Ariane Wald's page

I'm confused by the rules for Requests, which seem to contradict themselves.

The Request action says:

You can make a request of a creature that's friendly or helpful to you. You must couch the request in terms that the target would accept given their current attitude toward you.

The attitude conditions say the following:

It will accept reasonable Requests from that character, as long as such requests aren't at the expense of the helpful creature's goals or quality of life.

It is likely to agree to Requests from that character as long as they are simple, safe, and don't cost too much to fulfill.

(Doesn't mention Requests)

The unfriendly creature won't accept Requests from the character.

It doesn't necessarily attack, but it won't accept Requests from the character.

The GM Core section on Social Skills says:

When a character uses Deception, Diplomacy, Intimidation, or Performance to influence or impress someone...It often makes sense to adjust the DC based on the target’s attitude for Deception, Diplomacy, or Performance, making the DC easy for a friendly creature, very easy for a helpful one, hard for an unfriendly one, or very hard for a hostile one. You might adjust the DC further or differently based on the PC’s goal; for instance, the DC to Request something an indifferent NPC is fundamentally opposed to might be incredibly hard or impossible, and it might be easy to convince an unfriendly creature to do something it already wants to do.

Then there's the Tense Negotiator feat, one of whose benefits is:

You can attempt checks to make Requests of creatures who're indifferent or unfriendly toward you.

I've quoted these from the Remaster version where appropriate, but as far as I can tell none of the quoted text has changed between Premaster and Remaster.

All of these seem to indicate something different.

The request action clearly says that you can only make requests to creatures which are friendly or helpful, and you have to ask for something that they would accept - per the descriptions of friendly and helpful, this means simple, safe and non-costly requests for friendly creatures, or requests that don't harm the character's goals or quality of life for helpful creatures.

Tense Negotiator also confirms that you can't normally make requests of creatures which aren't friendly or helpful. But it doesn't work properly if you enforce the requirement for the request to be one "the target would normally accept given their current attitude to you" as stated in the Request action, since unfriendly creatures normally explicitly won't accept any requests.

The attitude descriptions themselves explicitly say you can't make requests of unfriendly (or hostile) creatures, but don't say that for indifferent creatures. This strongly suggests that you're supposed to be able to make requests of indifferent creatures. Reading the attitude descriptions, it appears that Helpful creatures automatically accept requests that aren't opposing their goals or quality of life, without having to make diplomacy roll at all. From this section of the rules, it looks like you're supposed to be able to make requests for anything, and make requests of indifferent creatures, and friendly/helpful gives you lower DCs or automatic successes on reasonable requests.

Finally, the GM guidance explicitly says that you can make a Request to an indifferent creature, and even request things which it's fundamentally opposed to (albeit at a very high DC). It even indicates that you can make a request to an unfriendly creature, and that the DC might be very low if you request the right thing.

Could we get some clarity on which of these is the correct reading?

I've been reading about Lastwall on the Pathfinder wiki, and I think I've noticed a continuity error. According to the page on Lastwall itself, the Hordeline was the third border line between Lastwall and Belkzen (after the Sunwall, and Harchrist's Blockade, both failed), and was constructed after Harchrist's Blockade was overrun in 4517. But according to the page on the Hordeline itself, the Hordeline it was created in 4515 and overrun two years later in 4517, which seems to be describing Harchrist's blockade.

Could someone with access to both books check the citations for both those articles? And if they are both "correct", maybe a passing writer could weigh in on which is the canonical Hordeline?

In most D&D-esque systems, where some classes expend resources over multiple encounters and restock them when they rest, there's some common wisdom regarding how many encounters a party can face per day. Often this is spelled out by the game designers explicitly. Has Paizo made any comments about how many encounters they anticipate players having per day? If not, how many would you recommend?

I've repeatedly seen people on these forums claim that PF2 doesn't need such guidelines because there are ways to restore hp, etc, after every encounter so the resource drain of PF1 isn't really a thing, and I'd like to save time by responding to those claims in advance. To some extent, they seem to be valid. I tested the system by making a party of 4 characters (including a Champion) and running them through the first floor of the fortress in Age of Ashes, and thanks to some lucky dice rolls and regular use of Lay on Hands I was able to get through the whole thing without anyone dying and without having to rest for the night.

But the game didn't feel great. In 90% of the battles, my casters were on cantrip auto-attack, and contributing a lot less than the martials. I'd been anticipating using the druid as a healer, but in fact his healing spells only got used once in the final battle, where a character was at risk of dying. It was OK, because I was also playing the martial characters and that was fun, but if that had been a real game and I'd been playing a caster in it I'd have found it extremely boring, because of the large number of encounters per day. And even the martials were less fun to play than they would have been with more status effects and buffs flying around.

Conversely, if I played a campaign which had just one encounter per day and the casters were able to nova all their high level spell slots on each encounter, it seems like they'd be controlling the battles and it would feel bad to play a martial character.

Both of these extremes seem bad to me; bad enough that I wouldn't want to play in a game which regularly used them. But presumably, there must be some amount of content per day between those two extremes where the casters don't end up either controlling the game or relegated to cantrip duty in battle. What is that amount of content? Does it vary depending on the difficulty of the encounters, or the level of the party? How much tolerance is there in going over or under the amount, before the game becomes un-fun?

I've been trying out PF2 with some solo adventures (that is, me GMing and controlling the whole party of PCs at the same time), and one of the things which has frustrated me is the very small number of spell slots. I don't know if it's just my playstyle, but I found myself playing my casters very conservatively, relying on the Champion's Lay on Hands and the Medicine skill for healing and avoiding using any daily resources if I could get away without them. In doing so, I discovered that unless my dice hated me or I found an enemy my builds were bad against, I could generally get through anything less than a severe encounter without spending any daily resources like spell slots. Thus I still had nearly all my spell slots when I reached the boss, and I was able to nova him and win easily and anticlimactically. For the rest of the battles, though, my casters felt rather unexciting - since I wasn't willing to cast their spells on fights where they weren't needed, they were stuck just using cantrips which rightly seem to be less effective than martial attacks. All in all, while it was an OK experience while I was playing the whole party, I think I would be rather disappointed to either play a caster, or play in a party with a caster if they were played in the way I was playing them. And yet that method is the one I gravitate to since I dislike expending resources I can't replace if I think I can safely avoid it. They're Too Awesome to Use, as TV tropes would put it.

(Digression: I think this effect is more pronounced than it is when I play PF1 because of the smaller number of spell slots making me want to hoard them more, and because the focus/medicine mechanics mean that hp isn't a resource you have to spend spells to restore any more, so unless there's an immediate time pressure I prefer to lose a few more hp and then rest for 10 minutes more rather than spend a daily ability to finish a fight faster.)

Rather than just complain about the issue, I've been trying to think of a solution, and I wonder about simply making spell slots recharge like focus points. Nearly everything else seems to recharge at that kind of rate anyway, including hp (if you have a healing focus power, or the right skill feats), so why not? Of course, you'd also have to decrease the number of spell slots you get, dramatically, to avoid overwhelming the noncasters and nova-ing every battle. I'm currently thinking of someting like this:

You get only 1 spell slot of each spell level you have access to. If you're a prepared caster, you prepare a spell in each slot at the start of the day as usual. If you cast spontaneously, then you can use the spell slot to cast any spell in your repertoire - use the official spell slot progression to determine how many spells you can have in your repertoire. A spell which lasts "until the next time you make your daily preparations" ends if you regain the spell slot using the Refocus activity. Otherwise, spellcasting works normally.

If instead your casting comes from archetype feats, you get one spell slot if you have basic spellcasting, a second slot if you have expert spellcasting, and a third if you have master spellcasting. These slots' levels are equal to the highest level slot their respective feats would normally give you at your level. For example, if you're level 14 and have Basic and Expert spellcasting, then your two spell slots will be 3rd and 5th level.

The Refocus activity is adjusted as follows:

Obviously, this is not a finished house rule. I'm not really experienced enough in the game to predict all the knock-on effects or judge what effect it will have on balance, so I'm posting here to ask: is this viable in principle, or will it break the game for some reason? As written, are martials and casters reasonably balanced in how much they can contribute to an encounter, or would it be better to be more generous/stingy? Does it make spontaneous casters too strong compared with prepared ones? How about archetype spellcasters? Which special abilities will need rewriting which I haven't noticed? How could they be rewritten? Are there more obvious solutions to the "Too Awesome to Use" problem which I haven't noticed?

"What, everyone brought chalk?"

I've got a bit tired of seeing entire groups of adventurers all carrying exactly the same equipment, just because that's what was in the adventurer's pack. An average size party will have:

200ft of rope but no grapple
20 torches for lighting up the dungeon but no ten foot poles or crowbars
40 pieces of chalk but no paper for mapping

Clearly, this is a bit silly, so I set up some alternative options. These packs are a little more expensive than the standard one, as they include more gear, but they're still significantly cheaper than buying the stuff individually. For that reason, you can only buy these during character creation.

If anyone wants to contribute more specialisation options, please do. To match up with the ones above, they should add up to about 16-17sp in value, and should ideally contain a torch or a couple of candles in case no one went for the light specialisation.

Apologies if this turns out to be a duplicate; there was some sort of hiccup with the forum the first time I tried to post this.

I've been trying to work out whether Lonjiku's wife was Tian or Varisian, and there seem to be contradictions in the timelines. She has a clearly Minkaian/Japanese name, and the fan-run wikis seem to think she was Tian. Originally I assumed that they had met and married before coming to Varisia; but according to the RotR appendix (and the backstory in Jade Regent) Lonjiku was born in Varisia and never went to Tian at all. So...what? Was it just a strange coincidence that Atsuii was also from Minkai? Did he (or his father) deliberately seek out another Minkaian out of some bizarre wish to preserve their bloodline's purity (an odd decision when you're specifically trying to *conceal* your identity)? Or did she change her name when they married for some reason?

I'm planning on starting to run Rise of the Runelords, and am planning on making some adjustments to the plot. Based on a previous conversation with James Jacobs, I'm concerned that some of the things I'm thinking of may conflict with things in Return, which I'm interested in running at some future point.

I can't really afford to buy Return at this point; at least, not just for the sake of checking whether my changes will be cause issues if I ever end up running the AP. Of course, I'll buy the path if and when I start running it, but in the meantime, would someone mind explaining the plot of the path to me in detail? With particular emphasis on what Alaznist gets up to (and has been doing before the path began) and on the time travel elements? Many thanks.

TL;DR: Currently, mundane healing is unable to stand in for a magic healer, even suboptimally. And if you have a magic healer, it's so weak in comparison that it's not worth investing in. To solve this, allow medicine to heal hp without Battle Medic as a 10 minute activity, let each creature benefit from mundane healing once per hd per day rather than the current limit; and reduce the DC and/or remove the critical failure effect.

For various reasons, it looked like the playtest game I'm participating in was going to be without a class that could use healing magic. Initially we thought this would be fine. Perhaps suboptimal, but we could always rely on the medicine skill, and perhaps later someone could multiclass into cleric.

But we then realised that the equivalent of Treat Deadly Wounds from PF1 is locked behind a skill feat. Without that feat (battle medic) there is no way to use medicine to heal hit point damage (other than bringing people from 0hp to 1hp). This is a serious problem, since nonhumans can't get their first skill feat at level 2. Thus, at level 1 a party without a caster with healing will have no way to recover hp other than bed rest, or items/NPCs the GM plants in the adventure. Obviously, this is a problem, as it means that every game starting at first level will need a divine/primal caster.

The obvious solution to this is to shift the action that Battle Medic offers into an activity under the medicine skill, that takes a long time to do - perhaps an hour, like Treat Deadly Wounds in PF1, or perhaps ten minutes like Natural Medicine's option. Battle Medic would then turn that into a single action, allowing it to be used in combat.

In a separate but related complaint, the amount healed by Battle Medic doesn't scale properly with level. Since at each level everyone gains an extra hit die, your healing should also increase by about a hit die's worth of hp to remain effective. The Heal spell does this; it starts with (a little more than) 1d8hp, and each level it's heightened increases it by 2d8. On the other hand, Battle Medic just remains fixed. Unless you make the skill master/legendary and get a high enough bonus to meet the greater DCs, but even then it can only do a maximum of 4 dice of healing which is worse than a third level Heal spell.

This could be solved by simply allowing each creature to benefit from mundane healing once per day per hit die of the creature. Battle Medic would still be of limited value mid-battle, but at least it would be possible to play the game without someone being stuck playing a healbot caster.

This also solves another exploit/problem: since Bolstered only prevents you getting healing again from the same person, you can get more healing if you go round asking lots of different people to heal you one after the other.

A cleric would still be the best healer, since they a) have magic to augment their medicine, and b) they'll have a high wisdom naturally.

Oh, and either lower the DC for Battle Medic, or ditch the critical failure effect. Preferably both, at least for the ten minute option I suggested above. Currently Nature is better than Medicine for healing people outside combat!