Ascalaphus's page

I don't think the creature building rules have changed. I like that they're in GM Core now, because the GMG felt a teensy bit like an optional book while GM Core really isn't optional. And building creatures is a ruleset every GM should be able to look into.

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On this aspect at least, you can think of the remaster as "well, previous print run is sold out, this print run we'll do a bit more than just fixing some typos". It's still very much the same key game as before the remaster.

I come to very different valuations of some of the stuff you don't like.

Blessed Shield: I'm always cautious about trading feats/features for money, but there IS a price point where it's a good trade. I think this one does hit that price point, since it's a permanent item that you want on top of the normal permanent items everyone wants, and you want it ASAP. This way, I don't have to choose between a Striking weapon and a sturdy shield, or the next sturdy shield and boots of binding, or a charm of energy resistance. All of which really help.

Feats: not all of the champion feats excite me, but there are enough that do. Nimble Reprisal is a no-brainer for a Justice champion, and Weight of Guilt is very interesting if you either have to fighter a caster (giving them chance of spells failing outright, and lowering the save DC for any spell they cast) or if your party has casters (lowering enemy will saves). Defensive Advance saves actions on your standard combat loop, so it's good too. Aura of Courage is good because things that cause Frightened are quite common.

Reactive Strike is interesting because at first it seems like it competes with shield block or your champion reaction. But actually it doesn't; it fills a gap they didn't cover.
- If the enemy attacks you, you shield block
- If they attack your front row buddy, you use a champion reaction
- If they try to get out of your aura you use reactive strike

Those reactions stack "sideways"; when you're using the one, you probably don't need the other that turn. But having all of them, you make it so that whatever the enemy does, isn't great for them. And for you, it means that it gets really likely that you get value out of your reaction every turn.

- As a twisting tree magus, she has reach with the staff while using it two-handed. During one of the combats, she attacked an enemy 10 feet away, with an ally standing between her and the enemy. Does the enemy get the lesser cover bonus? (+1 to AC)

Yes, there's nothing special about this just because you're a magus.

- One of the enemies in that combat had the Reactive Strike ability and 10-foot reach. When the magus used Spellstrike, the ability triggered because the spell used as part of the Cast a Spell subordinate action had the manipulate trait. The enemy got a critical success on the attack roll. Is the whole Spellstrike disrupted, or just the spell?

As you quoted, the Disrupting Actions section states:

The GM decides what effects a disruption causes beyond simply negating the effects that would have occurred from the disrupted action. For instance, a Leap disrupted midway wouldn't transport you back to the start of your jump, and a disrupted item hand off might cause the item to fall to the ground instead of staying in the hand of the creature who was trying to give it away.

The spell is simply negated. It's up to you to decide if that bubbles up to also preventing the rest of the spellstrike, so does it also disrupt the strike part?

I would personally rule that only the spell is disrupted. The strike part of a spellstrike doesn't depend on the spell being useful, and a reactive strike can't normally disrupt a strike.

- The magus used the Wooden Double spell to reduce damage received by a critical hit. The spell has this trigger: "You're critically hit by a damage-dealing effect or Strike". Am I right by thinking that you need to decide if you cast this spell before knowing how much damage are you taking? I am not sure because the double basically functions as a shield, with some hardness and hitpoints of its own, and I know the step to use shields is when applying damage (that you already calculated). Is this spell intended to be used in the same step as shields?

The trigger happens when you've determined that the attack would be a critical hit. At that point you haven't rolled damage yet.

It appear look a bit like a shield, but it's not a shield.

I can't think of anything practical, no. Directly bypassing immunity probably isn't an option. But what about shifting the question a bit -

1) What kind of enemies are resistant/immune to sneak attack?
Typically, these are oozes and incorporeal creatures. There are a few others that are "like" oozes and incorporeal creatures.

Many oozes have low AC, although not all. Other creatures (and objects) that also have really low AC are also more likely to be immune to critical hits and sneak attacks.

Incorporeal creatures tend to have low HP to compensate for how hard it is to land a hit on them.

2) What kind of enemies are resistant/immune to slashing, piercing, bludgeoning?

Outright immunity is extremely rare. Some oozes are immune to piercing/slashing because something else happens when they take that kind of damage (splitting). So it does do something, but you need a bludgeoning attack to finish them. (Like unarmed strikes.)

Incorporeal creatures resist all damage, so also these kinds of damage, unless you have a ghost touch weapon.

Devils are a common creature type that resists physical damage that can be bypassed (with silver weapons).

Skeletal undead tend to need bludgeoning attacks to bypass their resistances.

3) What can I do as a rogue to be effective in those combats?

What you probably won't get is an ability that somehow makes sure you can always keep following Plan A. The game is designed so that occasionally switching to a plan B or C is just better than always doing the same thing.

For example, backup weapons. You probably have a favorite weapon that you'll use against enemies most of the time. But against some enemies it's just better to switch to a different weapon.

- Sometimes you absolutely need a bludgeoning weapon.
- Sometimes life is hard without a silver or ghost touch weapon.
- Sometimes you're missing out on triggering enemy weaknesses without a slashing or cold iron weapon.
- Sometimes your normal melee weapon would work perfectly fine on an enemy, but the enemy has absolutely no ranged options and if you used a ranged weapon, you could make the fight really unfair.

And against for example an ooze that can't be critted or sneak attacked, but has low AC, you could try just hitting it really often, probably with a bludgeoning weapon. Bonus if you can get one with Fatal, because you can still get some extra damage from that.

It might also be possible to take advantage of other things, for example if the ooze has really slow movement speed. If you can move into melee, strike once, and move out so far that the ooze spends its whole turn just moving to you, you're going to win this fight. Might take a while but it's a guaranteed victory.

Something to keep in mind also is that it's *fine* that champions don't have a monopoly on "tanking" or "defending", that other classes can also do it to some degree. Because if champions had a monopoly, would every party have to have a champion?

I'd say at low level fighters and champions do have the best obvious cards to play here, but in a somewhat different way. Champions need to be close to their friends, so that both friend and enemy are in the aura. Fighters need to be in between enemy and friend, so that enemies have to walk through a reactive strike to get to friends.

A front row composed of a fighter and a champion is probably the best at stopping enemies from getting to the back row PCs. The fighter will punish any enemy trying to get past them, and the champion makes the front row hardier.

That the best combination is to have not two champions, or two fighters, but one of each, shows that the feature set of the classes is pretty good.

I really disagree that blessed shield is a nerf. I think it's a buff, because it frees up a lot of capital to spend on other items.

Instead of wringing your hands at level 4 wondering how you're gonna afford both that sturdy shield and a striking weapon, you get the sturdy effect for free at level 3. Later on, you can spend the extra gold you're not spending upgrading the shield to buy energy resistance items.

I also don't agree shields break quickly. You can choose if you wanna use shield block, so you use it to mostly block the smaller hits, so that you can take a lot of them. You shave some damage off every round.

Even with the level 1 steel shield, suppose you're fighting a level 3 creature with moderate damage (average 10), you can block at least two times, maybe even three if some of the hits are slightly below average. Three rounds is a fair amount in a combat, and if you use that to prevent 15 damage to yourself then that's a lot more than the barbarian's HP/temp HP. And because your AC is 2-3 higher due to heavy armor and raised shield, you'll also be hit less.

If you think Lay on Hands is often punished by reactive strike, then maybe you're dealing with an unusual selection of enemies. while it's not completely rare, most creatures don't have it. And it should be pretty easy to guess "is this the kind of enemy that could have it?" (Red flags: looks like a professional soldier, wields a polearm, or has a really long leg/tail/tentacle.)

Finoan wrote:

One, the same thing can be said of pretty much every class. They all have some options that don't come online at level 1.

Eh, not exactly. Janky scaling is mostly an issue that only applies in a few places, and it's an absolute mystery why Paizo designed the game that way. It serves no benefit to anyone.

Imagine if the fighter didn't get their enhanced weapon proficiency until level 5 for no real reason.

I think they intentionally put in "jumps" so that some levels feel important.

Casters when they get their first fireball like spell for example, or their advanced focus spell. Champions when they start getting really higher AC than everyone else. Giant barbarians when they actually become bigger. Rogues when Gang Up means flanking is almost always on.

But the champion starts level 1 with shield block, heavy armor, a strong champion reaction, and a focus spell. Along with feats like Defensive Advance, champions start the game really good in defense.

I think the disconnect here isn't about how the math works, but in appetite for success rate vs character investment.

If you use the Search activity you get only one chance of finding a trap before triggering it. Since most traps will be within a few levels of your own, the odds of success are somewhere in the 40% to 80%.

Deriven however feels that if you invested heavily in it, you should be almost certain to find the trap when looking for it. If you roll multiple times, it basically comes down to the chance that you'll roll a 1/critfail before you roll a success. Overall that gives far better odds than if you only rolled once.

I don't think this is how the game is intended. Traps are bad enough that if you're allowed to improve your odds this way, you should always do that, and the Search activity is so much worse that you should never use it.

Also, I don't think PF2 is designed with the idea that you can get so good at something that it'll almost always succeed. If you have to roll for something, there should be a decent chance of success and a decent chance of failure. By rolling multiple times you undermine that design.

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Also, if you can retry Seek indefinitely, then with one feat, Ageless Patience you basically "solved" all non-combat Seek problems, because you can never critically fail.

So circling back to "exploration does some stuff different than encounter mode for a reason": maybe rolling Avoid Notice only once outside encounters is a feature. You roll only once, so the chance of failure is way lower than if you have to roll for dash between two shrubberies.

Also, maybe the failure condition isn't entirely the same as Sneak either. If you fail to Avoid Notice, you're no longer Unnoticed. But maybe that's all it is - you could still be Undetected, because all you failed to do was avoid getting noticed. It'll be your initiative roll (the second roll for Avoid Notice) that determines if you're going to remain Undetected or if people figure out where you are.

If you put these two things together, then we actually have halfway feasible scouting, which is something a lot of people wish the game had but which seems so really numerically hard to pull off.

But if a failure on the first roll means starting an encounter where you still have some distance to enemies AND you have chance that they don't know exactly where you are before you start running away, then it's starting to look like a sporting chance.

Well, this got me thinking. We keep saying that exploration mode is only there for convenience, but I think there's more to it. It's also for handling effects that scale a bit differently.

For example, travel speed. The table in PC1 p. 438 is pretty clear: a speed of 10ft per Stride gets you 100ft per minute, 1 mile per hour and 8 miles per day. Doubling your Speed doubles all those other speeds too.

But if you stayed in encounter mode, you could take three Stride actions per round, so this "clever hack" would let you travel three times as fast in a day. Just stay in encounter mode, don't use Hustle, and you'll be fine.

Or repeating a spell: instead of using the Repeat a Spell activity that makes you tired, just stay in encounter mode and repeat the spell "manually".

I hope you see that this is cheesy?

A way to look at this is that in encounter mode, we ignore some of the "costs" because you're only doing the thing for a moment. We don't track how many Stride actions to you take in a combat to see if you're getting fatigued. At the scale of one combat, it doesn't really matter enough to be worth tracking. But at the scale of an adventuring day, it does matter.

So Seek vs Search is a similar issue. Using Seek multiple times in a round because you really want to find that invisible enemy is fine. If you're in an area where you know there's supposed to be a trap because you had advance warning, or where you were told there's a secret door for example, I'd still be okay with repeat Seek actions. But when moving through a dungeon complex where you have no specific intel about a particular hidden feature to Seek, then I'm not okay with it. Because then it becomes a "clever hack" that gives a far better probability of finding any trap than the Search activity.

Basically, if staying in encounter mode lets you do an encounter-mode variant of an exploration activity far far better, then that's a too good to be true thing.

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So I'm fine with rushing from one encounter to another to milk buffs a bit more. Totally reasonable, you're not making any exploration activity obsolete with that.

I'm not so on board with keeping the initiative order. Because then it basically means that for the first combat of the day you're in a (dice-based) random order, while for the rest of the day your initiative order is far more controlled than you'd get if you just rolled every time. Again, this is using a "clever rules hack" by staying in encounter mode that would give a completely different mechanical result than using the normal exploration mode.

If there's no enemies left, initiative ends. We can still go round by round if it's a short distance, but we can dispense with going in a strict turn sequence, because we'll establish initiative the next time we see enemies.

Now you could say you still want to do Stride and Seek actions instead of going to Search, because it's a little bit faster. But keep in mind that then you're responsible for using Seek actions on defined areas as determined by the GM, and you might need more than one Seek action to check the main path, doors, cupboards and whatnot depending on the amount of clutter.

At this point we might as well use exploration mode, but with an eye towards durations measured in rounds. Exploration mode works fine for "not in a strict initiative order, but still moving swiftly" situations like this. You can just take the party's preferred marching order and determine the slowest effective movement speed in the party, and calculate how many rounds it took them to get to the next encounter.

Ah, good question, how wide is the border between squares anyway? Is it infinitely thin? Coincidentally just one inch thick?

Anyway, another interesting point is that the spell says that it doesn't have to be aligned vertically; you can use it to create a bridge or stairs. To be a feasible bridge/staircase you'd already be going off-grid-border and actually through or over squares.

I think the spell may need additional balancing. But I don't like balancing through crazy technicalities. It should be done through obvious straightforward methods, not obscure limitations.

I also think the five foot grid should not be treated as if it was a rigid unyielding metaphysical truth of the universe, but more as a practical way to simplify determining distances and positions. So saying you can draw a wall if the grid line is free, but not if a piece of scenery is one inch over it, is wrong in my eyes.

NorrKnekten also pointed out that the rules for wall spells allow doubling back and being adjacent, so theoretically you could go left along the gridline and then come back right along the same gridline. The only thing you definitely cannot do is intersect.

I think the idea of the wall running along gridlines should be understood more as an ease of use thing: you're not gonna worry about how much of a 5ft square is cut off by a wall running through that square, and which side of the square is still inhabitable. It's not meant to be the thing that the spell depends on to be balanced.

Now, if you double back the wall along the same gridline, I do think I would rule that this doesn't allow you to make that segment extra thick, because that would be a "too good to be true" thing.

The game is written as if they expect exploration mode to be a usable part of the game mechanics, and exploration activities to be a good thing to use.

If you had a trap that you had a 60% chance of spotting in Search mode, and doing it in encounter mode with repeat Seek actions gave you 10 rolls, that'd result in a (1 - 0.4^10)*100 = 99.99% chance of finding it.

Clearly, that can't be how the game was supposed to work.

Should spirit damage typically penetrate the resistance to all damage granted by Incorporeal?

On the face of it, spirit damage should be exactly the thing used to hurt spirit critters. However, it typically isn't exempt from the resistance.

The incorporeal trait states that "They usually have resistance against all damage (except force damage and damage from Strikes with the ghost touch property rune), with double the resistance against non-magical damage."

This isn't the whole truth though. Sampling from Bestiary 1-3, almost all incorporeal creatures are undead and positive damage also bypasses their resistance. In the remaster, this pattern continues for incorporeal undead. There are also a handful of not-undead incorporeal critters in the old bestiaries that can be effectively hurt with negative damage.

The real change is that in the remaster, the divine list replaced a lot of force effects with spirit effects. So suddenly there's far fewer things divine casters can do against a type of enemy they were traditionally the go-to people to handle. For example, Spiritual Weapon dealt force damage, but Spiritual Armament deals spirit damage.

Maybe a way to make sense of it is to point out WHY you would roll initiative.

You don't roll initiative if two sides meet but both sides do so well on Avoid Notice that they don't notice each other, and just quietly pass each other by.

You also don't roll initiative if one sides does notice the other, but keeps quiet and doesn't engage.

You roll initiative when one side is going try to do something to the other.

GM Core (p. 25) implies that the mere act of wanting to do something initiative-worthy, is going to warn the opposition that something is about to happen;

So what do you do if

someone rolls better than everyone else on initiative,
but all their foes beat their Perception DC? Well, all the
enemies are undetected, but not unnoticed.

This is a bit weird - why would they suddenly be unnoticed? The only way I can square it is by coming back to the general principle for initiative - you roll it when people are actually going to do something to each other, and that means everyone hears the battle music playing in the background?

It does pose some problems though - abilities like Assassinate require an attack against a target to which you're Unnoticed, but the above quote doesn't seem to allow that to be possible.

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I think it's quite possible that these rules just aren't totally consistent with each other. Individual GMs make some interpretations that work okay enough to get by, but if you look at the bare rules, I'm not convinced that they really work.

If they'd made a tradition and called in the "Fey" tradition, that would have been a shoe-in for those more whimsical bards.

But I can also see the "looks whimsical on the outside, but harbors dark truths on the inside" occult bard.

Arguably, the occult list has a bit of a dual identity because it's sort of meant for both of those. As in, some list was supposed to do the whimsical fey magic and it's not primal (too ephemeral, mental, unreal to be in primal), arcane (arcane is more studious) and also not divine. But overall occult is more draped in spooky/nasty aesthetics.

Maybe there was design space that wasn't claimed for this; maybe different muses could lean into different perspectives here and also tweak your spell list a bit for that, similar to sorcerers adding off-list spells based on bloodline. (I'm a big fan of your main class-path choice giving you off-list spells. It's a choice you generally get only one of.)

I think the whole "don't do attacks with MAP" thing can become a bit dogmatic. It's fairly accurate at low level, but at higher levels and against mooks it's really not that unusual for second and third attacks to hit.

It sure does feel like the "finisher" part of the name narrowed down the design space a lot. It's a bit like a sniper-themed class will tend to have abilities that sound like they're going to instantly kill enemies, but what with how many HP enemies get, it doesn't happen.

I do think there's some alternative design space available, for example:

- If your finisher doesn't finish them, you get some kind of "revenge" bonus.
- Finishers work better if they're used on an attack with MAP
- Finishers only lock you out of Strikes, not other kinds of attacks
- Finishers ignore the MAP caused by non-Strike attacks
- Finishers have a chance of disabling mooks outright, regardless of HP

I find it hard to read "successful throw" as anything else than a hit with a Strike. I mean, it's a thrown weapon. How else were you going to measure success?

That said, maybe the explanation is a typo? If the text had said that it returns to your hand after an UN-successful throw, that would make sense with both the trait and with what you'd expect from a real boomerang. If you actually hit something with the boomerang it's going to expend its kinetic energy and be knocked off-course.

I think the remastered swashbuckler is a huge improvement compared to the legacy one, but yeah there are still a couple of things to work on.

1. Big hits vs high AC enemies
I don't think swashbucklers have any less ability to debuff such enemies than for example rogues. Maybe slightly more even, because a lot of panache inducing things also can debuff, so you're nudged into being good at those things.

However, sometimes the only real way to deal with high AC enemies is just to keep trying to hit them, and grind them down. The rogue and monk will just hit as often as they can and get through some of the time. The swashbuckler however has to choose: do I try to finish on my best to-hit, and lock out of follow up hits? Or do I try to finish with MAP, and therefore often miss it?

Maybe a solution is to lean really hard into the "confident" part of finishers, and go for doing some damage even on a miss, as a way of grinding through? That's kind of the deal the alchemist got, so can it work for swashbucklers too? I dunno.

Then again, I'm really not a fan of high defense enemies that are technically speaking a fair fight, because the players will overwhelm them with action economy. Because while it's technically fair, you miss so very often, and that's not great. I'd rather for example give the enemy lower AC but more HP. It'll take the same amount of rounds to wear them down, but the amount of actions where you get the little dopamine hit of success goes up.

2. finishing so soon?
Now that you still get temp panache on a failed bravado check, it's actually really really easy to end up with a leftover third action. You can use Tumble to get to an enemy and try to get panache. If you succeed, you move through their square. If you fail, you stop in front of their square, still within reach to perform a finisher. The key thing is that you compress the action to move within reach, with the action to gain panache. So you end up with a third leftover action because finisher locks you out.

You could spend the third action to gain panache, but you don't truly need to. Because then the next round you'll end up with even more leftover actions. You could do something like Demoralize, but tend to run out of targets.

I think this is a solvable problem, but it's not always directly obvious that this is a problem you ought to be solving. When you're building a swashbuckler there's no explicit step in making the character that says "now pick a favorite third action that's likely to be useful every round". But if you do, it could be really helpful.

Raise Shield is a candidate. You could use bucklers or regular shields. Reinforcing runes make bucklers even plausible with Shield Block if you like.

Feint and Bon Mot are also candidates. I feel like Feint is a bit overshadowed by how easy it is to get off-guard through flanking though.

Finally, just moving back out of reach is an option. Swashbuckler is a plausible class for actually kiting enemies. If you're only gonna do one attack per round, then why should you end your turn next to an enemy and give them multiple shots at you? But that does mean you're probably not gonna be the one in your party who shields the squishies from enemies coming close. (In that sort of party, maybe the Shield Block build makes more sense?)

In summary: I think the class has a lot of room for system mastery to play a role, more than is apparent at first look.

22 is not 8 more than 16, so you wouldn't add two creatures.

In general, PF2 rounds down:

You may need to calculate a fraction of a value, like halving damage. Always round down unless otherwise specified. For example, if a spell deals 7 damage and a creature takes half damage from it, that creature takes 3 damage.

I think the communication problem here is that people write something a bit too broad and absolute, like:

You already can't attack items with Strike or spells with spell attack roll. They all target creatures only.

... which sounds a lot like you could never ever do it. Which is clearly not true because there are enough specific cases when you can. And probably not quite what SuperBidi meant.

But because we're geeks we get riled up by that sort of language. We've had this discussion with more or less the same people multiple times already. But we keep stumbling into it again.

SuperParkourio wrote:

The crit chance with the static DC isn't much of an issue since most objects with low AC are immune to crits anyway (though hydraulic push bypasses that).

They aren't immune to crits as a class, though, unless I'm missing something; it has to be specifically called out for the object. Immunity to critical hits isn't listed under object immunities.

You didn't miss anything - I think there's no such general rule.

* There's a bunch of wall spells and other spells/effects that create things with 5 AC that are immune to crits.
* Most oozes have really low AC, but are immune to crits.
* Hazards often have quite competitive AC, and don't mention crit immunity.

Seems pretty fair to me.

Ascalaphus wrote:

As far as I can tell the SSL setup is quite run of the mill Letsencrypt/Certbot, and I can't find any problems with it. I suspect the Chrome complaints are based on a caching issue that will hopefully fade.

What I observe is that chrome is getting the old cert for https://www.pfstracker.net (the www. subdomain).

Whereas if you just go to the naked domain https://pfstracker.net, etc you get the correct new cert.

This shouldn't really matter, but it might explain some folks' experience and without a successful redirect they may sometimes give up early (?)

Ah! Thank you! That's what I was overlooking. Should be better now.

We did so much abuse of attacking objects in PF1. For example, sundering a priest's holy symbol, which NPCs often only had one listed of in their statblock. And which had like a tiny amount of HP of course. Suddenly the GM has to go look up every prepared spell to see if it uses a holy symbol.

There was also the case where the sunder maneuver (attacking a held/worn object) could have a lot lower DC than attacking AC, but with the right feats any excess damage would flow on to the creature. So you'd destroy someone's shirt, then their belt, then their shoes...

PF2 is much better off not having that a thing players are gaming the system for.

That's an interesting bit of spelunking. It's weird though that hydraulic push doesn't really do any less damage, when heightened to the same rank, than a lot of these other spells.

I think a cleaner solution might have been to say that you can't target attended objects with attacks unless an effect specifically says so.

And as for area effects, clearly some kind of middle ground is needed. It'd be absurd if you could throw fireballs in a library without worrying about collateral damage, but also borderline unplayable if fireballs destroy loot on fallen foes (who, after all, are no longer attending their objects).

I don't really see the need for "AC: pointless", no.

Of course there are also hazards with actually challenging AC for their level. Good to note that those also normally aren't listed as immune to crits. Seems like the design paradigm is that crit immunity goes hand in hand with AC so low that crits would be really frequent.

AC 5 and auto-hitting are at that level nearly the same thing, even with MAP, unless you roll a 1.

It doesn't make sense to say that you can't critically hit it if you can't even attack it. So we can rule that one out.

Hey folks :)

As far as I can tell the SSL setup is quite run of the mill Letsencrypt/Certbot, and I can't find any problems with it. I suspect the Chrome complaints are based on a caching issue that will hopefully fade.

As for email, the main difficulties seem to be:
* People who used to use a different email address, that they no longer have access to.
* Yahoo doesn't like my DNS settings for email somehow. I fixed some settings that were initially incomplete but I still get the occasional rejection. Apparently Yahoo is particularly difficult about these things.

In either case, it's easy enough for me to fix it for people manually. The contact link at the bottom of the page is a good way to get my attention :)

I don't really need financial help with this, costs are pretty modest. If someone knows a lot about debugging Yahoo's issues with DMARC/SPF/DKIM though, I could use help with that.

For sure.

This is something where you need to balance multiple things:
* The game needs to be somewhat challenging to be fun
* The game needs to not be too spiteful to be fun
* Enemies need to act believably enough not to hinder immersion
* Enemies should not act so rigidly realistic that it breaks fun gameplay or stories.

For example, there's a lot of things you could insist enemies should "realistically" do like finishing off PCs or focusing on the healer. But that's only half realistic; realistic enemies should probably realize that in most encounters they're drastically outmatched and should be trying to get away from the PCs. Basically any encounter that by design is more than 50% likely to be won by the PCs, so any Severe or lower encounter. Even Extreme encounters get won more often than not, but it's dicier and more of a slog.

So we already require enemies to be a bit more suicidal than is really realistic. It's not reasonable to insist that they must act realistic in one unfun way but don't have to act realistic in another unfun way.

I think what we really want is a fun and exciting game that's just believable enough to be immersive. So enemies should certainly respond a bit to player behavior, but not with maximum attempts from the GM to inflict expensive long term damage.

I like it when the players get a bit involved in giving me good excuses not to do that. If someone goes down and nobody tries to help, ok that's grim. But if there's another PC who actually makes sure they're also in striking range of that enemy, and who taunts them a bit, well that can buy a bit of time.

There wouldn't be a lot of market for it for Paizo to make tons of void healing spells. But it's not an inherent thing that absolutely mustn't exist in the game. It's just not a priority to publish.

If your group is an outlier and needs it, that's a good spot to do a bit of homebrewing. Homebrewing is not a dirty thing.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

If the PC has gotten up from healing, then is knocked down again I will have an enemy attack a downed PC because they are tired of them getting up from healing. No intelligent enemy likes fighting the same thing over and over again after they brought it down, so it is an intelligent tactic to permanently put down an enemy getting up from healing.

I agree that is what a reasonably intelligent enemy would do....

But that kind of means the existence of in combat healing means an enemy should spend an extra action to kill someone they've just downed, to make it harder for them to get back up.

And if your group likes that, great. In my experience, I don't find it fun (as a player) and neither do my friends.

There's a subtle difference between two cases:

* Someone goes down, and the enemy doesn't know/suspect they could get back up again

* Someone goes down, they get healed back up, and go down again

For example, if you're fighting a T-Rex, it doesn't know about your cleric. But if you're fighting a major demon and your cleric has been throwing around a lot of holy smiting magic, it's gonna be more aware.

I also don't like a playstyle where enemies go after downed PCs, and pretty often there isn't a "need" for the GM to do it. But I'm not gonna promise they will never do it.

Healing at the right time is definitely a game skill. Too early and maybe it would've been better to just be doing damage yourself as a healer. Too late and PCs go down to 0 and even if enemies aren't going for the "make sure" killing blow, you're still losing a lot of action economy getting people to stand up, grab weapons again, potentially while dealing with reactive strikes etc. (And of course sometimes you get unlucky and enemies crit more times per round than you were counting on etc.)

I like the idea of the arcane cascade being fueled by leftover spell energy. But I think it'd be okay as something you activate as a free action after casting a spell/spellstrike. Currently, it's just a bit too much hamstrung by "combat starts.. move to enemy, spellstrike, don't have action left to cascade.. next turn, now you first need to cast a new spell.."

Barbarian now gets to rage for free at the start of combat. Gunslinger is pretty guaranteed to have a gun loaded and drawn at start of combat. Magus shouldn't need a multi-round boot sequence.

I wonder if the complaints about Arcane Cascade being not significant enough, and Reactive Strike being such a hoser for magi, couldn't have the same solution?

What if being in arcane cascade removed the manipulate trait from spellstrike?

I think the point of doubling rings was to make sure that 2-weapon-melee builds didn't have to buy twice as many runes as 1-weapon-melee builds. So that Double Slice/Twin Takedown kinda builds are competitive with polearms.

But there's a fair amount of territory they don't cover: ranged weapons for example. Your fighter or ranger might very well have a bow as a backup weapon, but you're gonna have to buy runes for that separately.

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I do think the "unarmed strikes aren't weapons" theme is annoying. I can see the numerical reasons for it, and there's a lot of balancing around things that don't take up a hand. But it creates a ton of glitches and oddly not working things. It really bugs me that for example a lizardfolk ranger (seems like a reasonable combo right?) has no nice feat support for fighting with claws.

As a "spectator" I like the differentiation between fiends, and I totally see the point of avoiding forced symmetry.

But in actual play, the demon weaknesses are the ones I've enjoyed the most. It's something you as a player can try to do something with, which is a bit different from an ability the monster has that you try to endure as best you an. So there's a bit more initiative/agency involved for the players with demon weaknesses.

Yeah I ran into them while running a PFS scenario. It gave me the vibe of the sort of monster you sometimes find in an AP, that hasn't had quite the same amount of rigorous QA that a core monster has.

I wonder if it's a case of an author being stuck in 1E thinking, where breaking the fascinate would break all of the effect? There were a lot of those "fascinate completely steals your turn, but it's easy for someone else to spend an action to bring you back into the game" effects in 1E. It became almost like an IQ test for gamers. Do you attack the monster, or do you spend an action bringing your teammate back into the game?

"Why is it that only Demons have special vulnerabilities out of the three main fiends (demon, daemon, devil)?

I think the reason for that is found in the creature creation guidelines, found in GM Core 162. It seems that page wasn't featured on Archives of Nethys somehow.

Basically, each creature trait brings with it certain design expectations. For demons, it's that they'll have a sin vulnerability and a sin ability. For daemons, it's a "death ability" themed to the kind of death they represent. For devils it's an "infernal hierarchy ability" that has to do with what role they play in hell.

Same with celestials; angels all have an aura, archons have a virtue ability, and azatas have a freedom ability.

I kinda like that design methodology myself, at least in theory. But the demon sin vulnerability does seem like it comes into actual play more often than for example devil hierarchy abilities.

Or they should...

This campaign is just getting started. The PCs are level 2, and the villain I have planned is a level 4ish Kobold sorcerer or cleric. While I expect the PCs to win the fight against him, I also need him to escape alive to confront them once again later in the campaign. I'm leery of giving him higher than normal magic items to facilitate his escape just in case well, doesn't and the PCs end up with something they shouldn't.

Other than that I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

I think the trick is to fiddle with what "fight against" and "win" mean.

What if the leader is standing high up on a ledge, throwing a couple of spells at the PCs but mostly out of reach. Meanwhile, he's got some minions confronting the PCs in melee directly. When the PCs defeat the minions and start trying to climb up to the leader, he runs away and collapses a cave ceiling behind him, so PCs can't follow.

The PCs have won the fight, forced him to flee, defeated his minions. But he's alive to confront them another day.

PF2 APs are full of stuff like slavers who have 1-2 fancy moves to apply shackles mid-combat to do a weird version of Grab. In general, NPCs and monsters can have abilities that vaguely look like PC abilities, but work differently, are perfectly suited to the creature, and would probably be abusive as heck in PC hands.

All that to say, that I think jinkins should have had a bespoke ability, rather than generic sneak attack. Something like an "ankle strike" that they specifically use when in your square.

It's not clear in the Gamemastery Guide. I don't think they brought over dual classing in the remaster / GM Core, so it's also unlikely that you're ever going to get an official answer to this.

Old-style harpies always had me suspicious if all the people involved in writing them were on the same page about the rules involved.

An effect that's broken as easily as Fascinate doesn't make sense to also grant immunity to it for the rest of the fight.

But the other reading flips over all the way in the other direction - if you have a fight with two harpies, one of them could captivate PCs and they wouldn't be able to snap out of them if the other harpy attacked them. That's too rough to be true (in a normally quite carefully balanced game like PF2).

I suspect we're not gonna get an official rules answer now on "how to fix stuff we removed from the game". If anything, the mechanic being removed is the answer.

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For PFS, it's a bit tricky. There's some guidance that when for example you run into a fiend with evil damage, you could replace that with unholy spirit damage, and swap out evil and unholy traits/weaknesses. However, most fiends in the Monster Core don't actually do separate spirit damage anymore.

PFS doesn't have the editorial budget to go back and revise dozens of scenarios. And it also wants to keep experiences of existing scenarios fairly consistent - someone playing a scenario now shouldn't experience a radically different scenario than someone playing it three years ago.

As a GM you kinda have to make do with the situation. Sometimes that means doing some remaster adaptation on monsters, and sometimes not so much. It's really hard to write a simple rule that gives perfect results for every scenario ever made. You have to rely a bit on GM good sense for this. And of course as a GM you can always ask your local VO for advice on how to handle specific cases.

Maybe it's also the RP dimension that's important? Is the patron ever actually playing a role, communicating desires in any way? Or is it just an abstract game mechanic?

Using an applicable Lore to Recall Knowledge about a topic, such as Engineering Lore instead of Crafting to find structural weaknesses in a bridge, typically comes with a lower DC. Your special interests can pay off!

Yeah, that does give a lot of room to the GM to say:

I think this is ambiguous enough that you can't find an interpretation that everyone will agree is "clear RAW" for this.

On the face of it, Untrained Improvisation is for using skills you're not trained in - which it does fine. You won't be amazing at those skills, but at least you stand a chance. By around level 5, having to roll a skill without adding your level is making it quite likely you'll critfail. So it's great for those skill challenges where YOU must roll, and you MUST roll.

Getting a DC break on lore/RK checks is not in the description of UI. It's a kind of "trick" you get from making a surprising connection between things in very different ends of the book. That doesn't mean it couldn't possibly work, but it's not what UI was made for.

It also strikes me as a "too good to be true" thing. I'm fine with UI letting you use a lore instead of religion/nature to identify half a dozen monster types, so if your intelligence is better than your wisdom it's still decent.

I'm really enjoying Reverend Sunshine, my "priest" (conspirator dragon bloodline sorcerer/liberator champion archetype tanuki). The other players are starting to catch on that my Perception is noticeably low for a cleric. And that I seem to bull through skill challenges on diplomacy and athletics a lot.

I think it's worth asking the GM if he would feel it was okay if the players did this; use Reposition on their last action (who cares about MAP if you don't need to roll for an auto-crit) to do all their movement in ways that don't risk reactions. And to basically let mooks donate their actions to let the boss get free movement.

If he goes "that's shenanigans" then you ask "then what about what you just did?"

1, since M2 was an ally of B, M2 didn't need to roll a check to reposition B

"There's no rule explaining how this works" isn't the same as "you don't need to roll".

Obviously the GM can make a ruling about unclear situations, such as "what would happen if an ally wants to use an action on you that is only described in the rules as a hostile action used by enemies, but you're cool with it because it's your ally".

But when you're making those rulings, you don't get to say it's RAW, since there's no W(ritten).

2, since no check was needed, M2 got the critical result of reposition

This isn't a rule in the book.

3, M2 could chain two repositions together to move B 20 feet south

Well M2 could spend two actions on repositioning, so given points 1 and 2, yes.

4, since M2 was moving B, B did not provoke a Reactive Strike from me

Normally, "forced movement" doesn't provoke. But as pointed out by the others, how forced is this movement?

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I think the GM went a bit overboard here. It's absolutely reasonable to say "you should also be able to try repositioning non-enemies". But going from there to "it always automatically succeeds" and "it's still forced movement so doesn't provoke" is a bit much.

Consider also that if players did this, after a while you'd probably call shenanigans. Because it'd be more efficient to spend your last action moving an ally without provoking, than that enemy spending their first action on that move. So you get this weird "I move you you move me" kinda dance.

When your house rules result in the core play of the game shifting, you've probably overdone it.

moosher12 wrote:

Three things are for sure:

2. We are getting a winged bear (of whose name I don't know if it was announced yet) that is totally-not-an-owlbear.

Considering the winged bear is in Sarkorian art, couldn't it be a variety of the Spirit Guide? They already have the feathered bear, and their spirit guides/gods are usually amalgams of various animals. Maybe it represents a Sarkorian God, or is a higher level version of the feathered bear (like the Royal Basilisk in HotW is to regular basilisks).

Yeah, that might just be Dolok Darkfur, the bear-god of the Farheavens clan.

I'm kinda counting on a MC2, maybe MC3, and then a pivot to more theme-specific books, kinda like what they did with Book of the Dead / Howl of the Wild.

Particularly for a MC2, there should be plenty of material to be found in B1-3, APs, and things like more new dragons for each tradition.

I think it's just simple economics that a monster core 2 will happen. They have the content and the demand exists.