Arcaian's page

Why is it that we take for granted then the idea that Animal Companions (and a handful of other feat chains) must actively degrade in functionality over the course of a campaign?

Because the alternative is that they start off so weak or domineering of your actions as to be unsatisfying. Right now, a generic level 2 STR martial with a d8 weapon is attacking at +8(1d8+4); your level 2 companion will be attacking with +7(1d8+3), Against an average same-level AC, that's 5.1 vs 4.125 expected damage, or doing 81% of the expected damage of the martial. The martial only gets better if it's using a bigger weapon, or from class features that boost damage (and not all martials get substantial boosts there) - and you can get 2 actions to cast spells while your companion still gets 2 actions to be a martial. If you could get the current level of functionality for only a level 2 feat, it'd be pretty straightforward - and probably optimal - for a party to all invest one 2nd level feat in this, and get a functional frontline without needing to have any frontline characters. I do wish companions were able to keep their low-level power throughout the whole game at the cost of the additional feats, as it's frustrating to see a feature get less useful even as you invest in it, but they cannot do so at the cost of a single 2nd level feat.

The alternative would be to either start with the companion being very weak and letting that weak power level stay true relative to your power throughout leveling up, and then provide options to improve it (which I think would feel substantially worse), or to make it really difficult to use with the low level feats (3 of your actions for 2 of theirs or something) and have the current level of power scale well as you level, with the additional feats making it simpler to use. I'd prefer that over it being very weak at the start, but I think the current compromise works better than either of these.

I think Battlecry's admonitions about "war has a right side, and the PCs are on it" isn't so much a statement about the nature of war, but more a statement about the appropriate sorts of war stories to tell in a game like Pathfinder 2e.

Just like you want to leave the truly horrible stuff that happens in non-war contexts entirely offscreen, you want to leave the truly horrible stuff related to war similarly out of view. The version of Golarion that is appropriate for a fun game one plays with their friends is somewhat sanitized by the nature of "we're cultivating for fun here".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to avoid telling content that is too horrific for the vibe you want to be giving as a publisher - but I do think that there's some danger in doing that by presenting horrific content in a sanitized way in some cases. Sanitizing the reality of mental health care in the times the setting is inspired by? Not the end of the world in my opinion, it's not really too relevant to the modern day. But sanitizing war into "there's a good side to a war, and if you're on the good side you just do good things and be morally virtuous" is I think legitimately dangerous as a concept - though to be clear, don't have Battlecry, and I obviously don't have Hellbreakers, so I do not know if that's the direction Paizo is taking. But if it is, I do think that's an inappropriate sanitization - it's taking a myth that is widely used to manipulate people into supporting something they otherwise wouldn't, and making it true in your setting. While widespread in a lot of fiction, I do think it's a dangerous thing to do.

Tl;dr I don't think there's a way that you can tell war stories that are so sanitised as to safely remove the horrific things that are done by all sides of the war, even those we now view as morally good participants, without buying into very dangerous myth-making about how conflict works. If it's important enough to a publisher to avoid telling those stories, I think it's more appropriate to exclude war stories from your narrative all-together.

keftiu wrote:

I'd still love to know what "worldview the writer is forcing on us" by not depicting Cheliax's POV, Arkat. It's been three days and I still think that's kind of an unreal thing to post.

I was trying to avoid answering this, but since you called me out directly, here you go:

That it's THEIR world and that we have to play how Paizo wants us to play.

One of their employees made that quite clear in an X post some months ago.

Are you satisfied?

I'm quite confused by this one, because it is obviously Paizo's world, and if you are exclusively running pre-published content without altering it, you do have to play what Paizo thinks would be most fun. What other possibility is there? Paizo could make content that it thinks is not a good fit for the game purely because some people on the internet want to do it, but why would they do that? If you disagree with Paizo's perspective on what is fun content for the game, run your own game differently - or even write up alternative pre-published content and sell that, if you think there's demand for the content. Nowadays with Infinite, you can even sell that content while using all of Paizo's IP! I'd understand your argument if the game excluded all content that could plausibly be used for anything except the sort of APs Paizo is writing (though it'd still be fine to have an intention for how the game should be engaged with, but I'd understand not wanting to engage with it if you have a different intention). But Paizo has gone out of its way to make it possible to play all sorts of stories that clearly aren't the focus of their prepublished content - what more do you want them to do to make it possible for you to play those stories?

The ability to prevent enemies from focusing fire on a single target, unless they choose to target you, is extremely powerful. Combine that with the natural resistances to damage that the Guardian is getting in its final release, I don't think it will be a bad idea to regularly use Intercept Attack. Certainly I think it's worthwhile using even if the attack wouldn't knock the ally unconscious - much better for 2 party members to be 3 hits from going down than 1 party member be 1 hit from going down. The guardian is also using it's own AC to protect allies by its taunt mechanic (as well as feats like that 1-action power attack so long as your enemy is flat-footed from your taunt) - if they don't attack the guardian, they're taking a penalty to-hit and becoming flatfooted. The enemy either has to hit the guardians substantial AC + resistances, or open themselves up to more incoming damage.

Yeah loss of automation for the free society stuff is a bad move for me, and frankly this does nothing but make stockholders feel good. It is what it is.

It's kinda wild to say 'this does nothing but make stockholders feel good' when it's better for anyone without several subscriptions, which themselves are pretty absurdly expensive if you live anywhere but North America. This benefits plenty of people - perhaps at the cost of long-time subscribers to multiple lines, and I understand that frustration. But it is noticeably better for many, many people too.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Quentin Coldwater wrote:

I still feel like a +1 skill increase is too little to feel like an actual increase. Unless there's more ranks of proficiency so you could still climb that ladder faster. But at that point, you're back to 1e's skill points.

I do miss skill points, though. Felt much more rewarding than 2e's "which singular skill will I get better at?" every two levels.

That framing feels odd to me. You don't choose a singular skill to get better at every two levels, you get better at ALL your trained skills and choose a skill every two levels to get even better at than those other skills. And at the alternating levels you get to choose a skill to get better at via a skill feat. And that's assuming you don't gain anything else from your general feats, class, or archetype.

Skill ranks were just never going to survive in the tight math of PF2 anymore than feats like weapon focus and greater weapon focus would.

Yes, going from Untrained to Trained means that skill will forever scale with you, but with level-based DCs scaling faster than that (DCs seem to go up by 4 every 3 levels), eventually that Trained proficiency will not swing it anymore (meaning that if you have to roll a 10 at level 1 for a success, you'd need to roll a 12 by level 6, a 14 by level 12, and so on). Boosting that one skill means keeping up with the DC, instead of getting ahead of the curve. Meaning you steadily get worse at the skills you don't invest in. +1 items and stat boosts help catch up, but they feel more mandatory than optional.

If you want to keep up with the DC by level chart, you actually don't need anywhere near the amount of investment you're talking about here. From level 1 to level 11, the DC-by-level goes from 15 to 28 - after taking into account you getting +10 from level here, you only need to get +3 from any source to maintain the same chance of success. If you boosted the ability score at level 5 and 10, you only need to buy a +1 item bonus item to keep up with the chance of success, with the sub-100 gp expense barely being noticeable at all at level 11. Even from level 1 to 20, the DC only goes to 40 - after taking into account the +19 from leveling you've gained, you only need +6 to maintain your chances of success. If you've got +3 to your ability modifier (at some point you might've hit 18), you can get away with only boosting it to expert and keeping that +1 item from before, or invest in a +3 item and maintain the same chances of success without needing any skill increases invested at all.

Lets say you have a system with 3 core attributes.

One for physical power one for speed and reflexes and one for mental stuff.

With that set up all caster types are going to draw off the same mental stat, there will be no differentiation based on core attributes for all the different kinds of casters you want in your game, that is unless you have derived stats that provide that differentiation at which point why not just start with more mental stats that lend the descriptive quality to them.

Yeah, you could make a bad set of attributes and it'd cause a problem, but I don't see why that is being treated as an argument against the whole concept? You could have 3 stats that are all appropriate for both magic and mundane means - for a random example: "heart", "violence", and "finesse". Each one of those could work for a martial character - a selfless protector who defends their allies might be a more heart-based character, an in-your-face martial combatant might be more violence-based, and a technical fighter who fights with control might be more finesse-based. Similarly, you could easily have magical options for each of them - a healer who cares more for protecting allies than hurting enemies might be heart-based, a dangerous stormcaster might be violence-based, and a highly technical magician who controls the enemy via their magic might be finesse-based. At the same time, I feel like those stats all give you good ideas for what that character's narrative might look like, without outwardly dictating anything. If we're moving away from the sacred cow of 6 attributes, we don't have to stick with slightly modified and merged versions of the existing attributes.

As an alternative solution to your final question, if you find there's a problem with 3 core attributes, why do you say we have to start adding more of those mental stats back? Why not remove the attributes entirely and let the casters be differentiated by their own unique mechanics instead of the attribute they're based off of, which is not a very interesting area of differentiation IMO.

I hear what everyone is saying, and to be clear, I agree shields are pretty strong as is. I have just noticed at higher levels 8+ that even ignoring cirts most shields are three hits away from broken on normal hits. My champion level 10, has a sturdy shield and the blessed shield. It currently has a 14 hardness 102 hit points. Assuming a dps monster is hitting for 40 points 1 a round, the hield is almost broken after 2 blocks on those normal hits. That seems to be a little fragile, again just my opinion. I am just not sure how to solve the issue with out skewing things to far the other way. Keep in mind I have a marty shield upgraded to a sturdy shield, invested in the shield path so can potentially do three blocks a round.

I have in multiple fights noticed my shield is out of action by the second or third round, forget the fact that twice I had to block a crit or I would have gone down in one shot (though that was kind of an outlier 8th level playing up in a 7-10).

Thanks for all the feedback though Ill take a look at the mending latice I hadnt heard of that before.

But why assume a dps monster is hitting for 40 damage in 1 action? That's the High damage for a level 18 creature, which you definitely shouldn't be fighting. A level+2 boss with High damage would be averaging 30/hit, which means your shield would break after the 4th block it makes against a martially-oriented boss' hit on average, or after the 5th hit from an on-level martially oriented enemy's hit, or after the 6th hit from a level-2 martially oriented mook's hit. If you intentionally block low damage rolls, it's even more than that - I'll fully admit that it's a little strange narratively to prioritize blocking those weaker hits, but the shields do work well when you do it.

Thanks for the response James.

It seems there are 3 Severe encounters but we skipped 1. Of those 2 we rolled them with our party of 5. We are playing in Foundry so it seems it's calculating the CR from our party of 5 so I will ask the GM to adjust.

From a design perspective, isn't it easier for a GM to just delete a monster than tinker with making an encounter harder by adding monsters? You can't take them away once they're on the map but "backup" can arrive.

If you're playing in a 5-person party, then there should be adjustments made to the encounters to account for that as you say - the rules are here on the Archives of Nethys. For instance, in a Moderate encounter, going from a 4-player to a 5-player party means you should add 20 XP of extra enemies to maintain the same difficulty - maybe a level-2 creature. The guidelines also aren't perfect - if you add a 5th PC who is particularly good at amplifying the power of existing PCs (for example, a bard) that is a larger boost in power than if you add someone who doesn't benefit (or benefit from) the other character's actions as much.

An entire AP book being mostly moderates with a few Severe encounters is a little bit on the easy end for how I personally run the game at most of my tables, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea for a good amount of the published content to be like this for a few reasons:
- Straightforwardly, inexperienced players are going to make mistakes, and it's a lot better an experience for people coming in fresh to the game to mess up and make a moderate encounter into a severe one than it is to mess up and make severe encounter into an extreme one
- While the experience of walking all over the encounters in an AP is not normally the most fun, the single bad experience of a TPK can ruin an AP for many tables. It's generally easier to recognise that the game is feeling like it is lacking tension and then work to fix that than it is to fix the negative experience of a TPK, because one is slow and gradual and the other is very sudden.
- While the difficulty levels in PF2 are overall good estimates to the difficulty of the encounter, the way the GM runs the enemies can still pretty substantially change the experience of difficulty. Do all the enemies focus-fire on one PC at a time to ensure the party is losing action economy the same way the enemies are? Do the enemies kill dying creatures after they've seen healing? Do enemies with big scary one-target abilities go after the person they most want to see suffer, or do they go after the most tactically advantageous target? How tactical are the enemies - do they weaponise Delaying and Readying to ensure they're working together as best as possible? How much do any of these vary based off of the nature of the enemy - are demons bloodthristy, devils tactical, and wild animals straightforward? Or is everyone equally tactical all the time? Some of these don't even necessarily make the fight harder - e.g. targeting downed PCs might reduce the chance of other PCs dying - but they do add to the stakes one might be missing from an otherwise-simple Moderate encounter. The authors of the AP cannot know how a GM is running all of these, and so cannot make decisions based off of this - whereas I know that I tend to softball on targeting single PCs, only use the best tactics when I want to emphasize the narrative of their enemies being organised, and try not to kill any PCs if I can avoid it. This means I tend to bump the difficulty of the fights in APs up a little bit, because I know that I'm not adding as much tension through my GMing style (which I do not wish to change - I think it's not very fun to be dying/dead for half a session). When writing an AP, the authors don't know where people stand on this one, and are trying to avoid the singularly bad experience of something like a TPK. I can't imagine the reputation of PF2 APs still have as being brutal helps them want to push the difficulty too high either, to be honest.

That last point can be addressed to some degree by including tactics and the like in the AP itself - but the issue there is that GMs do miss them quite regularly. Maybe there's a better way of presenting them, but quite a few of the most infamous death-traps in early PF2 APs actually had some sort of tactics recommendation to avoid the worst possible outcomes, which were neglected by many GMs who missed/forgot that part of the text.

Hermea || 6,300 || 0.4 million || 1.58%

If we're getting Hermea having a 1.58% urbanization rate, I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the methodology - it is an island that was only recently inhabited, whose economy revolves very heavily around exporting knowledge while being fed by a noticeably efficient agricultural scheme. The only city on the island has 6,300 residents, the people coming onto the island are heavily restricted to a very small number, and the state has been focused on maintaining as much control over individual's lives as possible. In the most recent overview of the island, there is only a single set of residents outside of Promise itself that is mentioned, and they are explicitly described a small group that might 'progress towards an independent settlement'. I'm sure the agriculture has some residents outside of the city - but the neighbourhood of Farmer houses many of the people who work on the island's agricultural work, even that outside the city. I do not think that 98.42% of the population lives outside of Promise.

Pendragon isn't half of what I'd want. The Riddle of Steel, with QoL hacks and fixes from other derived systems, is where I'd go for crunchy combat. It is tough to find a game, though.

Weird, it's almost like the changes you're advocating for are wildly unpopular with the vast majority of players. Perhaps most people are more interested in enjoyable mechanics and sticking to an interesting shared fiction rather than painful levels of realism? :O

I think this is looking in the wrong place in a few ways.

-One has to do with encounter math and variety. I deal with that a lot, a lot, a lot later in the post. Suffice it to say that I feel like the encounter builder is pretty constrained in what it allows.
-A common complaint with the game is that it tends to funnel effects into +2s or -2s, instead of making them feel unique or giving them unique mechanics. This doesn't really change that.
-Ultimately, almost all martial damage is funneled into checks against AC. This... has issues, and closes off a lot of design space. The removal of touch AC and flat AC is understandable in this design, but it hurt gameplay variety and spell attacks both. This, oddly, is something 4E did better than PF2E; I feel like I remember more abilities that hit Fort/Will/Ref DCs there, and I half suspect they didn't put such things in the game because they were afraid of it looking similar to 4e. The end result is homogenization (and casters just being harder to play than martials for no obvious reason).

I also have never felt like PF2E's in-combat options were that interesting, personally, so shifting the burden to them is a net negative. To me, the game is—as you noted it can be—pretty repetitive, and the good choices are usually pretty obvious. I'm rarely unsure of what to do or asking myself how to handle a situation. About the biggest source of interest is remembering consumable items and item abilities.

I'm not sure that a common complaint is that the game funnels effects into +2s or -2s, I've barely seen that discussed, outside of some people's frustration with bonuses and penalties not stacking. I don't think the wording you've outlined is a reasonable complaint - I feel like PF2 goes out of its way to avoid giving mathematical bonuses. If we look at some random list of abilities, like lets say the 1st and 2nd level barbarian feats, the options include:

That's 3 out of the 15 that meaningfully engage in changing modifiers, while the vast majority give you different ways of engaging with the game. That's my experience for the vast majority of classes as well, the game really does focus on trying to give you a variety of ways to engage with combats, and those methods are rarely just different numerical bonuses. The fact that the primary way to engage with non-AC defences as a martial requires active investment is a problem, I agree - I tend to play martials who have a variety of options for targeting different defences via either things like feinting/demoralize/bon mot/stealth/combat maneuvers, the fact that you need to know those options exist and invest in them can lead to people building characters that don't have a great deal of options available. I don't think touch or flatfooted AC would help here, however - just giving martials a different way of debuffing AC isn't going to address concerns about being unable to target other defences. This is also something that different classes can help with, and post-Core classes have tended to be better at - inventors, thaumaturge, exemplars, and swashbucklers are all much better at letting you get meaningful advantages out of targeting other defences.

All that being said, if you don't enjoy the in-combat options, I don't think PF2 is really the game that you should be spending your time playing. There are many excellent games out there, and PF2's focus and key area of advantage is making tactical combat interesting and focusing on it - I'd happily encourage you to try varying combats in a way that encourages tactical flexibility (something the APs are often bad at), but if the fundamental baseline of the system isn't interesting to you, why not play some of the many other good ttRPGs out there?

I don't think that a game's monster design must work like PF2E for the game to be balanced. There's a lot of pushback against the kinds of homogenization PF2E uses to achieve its balance in almost every gaming sphere I interact in. People who play the MMOs I play complain about classes becoming too samey for balance. People complain about fighting games homogenizing different characters' options. This isn't something universally liked or good. It's just that the people who dislike it won't be posting on the official paizo boards for the game.

To call this homogenization is to assume that the only way to have differentiation is numbers. Sure, the numbers in character creation are homogenized in PF2, and that's not the only way to achieve balance in theory - though I also have never seen a game with the amount of crunch that PF2 has be anything approaching balanced in the long-term without reducing pre-combat numbers to pretty small bands. But it's theoretically possible to have massively different numbers and balance it out, especially if you only publish a small amount of content to ensure it's all carefully triple-checked and playtested. But the whole point of PF2 is to try and put the focus on your active choices in combat; allowing the pre-combat numbers to be massively divergent is really running the risk of locking you into whatever your numbers dictate. If my champion's AC is massively higher than all the other martials at the cost of having terrible offensive capabilities, or if my cleric's healing spells are massively better than everyone else's healing at the cost of being terrible at other sorts of magic, then I'm already locked into things extremely strongly. I like that the champion in my Stolen Fate table is a sword + shield champion and mostly goes pretty defensively with 1 strike/turn, but in the fights against fiends recently they've been incentivized to strike 2/turn and neglect those defences a little because their Holy Avenger is really effective at triggering weaknesses.

PF2 does allow for pretty drastically different numbers, but the expectation is that those numbers primarily come from action you take in combat - the Champion who has Raised a tower shield and got a +1 status bonus to AC from the bard is 8 points higher in AC than a standard non-plate wearing martial. The Fighter with a +4 aid bonus and a +3 Fortissimo status bonus targeting a Frightened 2 off-guard creature has an effective +13 bonus to-hit over a standard martial. A spellcaster targeting the weak Ref save of a Frightened 2 creature affected by Distracting Feint or Catfolk Dance has about a +7 accuracy bonus over one targeting an un-debuffed average save. But to get these changes in numbers, you take actions during combat; that's the intent of PF2's "homogenization" of the maths, to put the focus on the active tactical choices you're making in combat. Are there issues with this? Absolutely, no game is perfect, and there are both characters that tend to have minimal tactical choices available/options so good they remove choice (ranged flurry ranger should basically always just put as many attacks as possible into the creature most likely to be killed by those attacks every turn), and it is definitely possible to end up repeating the same similar tactics in most fights, at which point it can really make the game feel like you're not meaningfully making tactical choices anymore. Both are significant problems; the first should just not have been printed, and the second should be addressed by varying the combats significantly enough that keeping reusing the same tactics is actively harmful. This is not an easy thing to do, though, and I think it's a pain point of PF2 - the game doesn't provide the tools for a GM to easily be able to figure out how to do this (and the GMG was better than GM Core here, IMO), and the APs don't demonstrate it well. Varying the amount of enemies, the distance at which combat starts + that enemies work well in, the primary aim of the combat (e.g. are you trying to kill them all, are you trying to keep non-combatants around alive, are you trying to buy time for reinforcements to arrive/a retreat to finish), time limits on a fight, and the introduction of terrain, hazards, enemies you don't have to fight, etc, are all pretty essential for a game focused on tactical choices to not become 'solved', and I think a lot of tables would benefit from guidance here. Ironically, I think Dawnsbury Days, the PF2 game on Steam does a good job here in a lot of ways - the stat blocks for all enemies are completely transparent and you can try a fight as often as you want with the same starting point, so the challenge doesn't come from obfuscation but from varying the conditions. It's not perfect, but there are some fun demonstrations of different sorts of ways one can vary encounters to encourage tactical flexibility.

For example, the Wrath of the Righteous campaign includes demons invading a city and features street to street fighting of low level paladins and guards against demons of various levels. In pf2e this narrative is a complete farce, the lowliest of demon hangers-on to Khorramzadeh would be capable of wiping out the city with ease. In pf1e, however, a group of well-built level 1-2 paladins and a bunch of level 1 volunteers, between the benefits of smite and the less extreme AC ranges of pf1e, can absolutely win against demons in the CR 7-10 range, even if doing so has a terrible cost. Even a group of basic guards can consistently and meaningfully contribute with cold-iron weapons and the basic consumables available to level 1-2 creatures.

This is literally just turning the bad balance of PF1 into a point in its favor somehow because level 1-2 characters can take on level 7-10 threats if well built. If we look at level 1-2 PCs built by the same people who made the demon stat blocks, it is plainly obvious that the intent of the story is that they cannot defeat those creatures. If I pick a low CR you listed, 8, and take the Nabasu, and then compare its stats to a party of 4 Honorable Outcasts, the level 2 paladin from the NPC Codex, we can see:

This is not even close to a fight these paladins are supposed to be able to win. What you are describing is not PF1 enabling a tabletop simulation of a living world, you are describing the ability for broken characters to perform feats the game did not intend them to be able to do. If it weren't for the fact it would ruin everyone's night, you could absolutely do the same thing as a GM and optimize the enemies much more than the PCs, and you could cause a TPK with underleveled enemies - hell, I've nearly done it in a PFS scenario just because many incorporeal creatures can take down characters with min-maxed ability scores very easily. This sort of "level 2 characters killing a level 8 character" narrative is also not included in the stories being told in pre-published content; to use your own Wrath of the Righteous example, the only time the story expects you to face a CR 6 encounter is when you're already level 4. Stories about 50 1st level militia holding off a bunch of demons when prepared with anti-demon weapons is also easier to tell in PF2 than in PF1; in PF1 you're hoping that you can confirm a bunch of crits to do enough damage from the massed attacks, in PF2 they can all just throw some vials of holy water, trigger the weakness even on a miss, and that'll be a very credible threat to a massed demon attack.

Dimity wrote:

monochromaticPrism wrote:

for example, a level 10 grunt minion at the very bottom of the level 18 BBEG's organizational hierarchy could conquer a substantial portion of the world and live like a king as long as they only attacked parts of the world that are in "low level zones", so why are they putting up with their current situation?

I don't get this at all.

Why would a grunt minion be able to conquer anything? He's a grunt minion, he's not a king of anything. You said it right there -- Grunt Minion. Why would you expect him to be able to conquer things? He can't.

Relative to the level 18 party, a level 14 grunt minion is, well, a grunt.

Relative to a town of peasants and guards not exceeding level 5, the level 14 grunt minion is deific.

This is just how the game math works.

It's just strange to call it out in a discussion of the differences between PF1 and PF2 to me - sure, if you weren't doing any optimization in PF1, you might not have a +1/level scaling on some things (mostly saves and spell DCs), but most numbers had something close to that built in (max-ranking a skill gave you +1/level, full-bab classes got +1 to hit/level, etc). On top of that, PF1 just obviously had high level characters being more dominant. You could have mook casters at level 13-14 by the end of APs quite easily (would be higher if APs regularly went to 20 instead of stopping at 16-17), and a 14th level caster in PF1 would absolutely be able to rule an area of max 5th level people with an iron fist if they wanted to, especially with the broken things you can do in PF1. Outside of the fact that the gap between well-built and badly-built humanoids being much, much bigger in PF1 making it less obvious by blurring the directness of the relationship between level and power, I don't see a reason to say that a 10th level grunt is more powerful compared to the low-level zones in PF2 than PF1, unless we assume a significant difference in optimization of the grunt and the creatures in the low-level zone.

It's just another area where Paizo chose to throw out the simulationist roots of why ttrpgs work in the first place

What a bold claim to make. There are multiple reasons why ttRPGs can work, simulationism is not a requirement for ttRPGs to work, and non-simulationist RPGs have been around forever.

Arcaian wrote:

If it's the case that one shot from a dueling pistol favourably compares to two attacks from a shortbow by a generic martial when below 30% or above 70% chance to hit, that's better than you'd think from this thread - it's pretty easy to be above a 70% chance to hit when targeting mooks. For a level 5 martial, you're at a 75% chance to hit a same-level enemy with high AC who is off-guard and got a -1 status penalty to AC, and an on-level enemy is as powerful as a mook is normally going to get. At level-1, that's 80%; at level-2 that's 90% (or to flip things around, for a level-2 mook you don't need to debuff them at all to be at 75% chance). On top of that, the 2-action routine is assuming the 2nd action is useless to the gun-user, but the intent is definitely to have some sort of rider on it that makes it more useful (though that does have a feat/class cost, there's not much that bow users can take to raise the ceiling too much, they're already at it). If one is only fighting higher-level solo enemies, I guess you wouldn't see these chances too frequently, but those numbers aren't bad for most situations actually.

Why is the Gunslinger, who can only do single-target damage, the one who should be dealing with mooks? Isn't that the job of a spellcaster, Bomber Alchemist, and Kineticist who can ravage such rabble with large AoE effects? No single target damage dealer or weapon should ever have a niche solely against PL-1 or lower enemies.

None of my comments were about the gunslinger, they were about guns. I was pointing out that if the 2-action routine of [strike, reload] does more damage for a dueling pistol than a shortbow's [strike, strike] if you have > 70% chance to hit, then that gives guns a solid, class-agnostic niche of being better in fights against larger numbers of enemies, and then reload actions can help you differentiate your gameplay further. Gunslingers would fit into that by boosting the level of enemies where it's trivial to get that threshold - for instance, a sniper gunslinger who reloads to Hide and gets the enemies flat-footed is going to be hitting that 75% chance against a same-level enemy from the previous example, and a single -1 from something like Demoralize would get them to that point against a level+1 enemy.

Coming back to this, I believe I've fixed my calculation (although I will say I'm being slightly unfair to the shortbow by assuming no damage bonus from strength) and the inflection points I'm seeing are somewhere between 25% to 30% chance to hit and 70% and 75%.

Somewhere below a 30% chance to hit the dueling pistol does better, and then again at somewhere above 70% chance to hit.

The unfortunate thing though, is that with properly designed encounters we shouldn't see players facing encounters with those kind of chances to hit (on their first attack).

The majority of encounters should put our first attacks in the 55% to 65% chance to hit range. Thus we never see encounters where dueling pistols shine because of the games inherent math structures and the encounter building rules.

If it's the case that one shot from a dueling pistol favourably compares to two attacks from a shortbow by a generic martial when below 30% or above 70% chance to hit, that's better than you'd think from this thread - it's pretty easy to be above a 70% chance to hit when targeting mooks. For a level 5 martial, you're at a 75% chance to hit a same-level enemy with high AC who is off-guard and got a -1 status penalty to AC, and an on-level enemy is as powerful as a mook is normally going to get. At level-1, that's 80%; at level-2 that's 90% (or to flip things around, for a level-2 mook you don't need to debuff them at all to be at 75% chance). On top of that, the 2-action routine is assuming the 2nd action is useless to the gun-user, but the intent is definitely to have some sort of rider on it that makes it more useful (though that does have a feat/class cost, there's not much that bow users can take to raise the ceiling too much, they're already at it). If one is only fighting higher-level solo enemies, I guess you wouldn't see these chances too frequently, but those numbers aren't bad for most situations actually.

Arcaian wrote:

Karys wrote:

I think it's high time someone in Alkenstar invent a proper revolver to solve these reload problems.

Edit: Ok, that was like half joking, but I just found out there were revolvers in Ultimate Equipment for first edition, what's the deal? Why can't we have those here? I might actually be kinda upset now cause those would be a big help lol.

At the time of Ultimate Equipment's release, the RPG line for PF1 was system-agnostic, and so when guns were introduced there was an expected standard fantasy set of firearms, similar in technology level to PF2's firearms, and which were used in Golarion. There were additional 'firearms are common' setting option, where things like revolvers were normal and available, but they were never intended to be present in the Golarion setting outside of niche situations from APs that might allow one or two to be present (iirc there were 2 PF1 APs were you could access those higher-tech weapons).

I've yet to see any account that suggests a Gunslinger with those advanced firearms was competitive with even tier 3 classes, much less that they break things. I feel the same about PF2, you could likely give the Gunslinger Starfinder weapons and not break anything.

Comparing a pure martial to T3 classes is comparing apples and oranges - T1-T5 in PF1 optimization terms is talking about your power to control various situations, with higher tiers meaning you can consistently control situations you've specialized in more than anyone else (T3) or able to control situations even outside of your areas of expertise to a degree greater than what specialized characters in that area can (T1-T2). Gunslingers receive no benefits towards almost any of this - they can simply deal damage effectively, and so will never be able to compete with the narrative control the T1-T3 characters have, because the class is not designed to do anything like that. There's a reason there are no pure martials in the T1-T3 bracket.

In terms of damage, they gave you the equivalent of all the rapid reload feats, items, etc, gunslingers invested in for free. That's a meaningful power boost, but gunslingers already would kill any CR-appropriate threat in one round anyway, so it'll just make the point that happens faster.

I think it's high time someone in Alkenstar invent a proper revolver to solve these reload problems.

Edit: Ok, that was like half joking, but I just found out there were revolvers in Ultimate Equipment for first edition, what's the deal? Why can't we have those here? I might actually be kinda upset now cause those would be a big help lol.

At the time of Ultimate Equipment's release, the RPG line for PF1 was system-agnostic, and so when guns were introduced there was an expected standard fantasy set of firearms, similar in technology level to PF2's firearms, and which were used in Golarion. There were additional 'firearms are common' setting option, where things like revolvers were normal and available, but they were never intended to be present in the Golarion setting outside of niche situations from APs that might allow one or two to be present (iirc there were 2 PF1 APs were you could access those higher-tech weapons).

I am curious if the rationale behind Thrune's nationalization of the Hellknight orders is going to be expanded at all... I imagine it's going to be sold as something as simple as an attempt by Thrune to coalesce power. I hope that's not the case though, because by making them chelish orders in this particular moment will make the butchery of Breachill be seen as a Chelaxian action, which should burn whatever goodwill Cheliax has left with its non-allied neighbors. For a nation that serves Hell and thus Asmodeus, they could really take note from his game plan... They are really dense when considering their image and relationships, and other soft power notions.

I think Cheliax could argue that, in response to some of the particularly damaging actions that Hellknights have taken recently, they're trying to take them under the control of a strong, centralizing force to ensure the Hellknights will face consequences for any similar actions on the future. It's probably not the most convincing thing in the world, but I think that sort of framing could be effective at convincing those who already had an incentive to believe them.

Why would a first level party regularly be encountering level +2 creatures? That should probably be a one time thing that happens during the whole of 1st level encounters, if it happens at all.

Why is that the case, though? It's not the case at higher levels - you can comfortably throw level+2 creatures there without issue. So why should the maths of the game make it unwise to regularly use level+2 creatures in the first few levels? Of all the published content I've run or played for PF2, level+2 creatures haven't been avoided at low level either. In an AP I'm running, there were 3 level+2 creatures at level 1 and 4 at level 2. In an Adventure I played, the very first creature we encountered was a completely unhinted at level+2 creature when we were level 3. Looking at the most recent 1-10 AP I own, there are 2 level+2 creatures at 1st level still, one of which does not seem to be built up much at all. Not only does the game not effectively communicate that it's best to avoid level+2 or level+3 creatures at low levels, they actively still use these creatures at low levels. Why not make level+2 mean the same thing throughout the whole game?

Not particularly surprised, but seriously, is playing a Chelaxian character who isn't actively fighting against House Thrune even supported anymore?

It's supported in any AP that isn't about fighting House Thrune, I imagine. There are many adventures and APs that are fitting for a Chelaxian character to be present. If you instead mean "When will I be able to play a Chelaxian fighting on the side of House Thrune?" then I think you'll be waiting some time - they've stated that there aren't many writers interested in writing an AP that explicitly evil, and that players show substantially reduced interest in it as well, so it'll likely not happen in an AP for some time. Perhaps an Adventure might be more possible?

exequiel759 wrote:

I think the main problem with the gunslinger is that its limited by the fact that firearms (and ranged weapons in general) have to seemingly be worse than bows for whatever reason that was stablished in the fantasy genre (bows are even better than most guns in Starfinder 2e too, which is weirder), with PF2e firearms in particular having built-in action taxes in the form of reloads, which the gunslinger class needs to fix to make firearms usable.

I think Guns & Gears is probably the book with the worst content in PF2e. In the case of the gunslinger, I don't think its bad necesarily, but in an ideal world bows wouldn't be the gold standard and all ranged weapons should be made equally, and in that ideal world the gunslinger would just be a fighter.

One of the many reasons I don't like guns in my fantasy, they never do them right. Guns made man-powered weapons like bows obsolete and are far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows, crossbows, or the like. Yet in fantasy game rules due to balance, they end up worse or equal to bows. That should not ever happen.

Putting the two weapons next to each other ruins the verisimilitude for guns and for bows at the same time.

I understand some folks want the steampunk feel to their game and don't care about accurate power. I just can't get past it. It's too much to buy into for me and I enjoy buying into dragons and wizards.

This really isn't true, and they do go to some effort in Guns and Gears to establish a reasonable technological space for firearms to occupy that makes them comparable to, but not superior to, other ranged weapons. It's not like everyone abandoned bows or crossbows the moment a firearm was invented - there were ~200 years of overlap between the bow, crossbow, and firearm in western europe - ~1350 to ~1550 they were all used. That's comfortably in the time period from which Pathfinder draws from - full plate armour was basically unheard of before ~1400. By the end of that time period it was pretty clear the firearms were superior but economics might stop your force from relying on them, but earlier in that time period there were benefits and disadvantages to each of these options. There's no reason to say that guns necessarily have to be "far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows" - that's obviously true of modern guns, but the technology level of the Lost Omens setting is clearly drawing from a period of overlap of all 3 of these weapons.

There are some really interesting analyses of the change between longbow and firearm in the English army in particular, as they had to discuss it very heavily due to how much they'd previously relied on longbows. This is an interesting article discussing the topic: link to JSTOR article.

Why? All the planer dragons are Paizo originals aren't they? I don't see a need for this and sort of just makes things more difficult.

They specified for Delight vs Havok that, as Elysian dragons, Havok gives the wrong vibes - even if they do sometimes cause havok, it makes more sense for a creature meant to represent Elysium to have its narrative focus be on the Delight it is associated with.

AV is a bad example. If you read what James Jacobs was doing with AV, lethality was intended. He made it like an old school sandbox module like Keep on the Borderlands or something similar where if you wander into the wrong area, you die. Just like in Keep on the Borderlands way back when, you wander into the Ogre or owlbear cave or the hobgoblins or evil church too early, it was goodbye character time.

I believe this was intended design to create that old school sandbox experience that wandering into particularly dangerous areas was a likely goodbye to your character and likely a TPK. Some of us old school people remember these TPKs in old modules because they were built to happen by design. It made beating those modules when you finally did feel great and memorable.

Another AP that shouldn't be in the conversation is Age of Ashes as it was early design and they over-tuned it because the module writers didn't have a full grasp of encounter design.

Otherwise, most APs have a few encounters here and there that may be rough, but are otherwise very manageable.

That seems directly at odds with James Jacob's GM advice at the start of Abomination Vaults, which states:

It seems pretty clear to me that the intention is not for players to walk into harder-than-expected challenges and just die, at least not if they're willing to retreat.

Arcaian wrote:

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level

You need to wait for level 2 to get your Full Plate or even sometimes your weapon (some firearms are really expensive). That's peasant's concerns.

You are literally expert in no skill. The main difference in competence between 2 level one characters are their attributes value as none of them is actually specialized in anything.
Any classic fantasy enemy is a deadly threat (ogre, ankheg, whatever). The safest way to gain experience is to face a ton of low level enemies. That doesn't feel heroic at all.
You lack feats so most of your actions are pretty generic.

Feelings being what they are we have all the right in the world to disagree. But I do think the feeling of playing a peasant with a greatsword is there.
I've played games where you start at a "pretty good power level" and it's not at all the same feeling: You start with all your equipment, you have most of your powers, you don't wait for higher levels for your build to go online, etc...

Being able to go into battle equipped with heavy armour, large professional weapons (including backup weapons), perhaps with some minor magical items like a healing potion, is "peasant's concerns"? You aren't an expert in combat at level 1 (unless you are, like a Fighter or Gunslinger), but you're a well-trained combatant, not someone inexperienced in the field. Being Trained in something means you'll reliably be able to do things that are expected of competent people, not "peasant thrown into the deep end"; you can swim flowing water easily, but rapid flowing rivers might be a struggle, you can climb well but might struggle when only small handholds are available, you can navigate a difficult path through a forest but might struggle with something intentionally confusing like a hedge maze, you can track a normal creature through the plains but maybe not a nimble panther through the jungle (all examples from the book, not my personal opinion). Even then, if you're talented in the area, you'll have a ~40% success chance at those difficult things - with someone Aiding you, you're just barely missing being at a 50:50 shot of tracking a panther through a jungle! It's not super blue-collar fantasy at level 1. Sure, classic fantasy enemies are deadly threats - but that's true beyond the first 2 levels where this HP thing is a problem, even a small dragon is a major threat to a 5th level character. Fantasy enemies tend to have all variety of threat levels, it's not hard to find one that threatens a character - and it's not like all of them are a deadly threat at level 1. Kobolds, goblins, etc are all classic fantasy enemies and they're not deadly (individually) to you.

If we're comparing this to other fiction, there are other stories where there's high lethality, a single mistake leaves you dead, and the protagonist(s) must be highly cautious if they're to survive. These stories are typically grimdark, or horror-adjacent, or maybe set during an apocalypse, and are almost always stories where the protagonists aren't expecting to be able to do massive changes, they're just trying to do what they can. They're almost always stories of low narrative agency for the characters. Those do not seem to be the same sorts of stories being told as in low-level PF2. My experience of low-level PF2 includes some horror-adjacent content, yeah - but it's not very much. There are mostly-cute stories of settling into a supportive university, there are explorations of forests with kobolds and traps, there are dungeons filled with mitflits and spooky-but-not-incredibly-strong creatures, hunting wild animals and fights against other humans who aren't individually stronger than you, etc. In all of them, you're expected to have high narrative agency, and you never feel like you're being beaten down by an unfair world that you're desperately trying to survive in. I do not think low-level PF2 is meant to feel like the existing fiction in which this lethality is found, I think it's meant to feel like a normal part of the heroic fantasy that the rest of the levels more accurately reflect.

Then you agree with me. My take is that Paizo should make 90% of it's releases for established players and 10% for new players.

This feels thoroughly disconnected from the point of the thread - I don't think there are many people advocating making levels 1-3 of all APs into Beginner Box style teach-the-new-players scenarios. The point of criticism is that the maths of the game in the first few levels teaches very different lessons to the maths of the game after those levels, and I think that it is clear to see that: a): the community online went through a phase of treating those early level lessons like they were true the whole game, and took years to get past it, b): new players often encounter issues at early levels where they either learn these not-always-true lessons themselves or are taught them as a solution to their problems at early levels by others, and c): many of the most common reasons for new players bouncing off the game are connected to these difficulties at lower levels.

None of that requires new releases to be marketed at new players to fix - the maths could be changed so it takes ~3 hits from a boss mob to take you down at all levels, instead of ~2 at level 1, and ~4 at level 20. That way people would learn the same lesson across the whole game, and it'd be less frustrating when you go from full hp to 0 hp without having the chance to take any action against it. Sure, you could carefully design all low-level prepublished content to avoid these weak points of lower level play that lead to frustrating situations, but you could also just change the maths. Presuming that people frustrated with this would leave the game anyway doesn't have any firm grounding, I think - if the game was constantly at risk of my PC dying before I took action in any given boss fight I probably would enjoy the game much less, I just know that it stops being like that quickly where a new player might not.

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level - hell, you start out the game able to wrestle a camel into submission with about a 50% success rate, that's not the right vibes for a weak peasant thrown into the deep end (unless the story is very specifically trying to tell that by putting you up against higher level creatures). This description feels like it lines up more with the 0th level variant, where I do think it should feel like you're in over your head. I do feel like this is just a weirdness of the maths at low levels, and I don't think the game is better for having it present.

It's pretty trivial to show that time-to-kill is significantly lower at 1st level, if we're doubting that maths:

- A 1st level character with average con (+2), 8 HP/level from their class, and 8 ancestry hit points: 18 HP
- High damage on a level+2 strike for that character: 12, or 67% of their HP; ~2 hits or 1 crit brings them down.

- The same character at 5th level, having raised their con to +3: 63 HP
- High damage on a level+2 strike for that character: 20, or 32% of their HP; ~3 hits or ~2 crits are now needed to bring them down

- The same character at 10th level, having raised their con to +4: 128 HP
- High damage on a level+2 strike for that character: 30, or 23% of their HP; ~4 hits or ~2 crits are now needed to bring them down.

This is not something like a 6 hp/level class with a -1 CON getting one-shot, it's a decent HP character - either a more tanky backliner, or one of the squishier frontliners like thaumaturge, magus, etc. The numbers wouldn't be very different for a 10 HP/level class either - it'd be 60%, 27%, and 20% respectively.

So the answer to the original (implied) question is certainly that there's no way to do a good or bad job at teaching new players how to play.

That's just plainly wrong - I don't agree with Trip about most of their PF2 opinions, but I truly don't understand why they're getting the backlash they are for the concept that a game should incentivize new players to learn the game in a way that will actually be helpful for their future enjoyment of the game.

A game's design will absolutely impact the way that players learn to play; for instance, in a 20-level RPG, you could design it so that using melee attacks is the only way to do enough damage to win a fight for the first 10 levels - ranged attacks and spells are just uselessly low damage and don't provide enough support/debuffing/etc to be close to worthwhile. Everyone who starts at level 1, which is almost everyone on their first campaign, will learn to exclusively build melee characters, because that it was what the game is teaching them to do. If the game continues to put melee characters in a similar position of power for the next 10 levels as well, then it has taught them how to play the game successfully; the game design is terrible and I hate it, but it doesn't incentivize players to learn things that will ruin their later enjoyment. In comparison, if levels 11-12 suddenly all spells get incredibly OP, bows get replaced with guns which do massive damage, and monster damage went up massively so being in melee was a huge risk, then the game design has taught you to behave in such a way (only build all melee parties) that will ruin your future enjoyment (you will always get TPK'd once you get to level 11).

Sure, if you stick with the game long enough you'll figure out what has happened, and might learn to make switch hitters who focus more on ranged damage once they get to level 9-10 to prepare themselves for the change. You might even say it is a badge of honour that you have become an expert at a challenging game as one of the few people who managed (bothered) to do so. But the game design failed to teach you this, and that will cause people to have a less fun time, and that is not a good outcome. This isn't even saying it's bad or good game design overall - I think both of these hypothetical games are terribly designed, but one is designed well to incentivize learning the game properly.

In almost all games where characters gain HP via leveling, PCs start with a substantial base pool, and have rather small [% total] gains.

If you want that to happen, you need to drastically reduce the ability to fight up or down large level differences in creatures in another way; if level isn't a particularly large factor on total HP, then lower level characters will be much more effective at taking down higher level enemies than today (especially with things that mitigate or avoid target defences, like half-damage-on-a-save abilities or Force barrage). Once could boost their defences in other ways - make AC and saves scale more significantly with level, for example. That would introduce further complexity - for one, how would that scaling happen in PF2's design? Are there additional proficiency ranks for defences only? Is your total proficiency not equal to the same number for defences as other numbers (i.e. trained is 2+level for everything else, but 2+1.5*level for defences)? Do you get a penalty to attack higher level targets? Alternatively we accept that defences are just something that scales less than offensive capability with level, which could also be fine, but will affect the game's feel as well. I don't disagree that there's a significant problem with going down in 1 hit at low levels, but pretending that there's an objectively correct game design is foolish - any change to a game's design has wide ranging flow-on effects, and there's not an objective right or wrong answer to which set of side-effects is better. "Subjectively, avoiding the tactical consequences of low time-to-kill is more important to me than the consequences of doing so" is a perfectly reasonable statement, but it's not objective game design.

Spamotron wrote:

Movie Smaug is explicitly a bad example for your argument. Because it wasn't arbitrary. There's plenty of interviews explaining that his initial design was based on the original four legged artwork but they couldn't get the model skeleton to move naturally and he came across as a blatantly artificical. The "wyvern," redesign was as much a practical decision based on technical limitations as anything else. Given that Smaug is what a lot of people consider to be the best thing about those movies. Often citing how impressively he moves. It was almost certainly the right choice to change him.

Well guess we should make vampires into glittering vegetarian xmen then after all so many teenager girls loved it.

Obviously it would be absurd to allow vampires to glitter - we should keep vampires how they have always been. Any vampire that doesn't follow the trend of Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre is obviously a contemptuous betrayal of tradition - all of this nonsense about garlic and burning in the sun and being highly capable in a fight should never have been in the vampiric tradition, they should be killed by bandits like they have traditionally been.

Sarcasm, obviously - at what point do we decide a fantasy concept should be set in stone? It's nonsensical, these are shared concepts that will naturally evolve over time in ways that people find interesting, and that keeps them relevant. It is good that vampires are weak to sunlight, that is an interesting twist that was thoroughly changed from their original creation as a fantasy creature.

With May the 4th coming up, i'm curious if there are any low to mid level scenarios involving the Technic League and/or are more sci-fi themed to run on that weekend. Thanks.

If the level isn't important, there's Lightning Strikes, Stars Fall, a 5-8 PFS scenario that seems to fit :)

We actually just went through this recently as one of my groups decided to stop playing Kingmaker. The GM is excited about Spore War and we were looking at lead ins for it. Not a lot feels like it fits well, especially considering some of the potential options we had already done.

In the end we couldn't really find a lead-in that works for the group so we just didn't bother: we're starting at 11. Two of us are literally just playing our Kingmaker characters who were level 8, so we just add 3 levels, make up an excuse to be there related to being diplomatic envoys, and we're good to go. The others are just making new characters and coming up with an explanation for why they are there.

Ironically only one of the 5 PCs is actually from Kyonin and the other 4 are there because "the player wants to play this concept/class/ancestry/whatever, so we're making up a reason for them to be here at the start." So maybe we overthought the whole "the lead-in has to be appropriate" thing. :)

That said, saying "we want to run Spore War so to have some thematically appropriate characters, we're going to run Outlaws of Alkenstar first" doesn't make any sense. Sky Kings Tomb might make sense if you know what it's about, but from the outside looking in it doesn't because one is a "Dwarf Adventure" and another is an "Elf Adventure" on the box. We weren't really sure what a good lead in would be which is why we didn't use one. None of the APs fit together to form a 1-20 arc the way the full 1-20 APs did.

This sort of situation is I think a good example of how starting at 11 without it being a follow-on from a previous adventure can be quite liberating. We had a similar experience - I finished running a PF2 conversion of Ironfang Invasion at level 10 (they did ... strange things for it to end there :P ), and so when we discussed what we wanted to do next and they picked Stolen Fate (which starts at level 11), there was a lot of freedom in what characters people could bring. We had one player directly follow on from the Ironfang Invasion story, bringing the same character. We had two players adapt characters they'd not been able to finish up the story on previously to the new campaign - one PF1 character from a Mummy's Mask campaign we stopped at level 9, and another a version of a PFS1 character that has an ongoing story. The other three players made completely custom characters, feeling all their established characters had concluded everything cleanly already, or weren't a fit for Stolen Fate. For those people who wanted a 1-20 character experience, they could get it - but for people who were happy with the previous story, they could do what they wanted. I enjoyed how it worked a lot! :)

I think I will make the Finisher tag work more like a flourish. I am not seeing a reason why a finisher prevents all further attack actions.

The investigator does 5d6 once per round and they made it far easier for remastered investigators to get the Devise a Stratagem as a free action. I see no reason why one additional d6 of damage should lead to such an intense limit on the swashbuckler other than the name "Finisher" which I guess the designer wanted to be a killing blow type of attack.

Since it doesn't actually work this way in the game, I'll consider the "finisher" more of a deadly technique of the swashbuckler they can use once a round without additional limitation. I'll adjust if I see problems with it.

I think with the need to obtain panache every round and a maximum of one finisher a round and MAP, that should all be enough to throttle the finisher to the right level of power, especially compared to the rogue or fighter or barbarian.

I accidentally ran Finishers this was for a couple of levels due to a misread of the rules, and then I intentionally started running Finishers this way and didn't regret it. There are a few finishers that are weaker than they otherwise would be - the one that reduces MAP effects on the finisher, for example - but overall I find it to be a nice QoL change without a huge impact on the game balance.

Errenor wrote:

Because this isn't forbidden in the game mechanically and frankly doesn't break anything.

That's where our opinions differ.

While for a melee character Aiding is extremely costly (melee characters lack actions and reactions), for a ranged character it just costs you a third action and a useless reaction. The cost is negligible. If you can do it using an attack roll you also benefit from a bonus that goes automatically up to +3, and even +4 for Fighters (and Gunslingers but they already have Fake out for them). At high level, with the natural action compression archers can gain with Hunted Shot or Flurry of Blows, it's incredible.

On the other hand, it severely nerfs Fake Out, which is in my opinion one of the selling points of the Gunslinger (which is definitely an issue, Gunslingers need some love), and all the feats to Aid (like One For All). And it pushes archers toward some form of "One True playstyle", again a hit on build variation.

So, in my opinion, it significantly impact high level play to the point of being an issue. So, no, I don't allow Aiding a melee attack with a ranged weapon at my table.

Honestly, it sounds like you've placed a very high value on One For All and Fake Out on ranged builds, and are now trying to justify that value by keeping any alternative weak. One For All has the inherent advantage of always working in basically all combat situations (to compare to our current example, you don't need to have line of sight on your enemy to make the attack roll), always using your Diplomacy (which you can always have at maximum proficiency, will always have maxed-out item bonuses for), has the bravado trait to give you panache, and it is completely applicable outside of combat as well as in - it's a very good feat with those benefits even if you run Aid in a fairly permissive way. I'm currently playing in a campaign where Aid is run permissively and I use One for All frequently still, and don't regret it. Perhaps it'll be less common for someone to take the Swashbuckler archetype when they're uninterested in anything but One For All, but that honestly seems like a good outcome to me. There's also the consistency provided by being an explicit mechanical option like One For All - if you keep Aiding with attack rolls, I'll start boosting the DC; if you keep repeatedly intentionally shooting near but not hitting an enemy, they'll eventually focus on the real attack a little more easily. I'm not going to do that for something like One For All. Fake Out is obviously even better; it doesn't require an action to prepare, and it doesn't require you to specify a benefiting ally ahead of the reaction. I don't think anyone who would qualify for using Fake Out would not pick up the feat because someone else can occasionally aid using their attack roll.

With Paizo phasing out chromatic and metallic dragons, how will their presence be handled along the Golden Road? I'm aware of two major dragons in Osirion, though it doesn't sound too hard to keep the name and plot bunnies they represent and simply change them to primal dragons - Sussurex is already called the "Crystal King" and could be switched from a Blue to a Crystal Dragon, and Asuulek, being interested in a volcano with an extraplanar dimension within, is almost perfect for a Magma Dragon. But blue dragons being more common in the Thuvian desert (especially as guardians/hoarders of the oases) and Katapesh is fairly well established. Do you simply replace them with Cloud Dragons as the closest equivalents? Mirage and Fortune Dragons also sound like ideal inhabitants of vast desert sands that hide ancient treasures. Or is the Golden Road going to find itself populated by a more diverse draconic ecosystem?

They've previously stated that for major named chromatic/metallic dragons that don't have an obvious creature to be based off of in ORC pathfinder, they'll just make them a custom stat block - for example, Choral the Conqueror won't be statted up as another type of dragon if he returns to Brevoy, he'll simply be a dragon that is red and that has a unique stat block :)

Errenor wrote:

What about real shots? With ammo expended if you are counting it, action costs for reload if required and no damage even on good rolls (higher than AC).

Just curious. Maybe we even have discussed that, I don't remember.

What's the in character difference between shooting an enemy to hurt them and shooting an enemy to help your friend hitting? If there's none then there should be no mechanical difference.

I don't see any way to shoot at an enemy to help an ally and as such I don't allow Aid with a ranged weapon. It just looks like a way to gain a benefit without having paid for anything.

You pay the same action + reaction cost as anyone else does, not sure what you mean by 'without having paid for anything'. Personally, I think it makes a good amount of sense that if someone is firing an arrow at you at the same time you're trying to dodge someone else's sword strike, it's harder for you to avoid both; if that's the effect you're looking for, you don't need to hit a weak point in their armour/put your full draw weight into it/take the time to line up the shot perfectly/etc, because it just needs to be an arrow going near the enemy, which is the difference between shooting with the intent to hurt and the intent to aid. Surely it's harder to differentiate swinging a sword at an enemy with the intent to hurt vs aid someone else than it is with a bow, especially when something like Feint already exists?

I legit do not understand that decision about Fleshwarps...

In P1E, it led to different species based on the victim's heritage, but in P2E, they became homogenous???

Then again, now they need to find another creator ancestry to replace dark elves...

I don't think they became homogeneous in PF2, I think the intended narrative is that a fleshwarp has so little in common with whatever their original ancestry's physical form was that you're functionally a completely distinct creature. I think that narrative could be sold more effectively if they had an Adopted-like effect to still get more cultural feats from their previous ancestry, and I think a less-completely-Fleshwarped versatile heritage would absolutely be appropriate as well.

Interesting to see the comment suggesting avoiding picking aquatic ancestries because the presumed focus of water in the campaign is incorrect! That makes me more interested in this one :)

I think many people miss the mark when it comes to Cheliax. First Cheliax may be the largest imperial empire in the world. Sure Quadira may be bigger but that is speculation and on the other side of the world. Cheliax is the world power of the inner sea.

Second, Cheliax is the kingdom of men. Always has been. Cheliax was the chosen of the god of men, Aroden. It was KNOWN that Aroden would return to Golarion to usurer in the golden age of men and he would do it in the capital of Cheliax, Westcrown.

The death of Aroden shook the world but nowhere as much as Cheliax. By the time Aroden died Cheliax had converted ALL government functions over to the church of Aroden. Why do you need mortals in government when a god is going to do it. So when Aroden died the government collapsed and civil war broke out.

The civil war lasted 30 years. During which house Thrune made a pact with Asmodeous. This pushed Thrune to win the war. As a part of the pact Asmodeous became the state religion.

Hell Knights should be given an even more close look as they PREDATE the rule of Thrune and are not beholden to it; unless you count the Order of the Glyph, which most do not. To become a Hellknight one must kill a devil in single combat.

This I believe is the reason Tieflings are considered lesser than man. Add to this and the enslavement of any Halfling they can catch and you get a society that views all races less than man.

In my campaigns I envision Berlin 1936-1939. I believe this is the historical moment that inspired the look and feel of Cheliax. Especially the imagery of the banners of Thrune prominently displayed reminds me of images of Berlin 1936. I use this period as it is the time between the 1936 Berlin Olympic's and the Feb 20,1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, New York where over 20,000 Americans attended. Of course that all change when Germany invaded Poland Sept 1, 1939.

Cheliax is also the de-facto colonizer. That is until Andoran sank their navy. You can add all the colonial history to...

It's not speculation that the Kelesh empire is larger, it has been concretely canon since the original campaign setting book. Qadira on its own is maybe half the size of Cheliax, and that's just one of many satrapies in the Kelesh empire, which is itself larger than any of its satrapies. It's also not on the other side of the world; the holdings of the Kelesh empire border Taldor and are part of the Inner Sea. Cheliax is also not particularly large for Tian-Xia either; Xa Hoi, Lingshen, Minkai, and Nagajor are all comfortably larger than Cheliax. Cheliax is the largest state in the Inner Sea, and is clearly one of the major centers of power in the region, but is not a world-defining power, and is not without rivals in the Inner Sea - any two of Taldor, Andoran, Osirion, and Rahadoum would at least be able to seriously hinder Cheliax, and any three of them would certainly win. Cheliax is not in a position where it is clearly the sole dominant power in its region.

I also think it's unfair to say that Cheliax is the definitive kingdom of men - yes, Aroden was prophesized to appear in Westcrown and rule from it, but Aroden has always had a very Inner Sea-centric definition of humanity, neglecting the humans Tian-Xia, Casmaron, and Arcadia very thoroughly. I see no reason to expect that to change upon this return of Aroden - he'd had plenty of time walking the surface of Golarion and leading people previously, it's not like this would be his first time doing this.

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

Honestly, I'd be shocked if a lawful evil human society didn't have a bunch of laws/customs set up to preserve the position of humans from 'outsiders' (in any sense of the word) that might have the gall to try to get ahead in 'their' society...

.

This is what I did for Molthune -- in order to separate Molthune from Cheliax or other 'evil' societies. I decided to make Molthune this Nazi or aryan-like bad-guy state that was equally against Orcs from Belkzin and human ethnicities other than their own. They war against Kyonin and 5-Kings-Mts and push a pogrom of ethnic cleansing from all 'non-Molthuni' humans. .... Back in the day when the campaign setting was brand new, it was my way of really telling the difference between Molthune and Cheliax. So for me, in Molthune they'd be very racist against any Tiefling, Orc, Ratfolk, Halfling, Half-Elf, Ifrit, even an Aasimar if the Human-side wasn't Molthuni. .... So far I've only run one game in Molthune, where the PCs are tasked with liberating a 'concentration camp' to rescue Nirmathi, Druman, and Elven people from the Molthuni.

Ultimately, the Molthuni for me are kinda like the Zhentarim in FR (at least how I see the Zhents.)

Interesting, my favourite aspect of Molthune in the canon is that they're almost the opposite of this interpretation! The two-tier system of residency where those who serve in the military can go from labourers/foreigners to the well-supported citizen category, as well as the roman aesthetics in some of the art giving some direction as to where the citizenship inspiration is drawing from, gives rise to a very interesting society to me. There's a core of old-money citizens who are very prejudiced, but also an increasing influx of newer citizens from very diverse backgrounds - they just had to be willing to serve for years in an imperialistic military to join. I think it justifies the old position of Molthune being LN rather than LE, and sets up an interesting situation - regardless of almost any inherent aspect of who you are, it seems like you can become a citizen in Molthune, but the cost is that you'll need to be complicit with their military. I find it a really interesting place in the setting.

This RL horror show, still ongoing in 2025, is outright what Paizo presents as what the "atheists" would do if they had a country of their own, execute people for the crime of non/belief.

I don't think the argument that "Rahadoum is presented as the natural outcome of atheism" stands up to scrutiny. I find it particularly strange to say when you're approaching it from a literary analysis perspective - it seems very clear to me that the critique happening here is of the authoritarian response, not the atheism. There's nothing about the rest of the setting that seems to imply this is the only possibility for atheism - there are other polities that are predominantly atheist (e.g. Druma) which don't have this authoritarian response, and there are certainly individual atheists who stand in stark relief from the authoritarianism of Rahadoum - including figures from Rahadoum. I don't see why "Rahadoum's authoritarian and violent response to the Oath Wars as a state, of which there are differing opinions even within the state, is a tragically brutal response to a real problem that metatextually works to invert the typical assumption in fantasy of violent theocracies (of which the Lost Omens setting has many)" isn't a valid reading of the text.

There's interesting space in Rahadoum to expand on - the Sword of Man of the Pure Legion has very significant authority and seems like they're in a position of comparable authority to the legal head of state in many ways. Tension between the Sword of Man and the Council of Elders, especially with the Keeper of the First Law typically being an insecure position, has the possibility for some interesting tension there. But right now, we don't really know almost anything about the state - in nearly 2 decades of the setting, we've not yet had anything that focuses on it to a meaningful degree. There's a lot of space for them to take Rahadoum in different directions, and I think there's some tension between those directions in published books. There's Rahadoum as an authoritarian but not horrific state, filled with intellectuals and the pursuit of human development, with questions about the cost of the violent anti-theism on this state. There's also a Rahadoum that's almost cartoonishly repressive and is basically acting fully as an inversion of your evil theocracy, but this time an evil anti-theocracy. Both of these are present as far back as the Inner Sea World Guide, where we're first really introduced to the nation, but I think the first seems to be a little more where PF2 is taking it; but again, with the lack of detail we have, both are still present. The fact that both of them are present without clarity as to which is more correct is a little unfortunate, I think - it does lend itself to some stereotypes around atheism. When we get Lost Omens: Golden Road, or whatever book fleshes out the area a little more, I think the lack of clarity will go away.

On top of that, I don't think there's a fundamental moral issue with telling a story about an oppressed group who gain power and react to their past trauma by violently imposing restrictions intended to prevent their past troubles happening again. It's a complicated story, for sure - one has to be careful in how one tells it, but I see no reason why this is fundamentally a bad story to tell. It happens in the real world, all too often - exploring how and why is important, I think. Perhaps a little out-of-tone with Golarion as a broader setting, but it's not necessarily a bad direction to take a story.

Honestly that just sucks.

Because that's very conflicting with the earlier published information I linked.

Actually, looking into this more, the world guide was published before Lost Omens Gods and Magic, which I cited.

Since they are in direct contradiction of one another, I would say that your source has been....redacted isn't the right word...overwritten.

Anyways, based on the most recent published item (just looking at these two) I would go with the description from Gods and Magic. It also makes a lot more sense to me than the first.

I don't think this is a case of a change in the lore - for one, it was only ~6 months between releases, so their development was happening at the same time. That always makes it difficult to figure out which was the intended one. Secondly, I don't think there's necessarily an out-of-universe contradiction here - and it seems too far-reaching (to me) to say that the edicts/anathema of a philosophy being released overrules recently-published specific lore about a part of the setting. There's an interesting almost-contradiction here, but it entirely could be in-universe. Especially when an even more recent source (Divine Mysteries) continues to reinforce the World Guide information.

The general edicts and anathema of the Laws of Mortality can be to challenge religious power and to resist religious aid, and Rahadoum can allow specific non-deific faiths to operate in their borders. Does the Green Faith count as a religion, and so it is against the edicts of the Laws of Mortality to receive aid from it? There's a strong argument to be made - and I imagine it is being made by many members of the Pure Legion. Others will disagree, and yet others will be acknowledging the assistance of druids of the Green Faith in stopping desertification and view that as more important than fights about what does and does not qualify as 'religious aid'. Is astrology a faith? Many will argue it has no deity involved, and is not necessarily based in faith - especially in a setting like the Lost Omens setting, where it is provably real in some ways. Others will disagree, and that conflict makes Rahadoum more interesting, not less. Rahadoum should not be a monolith, and the possibility for multiple perspectives for characters from the region (as well as the potential for stories like a power struggle between the Pure Legion and the main government over this sort of decision) is something I'd like more of in the setting, not less.

James Jacobs wrote:

So here's the thing: Pathfinder, and by extension Golarion, is a made-up world where the gods are real, and magic is a fundamental part of existence. That sort of thing changes how religion and faith works on a deep, fundamental level, and it gets worse if you approach it from an omniscient perspective as a writer of a fantasy world or a reader of a fantasy world.

Keep in mind that no one who lives in Golarion exists in a reality where they can pick up the books we create about Golarion. They don't have those resources, and it's not really appropriate to assume everyone who lives on Golarion has read every book about Golarion that has been published.

As for Pharasma... the key there is to remember she's not human, nor does she have a human mind. She is, as are many deities, unknowable by human minds, including those that invent her. That's part of the mystery and terror and beauty and problem with matters of belief and mythology when they're presented as fantasies by a content creator, and not presented as guesswork from an in-world author.

My own personal take about the OP's question (and this, I MUST STRESS, is my take alone and IS NOT MEANT to be "canon" for Golarion in any way):

** spoiler omitted **

Have you considered creating a faction to represent these people? Because, if you ask me, the problem isn't so much Pharasma herself, but the fact that every alternative to her is evil—like the asura, the undead, or the sahkil. Maybe if there were a neutral or chaotic neutral faction to represent people who feel this way, others would side with them and champion their cause, much like how some people play the Bellflower Network.

There's no longer alignment in the setting, so TN/CN isn't a meaningful distinction any longer, but you might be interested in The Lady of the North Star, a Tian deity who is a huge enemy of Pharasma's - to the extent that Pharasma and her servants go out of their way to remove all evidence of her existence. She allows her servitors to become Holy, but not Unholy - closer to the good end of the spectrum under the old alignment rules, she's pretty upstanding morally IMO - and her entire thing is about gifting immortality to mortals. I think she's an example of the setting moving away from the idea that Pharasma's justice is unquestionable.

Alynia wrote:

vyshan wrote:

So with this war, are we going to see Cheliax take more beatings and stop being a threat, or be utterly defeated and another big bad empire is removed from the board?

I am afraid about the same thing to be honest. "Hellbreakers" sounds a lot like Cheliax will loose this. And removing the last "Big bad evil empire" might feel good while doing so in the story itself, but leaves a big hole afterwards narrative-wise.

To be fair, Cheliax works as a bogeyman but every time they appear in APs they get the stuffing kicked out of them and end up taking the L (which makes sense, since they're villains).

Even if we take into account that they win in Hell's Vengeance, this is counterbalanced by how thoroughly they got trounced in Hell's Rebels.

However, I don't think the AP will see Cheliax gone. I think a much better bet, given the geographical positions involved, is that Andoran takes part or the entirety of Isger, which has already tried rebelling before.

That would deal a blow to Cheliax without removing them from the board, so to speak.

I don't think they really get trounced in Hell's Rebels - spoilering the rest of the discussion, just in case :)

They functionally get a vassal state with a decent degree of autonomy, still getting most of what they want out of the land. They do lose the land, but it had no sites of importance in it, it's barely populated, and they still have primary access to its resources. And that's the best case scenario! Depending on the PC's results, they could be giving 70% of their resources away to Cheliax, or be forced to send their entire army + navy to support cheliax's wars, regardless of who they're fighting. It's definitely a loss, no doubt about that - but I think the Glorious Reclamation's seizing of Westcrown is more of a strike against House Thrune than the outcome of the Silver Raven's rebellion.

Arcaian wrote:

I don't think the core point of the essay is wrong - if you don't balance the game around assuming that a highly versatile character takes advantage (not perfectly, but pretty well) of their versatility, people who do take advantage of the versatility well are going to be unbalanced.

How much of a problem is it that someone playing perfectly is going to have above average results? How much are we throwing out chasing that? Like, other classes also have gradients of power to them but we don't seem nearly as fixated on aiming for the top.

To put "if you don't balance around taking advantage of all your versatility" another way...

If you balance a class around the assumption that it's played near-perfectly, anyone who makes suboptimal choices for any reason is going to have a bad time. Or anyone who plays in a game environment where perfect decision making is not possible will have a degraded experience. And so on.

The real damning thing for me here is that this standard doesn't really seem to be applied in the same way to other classes. There have been significant efforts, both in base PF2 and even moreso with remaster balance changes, to try to promote a variety of options for classes to be able to lean into. PF2 has prided itself on this. The community has prided itself on promoting this, on encouraging people to play what feels good because there are often ways to make it functional.

... Yet inevitably whenever this conversation comes up, even the designers (or well, former designers) default to a discussion of optimization first and everything else second.

You literally quote me saying "not perfectly, but pretty well" before proceeding to argue against the idea that we should balance all casters around perfect play. I didn't say that, and Michael Sayre didn't say that. The difference in the versatility of something like a ranger and a prepared caster aren't comparable, that's why this conversation comes up for prepared casters. It's not like I'm sitting here saying that the wizard is perfect - I do think there are issues with the power level and class options of the wizard specifically, which is why I wrote and published a 3PP book addressing my issues with the class. And yes, balancing around playing perfectly is going to mean anyone who isn't playing perfectly underperforms; it's basically an unavoidable situation when a class has very significant versatility and balance is a key goal of the system. If you're not going to undermine the balance, you either need to reduce their versatility, or you need to do your best to communicate the expected level of competence and give tools and education to help players reach that point. I don't think that has been pulled off fully in this case - but that doesn't mean the fundamental logic here has a flaw.

That essay is really tragic. Basically admits to a bunch of things players find fun then shrugs them off as not worth the effort and kind of handwaves a lot of balance problems based on hypothetical versatility that a character probably doesn't even have in the first place.

I think that's mischaracterizing the essay to some degree - I don't think it's saying that they're not worth the effort, I think it's saying that there is a fundamental trade-off here you can't ignore. I don't think the core point of the essay is wrong - if you don't balance the game around assuming that a highly versatile character takes advantage (not perfectly, but pretty well) of their versatility, people who do take advantage of the versatility well are going to be unbalanced. If consistently casting only fire spells, or focusing your build around casting spell attack rolls, gave you equivalent outcomes to other classes and you maintain the ability to pull out all manner of other useful spells, then the class is too versatile for its power, and that's an important consideration in class design.

The exact degree of taking advantage of that versatility you balance around is definitely worth discussing, and the amount of power you gain from versatility needs to be considered as well. If you can perform at 95% of your theoretical maximum power by just preparing the best all-round spells, then this whole point is moot. It's difficult to determine exactly how much power the versatility of prepared casting gives you in PF2, because it is pretty radically table-dependent, as has been discussed many times already in this thread. Personally, I think the degree of versatility inherent to Vancian casting with big spell lists is a bit too much - I rarely see players engaging heavily in re-preparing their whole spell list every day, and I regularly see players wanting to specialise their magic in a way that Vancian casting doesn't really allow. If we had some sort of trade-off where you have to pick between broadening the spells you have available to you to prepare vs specialising in the few spells you do have available, I think you could make the versatility more impactful should you choose to invest, and you can make the doubling-down on one type of magic possible without necessarily having to worry about the consequences for a highly versatile caster - but that might've been too radical a change for the PF1 -> PF2 era.

After having read a lot of these discussions, I figure I'll jump in here and mention that many of these discussions about different ways to add content/rebalance existing content have been thought about and 3rd party products have been developed in (partial) response to these sorts of frustrations. I'm over on Infinite, so that's where I know the products best, but if anyone wants to look at already-published additions to the Wizard class, here are 3!
- Wizards+; there's a good chance people here already know this one, it's recently released by Team+ and adds a wide variety of new content to the class. As typical for Team+, it's mostly not focused on rebalancing existing content, but instead about adding new ways to play the class. This includes new feats, theses, and schools - but also a class archetype to introduce some almost animist-like casting to Wizards, and Deliberations, which replace your arcane bond. There are also some rebalancing changes at the end of the book. It's a really fun introduction of new content!
- Arcane Accoutrements; the debut book from Three Rooks Books, this one also focuses on adding a variety of new content for the wizard class - I really like the sword binder arcane thesis, personally. It's got more of all the normal wizard options, as well as some magic items, plus an extra Deliberation using the rules from Wizards+!
- Wizards Refocused; this is the one I wrote, which has a slightly different focus than the other two. There's still new content - a bunch of new class feats, especially focused on trying to introduce some of that academic flavour into wizard, a new thesis, and a Deliberation, but then there's also an archetype to let other classes get some of the nerdy stuff if they want to, and then pretty substantial rebalancing of existing content - I introduced a new ability all Wizards get (Expand your Education) to try and add some academic flavour, as well as to make up for the less flexible schools in the Remaster. I also rebalanced all of the existing theses to try and ensure they each have a fun niche and are more comparable in power to the strongest option available at the moment.

If 3PP isn't the stuff for you, feel no pressure to look at them - but if you're invested enough in wizards to be 3 pages deep into a forum discussion, you might also be interested enough to give a read of how some 3rd party publishers have given the wizard class a bit of a revamp.

I do agree with people saying not to try to interrogate this too closely. In this particular case, I'd also point out that you can move 3 times/turn now, not 2 like in PF1 (barring running in a straight line) - so the average move speed of ancestries tends to be reduced 25 to account for the greater number of times you can move that distance.