability to carve out your own niche in whatever your focus might be is very much my favorite thing about the PF2 design ethos.

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

I still wish that the Thievery skill was called something else, though. That's the only thing so far that I haven't come around on. It irks me so.

Additionally, each class gets a suite of thematic skills that they're trained in; the 3+Int the Fighter gets is a bonus set of choices you can take in addition to whatever skills all Fighters are trained in. We know all Clerics start off trained in Perform, for example.


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Corrik wrote:
With the Lv 15 Legendary stealth feat, you no longer have to tell your DM "Just assume I'm stealthing unless I say otherwise."

Other things seem to be: "I'm stealthy even when I'm asleep", "I'm stealthy while surrounded by guards staring at me", and "I'm stealthy while there's literally no way to stealth". At least theoretically.

If I'm right, the big boon is "always use Stealth as initiative, no matter what". That sounds pretty good.

Sovereign Court

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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
FedoraFerret wrote:
Not gonna lie, unless Remove Blindness/Deafness and Cure Disease have been turned into much higher level spells I'm not super impressed by that legendary Heal feat.

Seconded.

Remove Poison/Disease and Remove Blindness/Deafness are 3rd level spells that Divine spellcasters of 5th level or higher could cast in PF1. The fact that they think Legendary proficiency with a Skill Feat being even just comparable to a 5th level Cleric's spell power (again, assuming no major spell level change) is just laughable.

Let me guess what's next, Legendary Stealth allows a "Hide in Plain Sight" skill feat that grants a form of Invisbility, something that 2nd level+ Arcane Spellcasters can do? Cool, sure, but you could at least raise it to Improved Invisibility for a Legendary Skill + Feat.

Remove Blindness/Deafness

Remove blindness/deafness cures blindness or deafness (your choice), whether the effect is normal or magical in nature. The spell does not restore ears or eyes that have been lost, but it repairs them if they are damaged.

Regenerate
The subject’s severed body members (fingers, toes, hands, feet, arms, legs, tails, or even heads of multi-headed creatures), broken bones, and ruined organs grow back. After the spell is cast, the physical regeneration is complete in 1 round if the severed members are present and touching the creature. It takes 2d10 rounds otherwise.

Legendary Medic seems to mimic BOTH of these effects, not just one of them. If I rip your eyes from your body the way Legendary Medic is worded, it can fix that. Cure Blind/Deaf... not so much. So before you rant about copying a 5th level ability also look at the fact that you are also copying a 13th level ability without expending any magic.


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I wpuld question about disease curing spells. Things are changing and they already said stuff like diseases, poison and such are much more serious.
Stop basing comments around the idea everything else is going to remain the same. It won't.
Being able to heal a permanently blind person is amazing even nowadays, and normally using stealth in exploration is likelly going to have a cost.
These feats are already amazing. I wpuld absolutely hate if skills could do supernatural stuff, instead of superhuman.

Designer

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Legendary Medic also has another really powerful advantage that would likely require in-depth analysis of the playtest document to undercover but I can tell you right off: The chances for say, a 16th-level legendary Medicine user to remove a 17th+ level affliction with this feat are substantially better than any other 16th-level character's odds. This advantages dissipates a bit at level 17 for a caster willing to use a 9th-level spell slot on affliction-removal (though that's quite an expensive resource), and evaporates compared to a level 20 cleric who takes 10th-level spells and then prepares a remove curse or the like in that slot (which seems quite unlikely when you could prepare miracle or avatar, and even then, the Legendary Medic can keep going with it and the cleric has one of those a day).


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Crayon wrote:
That said, it seems like Skills are another aspect of the game being made more complicated for complexity's sake...

I think that's an unfair assertion. In many ways skills are less complicated than they were. You don't have to keep divvying up your points the same way every level or fall hopelessly behind. You know exactly what non-standard things you can do with your skills, because you had to actively choose to be able to do those things.

And, while the skill feats system might be more complex in a vacuum than the skill system in PF1, it's not for no reason. If 6 years down the line the developers have an idea that they think would make a great skill feat for skill X to work with subsystem Y, then the only thing they have to do is make that skill feat. The things that make the system more complex also make it future-proof in a way that PF1 never was.


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Kiln Norn wrote:
Legendary Medic seems to mimic BOTH of these effects, not just one of them. If I rip your eyes from your body the way Legendary Medic is worded, it can fix that.

It is? The way I read Legendary Medic it cannot cure mutilations, and if that is within the scope of the ability I will like to marked it as a FAQ candidate right now.


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Igwilly wrote:

I wpuld question about disease curing spells. Things are changing and they already said stuff like diseases, poison and such are much more serious.

Stop basing comments around the idea everything else is going to remain the same. It won't.
Being able to heal a permanently blind person is amazing even nowadays, and normally using stealth in exploration is likelly going to have a cost.
These feats are already amazing. I wpuld absolutely hate if skills could do supernatural stuff, instead of superhuman.

Fortunately, you're not getting what you want. We already have an example of a Stealth feat that makes you so good at hiding you can't be detected even with true seeing.


Kiln Norn wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
FedoraFerret wrote:
Not gonna lie, unless Remove Blindness/Deafness and Cure Disease have been turned into much higher level spells I'm not super impressed by that legendary Heal feat.

Seconded.

Remove Poison/Disease and Remove Blindness/Deafness are 3rd level spells that Divine spellcasters of 5th level or higher could cast in PF1. The fact that they think Legendary proficiency with a Skill Feat being even just comparable to a 5th level Cleric's spell power (again, assuming no major spell level change) is just laughable.

Let me guess what's next, Legendary Stealth allows a "Hide in Plain Sight" skill feat that grants a form of Invisbility, something that 2nd level+ Arcane Spellcasters can do? Cool, sure, but you could at least raise it to Improved Invisibility for a Legendary Skill + Feat.

Remove Blindness/Deafness

Remove blindness/deafness cures blindness or deafness (your choice), whether the effect is normal or magical in nature. The spell does not restore ears or eyes that have been lost, but it repairs them if they are damaged.

Regenerate
The subject’s severed body members (fingers, toes, hands, feet, arms, legs, tails, or even heads of multi-headed creatures), broken bones, and ruined organs grow back. After the spell is cast, the physical regeneration is complete in 1 round if the severed members are present and touching the creature. It takes 2d10 rounds otherwise.

Legendary Medic seems to mimic BOTH of these effects, not just one of them. If I rip your eyes from your body the way Legendary Medic is worded, it can fix that. Cure Blind/Deaf... not so much. So before you rant about copying a 5th level ability also look at the fact that you are also copying a 13th level ability without expending any magic.

That's a pretty loose interpretation. The legendary skill feat does not state it puts your eyes back in. It says it removes the blinded condition. So you spend an hour, remove the blinded condition, then I immediately regain it because I still don't have eyes.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Arachnofiend wrote:
Igwilly wrote:

I wpuld question about disease curing spells. Things are changing and they already said stuff like diseases, poison and such are much more serious.

Stop basing comments around the idea everything else is going to remain the same. It won't.
Being able to heal a permanently blind person is amazing even nowadays, and normally using stealth in exploration is likelly going to have a cost.
These feats are already amazing. I wpuld absolutely hate if skills could do supernatural stuff, instead of superhuman.
Fortunately, you're not getting what you want. We already have an example of a Stealth feat that makes you so good at hiding you can't be detected even with true seeing.

Magic is limited, not omnipotent ;)

Designer

9 people marked this as a favorite.
Arachnofiend wrote:
Leedwashere wrote:
Lucas Yew wrote:
Not bad, the legendary feats are. But seriously, fighters and other non-casters should have above average skill points compared to casters; +1 compared to PF1 is a bit meh...

It's not just +1 compared to PF1. The maximum number of skills has been reduced by nearly half, and many useful ones are rolled together. Perception isn't something that takes your skill ranks at all anymore. It looks like just +1 over PF1 at first glance, but that ignores all of the changes which make it more significant. In PF1 if you wanted your fighter to be good at climbing, swimming, noticing things, and reading people, that took 4 skill ranks. In PF2 that requires just 1. (EDIT: that is, of course, assuming that sense motive has been rolled into perception and not deception. Sense motive may not have had the same publicity as a "necessary skill" in PF1 as perception did, but it should have)

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

Overall I really like where this is going. It's good to know that skills have things that anyone can do, and it's great to know that a bunch of different people who are all of the same proficiency level in the same skill might still have vastly different abilities. That ability to carve out your own niche in whatever your focus might be is very much my favorite thing about the PF2 design ethos.

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

I still wish that the Thievery skill was called something else, though. That's the only thing so far that I haven't come around on. It irks me so.

Additionally, each class gets a suite of thematic skills that they're trained in; the 3+Int the Fighter gets is a bonus set of choices you can take in addition to whatever skills all Fighters are trained in. We know all Clerics start off trained in Perform, for example.

This is not quite how it works. You pick what skills you're trained in. Classes do have signature skills, but you are not forced to be trained in those if you don't want.

Sovereign Court

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Pathfinder Starfinder Society Subscriber
edduardco wrote:
Yes I know, but that means that most characters are only going to have three or four skills maxed, I don't see how are they going to be more round up with that. Although given the number of skill feats maybe that is more than enough, I definitely need to play with this to see how it goes, because right now I don't think I like it much.

I'm okay with most characters becoming legendary in only 2-3 skills. It helps give a character focus.


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Mark Seifter wrote:
This is not quite how it works. You pick what skills you're trained in. Classes do have signature skills, but you are not forced to be trained in those if you don't want.

Hmm, I guess I misunderstood. I don't think I understand what it means for a skill to be a signature skill, then. Has that been revealed anywhere, yet?


Mewzard wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Let me guess what's next, Legendary Stealth allows a "Hide in Plain Sight" skill feat that grants a form of Invisbility, something that 2nd level+ Arcane Spellcasters can do? Cool, sure, but you could at least raise it to Improved Invisibility for a Legendary Skill + Feat.

Here is something that was posted with the Rogue section of the Hail the Gauntlet blog:

"And finally, Hidden Paragon lets you go completely invisible, even beyond the sight of true seeing, see invisibility and the like and impossible to outline with even glitterdust, faerie fire, or similar magic!"

You might be underestimating some of these skill feats a bit.

Also, keep in mind, the Legendary Medic feat lets you cure these things at no cost of spellslots. In a game that seems to be reducing the spellslot number a bit, that's useful.

Hidden Paragon is a rogue class feat not a skill feat and is effectively the capstone ninja feature from PF1e so presumably still a capstone ability.


So wait, there's no scaling of the DCs to treat a wound at higher levels? That boss knocks my buddy down and I just walk over to them being untrained at level 12 with a 14 wisdom and I'm like "you're good!"

I don't know, that sounds off to me.

Silver Crusade

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Mark Seifter wrote:
Arachnofiend wrote:
Additionally, each class gets a suite of thematic skills that they're trained in; the 3+Int the Fighter gets is a bonus set of choices you can take in addition to whatever skills all Fighters are trained in. We know all Clerics start off trained in Perform, for example.
This is not quite how it works. You pick what skills you're trained in. Classes do have signature skills, but you are not forced to be trained in those if you don't want.

Oh? Hmm, what does “Signature Skills” mean in this case? Is it purely thematic or is there any mechanical benefit along with it?

Liberty's Edge

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People seem to be misunderstanding the Sneak in Exploration Mode thing. Remember, systems for exploration almost always have rules where you have to decide what sort of thing you're doing while you're exploring, which limits your ability to do other things. For example, most exploration systems in RPG's would have "Be in Stealth mode." and "Be in trapfinding mode." be two separate things you can do while exploring... but a Legendary Stealth character could do both, because they don't have to declare that they're in "Stealth mode".


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Expanding on what I said:
Magic is perfectly capable of reacting to non-magical stuff. It is very possible (even probable) that true seeing has a limit, and, if the sneaker is good enough, it just doesn't work. That's not making stealth magical; that's limiting magic. Something the game desperatly needs.

Silver Crusade

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tivadar27 wrote:

So wait, there's no scaling of the DCs to treat a wound at higher levels? That boss knocks my buddy down and I just walk over to them being untrained at level 13 with a 14 wisdom and I'm like "you're good!"

I don't know, that sounds off to me.

Bandages are f*@#ing awesome.


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tivadar27 wrote:

So wait, there's no scaling of the DCs to treat a wound at higher levels? That boss knocks my buddy down and I just walk over to them being untrained at level 13 with a 14 wisdom and I'm like "you're good!"

I don't know, that sounds off to me.

Why? All you're doing is keeping a PC from dying on the battlefield, not restoring them to full hp or even consciousness. Why should it be harder to keep high-level PCs from bleeding out than low-level ones?


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tivadar27 wrote:

So wait, there's no scaling of the DCs to treat a wound at higher levels? That boss knocks my buddy down and I just walk over to them being untrained at level 13 with a 14 wisdom and I'm like "you're good!"

I don't know, that sounds off to me.

Presumably, if you were untrained, all you would be able to do is to stabilize your dying friend who got knocked out by the boss or stop their bleeding. If you want to do more than just that, you would very likely need better proficiency than untrained and maybe a skill feat or two as well.

I think a level 13 character being able to stop their adventuring companion of so many levels from bleeding out without having to sweat about it isn't mind-blowing.

Silver Crusade

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Joana wrote:
tivadar27 wrote:

So wait, there's no scaling of the DCs to treat a wound at higher levels? That boss knocks my buddy down and I just walk over to them being untrained at level 13 with a 14 wisdom and I'm like "you're good!"

I don't know, that sounds off to me.

Why? All you're doing is keeping a PC from dying on the battlefield, not restoring them to full hp or even consciousness. Why should it be harder to keep high-level PCs from bleeding out than low-level ones?

Yep. Outside of magic the unconscious PC still has to beat the original DC in order to wake up.


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KingOfAnything wrote:
edduardco wrote:
Yes I know, but that means that most characters are only going to have three or four skills maxed, I don't see how are they going to be more round up with that. Although given the number of skill feats maybe that is more than enough, I definitely need to play with this to see how it goes, because right now I don't think I like it much.
I'm okay with most characters becoming legendary in only 2-3 skills. It helps give a character focus.

Is not that they only have 2 or 3 skills with legendary proficiency, is that are the only skills thst are going to matter. By level 7 I'm assuming that a character is going to be an Expert in 3 skills, by level 13 is going to be Master in those 3 skills, and by level 20 is going to be legendary in those 3 skills.

I though the idea was to make characters more round up, I expected something like a curve, that by level 20 a character is Legendary in 2 or 3 skills, Master in another 4 or 5, and expert in another 6 or 7.


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JRutterbush wrote:
People seem to be misunderstanding the Sneak in Exploration Mode thing. Remember, systems for exploration almost always have rules where you have to decide what sort of thing you're doing while you're exploring, which limits your ability to do other things. For example, most exploration systems in RPG's would have "Be in Stealth mode." and "Be in trapfinding mode." be two separate things you can do while exploring... but a Legendary Stealth character could do both, because they don't have to declare that they're in "Stealth mode".

Thank you.

The very fact that there is a exploration game mode instead of "just tell the DM what you're doing" clearly implies that sneaking or whatever will have a cost, and that feat negates that cost.


Some consolidation makes sense, but 17 seems like too few for me What happened to social skills?

From the legendary medic I get the feeling guides will quickly rule out skills worth ever taking to legendary...

Thats just a feeling tho. I think legendary medic may have been a poor choice since there seems to be extra attachments that cant be mentioned at this time...

Now im wondering how easy it could be to axe skill feats and just drop PF1 skill system into PF2?


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Cyouni wrote:
Corrik wrote:
With the Lv 15 Legendary stealth feat, you no longer have to tell your DM "Just assume I'm stealthing unless I say otherwise."

Other things seem to be: "I'm stealthy even when I'm asleep", "I'm stealthy while surrounded by guards staring at me", and "I'm stealthy while there's literally no way to stealth". At least theoretically.

If I'm right, the big boon is "always use Stealth as initiative, no matter what". That sounds pretty good.

Yeah. If I can be talking to somebody who decides to betray me, and I get to force them to start by finding me, I'll count that as suitably legendary.

Also, that doesn't take a feat. That's just what you get as soon as you become legendary in sneak.


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LuniasM wrote:
Lucas Yew wrote:
Not bad, the legendary feats are. But seriously, fighters and other non-casters should have above average skill points compared to casters; +1 compared to PF1 is a bit meh...
Gotta remember though that the total skill list is half the size and Perception is automatic now, so 3+INT is more like 6+INT and free ranks in Perception.

The skill list is reduced in size for all of the other classes too. The Fighter being relatively more skillful than the PF1 Fighter is completely meaningless if they're still the least skilled class in in PF2.

Wizards are going to be adding their INT to skills and will be better at mundane problem solving than the mundane fighter class.


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Planpanther wrote:

Some consolidation makes sense, but 17 seems like too few for me What happened to social skills?

From the legendary medic I get the feeling guides will quickly rule out skills worth ever taking to legendary...

Thats just a feeling tho. I think legendary medic may have been a poor choice since there seems to be extra attachments that cant be mentioned at this time...

Now im wondering how easy it could be to axe skill feats and just drop PF1 skill system into PF2?

Why would you drop the skill feat system? It's one of the best parts of Pathfinder 2E. Legendary Medic alone saves you spell uses in a game that cut down on spell slots. It also scales to level, whereas with spell slots, you'd have to heighten it to increase the odds of success.

Like Mark posted earlier, at level 16, you'd already be curing high level diseases more easily than someone using one of their limited 8th level slots for that purpose, and only surpassing it with 9th or 10th level slots.

Would you waste your one tenth level slot for such a purpose when you could instead be preparing Avatar and literally turning into the Avatar of your god?


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It seems reasonable to make "do they spot you when you're sneaking" or "can they tell you are lying" to be checks against a passive DC rather than opposed rolls, since the "roll for perception" or "roll for sense motive" sort of are a dead giveaway that there's a thing to see or someone is lying. Sure there are ways around this, but I'm okay with sense motive going away.

Also "you are intimidating hence hard to intimidate" and "you are an accomplished liar, so you know how to spot one of your ilk" seem like reasonable things to define with feats.


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Mewzard wrote:
Planpanther wrote:

Some consolidation makes sense, but 17 seems like too few for me What happened to social skills?

From the legendary medic I get the feeling guides will quickly rule out skills worth ever taking to legendary...

Thats just a feeling tho. I think legendary medic may have been a poor choice since there seems to be extra attachments that cant be mentioned at this time...

Now im wondering how easy it could be to axe skill feats and just drop PF1 skill system into PF2?

Why would you drop the skill feat system? It's one of the best parts of Pathfinder 2E. Legendary Medic alone saves you spell uses in a game that cut down on spell slots. It also scales to level, whereas with spell slots, you'd have to heighten it to increase the odds of success.

Like Mark posted earlier, at level 16, you'd already be curing high level diseases more easily than someone using one of their limited 8th level slots for that purpose, and only surpassing it with 9th or 10th level slots.

Would you waste your one tenth level slot for such a purpose when you could instead be preparing Avatar and literally turning into the Avatar of your god?

If you put it that way Heightening sounds worse each time and speak waves of the nerf spells suffered.

Designer

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JRutterbush wrote:
People seem to be misunderstanding the Sneak in Exploration Mode thing. Remember, systems for exploration almost always have rules where you have to decide what sort of thing you're doing while you're exploring, which limits your ability to do other things. For example, most exploration systems in RPG's would have "Be in Stealth mode." and "Be in trapfinding mode." be two separate things you can do while exploring... but a Legendary Stealth character could do both, because they don't have to declare that they're in "Stealth mode".

In fact, a rogue with the Trap Finder class feat and the Legendary Sneak skill feat could theoretically be sneaking and searching for traps while hustling through the area at a brisk 6 miles per hour without pausing (faster with movement speed buffs). If you splashed some ranger and were legendary in Survival, I think you could also be following tracks while doing all of these things. That sounds pretty cool...I actually want to try to build that super exploration character now.


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I did wonder on what the different proficiency levels would grant you, apart from the bonus, since skill feats must also be doing something AND certain class features affect skill usage too from what I remember about the rogue.
It will be interesting to see how all of this shakes out.


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Joana wrote:
tivadar27 wrote:

So wait, there's no scaling of the DCs to treat a wound at higher levels? That boss knocks my buddy down and I just walk over to them being untrained at level 13 with a 14 wisdom and I'm like "you're good!"

I don't know, that sounds off to me.

Why? All you're doing is keeping a PC from dying on the battlefield, not restoring them to full hp or even consciousness. Why should it be harder to keep high-level PCs from bleeding out than low-level ones?

It doesn't have to do with the PC being a higher level, it has to do with what caused the PC to go down.

If Bob goes down due to being clonked on the back of the head by a goblin's club, that's one thing. If he get's chewed up and spit out by a dragon, that's an entirely different problem.

As it stands, it is actually EASIER to heal higher level characters, because their allies with likely have a higher level bonus to Medicine to revive them.

For example, a level 16 character with 10 WIS and no training in Medicine needs to not roll a 1 to revive an ally stomped by a dragon, while a level 1 character with 18 WIS(?), and expert training in Medicine needs to roll a 9 or better to pick up his buddy who got scratched by a skeleton.


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edduardco wrote:
If you put it that way Heightening sounds worse each time and speak waves of the nerf spells suffered.

I don't think it speaks badly of that so much as good of this skill. If you had no option, using a spell on it will work, but if you're the dedicated healer as is, why not study medicine? Why not give yourself some free options there for treating serious issues.

Hell, not only the healer, a Fighter could see the rationale that the Cleric won't always be able to make it through a battle, and would at least like the option of bringing the Cleric up if nothing else.

Like they said above:

"Moving forward with the example of the Medicine skill, as long as you are at least trained in Medicine, you can take the Battle Medic skill feat. This feat allows you to apply straight-up healing to an ally through nonmagical means, which is nice when your cleric is knocked to the ground or has run out of uses of channel energy."

It's nice to have options outside of spells.

Silver Crusade

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Mark Seifter wrote:
JRutterbush wrote:
People seem to be misunderstanding the Sneak in Exploration Mode thing. Remember, systems for exploration almost always have rules where you have to decide what sort of thing you're doing while you're exploring, which limits your ability to do other things. For example, most exploration systems in RPG's would have "Be in Stealth mode." and "Be in trapfinding mode." be two separate things you can do while exploring... but a Legendary Stealth character could do both, because they don't have to declare that they're in "Stealth mode".
In fact, a rogue with the Trap Finder class feat and the Legendary Sneak skill feat could theoretically be sneaking and searching for traps while hustling through the area at a brisk 6 miles per hour without pausing (faster with movement speed buffs). If you splashed some ranger and were legendary in Survival, I think you could also be following tracks while doing all of these things. That sounds pretty cool...I actually want to try to build that super exploration character now.

I had a Gnoll like that. I named him Bethesda :3


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So in this blog post we see Paizo have gone a particular route in divorcing skills from ability scores that make sense (Int for knowledge) and instead gone for whichever ability score best suits a particular class  (wis for knowledge religion). Can't say I'm a fan* and I know the reaction my table will have to this (based on how they reacted to other games that implemented this) and it won't be pretty.

Which is unfortunate because everything else was such good news. I am glad to see being untrained means you don't get +level to the skill. It was believed this wasn't the case and I am very glad to see it will be. The rest of the info is really positive.

*And I really hope we don't get something silly like clerics using wis to attack or bards using cha to attack.


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John Lynch 106 wrote:
I am glad to see being untrained means you don't get +level to the skill. It was believed this wasn't the case and I am very glad to see it will be. The rest of the info is really positive.
Blog Post wrote:
"Being untrained grants you a modifier of your level-2..."

Just wanted to clear up the misunderstanding so it doesn't get passed along. :)


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Damnit. Don't know how I misread that. This blog post went from "mixed" to "bad". The only thing I really like at this point are the skill powers.


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Has anyone complained yet that an Expert in Athletics (presumably) can't flap his arms in order to gain a 90' fly speed?

Lots of people mad that PF2 is going to give them limitless abilities to do things that are flat out real world impossible (and not previously possibly in PF1) as an outgrowth of investing an abundant character resource just because they aren't as good as magic that inherently breaks the laws of nature, is a limited resource, and requires foregoing all the other classes' abilities that also can't be replaced by skills.


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If "Untrained people are 'good' at things" is really a problem (even if there are a bunch of things one can't attempt. It seems like "Changing level-2" to anything you like better seems really easy and painless.

For my money, this will result in high level characters who potentially can't swim, climb a tree, or tell the difference between a dragon and an ooze, which is undesirable but y'all do y'all.


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Please, please correct me if I am wrong, but a level 20 who is untrained in a skill gets a +18, where a level 20 who is legendary in the skill gets a +23?

A +5 difference? Previously, it would have been a +20 difference (0 ranks vs 20 ranks)

Sure, the legendary gets some cool, but niche feat options. But for the normal roll, which will be the majority of game-play, legendary amounts to a +5 compared to someone who is untrained? That is it?

That is way to similar to 5e where you scale with level as well, making all characters seem samey.

Dislike! Make each rank equal a +5 and it scales fine again..

Liberty's Edge

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I like it, though from my perspective (having paid very close attention to skill related stuff) there's not a whole lot of new information here. I am pleased to have deduced the Skill List correctly in advance of its reveal.

I'm slightly concerned at the idea of Fighters not getting more skills than that, though I'll obviously need to see how many other Classes get to make a proper assessment. Though we do know Druids get 4 + Int. I'm not sure full casters getting more Skills than Fighters is a good precedent (even if Fighters do get better Perception Proficiency).

I agree Legendary Medic could use a name change to avoid confusion. I also agree that we don't actually know enough about the condition removal spells to know how good it is mechanically.


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John Lynch 106 wrote:
Damnit. Don't know how I misread that. This blog post went from "mixed" to "bad". The only thing I really like at this point are the skill powers.

-2 is still a pretty harsh penalty. The goal here is to make the math tighter so that you don't have one character in the party rolling at +50 more than the other one. If your level 20 Barbarian wants to try to Sneak, he can definitely try it, even untrained. This creates a "dramatic scenario" where he is just as likely to critically fail as to succeed, but he isn't so far behind as to never even try it.

Given that buffs are a thing, this could conceivably result in the scenario where the entire party decides to buff the Paladin's untrained Deceive in order to get her disguised into the BBEG's dinner party with all his henchmen. This results in everyone in the party on the edge of their seats rather than no one caring because the Disguise-master 1000 rogue is obviously going to get in without a problem.

The primary goal is to keep the game fun. It doesn't matter how 'realistic' the game is if it isn't fun. Telling players that they can't even try to do anything at all related to Sneaking or Deceiving or Surviving just because they chose the wrong skills isn't fun. Instead, the specialist gets some neat rules exceptions but everyone can try their luck at the skill - which I think is a good design goal.

Shadow Lodge

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the new skill system and the changes to action economy are probably my favourite things in 2e...really looking forward to trying this out...


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Alexander Bascom wrote:

Please, please correct me if I am wrong, but a level 20 who is untrained in a skill gets a +18, where a level 20 who is legendary in the skill gets a +23?

A +5 difference? Previously, it would have been a +20 difference (0 ranks vs 20 ranks)

Well...

A specialist in a skill will probably have other things to invest in "being great at that skill" to get a modifier greater than +23. Someone who does not care about a skill at all likely will not do that.

Moreover, it's meaningful that a lot of skill applications simply cannot be attempted without a level of proficiency. Even if I get +18 to my craft armor roll, that doesn't mean I can make good plate mail.

Additionally, the basic math of DCs has changed. Previously we had to set DCs at a high enough level to be a meaningful challenge to a specialist, which meant that dabblers simply could not attempt them. With the "clear/miss by 10+ is a critical success/failure" rule, a +1 matters a lot more than it used to.


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Alexander Bascom wrote:

Please, please correct me if I am wrong, but a level 20 who is untrained in a skill gets a +18, where a level 20 who is legendary in the skill gets a +23?

A +5 difference? Previously, it would have been a +20 difference (0 ranks vs 20 ranks)

Sure, the legendary gets some cool, but niche feat options. But for the normal roll, which will be the majority of game-play, legendary amounts to a +5 compared to someone who is untrained? That is it?

That is way to similar to 5e where you scale with level as well, making all characters seem samey.

Dislike! Make each rank equal a +5 and it scales fine again..

The majority of game play is not the normal roll. It's designed so that the skill feats you can take and the abilities you unlock with higher proficiency make more of a difference than your skill modifier.

Designer

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Deadmanwalking wrote:

I like it, though from my perspective (having paid very close attention to skill related stuff) there's not a whole lot of new information here. I am pleased to have deduced the Skill List correctly in advance of its reveal.

I'm slightly concerned at the idea of Fighters not getting more skills than that, though I'll obviously need to see how many other Classes get to make a proper assessment. Though we do know Druids get 4 + Int. I'm not sure full casters getting more Skills than Fighters is a good precedent (even if Fighters do get better Perception Proficiency).

I agree Legendary Medic could use a name change to avoid confusion. I also agree that we don't actually know enough about the condition removal spells to know how good it is mechanically.

We have a known discussion point where the fighter should very likely get Intimidate as a signature skill and also another starting trained skill, but alas, that omission was pointed out after the book hit the printer (after which we noticed it in several times from several places). I am guessing there won't really be two sides among you guys in the playtest as to whether we should carry through on that.


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Lol, that legendary stealth ability. You literally need to wear a bell on you at all times to keep from giving your party mates heart attacks.

Designer

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Deranged Stabby-Man wrote:
Lol, that legendary stealth ability. You literally need to wear a bell on you at all times to keep from giving your party mates heart attacks.

Or you can double down and also take Scare to Death from legendary Intimidate, and literally give them heart attacks.


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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
FedoraFerret wrote:
Not gonna lie, unless Remove Blindness/Deafness and Cure Disease have been turned into much higher level spells I'm not super impressed by that legendary Heal feat.

Seconded.

Remove Poison/Disease and Remove Blindness/Deafness are 3rd level spells that Divine spellcasters of 5th level or higher could cast in PF1. The fact that they think Legendary proficiency with a Skill Feat being even just comparable to a 5th level Cleric's spell power (again, assuming no major spell level change) is just laughable.

Let me guess what's next, Legendary Stealth allows a "Hide in Plain Sight" skill feat that grants a form of Invisbility, something that 2nd level+ Arcane Spellcasters can do? Cool, sure, but you could at least raise it to Improved Invisibility for a Legendary Skill + Feat.

The skill feat can be used in an antimagic field/room/countryside. It also only takes the resource of time; once per target per day, and one hour for the attempt. So with the new spell slot system, the a Legendary Medic can attempt to heal a lot more people than your average cleric/druid/whatever might be ready to with their at ready spell per day, and might be able to out preform them in the amount of quality heal attempts they can make even when they prep for full disease removal mode the next morning. (A designer mentioned remove affliction being a spell that scaled with prepared spell slot well after you made this post.)

Also, based on how the skill feat reads... you might be able to do the remove disease check without ANY tools. You'll still want the best healer tools available for their skill bonuses, but the image of healing the sick while stripped of all tools in an antimagic dungeon... pretty powerful image worthy of Legendary Healer.

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