Ascalaphus's page

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.

No.

Longer answer: Trick Magic Item and Scroll Thaumaturgy are separate abilities, and don't really interact with each other.

You can try to use a scroll with Trick Magic Item. This requires spending an action on TMI, making a skill check for Arcana, Religion etc, and if all that goes well, you get a DC that's not particularly good because it starts at just your level, trained if you're a master in the skill, and expert if you're legendary in the skill.

Or, you use Scroll Thaumaturgy. You don't need to spend any action on Trick Magic Item because you're not using it. You don't need to make a skill check to see if you can use the scroll. And the DC is based on your class DC, which you're at least Trained in.

There's a theoretical situation where you'd have a higher Wisdom/Intelligence than Charisma and are master in a skill and not yet expert in thaumaturge class DC (which you get at level 9) in which you might just maybe get a slightly higher DC with trick magic item, but that requires you to be actually having an unusually low charisma, which is not really a strong idea for a thaumaturge.

I think you're on to something.

The school/curriculum has a lot of flavor potential, but you don't want every wizard from the same school to be the same.

The thesis makes for another big thing to build flavor around, but again you don't want all wizards with the same thesis to feel the same.

But combining school X thesis, you get a lot of different wizards, while keeping the main character building choices of the class quite clear.

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And yeah, making spell substitution a core feature feels right. Wizard is thematically "the" preparation&adaptation class. Clerics and druids get to prepare from their whole list. It'd be a good contrast if wizards got to change their mind more easily.

It's just as powerful as the fighter's Reactive Strike. And when the rogue gets Opportune Backstab, that's even more "outrageously powerful".

By level 6-8, all martial classes have the opportunity to get a powerful reaction. Champions and fighters just get it early.

Quite often when using RK in combat, it's because you want to know something about the boss monster. The boss monster is scary and you want to find out something that makes it easier.

But the boss monster is probably 1-3 levels higher than you, so the RK check DC is going to be kinda hard.

With that in mind, I think the GM should really not pile on extra artificial difficulty like making you guess which skill to use.

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I also think as GMs you really don't need to worry so much about the players knowing a lot about the enemy. Even if you know good stuff about the monster, you still need to actually hit DCs / make your saves and all that.

I'd worry much more if players start saying like "well gosh, the thing that really works against this monster is rolling high" or "don't bother using RK, it doesn't work, just hit it harder".

If simple brute violence is the only thing you know works against a monster, all fights become very samey. If players actually know stuff about enemies, it makes it possible to use more varied tactics per fight.

The non-combat part of the game is pretty important. Skill challenges and such earn you a lot of loot and other rewards. And many skill challenges are designed so that multiple characters need to earn successes to get the best outcome. So, it's not just the skill monkey character that does all the work out of combat, or the face character that does all the talking.

As a martial, I think a solid approach is to pick one mental stat as your favorite, and put boosts in it an take the related skills. So in your case, pick up wisdom skills like Nature, Survival, Religion and Medicine.

If you can manage to get at least a +2 in it at level 1, and just increase it every five levels, that's good enough that you can contribute decently to various skill challenges.

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The "every martial has one favorite mental stat" is a pretty smooth way to do things. Barbarians often like wisdom (nature skills) or charisma (intimidation and being a tribal leader). Rangers like their wisdom/nature skills. Swashbucklers of course go for the flashy charisma stuff. Fighters and rogues can go in any direction - intelligence works well with item Crafting and shield Repair. Champions get a lot out of charisma, since being obviously the chosen one of your deity is a good social starting point, but they also like having shields in good repair.

I think it'd be really cool if they used a Numeria book to show how that tech is different from what you'd have in Starfinder. In Starfinder a lot of the tech is new, or at least people know what an object is supposed to be. In Numeria you might get a lot more stuff like people cutting up big plastic vats to repurpose them as lightweight plate armor.

Just started reading, but this is VERY cool.

Tridus wrote:

Dubious Scholar wrote:

This is a bit more of a stretch, but... weapons with finesse+maneuver traits should be allowed to use dexterity on the roll.

Finesse weapons already pay a price in damage output to let dex be used for accuracy, but maneuvers are strength based. It seems like the pairing of finesse+trip is kind of at odds with itself as a result.

DEX is already a very good ability score. It doesn't need to be able to do yet another thing. If you want to be good at those, that's a reason to invest in some STR.

Dex is very good as an ability score, sure. It contributes to half your defenses, ranged accuracy, and multiple useful skills. But... there's ways for strength to substitute for dex on both AC and reflex saves - the big gap in combat is in ranged attacks alone, and there's definitely ways around that (Spirit Warrior is especially good at it). If anything, str is better than dex in the context of martial classes during combat at lower levels (I'd also give str a slight edge on skills because athletics is easier to apply to enemies in most cases)

I suppose also this could arguably fall under the GM discretion on using alternate stats for skills anyways - is tripping someone with a whip really more based on strength than dexterity in getting it to tangle their foot up at the wrong moment?

I don't really expect anything to happen on this, it's just something that feels like it could be better? You have weapons that are basically tagged for use by dex builds with a trait that pushes you towards str instead.

I don't want to get into a back and forth on this - this thread is for bringing to attention topics, not for extended discussion.

But on this particular topic, I think you're not gonna get what you're asking for. Paizo actually wrote errata in the opposite direction to prevent this. In early prints of the premaster it was more ambiguous if you could for example use a whip to trip with dexterity, and they nailed down the language to prevent it by saying finesse only applied to attack rolls and while trip was an attack that involved a roll, it wasn't an "attack roll".

I'm a big fan of The Alexandrian, who's been writing and foraying into youtube gamemastery advice. A particularly relevant episode is Calling in the Big Guns;

A unique challenge to running urban campaigns is figuring out what happens if the PCs, confronted with some horrible crime or circumstance, do the logical thing and seek help from powerful allies.

The video is well worth watching (15m), but there's a couple of key ideas in it that I think apply a lot to this discussion;

* At some point the PCs are going to run into an issue that is big and serious, and it just plain makes sense to take it to the authorities.
* But neither the GM or players want the authorities to take over and the PCs to be completely sidelined.

He goes on to discuss six different styles for achieving a much more satisfying outcome. A common trend in them is this: taking the issue to the authorities is a good thing, and should be validated in some way, but that doesn't mean the story ends for the PCs.

For example: there's a statue attacking people with lethal force. Okay, yeah that's pretty problematic, thanks for telling me. Let's turn this into a learning opportunity. I want you to deal with this statue, but I'll be standing by in case it gets out of hand. Also, let's review the magical theory of constructs, so that you can properly prepare for this fight.

Another one is to establish that powerful NPCs have big responsibilities. While they care about the issues the PCs bring up, that doesn't mean they have enough time to handle them. This is an opportunity to lift the curtain a bit and show that the faculty might be quietly handling some big crisis that they don't want to worry the population at large about. While they're doing that, they need the PCs to handle the new problem, but the faculty can give them some advice, and maybe a powerful scroll or too with just the right thing on it.

In these examples, the players are taking an issue to an authority figure who genuinely cares, and who validates that they did the right thing by bringing in the information. But the rest of the adventure isn't gonna be yanked out of the players' hands. They're going to be better off for having done this - face the monster with a bit more information and story context.

So players don't have to "play dumb" to get to actually play the adventure instead of delegating it entirely to their higher ups.

I don't think it's gonna break your game to allow it, but I also don't think it's something that NEEDS to change for everyone.

Personally the thing I'd like to see changed is giving access to uncommon ancestry weapons to characters of that ancestry automatically. Currently it's hinted that the GM could allow that, but that's not definite enough for PFS.

Like, most elves that would really care about using a curve blade are already proficient in it (post-remaster rogues, in particular). They don't actually need the feat. But if you want one in PFS you have to pay the tax to gain access.

This goes back to a lot and I mean a LOT of forum/rules discussion about Battle Medicine and how many hands it needs. Use the search feature if you really want to read several thousand posts arguing about it :P

What it came down to was that way back in the first print run of PF2, you needed two hands to use a medkit, presumably one to hold stuff and the other to apply. Or maybe none, because how some traits were printed or items were listed or not listed as needed. It was all a bit vague and caused a lot of arguments.

Needing 0 hands to use Battle Medicine seemed a bit implausible. Needing two hands to use it seemed so harsh that it was basically unusable because it's so expensive in action economy. Because it would mean:
- dropping or stowing a weapon and maybe a shield
- grabbing a medkit
- using it
- putting it back
- getting your weapon/shield back into action

Eventually they narrowed it down to needing only 1 hand if you were wearing the medkit instead of holding it in your hand. Basically, you grab a bandaid from your shirt pocket and slaw it onto someone. Done. So you don't need to spend extra actions stowing your medkit anymore, because you're wearing them ready for quick access.

However, you do still need to spend any actions re-gripping two-handed weapons and all that. That's part of the balancing of different weapon usage styles. On the one hand a two-handed weapon hits harder. On the other hand, going one-handed leaves you more flexible to do stuff like battle medicine or using potions.

With normal Grab, yeah, you could use Liberating Step after the damage, before the monster can take its next action to Grab, thus putting the ally out of reach.

Liberating Step is a pretty good reaction. It's not as obvious how good it is compared to say, Retributive Strike, but it's intended to be just as awesome. Working as intended :)

Baarogue makes some more good points about Improved Grab. It does mean that Liberating Step is still quite good against it, but that it doesn't completely foil it like it can foil the weaker ability. Again, looks like working as intended to me.

Agree with Baarogue. The Quick Capture ability is a bit different than regular Grab/Improved Grab abilities.

Grab/Improved Grab trigger after a hit, and then then you can as a normal/free action try to grapple. Quick Capture on the other hand includes an automatically successful grapple as part of the strike's effect. Also relevant is that this is when the strike hits, so before even getting around to rolling damage.

Now, there are two triggers that you could use to use Liberating Step:
- the fighter becomes grabbed, which happens as soon as the hit result is announced
- the fighter takes damage, which happens after damage is rolled (so, later)

But one of them is a much better choice for the champion to use than the other.

If the champion reacts to the grab, the damage still happens, because we already know the hit happened. But he doesn't get resistance, because you only get the resistance if the trigger was taking damage.

On the other hand, if the champion reacts to the damage, then the fighter does get to try to Escape & move, because there's no "if the trigger was" clause limiting that. So this is a much better choice in this case.

What makes innate spells better than traditional spells? What makes them worse? How do they differ from traditional spells?

They're, extremely literally speaking, spells you were born with; not spells you learned by practicing a class. That's not precisely correct in all cases, but it's a good general mental model for what a normal vs an innate spell is like.

Aside from the "Innate" designation, I'm not seeing any practical difference and so am beginning to wonder why the distinction exists at all.

Largely using the same mechanics as all other spells is a good thing! It means you don't need to learn a whole new set of mechanics just because gnomes know some tricks without being a spellcasting class.

Do they not provoke reactions? Do they have the concentrate and manipulate traits? Does the mere act of casting them generate observable effects?

They have the same traits as regular spells, provoke in the same way, are just as observable.

The main differences are:
- default ability is Charisma unless stated otherwise
- it doesn't give you the "Cast a Spell" or "Spellcasting" class features that you need to use various magic items.

A lot of the things I've enjoyed have already been mentioned, but there's another one I want to highlight: shared experiences.

If I'm playing a scenario with my friends over here, and later on I talk with someone on the far side of the world who's played the same adventure with their group, we get to swap stories. Which side did you pick in the dispute? How did you beat the dragon? And so forth.

You have some of that with adventure paths as well of course, but I get a lot more of it with PFS. It's one of the social side bits that I really like.

Maybe a good perspective to judge these things is: how many feats will the Before and After character differ in?

As opposed to: how many edits does it take to get from Before to After? (Which is what the book rules focus on.)

I value the first comparison more. If the Before/After builds are very similar it doesn't seem right to make someone pay through the nose for it.