Ascalaphus's page

I think for scenario length, there are good use cases for both lengths we've seen. People playing on a weekday night in a local store do well with 2-3 hour scenarios. People who take the time to travel to a game day in a different city in the weekend get more out of a 4-5 hour scenario.

I wish they'd kept up the scenario/quest distinction, and not gone all-in on making scenarios shorter too.

I'd propose a fourth alternative: spontaneous with a pinch of preparation.

This is what the Polymath Bard and the Arcane Sorcerer with spellbook already kinda do. Basically, you're a spontaneous caster, but you can switch out a few spells per day with different ones.

Overall I think spontaneous casting is good for game flow - it skips a frequent analysis paralysis moment of "what do I do with all of these slots today" for a simpler one: "is there one specific spell that looks really good today?" And for the sorcerer, it's also simpler: what are the spells you want most of the time, knowing you still have some wiggle room for things you'll only need rarely.

You can make some classes a bit better at this than others; maybe wizards get to change 4 spells per day to a sorcerer's 1, or sorcerers are more locked into bloodline spells you can't switch. That still allows you to present some class flavor. But you can have everyone running on the basic rails of spontaneous casting, while still keeping some customizability.

That's nice, because then we don't have to devote "budget" to artificially creating some things prepared is better at and some spontaneous. Maybe this frees up space to let every spell be "signature" for example, because we're no longer infringing on a powerful feature from the prepared casters.

Smart players will try to do clever things with chokepoints, and that's cool - players engaging with the specific battlefield makes the game interesting. But that doesn't mean that everything they try should always work smoothly. It's more interesting if there's some wrinkles here and there.

A while back my players were investigating an abandoned building, opened a door, and found an emperor cobra. They fired a shot at it and closed the door again. Next round, opened the door again, fired another shot, closed the door again.

Then I had the cobra Force Open the door and attack them. They hadn't seen that coming, and it made for a cool "here's Johnny" moment.

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In this situation, it could also be interesting to use Reposition to actually drag one of the melee PCs into the monster room, and then shut the door on the rest of the party. Not sure if the monsters would be clever enough for it of course. But it's definitely something that should startle the players, in a fun way.

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I do agree that some sort of push-through move here is appropriate, even when the rules don't normally model that really well. The rules after all are only a MODEL of the game world, and sometimes just don't work well. As a GM you can say "this is exceptional, this calls for a different approach".

Two groups of creatures trying to push each other back is certainly something that could happen in the world, but the rules don't have an answer on how to handle it.

I think next time I'll go with the table, but add some "care packages" of which everyone gets to pick one. Some of which will be the on-level items like fundamental runes, and some other interesting/relevant stuff

Reference: Treasure for New Characters

A while back I was running a conversion of an 1E module and starting all four characters at level 5, using the "pick items" method from that table. It felt a bit off to me. Normally, a fresh level 5 party would have found ~2 level 5 items during level 4 already. Because all of the players started fresh, that wasn't the case. As a GM I worried if that meant I should drop extra level 5 items (armor runes, really) to make up for it.

What are your experiences with it? Have you used it with a whole group starting at higher level, for example for an AP? Does it work well? Need a change?

Tridus wrote:

There's no way they would make a class that requires Crafting to function at all and then not give it auto-advancement in Crafting.

Bard does not get auto-advancement in Performance.

Yeah but a bard can still cast higher-rank spells if they don't increase Performance.

An alchemist that doesn't increase Crafting has some hindrance making extra supplies in downtime, which is similar to a bard with only Trained performance having somewhat unreliable Lingering Performance. But they should both still be able to do their main job of casting spells/making stuff during "uptime".

The Raven Black wrote:

Seen in this light, I feel the only Must Have is a way to heal everyone to full after each encounter.

Musing further on this, I wish all PCs had an innate ability to go back to full HPs after an encounter.

So that we don't need to have so many ways to get this same result.

Why spend build choices, resources and time/rolls just to reach the predefined end result of "fully healed" ?

What should stay though is how much you can heal when you only have a few rounds or max 10 minutes between wave encounters. Similar to Focus Points recovery.

Well, there's natural healing, over days. Anyone can do that.

More seriously though, Starfinder 1 had a system like that. You had a daily pool of Resolve Points, and you had Stamina and Hit Points, roughly 50/50. Damage first went through stamina, then hit points. After combat, you could spend a resolve point and 10m rest to get all your stamina back.

So an easy fight would be one where nobody gets damaged beyond their stamina, and you can cheaply heal up. A tough fight is where some or many PCs get hit down to hit points, and you actually need to spend some resources to heal up.

Destroying a graveknight armor should be pretty hard, for a party that's able to take on a single graveknight and have it be an impressive opponent. For a level 7 party, a graveknight is a scary boss monster. Even when they manage to kill it, they have to deal with the armor because it keeps coming back. Scary. Having to go to a volcano to get rid of it permanently, makes for a cool story.

But it's all relative. For a level 12 party, that 10 graveknight is not a boss monster anymore. It's a mook. You could be going through a dungeon with a dozen of them. It's not so cool to have to go to the volcano with several cartloads of armors. At that point it makes more sense to spend a day or two of downtime disintegrating them.

I think for time pressure it's best to lean into the 10m time increment - classic AD&D "turns" if you will. So usually you don't have to timekeep 1m actions closely. For how fast the party can recover, you're mostly talking in those 10m "turns" - Treat Wounds, Refocus, and alchemists regaining vials.

Pathfinder doesn't really have time pressure built in but that's a good hook to start sketching something out.

You could for example start with a dungeon "asleep". You can just pause for a long time in rooms. If the PCs create a small disturbance (short fight, hide the bodies) then the dungeon starts trying to figure out what's wrong and patrols happen every 30m (and you have to fight or hide from them). If a patrol disappears, the frequency goes up to every 10m. The next escalation might just be pulling the remainder of the dungeon.

Well if everything that's in between Downtime and Encounter Mode falls into the Exploration Mode bin, that's a messy bin. It might make more sense to talk about Break Mode + March Mode.

March Mode is basically modifiers on how you're moving through a dangerous area; Defend, Search, Avoid Notice. The focus is really on how and where your character starts the next encounter.

Break Mode is for things that keep you in the same place: deep-searching a room, investigating detailed murals, working on a puzzle, treating wounds, repairing shields, identifying magic items, refocusing etc.

Wow that's actually quite a solid spell yeah. 2d8 heightening is already very solid, but 30ft burst is also good for an enemies-only blast. And Divine casters do want some Will spells to balance out the many Fortitude blasts.

And that ties in to my one observation when Exploration Mode is not working. Sometimes I need a mode that is part Encounter Mode and part Exploration Mode. For example, one battle ended with a character poisoned and the healers trying to keep the character alive as the poison affliction dealt damage. They were still counting rounds. The other PCs had no contribution to that effort, so they moved to exploration activities, interrogating enemies captured alive.

I feel for this you could also just let people "pass" their turns. If you're just dealing with a poison that maybe four more rounds maximum duration to go, it's not important to optimize how all the remaining characters spend their time.

That actually ties back to something that I've seen in games before: the urge to have everyone spend all their time optimally deployed. For example, one character needs to Refocus three times to get all their focus back, which takes 30 minutes but takes no real table time: you just say "I refocus three times". But the GM asks "what are the rest of you doing during that time?" and they go off and talk to an NPC which takes half an hour of real table time, and in which the refocusing player is excluded.

If there was real in-game time pressure (the cultists finish their plan by midnight) then fine. But often this is just accidental; there was no real need for the other PCs do save those 30 minutes of their day. So for the enjoyment of all players, it would be better to just "pass".

Spend 1 hour per spell rank, during which you must remain in conversation with a person who knows the spell or have the magical writing in your possession.

* Learning a spell doesn't consume the scroll. You just need to have the scroll in your possession. Strictly speaking, you don't even need to look at it, you could just leave it in your backpack. That's probably pushing it a bit, but still, it doesn't say it consumes the scroll. Witches can feed the scroll to their familiar, but that has the benefit of avoiding the check and cost of Learn a Spell.

* Wizards could just talk to a druid or cleric - they know all their (common) spells, and the Learn a Spell activity doesn't require that it's coming from a source of the same tradition.

I think Double Slice and Point Blank Stance are pretty decent feats. They don't let you do things that "everyone should be able to do". You can already fire a longbow at someone who's too close for how the bow is designed, and you can already use two actions to Strike with a weapon in each hand. What these feats do is make you better at doing it than other people.

Vicious Swing I think you can argue about though. It would be reasonable for a game where damage resistances occur to just have a base ability to "spend more of your turn to try one big hit to get through resistance".

It irritates me that "sneaking ahead to scout" doesn't combine well with Search. Trapfinder would give you a chance to detect traps but it doesn't find hidden creatures. Most scouts would want to do so quietly but it seems locked behind a level 8 ranger feat. I wouldn't call it a case of "if that feat didn't exist, everyone could do it" though - if that feat didn't exist, the book wouldn't allow anyone to do it.

I agree with Unicore that Search is overly dominant. Traps do a lot of damage and taking a hit from a Trivial hazard just before another fight can be really bad. On the other hand, if everyone is trying to Search, many hazard encounters may fall a bit flat just due to weight of statistics. Minimum Perception requirements can play a role there but that's kind of a yucky game mechanic. I find it's overly constraining on party resource management - people are locked into a job because they're the only ones who can reliably do it, even though their character concept wants them to do something different.

Maybe spotting traps should be a bit like Perception - so important compared to other things that it's good to bump up to it's own thing, so that people don't feel pressured into all doing it.

That'd free up room to split what everyone is doing into stuff like "try to spot (hidden) enemies early" (overlaps with Scout), "watch out for hidden doors and items", (overlaps with Investigate), "look for tracks/survey environmental clues about creatures", "look for mystical phenomena" (overlaps with Detect Magic, but currently Search does anything with a DC...)

Do clerics, druids or sorcerers have a comparable expense? Or is the wizard getting something valuable they're not getting?

Why does the wizard pay more than the rest?

I think taking prisoners and interrogating them has great potential. Realistically, many monsters know the layout of the dungeon they live in and might be evil/cowardly enough to spill it if captured.

The big "if" is in whether the GM is cool with it though. I've seen a lot of GMs cramp up if you try this, because they feel it totally takes their pre-written adventure off the rails.

And if you think that through, it says something rather damning about "the wizard is the master of preparing ahead" - if GMs instinctively don't want you to know what's ahead because it would "ruin" the adventure, then this playstyle has severe handicaps.

I feel like there's a poor match between the identity & narrative on the one hand, and the mechanics to make that work in the game on the other hand.

For me, wizards are characterised by:

Wizards get their power from study Other classes train too - a sorcerer is born with a magical spark but has to train to develop their talent. A cleric has been blessed, but needs to train their mind to be a channel through which they can manifest the full power of their patron. But the wizard basically starts without that, and has to figure out the rules of the cosmos to make magic happen from scratch. They'll start out with less sheer power than other classes, but because they had to learn it from the ground up, they can wield it in weird ways that other classes can't.

Wizards also just study and know a lot of things. Not just spells. If something weird happens or a monster appears, people go to the wizard to ask what's what.

Wizards collect secrets. Forming schools is a way to hoard and pass on secrets. Each school has secret techniques that the others don't have. You can research new secrets, or go on adventures to recover ancient lost techniques.

Wizards are into preparation, planning, and scheming This manifests during adventuring by having tricks up their sleeve, and it manifests in narrative because wizards are moving behind the scenes and trying to achieve things. Is it because they got a chip on their shoulder about the sorcerers and clerics getting their power handed to them? Maybe. Or maybe it's just that small habits of doing homework and preparation snowball into global conspiracies if you become high level enough.

Wizards are into books Their spellbook, lore-books, and also scrolls. Wizards are the most into written magic of all the casters. (Honorable mention for runesmith.)

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Now, the actual mechanics don't really realise all that.

"Preparation" as a character theme is pretty hard to design. You don't want to bog down the game with the preparation that one player has to do, while other people are waiting. Also, a lot of adventures are built in a way that doesn't really give you that much foreknowledge of what you're gonna be facing. Many PFS scenarios just take a single day, and most APs also don't expect you to back out of encounters to come back with a different spell loadout. The best you can do is guess the overall theme of the enemies you're facing and what kinda distribution of spells to prepare maybe.

So we want to create the feel of a character that does preparation, but the actual sort of game we're playing makes actual preparation pretty tricky.

I'm also not wild about prepared casting. I think it's just something that someone came up with and that we stuck with for decades, but there's no intrinsic reason why it's the best, most enjoyable way to do spellcasters. PF2 spontaneous casting is pretty pleasant to play. SF2 has the Witchwarper as a spontaneous arcane/occult intelligence/charisma caster. We also have bard and sorcerer feats to do the "change 1 spell in your repertoire per day" gimmick.

I don't think changing *all* your repertoire during daily prep is something anyone should really have. Too much analysis paralysis in the middle of the game. But the wizard could be using spontaneous casting with the difference that in the morning you can rotate a spell *of each rank* instead of just one.

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Another idea I'm toying with is focusing on the spellbook. I was thinking about adding class feature for all spellbook-based casters, including archetype. (I'm running Strength of Thousands and all the PCs have wizard dedication.)

I Must Consult My Spellbook
Requirement You're holding your spellbook or wearing it and have a hand free.
Effect When you gain at least one piece of information from Recall Knowledge (on a success, critical failure, or for example Dubious Knowledge), you can also pick a spell that was prepared from your spellbook. Until the end of your turn, you can cast any spell of that rank or lower in your spellbook by expending that prepared spell slot. If the spell you cast was of lower rank, it is heightened to the rank of the expended slot.

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Another piece of mechanics that isn't really working out well is wizards being loremasters. By now, thaumaturges are the absolute kings of that, and there's investigators and bards who are pretty sharp. Necromancers and commanders have feats to use their auto-scaling lore to recall knowledge about a wide swath of creatures as well.

Wizards should be in the same league as these classes. Not beyond them, but in the same ballpark. Instead, they get a dash of skill training (more at higher levels as they gain more intelligence) but it stays stuck at Trained. And unlike those classes you don't get a clever workaround for not-your-key-attribute Religion and Nature RK.

Added to that, Intelligence skill feats are pretty lacking, compared to say, Medicine, Intimidate and Diplomacy (Bon Mot).

I don't have a cool idea for this yet, but I feel like wizards really should be better at this. Maybe they should just get extra skill increases that can only go into mental skills? Being able to afford better social skills here and there would also give a boost to the "scheming" wizards.

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Schools - I think newer schools have been doing a bit better, but the bar needs to be higher here. Every school should have something *exclusive*. Uncommon/Rare arcane spells that are pretty hard to get outside the school, or out-of-tradition spells that can be done arcanely according to your school's specific magical theories.

I like the suggestion given that each school should also give you some Additional Lore.

Another idea - focus spells. It's just not ok that you have to go outside your class to get a third focus point, or that many schools have lame focus spells. An idea I was toying with was:

* At level 1, you can prepare any rank 1 or 2 curriculum spell as a focus spell. Therefore, you have a focus pool of 1. Whenever you Refocus, you can change 1 prepared curriculum focus spell.
* At level 6 you can take a class feat to gain another curriculum focus slot that can hold a spell with a base rank of up to 4. And your focus pool goes up.
* At level 10 you you can take another feat to gain a final focus slot that accepts a curriculum spell up to rank 7.
* And at level 12 or 14 or so, a feat to quickly Refocus all focus points.

This would replace the previous curriculum-only slot of each rank. You'd be a class that has 3 slots per rank + 1-3 focus spells with just about the widest, most adaptable choice of focus spells of any class. And since they're focus spells, they auto-heighten. This means you don't have stuff like rank 1 focus slots that are useless for damage or incapacitation spells.

Another related idea is a class feat where you select a rare or uncommon spell you know, and gain that as a focus spell. Can't do it with a common spell, that's just not secretive enough to be interesting to a wizard.

I think exploration is a bit of a mish-mash of different things. And that lack of focus is why it's stumbling along a bit.

1. There's "as you go" activities, like Search, Avoid Notice, Scout, Defend, Track and so forth. These are about what you're doing while moving, or being ready for a fight in some way or another. These have an effect on your movement speed so if you were under crazy time pressure you could say that the slow dwarf should abstain and the fast elf has to do the searching. But that would only start to matter in really big dungeons etc., not on anything that fits on a flipmat.

2. There's basically "short rest" activities, like treating wounds, identifying loot, refocusing, repairing shields etc. These usually happen after a combat and are part of the "how much time pressure is there in this dungeon" calculus.

3. There's also some "this just takes longer than you can practically do in combat" things like the social activities. These often take just a minute or so. They're somewhat distinct from #2 because they're not so much after-effects of a fight, and usually don't take long enough that they really matter for time-pressure counts. They might happen *before* the combats - the social check that wasn't quite good enough to talk you through peacefully.

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Those are pretty different things, lumped together because they happen during the adventuring day but not during the combats. Exploration mode looks incoherent until you realise it's three minor game modes stacked in a trenchcoat.

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I also think #1 suffers from not knowing if it wants to be a minigame or not. Should allocating everyone to an exploration be an interesting allocation problem where you'd want every activity to be balanced to be comparably good? Or, is #1 just a convenient shorthand for "I move 10ft, search for traps, move 10ft, search for traps, ..." and "I raise shield, move, raise shield, move, ...." and so forth? Is it really important that everyone can find an activity that they're strong at? Or were we just trying to make the rogue searching for traps less tedious?

My pet peeve is everyone Searching. I feel like if you're Searching you have to be somewhat at the front of the party. Otherwise someone has stepped into the trap before you got close enough to take a look at it.

The problem there is that a lot of the other roles also need to be at the front; Defend in the back row is lackluster, and Scout also makes more sense at the front.

Investigate is too vague and probably shouldn't be in this category. It just makes more sense that if the party runs into an interesting room they pause, investigate it, and then resume other XM activities. Tracking and covering tracks actually feel more natural as as-you-go activities, but they're rarely used.

Although since Defend is a thing, there could also be a role for "I'm trying to see what we're fighting next" so you can roll initiative with a RK skill and maybe get some intel as well. That'd be a cool back row thing to do. But it's not super related to the original description of Investigate.

Detect Magic I think is a missed opportunity. As written it basically can't detect any halfway interesting things. I'm thinking about homebrewing an Arcana/Occult skill feat to use it to detect magical traps/treasures/haunts/critters from the back of the party using the skill & rank instead of Perception. Like, PF1 had Detect Magic be too good at spotting stuff for free. But in PF2 we could let it enable alternative skills than Perception.

Scouting is a bit irritating in that the characters who thematically would be good scouts, are probably better off doing Searching. And because you need no skill of any kind for it, instead you delegate the low Perception wizard to do the scouting because that's optimal worker placement. I'd like to see that re-engineered somehow. Maybe it should let you roll Survival for initiative and give people bonuses as if you were Aiding the whole party?

I think you have to make a decision on whether necromancers are "new" in the world. If they're new, then monsters might not have a plan on how to tactically respond. Exemplars you could say are new - maybe there were some now and then, but really they only start appearing since the Godsrain. Monsters don't know what's happening.

I don't think necromancers are new in that way - yeah, the class is new, but in the setting, they've always been there (retroactively). So enemies may be ready for them.

Of course a wild animal is gonna react differently than a rough bandit or a trained warlord.

Nice guide :)

Personally I prefer guides that show a class from a couple of different angles, that give you deeper insight in how it works "normally" and perhaps also a couple of "abnormal" builds.

Fan dancer definitely is a good combo with sorcerer, and worth noting in a guide. But it's also a very strong particular flavor and not what *everyone* wants in their sorcerer build. And it's not necessary - the sorcerer class is good enough that a lot of other builds will feel not just viable but actually strong.

You can optimize PDFs with ghostscript without sacrificing visible quality. I suspect there's something wrong with the way background elements (borders etc.) get duplicated for every page they're used on.

Yeah I have a hard time seeing how mundane-martial flavored classes would do daily resources well. We have it a bit with the alchemist's daily preparation items, but for a fighter? Yeah at level 9 they can take a daily feat, but that's not really a resource you can run out of mid-adventuring-day. And I don't really know what else would make sense as a daily resource.

But if we can't really make every class work with daily resources, I'd rather have no classes really *rely* on daily resources. A draconic sorcerer that can lean on focus spells can keep going through a longer adventuring day than a wizard with more meh focus spells and a harder time gaining a third point. The sorcerer still has daily resources but isn't reduced to piddling cantrips as quickly in a big dungeon.

I think 4E was on to something with "every class has daily, encounter and at will abilities". We can do "nobody has daily abilities", but I'd like to move away from "some classes have daily abilities, others don't".

First, thanks for the many suggestions! I enjoyed y'all's thoughts.

Second, I do want to reiterate that one of our goals -- because this is our first experience with PF2E -- is sticking strictly to RAW. So milestone leveling, free archetypes, and other optional/alternate systems are out as solutions.

Free archetype is a very popular optional rule, but still optional. Milestone levelling is actually closer to being the default. For some APs like Abomination Vaults, game developers have said the prefer XP based leveling, but on the whole I think they lean more towards considering milestone levelling the normal way to play. The APs have a "written" section telling you where the milestones are, so it's really quite RAW. But okay, you say later on your players just enjoy XP levelling, and enjoyment is important.

My players are very experienced RPGers, and they (like me, when I'm a player) insist that "the dice fall where they may." That's been the culture at our table for literally 25 years of playing together. (For me personally, that culture goes back ... longer.)

Perpdepog wrote:

Remember that PF2's XP awards are relative to party strength, so a moderate threat encounter (80 XP) becomes a low threat encounter (60 XP) if the party are one level higher. Yeah this makes the encounter easier for the party, but it also means they're awarded less XP for defeating it; it's a self-correcting system that narrows that experience gap as they play.

Unfortunately, the self-correction is actually quite slow. If it were significantly quicker, this would probably be the best solution.

Perpdepog wrote:

And, you know, if they're doing side quests and getting invested, why not reward that investment by letting them be a bit stronger than they otherwise would be?

Because they genuinely don't enjoy easy encounters. It's honestly that simple. I'm not talking about Trivial or Low encounters; they're all experienced enough to know these serve the purpose of resource-burning (or resource-conservation). But a major encounter that's too easy? I know there are groups out there that enjoy it when the tough bad guy goes down in the first round, but my players absolutely do not enjoy it.

I get the sensation your players enjoy the feeling of treating the adventure as a sort of "set challenge" and seeing if they're clever enough to beat it. They don't want things to be too easy. They'd prefer to face most of the challenges at the correct level, and not *higher*. They're okay with occasionally stumbling into them early and getting their nose bloodied.

There's clearly a mathematical tension between giving XP for sidequests and not overleveling for the regular encounters. But I get the feeling your players are sensible enough to add that up to. You don't have to solve this problem behind their back - you can take ideas you got here and pitch them to the group and find something that fits the sort of challenge you all like.

Here's an idea that came to me: you do track XP for sidequests, but don't add it to the main tally immediately. However, if the party would be about to enter into a next part of the adventure *underleveled*, then you add the XP. So it can help them catch up if they've fallen behind (maybe missed some encounter/trap that could have given XP). But it won't overlevel them and make things easier than they should be.

Overall, that would still mean most of the time sidequests don't have a lot of XP impact, but this might fix the bad feeling that they don't have *any* reward. And you can do this quite openly to the players according to clearly laid out rules so that everyone knows it's done fairly.

People are using some of the same words, but not with shared meaning. PF2 has not shifted away from daily resources to become a resourceless game. Limited resource options are the most powerful options in the game, including daily spells and consumable items, and that has not changed since the remaster.

Focus spells are spells first, not encounter powers. PF2 has non-spell powers and abilities that can only be used once an encounter, that don’t all hing on the same trackable resource. The kineticist gets several of these, skills have them, several martial classes have them; that is a big part of why focus spells don’t line up with 4e encounter powers.

It's a matter of degrees. Focus spells aren't exactly 4E encounter powers, but pretty close. A little more immersive to my taste. A lot of encounter powers were flavored as "this is hard - you need to recover before doing it again" but somehow you were able to do *different* encounter powers without difficulty. Focus points gives a better flavor to that.

And yeah, daily powers aren't completely gone, and we're definitely not in a resourceless game. But the balance has shifted a significant amount from daily to encounter resources. For two main reasons: more generous focus point recovery, and more ways to heal out of combat. Because hit points are basically the other encounter-scale resource, that *everyone* deals with. At the start of 2E there weren't many ways to do unlimited out of combat healing. Treat Wounds took a few levels to build up; you need Continual Recovery and Ward Medic before it becomes efficient. Lay on Hands scaled very slowly. But now, we have a lot more ways. Unlimited out of combat healing is much more the default assumption now. You're not likely to cut the adventuring day short because you were relying on Heal or Soothe for out of combat healing - if you have the option of cutting short, you can also just wait an hour and heal up.

I think it's a good thing when classes aren't too different in how their attrition model works. It's awkward if most classes aren't leaning so much on daily powers, but some are. When we played Rusthenge, the sorcerer was unhappy that he had to mostly lean on cantrips because there were just so many encounters per floor. The ranger, fighter and kineticist didn't have that. But if the sorcerer had had a bloodline with a better focus spell, that would have been more enjoyable.

I like that the balance point of the game moved more to per-encounter resources and away from per-day resources. While PFS scenarios tend to have only 2-4 encounters per day, AP dungeons are different. They often have an urgent-sounding plot ("save the kidnapped town elder") but buried at the bottom of a dungeon where each floor contains a level's XP worth of encounters.

A game leaning heavily on daily resources struggles if you have fewer ("you travel for three days, then have one fight, then travel four more days") or more ("each of three flours has about 10 fights, and the clock is ticking") encounters than the normal amount. A game more balanced around per-encounter resources is more flexible in accommodating all of these adventure types.

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That said, if people take feats just for the second and third focus points, but always only spend those points on just one of their three focus spells, that would be a bit sad.

I've been thinking over this spell for my Strength of Thousands home campaign:

NUMBING TOUCH - CANTRIP 1
Cantrip, Concentrate, Mental, Nonlethal
Traditions: arcane, occult, primal, divine
Range: Touch
Target: 1 creature
Make a melee spell attack. On a hit you deal 2d6 nonlethal mental damage. On a critical hit, double this damage.

(Notice the lack of a Manipulate trait.)

Yeah making size increase optional would be an easy but really helpful change.

It seems to be really varying by campaign theme. When PFS was busy with the war with Cheliax, suddenly there were a lot of Hellknights with reactive strike in almost every adventure. In other seasons, it was fairly uncommon.

I don't personally find Ignition to be a poor spell. I've had fights with big lumpy oozes that were easy to crit and set on fire and the persistent damage was quite nice. Also, fire weakness is somewhat common. And sometimes you just need to set things on fire for story purposes. Altogether it's a cantrip that does enough work.

But I do think we should have at least one melee cantrip that doesn't provoke. It's fine if it's not your first choice in all situations. But right now, for a magus fighting a boss monster with reactive strike is pretty miserable. And boss monsters are more likely to have reaction abilities.

It definitely seems like an outlier. The rules are clear enough, but the numbers are better than the normal ranges.

Has anyone come up with a decent compromise home version for kineticists?

* They definitely won't take the poison damage that they're immune to.

* There's no particular reason why the precision damage would "jump" from the poison to the spirit damage. So that's also matched by the immunity.

* If the whole ability doesn't have a poison trait, just the main damage, then it's totally clear the spirit damage still happens. Venom Spit for example only has the Nagaji trait, not a poison trait. The spirit damage isn't poison, so it bypasses the immunity.

Now, if the whole ability had the poison trait as well, it might still work, but it would be a GM decision;

When you have immunity to a specific type of damage, you ignore all damage of that type. If you have immunity to a specific condition or type of effect, you can't be affected by that condition or any effect of that type. You can still be targeted by an ability that includes an effect or condition you are immune to; you just don't apply that particular effect or condition.

If you have immunity to effects with a certain trait (such as death effects, poison, or disease), you are unaffected by effects with that trait. An immunity might match both a trait and a damage type (such as electricity). The immunity applies to effects with the trait as well as damage of that type. Some complex effects might have parts that affect you even if you're immune to one of the effect's traits; for instance, a creature immune to death effects wouldn't ignore the poison damage or concealed condition from a toxic cloud spell.

The least they could do is add a clause like "you are proficient in this armor".

Imagining whole parts of certain people being untrained in their own natural armor is just absurd.
It would open a bit of design space for casters that are not that dextrous and still have an ok armor class.

I think that would be interesting - particularly if you still kept the strength requirements. So you could do a "muscle wizard" instead of the obligatory wizard with high dex and light armor training.

I think spells like tempest surge stat good, even though at later levels you also get slotted spells that do the same damage but to a bigger area. Because it's still level-appropriate damage and you will very often fight just a few creatures, so single-target focus spells don't become irrelevant. It's close to having a free top-rank spell slot every combat. But the key here is the good scaling on the spell.

Interesting analysis. My favorite focus spells are the dragon sorcerer's. I've still used the rank 3 breath weapon spell into the late (14-17) levels because it was solidly scaling damage, with a good damage type and adequate area. But the rank 1 claws do become more niche over time. So I think that supports the original theory.

Outlier Faith Tattoo is to my knowledge the only non-class non-archetype way to get sanctified. It's useful to divine sorcerers and oracles, anyone with Divine Lance as an innate (ancestry) spell, and bards using Spiritual Armament

I've had a lot of fun playing a fighter with wizard dedication in PFS, he's currently level 10.

Of course Strength is maxed and there's some investment in Con, but Int is my second stat and Wis I think my third. He's quite good in skill challenges and that's often helped the party out of trouble.

Note: even the poor classes are playable.

Excellent Classes that go beyond just being good
- Fighter: solid martial chassis, many solid feats, and the higher accuracy that just makes everything easier. The "pick your weapon" choice enables a lot of different builds.
- Rogue: exceptional chassis (three saves that go to success->crit, legendary perception), strong class features (sneak attack, deny advantage, debilitation, master strike) and a couple of insane feats (gang up, opportune backstab) and many just plain good feats.

Good Classes that do what they promise, and do it very well
- Thaumaturge: damage output close to a barbarian, but with more of an out of combat game as well, and general versatility
- Sorcerer: lots of spells, strong focus spells, good feats
- Guardian: really effective defence
- Champion: really effective defence
- Bard: buffs are good, there are strong occult spells (but it also has some big blind spots) and you have a solid chassis
- Cleric: good spell list, divine font

Fine Classes that do what they promise
- Ranger
- Barbarian
- Magus
- Monk
- Druid
- Alchemist
- Exemplar

Poor Classes with some problem holding them back.
- Investigator: most adventures don't have a mystery so complicated that you needed the extra narrative crowbar for it, and their combat loop is just awkward. Why not play a magus, thaumaturge, alchemist or rogue who investigates things?
- Swashbuckler: it's functional now, but the extra finisher damage doesn't justify the awkwardness of being locked out of further attack actions.
- Gunslinger: guns are poor, the class spends all its budget making them adequate
- Psychic: cantrips are the guns of the spells. This class spends all its budget trying to make cantrips almost like real spells, and hands in being able to cast enough real spells to do it. Sorcerers tend to just have much better focus spells too.
- Wizard: most schools are too meh in their spell selection. You get few base skills because you're an intelligence class, so basically got tricked. And having a lot of skills is so-so if you can't keep upgrading all those extra skills. Also, intelligence skills really lack strong skill feats.
- Witch: awkward action economy and the hexes and familiars just don't seem to justify the fragile chassis. Also, see wizard intelligence.
- Kineticist: too different from other classes to profit from a lot of archetypes or loot, and doesn't get enough content in new books

Not rated due to lack of experience
- Animist
- Commander
- Summoner
- Inventor
- Oracle

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

Use Bond Conversation on the 5th rank spell we just cast, we use the additional granted use of Drain Bonded Item on a spell 2 ranks lower - our original 3rd rank slot - Spellshield heightens it 5th again, and we cast the spell.

Yeah, absolutely not. Rules-lawyering strikes again!

This is what actually happens: You use Bond Conversation on the 3rd rank spell you just cast (with its effects heightened to 5th rank, which is irrelevant to anything further). You then use the additional granted use of Drain Bonded Item on a spell 2 ranks lower - 1st rank slot spell (with its effects heightened to 5th rank, which is irrelevant to anything further). And this is the end, because there's nothing less than 1st.

I think that's an order of operations issue, and I'm not sure your order of operations is correct.

Let's take a step back. Say you have a regular, non-war-mage wizard, who prepared a heightened spell. Say, a rank 3 force barrage. Then casts it. Then uses Drain Bond to cast it again. It would be another rank 3 force barrage, not a rank 1 force barrage. It doesn't matter what the base ranl of the spell is, it matters what rank of the spell was that you cast.

Now let's come back to the war mage. You cast a spell and spellshield heightens it. Then you do bond conservation and bond conservation asks "what was the rank of the spell you just cast?". At that moment, it was already heightened. The spell was heightened; it wasn't a high slot it was cast from. The Bond Conservation feat doesn't make a difference between those two because that difference never mattered before, but with this ability it does.

I think there's something to be said for "technically, the spell that Bond Conservation is looking at is heightened so it's fine". But it's also fair to say "that sounds like a strained technical reading, and it's too good to be true" and by the Too Good To Be True rule principle reject it.

*My* take on it is that the cost you pay for it, and the limitations on it, are enough that it's not *too good* to be true. It's good and it's a little bit on the edge of things, but it's not OP. Actually, it's kind of a fun way to manage resources for wizards and Nethys knows they can use some help keeping up with sorcerers anyway.

Now let's pan back to the war mage. You use bond conservation and spell shield to cast a spell.

That all the 'cascade' spells which Bond Conversation gives become heightened to max rank-1 is crazy enough. I would maybe burn with fire even that. But what you propose definitely doesn't happen.

It's really important to remember that "all" the cascade spells you're talking about are actually very few spells, and that you already paid a max-1 slot for it.

Think about it: suppose you're a level 12 wizard with Spellshield but no Bond Conservation. What does it do for you? You can burn a rank 5 slot so that if you use Drain Bond that day on a rank 1-4 spell, it'll heighten to rank 5. You might as well just prepare your favorite spell in a rank 5 slot instead, and save a level 8 feat.

Then add in Bond Conservation. Okay, now you could then Drain to do one rank 6 spell, next round do a rank 4 spell that gets heightened to 5, then the round after do a rank 2 spell that gets heightened to 5, and then nothing.

Is that really worth a level 8 and then a level 10 feat slot? Your level 10 slot is competing with Quickened Casting, Overwhelming Energy, and honestly just multiclass archetype feats, since those tend to have some really good stuff in the level 8-10 range.

Ascalaphus wrote:

My first reaction is "that can't be right", but it could be possible yeah.

A couple of details though;

* Abilities that talk about "your most recent action was X" are intended to be "your most recent action THIS TURN was X". That still works, but it means that Bond Conservation has to be the last action of turn 1, not the first one of turn 2.

I’d quibble this.

Bond Conservation is a spellshape feat, and as such follows the spellshape rules

spellshapes wrote:

Actions with the spellshape trait tweak the properties of your spells. You must use a spellshape action directly before casting the spell you want to alter. If you use any action (including free actions and reactions) other than casting a spell directly after, you waste the benefits of the spellshape action. The benefit is also lost if your turn ends before you cast the spell. Any additional effects added by a spellshape action are part of the spell's effect, not of the spellshape action itself.

It still seems to be that Bond Conservation needs to happen as you cast the spell itself, with a backwards looking trigger condition. Or else Bond Conversation itself wouldn’t really work at all, regardless of the interaction mentioned here.

Interesting, yeah they kinda painted themselves into a corner there.

My first reaction is "that can't be right", but it could be possible yeah.

A couple of details though;

* Abilities that talk about "your most recent action was X" are intended to be "your most recent action THIS TURN was X". That still works, but it means that Bond Conservation has to be the last action of turn 1, not the first one of turn 2.

* You can still only use Arcane Bond once per day. You can keep repeating it with Bond Conservation, but once that's done you're done for the rest of the day. So this is good for one combat only.

So although it looks powerful at first, I think this is limited enough that it's actually not "too good to be true";

* It's only once per day.
* It's at one rank below your maximum.
* You're paying a spell of that rank for it in advance.
* You must have already used one of the spells you want to keep reusing before starting this.
* You have to keep using bond-spells or the combo ends.
* It costs two level 8 feats, which makes it fairly pricy, and available from level 10+ only.
* You're a sitting duck (Haste can help. R7 Haste is going to be available at level 13.)
* Many encounters are decided in the first 1-3 rounds, which means that infinite spells of a rank below your max, aren't that relevant.

It's limited and it's sufficiently priced, so the power level isn't insane. I do like the combo though, because it gives you what I'd call "bossfight insurance". During most of the adventuring day, you can be a bit more aggressive with how many spells you cast from slots. And then if you end up in the big fight of the day, you can bring all of them back again for an encore performance.

Normally, in a fight, I try to open with some powerful spells to give the party an advantage, and then when the balance of the fight is shifted to our side, I finish up with cantrips to conserve spell slots. With this, once per day you can do that with actual slots instead. And the difference at level 10 between a rank 4 slot spell and a rank 5 cantrip is getting serious.

I usually still wouldn't open the fight with this combo though, because you have to keep going, and if it looks like the big fight, I'd wanna open with a rank 5 spell instead.

I think it's just a small error. Compare it to Divine Wrath:

Critical Failure The creature takes full damage and is sickened 2; while it's sickened, it's also slowed 1.

You could *design* a vampire with a rank 8 dominate if you wanted. But if you just wrote "dominate" without anything else, it'd be the base rank of the spell.

Innate *cantrips* heighten automatically as normal, but for other spells, it has to be an explicit decision.

I'm about to start running chapter two as well, and I'm also looking at how to fit the timeline.

The way I think I'll approach it is that Salathiss doesn't go directly from infiltrating the Magaambya to taking over Asanda's. The academy knows there were some serpentfolk and for a while they're on high alert; Salathis lies low. A whole year might pass. Then Salathiss infiltrates Asanda's manor and start commissioning a second wood golem and all that, and things start happening. All part of some complicated v2.0 scheme for him to get access to the Egg, but then he gets sidetracked playing Asanda.

Meanwhile I'm gonna sprinkle in a bunch more non-Froglegs, non-Salathiss missions in the city and on campus. Because right now it bothers me that every unrelated mission turns out not to be unrelated. It's too convenient.

On campus, I've gone with a bit of student rivalry between the old cohort (Esi and pals) and the newcomers (the anadi, and maybe some of the book three students). It's a lighthearted rivalry that mostly manifests in them trying to outdo each other in school projects and such. I'm adding some notes of "cosy fantasy" to this campaign because that's what my players enjoy.

I've also abstracted the amount of downtime a bit, to "aside from spending time studying so you can make study checks, there's also time for extracurricular projects". Some of the PCs are designing new magic or alchemical items, some are dealing with their Tragic Backstory™ and so on.

"Contradiction" is a bit too strong a term for it. But there's a discrepancy, and you could argue which line best represents the RAI. Unlike fireball with this one I'm not 100% sure it's impersonal energy that couldn't distinguish friend from foe. Impersonal energies don't talk.

But I lean toward thinking it just hurts everyone in the area, the void isn't nice after all. And it's a compact area, not too hard to place without friendly fire.

I dunno if I'd call it a "house rule". It's an unclear situation and the GM has to make a decision on how to handle it. There's multiple ways to interpret it that I think are reasonable.

1) You could say that since it's clearly like a particular armor, that you use the stats for that kind of armor. But since it's a part of your body that can't be removed, it can't be destroyed, only broken. To repair it, you could do anything that could restore hit points to a creature (like Treat Wounds or Heal) and target the body armor.

2) You could rule that it can't be separately targeted, and just deals HP damage to the character.

2a) If the effect would normally deal damage to both the character and the armor, you may decide that you only do damage once. Similar "both targets in the area" situations like a summoner and eidolon also only take damage once.

3) You could rule that it just doesn't work that way. It's not real armor and doesn't get damage that way. Sometimes, a PC just happens to have the perfect ability to deal with that kind of enemy. You don't have to block that.

Another way to go is Rogue. It has a lot to offer to casters:

- you get light armor proficiency. By level 13 you might want to switch to unarmored, but it really helps to get safely through the lower levels.

- there are some really good rogue feats you can pick up, particularly Mobility. As a caster, if an enemy with Reactive Strike is bullying you, just... walk away. Without getting punished.

- the archetype also lets you pick up Master Reflex saves and Deny Advantage, which helps when being mobbed by rogue-like enemies.

- the Skill Mastery feats are also pretty cool, really moving you up to a primary skill monkey character

- if you like making spell attacks, the Surprise Attack feature you get, along with the Dread Striker feat, can make ranged attacks work pretty well.

@Deriven

So there's a few things that I think play into why this troll did so poorly.

- The players all succeeded in their stealth checks? PF2 doesn't impose distance penalties on Perception anymore. There's a solid chance that stealth checks against a higher level monster fail, simply because higher level means high Perception score. And each sneaking PC needs to check, unless they're using Quiet Allies. Even so, with Quiet Allies you're still using the worst Stealth modifier in the party. Invisibility helps a bit, makes it hard for enemies to see you, but numerically speaking, doesn't make it easier to sneak up quietly.

- The players got to pre-buff (haste). Did the spellcasting alert enemies? You could use Subtle Spell spellshape I guess, but if you didn't, then spellcasting isn't quiet. If you do it really far away so that it should be out of earshot, sure, but then you're spending some actions just closing in. And remember that Haste actions can't be used to Sneak.

- Was there that much open ground that the troll had to cross? It's possible of course, but at that point you could analyse that the terrain isn't a neutral factor, it's a factor in favor of the players. A troll that's only strong in melee in a wide open space, fighting ranged PCs, has a terrain disadvantage.

I think trolls are typically more of a mountain/dungeon/cave/forest kinda monsters. But there's a lot of variants. If you wanted to use this kind of terrain, maybe you should design a "savannah troll" that gets Pounce and a high base speed?

I have to say though, that I haven't had that much luck with trolls as a GM either. The regeneration gimmick is a bit played out, it's fairly easy to do fire or acid damage. Pretty often monsters with regeneration also get a weakness against the damage type that shuts off the regen, and as you mention the impact of weakness is pretty high. Since fire regen+weakness is so very easy to match, the monster ends up more vulnerable than a monster that didn't have the weakness or regeneration.

Oh yeah, taking notes AFTER the game session is something I wish I'd do more of.

I think the most useful thing is to make sure you really understand the plot of the adventure you're GMing, whether that's an adventure you wrote yourself or a published one. If you really "get it", then it's also easier to answer unexpected questions, or to know that the room the PCs are in contains an important clue.

A mindset shift that I like is going from "how to I keep the players from guesssing to soon", is to go to "okay, so where are my opportunities to reveal bit by bit what the plot is?"

A mystery that the players never find out about might as well not exist. As a GM, your goal is to create opportunities for the players to find out about what's going on, not to try to prevent them from figuring it out.

When the adventure is finished, players should understand the story behind it. It'd be disappointing to have fought a bunch of monsters and collected loot, but not really understand why it all happened.

So I'd view an investigator character as just one more channel that you as a GM can use to drizzle information onto the players. If they're searching a room, think to yourself, "could there be a clue to the plot here?" and if you come up with one, give it.