Field Test #4: Team Up with an Envoy!

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Perpdepog wrote:

To date I've been in five different campaigns, each starting at level 1, and medicine's always worked well for us.

I see no mechanism for you getting passed a roughly 50% fail rate.

At 1st level, someone trained in medicine with a +2 wisdom could take 10

If a situation prevents taking 10 the assurance feat will do the same.

Taking 10 does not exist in Pathfinder 2nd Edition, so I presume it will be left out of Starfinder 2nd Edition, too. And Assurance, besides costing a skill feat better used on Battle Medicine, says, "You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonus (do not apply any other bonuses, penalties, or modifiers)." That would result in 10+3 for a 1st-level trained Medicine skill, a failure against DC 15.

The working mechanism for dealing with the roughly 50% fail rate and one-per-hour restriction on 1st-level Treat Wounds is tactics.

A party in a typical mission can expect about 3 Moderate-Threat encounters per day. For simpicity, let us assume that each party member has 16 hit points and so do their two opponents. Since the party is dealing twice the damage (this is also a simplification) as their outnumbered opponents, by the time they deal 32 damage to take out their opponents, the party will have taken 16 damage. Let's say that is 8 damage each on two party members. The party medic spends 20 minutes Treating Wounds to heal one up to full health but fail on the other. The party decides to not wait an hour in a dangerous dungeon and presses on with a single injured party member.

And this is where tactics comes into play. Don't put that injured party member where they will get further damaged. It could be your fighter, but tell the fighter, "No front line tanking for you. Stand in the back with the wizard and use your bow." This will probably be easier in Starfinder, since ranged weapons are more common. In that case, the injured soldier will be Taking Cover and other defensives measures rather than attacking at full force.

Due to the reduced efficiency of the new tactics, the party will take even more damage on the second encounter, let's say 24 damage. Say the party is at 4, 8, 8, and 12 hit points out of 16 hp each. This is the time to hunker down for over an hour and try to heal up. Say the 4-hp operative and 8-hp soldier are still on the one-hour wait for the previous Treat Wounds, but the other 8 hp party member is healed up and the 12 hp party member fails to heal. That puts the party at 4, 8, 12, and 16 hp each.

While waiting, a Moderate-Threat enemy patrol finds the party. This time, the 4-hp operative is the one the party protects. The party takes 24 damage again, but manages to confine it to the healthier party members through battlefield control. They are down to 2 to 6 hit points each. Time to retreat. They had their 3 Moderate-Threat encounters for the day.

Back at camp, their 45-minute adventuring day left them with plenty of time for the one-hour restriction on Treat Wounds to pass 7 times. Everyone is fully healed by bedtime.

Of course, the skills of different groups of players vary. Some parties will take only 10 damage in a Moderate-Threat encounter rather than 16. Others might be terrible at battlefield control and the damage might end up concentrated on a single PC on whom Treat Wounds failed. But if bad luck or bad tactics leaves the party too vulnerable before the 3rd encounter, then they retreat early. They are only beginning adventurers, don't expect them to act bold and courageous at 1st level.

It's also the case that there's a pretty big space in between "just having some people trained in medicine is fine" and we need a dedicated healer." Even just from first level...

- Three of the four casting traditions have level 1 access to slot spells for healing.
- Healing elixirs are purchasable
- If you want those healing elixirs without paying the cash, then Alchemist exists and is a thing. Alchemical Sciences Investigators can also turn their vials into healing in the early levels, and then pivot to more interesting uses as you get higher level and the access to healing opens up a bit.
- Champions get Lay on Hands
- Thaumaturges who take Chalice can hand out a bit of healing that way
- Two of the six elements of kineticist have a heal power available at level 1

A bit over half of the available classes out there either have healing built in or could get some pretty readily with a few specific build choices... and those aren't bad build choices in general. Alchemical sciences is generally accepted as one of the stronger Investigator methodologies, Chalice is generally well thought of as a Thaumaturge Implement, and there's nothing wrong with Water or Wood from a kineticist standpoint.

Having two or three party members each grab some healing can do a lot to help get you over that early hump.

The working mechanism for dealing with the roughly 50% fail rate and one-per-hour restriction on 1st-level Treat Wounds is tactics.

Every time I have seen someone suggest the vague handwave of "tactics" they've left if blank. Or said something that won't work. You've done the same thing but moved tactics (that would help some supposing battlefield control) to use battlefield control and then handwaived there will be battlefield control. The bad guys can throw rocks too, and in starfinder the plan is they all have lasers. Even the wolfs have lasers. The wolfs ARE lasers.

They don't HAVE to attack the healthy people in front. They can see bob's in the back holding a kidney and leaking valuable red fluid like a sieve. The lack of AOO means walking past the people you put up front is really easy outside of spaceship corridors.

Even IF you somehow manage to control where every monster is fighting and one of those hits you're averaging is going to be a crit, or a lucky 3 hits, or a higher than average 2 hits, it will drop someone. And then the rest goes like dominoes.

Quote:

The working mechanism for dealing with the roughly 50% fail rate and one-per-hour restriction on 1st-level Treat Wounds is tactics.

Every time I have seen someone suggest the vague handwave of "tactics" they've left if blank. Or said something that won't work. You've done the same thing ...

I have explained tactics in detail many times in the Pathfinder 2nd Edition forums, such as a May 2020 comment on my players forcing an archery battle, an October 2021 comment on different tactics for different opponents, a September 2023 comment on Trip, my February 2023 comments on Gortle's Strategy Guide, and my own June 2023 thread on Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters. That is a small random sample from searching for the word "tactics" in my posts.

However, in comment #151 I was discussing only one simple tactic, Protect the Injured, with a connection to a more complex tactic, battlefield control.

Even assuming that the enemy is relying on ranged attacks for which defensive positioning is useless, Pathfinder 2nd Edition still offers defensive actions such as Take Cover, Hide, and Raise a Shield, though I hope that in Starfinder 2nd Edition a "shield" will be a personal force field rather than a held object. Sure, an opponent could still target someone who is concealed (20% miss change) with a shield raises (+2 circumstance bonus to AC), but that would be foolish when the other party members are more exposed and using more of their actions to attack back.

I have been playing long enough to see battlefield control as a new concept explained in Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards: Being a God for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. It means controlling the enemy through effects that prevent them from ganging up on the party at full force. These effects, such as a wall spell, are not necessarily good at protecting one particular injured party member, but with fewer opponents attacking the party at once, the injured party member is more able to be overlooked.

My wife once played a PF1 gunslinger Boffin who performed battlefield control, so this tactic is not dependent on magic. This was during my Iron Gods campaign, so it had much in common with Starfinder, such as laser pistols. Boffin wielded a grappling gun and could grapple opponents at range. Later with the PF1 gunslinger's Targeting Deed, she could shot weapons out of opponents' hands or confuse them with a head shot. These tactics could be included in Starfinder 2nd Edition.

They can see bob's in the back holding a kidney and leaking valuable red fluid like a sieve.

Bob is not at half hit points. Bob is on their last hit points. And why hasn't the party dealt with the persistent bleed damage with Administer First Aid? And why should the opponent attack a party member who is going to bleed to death in 2 rounds without any further attacks? That does suggest another good defensive tactic for an injured Envoy: deceiving the opponent that you are about to drop dead from existing injuries.

If a party member is at their last few hit points and Treat Wounds has failed, the party should retreat regardless of how healthy the rest of the party is. If the party cannot retreat, then the GM gave them the wrong kind of mission for a 1st-level party.

So if you have had a discussion with your GM about how no one in the party wanted to go healer, and you don't have the healing items or NPC to deal with situations like this, sounds like a GM problem. If you didn't discuss this with the GM, sounds like a player problem.

All in all, it sounds like you are upset about a hypothetical problem that can easily be solved at any table where people are acting like adults.

I note that tactics in general are very much a GM-dependent thing.

Like, you'll have some GMs who will deliberately make their enemies do dumb things in order to make ti easy for the party. You have some who will play their enemies as dumb but in character. You will have some GMs who just aren't all that good at the strategy side of things themselves. You will have some who will play their enemies in-character in ways that will let you plan around that and/or manipulate them if you know the enemy in question well enough. You have some that will play their enemies as generally intelligent but not overly taking advantage of privileged information and you will have some who play it like it's a tabletop wargame that they're trying to win.

Sometimes it dials in even further than that. There are GMs who hate certain strategies for whatever reason, and who will suddenly start playing much more dangerously if the players use them, in order to punish that behavior. I once had a GM who would play "wargamer trying to win" until one of the party members ran out of HP and fell over and would then immediately and blatantly switch to "clueless and stupid". (It was awful.)

For most GMs, playing with "good tactics" will get you better results than playing with "bad tactics", but which specific tactics tend to work well can vary wildly depending on the GM in question. The question of how hard is it to keep the enemy from focusing fire on a wounded party member hiding in the back stands out as a particularly strong case of this. For some DMs, just swapping things around so that the enemy hits the healthy party members first is plenty to control their targeting. For others, you have to make if legitimately difficult and/or costly to get past that front line in order to get them to leave your wounded alone. There are some who will dial in on maximizing the chance of actually scoring a kill no matter what it takes. There are some where it legit depends on what the monster is, and how it would act. It's all going to vary.

...and, of course, there's also favoritism on the one side and varying levels of player skill on the other, just to make the whole thign more complicated.

TL;DR - How much any given issue is affected by good player tactics is going to vary by GM, in a lot of ways.

I have explained tactics in detail many times in the Pathfinder 2nd Edition forums

The tactics you're describing are the best you can do with a bad situation, but I don't think they rise to a solution. Crit happens, and its guaranteed to happen with enough rolls. You're relying on a solution which I've found to be more of a paradigm than a strategy, and as stated above, that can easily break and is not load bearing.

Control the battlefield is a goal, not a method.

Even assuming that the enemy is relying on ranged attacks for which defensive positioning is useless

In pathfinder/ 3.x , Pike the Pikeman could control the battlefield by threat of AoO's given. You didn't want to pass him. Even if the first penguin got pushed through his reach and found an AOO, combat reflexes leads to the dirty harry speech about how many shots are left in the polearm.

Besides habit, I do not see much allowing that in PF2 at low level. I don't need a ranged weapon to stab Bob while he's hiding in the back. I can walk 50 feet, right past the entire party, and gank Bob with no repercussions, and start flanking with my friends next round. The party needs to fill a corridor to stop that.

I have been playing long enough to see battlefield control as a new concept explained in Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards: Being a God for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition

... That was not a remotely new concept at that point.

I am not unfamiliar with the concept. I am skeptical of its importance when it comes to brass tacks. Those brass tacks are INCREDIBLY system dependent.

So your arguments boil down to "No one wants to be a healer"
"Off healing isn't enough"
"the DM is gonna make it lethal, and doesn't have a choice not to"
"Using stategies and tactics to avoid damage won't work because I've never seen it work."

So your arguments boil down to "No one wants to be a healer"

"Off healing isn't enough"
"the DM is gonna make it lethal, and doesn't have a choice not to"
"Using stategies and tactics to avoid damage won't work because I've never seen it work."

A system that allows individuals to build THEIR characters and still function is far more enjoyable to me than a system that requires rigid builds and food groups. Starfinder is absurdly good at that and pathfinder2 is really pushing the foodgroup model at low levels. If the envoy doesn't work in a melee party then you need to geek suduko melee around someone wanting to play an envoy or an envoy wanting to play with melee.

Off healing isn't enough at low levels.

What players consider basic strategy: focus fire on the wounded person till they drop the bad guys consider basic strategy too. PF2 lacks components to ameliorate that. In starpath1 I can justify the kobold not rushing past Pike to finish off Bob. In pf2 not taking out bob feels like playing deliberately dumb. It is the DM's choice, but it should feel more natural than metagamey. With Starfinder 2s ranged meta, that is going to kick into overdrive.

When I've never seen it work, there are factors not accounted for in the math that will make it not work, and there's a part that is entirely hand-waived.. Yes. I am going to conclude it won't work. I don't think that the skill ceiling for most RPGs is so high that there's some secret tactics fu that can't be explained. I have never seen anyone appeal to it and then demonstrate it, and I have seen a LOT of people appeal to it in a lot of systems over the years.

I'll say... I wouldn't want to go into a level 1 game where no one packed along any healing. Ideally in PF2 you have two or three people who pick up some sort of healing sidebar, and if you can't get that you pour extra money into healing elixirs. Characters who are heavy on the healing are also quite nice, when you have someone to play that. They're not mandatory, though, and the game is set up so that they pretty much always have the capacity to function as something other than a healer as well... like the bit where the cleric easy access to healing went to "in addition to" rather than "instead of". The mystic's "I come with extra healing" feature functions similarly.

But... PF2 is a party op game. For best results, you work together with your fellow party members when you're in the character design phase to try to work out useful synergies and viable strategies. If everyone wants to be able to just make their own thing in a vacuum without having to consider what anyone else is doing then the results are going to be weaker overall. That's true. There's a reason why PFS encounters are easier than AP encounters in general.

And lets not forget the last person you can work with... the DM. If the GM knows all of you are, for some bizarre reason, averse to packing healing, he can give you an NPC who can do your healing, or adjust difficulty and damage amounts.

Zoken44 wrote:

So your arguments boil down to "No one wants to be a healer"

"Off healing isn't enough"
"the DM is gonna make it lethal, and doesn't have a choice not to"
"Using stategies and tactics to avoid damage won't work because I've never seen it work."

A system that allows individuals to build THEIR characters and still function is far more enjoyable to me than a system that requires rigid builds and food groups. Starfinder is absurdly good at that and pathfinder2 is really pushing the foodgroup model at low levels. If the envoy doesn't work in a melee party then you need to geek suduko melee around someone wanting to play an envoy or an envoy wanting to play with melee.

Off healing isn't enough at low levels.

What players consider basic strategy: focus fire on the wounded person till they drop the bad guys consider basic strategy too. PF2 lacks components to ameliorate that. In starpath1 I can justify the kobold not rushing past Pike to finish off Bob. In pf2 not taking out bob feels like playing deliberately dumb. It is the DM's choice, but it should feel more natural than metagamey. With Starfinder 2s ranged meta, that is going to kick into overdrive.

When I've never seen it work, there are factors not accounted for in the math that will make it not work, and there's a part that is entirely hand-waived.. Yes. I am going to conclude it won't work. I don't think that the skill ceiling for most RPGs is so high that there's some secret tactics fu that can't be explained. I have never seen anyone appeal to it and then demonstrate it, and I have seen a LOT of people appeal to it in a lot of systems over the years.

Man, this whole post is so completely opposite to my experience with PF2e that I don't even know where to start. I know table variation is a thing but, like, not this much.

Control the battlefield is a goal, not a method.

We must be usibg different definitions of battlefield control. Mine is merely a method.

Off healing isn't enough at low levels.

My experience at 1st level in PF2 is limited. I ran a PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign from 1st level to 20th level, but that meant that 95% of the campaign was above 1st level. I recently started a Strength of Thousands campaign and we are still at 1st level, but only 3 sessions so far. I ran A Fistful of Flowers and A Few Flowers More and started at 2nd level rather than 3rd level, but that still skipped 1st level. And each campaign had characters with healing magic.

Strength of Thousands starts with a one encounter per day. At that rate, the party can handle a Severe-Threat encounter.

Ironfang Invasion started with an invasion by an overwhelming force. The original module had the party fighting a few incompetent recruits who ran ahead of the main army. I rewrote the Ironfang Legion as a lot more competent and disciplined, because my players take their challenges seriously, but I also organized the villagers into defense squads that fought alongside the PCs. This let me easily adjust the difficulty that the party was exposed to. Sure, I had an entire army and could have killed the party if the invaders chose to bypass the village defenders to take on the more dangerous PCs, but that would have ended the campaign immediately. At 2nd level, the party was protecting refugee villagers hiding in the forest and down to one or two Moderate-Threat encounters per day.

A Fistful of Flowers did have a series of encounters, but most were Low Threat, which barely damages a capable party.

Sanityfaerie's comments yesterday about GM styles apply to my campaigns. I am a storyteller and I tend to let my players' efforts work as intended if they are competently planned, tell a good story, and the dice don't turn malicious. They gather information about their opponents' capabilities beforehand, which does lock in the opponents' strategy before the battle since I want to follow what the advance information forewarned.

I don't think that the skill ceiling for most RPGs is so high that there's some secret tactics fu that can't be explained.

The secret tactics fu in Pathfinder 2nd Edition is that powergamed builds don't work but teamwork does. People who were accustomed to extremely optimized characters in Pathfinder 1st Edition had trouble adapting to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Optimizing a build is an intuitive tactic, because it is essentially, "This worked, so let's do more of it." Teamwork means that the characters often have to play outside their strongest roles in order to support the current team tactics, And the team tactics keep changing, because no single tactic works against everything. Teamwork is not intuitive, so it is hard to learn without advice from experienced teamwork players.

But that fumbling around to discover what works in the current encounter is fun for me. If I wanted a story about a perfectly planned encounter, I would read a novel with a tight plot. Roleplaying campaigns have false starts and abandoned plans and corrected misconceptions and slow progress. They are a different kind of story than a novel, play, or television show.

We must be using different definitions of battlefield control. Mine is merely a method.

That new fangled treantmonks guide you were pointing out doesn't just tell you to control the battlefield its very explicit about what spells do that and how.

WHAT exactly are you doing to do "battlefield control" ? you're not just declaring to the dm "I will control the battlefield!" you're doing SOMETHING.

The secret tactics fu in Pathfinder 2nd Edition

The technique over controlling who takes the damage is what I'm questioning. The damage will be average (even a bit above on the bellcurve and there's a problem), the damage won't come in crits, and the damage will be evenly spread our are all problematic. The last one in particular because...

I am a storyteller and I tend to let my players' efforts work as intended if they are competently planned

And ideas of competent vary wildly.

What I see a lot of is a defensive line of characters (either pcs or npcs) with characters out front as bait. having the bad guys attack the battle turtle in front is a convention. It's one that previous editions helped to establish and the biggest reason I see it work is people buy into it.

Naratively, you're standing there protecting your allies the bad guys have to get through the slightly injured people to get to the people one hit away from going horizontal. (Bob at 4 hp).

As a tactical game you're doing nothing to show your allegedly superior tactics and battlefield control. There is very little you can do to stop people from walking right past you to kill bob without some really fortuitous terrain. Cover and hidden stop working once the kobold passes the corner. The three action system and few AOOs give people a LOT of freedom to just zip around the battlefield.

On the one hand, its kind of unrealistic how easy it is to get by people- that's enabled by the stop motion nature of the game. One the other hand, someone is just as dangerous at 4 hp as 24 and the kobold knows that, as well as the other rules the world works under. Going around the mostly intact person to Finish someone off is mean.. but the kobolds motivation is to live.

I don't think you can count on one of those considerations being more important than the other assume that one WILL outweigh the other and deride any other results as poor tactics.

What I see a lot of is a defensive line of characters (either pcs or npcs) with characters out front as bait. having the bad guys attack the battle turtle in front is a convention. It's one that previous editions helped to establish and the biggest reason I see it work is people buy into it.

1) The developers of Pathfinder 2nd Edition decided to break the battle turtle trope. Having to stand still except for a 5-foot-step seemed boring, so they switched to the 3-action system where making a full-round attack did not provide extra attacks. My players, after a brief Starfinder mini-campaign wanted to go back to the 3-action system, so we sticked back to PF2 for our next long campaign. I had been hoping to run a Starfinder campaign instead, but they decided to wait for Starfinder 2nd Edition. (I will be dragging them into the Starfinder 2nd Edition public playtest.)

2) How well does that defensive line work against the ranged attacks of Starfinder? My players did not use that tactic during our sojourn into Starfinder.

My own players abandoned the defensive line during our PF1 Iron Gods campaign, Iron Gods among Scientists, that began in December 2015. The party was a half-elf magus, a dwarf gunslinger, a strix skald, a human fighter/investigator, and a human bloodrager. They realized that they had no squishy wizard to protect in the back, so they did not maintain a front line. Their style was to skirmish in motion, negating their opponents' desire to stand and make full-round attacks. Since some opponents had laser guns or built-in lasers, we had some fights that were mostly ranged attacks, though the skald and the fighter preferred melee.

Years later, in our first PF2 campaign, that converted Ironfang Invasion adventure path, the party started as an elf ranger, a gnome druid, a gnome rogue, and a halfling rogue with sorcerer archetype. Their classes were better built for ranged combat than melee combat. Once they were in the forest, they would take cover behind trees and shoot at their enemy. Once again they had no defensive line. When the goblin champion joined them, they had a defense, but the defense was in a 15-foot-radius circle centered on the champion rather than a line.

Strangely, despite Big Norse Wolf's arguments, the PCs have been very good at protecting each other. At 19th level in the Ironfang Invasion campaign, a 23rd-level avatar of the god Hadregash materialzied with intent to kill a single party member Twining Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine. The leshy Honey had recently acquired fledgling godhood and Hadregash wanted her dead before she became immortal. I had arranged some secret support from other gods that liked Honey to prevent her immedate death, but I had underestimated the party. They kept Honey safe despite her being the sole target of an angry god. Of course, this was a 19th-level encounter rather than a 1st-level encounter, so the party had lots of methods for protecting each other. And, undermining my argument, they did hastily set up a defensive line in that particular encounter.

Rereading my summary of that encounter I see that a lot of what the party had done to protect Honey was simply weakening Hadregash and getting in his way. A defensive line in PF2 is not as impenetrable as a defensive line in PF1, but forcing the opponent to spend an extra action to move around the defensive line (each turn, since the defensive line could move as easily as the opponent) meant one fewer action to Strike. Forcing a single higher-level opponent to waste actions is an effective tactic.

Let's bring this conversation back to the Envoy.

Suppose that Starfinder 2nd Edition does need to provide more protection, healing like a Cleric or defense like a Champion, for PCs to survive at low levels. The teamwork emphasis on the Envoy makes this class a good candidate for protecting fellow team members. What is available in this field test document?

The Envoy is initially trained in Deception, Diplomacy, Intimidation, a leadership-style skill (Acrobatics, Athletics, Computers, Medicine, Performance, Piloting, or Stealth), and 6 plus Int other skills. That easily enables the Envoy to train in Medicine. The THROUGH DESPERATE TIMES leadership style also offers the Battle Medicine feat.

PARDON ME! class feat 1 can debuff an opponent via suppress.

WATCH OUT! reaction class feat 1 can grants a one-shot +2 circumstance bonus to AC to an ally.

DON’T YOU DIE ON ME! class feat 2 can reduce an adjacent character’s dying value by 1 once an hour.

SUPPRESSING INSULTS class feat 2 can debuff an opponent via suppress.

GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME! class feat 4 can remove off-guard from an ally once an hour.

The offerings for party protection are weak except for the Battle Medicine from THROUGH DESPERATE TIMES leadership style.

I don't know how well suppression defends the party in PARDON ME! and SUPPRESSING INSULTS. The "once per hour" on DON’T YOU DIE ON ME! and GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME! is too infrequent to fit well with the 10-minute break between encounters that Pathfinder/Starfinder 2nd Edition encourages. WATCH OUT! looks fine. Yet importantly, none of those class feats are directives. The Envoy is encouraged to use directives, so those feats are unlikely to be selected.

In the field test, the only 1st-level directives for an Envoy are the feature GET ’EM! and the class feat 1 TAKE ’EM ALIVE! I think that the Envoy needs a 1st-level protective directive.

GET DOWN! [One Action] Feat 1
DIRECTIVE, ENVOY, VISUAL
You urge your allies to stay out of sight. Until the beginning of your next turn, you and your allies may take the Hide action without cover, greater cover, or concealment. A success gives the character concealment in their square until the end of your next turn. They may use that concealment for a regular Hide action.
Lead by Example If you become hidden or otherwise obscured, your allies can still clearly see, hear, and otherwise sense you until the end of your next turn.

I don't think Hiding without anything to hide behind would make much sense.

Allowing them to use a free action on their turn to take cover, hide, or drop prone would make much more sense to me, then the lead by example would grant a circumstance or status bonus to reflex saves.

I don't think Hiding without anything to hide behind would make much sense.

Allowing them to use a free action on their turn to take cover, hide, or drop prone would make much more sense to me, then the lead by example would grant a circumstance or status bonus to reflex saves.

Yes, my GET DOWN! directive could use some brainstorming and wordsmithing. For example, it also let's the party see the envoy if he or she goes around a corner.

What do you think of the basic concept of a directive that helps the party hide? It should go well with the FROM THE SHADOWS leadership style, but my goal here is to let any envoy help injured party members stay out of sight.

Onward to the brainstorming to fix the directive. However, the many circumstance and status bonuses already on the Envoy in the field test bother me. Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a clean design that offers optional abilities rather than tiny bonuses. This is probably because the designers wanted to avoid the players stacking several tiny bonuses like is common in PF1. The fewer-bonuses style is easier to play. So I am going to try to adapt Quiet Allies to Encounter mode rather than give a circumstance bonus.

GET DOWN! 2nd Version [One Action] Feat 1
DIRECTIVE, ENVOY, VISUAL
You and your allies may Take Cover if they meet the requirements. An ally may Step to adjacent cover or Drop Prone before Taking Cover.
Lead by Example If you take a Hide action this turn, then your allies if they Hide or Sneak on their following turn may use your Stealth check, but with their modifier instead of yours, instead of rolling a new Stealth check.

I like this a lot better. I would add the words "Immediately as a Free action" to the end of the first sentence" just for clarity.

And setting the dice roll... I don't know. I think it would make sense to let them use your modifier instead of your own. That's a feeling, nothing to insist on it.

That version of Get Down is very strong. It's basically a Take Cover action that also lets all of your allies Take Cover (with optional step or drop prone). It's an incredible action efficiency booster.

The Lead By Example, though, is weird. In particular, it doesn't actually permit Acts of Leadership.

That version of Get Down is very strong. It's basically a Take Cover action that also lets all of your allies Take Cover (with optional step or drop prone). It's an incredible action efficiency booster.

Okay, the free Step is too much. An ally with cover ahead could use that Step to advance rather than to seek cover. Without the Step, the allies would have to position themselves carefully before the Envoy's GET DOWN! to take full advantage of it.

I will leave the Drop Prone in version 3, because prone is typically a disadvantaged condition. And dropping to the ground would look nicely cinematic.

The action efficiency booster is the point of GET DOWN!. It does not offer any bonus nor any action that the ally could not have taken on their own, so the only benefit is saving an action. Take Cover lasts until you move from your current space, use an attack action, become unconscious, or end the effect as a free action, so Take Cover is more easily ended than the Envoy debuffing the opponent with Demoralize. And if the ally moves and wants cover, then they would probably use Take Cover on their own action rather than wait for the GET DOWN!.

The Lead By Example, though, is weird. In particular, it doesn't actually permit Acts of Leadership.

I was not considering Acts of Leadership, because they were merely summarized as a 6th-level ability on page 4. Upon rereading it, the issue is terribly complicated. An act of leadership can trigger the Lead by Example instead of the usual trigger. This means that all the details of the Lead by Example have to be defined in the main body of the directive or in the result of Lead by Example rather than in the trigger. But the Stealth check in my 2nd version was in the trigger.

No wonder why the Envoy design favors circumstance bonuses. They don't have targets or checks to define ahead of time. Fortunately, PF2 provides conditions as another way to avoid customized bonuses.

GET DOWN! 3rd Version [One Action] Feat 1
DIRECTIVE, ENVOY, VISUAL
You and your allies may Take Cover Immediately as a free action if they meet the requirements. An ally may Drop Prone before Taking Cover.
Lead by Example If you Create a Diversion this turn, then until the beginning of your next turn cover and greater cover make your allies concealed to enemies and prone makes your allies concealed to ranged attacks.

In pathfinder/ 3.x , Pike the Pikeman could control the battlefield by threat of AoO's given. You didn't want to pass him. Even if the first penguin got pushed through his reach and found an AOO, combat reflexes leads to the dirty harry speech about how many shots are left in the polearm.

Besides habit, I do not see much allowing that in PF2 at low level. I don't need a ranged weapon to stab Bob while he's hiding in the back. I can walk 50 feet, right past the entire party, and gank Bob with no repercussions, and start flanking with my friends next round. The party needs to fill a corridor to stop that.

At 1st level anyone can use the ready action to save 1 action to strike at Bob if Bob moves too close, but to do so you would have to beat Bob's initiative.

At 6th level several classes also gain access to reactive strike.

At 10th level, Fighters can gain access to a second reactive strike.

Might not be dirty harry level AOO But that could help hold a defensive line. I don't claim to play a rules lawer on TV so maybe some of the PF2e players might know of other ways to get more reactive strikes.

I have seen only one Envoy in play, the witchwyred Dekoorc in my mini-campaign, who was a forger, con-man, and negotiator. He usually performed crowd control during combat, calming and evacuating innocent bystanders, rather than attacking. Thus, my ideas about Starfinder Envoys comes from science fiction stories.

Jame Retief, main character of Envoy to New Worlds by Keith Laumer is the archetypical two-fisted diplomat. He would figure out the schemes of rival factions and either recruit competent local aliens or divert incompetent local aliens to foil those schemes. Other classic characters who fit the Starfinder Envoy include merchant Nicholas van Rijn by Poul Anderson and actor Lorenzo Smythe of Double Star by Robert Heinlein. The more recent character Miles Vorkosigan by Lois McMaster Bujold has military training and operates a mercenary company but his main talent is talking people into following his plans. For Envoys on television, I think that captain James Holden and undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala of The Expanse fit the class. Communications officer Uhura in Star Trek might be an envoy, since Starfinder lacks a separate linguist class.

As a side note, imagining a Linguist leadership style for Uhura is amusing.
OPEN A CHANNEL
Every peace begins with talks. You spend your time learning about your friends and your enemies. And then you listen, you negotiate, you persuade, or you distract.
Leadership Skill (1st) Culture
Leadership Perk (1st) You gain Multilingual as a bonus feat.
Acts of Leadership (6th) Demoralize, Request, Make an Impression via Glad-Hand

The unifying characteristic of the fictional characters that I view as envoys is that they talk. As the Starfinder team said, "They’re a Charisma-based class."

Yet the only place the word Charisma shows up in the Field Test document is, "Key Attribute: Charisma." They get one Charisma-based skill automatically, and everything they do that is Charisma-based is through regular uses of Charisma skills.
SIZE UP can give an Envoy a +1 circumstance bonus to them.
PRACTICED INFLUENCER allows rolling twice on them once a day.
PARDON ME! feat 1 allows Deception for Tumble Through.
QUIP feat 1 permits Demoralize as a reaction.
SUPPRESSING INSULTS feat 2 can suppress an opponent through Demoralize.
NOT IN THE FACE! feat 4 uses Deception to weaken an attack against the Envoy.

I find the Envoy channeling their key ability through skills to be flavorful, but I share dmerceless's worries in comment #52:

- The Charisma key feels a bit out of place right now, mechanically. It makes sense flavor-wise, but almost everything the class does with Charisma is optional, to the point where the Cha key feels more like a restriction than a feature. I'd definitely go 18 Dex 16 Cha here if I could instead of the opposite.

Compare Envoy's use of Charisma to the PF2 Charisma classes.

Five of those seven can exploit Charisma as their spellcasting stat. The thaumaturge uses its Charisma bonus for its characteristic Exploit Vulnerability ability to deal extra damage. As for the Scoundrel Rogue, Tarondor's Guide to the Pathfinder 2e Rogue recommends, "You might want to leave Dexterity as your key ability score and set your initial Charisma to 16." The Scoundrel Rogue in my campaign started with Charisma 18, but the Charisma served double duty because he multiclassed to Sorcerer at 2nd level.

The Envoy's abilities mostly resemble those of the Scoundrel Rogue. I don't want Envoy to be a class that sets its initial Charisma to 16. I want to see the Envoy talking and persuading with high Charisma bonus +4. But the dangers of combat call for a high-powered combat ability. If success in combat comes at the price of lowering Charisma, many players will pay that price. Therefore, I desire a Charisma-based combat ability for the Envoy.

Applying the Charisma bonus to Strike attack rolls or to damage rolls does not fit the flavor of the Envoy. Charisma is not magic for this class. I still like that the Envoy relies upon Charismatic skills.

My younger daughter as a teenager owned a t-shirt with pictures of polyhedral dice of all sizes and a caption that said, "Chose your weapon." I asked her which weapon used the d20? She replied, "Diplomacy." Scoundrel Rogue further weaponized Feint. Let's do the same for the Envoy with a Diplomacy action. Request takes only one action, but I had to rewrite it heavily.

Talkative Response [One Action] Envoy feature 1st level
Auditory Envoy Linguistic
Your passion for connection inspires a response in everyone. Ask a target creature to talk about themselves. Make a Diplomacy check against the Will DC of the target. A target will spend only one action per turn answering successful Talkative Responses; nevertheless, multiple Talkative Requests will reveal more information.

Critical Success The target spends an action on their next turn truthfully answering with information that a successful Recall Knowledge would have revealed.
Success The target spends an action on their next turn truthfully talking about themselves on a topic of their choice.
Critical Failure The target is immune to your Talkative Response for the next ten minutes.

To quote Syndrome in The Incredibles, "Oh, ho ho! You sly dog! You got me monologuing!" Losing an action is a serious debuff on a boss creature. On the other hand, it serves little benefit against a lower-level enemy. In theory, maximizing the key ability score is for opposing the strongest foes with the strongest defenses. An Envoy should be able to rely Dexterity-based or Strength-based attacks, perhaps boosted by Demoralize or Feint, against a lower-level adversary.

The 1e envoy definitely has the problem where you benefit so little from charisma that you don't want to max it out and instead concentrate on your hit stat. (Usually dex. Strength based envoys have problems at a lot of levels. The three action economy would probably help that a lot.) Don't get me wrong you need a good charisma for your social skills, but the difference between 1d20+14+1d6+1 and a reroll and a partridge in a pear tree and 1d20+16+1d6+1 and a partridge in a pear tree.

The best weapon for the class is a large unwieldy gun but unlike the operative, they're disincentivized from using a weapon you'd think of an envoy having (like a deringer or a stilletto)

If you SAY something is a charsima based class and don't build it in, then part of the player base subverts the expectation and you have show don't tell. The other half goes with the path laid down and get frustrated when their class isn't working. In PF1 an envoy with a gun bigger than they are isn't a trade off it's an upgrade.

I definitely feel like envoy should get to pick INT (and *maybe* WIS) as its key ability. People have mentioned in this thread already that the class doesn't do a lot with CHA *mechanically*, but what I'm surprised that people haven't mentioned is that "provides guidance and support to allies in combat" isn't exclusively the thematic domain of CHA anyway. I'd love to to an INT-based envoy that leans really hard into Warfare Lore and focuses on ensuring my allies are safely moving from cover to cover, pinning down key targets, checking for flanking enemies, etc.

The base class gets a few social-related abilities (e.g rerolling social skill checks once per day), so it'd be nice if there were other alternatives to those, as well. Maybe make different subclasses for different key abilities (like how psychic works with subconscious minds) and tie those kinds of abilities to that, instead of the core class?

A new PF2 playtest was just announced on stream, for the Guardian and Commander classes - seemingly two new martials. It'll be fun to contrast the Commander with Envoys!

A new PF2 playtest was just announced on stream, for the Guardian and Commander classes - seemingly two new martials. It'll be fun to contrast the Commander with Envoys!

Yeah, if commander ends up being the INT-based "tactician" class then I guess everything I just suggested in the post immediately above Isn't really necessary.

It'd definitely help the envoy more firmly carve out its niche as the charisma-based, scoundrel-y class. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how these two eventually stack up.

We've worked closely with the Pathfinder design team to make sure the envoy and commander have distinct class identities.

In addition to the points others have made about Charisma not being particularly useful to Envoys mechanically, it doesn't seem like they even have a lot of room in their action rotation to use cha-based skills. Assuming you want to issue a directive and lead by example whenever you can, that only leaves their third action, which is going to compete with striding, striking, taking cover etc.

I'd like to see all Envoys get Demoralize, Bon Mot and Create a Diversion as Acts of Leadership at level 1. That would let them be used much more frequently and give some flexibility before the other Acts of Leadership kick in at lv. 6.

(If all three are too much, then we could at least get the one that corresponds to the choice of Diplomacy, Deception or Intimidation, then have a repeatable low level feat to gain the others).

A new PF2 playtest was just announced on stream, for the Guardian and Commander classes - seemingly two new martials. It'll be fun to contrast the Commander with Envoys!

Honestly, from what they've said about guardians, they kinda seem like Soldiers but without heavy weapons. Its interesting how these classes compare to each other.

It does sound like the Guardian is intended to be a defensive tank while the Soldier is an offensive one. It'll be cool to make squads out of these classes once they're all out.

As far as I can see, we know almost nothing about the Guardian other than "heavy armor defender martial, has a taunt". So it could be all sorts of things.

That said, it's likely that the Guardian has ways of convincing the enemy to cluster around them... which can synergize well with a class that's all about the area attacks. It's just going to mean looking for ways to make the whole thing a bit more party-friendly. Possibly we'll get an updated version of Backfire Mantle that isn't spell-specific?

I'm also curious about the Envoy/Commander combo. Will there be a way to leverage party-buffers buffing each other's buffs?

As far as I can see, we know almost nothing about the Guardian other than "heavy armor defender martial, has a taunt". So it could be all sorts of things.

That said, it's likely that the Guardian has ways of convincing the enemy to cluster around them... which can synergize well with a class that's all about the area attacks. It's just going to mean looking for ways to make the whole thing a bit more party-friendly. Possibly we'll get an updated version of Backfire Mantle that isn't spell-specific?

I'm also curious about the Envoy/Commander combo. Will there be a way to leverage party-buffers buffing each other's buffs?

There's a fun combo to fantasize about. The guardian pulls all the enemies around them, somehow, and hopefully has some kind of feat to exclude themselves from their allies' attacks, so they aren't harmed when the soldier lights them all up.

"Please, please, gather round! My friend has something to show you!"