A Man In Black's page

The VP system can overlay a combat encounter. You can count up VP after every round and easily have things like "Is a party member hidden at the end of a round?" factor into whether the slider moves towards captain Akkab intervening or not.

Look at how ridiculous this is, though. Hiding at the end of a round involves literally hiding behind an obstacle. How would that limit the amount of ruckus their fight stirs up? Deception doesn't seem to cover this, either.

The base issue is that treating bystanders as objects or terrain is a bad fit. They're people, so they think and react, making them dynamic, but you PF2 absolutely does not scale to handle every single person in a busy street as a combatant. Treating each of them as a combatant breaks the game and prevents lots of scenes from working, but treating them just as terrain is too simplistic and stops characters from doing thematic things. Knowing how bystanders will react, when they'll do what you want or what you don't want, and how you can push them to do what you want, those are all skilled tasks. You can kinda sorta make it work if you stick to the siloed progressive skill challenges, but any time the progressive challenges bump against the sides of the silo (eg combat, scenes that are more open-ended), you have problems.

It handles these special situations, as special kind of encounters. PFS does this in almost every scenario. Your encounter of wanting to rough up a rival in public, but not too public a set of circumstances is a perfect set up for a VP encounter where party members might use intimidate, athletics, perception, and even deception to provide a show of force, but have to be careful about going to far.

How does the progressive encounter system mesh with the combat system?

Let me lay out this scene, to get into particulars.

Jack the rogue and Garf the barbarian (the PCs) have gotten themselves wrapped up in the internecine gang politics of the city. Their hated rival is Four, the ogre lieutenant of an enemy gang. He might be named that because he has four fingers on one hand, or it might be because it's as high as he can count. Nobody knows, since Four isn't much of a conversationalist. Four isn't specifically seeking out Jack and Garf but doesn't really need a whole lot of motivation to try to hurt them. None of them particularly want to attract the attention of Captain Akkab, a cruel taskmaster of a man who keeps the tensions between the gangs from spilling into the streets with punitive and arbitrary reprisals.

I know how I'd do this in BITD. It's even one of the examples of how to handle play, on pages 39-40. Basically, BITD encourages easy success but at the cost of complications, so beating down Four isn't the hard part. The hard part is what you miss healing up from the injuries he inflicts, or who you offended by beating Four, or the evidence you left behind, or Akkab catching wind and planning a reprisal long-term.

I also know how I'd do this in AW. How they get Four out into the fight would probably involve Going Aggro or Manipulating him, although a number of playbooks have moves to draw or call people out. Garf would probably Go Aggro on Four (and get drawn into a fight since Four's not one to back down), while Jack Reads The Sitch for possible short-term complications and maybe Keeps An Eye Out unless he has to get involved. In the fight, Garf and Four trade harm and try to get enough of an advantage to force the other to escalate, submit, or flee. I have lots of opportunities to offer the PCs success-but-at-a-cost: "but Four's gang shows up," "but Four plans a trap of his own," "but someone goes shouting for the guards," "but Akkab shows up," etc.

What I don't know is how to do this in PF2. I get how you'd make drawing out Four into a progressive challenge. I can even figure out how to work the crowd into that challenge: drawing out Four is basically assured, but more successes mean that Four is drawn into circumstances more and more favorable to the PCs. (Abject failure is Four just ambushing them.) The relevant skills would probably be Stealth, Deception, Diplomacy (still silly that they're separate), and Social.

Where it gets dicey is the actual press-your-luck of the fight. I can see how I want this to go: the combatants want to hurt each other, but both sides are walking a figurative tightrope of not drawing in Akkab and the authorities. How do I offer the players hard, interesting choices that engage their characters' abilities? I can't do it purely with the skill system because this is a fight and that's Garf's whole deal. But I can't do it purely with combat because PF2 combat is predicated on LOS granting basically perfect information, and the skill system offers little in the way of tools to handle this.

This space of violent, skillful, surreptitious action falls into the gap between PF2's skills and PF2's combat, so far as I can tell. And it's not a one-off, it's something I'd want to do as a GM all the time in a game of intrigue in a city. Blackbagging or kidnapping a rival. Any assassination scene. A running battle through a crowd, where sides are fleeing for better ground and renewing the fight. Seeking your rival in a pitched battle, or sneaking up on people busy fighting in that battle. It's any scene where you want to hurt someone on the sly.

This overlaps with but is a separate problem from the fact that PF2's rules for sneaking don't really accommodate moving through a place full of bystanders well. It's just complicated by the fact that PF2's rules don't do that.

If anything, the GMG did go out of its way to provide special rules for outlier scenarios and empowers you as a GM to run noncombat encounters in the way that is going to be best for your game, as opposed to force the players to have to roll stealth 3 times every round while they try to sneak through a city at night, with 90% of the rolls immaterial to the success of the mission, as anyone seeing the players for most of that time might not really care if they are there or not, the GM crafts the encounter as an infiltration encounter, or as a chase or as the kind of VP encounter that will best satisfy the context of the encounter for the adventure.

Let's dig a little deeper into this.

Bystanders fundamentally change the calculus of hiding.

In a dungeon, it can be simply assumed that anyone that any character can see is interesting. This can be good interesting or bad interesting, but the simple act of being in each other's presence means that, by default, both parties are instantly aware of that presence and alert. This is a symmetric relationship. The PCs care very much about the orcs, and the orcs often have no reason to exist in the game except to care about the PCs. Everyone who can be seen is a main character in a dungeon scene, even if that character is just Orc #4. If the PCs don't want to have to deal with the orc, with words or spell or sword, they need to do something to prevent the orc from being aware of their presence. You roll Stealth to hide from that orc's sight, or Disguise to look like another orc. If the orc's on guard, it might get a bonus; if the orc's eating lunch, maybe a penalty. As far as I can tell, these rules work fine in PF2. Poor Jack was so hapless because PF1's rules for this situation did not work fine.

However, when you add bystanders to the discussion, those rules for sneaking in a dungeon break down. There are no bystanders in a dungeon. Once you get into situations where not every character is worth noting, then what it means to "hide" completely changes. The game should not have you roll to hide against literally every bystander, because it's probably impossible (both because there just aren't enough hiding places and also because of difficulty^N scaling), and also because trying to hide behind lamp posts and trash heaps seems like it should be more conspicuous than just walking down the street anyway.

Bystanders introduce two sorts of complications. First, the attitudes of actual bystanders. Bystanders definitionally don't care about the PCs (or the antagonists, if any) by default. They're just living their lives. However, they might be roused into caring about them. The stranger a character looks or acts, the more likely that bystanders should get involved. It's easy to imagine a gradiated scale of bystander reaction, perhaps: "Indifference, witnessing what's happening, alarmed commotion, angry or fearful reaction, absolute panic/murderous resolve." To apply this to a crowd of (demi)humans in a market square: people will remember the day a gnoll came to trade, and there might be witnesses to a failed theft. A fistfight, or a hill giant and his tremendous cart drawn by aurochs, might inspire a larger commotion that can be noticed from a distance, as people cheer or shout or hustle their children away. A battle to the death or a chimera touching down is going to result in people ringing the alarm, fleeing for safety, and the guards rushing in as fast as they can. Burning the mayor alive or the Witch King on his fell winged steed touching down, those are going to start a riot or a panic or both.

Now, if the PCs aren't subtle, you don't need much more of a rules framework than GM intuition. If the PCs are just going about their business, then whatever, nothing happens. If the PC is an ogre laying about himself with a giant axe, shouting about his lust for the livers of human children, then the bystanders should obviously react to that immediately and it's not hard to figure out how. Where this gets gameable is when characters want to control how the crowd reacts. The PCs can theoretically do this by hiding what they are doing from sight (either completely or by concealing it in the chaos of public business), making what they are doing look like something less alarming, or seeking a place where what they want to do fits expectations better. (A fistfight in front of a bar is barely noteworthy, for example.) Sometimes these actions are very active (kill the mayor, break into a building), some of them are passive (do your business despite being an orc, do your business despite being known and wanted criminal Robin of Loxley). Knowing how to move without being seen is a skill. Not necessarily in the Pathfinder sense of A Thing You Write On Your Character Sheet, as it could reasonably be several skill listings in that sense. But it seems reasonable that someone playing Pathfinder will want their ranger to be able to tackle the challenge of leading four hapless hobbits across town in a hurry without leaving any witnesses who can point the pursuing wraiths in their direction. Moving through and acting a crowded public space while attracting the least amount of attention possible based on your character's attributes? That seems like a reasonable thing to expect from a game with "rogue" and "ranger" character classes.

While bystanders are people you don't care about and who don't care about you, they are also people. The existence of bystanders means that it's reasonable for a stranger to walk straight through your line of sight without you noticing or caring. This changes the calculus of hiding: anyone can hide in plain sight in a public place as long as they are (or make themselves) unremarkable. The PCs and their antagonists can now exist in the same space, but with no or limited awareness of the other. This is a form of stealth, and it can involve not lingering in someone's line of sight, but not everyone who does this is also sneaky in the sense that they are very good at hiding behind rocks. You could use a disguise to do this, but that doesn't make sense if the "camouflage" of one party or another is simply being naturally indistinguishable from a bystander or being unknown to the other party. You can again easily imagine a gradiated scale of awareness: unaware, aware of something awry (someone's following me!), suspicious of a particular person or thing, fully aware of a specific person or thing.

PF2 already sort of handles this sort of gradiated awareness for hiding behind a rock outcropping in a dungeon. Valjean can't hide from Javert in a crowd of people RAW (AFAICT), but you do have a framework for Javert to know Valjean was here, and, if so, where exactly. But it doesn't handle an environment where you can hide in plain sight, or an environment where one party has to do something in the sight of another and risk giving themselves away.

Drawing more heavily on Les Mis, in PF2's frameworks, Javert has perfect awareness of everything Valjean does to save Fauchelevent's life, and it's entirely up to the GM what Javert knows. In a framework where a sneaky character can manipulate what information he gives away, Valjean's player could (roll to) know that shouting for help is ordinary and would arouse no suspicion, but could also (roll to) know that lifting the cart would be remarkable to Javert. Perhaps a more-skilled version of Valjean could lift it in a way less visible or obvious to Javert, or simply know what sort of solution would work without being suspicious. Similarly, if Javert is instead the PC, they could (roll to) attempt to tell if there was something suspicious going on here, and if so, how much they learn from that observation. If there was a framework for knowing and controlling how conspicuous you are and attempting to ferret out suspicious activity, it would work for almost every sort of scene where characters need to do things in public sneakily despite the possible presence of their antagonists.

These two elements meld together. The party wants to punish a member of a rival gang. They want attack that rival gangster in public, to intimidate their enemies, but not attract so much attention that guards come down on their heads. But they don't want to do it if the guard lieutenant that hates them is on patrol. How do they identify a place to have this fight? How do they attack someone without attracting too much attention? How do they tell if their hated gang rival is around? How do they tell if their hated guard rival is around and a threat? A robust framework that incorporates both skills and combat (and spells, of course) could handle this, and many other sorts of scenes.

Trying to treat crowds the same as a mobile patch of brush is a fundamentally limited POV that doesn't allow for handling the way bystanders make the scenes more interesting, and isn't actually supported by the rules as written to boot. You can hammer some of these sorts of scenes into the Infiltration/Chase rules, or the progressive skill system in general, but those systems don't mesh nicely with the combat rules. Every example has involved killing/incapacitating people with a skill check, which is very fine and good for Jack but seems to leave the rest of the party in the cold. (It's how you'd resolve this same sort of scene in BITD or AW, where violence is a skill check.) Stealth in combat is still written like you're back in the dungeon, where the only people in the world who matter are the protagonists and antagonists.

Does PF2 have a good way to handle the presence of bystanders, or the ambiguity between bystander and participant? People keep pointing me to the Disguise action under Deception, and it's not even really close to what I'm talking about.

This is a separate topic from handling the ambush scene. Although it's certainly one you'd want to support in this sort of environment, too.

Why can't you lure the enemy around a corner? There is no rule that says all enemies will automatically hear you kill a low level guard if you do it out of sight. Maybe the GM will have the guards make a perception check and possibly come and investigate, so you have to hide the body quickly or have some other plan in place, but I am struggling to think of any game that has rules for killing someone right in the line of sight of an enemy and they don't do anything. That feels like a hokey video game, not a staple of the fantasy genre...unless you are talking 20th level, god-like rogue abilities, which the game also has.

"Hey, where did Jim go?" is not a hokey video game scene, it's a horror/suspense staple so hoary that even joking about it is cliche.

So, the PCs are tracking a pack of orcs down the path. The orcs are entirely unaware that they are in danger. How many of them can you attempt to quietly dispatch before they catch on? How far can you push your luck before they know they're under attack? How far can you push your luck before they figure out who's attacking them? It's not a matter of trivializing the fight but rather having an understanding of how hard this challenge is and how likely to succeed you are and what the consequences for failure would be. It shouldn't be easy, but it should be possible.

Right now, you have to play a game of figuring out when orcs are within attacking range of a hiding spot while also moving to a position where there's no second orc with LOS to the would-be victim orc and the hiding spot. (If that sounds very complicated and confusing, that's because it is.) This probably involves breaking out the combat map and putting everyone down in their positions and using combat movement, but also lots of "turns" of the GM just shuffling orcs around until they move into a position where they can be attacked without giving away LOS. This is Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game, and it might be fun! But it's going to take even more prep than a standard combat and it's going to involve lots of the actual tedium of waiting for an opportunity. It's also not real well supported by the rules, and could easily be negated by the GM just setting down the orcs in LOS of each other and saying, "Yeah, we're just doing this as a regular combat, whatever."

And, incidentally, a PC can't be better or worse at identifying these opportunities for an attack from ambush. It's entirely a matter of the player's skill at these sort of tactical board games.

The progressive infiltration rules don't really handle this very well because it's not just a sneaking challenge, it's a sneaky fighting challenge. If you reduce the orcs to just a skill check, then, sure, you can just use the Infiltration rules. But that doesn't allow the characters whose main role is combat prowess to really participate in what is fundamentally a scene of hewing orcs. If you don't use any framework, you can just leave it up to GM fiat whether they can get (or create) opportunities for ambush, but that makes it impossible to make a character who is measurably better at spotting or creating those opportunities. Everyone can do a thing if the GM says they can, but rules exist to allow players to know what their character can be expected to do.

This sort of scene appears in lots of forms. Dealing with the castle guards without raising the alarm. Identifying and ambushing the patrols to leave a camp vulnerable. Blackbagging or suckerpunching someone in a crowd without attracting attention or being seen as the one hitting them. None of these things are things that only the 20th-level god-powered canard should be able to do.

It sounds like you want to be able to sneak up on a level appropriate encounter foe, and one shot them without giving away your position.

No, I want it to be possible to fight an enemy without alerting his friends under the right conditions, since it's a genre staple. Right now, even if you can otherwise one-shot a level-appropriate enemy, you can't do that. So there's lots of sneaky scenes you just can't do without throwing either or both of the skill system or the combat system out the window.

If you attack someone or cast a spell, you immediately aren't hidden any more. The enemies immediately know that they're under attack, that their ally was taken down, and as long as they can see at all, they can see the attacker immediately. Now, the attacker can immediately run and hide, but you can't do the scene where you take out the guards without alerting everyone unless the guards are so isolated from each other that none of them have LOS to each other.

Fencing is not a comparable example to the color shirt you choose to wear.

I want to emphasize, your main defense against a fencer is what sort of shirt you're wearing, whether it's made of cloth or leather or chain or plate.

There's no framework to be numerically good at not attracting attention. All of this nonsense about "Well, you don't need a system!" would be intolerable if you applied it to melee or spellcasting, so why is it tolerable here? Those frameworks exist so players can know a baseline of what they are always allowed to (attempt to) do in a given set of common situations.

If anything, the GMG did go out of its way to provide special rules for outlier scenarios and empowers you as a GM to run noncombat encounters in the way that is going to be best for your game, as opposed to force the players to have to roll stealth 3 times every round while they try to sneak through a city at night, with 90% of the rolls immaterial to the success of the mission, as anyone seeing the players for most of that time might not really care if they are there or not, the GM crafts the encounter as an infiltration encounter, or as a chase or as the kind of VP encounter that will best satisfy the context of the encounter for the adventure.

You're making up some fake bad rules about rolling dice in trivial situations to rail on about how dumb those fake bad rules are. That ruleset that exists strictly in your imagination sure sounds like it sucks, but it doesn't do what I want anyway!

The so called "mother may I" system lets the answer to the question be yes more often than not. While in non mother games the answer has been more often a no or at least a pause in gameplay to try and find supporting rules.

If I have to make up the rules as the GM, I can do that for free instead of giving Paizo money for rulebooks.

The whole point of rulebooks is that someone has already done that work for me, and I'm paying them for the trouble.

Trying to replace these contextual factors with a numerical bonus would really just make the game drabber and feel less like a story.

Yet nobody says, "Trying to replace the contextual factors of fencing with a numerical chance to hit with a melee attack would really just make the game drabber." Nobody's out here posting, "Really, it's taking the fun out of the game to reduce the whims of the ley lines to a simple spell DC."

Nobody has to play mother-may-I with the GM to have their other class abilities work. Classes have numeric abilities so you can understand how likely your character is to succeed in a given situation. If you just leave all of that to GM fiat, then why bother giving Paizo a pile of money to make rulebooks? I can do rules-free RP for free.

Well, yeah, whether or not your character stands out in this particular story is based on the story.

But it's a part of the story that players don't have any tools to affect. You can't be measurably good or bad at escaping notice; just measurably good or bad at hiding behind a rock or getting the first turn in a fight. The fighter doesn't have to rely on the GM to decide "Well, according to the story, you get to hit that orc with an axe." The wizard doesn't have to wait for the GM to feel like saying, "Okay, now you're allowed to cast Fireball." Skills labor under limitations that other class abilities - other players' ability to affect the story - do not.

No game can cover every eventuality, but they should cover common and important ones in the genres they're attempting to cover. I do think it is a weakness that Pathfinder attempts to support sneaky characters and urban adventures, but does not support the way you sneak through busy urban environments very well. The progressive challenge rules (Chases, Heists, Infiltration) are an improvement over some D&D/likes but there's still a soft spot in the rules here.

Also, I don't want to get too deep into Tolkien pedantry! I just want to emphasize that a character who is sneaky without being literally unseeable is a perfectly ordinary sort of character to play in a fantasy game.

I don't really think the real world examples are applicable, though. In a situation where no one is on the look out for the PCs or cares about people walking by, you don't need to roll stealth. You probably don't need to roll Deception either-- you just avoid doing things that will draw attention like visibly carrying giant weapons or whatever. As you out it yourself, most people do that automatically when they walk around in public, so you don't need to make it a dice challenge anymore than tying your shoes.

Exactly. Whether your characters are noticeable or not is entirely up to GM fiat, rather than being a challenge your characters can be better or worse at. Either you are noticeable, in which case you you need a rock, hill giant's leg, or dark corner to hide in, or you're not noticeable, in which case there's no game.

You usually roll stealth in scenarios where your mere presence will lead to conflict.

Exactly! They're rules written for a dungeon crawl, and they stop working once you move outside of the dungeon.

Player: "I want to cross the courtyard unnoticed."

GM: "Well that's going to be hard, because you'd be crossing in the open and there are guards on watch."
Player2: "My wizard could distract them for a moment with a fireball. While they're looking at what the hell just happened my buddy could tiptoe past."
GM: "Well. There's no rule for that in the book, but it makes sense that it could work."

This sort of mother-may-I design doesn't apply to class abilities that aren't skills, though. There's no "Well, there's no rule for hitting someone with an axe, but it makes sense that that could work" or "There's no rule for casting a spell, but I guess I could let you do it this time." You're describing a scene where you're not allowed to sneak across, but if you ask the GM really nicely, they might make up some different rules on the spot to make up for the deficiencies of the written rules.

You still can't do the scene where Merry sneaks up on the Witch King because he's beneath the Witch King's notice. "Beneath someone's notice" isn't a state in the game; you're just visible or not visible.

Really, the biggest immersion problem is the lack of facing.

More than facing, I think the biggest missing factor is the lack of the state of awareness. When it's sound, it's the difference between hearing a sound and listening to it. Nobody is fully aware of their surroundings. Even if they could choose to be aware of each of the things in their surroundings, they can't be aware of all of them simultaneously.

If you track the exact position of someone's head, we start running into realism problems really fast because people can look around themselves in a literal second. It's just that most people don't unless they feel like they have some reason to do so. In fact, most people aren't even really paying that much attention to what's in front of them unless what's in front of them is something interesting, unusual, obtrusive, dangerous, or something they're looking for or working on. So it's really easy to hide in plain sight as long as you aren't one of those things, and very hard to hide if you are. You probably "hide in plain sight" every time you get on the bus or go to the grocery store, not because you're sneaky but because nobody really gives a s~!* about you.

Sneaking in most D&D-likes - and, in large part, PF2 AFAICT - is predicated on the idea that the PCs are the protagonists of reality and the only people who they need to compete with are antagonists, who are focused chiefly on them. That's a perfectly reasonable stance to have for a dungeon crawl game. Anyone who rolls into the orcs' 40'x40' square home armed to the teeth had better have a very good explanation or a very soft step or it's time for the hewing and stabbing. But if we're going to talk about industry and swashbuckling and suchlike, it's time to start talking about a world full of bystanders. That means a world full of people who don't care about the PCs unless the PCs give them a reason, and a world full of people indistinguishable from the PCs by the antagonists until the antagonists figure out who their enemies are.

This is a matter of information overload. Urban environments are just one example. Another example is a pitched battle, where there's so much going on that nobody can possibly be aware of it all at once. It's reasonable to assume that even extremely powerful beings can't do that. As I said before, the Witch King doesn't realize that Merry has crept up to hamstring him, not because Merry is hiding behind a rock or an ent, but because Merry is beneath his notice.

How do you model people's attention span? How do you make a fun, gameable-but-not-degenerate system of manipulating that attention span to sometimes escape notice in plain sight? I don't know. I feel like a fantasy game that hopes to include Strider and the Grey Mouser and Bilbo and Merry should do that. But I don't know how you would make workable rules to avoid being seen without disappearing entirely.

Follow the Expert (an activity anybody can do) and Quiet Allies (a skill feat that Jack or anyone with Stealth training can take) do a great job of allowing the party to sneak almost as well as Jack, even if they didn't invest in Stealth. The latter even sets up the whole party for a single Stealth check, rather than several, vastly improving the odds that the party remains undetected.

These are the kinds of things I was looking for, thanks!

It is interesting to look at how they reflect some of the baked-in assumptions of D&D-likes, though.

Follow the Expert is very weak in a subtle way. Most people don't think about how or why skills are weak this way, but the way it's weak has shaped player behavior in most WOTC-era D&D-likes (Pathfinder included). The problem with Follow the Expert is that you are probably going to fail four or five skill checks rolled in series. If Jack rolls a 2+ to sneak and everyone else in a party of four rolls a 3+, that sounds like a very trivial task, right? Well, you have a >30% chance to fail. It gets worse very fast, as a party of four all rolling 6+ fail ~68% of the time, with a crit failure ~20% of the time. Not Nice, not Nice at all. If everyone has to roll pass-fail, things get XCOM-shaped very quickly.

It's relatively strong for situations like using Avoiding Notice for initiative where you're going to have to roll something anyway, and it's better than nothing in situations where you either have the ability to attempt to proceed or don't (like climbing a sheer cliff), but in situations like sneaking past a guard where everyone has to make a roll, you are generally going to fail more than you're going to succeed.

As a result, generally people think of skills as solo activities because they are designed that way. If two people try to do something where one failure scuttles the task, they have a much larger chance to fail. If the whole party gets involved - even if the whole party is sneaky! - everyone succeeding is the exception rather than the rule.

Quiet Allies solves this problem... for one skill. In one sort of situation. At the cost of a permanent expenditure of character building resource, spent before knowing you'll ever need to do that task. Feats are useful to game designers as a cue to players: hey, this is a thing you can do that maybe you'll want to, and nobody else will be able to do it as well as you! But also they're also pagechewing filler whose role is largely to say that if you don't spend resources on this beforehand, then you're not allowed to do it (except possibly at a significant penalty). In this case, it's a counterintuitive penalty caused by the difficulty of estimating odds in sequence, but it's similar to "eliminate a -4 penalty" feat design in practice.

Oftentimes these "special" things are not things which are themselves special tricks, but rather just ignoring the baked-in assumptions of the game designers. There's no reason in particular that skills should be inherently selfish, but players here are charged resources to ignore that basic assumption.

It's interesting to me how much these base design assumptions remain in PF2, apparently unchanged.

I'm just here to note that all skill checks have that caveat. And it's an optional one.

It seems strange to me to have that caveat for skills when it isn't similarly applied to any of the other common attribute-based checks.

Anyhow if you don't feel like reading the posts, feel free to not reply!

The biggest issue with most of these scenarios, from a game stand point, is that they are not team challenges, but solo character challenges.

Only for the sake of readability. I do also wonder how you'd make those scenes work with Jack and his friends; I'd just rather not get into answers that boil down to "the wizard casts Mordenkainen's Expeditious Exit."

There's also the common problem that skills are generally atomized and personal in a way that spells and attacks are not, because they mainly act on the self rather than the target. You can have a fighter cut down an orc, or a spellcaster cast a spell that slays the orc or turns the whole party invisible, but generally skill-based characters start from the assumption that they only can use their skills for themselves but need special exceptions or eat significant penalties when they use them for anyone else. This is something that crept into D&D around the Player's Option era without ever really being properly reconsidered (except for a brief and largely abandoned attempt to fit skill actions into the spell template with D&D4e). It seems silly when one of the main inspirations for the thief class is Bilbo, the scout and guide for the loutish and unsubtle dwarfs.

Other feats might allow you to use Stealth or Performance here instead, but the default is clearly Deception to Impersonate. They lumped the two skills together for the same reason you think they should have put Deception and Diplomacy together-- they are too intermingled to be separate.

It seems strange to me that the relevant skill to do something that isn't a lie or a ruse is Deception, but I follow your logic here.

Also, there's lots of ways to get around cover requirementa with the right feats. Looking at the base rules but ignoring feats in a game where you get literally 30 of them is a bad way to evaluate the game, but we are getting into "just the book dude" territory.

I'm not ignoring the feats; I asked people to make suggestions. "You take a feat to let you do that" is an answer to my question! I'm still curious what feats, though. Speaking of which...

As reference to what Cap'n is talking about, Lion Blade is a spy-themed archetype which has at least two feats related to hiding in crowds.

Personally I feel like at least the first one could have been given the Skill trait, but things were a lil wonky in World Guide.

Yeah, seems weird you have to take an archetype to do something that normal people can do in real life.

So much of D&D's combat thinking is structured around fights happening in 40x40 dungeon rooms, maybe with furniture scattered around. Disallowing hiding behind your party members makes a sort of sense in that context, but it falls apart any time you're talking about a fight in more interesting circumstances.

Chase rules provide a framework for escaping people pursuing you

Oh! I guess I didn't fully understand how the progressive challenges were meant to work.

I was thinking of the progressive challenges as a series of scenes to be overcome, but this instead is presenting them as a single scene/encounter that the entire party each contributes to, with more-skilled characters able to pick up slack for characters who can't contribute. Interesting.

I will also admit that while ending your action outside of cover is a very solvable problem, there is little to no support for not revealing yourself by taking an offensive action. You can immediately hide after, but not avoid alerting allies within line of sight. This goes back to the rules assuming a reasonably competitive opponent (within 4 levels of you.) If the level gap exceeds that, you frankly might as well go into montage mode and let the players narrate how they do it, because rolls won't really matter.

It also assumes that defeating a level-appropriate opponent involves hewing at them several times. I get why: basically every successor to D&D3e is coping with the fact that combat in that game could be very deterministic and brutal and short and that wasn't really very fun for players when they invest so heavily in their PCs. But it does mean that just straight murdering people unawares is left out in the cold.

How do you make that fun in a game with symmetry between PC and NPCs? Well, if you figure out how (without tossing out the symmetry), that'll be quite a breakthrough!

It is still disappointing that there's no way to do that scene as a challenge, though, even if you're clever enough to figure out how to disable the enemy in one hit.

I'm going to walk Jack through the original chicken-stealing scenario using the above stats.

There is still the issue that Jack can't wring the neck of a chicken stealthily without resorting to the trivial encounter rules or reducing a chicken to an object rather than a creature. The whole point of the Jack story was that he couldn't do the adventurer-type things you'd expect a rogue to be able to do at all; the harmlessness of his targets just illustrated how deep the problems ran. I do still feel like quietly shanking an orc or a guard should be something a sneaky character should be able to do, and AFAICT it's not possible except in situations where you simply handwave away the challenge entirely.

If the GM needs to caulk a the gap between the way things feel like they should work and the way the rules say they work, that seems like a failure of the rules to me.

It may be a genre staple, but it isn't a medium staple. A tactical game with minis and a map is not really a good fit for crowds of unimportant NPCs, and PF2 leaned further into the tactical.

Shadowrun does miniatures combat and specific locations and it has rules for losing people in a crowd. I don't see why being "a tactical game with minis and a map" is a problem.

I mean, it is doable, but you need to outclass the opponent enough to make very quick work of them.

You automatically give away your presence and location by attacking someone, so no, it's not doable. It's not a Hide, Step, or Sneak action, so the attacker is immediately Observed, and there's no way (AFAIK) to hide the fact that you dropped them.

If you attack someone, everyone who can see you do it or see the target go down knows that there was an attack, where the person went down, who attacked them, and where the attacker was. There does not seem to be a way to pick off people when nobody's looking unless you do it when there is no living enemy with LOS to you or the victim, unless I am mistaken.

The actual damage being a one-shot isn't the issue here. Obviously if the victim survives, then the attacker should be blown. I'm aware of how WOTC-era D&D isn't very good at handling this scene because of HP inflation.

Physically breaking LOS is not necessarily required for the crowd/pitched battle situation - as Ascalaphus and Captain Morgan have pointed out, it'd be very reasonable to rule that being on the other side of a crowd counts as cover/concealment (I'd misinterpreted your original question as literally stealthing through the crowd, rather than using it as cover to avoid being spotted).

But it would also be very reasonable to rule that being in a crowd of people is only lesser cover and not sufficient for Hide or Sneak, because, well, that's what the rules say.

If cover is especially light, typically when it's provided by a creature, you have lesser cover, which grants a +1 circumstance bonus to AC. A creature with standard cover or greater cover can attempt to use Stealth to Hide, but lesser cover isn't sufficient.

It's always going to involve some judgement call on the part of the GM, but there isn't even a basic framework for how losing pursuers in a crowd of bystanders or in a pitched battle should work. That's disappointing.

Plus, there's no sort of situation chaotic enough (short of actually blinding everyone) that allows you to escape unless you have something obstructive to hide behind. You can't do the scene where Merry catches the Witch King unawares because there's nowhere for Merry to hide.

I think you're overthinking this, because not being recognized in a crowd is a perfectly reasonable example of the Impersonate activity.

If you want a more robust infiltration challenge, well, the GMG has a whole chapter on it.

What skill covers pretending to be an upstanding citizen so you don't get hassled by authorities? Or just not get picked out of a crowd as someone they should be looking into? Outside of concealing your face because it's on wanted posters all over town, it's only impersonation in the absolute most abstract way. It's not about how you're dressed or covering up your face, it's about how you act and how you avoid catching the eye.

It's not tiptoeing past people like most uses of Stealth. It's not concealing some physical feature or looking like someone or something in particular. What skill covers acting casual and like you belong?

The Infiltration challenge seems like a good addition, and reminds me a lot of BITD's structure. It does leave something to be desired in that the success/complication points don't really work unless you've organized the challenges in a way that's long enough to have the points make sense.

Here's an example:

The inn explodes. Jack the Unsuccessful Chicken Thief, a block down the street, realizes that this means that the notoriously humorless Red Dragon Cultists are putting their final plan into action. Since that plan will eventually end in mind-controlling everyone left in the city, it's time for him to leave town immediately. The streets are full of panicking people, and the guards are about to be out in force, looking for any suspicious characters.

Jack's goal is to leave town immediately and not be hassled in doing so. Ideally, not even be remembered doing so, since everyone in town is shortly going to be in thrall to the Red Dragon. He needs to walk down the street, past the guards, to the gate, leave via the gate along with the bustle of the people who live on the outside of the walls fleeing town, and escape.

There are about two scenes for this. There are guards rushing out into the street, looking for people to question or detain or blame. Then, there are the guards at the gate, trying to stop or question people leaving but clearly overwhelmed by numbers as most of them simply press on by. What skill does Jack use to walk down the street through this crowd of people without drawing suspicion? What skill does Jack use to be one of the people who brushes past the guards without being stopped and questioned?

Now, if that fails, I know what skills Jack would use to talk his way out of further entanglement. (Although PF2 retains the very silly D&D3 quality that many characters are more convincing when lying than telling the truth, because because they're separate skills.)

Is this Stealth? He's trying not to be seen, and he's trying to avoid catching anyone's eye, but he's in plain sight, not hidden. Is this Disguise? Jack doesn't look like a Red Dragon cultist or a mad bomber, but the guards don't know what a mad bomber looks like and don't even know about the Red Dragon. (SOON.) They're just looking for anyone suspicious. Any other skills, like Thievery or Diplomacy or Deception, seem tenuous at best.

I get how you'd use the Infiltration rules here. But it's only two scenes long, so building points up to an escalation doesn't really work.

This is a very basic sneaky scene. You want to go from X to Y without being noticed or remembered. This can involve bystanders, who don't care about you but you don't want to leave an impression on, entanglements, who are people who aren't looking for you but could certainly give you a lot of trouble if you draw their attention, disinterested opposition, who are on the lookout for people like you but not you in particular, or interested opposition, who are looking for you in particular but not currently on the alert that you're going to come by right now. They can't remember or hassle literally everyone, so how do you avoid being remembered or hassled?

A sufficiently skilled character should be able to walk past all of those people in plain sight at least some of the time, in any situation where it's reasonable for a nondescript stranger to walk past. That's a normal thing real people can do with practice, training, and no supernatural powers whatsoever.

Now, I'm asking these questions mostly as a GM. It's easy to just say, "Sure, roll Stealth." But looking from the POV of a player, I want to know exactly what my character can do. If I want to make a character that, like Strider, knows how to avoid being seen without disappearing completely, how would I go about doing that? How do I avoid pitfalls where, actually, avoiding being seen involves Disguise/Thievery/Diplomacy/Deception/Lore/Survival this time? While Shadowrun handles moving in plain sight unsuspiciously better than any D&D game I can recall, it does have major problems with overlapping skills and thus a lack of clarity. So I do wonder how PF2 handles this.

This brings me to non-visual senses.

Captain Morgan's suggestion of Wisdom to understand the way the wind is going to affect things is certainly one you could go with, but I think the important difference from PF1 for me here is just that it is possible to attempt it without some strange combination of feats. For most of these, I think keeping it with Dexterity is going to make sense - can you stealthily and quickly move in such a way that you're never close enough to the creature with scent for them to pick it up? That seems fairly appropriate for Dexterity still, personally. I do agree that it's more of a framework for non-visual senses - but the base mechanics embrace that it's a framework, don't try and put down hard-and-fast rules that break as soon as you get out of visual senses, and as long as the table is willing to improvise around that framework a little bit, I've found it quite easy to have interesting outcomes with it.

It's a framework. That's an improvement. Where it gets dicey for me is this stuff about ability modifiers. That can easily be half or more of the difference between a trained and untrained skill. And there's no real way to know beforehand what your skill mod is going to be to sneak past something before it's time to sneak past it, because what modifier applies is up to the GM's whim. It's especially strange to me because the example is controlling the movement of your body to avoid giving away your position. That's what you do against an enemy that sees or hears, too.

This element of GM whim only (again, AFAIK) applies here. You don't suddenly discover that swinging your sword is INT-based against this particular foe, or that casting a spell on a particular foe is DEX-based instead of WIS-based. Why does sneaking have this caveat?

For a lot of these the flippant answer would be "go read the book", but to be fair, the answers are spread out around multiple sections so you need to know where to go. And reading rules is one thing, a feeling for how they play out in practice is another. Arcaian has already done a good job with most of these but I have a few remarks.

It's worth also remembering that PF1 had its stealth rules scattered over many sections of the book. Most notably, this included the "bright light" rules that made Stealth almost completely useless. So it's less that I haven't read PF2 than that I may have missed something.

Distraction scene:

The Create A Diversion action uses Deception to do this sort of thing. You create a distraction - either audible or with a gesture - and if you succeed, you become Hidden. This means they know you're there, but they don't know where you are. You can them immediately use stealth to Sneak, making you Undetected - i.e. they don't know where in the area you are, but do know of your presence. That should cover both of those.

Going from well-seen to "where is he now" is a two-stage process. First you need to become Hidden, which means people are still aware of what square you're in but don't have direct sight on you anymore. When you're Hidden you can Sneak to a different square to become Undetected, which means they also don't know where you are anymore.

The Create Distraction task of the Deception skill helps you with the first part - people still know where you are, so you're only Hidden. But this allows you to use Stealth to Sneak away.

Taking advantage of a distraction caused by someone or something else would follow essentially the same rules, just that someone else caused the event that gave you a moment of being Hidden.

The way I understand this is that there's nothing that serves as a distraction sufficient to escape except the Create Distraction task, and you still need a physical object to hide behind or darkness to hide in by the end of your move. Is this correct?

There does not seem to be a game state for "I know he's here somewhere, but lost him in the visual noise," just "I know he's here somewhere, but he hid behind/in something." It does not seem possible to lose a pursuer in a chaotic situation (a pitched battle between armies, a busy city street) unless you can physically break LOS. "Hey look over there!" is supported but taking advantage of a Fireball to run away is not.

Hiding in a crowd:

Without something like Halfling's Distraction Shadows, you won't be able to move through a crowd without being observed at all

Arcaian pointed at a halfling feat to hide behind a single person. For a crowd, the GM might rule that a crowd counts as sufficient cover or concealment to satisfy the requirements for the Hide and Sneak tasks of the Stealth skill.

It's disappointing that you're still having to go into fuzzy GM call territory or race-specific feats to hide in a crowd of people. It seems like a basic genre staple.

I don't really see a good answer for how you handle a scene where a character is trying to avoid being picked out of a crowd, either. It falls into a soft spot between so many different skills, none of which fully cover it.

The entrance to the castle has two guards, and people are filing through as part of their daily business in the middle of the day.

How do you sneak into the castle through that gate if you are Robin of Loxley, known and wanted criminal? How do you sneak through it if you're the sort of suspicious character the guards are tasked with filtering out but not specifically known to them in particular? How do you simply avoid being randomly hassled or remembered if it's important to you that you do that?

Deception to Disguise isn't really helpful for anything but Robin of Loxley, I don't think, and even then it feels insufficient. You're not looking to pretend to be anything you're not, just not be noticed.

"Bypass a checkpoint" is a very basic scene that you'd want to do in any kind of game that involves sneakiness. I know how you'd do it in SR, or BOTD, or AW, but I don't know how you'd handle it in PF2. I do know that PF1 and SF didn't handle it very well at all.

Take out the guards one by one:

This one is hard to do, I think. [...] You'd need to end your turn in a square you can attack one from, and Strike, Create a Diversion, and then Sneak. They'd know you're there, but you're just disappearing each time.

It's disappointing that PF2 doesn't really support this sort of scene. It seems weird that "kill someone silently without giving away your presence" is not an option in a game where one of the core classes is a sneaky killer.

Sleeping:

When they're asleep, they're unconscious, and so have a -4 penalty to their Perception DC to sneak past, and are Blinded. This means you can't Critically Fail to Sneak past them, so at worst they wake up and know someone's there but don't know where you may be. You also don't need to maintain cover or concealment to sneak past them.

This seems like a big improvement over PF1.

Kidnapping:

Trying to take a physical object in plain sight will be using Thievery to Palm an Object, with later options to improve what you can steal. Hitting someone and making others think they fell would likely be using Deception to Lie, but I may have misunderstood the scene you're describing.

I think you have misunderstood. I'm describing a scene where you kidnap someone or assault them in plain sight, but without disinterested observers realizing what is happening, or that anything is happening at all. Snatching a person into a shadowy doorway. Hitting someone and making it look like they fell and hurt themselves. Basically any scene where you're blackbagging someone.

I know how you'd handle picking someone's pocket, but not how you'd handle kidnapping someone.

Extraordinary senses:

Senses are more formally defined now, and split into three categories: precise senses (can always tell exactly where someone is with them if they're not hiding; vision for humans), Imprecise Senses (you can tell the general square someone is in if they're not hiding; hearing for humans), and Vague Senses (you can tell the general presence of a creature if they're not hiding; smell for humans). If a creature isn't primarily visually oriented, or can't see or hear, they'll have different senses, with different rules - but they'll still be listed as precise/imprecise/vague so you can figure out what they can tell with it - these are Special Senses.

This seems like a huge improvement. It's a little disappointing that the CRB doesn't seem to tackle common cases like scent. I can't really think of any ability modifier that makes a lot of sense to avoid being smelled.

I think it's a big improvement to have a difference between awareness of presence and awareness of location. Partial failures seem like a very good addition, too, making sneaking around certainly-deadly or difficult-to-appraise opposition less suicidal. (That was always a problem with the RAW in previous editions of D&D/PF.)

The changes to how non-visual senses work seem encouraging but incomplete. There's a framework for understanding how you'd do it, but it's sorely lacking even for common cases of non-visual senses.

Unless I'm missing something - a definite possibility! - I'm still not impressed with how PF2 handles a bunch of common sneaky scenes, though. Especially in the context of larger pitched battles or urban scenes.

I suppose I should give some examples. All of these questions are looking for an answer based on the rules-as-written.

How do you do a scene where someone creates or takes advantage of a distraction to escape? Everything from fleeing under cover of a dazzling cacophony that doesn't actually conceal you to straight up "Ninja vanish" or "Hey look over there."

How do you sneak up to someone in a crowd of people? How do you hide in a crowd of people? How does this change when you're trying to hide from someone looking for you specifically, someone searching for any suspicious character, a vigilant guard who is indifferent to you, or a disinterested and lazy guard?

How do you do a scene where you silently pick off the guards one by one?

How do you do a scene where the sneaky member of the party leads the rest of the party past a dangerous situation?

What happens when you try to sneak past someone who's lightly asleep?

How do you do a scene where you want to do something in plain sight without arousing suspicion from disinterested observers? (Snatch someone off the street into a doorway, hit someone and make it look like they fell, etc.)

Can a sneaky character sneak past someone with extraordinary senses? (eg a bloodhound) Can they sneak past someone with supernatural senses? (eg a grimlock or dragon) With or without class-specific abilities, magic spells, or magic items?

How does PF handle sneaking in the context of creatures that aren't primarily visually oriented? How about in the case of creatures so alien that they neither see nor hear?

All of these are scenes I can definitely see wanting to put a sneaky character through. How does PF2 handle them?

Who's Jack?

PF1e's rules for sneaking and stealth were not very good, in large part because they were crudely copy-pasted from D&D3.5e. Sneaky characters couldn't actually sneak around very well without magic or just ignoring half of the rules for sneaking around. (Most groups, I assume, did the latter) Jack was just an example to illustrate those problems.

You can run stealth as an actual encounter

How so?

I'm curious how well PF 2e's stealth rules turned out. I remember the 1e Stealth update and Starfinder's stealth rules both weren't great.

Time makes fools of us all.

Still, that doesn't necessarily make it constitutional, right or just. Even if American constitutional legal system determines that it is legal, it doesn't mean it should be.

Without the corporation (and specifically the limited liability corporation), you can't have modern capitalism at all, and the legal fiction that a corporation can act as a person with regard to contracts, taxes, and so on is key to having corporations at all. Without corporate personhood and limited liability, it would be impossible to start any business without personally controlling all of the capital to run that business and absorbing all possible liability yourself.

It's a cornerstone of modern capitalism. It's fair to be critical of it, knowing that, but corporate personhood is not a new or easily disposed of concept.

This is the same system where they're considering what kinds of video game currencies are taxable income and where politicians bring the entire government to a screeching halt out of pure ego. The fact corporations are ruled as persons just is part of the absurdity that the entire American government has become.

Corporate personhood is older than the United States of America.

Has anyone said buttcoins yet

Have they finally settled that war that Ukraine is in?

**is refusing to read the link until answer is given**

If you can find a definitive answer to that, I'm sure everyone in the Ukraine would like to know.

More recently, Japan decided to lock up every addict they could find for two years. So, the addicts went to jail. The distribution networks collapsed, pushers changed careers, drugs more or less disappeared for years afterward.

Japan turned their narcotic problem into a prescription drug abuse problem, more like. Substance abuse didn't go away in Japan, and now they're dealing with a serious amphetamine abuse problem.

And it may well be that self-medication started as a term in medical writings. That doesn't give it much validity today, considering that medicine moved on. The drug addicts love using it, however. Seriously, ask any of them and you'll hear it.

I don't know how I can make this clearer.

SELF-MEDICATION IS A VALID TERM FOR A REAL PHENOMENON. NOBODY HERE IS SAYING THAT IT IS A REASONABLE TREATMENT.

You are arguing against a position nobody here is advancing. Self-medication with addictive drugs at best trades short-term relief for long-term problems. Often as not, it just makes the problem worse immediately, as with depression and alcohol.

Self-medication is not medication. It's a word used to excuse your drug habits. So, it's not a thing. And exactly, because what A Man in Black wrote is correct.

Self-medication is a phenomenon that very clearly exists. Just because something is a method of medication does not mean it is an efficient or safe or wise method. Nobody here is claiming that it is at all a good idea.

What part does it play? if you are doing illegal drugs you get treatment in jail, not told how sorry the world is for not being perfect and not punishing the law breaking. And double down on them if they CHOOSE to go back to using after treatment.

You're taking it as self-evident that drug possession and use should be a crime. Why should addicts go to jail? It doesn't do a damn thing to help stop people from using drugs, and indeed often reinforces patterns of addiction plus encourages police to harass innocent people.

Once might have been a bad choice, twice is a pattern and basicly proof they have no intention on stopping.

For some drugs, you don't cure addiction. Heroin and alcohol in particular.

Exactly.

I'm not clear on why you claimed it wasn't a thing, then.

Well, I know "self-medication" is a very popular term in many communities. The idea is that you're doing drugs BECAUSE you're depressed.

Sorry, that's not a thing.

Self-medication is a bad idea, but it is a phenomenon that exists. People who already have pre-existing mental illness have a higher risk for drug addiction than healthy, otherwise-similar people, in large part because they (incorrectly!) perceive it to be an escape from or solution to their problems.

I see no reason in wanting to use something that will eventually destroy one's life and the lives of others close to that one.

No reason is good enough. Whatever it could be.

Depression.

Remember how I mentions that bringing bleach is treated as a disease because it's obvious self-harm? Many drug addicts, both alcoholics or hard drug users, are either (knowingly or unknowingly) self-medicating mental illness, or knowingly acting in a self-destructive manner.

Drug abuse is mental illness, but it is often associated with pre-existing mental illness.

Addiction treatment in both physical and mental and can be seen as a medical process but that should never remove the burden of personal choice in so much of it.

What role do you feel the burden of personal choice plays? S#+$ting on people for making the wrong choices only makes things worse, almost always.

Couple relevant Google searches will show that plenty of people use drugs without being killed by them

Plenty of people survive cancer. How is this relevant?

plenty of people willing to argue that homosexuality is a lifestyle that results in poor health or death.

Those people are demonstrably wrong. "Someone, somewhere, said a thing" doesn't make it true.

There is no such thing as gay overdose, cancer of the gay organ, or getting into an accident because of gay driving. Shut up about homosexuality.

There's such a thing as involuntary commitment, especially if a person is ruled to be a threat to others or to refuse treatment that's in their own best interest. Of course that relies on a third party to neutrally arbitrate to a person what's in their own best interest.

It is carefully limited to someone who presents an immediate danger to themselves or others and still sees abuse. Nobody is proposing expanding it.

In our culture we (rightly, I think) do not regard homosexuality as a dangerous aberrant addiction that needs to be cured but the same is not true of certain other lifestyle choices and I think that's something that can be fruitfully questioned and examined. As happens in this thread ;)

The difference between homosexuality and drug addiction is that homosexuality won't kill you stone dead, through physiological causes or self-destructive behavior.

Which seems to be problematic. Why not treat poverty as an illness and have all the poor rounded up to be "treated"? More effective than letting them rot in the streets, right? What other social ills could we dispense of by reclassifying them as illnesses?

It's only problematic because you somehow think "rounding people up" is a necessary condition of treating disease. You have some very weird ideas about what disease is and how it's treated.

If I'm reading you correctly (correct me please if I am) part of your argument is that addiction ought to be defined, for treatment purposes, as a disease when that is not necessarily the case?

You're not reading me correctly. I am saying that it is a disease, and we treat it because that treatment can help. It's a mix of physical, psychological, and sociological causes, like all mental illnesses. We don't treat poverty the same way because medicine (in the sense of doctors and therapy, not just pills) can't do much to help with sociological phenomena.

@Hitdice obviously but you don't treat a problem as a disease when it's not. If a person drinks bleach you don't treat that as a disease in the sense that you treat someone with throat cancer as having a disease.

Yes you absolutely do treat that as a disease! Drinking bleach is a suicide attempt. it's the A1 top priority symptom of mental illness.

@Man in Black why I prefaced with "devil's advocate". The condition is (a) congenital (b) natural (c) unlikely to be cured and (d) might have negative effects. Yes? Why is it intrinsically wrong for a parent to offer money if somebody can cure the child of this condition?

Because none of those are part of the definition of disease. By that cockamamie definition, having legs is a disease.

@Shouting Off Mountain - devil's advocate: How is that any different from offering 120 million to somebody to cure your daughter of a congenital illness? Especially if it's one with no known cure?

Because homosexuality isn't an illness, congenital or otherwise. Give me a break.

I don't know that you can treat all "addiction" as one phenomenon

Which is why you don't. Different addictions can be treated different ways under different circumstances, but treating them as diseases reduces addiction and reduces harm from addiction.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

@Man in Black If addiction is treated as a disease because it's the "only practical way to improve the lives of people who are addicted and the only way to do anything about drug problems long-term" why not treat poverty as a disease too?

Mostly because medical treatment does help with addiction and does not help with poverty unless mental illness or addiction are involved. If you want to treat poverty as a pandemic politically, I'm right there with you, f$@@in' a right on, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of will to do so.

Nobody has talked about why addiction is treated as a disease, only whether addicts deserve to be treated or punished (or neglected).

Addiction is treated as a disease because it's the only practical way to improve the lives of people who are addicted and the only way to do anything about drug problems long-term. Punishing addicts doesn't work, because it simply alienates people who were already marginalized themselves and pushes drug abuse as an option for alienated people. Punishing dealers doesn't work, because there's always someone willing to take the risk, and it leads to constant police harassment of people who have nothing to lose in the first place (as well as law-abiding people who happen to look like them). Shouting at people to "be more responsible" doesn't do anything at all but make the shouter feel more pleased about themselves while looking like a smug a#@~&$!.

Poverty is to addiction what a lack of cleanliness is to infection. Yes, being more responsible helps on an individual level, but if you don't want people dying of pneumonia or sepsis, you treat the disease instead of yelling at them for not doing more to prevent getting infected.

Instead, by helping addicted people, both with addiction and with whatever cause drove them to drug abuse as an escape in the first place, you can actually reduce both drug use in general and the harm caused to people who are addicted. Unfortunately, the main reasons people turn to drug abuse in the first place is mental illness or poverty, and nobody seems to much give a s*~@ about fixing either of those!

I'll post more about this later, but in the meantime remember that the laws for this vary considerably from state to state, do personal anecdotes are even less likely than usual to be relevant.

Sure, but was it ingrained in the public consciousness, during the silver age of comics, that Batman would always beat Superman in a one on one fight because? While I'm sure that contrast was always there, I think authors like Frank Miller, and others who have an obsession with the guy, have taken the obsession up to that next level.

Yes. It's easy to forget that DKR came out almost 30 years ago, and even then it was revisiting ideas from the author's childhood. The idea that Superman and Batman are peers is not at all a new idea. World's Finest (Superman and Batman team up: the anthology comic) started its run in 1941.

Fictional characters don't always slot neatly and nicely into power level boxes, even in the genres where power levels are an actual thing.

Weren't you aware? All NPC fighters in all stories are level 1 Warriors, and since the heroes who fight them fight only level 1 Warriors they cannot be higher than 4th level. . . its a circular logic trap you can never beat-- if the enemy in the book has no name and backstory, he is automatically a 1st level warrior, and that is used as justification for underestimating the good guys levels.

It's curious that a nameless mook who is a level 1 warrior has an impact on the story which is indistinguishable from a level 15 fighter nameless mook.

It's probably because Batman went from being world's greatest detective to being the "G@% D$%NED BATMAN!,"

Batman did that decades before you were born. Silver age Justice League stories had the same contrast with silver age Batman stories. It's not like it's some sort of recent development.

Little-Known ACA Feature Allows Govt. to Seize Medicaid Recipients' Assets

Linkbait title aside, this isn't a feature of the ACA at all, and is instead an already-existing Medicaid rule from a 1993 law. It's not new, but it's the sort of thing you're unlikely to ever hear about before talking to a lawyer or accountant about your will or other end of life issues. Here's some more on it. It's a pretty terrible rule, but it doesn't have very much to do with the ACA at all.

No one is claiming Batman is high level.

Batman is weird. Nobody much minds Batman hanging out with Superman to fight cosmic threats and taking an occasional punch from Darkseid, along the lines of Morrison JLA or (sigh) Loeb Superman & Batman, but at the same time he's also supposed to be seriously threatened by Black Mask, whose superpower is about three dozen dudes with assault rifles.

Fiction does not map onto linear power scales very well sometimes!

This is the worst idea for a thread in the history of bad threads.

I haven't gotten banned for saying that objectivists are worthless scum who hate the idea of generosity or cooperation yet. I wonder if Hobbes would have expected people to say, "All against all? F*!~ yeah, right on!"

That said, if you don't get GM fiat-ed in wizards with access to the spells you want, getting access to ten extra second level spells at level 3 costs 1900 gold, which is a big chunk of the 3000 WBL. If the GM do put in a friendly wizard with all the right spells the cost drops to 600 which is much more affordable, but that's GM Fiat which was to be avoided when discussing things like this.

Most of those spells aren't worth owning, and more aren't worth having available on short notice. The fact that wizards can know any spell they need to on a couple days' notice is a class feature, even if they themselves do not know every single spell.

This is also a somewhat myopic focus on wizards. If you're trying to make the point that wizards should be considered less powerful than clerics and druids and other spellcasters who just know everything, then that's a fair point, but it doesn't obviate tier discussion in broad strokes.

Could a rogue/witch with the prehensile hair hex(10' reach) flank a med sized (or smaller) creature by him/herself?

No. Flanking specifically requires an ally.

Also, I've already made the sort of examples you're talking about, albeit without the adversarial "gotcha" setup you seem to be angling for, using one generic example and two examples from published adventures.

If the difference is neglible at level one, then that means tiers do not exist at level one.

Class balance is meaningless in a context where a large difference between stats is +/-3 on a 20-wide RNG. If your point is that tier lists have little to say that's useful about level 1 games, then, okay, you win that point. I'm not sure anyone but you really cares.

I strongly disagree with it at level 3 too. Or 5 for that matter. If someone posts a 5th level wizard I can put together a list of challenges that other 5th level characters can manage and you'll get the chance to explain how it succeeds at them.

How many of them involve an anti-magic zone? Or cultural restrictions on magic use?

It's possible to construct challenges that spellcasters can't deal with for whatever reason, but it's almost always because of specific restrictions on solving the issue with spells, and not because of systemic class balance reasons.

It's not your fault that most archetypes are page-chewing low-content filler. Freelancers write to spec.

Care to show that build to me, and I can pitch a bunch of challenges that other 1st level character can do, and you'll get to say how you solve them?

At first-level? The difference between classes is too small at that level to prove anything. Then again, at that level the difference between a fighter and a level in an NPC class is negligible, so I'm not sure it somehow strengthens your point.