Ascalaphus's page

"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.

@Deriven

The ideal scenario you've mentioned a couple of times you want was:
- big brute monster
- the environment shouldn't matter

But as you describe, your party destroys the brute before it gets near to the party. I think at some point you have to say, that there simply is no such thing as a generic, impartial environment. The environment is always there, and it's good or bad for the monster.

A dragon with a really high fly speed, is gonna be a different fight in a small room or on the wide open plains.

A kraken is gonna be different if you fight it on land, on a ship, or with everyone underwater.

A big tentacle monster in a mid size room where it has enough reach that the martials can't really prevent it from threatening the casters, is pretty different than in a much bigger room where the casters can stay way out of reach.

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Now, I've played enough adventures where you run into a monster in an environment that really really favors them and you go "well isn't THAT convenient". You don't have to get that cheesy. But fighting the kraken at sea instead of in the tavern isn't a stretch. And the dragon deciding it'd rather fight you somewhere wide open where it can use its high fly speed isn't really a stretch either.

The main problem as noticed is overwhelming action advantage on the side of the players.

So maybe add specific boss actions into the round with their own initiative.

So a turn could end like.

Player A
Dragon
Player B
Player C
Boss Action 1
Player D
Boss Action 2

So if the boss in this case be a Bog Dragon you could make the boss actions, a mist of acid, roars, a wide tail swipe, a stomp and so on.

And if the players manage to land a debilitating effect, the dragon could sacrifice the next Boss action to recover from it.

And yeah keep the higher HP, looks like the players are managing to alpha strike the boss.

Oh, sacrificing boss actions to recover from debuffs, that's an interesting idea!

That might be a really good trade-off between making the boss not invulnerable to debuffing, but also not letting the boss get completely crippled by debuffs, and still letting the players doing the debuffs feel like they make a real contribution.

It could be something like:

Recover (boss)
Try to recover from a bad condition.

For "stunned X", this pays off 2 stunned actions.

If prone, you can Stand and then Step.

If the condition could be fixed with a check (Escaping a grapple, Retch against sickened, or an effect that allows a new save at the end of the turn), attempt that check.

Else, if the condition has a duration, reduce the duration by 1 size order: permanent->day->hour->minute->round->ended. This cannot shorten a Sustained duration.

PF2 monster design seems fond of the "Hydra" attack pattern. Monsters with lots of heads/tentacles etc, tend to have three choices:

* Just regular Strikes
* A flurry where each head/claw/tentacle attacks a different character, and MAP only goes up after, and which costs 2+ actions.
* A "all heads on one PC" attack, which also costs 2+ actions, and increases MAP a lot, but you only make one attack roll and on a hit you do some bonus damage, but not as much damage as you could do with the flurry-everyone version. Roughly, you do as much damage as two Strikes, so it's still better than using basic Strikes (because the MAP goes up after).

All in all, the monster's best bang for buck is the flurry-everyone attack, but that prevents it from focus-firing a single PC too hard.

I get you don't really want to change the structure, which is valid, but 1 encounter per day where it's one enemy is inherently doomed to fail in a system like this, especially with optimisation-minded players. Even if you're unwilling to add in extra combat encounters, you might benefit from adding other events that can use up some resources.

I half disagree.

From a storytelling perspective, "you travel for a couple of days with no incidents, and then you have an encounter" is very valid. And if you have a weekday game night where you do some story progression and maybe one juicy fight, that's also a good way to have fun.

PF2 supports "we face the thing at full strength" pretty well, it doesn't lean on "we had multiple fights this day already and we're worn down" as the central way to make things hard, at least nowhere near as much as earlier editions did.

For an encounter to just be fun and work, I don't think it's as key that it really strains your resources to the limit. It should be hard enough to work up a bit of a sweat and it should be original enough to feel fresh. But that still allows a lot of other playstyles apart from classic attrition based difficulty.

That said, it does create a "okay, we beat that, now we can relax" or "we only face one monster per few days, so let's fully unload" attitude. So that's the part where I agree with you.

I think it is more of a PF2 design issue. The high level game is far, far easier than the lower level game. PF2 designers did make PF2 high level less problematic than PF1, but once you're past 13th to 15th level you really destroy solo monsters.

I think solo monsters need to be designed differently at the higher levels. The weaknesses are too high. Hit point pools too low. Ability to resist common actions like trip or grapple set too low. The whole game changes once again to the point it becomes easy mode. Not as bad as PF1, but still easy mode.

It is what it is. System mastery in nearly any game system is going to lead to these type of problems.

This is why I brought up wurms. Their Inexorable ability is pretty powerful; you can grapple them, but they'll recover in one round. It's really really hard to keep them locked down.

Obviously, not every boss should use the same "get out of debuff free" tricks and debuffing should work to some degree, otherwise you're killing the build of people who thought it was a legitimate character choice. But debuffing can also get out of hand and lock down the boss too much.

I think the issue with weaknesses is that they're kinda predictable and repetitive. When playing Age of Ashes it was just obvious that a Holy and a Frost rune were going to be really useful in almost every fight. It doesn't feel like you're being rewarded for being really discerning and well-prepared, you're just doing the obvious things.

I do think weaknesses can be fun, it's very satisfying to hit them as a player. But it'd be better if there was more variation in weaknesses and you couldn't just autopilot them as a player.

Hit points are a solid, obvious first thing to try. It's a more fun thing to do than raising AC or saves or stapling resistances/immunities. It's much nicer than the common frustration of "why should I cast spells at it, it'll crit save anyway" that you get with L+3 and L+4 enemies.

But it's not perfect. You can still run into:
- the enemy gets so swamped with debuffs that it becomes toothless
- the enemy doesn't have enough actions to get to a PC it can hurt, it gets stonewalled by PCs that have enough defenses to cope with it
- the enemy has a big bag of HP but it doesn't do all that much different from one turn to another, so hacking it down just takes a lot of time.

There's two kinds of creatures that already have some solutions to this: dragons and wurms.

Dragons tend to come with fairly strong breath weapons that have an 1d4 round cooldown, and a high fly speed. They can try just strafing the party, spending actions to stay out of reach of half the party, and coming back for more. Typically, after the first breath hit, everyone will be thinking about how to avoid the whole party being in the blast zone the second time around.

Wurms are big enough and surprisingly mobile, so melee PCs can't necessarily keep them penned in and away from the back row. They also tend to have abilities that let them just shrug off some debuffs.

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Paizo hasn't really embraced the concept of "boss monster" so much; today's boss monster is tomorrow's lieutenant and the day after it's just a mook. That works for some monsters, but it cuts a bit against the idea of giving a boss monster really "special" powers.

I'm thinking of multi-stage bosses here. It's cool for a boss to be first arrogant (with some abilities), then if he gets hurt enough to get more cautious (fighting differently) and finally to get into desperate fury mode. That's not something you want every hobgoblin to do though, just because there was a L3 hobgoblin boss in the first adventure.

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So, if we say boss monsters get some special toys, we have stuff to work with. I'm thinking roughly as a framework:

* After losing 1/3 HP, the boss switches modes. This should take
* After losing the next 1/3 HP, the boss switches modes again
* When switching modes, the boss can shake off half (rounded down) of the debuffs affecting it for free
* When switching modes the boss moves, or the battlefield is changed somehow; at any rate, it should shake up any static stand-and-fight positioning. Maybe the boss gets a surge of energy and strides (without provoking). Maybe there's an earthquake and the whole room shifts 90 degrees.
* After switching modes, the boss has some (fully charged) new abilities to use, but also loses some previous ones
* Switching modes is always very clearly noticeable to the PCs

Yeah, there should be some push and pull between player and GM, not only push or only pull.

The GM can't steamroll over the player's backstory, but the player also can't write an "unlimited" backstory that doesn't jive with the rest of the campaign.

Could anyone please clarify?

I had been saving shield block to stop massive crits and stay alive, or should it be used on smaller hits to use the hardness? My concern then is that it eats reactions that could be used for other

Yeah, using Shield Block on smaller hits works better. It's maybe a bit weird, but maybe not *that* weird.

The really, really big hit? Well you're hosed no matter what. You can try to put the shield up if it'll keep you above 0HP, but otherwise, it's a bit late.

The real profit is in using the shield against all the small hits. Instead of all the small hits grinding you down, you can use the shield to reduce them significantly (if you've been keeping your shield upgraded..)

It *is* a choice of how you spend your reactions. A reaction spent on the shield might be one you then don't have to do a Reactive Strike or for a champion reaction. Sometimes it's easy to see which way to spend your reactions is the best choice, sometimes it's harder to see. But that's part of the game: giving you choices that are not sooo obvious that they're not really choices anymore :P

From what I've seen in games, it can be a good tactic to really go for the shield. If right now you're getting hit and can use the shield well, and you don't really know if the enemy is going to trigger a reactive strike, then it can be solid to just go with the shield instead of holding out for "maybe I get to Reactive Strike". If enemies are focusing on attacking you but you can negate a lot of that, that buys time for the rest of the party. It's really a choice between "is my job to hit the most of everyone" or "is my job to hit, but also to buy time for other people to hit".

I came into this with a bit of an ambivalent mindset, because:

* I've seen some feats & abilities where you react to for example getting attacked and React by moving out of reach, which doesn't actually prevent the attack, but gets factored in as giving an AC bonus against it.

* I don't want to live in a world where overly clever wording of Ready actions to step just out of reach is how we play the game.

But the majority of the evidence does seem to point toward the "interrupted or disrupted" phrasing which is repeated several times. That "or" is load-bearing; you can be interrupted, which is not the same as disrupted, and being interrupted is bad enough to make your action fail. It's not really specified concretely what being interrupted is though, but by any reasonable standard, being killed should count.

So I guess I'm changing my stance a bit:

* The cultist trying to pull the lever but getting killed by the fighter's Reactive Strike, doesn't manage to finish it. That's just a pretty standard Reactive Strike vs. Manipulate (Interact), and we know that there must be *something* that can interrupt actions and this is a really clear candidate.

* Ready Action however, is far far far more open-ended than other reactions AND the GM is told to exercise more judgement on what is appropriate. Because it's more open-ended in possibilities than feats or precious class features, I think it should also be more limited in power. So if someone tries the "if he tries to Strike me I Step out of reach" thing, I'm ruling that as (1) the Strike can still go through and hit you (2) but you get a +2 circumstance bonus to AC against that Strike (3) of course after that Strike your Step has happened, so the next Strike they'll have to move first to get you back into reach.

@Mathmuse, re: players getting off-track

It occurs to me that we don't see nearly as much threads & rage about "railroading" as we used to say, 5 or 10 years ago.

But it's something I've gotten quite interested in as a GM: when should you railroad and when shouldn't you? Some of my players have very clearly come out and told me that they'd rather have a story that's clearly going somewhere, even if I have to give them a bit of a push to move in a direction.

There's also cases where I think "low agency" is totally fine. Chases for example: you really don't need a ton of agency in a chase. It needs to be exciting, have cool set pieces, and run fast. Deeply character-driven choices are not really what makes a chase good.

But it does feel *extremely* nice when you're running an adventure and the players are supposed to come up with an X-shaped plan for solving problem Y, and you don't really have to push them, but after a bit of discussion someone goes "why don't we try X?"

To me that feels less like "we're on rails" and more like "if you give this cart a nudge, it's likely gonna roll downhill". *Writing* a plot so that the players will themselves come up with the "expected" plan (or something sufficiently close to it) is a sign of good craftsmanship.

I think back then I was looking at it in comparison to the Onyx StoryPath game engine, where if the GM asks players to make a check and they fail, they collect Momentum points, which they can later cash in again for (...something, I don't remember).

But that worked as a brake on GMs willy-nilly asking for checks for things that you should be able to just reliably do. If the GM is asking you for checks just to tie your shoelaces you're statistically gonna fail more often than you'd do in real life. But oh, the amount of Momentum points that you'll collect!

Pathfinder and D&D have always been "success is good and failure is 100% just bad" games, while (not-so-small) indie games have experimented with "failure is bad, but there is compensation" mechanics. It's kind of adjacent to fail-forward because if you have a lot of say, "Momentum", you might be able to try some risky stunts to get out of a bad situation.

I also think monster statblocks are already like summaries, there's very little you can leave out. But I find it really useful to take a highlighter and look for the "oh, I really need to remember to use that ability" bits in there.

What I tend to do with PFS scenarios is to print out the main body of the scenario and staple it together, then print out the monster statblocks and staple those together but as a second (or third, if the adventure has two difficulty tiers) document. That solves the problem of flipping back and forth between main text (which describes how the encounter is set up) and monster stats.

I've found that a tablet (or perhaps a big phone) is really handy for showing artwork to players: just zoom in on the picture and show that. No fuss with color printing or scissors.

For stuff that isn't in the scenario, I prefer pocket editions of the rulebooks. They're more portable and they eat up less table space. Physical books tend to be easier if you want to have a player look something up than trying to talk them through finding it on Nethys. (I think reading a rule in a book also gives you a better idea of what's on the pages around it, so better context and understanding. Nethys is okay for referencing stuff you already know but books are better for learning.)

Pocket edition monster cores with post-it notes are also an option for monster statblocks.

Rituals typically have pretty high DCs (+5 above the normal level-based DC) so they're kinda risky things to try, and they tend to have ingredient costs as well.

Also, they take time, so to really benefit from them requires quite a bit of planning.

Now, what about the upsides? You don't have to be a particular class or have a particular spell in your repertoire. Although the skill checks you're rolling are often gonna correlate with caster classes anyway.

Mainly, rituals tend to produce benefits that last longer than spells, or are more exotic or powerful.

I also think a good ritual is something you do for a specific occasion or undertaking. You don't want to have a ritual that provides a nice buff that you'd do every adventuring day.

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Considering all those things, I'd still be aiming to create more low-rank rituals that are at first kinda risky, but later on will become things the players can do more reliably.

Also, (I run Strength of Thousands), I like to use rituals not as something that I'm going to write lots of ahead of time. Rather, any time I want to do something magical but there's no exact spell that does that, I just say "well one of your teachers knows a ritual for that". Or it could be something a player researches themselves to do a particular thing. And then maybe uses once ever. That's fine.

For priests it's nice to have some "signature" rituals that you use to convey the flavour of the religion. For those, I think keeping the power modest and the rank low is good, because it means you can afford to use them more. Like, blessing a granary to keep out mice can just be a rank 1 ritual that's more about showing off a civic-oriented deity. And then maybe one time the party uses it in a dungeon to disperse a rat swarm and it's cool.

I think XP vs Milestone is also a matter of taste. And I can also see it being something you pick for one campaign, but not the other.

For example, if I was doing more of a West Marches style sandbox campaign without much overall plot, XP makes a lot of sense. You spot a cave with a really scary monster in it, you decide to leave that for later when you've leveled up a bit. I think Paizo also recommended that for Abomination Vaults, which has some opportunities to sneak to the next floor or leave some bosses to deal with later.

On the other hand, adventures with more of a story-based plot can work better with milestones. You *can't* make the bossfight easier by dragging your heels and going off on sidequests until you're a level higher than the bossfight was designed for. But you also won't be a level too low for it. A lot of APs have you leveling up after finishing a big event or dungeon, which does feel like they're the logical place for it.

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Now, the locked door. If I was doing XP in this particular campaign, and enemies coming out is the fail-forward plan for if the party can't pick the lock, then I wouldn't give *more* XP for doing the fight than if you'd managed to pick the lock. Maybe these are enemies that you would have had to fight either here, or later. But if you can pick the lock you can attack them before they're properly organised: they still need to spend actions drawing weapons, moving in from another room, opening doors etcetera. If you fail to pick the lock then you lose these tactical benefits. But the adventure doesn't completely fall flat (fail forward).

These days it's also not unusual to use Milestone leveling instead of XP, at which point random fights with guards aren't really rewarding anymore.

But if that doesn't feel Failure enough - showing that the players missed treasure is a decent fail state. Maybe the players being noisy triggered the enemies disposing of evidence, running away with loot, drinking potions etc.

There's also the question of: when do you check the validity of an action? Is it all the way through doing the action, or just when you want to see if you can start the action?

For example, the cultist pulling the lever: he checks that he's in reach of the lever, then starts to Interact. The fighter does a Reactive Strike but doesn't crit, but does enough damage to kill the cultist.

Now, is the Interact aborted because the cultist isn't alive anymore to finish it? Or is it enough that he was able to commit to the action, and since you didn't crit and disrupt it, he just sags down and with his dying breath manages to pull it down?

I'm not sure the rules really answer this.

I was a bit on the fence about this, so I went digging through the books to see if that made things any clearer for me.

If an activity gets

interrupted or disrupted in an encounter (page 415), you
lose all the actions you committed to it.

When you actually go look at that section on page 415, there's a formal definition of disrupting, but not of interrupting. However, throughout the book there's frequent mentions of activities being interrupted. A lot of that is about exploration activities that get interrupted by combat etc.

And in the quote above, we have the "or". Interrupting isn't just an alternative word for disrupting. You can sabotage an action through two paths, only one of which is precisely defined, the other left as just plain English.

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So what does "interrupting" mean? I think sending someone to 0HP mid-action is a plausible candidate. Tripping them while they're doing a Sudden Charge also sounds plausible to me.

But as a counterpoint, I think I've seen quite a couple of feats and abilities that go along the lines of:

* Reaction
* Trigger: someone attacks you
* Effect: you Step away, and gain a +2 circumstance bonus against the triggering attack

The way I read that is, you're moving away, but even if you step completely out of reach, you don't prevent the attack completely. But being on the way out does improve your defenses.

Trouble is, I can't seem to find the examples. I'm so sure I've seen a couple of them, both as monster abilities but also as class/ancestry options. Just can't find them.

But those would be counterexamples showing that you don't constantly check "is this still a valid target" but instead check validity when announcing the action.

The best I could find is Dodging Roll. You might think that rolling out of range of an effect that's in the process of doing damage to you could count as interrupting it, but apparently not completely.

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Narratively, I can really see both as possibilities.

Interrupt: you kill the cultist before he can pull the lever.

Alternative: you kill the cultist, but because you didn't do it flawlessly (no crit) the cultist sinks down to the ground and pulls the lever down with him.

So the alchemist is supplying the monk with mutagens, and the sorcerer is supplying the monk with haste.. it seems like the players have decided that this is going to be their team plan. It IS teamwork, but the shape of the teamwork is that they all decided to pitch into making one of them very tanky.

Normally this is more something I'd see in the 18-20 levels of a campaign, but I guess here it's at level 10, but at an AP that runs to level 10. But there's a moment in a campaign where as a GM you can just decide "well, the players are doing some broken stuff now, but we're also in the last stretch to the end of the campaign, so just let them finish on a high..."

I'd care a lot more about this if I was still in the middle of the campaign, than at the end of it.

I'd also consider telling people "yeah, that was clever, but now you should challenge yourself to find a different gimmick for the next character".

I suppose this would lend itself well to a book that isn't "objective truth from the Paizo head offices".

For example, the Dominion chapter could be written as a correspondence between some scholars who all believe somewhat different things about the Dominion, comparing reports, sightings, rumors etc. As a reader, it'd quickly become clear that none of the authors really knows for sure, and besides they don't really agree with each other.

I see this more as a tradeoff of realism vs both practicality and fun.

In your typical action movie, do you see people go to the bathroom at realistic frequency? No, not a lot. Any time they do, something "happens" (a conversation with someone, or a murder attempt). People going to the bathroom and nothing out of the ordinary happening is not interesting, so it's left out of the movie.

Dungeon maps also make choices like that. There's not a lot of dungeon maps with toilets on them. Or broom closets.

On the other hand, if you want a fight that's an enjoyable difficulty, you maybe don't want to have the monsters from the other encounter joining in (that'd be unenjoyably hard).

You can do a couple of things as a writer:
- come up with a reason why they don't, such as "there's a lot of noise so they don't hear it"
- put in a lot of empty rooms in between rooms with monsters
- make each fight a lot easier, because you often trigger multiple fights together

All of those are fine, but they're also a hassle. You get tired of having to come up with excuses why monsters don't hear anything. You want the dungeon map to fit on the gaming table. You don't want to use only weak enemies.

So you can also just say "well eff it, let's just be a bit less realistic so we don't have to work so hard to have some fun".

Yeah, the comparison with laughing shadow is pretty relevant. This should be different enough. Which does cause some challenge because if both of them deliver a spell into a flank, one of them adding weapon damage through spellstrike and the other sneak attack, how big of a difference is there really?

I really like the idea of making off-guard also help against saves, because that makes this feel like "still a rogue, still obsessed with off-guard". And that gives you a definite bias toward melee, without absolutely forcing it.

If we go the class archetype way, we could do something like:
- pick a tradition and a key stat (maybe with some restrictions, no arcane-wis?)
- there are basic spellcasting feats etc, using the standard caster multiclass archetype building blocks
- there can be some unique archetype feats as well
- there may be some things you lose from the rogue chassis (perhaps slowed weapon progression) while your casting progression pulls close to war priest/magus levels

So you're not taking a "bard" or "cleric" archetype, you're taking "occult" or "divine".

Compared to a magus, you're not getting the high-level spell slots, but you might get a lot more of the mid and low level ones, emphasizing the utility/trickery aspects. You're going a bit broader but not as tall.

Some ideas for unique feats/chassis things:
- once per day pulling a scroll out of nowhere that "you'd been carrying around all along" with just the right utility (arcane).
- getting sanctified and a top-rank Heal/Harm font (divine)
- a better version of the usual "breadth" feat that gives you a lot more slots of your lower ranks
- getting some kind of critical specialization effects on your spells
- easily adding subtle traits to spells (occult?)

Well eldritch trickster is definitely an itch people want to scratch. There's a legitimate theme here to design with.

The problems I see with it are:
- Your proficiency will start to fall behind your proficiency with weapons. Why are you using spells when your weapons are more accurate?
- Applying sneak attack at range takes considerable work, especially if you want to be able to do it reliably.

On the other hand, you have a lot of stuff casters would envy; the rogue class chassis with its saves and perception is really good. It's like on a line from cloistered cleric, war priest, harbinger - the eldritch trickster is another step further toward full martial. If you want to raise the quality of the caster, maybe you need to pay for it with a reduced chassis.

Maybe this is a good case for a class archetype, in the sense of actually trading out some class features? (I am in favor of making class archetypes non-blocking tho.)

I feel like this book could also cover oozes.

I imagine chapters about...
- the algollthu family
- the Dominion family
- oozes
- aberrations from spaaace
- aberrations from the darklands
- squicky things you can play
- tools against squicky things

You can quietly drop most measurements anyway.

One square is just one square. A speed of 25 is a speed of 5 squares. A range of 60 is just 12 squares.

We stopped measuring weight in pounds or grams, switching to bulk. De facto, we only care about distance in squares anyway.

I do think there's room for more Tian flavored archetypes, which could definitely scratch the itch.

Instead of for example making ninjas illusion-gish types (and disappointing the people who were hoping for a nonmagical stealth class), make two archetypes. One of them could be an "Shenmen disciple" that goes the more supernatural route. Another one could be a "Gokan dagger" that's focused on more urban parkour kinda stuff. And a "Songbai samurai" could focus more on being an honorable warrior while a "Chu Ye disciple" could be more of a grim warrior with supernatural backing kinda type.

A big advantage of going the archetype road is that it combines well with existing classes. You could already make a "ninja" with a rogue or monk, you just might one or two tidbits of stuff extra to get it complete.

Why should that be a reaction, and not just a free action? You're not really reacting to any particular thing.

I do think some kind of "Aha!" reaction could fit on the investigator, but then it should be something where you respond to the opponent's action. I do think most classes, especially martial ones, should have a reaction of some kind. Usually they're defensive ones (shield block) or aggressive-defensive ones (reactive strike, champion reactions). Of course for investigators they should be a bit brainy.

Another thing: on the one hand it makes kinda sense to lean heavily on Recall Knowledge for investigators. But on the other hand, the Thaumaturge is already there doing that. Whatever investigators do, should feel substantially different. But on the other hand, I do think we need some of the same things thaumaturges do: not caring about creature rarity. In particular, I think investigators should not care about the creature being Unique. Maybe their flavor of RK should be much more about "what I pieced together about this individual" while other classes focus more on "what we know about this kind of creature".

When I played an investigator I was sometimes annoyed, but at other times I was kinda enjoying that the class really pushes you to focus very much on paying attention to clues and plot, because you really want to make sure you're on the right Case. If you have a good sense of "we're now trying to figure out this bit" then it becomes easier to pick the right kind of Leads so that you can get the free action DaS.

That's on the one hand kind of an aggravating high-pay-attention playstyle, on the other hand that's kinda the attraction of the class. You're really trying to think ahead about what, based on everything you've seen, you think is coming next.

I think investigators need more "things to do" in combat, beyond merely striking. Defense stratagem is an interesting concept, but if you can't do hostile actions, then you're not left with very much to do that combat round.

I also think if you're not going to be Striking, you need a very VERY good plan about how you contribute to the party in combat. Classic answers are "cast combat spells" or "do kineticist blasts", but both of these still deal damage. In order for the party to defeat enemies, they need to deal damage; anyone not doing damage should be doing something extremely useful instead. A cleric casting Heal to make sure the barbarian stays in the fight is a good example. A wizard spending one action to move out of danger, another to recall knowledge, and a third to cast Guidance, is just a waste of space.

The RAW investigator struggles with this, because if you really lean on DaS/Strategic Strike, you're neglecting the regular to-hit stats for Intelligence, but only for one Strike with a middling damage bonus per round. That just doesn't cut it.

I do think investigators could be a class that's a bit less about dealing damage than others, but then the class should in itself have really good valuable ways to spend your actions. Doing the odd Demoralize or Recall Knowledge isn't enough. Having to take an archetype for Electric Arc isn't good either; it should be more significant and it should come from the class itself.

I do like the symmetry of Defense Stratagem: if you roll the d20 and it's good, you attack, and if it's bad, you don't attack but force the enemy to have a bad turn too. It might need some more polish but the seed idea is interesting. But you do need something else to do during that turn with your actions.

Just dumping some thoughts on this;

Investigator as an archetype is a reasonable idea It's a bit like the Vigilante: that was a PF1 class that became an archetype and I think that was a good move. It makes it easy to say "in this masked superhero campaign, everyone gets vigilante as free archetype" for example. And it makes it less of a "this class mimics other classes, but you trade out some power for a cape".

I think the investigator is similar: a lot of classes can fit it in their flavor to "investigate". A wizard can be a researcher. A cleric can be a wise woman who knows just what questions to ask a troubled soul. A bard can be a schmooze who tricks hidden traitors into betraying themselves. A ranger can search for forensic evidence.

So I think turning it into a big archetype that lets any class focus more on investigation, would also be a realistic path.

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"Meta" feats are not everyone's cup of tea like That's Odd. It's jarring to some GMs. I also think that sort of "plot power on steroids" is actually overkill for most written adventures, since they're basically already doable with regular abilities and regular players asking the right questions from time to time. Often to the point where villains will just reveal themselves, even without much investigation at all from the players.

Those sort of meta investigation abilities feel like they belong more in an indie style game that's more built around narrative co-control.

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I don't think investigators should dominate all skills at the same time I think it's much better if they're very good at a limited set of skills. Sherlock needs Watson for medical expertise, Sherlock isn't also the best doctor in the world. This is also why I'm not a fan of these "trained in everything" sort of abilities. You're in a party of about four PCs, so as a skill monkey if you're really good at about 40%, that's probably about as much of the pie you should be taking.

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I don't think Intelligence *has* to be their key skill You could be a wisdom or charisma based sleuth too, plenty of fictional examples.

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"Attack roll preview" has been tried and isn't really great It looked interesting on paper but it's kinda annoying in practice. And with the recent errata taking away bombs, it's even less interesting. I think we might as well just come up with something completely different.

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I feel investigators should tend toward light weapons which can be tricky to implement, just look at how much people try to find a way to let Implement's Empowerment count with weapons that it isn't meant for. But there should be some way that investigators have a decent combat contribution that just doesn't really gain that much from Strength.

It could be something somewhat odd, like:

Mastermind Strikes (class feature)
When using agile or finesse weapons or unarmed attacks, you use your highest mental attribute as to-hit bonus instead of strength/dexterity, and your second-highest mental attribute as damage bonus instead of strength (on any attack where you would be allowed to add strength to damage).

Deceptive Maneuvers (feat)
Through misdirection you get your foes off-balance. You can use Deception instead of Athletics for combat maneuvers.

I like the overall idea, but somehow it reads a bit complex to me. Maybe that's just in the phrasing though. But we don't want to get back into 3.x stereotypes of a 2-page flowchart to explain grappling, when it actually wasn't quite so dramatically complex if you understood it.

Maybe the initial paragraph should do more to explain what you're trying to do and what will sort of happen, instead of having to reconstruct it from the success/failure entries. I realize that IS Paizo's style for writing these things, but I think that works best only for really simple effects. For something a bit more involved like this, it can be obscure.

For something that doesn't come up very often, but can be life-or-death when it does, you really want the rules to be easy to intuit on a quick reading. Otherwise it'll (at best) kill the momentum of the scene.

I've been thinking about this change and at first I didn't like it, but I've come around a bit.

We're a small lodge, we usually run 1-2 tables. Some players have been there from the start and although they GM from time to time, they've been a player far more, so by now they've played almost everything. But, some of that was back in season 1 and it's not super fresh in their memory. We also get new players who haven't played anything yet.

This new policy makes it a lot easier to do something like "let's do a Season 1 metaplot series" without a lot of puzzling about who needs to use replays for that.

I think it's significant though that this change is coming now that we have a significant back catalogue of scenarios that we ran so very long ago, that they'd be fresh enough now if we ran them again.

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I think it's good that a fair bit of leeway is allowed to organizers how they want to handle things. Sometimes PFS has had policies handed down that seemed very tailored toward some problem that was happening in some lodges in the US of a certain scale, that weren't an issue for us. Or a policy made sense there but it caused problems on our scale. In particular, the new narrow level bands are more problematic for a 1-2 table lodge because you might very well have a situation where half the players have a level 2 character, and half have a level 3 character.

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I'm also looking at what this means for PFS Tracker. Originally it was made to help set up tables when replay rules were really strict. Over time more evergreens showed up and more ways to replay showed up, and I've adapted the ranking algorithm to that.

By the time season 8 rolls around I'm aiming to change the ranking algorithm/UI again, to make it easy to see how "fresh" a scenario is for players.

I was thinking a bit about how I'd go about it. I'd want to just make a big split between "combat effectiveness" stats and "skill challenge" stats.

For the skill side, we could maybe just keep the current attributes, dropping constition since it doesn't affect any skills. That means you'd have left over:

Strength
- bulk capacity
- armor penalty
- Athletics

Dexterity
- acrobatics
- stealth
- thievery

Intelligence
- arcana
- crafting
- occultism
- society
- lore
- extra skills (maybe not anymore?)
- extra languages (maybe move to Charisma?)

Wisdom
- perception
- medicine
- nature
- religion
- survival

Charisma
- deception
- diplomacy
- intimidation
- performance

The attributes aren't totally equally valued here, but they're not miles off either.

And on the combat side, you'd have Aspects, which you pick completely separately from Attributes:
- melee to-hit bonus
- melee, thrown and propulsive damage bonus
- ranged & finesse to-hit bonus
- spell attack, spell DC, class DC
- hit points
- fortitude
- reflex
- will

You could just give people a sack of points to spread over aspects, but I think you want to ensure that people have to spread them a bit. You can do a diminishing returns setup, where a +4 in one accent costs more than +2s in two accents. It could be tied to Ancestry/Background/Class, where each of those gives you some hardwired accents that you can't move, and then you get more accents to flexibly place where you want them.

Oooh that's interesting. I do really like the idea that wands and staves see a lot more use.

I'm not wild about the term "trait" since that's already widely used for another key game concept. How about "accent" or "aspect"?

Re: Intelligence. It's already the case that high intelligence sets you up with a bunch of skills, but those depreciate in quality because at higher level you do need some expert+ upgrades to keep up with DCs. Now, some classes also get low base amount of skills because they're expected to have high intelligence (wizard). Can we do something useful in this area?

It'd be interesting if you can define it as a Strike, so that it's compatible with Haste.

Aren't you making things really complicated by trying to link a premaster thing (components) to a remaster thing (subtle)?

Premaster: the book explicitly says you don't need a free hand for somatic components.

Remaster: nowhere does it say you need a free hand for spellcasting, not even in the manipulate trait. Quite a few other manipulate actions do say they require free hands, so it's reasonable to conclude a manipulate action only requires free hands if it says so.

There are some spells that clearly wouldn't work as intended if you invent a requirement for free hands that isn't actually in the written rules. A classic sword and board champion would have a hard time using Lay on Hands for example. A wizard holding a staff would have a hard time using a scroll.

And this isn't limited to spellcasting. Can you use Interact without free hands? You might think at first, no, you need a free hand to open a door. But do you really? Haven't you ever wrangled open a door while holding some dinnerware? And remember that Interact is also used for stowing stuff. It'd be crazy if you couldn't stow a weapon to free up a hand because some overly strict reading of the rule said that the hand needed to be free to do that manipulate action.

Something that I think is worthwhile to strive for, is to break out of the trap of some attributes (or their replacements) being too dominant. Right now, that's dex/con/wis for AC/saves/HP and your to-hit stat (varies by class, not always actually your key stat).

If people could pick five out of ten widgets, but three of those widgets are seen as essential to survival and the fourth as essential to just being effective, then there's only one really free choice.

I think this relates to the difference between point-buy and class based RPG systems. A problem that point-buy systems always have to watch out for is people just putting all their points into a few "essential" things. A vampire campaign where one PC puts everything into Fortitude has a problem, because anything that can scratch that PC will just turn the other PCs into a bloody smear. In Pathfinder, we also have this a bit (because current attributes are a bit point-buy-like): a party where some PCs take Dex and wear armor and others ignore it, isn't gonna work that well.

But PF2 does go further than a lot of point-buy systems in limiting the damage here. You can't just say "I'll take no skills at all so I can take more strength" for example.

It's pretty hard to convince people that you don't have to put boosts into dex/con/wis because at some point you're gonna have to make some hard saving throws and failing them is gonna feel bad. But it makes it hard to make a diplomatic wizard you know?

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A variant I've been thinking about is when your attributes don't apply to saving throws / AC / to-hit / spell DCs and such. If they were mainly there for skills, and some other sub-critical stuff like bulk limits.

Then for the combat-y things you could maybe give people 2-3 picks from:
- emphasize melee offense
- emphasize ranged offense
- emphasize save X
- emphasize HP
- emphasize AC
- emphasize spells

So a barbarian isn't asked to choose between Will save and Occultism and a wizard isn't picking between HP and Diplomacy.

Hello, I have question about stance and "natural" unarmed attack.

For example, if a character with an ancestry has a Tail 1d6 bludgeoning (sweep, trip, unarmed, brawling group) as unarmed attack.

And with an archetype thlipit contestant, the character gains a lash melee unarmed attack that is in the flail weapon group, deals 1d4 bludgeoning damage, and has the grapple and reach traits.

Is it cumulative or only one of both ?

They don't stack. You have two different ways to attack, with different stats.

So you can either strike with your d6 brawling tail, OR with your d4 flail reach "tail". But you don't get d6 together with reach and both brawling and flail at the same time.

Probably a holdover from an earlier draft where the tail was the vorpal part?

It really irks me that the ranger has so little support for unarmed weapons. A lizardfolk ranger sounds like a cool idea until you realize your class isn't going to give you a cool feat to double claw-swipe or anything.

I think attributes are fun IF there's enough varied arrays that are all viable, so that there's really something to choose from. I like my high strength sorcerer-champions that enjoy tripping enemies, and my high-charisma druids that make friends with all the animals and are fun at parties.

The main problem I see with attributes is when you get nudged to focus on the same array all the time (key stat + dex/con/wis) because it feels like anything less than maxing your defensive stats is going to be too painful.

I used to pooh-pooh that more, but after taking a wail of the banshee to the teeth and realizing I needed to roll a 10 on the die not to critically fail and die, I had to admit that freedom here is limited, and that you have to start making the "correct" choices early. I don't like that.

Starfinder lets witchwarpers decide if they'd rather be intelligence or charisma based. I think that's an interesting design direction. If you think about it, attributes are really working on a couple of different things:
* accuracy and damage (strength, dexterity, casting stats)
* defense potential (perception, saves, HP)
* skills
* character vibes ("my barbarian is sociable and wants to be a chieftain")

Feels like the first two categories can dominate the third and fourth two much.

Huh? At low level detect magic just says "there is at least one magic thing you didn't know, somewhere within 30 feet of you in any direction". At higher levels it goes to "somewhere in that 5ft cube". But that cube might have a corpse in it with lots of pieces of gear. And only after you fully investigate that magic item can you ignore it and use detect magic to pinpoint the next most powerful one.

But yeah, I think it's kinda outdated that these are two separate spells. And I think it's still too much tied up in 1E panics about "detect magic breaks the whole illusion school" or "breaks my whole plot".

Currently the Detect Magic exploration activity does almost nothing because it can't find hazards that require some level of Perception training (which I think is almost every magical hazard). It would have been fine IMO if Detect Magic allowed you to try detecting them with Arcana/Nature/Religion/Occultism instead of Perception.

Well the really easy thing would have been if spells used levels, and I mean actual levels. So you'd have level 1, 3, 5, 7,...19 spells. It wouldn't have worked in 1E because classes had totally different tables for what level they got access to a particular rank of spell, but in 2E that's all quite consistent.

Well Detect Magic doesn't really help very much in figuring out if a pile of defeated enemies contains any magic loot. The best you can get at rank 4 is saying which 5ft square has the most powerful magic in it.

Read Aura is then the fastest way of sorting the magic from the mundane.

We did do the air strike in SF1 once. There was this critter lairing in an acid lake and it had nasty mind control. But it was on a god-forsaken asteroid nobody cared about so we just used our ship's tractor beam to pull it out. Then found out that the tractor beam also did damage. Then found out that ship damage against ground targets is x10. The critter didn't stand a chance.

It's a tactic that you normally don't get to do (and Eox air traffic control didn't let us do it during the next adventure...) but for this one occasion it was glorious.

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As a note to the article: I agree with the approach (hazards instead of regular combat), but I think you might want to do not even 1 round of regular combat (to showcase the danger). A level 2 PC going up against a level 13 monster might die from massive damage on the pretty much inevitable critical hit.