Ascalaphus's page

My take on it is that it can be very okay for the players to know more than the characters. That goes a bit against established wisdom in RPGs for the past half century, but I don't think it's really that revolutionary. RPGs have been trying to clamp down on spoilers and metagaming with a ferocity that's completely out of tune with other media.

When you're looking at a book in the bookstore and you look at the back cover, they're giving you some information about what's coming. There's revelations on the back blurb of the book that the main characters won't know in chapter 1. If you watch a movie trailer, they're gonna tease you with snippets of big scenes that happen later in the movie too.

I think the movie trailer analogy works pretty well. You want to carve out juuuust the right slice of information to set some expectations, without actually revealing too much about it.

You might even frame it as a trailer. Think of a big turning point, like Quention gave as example.

You didn't make it to cover, and you feel the blast hitting you, ripping the life from you.
...
You're standing up, looking down at the gaping wound in your chest. You should be dead. You ARE dead. But walking. You've been fighting against undead for years and now you're one of them. Your friend managed to find cover and now he's looking at you.

"Are you one of THEM now? A slave of the Whispering Tyrant?"
"I... I don't feel like a slave. I feel... ANGRY!"

A thing to mention to the players is that this is a preview into what might happen, but not really an ironclad guarantee. It's really hard to force exact scripted outcomes, it tends to make people really unhappy. Maybe it ends up being that you are the one that managed their saving throw and got to cover, and the other guy became undead.

The point is: you haven't given out too much information here, but you've laid some groundwork for players to keep in mind that "this could happen".

Yeah, session 0 is a really useful thing. Imagine if you didn't do one, but just have everyone show up at session 1 with a character they made on their own, without discussing with anyone else;

Sally and Joe both made wizards specializing in the exact same spells, and they're booth bookish nerd types. Bob made a rogue who's a strict professional; doesn't steal from the party, but also doesn't believe in taking charity cases. He works for cash and cash only. Michelle built an occult sorcerer that's basically a scrawny goth kid and who's into frightening "the normies".

Meanwhile you as a GM had in mind a heroic campaign where the players defend the downtrodden because they're the Heroes Of Good. As the first session starts, you have a lot of trouble convincing Bob to actually take the quest, because there's no pay in it. Michelle's sorcerer and the quest-giver really don't get alone. Nobody in the party really wants to talk to normal people in the street to gather information. When they get into combat, Bob doesn't have anyone to flank with. There's also nobody protecting the two wizards and sorcerer from melee enemies. Although the party manages to flee, they don't have anyone with healing skill either.

So, a good session 0 is worth making time for. Imagine how it could have gone:

- Sally and Joe realize they were both about to make the same character. After some discussion Joe decides he's going to make a druid instead. The two characters will still not be the social life of the party, and actually bond a lot over introvert quality time. But Joe's bringing some healing abilities now, and they're both happier because they're not doing the exact same magic. Joe's also picking up a shield (druids can use proper quality metal shields now) and is prepared to do a bit of melee defending. Sally does some comparison of druid and wizard spell lists and makes notes of spells that are only on the arcane list.
- Michelle decides to bend her concept a bit. Instead of "freaking the normies" she pivots to "rebellious teen who dislikes authority figures", which actually works well because the campaign's authority figures are bad people.
- Bob decides that instead of a Rogue, a Thaumaturge might work a bit better because you can't really rely on flanking so much in this party. He's still going with the "strict professional" line, but you as a GM come up with the idea that there are a couple of people in the evil government who want things to improve, and are covertly funding rebel groups like the PCs. This also gives you an interesting new channel for feeding quest hooks to the party.

Notice that everyone made some compromises, but also everyone got to keep "identity" things that were important about their character.

Played this today, with Monkhound as GM.

Yeah, that DC 31 save is a bit bonkers. Looking in the Hazard Creation rules, it's actually 1 point above the extreme DC. Also, those guidelines contain this line:

Extreme: While extreme values remain world-class

statistics that are extremely difficult to meet or
exceed, unlike with monsters, almost all hazards
have one extreme statistic because hazards
normally activate only if they have gone unnoticed
or if someone critically failed to disable them.

I don't think that philosophy really applies here; the way the situation is scripted, you're not supposed to disable the hazard before Yollen shows up to activate it. I think going with the Hard DC (26) would have been more appropriate here.

There are a couple of good armor runes, such as Advancing.

And the energy resistance runes, although they're more expensive than the charms of energy resistance, don't cost you a separate investment slot.

And at later levels of course the Winged runes are good.

I admit I remain pleasantly confused why people believe it is correct narratively to block the big hits, because that's always, in fiction accompanied with 'and then the shield breaks and the shield user dramatically discards the broken shield'

Oooorrr you block the small hits for all eternity.

Admittedly, the gameplay effect of those two narratives of shield use (dramatically breaking to show the big, nasty hit, or essentially shutting down any number of small hits) combine to be 'you block small hits, facetank big hits until it would kill you' but the individual narratives are correct.

(Te alternative, I guess, is that shields keep blocking automatically until they break, resulting in anyone with a shield ending every fight with it broken with zero choice which is very realistic but will cause people to complain even more than the current situation)

I think because the current situation - hearing the damage before deciding to block - is weird.

You never read about a hero deciding not to block the big hit because that would break their shield, preferring to just take it in the face to keep their shield around.

Of course that's because most people in stories don't act like they have a quantifiable number of hit points and that it's okay to gamble that taking one really big hit that would break your shield on your face instead, is something you could handle.

Wikipedia has an extensive article about the WoW. The folklore version of the WoW is mainly dangerous for luring travelers into dangerous terrain at night, and then winking out, leaving the traveler stranded.

So going by that, you'd get a creature that might be incorporeal, and can glow or go invisible at will. But it doesn't really need to have a lot of attack capability; it relies on people following it because they're in a swamp and thought it was a lantern, or that it's a ghost-light that shows where treasure might be buried.

It's more like a shrieker mushroom which isn't even treated as a creature anymore in PF2 but as a hazard.

But the creature version is actually not that clever or subtle at all; it's got a real damaging attack paired with multiple compounding defense mechanisms.

If your players are fairly new to Pathfinder, it could help to run one of the "Bounties"; those are very self-contained, and take a couple of hours to play through. It gives the players a chance to see the rules in action, and make more informed choices for what characters they're interested in playing in the long term.

You could pick Cat's Cradle for example, and use the PFS Pregens so the players have some ready to go characters for that.

For new games (RPG and tabletop) we've found it to be really helpful to just play one or two rounds so everyone can see the mechanics in action, and then reset and "play for real". That way you avoid a lot of unhappiness when people make big mistakes in the beginning because they were only going off what they thought on first hearing the rules.

I'm conflicted about those feats. I think it's part of the overall difficulty of making classes that use "out of control" abilities like Unleash Psyche and oracle curses. You need to thread such a fine line between making it powerful enough to be appealing, without leaving a loophole that's easily exploited while barely feeling the downsides.

I like the vibe of a psychic letting their subconscious run wild, lashing out roughly to anyone nearby. But this is also a game and it needs to be playable. Looking at clerics, spells like Divine Wrath, Divine Decree and particularly Summon Elemental Herald all talk about only doing damage to enemies. Particularly when summoning a huge elemental herald it's a bit hard to imagine that it only damages enemies, but it does make the spells actually usable.

Also, when imagining a psychic, the first thing that comes to mind is not a massively armored, high HP hulk. Psychics shouldn't normally really want to be in the front row of melee.

What if a lot of those feats were redesigned not as emanations, but as cones (so you can point them at enemies) and triggered as a reaction to getting hit? So if your psychic gets whacked in the face, they can lash back out with a wave of pain in the direction of the enemy.

I'm imagining the sorcerer being questioned about how they practice and answering in the vein of

And then there's Ferrari and Le Tigre. Le Tigre's a lot softer. It's a bit more of a catalogue look. I use it for footwear sometimes.

Hi Roceka,

If you're not getting a password reset link, it could be for a couple of reasons;

- your email provider is rejecting them (in particular Yahoo can be overzealous in classifying mails as spam and not even letting them get to your spam box)
- they're going to your spam folder
- you didn't actually use the correct email address (maybe you used a different email address originally?)

There might be other reasons but those tend to be common reasons. I just sent myself a password reset mail to check, and in general the mail sending does work.

You can use the contact form to ask for a manual reset.

I think the spell immunities on the WoW are extremely arbitrary, perhaps based on some GM in the 1980s making an ad-hoc decision based on spells that were current back then. I mean, these days - specifying a specific rank 1, 2 and 8 spell vs a level 6 creature? That feels like it's vestigial design, not a fresh look at what this creature should really be like.

I feel like a better design could have been one of the following:

1) just the annoying invisibility stuff, but not the unusually high AC or magic immunity for no particular reason;

2) a far less directly deadly damaging creature, but more incorporeal design. It mainly just tries to lure you into the swamp so you die from natural hazards.

Here's another take on Unleash Psyche;

What if Unleash Psyche...
- lasts a minute
- grants a temporary focus point
- gives a +2 damage bonus per die to normal spells, but a +4 bonus to cantrips. This goes up further when you gain expert/master/legendary spellcasting
- you can use one "psyche" trait ability as a free action per round

We're leaning heavily into a theme here of the psychic having fewer spell slots, sure, but using cantrips almost like a barbarian to make up for it.

I'm surprised they didn't remaster these critters more thoroughly like they did with golems.

The way the statblock is formatted,

Magic Immunity A will-o’-wisp is immune to all spells except force barrage, quandary, and revealing light.

I think the intended way of reading it is: a wisp has an ability called Magic Immunity and what that ability does is make it immune all spells except those mentioned. That's all it does. It doesn't make them immune to other kinds of magic such as weapons with runes on them. (It's already a pretty dangerous monster.)

To take that a step further: what if, when you're on the "hangover stage" of Unleash Psyche, you become better using powers at melee distance?

I think the concept of "dangerous hard to control psychic powers" is a cool niche to build from. Instead of junking those emanation feats, maybe the rest of the class should be engineered a bit more to actually make the psychic a caster that's good at being in the thick of melee and makes enemies regret trying to corner the mage.

Right now, imaginary weapon makes more sense for a magus that's comfortable in melee, than a psychic. But what if the psychic was comfortable in melee?

I think it's also a case of marginal return. One spindle makes a big difference if you don't have reliable out of combat healing. The second just cuts the time-to-full by half. The third cuts it down to a third, and so on. Basically, each one is less impressive than the one before it.

Well, they could have just left out the word "skill";

A creature grabbed or restrained by the wyvern critically fails a skill check to Escape;

But did they do that with deeper intent or just by accident?

Who would prefer to use skill instead of (finesse) unarmed strike?

As this is a level 6 monster, you can count on it fighting level 4 PCs sometimes. Those might have already gotten to expert acrobatics (swashbucklers) or athletics (various martials).

There might also be the occasional war priest whose athletics goes up earlier than their unarmed proficiency. Or paranoid wizard who seriously invests in acrobatics.

But overall, it does seem rather niche

I don't think you can get a provably correct answer to this. It's a bit ambiguous and up to taste.

But, the aeon stone is an invested item. If you want two of them, you're spending two investment points on that. That adds up quickly.

As a GM I wouldn't worry about allowing it. The benefit is just not that powerful (there are many good ways to heal out of combat), and the price balances it out quite well.

I feel like the power difference between cantrips and spells from slots widened a smidgen in the remaster. Not adding your casting stat to cantrip damage lowered the damage floor. And for heightening - a "real" spell heightens at something close to 2d6 per rank, while a cantrip heightens at 1d4 per rank, 1d6 if you're one of the spicy cantrips.

This makes psychics as the "cantrip masters" kinda meh.

And yeah, the feat list doesn't help either. Feats that blast everyone around you with psychic angst are super flavorful, but you don't have the HP or AC to wade into the middle of a group of enemies, and your fellow PCs aren't protected from your feats.

I think psychics being not 100% stable, dipping a bit into uncontrolled amounts of power is a cool theme. But it does need to be sufficiently ergonomic to work.

You could maybe rewrite Unleash Psyche to have an "up" phase and a "down" phase. In the down phase you're stupefied, except for cantrips: cantrips still count you as being in the "up" phase. And maybe you don't pay focus points for amping cantrips while unleashed.

I feel psychic needs a remaster treatment with about the generosity that the swashbuckler got, because the sorcerer is currently taking its lunch.

What the Bestiary/Monster Core maybe don't spell out totally explicitly, but is pretty obvious if you're paying attention: not all monsters have the same amount of "story power".

A big bear is still just a simple animal. You run into it and fight it, or maybe run away or have your druid talk it down. But it's usually not going to go "out of the box" in which you encounter it.

A vampire that can dominate people, turn to mist and recuperate in a well-hidden coffin, fly, create a horde of minions to zerg rush the PCs: that's different. Yeah, sometimes you really do encounter a vampire that's just... there, and you find it's coffin in the next room and put an end to it. But that does feel like it's doing a disservice to the whole idea of the monster.

Same with dragons, liches, wizards and so on. They're good as high-plot enemies.

You could say that fighting a dragon in the wide open is like fighting a sea monster at sea - if you didn't bring the right answers, they're going to wreck you with their home ground advantages.

For dragons in particular a tactic to watch out for is when one PC is much faster than the rest and chases after the dragon. And then suddenly the dragon just goes full-turn murder on the lone PC, while the rest of the party is too far behind to help.

Just to be clear - does dfinan know that you first hear how much damage you would take, then decide if you want to use Shield Block? Because that's how most (maybe all) people here on the forum understand the rule. However, the rulebook isn't quite so explicit, and you could have understood the rule differently.

If you think you have to decide on using Shield Block before hearing how much damage the enemy rolled, then yeah shields probably break faster.

For example, you have a basic steel shield (hardness 5, 20hp, bt 10). And there's an incoming hit for 8 damage. Okay, block that one, your shield only takes 3 damage, and you've protected yourself from 5 damage. Good deal.

Next round the monster is gonna attack you three times. First hit is for 12 damage. You realize if you block that one, your shield will break. So you don't block. Second attack is for 11 damage and by now you're pretty beat up, so you block. But your shield still has 11 HP so it still works. Third attack the monster is at -10 from multiple attack penalty, and the +2 from your shield helps prevent a hit.

The third round, you can still block one more time.

So by deciding not to block that 12 HP hit, you end up being able to block a total of 15 damage this combat, instead of only 10 damage.

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I do agree with Witch of Miracles that it feels weird that blocking big hits with a shield is a bad tactic, while blocking smaller hits is a good tactic.

I'm looking at the adventure now and it doesn't say fight to the death, it says "surrender when X left standing". Knocking them out or otherwise disabling them should work too.

And Froglegs does have a sad backstory that explains why she went bad, and the book discusses possible redemption.

This AP is pretty okay in having enemies that can be defeated without killing them. The fey are kinda silly and don't really realize life in the Universe is more serious than the First World. But they can be scared with iron bells much of the time too.

I also think it can be a bit on the GM how this plays out. If the PCs capture a mook, does the mook suddenly turn into a prison break genius and it's a huge pain for the players? Is it really hard to hand off captured enemies to NPC lawfolk who'll take care of them? Or is killing mooks really the only way for your players not to get saddled with a huge amount of trouble?

I think I might homebrew a bit more nonlethal magic for the Magaambya though. They've had a couple thousand years to develop techniques that match their ethics after all.

Yeah I did enjoy the scenario a lot. The story requires some background but has really interesting implications.

The fights were pretty spicy. Unlike most scenarios that give you a bunch of enemies to fight, this one didn't feel like the enemies got diluted into irrelevance. Although if you check the numbers on the hellknights, they are High or near Extreme in a lot of key stats, so that's a fit iffy as monster design goes. So count on them being harder than a "Moderate" or "Severe" would normally be.

(I rather enjoyed the fights, felt a lot of other scenarios were not spicy enough.)

I feel like these sort of "gross errors" in adventures often come down to fine nuances of how you present them. Shade them a little bit differently and they make much better sense.

In this case:

* Law enforcement is not the same as pure (military) prowess. The chime ringers get much more training in de-escalation and solving issues civilly or nonfatally than a soldier or war-mage would get. The Magaambya prefers to let them do most of the policing because they're the experts.

* But, this is also an adventuring world and "levels" is something that the Magaambya is aware of at least on an intuitive level. They recognize that Froglegs is more than the neighborhood watch can handle, but unlikely to be a cosmic level threat. They estimate that the PCs are in fact more powerful than your typical chime-ringer and reasonably placed to do this.

In a way, the PCs are a pretty reasonable choice - the way most AP encounters are balanced, it's extremely likely that the players will win, so yes, the PCs are indeed a powerful enough supernatural SWAT team to send in there.

As for taking Froglegs alive - I would not interpret it as "it's okay to kill anyone else, just not Froglegs". You can read "survivor" also as "not knocked out".

Ascalaphus wrote:

I know quite a few people like FA, but I don't think the non-optional game design should be based on optional rules.

Even without it you can still have 9 cantrip slots by 4th.

You can have a lot more than that, if you're gonna sink Cantrip Expansion feats, ancestry cantrips and spellhearts into it.

But my proposal was to give a few more cantrips FOR FREE, because those feat slots should go to other things. We've been talking about making more exciting options for what you can do on turns when you're not spellstriking.

Just thought of another one.

Recharging Kata (2 actions)
Step or Stride, Strike and recharge your spellstrike.

I know quite a few people like FA, but I don't think the non-optional game design should be based on optional rules.

I rather like force fang, it's the only damaging magus focus spell that doesn't worry about MAP. I used it quite a lot. It's precisely as good as it needs to be.

Setting aside the psychic and their undue impact on the magus for the moment, just focusing on the magus.

I don't think I want to go so far as to say that magi should only use cantrips for spellstrike. It sure does feel good to occasionally throw a tantrum and just go for a true strike/disintegrate.

But painting cantrips a bit more as the happy path could be interesting. Spitballing some ideas:

- Make going into arcane cascade after a cantrip a free action.
- Increase the number of cantrip slots magi get a bit, so that you can access a lot of different damage types through arcane cascade + the right cantrip.
- A once per 10m ability to recover spellstrike for free if your spellstrike used a cantrip from a magus spell slot

And more indirectly, here's a feat idea:

Cascade Strike (2 actions)
Requirement: you are in arcane cascade
Make a Strike. For this attack, treat your weapon or unarmed strike as having the versatile trait with the damage type of your arcane cascade. Recharge your spellstrike.

I feel there's a lot of cool conceptual effects kineticists could be doing that don't have impulses yet.

As someone who enjoys hay fever a significant part of the year, I was looking for an air/wood composite pollen blast for example.

I don't think we're crippled and absolute need impulses, but there's a lot of cool design space still available.

I think Teridax has a good point on amping. If "Amp" was a free action spellshape, that would remove the need to say that you can't combine amps and spellshapes, since you can't do two spellshapes. And it would also prevent amping spellstrikes. So it prevents an out-of-class spell being better for the magus than an in-class one, by simplifying a rule.

That still leaves Fire Ray though, which is still a great spell for spellstriking. At some point I think the solution has to come from the in-class stuff being attractive enough that people's first thought shouldn't be to go shopping outside.

Yeah the magus is kinda unique in that they can do this. As long as you make sure your offensive spells are all spell-attack based, you don't care too much about intelligence. For buff spells etc it rarely matters what your intelligence is.

(It could be an issue with you trying to counteract, or resist someone's dispel magic. But it's really rare that people try to counteract your buffs.)

So about Arcane Cascade, my main gripe is that it's just yucky first turn experience. Combat starts, let's say you already have your weapon out. You move up to an enemy, spellstrike... and are out of actions to use arcane cascade.

I really like the idea of using arcane cascade to sticky a damage type that suits the current enemy to your weapon, based on spells you used. But you pretty much need to use attack spells to do that. And nearly all the spells with interesting damage types you can afford to prepare take two actions. So it's a really really rigid action economy. By making it a free action, this problem goes away. Compare to how barbarians can enter rage for free at the start of combat now.

I like Squark's idea of (1) not allowing focus spells on spellstrike, (2) beefing up the magus focus spells and really taking great care that they make a lot of sense to use on off-turns.

That would ensure every magus starts level 1 with at least one off-turn plan, but there should be more of them that you can choose from.

Take a feat like Magus' Analysis. You recall knowledge and IF you succeed you recharge spellstrike. If we take out that "if", it becomes a clean action compression. On turn two you recall knowledge and recharge spellstrike. Great for the magus that did prioritize Int.

Then, let's add a couple more different class feats that also do "X + recharge spellstrike". For example, Reload & Recharge, to lean into the desire for gun-magi (which has ghastly action economy).

Another one could be a two-action Recharge + Repair Shield (that deals with free hand issues). It's okay for recharge abilities to take two actions if they're pretty powerful; we want to make off-turns feel like you're getting real work done. But keep it at most two actions, so you can move or strike with the third.

Yeah, Hair Trigger is crazy. The SF1 tradition of operatives being over the top is continuing (at least in the playtest). I think disrupting actions should generally be limited quite heavily. Reactive Strike is a decent example: once you know someone has it, you have agency to Step away, or maybe Stride far enough away to be out of even long-tentacle reach and then cast your spell. Generally, people hate the thought of losing their spells even more than of getting hit. But with hair trigger, you can't really move out of it at all. Well you could first move entirely out of line of effect, but then casting spells back at them becomes prohibitive.

Most of the things in PF2 that can disrupt actions are melee based. And the ranged ones (implement's reaction for example) are still limited to very short distances on people you've tagged beforehand.

Because ranged attacks in general make it so much harder for enemies to get away from where you can strike them, they shouldn't be nearly as disruptive.

I think Psychic needs a really big rethink. "The cantrip class" and "the focus class" both had the rug pulled out from under them.

The remaster mostly widens the gap between cantrips and spells from proper slot, just look at the scaling. A real spell will heighten by 2d6 per rank, a cantrip by 1d4. That gap is just so big.

As for focus points, the remaster resolved a lot of doubt about how gaining focus points from multiple sources worked (it all just works now) and refocusing multiple points works fine now as well. So the psychic's focus gameplay lost some steam there. Arguably, remaster sorcerer feels a lot more like the focus master, because they have really good focus spells and recharge focus easily.

I feel like the Stupefied after unleashing probably could be toned down as well. Compared to a sorcerer you're really wondering why the psychic has to struggle so much.

There's also a lot of feats that cause bad emanations that also hurt your own party, but you don't really have the HP or AC to want to be surrounded by enemies.

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Magus: I don't know if they need to be completely unafraid of reactive strike, but they definitely need something. No other melee martial is this hampered by it. Reactions are particularly common on bosses, and you don't want boss fights to be your least favorite fights because you're not allowed to play your full class in them.

Also, arcane cascade needs something. I think it could be pretty easily done by just letting it activate as a free action (when you meet the conditions) instead of single normal action.

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Thaumaturge needs polishing on Implement's Empowerment. The way it's currently phrased just causes people to try to jump through hoops to make it work with things it doesn't work with. I get that it's a balancing number to offset that one of your hands is gonna be full of antique junk, so you're doing 1H weapon damage. But the rather obscure way it's phrased just pushes people to try to get around the restrictions using edge case, such as shields that also happen to be weapons so they match the requirement to be holding nothing that isn't an implement or 1H weapon.

Bows... well, if you got to apply IE on bows that'd be one of the biggest damage bonuses anyone can get on bows. But having to explain to people that 1H and 1+H are totally different things feels too rules lawyer-y.

I think if it wasn't an actual strike, you could reasonably change it to a skill check instead and take off the flourish trait. Although warning shot sounds more like intimidate than deception. Maybe (borrowing an idea from Trip) on a critical success you actually graze them for a bit of damage.

It'd also be possible for both of these to exist as feats. Doesn't have to be only one or the other.

I think it's about worth a Flourish because you're hoping to get an attack out of turn without MAP, and it doesn't prevent you from getting an attack in your own turn without MAP. Note that this would also trigger quite a lot on enemies that have to move anyway, for example melee types at the start of combat that haven't closed with any PC at all. It could fire so often that without the flourish trait this would be big power creep.

Circumstance bonus vs off-guard is pretty arbitrary. But if you miscalculate and the enemy manages to move into a flank, it would be stackable with the circumstance bonus. So it's a risky action, unless you're very confident you moved to a safe position. (It encourages ranged characters to keep repositioning...)

I think 5 or 10 feet speed penalties can be enough to force enemies to spend a move action more than they were counting on, and with bows it could even be enough that with two strides with penalty they still can't get to you.

I'm imagining this also working pretty well for a crossbow ranger with Precision and Running Reload. It's always been a bit of an annoyance that the "smart tricky" ranger stereotype is a thing, but doesn't have much mechanical teeth to it.

Anyway, I'm not married to it working exactly like this, it's more a rough sketch of how something like this could work. I dunno if it needs an actual Deception skill check worked into it - I feel with the ranged Strike you're already rolling dice, and rolling twice would feel forced/clunky.

It's a fine line to thread. Yesterday I was playing a scenario where we fought a lot of mooks (with chunky stats) with reactive strike, we felt pretty oppressed.

I think penalizing speed on a ranged reaction might be in the goldilocks zone - it's somewhat nasty, but not quite as wrecking as disrupting spellcasting at range would be. It'd probably take some careful phrasing of the ability though, for example that you have to do the reaction at the beginning of the movement, not halfway through. That way the enemy has a sporting chance of settling for a lesser movement path, like closing to melee but not making it all the way to flanking position. If you could do it midway through and abruptly cause enemies to run out of speed & stop their move it might be too cheesy.

If you phrase the trigger so it's precisely at the beginning of the movement, this also works well with a gameplay style of moving into position as an archer. After all, you can quite well predict where someone is going to START their movement, and move so they won't have cover. You can even bait them into doing that movement (and triggering) by appearing to offer a clear path toward you.

Taking a shot (pun intended) at writing this as an ability;

Baiting Shot (1 action, flourish)
Skill Feat - Trained Deception

You present yourself as a target to an enemy, baiting them into coming after you. Choose an enemy. Until the start of your next turn, that enemy gains a +2 circumstance bonus on melee attack rolls against you, and you gain the following reaction:

Shoot in the Foot (reaction)
Trigger: the baited creature starts a Stride, Fly, Climb or Swim action.
Effect: if the baited creature is within the first range increment of a ranged weapon or unarmed strike you're wielding, use it to Strike. If you hit, the creature takes a 5 foot circumstance penalty to all its speeds until the start of your next turn; this also reduces the distance it can cover with the triggering action. This cannot reduce a speed the creature has below 5 feet. If you are an expert in deception, increase the penalty to 10 feet, or to 15 feet if you are legendary.

On a critical hit, you can double the penalty. This replaces any other critical hit specialization effect you might have.

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While this doesn't interact with MAP, it's a flourish so it shouldn't excessively stack with powerful class abilities. It replaces critical hit spec effects because being able to stack this with the bow spec of stapling someone to the ground would be too intense.

Played this yesterday, and the infiltration was definitely the low point of the adventure. We made it through okay, but an obviously broken piece of scenario design really sets a bad tone.

For anyone GMing this, I'd really recommend doing what you can to fix it up and showing the players an infiltration that feels like fair tough challenge, not a broken mess.

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Just to point out why it's so broken, if you take it at face value:
- It basically says you need to do all obstacles.
- By GM Core p. 197, Awareness goes up by 1 every round, and on every failed check (2 on crit fail).
- There are six obstacles. One of the individual obstacles needs two successes. It's likely that you need at least 7 rounds even if people mostly succeed at checks.
- It's actually likely that quite a few checks will fail, because there's the checks ask for only a few skills, and at standard or higher DCs. That means that even if someone else passes the obstacle and can Smooth the path, if you were untrained in that skill, you probably also don't have a big ability modifier for it, and your general odds of success are gonna be something like 40% or worse.
- The Arnisant Alarm obstacle is completely bonkers. If you're a level 3 character with 10 int and trained in PFS lore, you have a +5 on that, to hit a DC 20. And you need 2 successes individually. This is crazy.

All in all, the most probable outcome is that people burn a lot of hero points and still fail the infiltration.

The consequence for failing the infiltration is also obscure. You're reasonably likely to accrue 5 IP before 10 AP, because that's basically the case when you've cleared the second obstacle. And that enabled the Pontia's Portrait opportunity. 5 IP is weirdly early since you're nowhere near the library by then.

So if you've gotten as far as that before failing, the only downside to failing the infiltration is fighting a Low difficulty encounter with armigers.

You have to wonder if you're not better off telling the players not to spend hero points on this since it's not worth it...

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So in conclusion: the as-written version of the infiltration is awful. You take a long time to suffer a fairly inconsequential failure.

I agree with the suggestions given by others: just change all the individual obstacles to group obstacles. If you look at what the obstacles represent, this makes sense:
* If one person can find their way through the winding sewers, they can also guide the person next to them.
* If one person can calm down the dog, the dog is calmed down.
* That one random imp roaming the halls? That one you just stuff in a sack and lock it in a closet. It's the complication with the whole group of imps that you need to hide from.

Making these changes, the infiltration does go from ridiculous to kind of easy. But that's not the worst thing. It gives you a bit more time to talk about backstory (check out Hillary's notes), because there is a lot of significant story here. Also, the fights can take a while because the enemies have generous HP and reactive strikes to restrict the party's tactics with.

A series of feats that let you ready a Strike as a single action and use it as a reaction under specific conditions (an enemy leaves cover, an enemy moves, etc.), with perhaps additional benefits too like slowing a fleeing enemy by shooting them in the leg, stunning an enemy popping out of cover by shooting their head, and so on.

This one stands out to me. We have a couple of effects like this on alchemical bombs, but I've never seen those be super amazing. (Though, I should give it a try next time in a blue moon I'm playing an alchemist against an ooze, and then just kite it.)

Normally slowing down an enemy is not that exciting because it tends not to last so long, and they can often plan around it by doing something else than moving, or budgeting actions to move differently. But if you can do it as a reaction you get much more potential to interrupt plans.

Bluemagetim wrote:

Increasing ranged damage isn't what i would want to see.

Aside from tipping the scales toward ranged over melee it also leaves casters in the dust.

Ranged is mostly fine.

As I stated earlier in the thread ranged reactions is the main design space I would like to see developed as it very weak.

You have a lot of good shield reactions.

You have solid melee reactions.

Some more reaction spells have been added and counterspell.

Useful ranged combat reactions are lacking.

You're right, there's not a lot of ranged reactions. And the ones that do exist, you usually have to open up via class feats that take a few levels to come online. For the purpose of setting the tone what a combat style is gonna be like, it's really helpful if you can already do things at level 1-2.

Well, readied attacks account for some of that. A lot of the fantasy about "reaction shots" you can say is people readying to shoot if this or that happens. But readied actions are intentionally worse than class feature style reactions; they share MAP with your turn, which Reactive Strike, Retributive Strike, Stand Still, Implement's Reaction etc. all don't.

I think ranged reactions that are a bit more powerful than that, but require you to be in the right spot, are an interesting design space. You can use requirements like:
* Weapon is ready (loaded, wielded)
* Within first range increment
* Opponent has no cover

Of course Starfinder has the operative with a reaction that triggers off a lot of things and causes a ranged Strike, which was pretty controversial if that wasn't a bit too much of a good thing. Maybe the sweet spot is in between that, and the somewhat lackluster ready action strike.

I know Fake Out is also controversial whether that's too good or not, but you could do the inverse: fire an shot in the general direction of an enemy to distract them just as they're making a strike at an ally (basically, Aid their AC against an attack).

We can argue about whether you want to actually fire the arrow/bullet or just threaten with it like Fake Out does. I'm not really thrilled with the gunslinger/reload gameplay, I don't personally want to drag down ranged combat in general with that. Arrows are cheap and returning thrown weapons are also a thing. And Starfinder guns can shoot more times before needing to reload.

The general idea of shifting ranged power away from range increment sizes and into damage and other contributions really appeals to me. I'd personally lean more towards more damage through new mechanics that incentivize ranged characters to move, such as some kind of high/low ground condition, maybe ranged flanking, and perhaps some other effects, but in all cases, having more of that visible power and less excessive safety would be a win-win IMO, and respect current balance.

Increasing ranged damage isn't what i would want to see.

Aside from tipping the scales toward ranged over melee it also leaves casters in the dust.

I think the current turret style fighter or ranger shouldn't really do less damage than they do now, maybe a little bit more. Others (Starlit Span) don't need more so much. But the main thing I think "conventional" archers need is a decent plan for handling enemies with resistance or hardness, like the irritatingly common animated statue.

I dunno about high ground. Ranged combat certainly benefits a lot from interesting terrain - any terrain that provides an obstacle to a melee trying to close in but doesn't provide cover is good for the archer. Even if you don't get a benefit for high ground, if a melee has to free up hands to try Climb checks to get to you, that's pretty good.

And on the other hand, the rules at this point also should work with the many already published adventures and maps out there. We can't just go and update the maps for all APs to include higher ground more often. Dungeon floors tend to have a lot of fights happening on level ground.

I think we gain most by brainstorming improvements that work in a lot of terrain types. I think ranged flanking is more promising that way.

EDIT:

Ascalaphus wrote:

Does anyone else find these sentence by sentence rebuttal posts hard/irritating to read?

This is a good point; I imagine walls of text like this are hard to get invested in when you're not one of the people arguing. I suppose my intention here was to be very clear on what I'm replying to, as I feel I've been repeatedly quote-mined and straw-manned already, but if there is a better way to engage with someone who uses those kinds of tactics in online discussion, then I genuinely would like to hear more about that, as I'm starting to feel like these large posts are making it difficult to get other conversations going.

Yeah, when I see a post that's line by line quotes with replies, and the whole post is about two screens long, and it seems like a lot of arguing, I probably won't bother reading it.

The problem with that is, that it's in the middle of a discussion on a topic that I think is very interesting. There's absolutely something not quite satisfying about ranged combat. And there's been some really interesting analyses about what that is and maybe what could be done about it.

So, what can you do if you find yourself drawn into this kind of argument? Well, the best I can offer is to just resist the urge to go for a line by line reply. Take a step back, decide on a few most interesting points, write a reply ONLY to those.

That can feel like you're leaving something on the table - there were other points on the table that you don't agree with, or feel you were mischaracterized on.

But if you want to get your point across, you have to prioritize THE point you care about making most. For all the other points, consider if they're going to distract from your main point?

I don't think realism and verisimilitude are all that valuable if they get in the way of a more interesting and fun-to-play game. Sure, in real life, ranged weapons are valuable because they let you kill or hamper a foe from a position where you can't easily be hurt, but when I want to make a character with a ranged weapon, my thoughts are, "Robin Hood/Legolas/Kagome cool," not, "hopefully this will prevent the enemies from using their cool abilities on me and I don't have to be exposed to any risks while playing this character."

Yeah, for quite a while my take has been that Pathfinder's "realism" is like Die Hard. A few tough main characters fighting their way through whole heaps of enemies. What we want isn't actually gritty realism, but a sense of consistency, that the game's laws of physics in one scene are consistent with those in the next scene.

I would rather see mechanics not punishing ranged characters for suboptimal play, but rather offering them risks and rewards. Making one of the most static playstyles less fun if you do it wrong seems ineffective compared to offering meaningful rewards for participating in the combat in fun and engaging ways.

I think any ranged system does need to deal honestly with players who DO want their character to be safe in the back row. It's a valid desire for a certain kind of character to play, and/or playstyle that someone wants out of a character.

Basically, some players really do have a low appetite for risk, and others enjoy taking bigger risks to access greater rewards. We should aim to offer something satisfying to both.

So we want to find things to offer to the daredevils who'd leave their turret position if only there was a good reason to. But without punishing the beer and pretzels in the turret player who is quite happy to stay there.

And there are certainly ways you can make a fight start at extra long range and still be fun (I'm thinking Shadows of the Colossus-style running from cover to cover), I think combats where the melee characters have to spend several actions to possibly several turns just moving into position would be the exception even in an ideal system, not the norm. Same as in stories, you start the scene when the action starts, and most of the time, archers plunking small-potatoes damage back and forth across a field while melee characters run is not going to be 'the action' in any meaningful sense, no matter whether it technically shaved off 10% of the enemy's health pool before the fight actually started.

Thinking this over, this used to be done as looooong range combat on an impractically large map that was hard to fit on the gaming table because well, "all combat is combat". But PF2 actually challenges that way of thinking quite a lot, why can't it just be a minigame/skill challenge instead?

An Infiltration scene could definitely have as an obstacle "here's some low level guards. You need to knock them out quietly so the alarm doesn't get raised", and solve that with a skill challenge or a few abstracted attack rolls, without actually doing the full rolling initiative and putting people on a grid part.

Running ultra long distance combat where some of the PCs have stuff to do and others don't, using the combat mechanics, is not great. So I'm more and more for really reducing range increments a lot.

Imagine the following:
* Increase ranged weapon damage a bit. Slightly bigger damage dice, and we can remove the "half" clause from the propulsive trait.
* Range increments also apply to damage.
* Range increments become shorter, say 30 foot for a shortbow, maybe 50 foot for a longbow.
* The battlemat that actually fits on your gaming table is the gold standard. Ranged challenges at longer distances than that should use a minigame instead.
* Might need to reduce fly speed for dragons a bit.

You'd want to tune it so that an archer operating in their second range increment would do about the same damage as currently, but one operating in the first increment would do a bit more.

This doesn't on its own solve turret effects, but it does balance archery around the prospect of combats that take place in forests (range is eventually limited by trees in the way) or in dungeons.

I would go with a 30 feet distance, just because that's the distance other game elements already use (Demoralize, short range spells etc), and because an enemy 30 feet away that takes a 25ft Stride is right up in your face.

I don't think it should require two actions per se, that's overdoing it. But you can indirectly ask for that: for example by also requiring that it's within 30 feet and nothing in between. So you might have to spend an action moving a bit to get a clear line to the enemy.

Something that always irritated me with "taunt" implementations is that people would try to use taunt abilities to try to divert monster aggression, while at the same time making it really hard for the monster to actually get to them. If you wrote abilities that can only function at full power if there is actually a clear path for the monster to get to you, you can write some interesting abilities with trade-offs.

They're good for different situations.

If you have one big fight, the numbing tonic giving you some temp HP every round is really nice.

The juggernaut mutagen gives you a bonus to fortitude saves, which can be pretty useful. The bonus is always a bit higher than what you could get from an armor rune of similar level.

Also, if you had a fight, quickly heal up in a minute, have another fight, quickly heal up in a minute, and have another fight, then the juggernaut mutagen's temp HP would be impressive too. This can work well if you're trying to make some 10-minute duration effects like Heroism work for more than one combat.

Much of the time, people do a fight, then a 10 minute rest for Treat Wounds a couple of times, and then move on to the next encounter. That also means that most buffs would wear off, because most of them only last for 1 minute or 10 minutes.

But if there's a couple of easy encounters quickly after another, you could also try to just keep going, to use the buffs for more than one fight. And then the juggernaut mutagen becomes really helpful.

Teridax wrote:

(...)

I agree with you that it would be nice if there were some universally available things with no investment.

I think the things you've suggested thus far are too good with no investment, but someone could come up with ideas that makes sense with no investment.

My preference is that we start with some base actions that are sort of in the ballpark of Feint and Shove/Trip/Grab/Reposition.

Some of them could be skill-based. For example, using Acrobatics to dash to a new position and fire a trick shot vs off-guard because you're moving unpredictably and fast. Or yeah like you said, Feint, why can't you do that at range anyway?

Ideally, the base options don't have hefty specialized requirements, to the point where enemies can also do them now and then, not just PCs.

Then as class feats, you can make feats that compress a combination of three actions of stuff into two, or that let you combine a strike with a ranged maneuver at no extra MAP, similar to what we have for melee.

So someone who's not a dedicated archer still has interesting options when they have to pivot to ranged, while archers have something to specialize further in.

Yes.

I think mechanics based on hitting enemies "from the right angle" are interesting for providing incentives to not do things we currently experience as being too good: firing from really long range increments, and turret firing.

Right now, you could of course move around to get a shot at an enemy without cover. This is sort of the same as spending multiple actions on a single attack to get rid of a to-hit penalty. We can tell that the penalty/cover has to be pretty severe for that to be worth it. After all, we are often willing to spend class feats doing the opposite: taking a penalty to hit in order to make more attacks.

So the incentive needs to be bigger. For rogues at least, if you could say, take a Stride action to guaranteed get an enemy off-guard for the rest of your turn against your ranged attacks, that would be interesting. You could Stride and then shoot twice with a bow to get sneak attack damage.

If you phrase the ability in terms of firing angles, it also provides an incentive to actually fight from closer range. Because if the ability only works if you fire at the enemy from a new angle, that takes a lot less movement to achieve if you were within 20 feet than within 200 feet.

You'd have to engineer the ability pretty strictly though, and make it a hard design principle that you don't give shortcut feats that allow you to bypass the requirements. For example, if you made the requirement that the enemy doesn't have soft cover, it's not going to take people very long to find a feat or item that negates soft cover. And then your archer will remain a turret.

It would be okay to provide class abilities that ease the action cost of things, if they still required you to end your movement somewhere quite different than where you started your turn.