Ascalaphus's page

I've been reviewing the recent encounters where they struggled (including this one) and there is definitely one key factor in all of them; AOE damage dealers really hurt them a lot more than they should, especially when this damage comes from a higher-level monster that has a DC hard enough that some of them fail their saves on average.

NPC spellcasters sometimes seem like they're split between absolute jokes and absolute horrors. Sometimes they're placed in such bad tactical situations that they have no will to live. And sometimes they hit so hard that it's hard to see that the party had any chance against them.

The thing with the really dangerous ones is that they often have a combination of these factors:
- they have high save DCs for their level
- they are higher level than the PCs, so the DCs were hard to begin with, and their spells also do a lot of damage

It's sort of a multiplication problem. High damage spells times high DCs means lots of failures and critical failures.

The warpriest has the Harm font and doesn't prepare many Heals, so the group relies on the Witch casting Soothe, Life Boost and Summon Unicorn to keep them going, and despite her best efforts if more than one of her allies is getting damaged each round she can't keep up.

I think from a GM perspective, if I avoid using creatures with high damage + high save DC area damage abilities against them in general, then the difficulty scaling of encounters should be more accurate. Their low mobility and quite strict action economy (for everyone except the rogue at least) leaves them sitting ducks for this kind of foe.

Another trend I'm seeing here is that it feels like the players don't really analyze and adapt to things that repeatedly cause a problem for them. The low mobility of the frontliners is something that the casters could help out with by preparing Fly and Haste for example.

I don't know if they realize this. Or maybe they're having difficulty seeing the patterns - if you use different monsters all the time, they might not connect the dots that all these monsters cause them the same problems. If you left clues that they might run into more of the same monster, that could cause them to do more of that preparation caster stuff.

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Anyway, I think what the others have said is true; this party has a lot of weak choices in it. If those are the characters the players want to play, fine. But then maybe it's time for you to just make encounters easier. One or two weak characters could have been fine, but if all of them are weak and they're not adapting & teamworking, then this is just not a party that should be playing at "default" difficulty. Dial down the numerical difficulty a bit.

If you're using a published adventure, just put weak templates on some of the monsters in most fights. Or if you're building your own adventures, just use a lower XP budget to construct encounters, and use few L+2 monsters. Again, if you wanted to use a particular monster but it's L+2, just put a weak template on it to make it more like L+1 instead.

I'm intrigued by the idea of spellbook-based casters spending an action to interact with their (worn or held) book to switch a prepared spell. Yeah, that's spell substitution on steroids, but it would finally drive home the point of wizards really being the most adaptable. You'd still want to have prepared the right spells just for action economy, so we don't lose the "thinking ahead" theme completely.

Also it puts the book much more in the spotlight instead of being just something that happens over breakfast. You could build on that with feats and special spellbooks that do something interesting when you're "must consult my notes"-ing.

(Also, I like how simple it is to implement.)

I think over the by now decades the idea of what class does spells in what way and why has drifted. Perhaps drifted a whole lot faster in PF2 than before.

For me one of the key elements of the "wizard fantasy" is that a wizard goes out into the world to learn new magics and is really excited to get hold of a defeated rival's spellbook. If you just knew all the spells already it'd take a lot of the wind out of those sails.

But it's already a bit busted in PF2. The "Learn Spell" activity can also be done by talking to someone who already knows the spell, doesn't require it be the same tradition. So a wizard can just find a druid buddy who automatically knows all the common primal spells. And then just take notes on all the spells that happen to be on the overlap of the arcane and primal list.

The way that clerics and druids automatically know all their common spells also seems like a bit of an archaism to me. Back when, a fair bit of those spell lists were really really circumstantial things. Not spells that you'd normally use when adventuring, but things that you might use to run a temple as a social organization, or to position yourself as the mysterious person in the wood who's awakening animals. A lot of that stuff has been turned into rituals instead (which helps trim the spell lists down to stuff that makes sense during encounters).

My big dream is that by the time of PF3 we'll mostly migrate to everyone using spontaneous casting, but that classes like the wizard have a better ability to switch a few spells from their repertoire during the morning.

It's already pretty rare that you switch a majority of your prepared spells. Usually you just make a few tweaks. Often you can't really predict what you're gonna face, so you pack a fair amount of generic spells that work well against any kind of enemy. I don't think the supposed advantage of the wizard of being much more versatile and preparing the perfect silver bullets (compared to a sorcerer) is really happening. In fact it's more likely that the sorcerer sometimes happens to have the silver bullet in their repertoire and just keeps pumping it out of every possible slot.

I think AoN should maybe make it easier to switch modes between a "core-oriented" mode and an "everything" mode.

Like, if I'm GMing and I give out a piece of AP-specific loot, it's convenient if players can look up the description themselves, I don't have to fuss with index cards or such. So that's when I want to use the "everything" mode.

But when it's about the players shopping, I might want to encourage them to focus on a "core + a few other books" subset.

I think you can already filter by sources a bit, but I'd want something big and obvious. One toggle you can switch that's quite visible in the UI, not having to remember to select stuff separately on every page.

Of course agreeing which books are core-ish apart from the obvious ones is another story.

I'd look at Ooze Form. It's not always going to be a good idea, because PF2 just isn't PF1. But there are some moments when it really does work well.

A friend of mine is fond of using it in PFS whenever we get into one of those "and then they drop a bucket of rogues on you" encounters. Turn into a large ooze that can't be critted, doesn't take precision damage, resists piercing and slashing damage, and gets a bag of temporary HP. Sure, they'll hit almost every strike they try against you, but they might not get through all of your temporary HP before the encounter is over. And any strike they're doing for pitiful damage on you, is a strike they're not doing efficiently with sneak attack and possible crits on another party member.

Ooze form makes for a remarkable tank, in the kind of encounters where it matters. But this being PF2, that won't be all encounters. PF2 just goes out of its way to make sure the same trick doesn't always work.

Keep in mind that as a wizard you can juice up ooze form quite a bit. Tailwind is a status bonus so it'll work fine to increase your bad battleform speed. Haste works too. So would Heroism if someone puts that on you.

It would be a bit more of a "wizard with tricks" build; you'd want to pick up some other spells for other occasions too. It's more a playstyle of "what does THIS encounter need" instead of "how can I make sure my standard plan is reliable in every encounter".

With regards to players feeling "too attached" to their items.

The players enjoying the game in their way is the point. Saying they're not enjoying the correct thing is not the way to go.

I think the rune system is genius here. PF2 makes it way easier to cater to different things players enjoy:

- someone who wants to keep using the same weapon across all levels, and doesn't want it to become numerically irrelevant

- someone who wants to switch weapons mid-career as it turns out a different fighting style appeals more, without having to start buying everything from scratch

- someone who enjoys finding an unexpected weapon and pivoting their fighting style to a signature weapon that came from a big story reward

Rune-swapping being fairly cheap combined with easy retraining rules and feats not requiring the narrow dedication to specific weapons make all of this very doable.

Static item DCs however get in the way of these.

Ascalaphus wrote:

I still wanna do a level 1 zombie horror adventure where at some point you make it to the local temple and there's a bunch of rank 3 Heal and Fireball scrolls in a "break the glass" case, and the casters can just lay waste and see the zombies driven before them.

I do feel that those rank 3 spells would still be incredibly effective in the hands of a level 1 party even if the party members were to use their own DCs. In general I don't think item DCs are what necessarily make higher-level items more interesting, so much as the effects they have -- if you give the party a potion of retaliation or a penultimate heartbeat, the fun factor will come from the retaliatory damage or the post-death explosion, and giving those when they're high-level items for the party will feel awesome even if they don't use an item DC. In the case of effects that deal damage, the double whammy of high DC and high damage I'd say would even be overkill -- you don't need to hugely rely on the former when you've already got tons of the latter.

When I look at consumables like bombs and scrolls, I feel pretty okay about them. Because they have a good balance between static power and level-scaled power.

Even a level 1 fire bomb in the hands of a level 10 character is pretty accurate based on their weapon proficiency, and you just need that splash damage to stop a regeneration. So it's effective. It doesn't do quite as much damage as a level 9 bomb, you're not gonna be mainlining level 1 bombs as your primary battle plan. But you feel good about it as a backup plan for regen monsters.

A scroll of Laughing Fit is likewise pretty good at any level as a backup plan, because the DC scales with your level. It's not as powerful as a rank 6 scroll of Roaring Applause, it's fair for its price. But if you're dealing with a boss with a reactive strike that's just wrecking your casters, it's totally fine.

And the level 1 party that gets a scroll of fireball as an ace card for a final battle, well the DC isn't crazy high but the damage is.

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The common thread here is that the effect of the items is in line with the item level, but the DC is in line with where the players are right now. If the effect is relevant at a higher level, the scaling DC means the item also stays relevant. But at level 15 you're not gonna be using rank 3 fireball scrolls as a main tactic, there's no need to worry that this is gonna totally skew balance.

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So I guess what I'm coming to is that I think higher level items should aim for better effects. Maybe they do more damage. Maybe they have more targets. Efficient actions.

Just like higher rank spells tend to start out more powerful than a lower level spell heightened to the same rank. The new toys are more powerful so that they'll get your attention, but your low rank spells in heightened slots aren't worthless.

I think I just talked myself into maybe letting item DC scale with level for free (I was expecting to ask money for it). Maybe like this, to minimize the amount of bespoke work needed?

If you're higher level than the item, increase the DC of the item's ability by the difference in level.

Note that this will lag a little bit behind after some levels. So when you get the next tier of the item you'll jump a bit in DC probably. I'm fine with that, the next tier should mean something. But until you hit that tier, your lower version of the item doesn't become completely obsolete within just a few levels.

I think the general issue is players approaching magic items as character defining game elements and that is very much against the design philosophy of PF2. Those kind of items are a part of a class kit like the exemplar. There are mandatory magic items for keeping up with numbers, but those items enable your class abilities (like weapons, shields, armor, etc). They are not character defining by themselves.

I'm wondering though. We've been doing this for half a century now. Game designers insisting the players should enjoy these items, and players saying Nope, I don't want it that way.

I feel like there's this ongoing struggle between designers insisting that a particular design is rational and balanced and exists for good reasons, and sure, I can be convinced of the sound reasoning.

Like the demon mask. It's pretty much a design rule that you can't have items that only give a +1 to a skill without doing anything else. And there are some of these items that are well-received, like the mage's hat that gives +1 arcana and prestidigitation. On the face of it, Intimidate is probably a more useful skill and prestidigitation isn't supposed to be powerful. But this feels like a nicer item than the demon mask. You can wear a wizard hat and just wave your hands at the dirty dishes.

But wearing a demon mask is a bit of a weird gimmick. Are you gonna wear that just walking around on the street? RP-wise it's kind of a big commitment, but mechanically it doesn't give you a lot back for that. A fear spell that is kind of marginal because it has a fading DC and also you probably already had Intimidate anyway because you're the one who cared about getting a bonus to the skill.

Static DCs let higher level items be awesome at the point of the story where they should play an oversized role in the adventure narrative.

This is a good point. I think PF2 wants to play around by making the level/power curve very much NOT a smooth diagonal line. They intentionally put steep jumps in there. They made sure different classes are getting their steep upgrades at different levels too, so that for a while this class will be really ahead with this, then that class will be ahead with that.

Items play into that too. When your third-level martial finds a Striking greatsword it's a bit of a power trip for a little bit. It's worth switching even if you were, say, a sword and board warrior. Because going from an 1d8 longsword to a 2d12 greatsword for a while is just wonderfully off-balance.

I still wanna do a level 1 zombie horror adventure where at some point you make it to the local temple and there's a bunch of rank 3 Heal and Fireball scrolls in a "break the glass" case, and the casters can just lay waste and see the zombies driven before them.

So, making item DC scale totally smoothly would remove that from the toolbox. There might be more nuanced designs that make it work though.

You could for example have your table of "to increase by X level and raise DC by X, pay Y". However, actual DCs go up by a bit more than 1/1 level. So when you actually hit the next higher tier of the item, you'd have a catch-up moment where it suddenly goes up in DC by 2-3.

That said, there really is one single game mechanic that is the tarrasque in the room.

The fact that all consumables (and static dc perm items) can be mulched for gp and put toward something really beneficial is *terrible* for consumables/items in pf2. I really want to use these neat summon-elemental gems we found, but they were -1 level when we found them, and now they are -2 level.

I *should* mulch them, and could instantly get a useful utility wand for the party, one which doesn't suffer from a static DC.

This is an interesting point. But we actually have some interesting sources to test this;

* PFS has always had a rule of your final gold reward for the adventure being about FINDING the item, doesn't matter if you used it up. If you find a consumable, you might as well use it, you won't have any less money at the end of the adventure if you save the item.

* Starfinder 1 went with a resale value of only 10% of the purchase price for all items.

In both cases, that should have led to more enthusiasm for using found consumables. But that's not what I saw in practice. I think what bites with a lot of consumables is that they're just not that good, compared to other things you could be doing.

You could use that healing potion to heal for 1d8 HP (spoiler: you're gonna roll a 1). But you need an action to draw it and an action to drink it. Oh, and were you using a two-handed weapon? Also an action to juggle that. Oh and it has Manipulate so you might wanna disengage from the enemy too.

I think the things that really get in the way of people using consumables is that:

* Hand economy is a real thing.
* Action cost is important.
* For items with a variable effect, how much am I gonna get at minimum?

Or to put it another way: my priority every round is to cast a spell or make at least one attack. You have to be driving in the direction of victory. I'm okay to forego an attack that already has MAP to use a consumable. But consumables that are so demanding that they eat up all your actions (like an oil that needs two hands to apply to a weapon) need to have totally transformative levels of power to be useful.

This is why talismans like the allow orb are well-designed. They don't mess with the hand economy, don't take too many actions to activate, and you're pretty sure they'll do something when you use them.

Bombs are also well-designed. You'll typically reach for them when fighting an enemy with a weakness that you'll gleefully try doing persistent damage to, or at least you'll have some splash damage. So the minimum effect is still satisfying. Especially splash damage vs. regeneration.

These elemental gems though... overpriced ways to get a so-so summon? I just don't think there will be a combat round where I feel that's the best way to spend my actions.

So even if you can't make money by selling them, I still don't expect to be using them.

I'm the only frontline character. The rest of the party is a witch, gunslinger, and rogue.

Once upon a time I was in a Starfinder campaign and our party was a ranged operative, ranged envoy, ranged mystic and my ranged mechanic.

Things weren't going well for us. Just about every fight, monsters would harass us in melee and we'd be spending sooo much of our actions just trying to get out of trouble.

One day we were all a bit gloomy and feeling down about the campaign because fights were really frustrating, and the GM said he was totally fine with it if someone wanted to refurbish their character. So I did; my character walked out into the night a frustrated dude with a rifle, and came back the next morning looking very muscular and a solarian with a flaming sword.

But, his personality and backstory stayed the same. He was still the android who was deeply disgusted by any organic looking food. The sort of person who takes "doesn't want to think about how cute the lamb was that's now a stew" to "doesn't want vegetables where you can still guess what plant they're from". As it turns out, character story and personality are more important for group-feel than precisely what kind of mechanics that character is using.

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That said, you are the only melee character in this group. Even if you were a super tanky class, that would still be a hard life. But if you switch to something else, your party needs to go make some adjustments too.

I'm curious, which of these sounds appealing to you?

* Maybe someone else in your party is open to switching to a more melee role as well? With two melee characters things can be more fun because you can also teamwork more. One of you could be more the "anvil", tanky, and the other more the "hammer" focused on hitting hard and using the anvil for protection. A champion/thaumaturge team for example can work nicely.

* Maybe you just don't want to play melee anymore? Someone else may have to step up to the plate then though, otherwise your party is going to be in trouble.

* Maybe you do want to play melee, but with a different class. You're high enough level now that you could still mix in the mirror implement by taking a thaumaturge multiclass.

* Maybe you wanna play a different class completely?

* Maybe you want to just streamline your thaumaturge build so you're more free in action economy?

I hope by the time PF3 rolls around we get a better take on weapons vs unarmed. There's so many feats that casually mention weapons and thereby exclude unarmed strikes when it doesn't feel like that was a particular balance goal. Just habit of phrasing.

I'm also still miffed that rangers are not that good with claws. As a nature-oriented class they should have nice synergy with close-to-nature ancestries with nice unarmed strikes, but instead it's a big nothingburger.

I also think Strike Hard is really good. It has a couple of different ways that it can work out really well:

* Your ally is already next to the enemy you want to target, and you're not.
* You already have MAP from making one attack; your ally using Strike Hard strikes without MAP.
* Your ally's attacks are just more valuable than yours (giant barbarian, fighter, rogue already in flanking position, thaumaturge with all the bells and whistles, or maybe PFS where the other character is two levels higher than you).

As I'm just starting to read the guide, just a note on the text colors: your bright green and bright yellow are really hard to read against a white background. It would be easier to read if you used a darker, more contrasting version of those colors.

(And now I'm gonna read it, very curious!)

I feel like even if having a GM star system of some kind only moves the needle 10% on GMing, that could still be a really good return on investment.

Because making it happen for donuts 1-4 is mostly a one-time cost of having an engineer implement it in the website. You have the occasional five-donut review and some backend admin. But is that a net cost, or is it compensated by having some good news content to put in a blog post for marketing?

A summoner might not want to spend the gold and invested item slot on an athletics item, but almost certainly will get the handwraps for the eidolon. I'm not impressed by the Disarm option but if you were gonna include Trip and Grab, there was no good reason to exclude Disarm?

It's fairly common in RPGs that drugs have totally unreasonable rules for downsides because it's assumed you're taking them willingly. So they're not balanced with the same kind of caution as poisons.

But using that in combination with a mind control effect is a good reason for the GM to say that that has to be rebalanced to be more in line with other things.

Oh, just thought of a really obvious one. Have them hand over their weapons to you/your allies. Let them try to critically disarm you to get them back.

Sometimes that's a problem with authors putting low-level flavored problems in chases for high level characters.

A low level chase is about "how fast can you get everyone over this garden wall". A high level chase problem is "a magical sandstorm is specifically chasing after you and seems intelligent and doesn't want you to dodge it".

I think we should celebrate that at some level, some things just aren't a reasonable obstacle anymore. Like at level 5, it's ridiculous to worry about provisions during hexploration. You've just graduated from those beginner level problems. It's time to start doing things where you run into much bigger scarier problems.

In any situation where you can't think of anything better, you can always have them run away at full speed. 3 actions going away means it'll take them 3 actions to come back too.

Making attacks against your other enemies is always a solid choice too, especially if you know they have a high level spell or something you'd rather see them spend on your enemies than on you. Super fun if you can get them to point a breath weapon or other effect with a cooldown at enemies instead of you.

For weapon-using enemies, throwing away their weapons (not just dropping - throwing them into the ravine) can be good too.

Having them drop prone is an option. So is making them try to Grab your other enemies. And you can have them jump of a cliff.

Your spell isn't normally Subtle, so people probably know the target is controlled. If you can make it Subtle, you could also try to have your target order the other enemies around.

PFS specifically asks the GMs not to get away from what is written. I can totally see GMs sticking to the letter of this.

Over the years PFS has added more nuance to that. This snippet has been in the PFS rules since at least 2014:

Creative Solutions

Sometimes during a game, your players might surprise you with a creative solution that the adventure did not anticipate. Rewarding the creative use of skills and roleplaying makes games more fun for the players. If your players find another solution that resolves or bypasses an encounter, give the PCs the same reward they would have gained by resolving the encounter as the adventure anticipated.

The Pathfinder Society never wants to give the impression that the only way to solve a problem is to kill it.

They also added a lot of clarification about GM adjustments to unexpected player actions here ; that part is more of a change, loosening previous "run as written" instructions a fair bit.

It would be bad if having a high speed auto-solved every chase, or if it gave you a bonus on every chase skill challenge on every obstacle.

But it's also not cool if it never plays a role at all even when the particular obstacle clearly calls for raw speed.

I think it's good as a GM not to cling too tightly to your skill challenges. Sometimes, someone has the perfect feat, magic item or spell to just totally own that problem. That's okay if it's just "well, the AP writer is asking for you to do this, but your solution makes sense and would just completely do it", once or twice. It's not as much fun if it works on every skill challenge. But if you pose the problem and a player goes "I have the perfect solution for this", okay that's cool.

But that should be occasionally, not all the time. Sometimes in a chase, being really fast should matter. But not all the time on all obstacles.

Coming back to Scar of the Survivor on this: yes, it's really really easy to heal up between combats with that. But healing up between encounters just isn't that hard in PF2 for many other classes either:

- Animists can get Garden of Healing to heal the whole party 1d4 per spell rank per round for a minute, with a 10m time to refocus and do it again.
- Champions can Lay on Hands for 6HP per spell rank with a 10m refocus.
- Kineticists can use Fresh Produce or Ocean's Balm to heal everyone every 10m as well.
- Anyone can take Medicine and the associated skill feats

There's a couple more, but you catch my drift. Out of combat healing takes a bit of time but even at level 1 it's very available and not really limited in amount, just in how fast it goes. Scar of the Survivor goes really fast but only on yourself.

Finoan gave a good explanation about why you need to balance how much RK or experimentation players need to do, with the DCs and how many checks players get and how many successes they need.

Overall, I hope the goal is to create a challenge that the players will probably win. But where it's uncertain if they'll win it easily, massively, barely, or maybe get really unlucky and fail. And where the adventure doesn't brick up if they fail that skill challenge, but winning is still better than not winning.

I don't think challenges where you need to do some RK are inherently worse or better. But it does need to factor into the numbers when you're figuring out the odds. If the players have less free actions remaining because they needed to do RK, you need to take that into account when determining how many overall actions/DCs/VP needed there are. And if you need to succeed at RK to get essential information about how to continue with the challenge, what if players fail the RK check? Normally with RK, at that point you can't try again. What happens to your skill challenge then? (It's no coincidence that the Discovery check in social challenges doesn't block on a failure.)

(...)

I guess this counts as a narrative approach in which the GM does not fully control the narrative.

I like to think of this style of GMing as "I'm putting a problem in front of you. I've made sure that at least some solutions exist, so that the adventure won't stall. But it's totally cool if you bring a different solution. The key goal is that you have fun engaging with the problem and the story it tells."

I will tell them which skills are available and which ones are easier or harder (but not actual DCs). I want players to be able to make informed decisions, not have to resort to betting or trying to read my mind.

I don't often have the problem of a player trying to talk me into letting them use their best skill for everything. I'll usually set a higher DC for alternative skills unless it truly makes sense that it's a really good option that the writer just totally overlooked.

Ascalaphus wrote:

A lot of GMs don't like the narrative jank that arises from the strict attended/unattended binary. At that table, the GM allowed Dispel Magic to work on foe weapons.

I have no idea if "a lot" of GMs have any feelings about it, it's a question that I rarely see come up.

The player did not then pivot into using Dispel on armor or other items, but that is what such a ruling opens the door to.

So you're saying that deviating from the standard rule opens things up to a situation that is unbalanced?

Don't do that then.

I think you might be drawing too strong a conclusion from Detonate Magic. It's a rank 9 spell, going from that to "the GM should allow Dispel Magic against attended items at all levels, because you can do that with a rank 9 spell" is a big jump.

I also think it's possible the intent behind Detonate Magic was that the emanation was from the item, but not to include the item itself. It's an emanation, there's quite a few emanation effects that only blast outward. This one doesn't say so explicitly, but it might have been intended. If the damage from the explosion nearly always destroys the item, it would be redundant to say that the spell disables the magic on the item or destroys it on a critical counteract.

I suppose it could go into the Lost Omens Campaign Setting forum instead, but it doesn't feel egregious here IMO.

I think Pathfinder never fully committed to the "mortals believing in gods is what makes them gods" style of cosmology. D&D and Terry Pratchett went heavily in for that.

Pathfinder keeps it a bit more open-ended. They lean more into the "it's mysterious why someone becomes a god, and there might be multiple ways" style.

So, just because there's a lot of mortals (or undead...) in a faction that have a system of religious practice, doesn't have to mean anything is going to happen.

But it's also not carved in stone that it couldn't. The nice thing about Pathfinder being a bit coy about what "the rules" are is that you could have a bad guy trying to become a god by running a religion, and as adventurers you can't be too certain that it won't work and there's nothing to worry about.

Some people seem to have become gods through having a certain mental state;
* Nethys used magic to achieve omniscience and went a big crazy but also became a god.
* Irori achieved mental perfection and self-actualization and became a god. So did his cousin Gruhastra.
* Arazni is... complicated.
* Milani was a minor saint who became a full deity after Aroden died, perhaps due to sheer motivation

So you know, it could happen. Maybe if Razmir gets enough worshippers that'll boost his confidence to the point that he becomes a real deity.

I wouldn't consider it metagaming to prefer will saves against a monster that behaves like a big dumb brute. It's an educated guess, you might be wrong. It's a reasonable guess because it's likely that its fortitude is going to be really high because it's a hulking brute, so then you're better off targeting something else.

If guessing isn't to your taste you can Recall Knowledge. Metagaming would be sneakily looking up the monster's stats on your phone.

If it's something you as a player can figure out but your character can't figure out, that's metagaming. But if it's a reasoned bet that your character can make based on the evidence your character has, that's fine.

Regarding the original question, isn't there an easy compromise?

If all magic comes from five gods, but Pathfinder ships with four magical traditions, why not work with that?

Basically, all magic traditions map to one of these gods, except divine which maps to two of them, the holy and unholy one. Wizards are actually tapping into magic from the nerdiest of the gods. Bards get theirs from the spooky one. Druids draw on the power of the god of nature. Clerics side with one of the two holy/unholy gods, while oracles get a bit from both which is why their magic is a bit messy but usually not sanctified.

APs being a bit linear is inherent to the format, because book 1 has to get you to the starting point of book 2, and book 2 has to get you to the starting point of book 3 and so on.

You could do it really different and make "the level 1-4 sandbox for this part of the setting" followed by "the level 5-8 sandbox". But part of sandbox adventures is that you're never going to see most of the sandbox. You chose to go in direction A, so you didn't get to see the low level encounters in direction B and C before you became so high level that they're kinda pointless.

Also, if you can make some strong assumptions about what people do in each book, you can make more of a story-set-up towards plots in later books. If people kinda walk around in a sandbox, setting up a big plot finale is really hard.

That doesn't mean sandbox adventures are bad, but what you get out of them is very different than a "big story" adventure setup. Paizo is mostly into the "big story" style of writing.

You can do sandbox style Pathfinder, no problem, but that does require a very different style of campaign plotting. You might get a lot out of blending the campaign design that you get in Sine Nomine games (Stars without number, worlds without number, wolves of god etc.) which is a lot about at the end of each game session asking the players "what do you plan to do next session?" and they HAVE to give you an answer. Then you prep one session ahead only. You're not going to create thousands of pages of content for directions you don't know if the players are ever going to go there. (Sine Nomine is also cool because they make a lot of random setting/encounter generation tools that work very well in other game systems. If you're doing sandbox and like the Pathfinder rule system, Sine Nomine can be the stuff you use to make your GM prep easier.)

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

Never used items with set DCs. Never will I ever touch items with set DCs as I do not wish to be stuck in the loop of liking items then it becomes useless then I see it then buy a new one and repeat. It feels sooooooo useless to me.

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There's a good point here. One of the reasons we play RPGs is to take a few hours break from reality. And lately reality is full of annoying subscriptions.

Lately PFS is full of soldier-flavored enemies with Reactive Strike and Shield Block (thanks, Battecry!), and Laughing Fit is really valuable.

Virulent is an interesting one. Especially because it's such a rare trait! It feels like there are more feats talking about how to do better at saving throws against it, than there actually are virulent things. Nethys counts:

* 4 virulent diseases, of which 1 is from an AP.
* 13 virulent poisons: 3 from the core books, 4 from treasure vault, 6 from adventures.

I feel like the affliction duration system is a bit half-baked because they had ideas about what they were gonna do, but then in practice didn't really pursue that direction all that much. Maybe they were looking for a unified approach to spell durations, poison durations, and "anonymous owner" condition durations like Frightened, but couldn't quite manage to get them all working the same way.

Also keep in mind RPG rules are not quite like computer code. If you write some inconsistent rules and send them to the printer, they'll just print that for you. There's no formal logic proofing or compiler errors.

I also think the line about processing afflictions at the end of your turn is over-interpreted. I think it's just talking about sequencing.

Once you've done all the things you want to do with the actions you have available, you reach the end of your turn. Take the following steps in any order you choose. Play then proceeds to the next creature in the initiative order.

* End any effects that last until the end of your turn. For example, spells with a sustained duration end at the end of your turn unless you used the Sustain a Spell action during your turn to extend them. Some effects caused by enemies might also last through a certain number of your turns, and you decrease the remaining duration by 1 during this step, ending the effect if its duration is reduced to 0.
* If you have a persistent damage condition, you take the damage at this point. After you take the damage, you can attempt the flat check to end the persistent damage. You then attempt any saving throws for ongoing afflictions. Many other conditions change at the end of your turn, such as the frightened condition decreasing in severity. These take place after you've taken any persistent damage, attempted flat checks to end the persistent damage, and attempted saves against any afflictions.
* You can use 1 free action or reaction with a trigger of “Your turn ends” or something similar.
* Resolve anything else specified to happen at the end of your turn.

Clearly you're not meant to roll a save every turn against poisons with an interval of 1 minute. But there's no difference between the phrasing of an 1-minute poison or a 1-round poison. In both cases, the affliction rules (not the end of your turn rules) talk about "durations", which are elsewhere defined as working in whole rounds.

The section here about saving against afflictions at the end of your turn should I think be read as follows:

IF you have an affliction that asks for a save at the end of your turn, THEN you do it after persistent damage but before resolving other types of conditions.

In other words, that paragraph is just talking about if you have any of those things, in what order you should do them.

Maybe what's missing in the RK system is the "famous" trait.

I think "a square adjacent" instead of "the square adjacent" is reasonable to say, because there can be multiple squares that are both fair choices for that.

For example, consider this situation, with you 🧙‍♂️ and a spider 🕷️.
.

◻️◻️🟥◻️◻️◻️◻️
🟥🧙‍♂️🟦◻️◻️◻️◻️
◻️◻️🟦◻️◻️◻️🕷️

The blue spots would be reasonable, they're the shortest to you. The top red one is not the shortest path so can't be direct. The left one goes past you, which doesn't survive a good-faith plain text reading of the ability.

1. It's clearly forced movement, they're not moving there of their own free will. So forced movement rules apply.

2. It involves the magic word "pull", so the presumption is you can pull them into dangerous terrain.

3. It says "directly toward you". That shouldn't allow moving them past you. I'd be looking for a straight line from their square to your square. If two straight line paths have the same distance then I'd be okay with you choosing.

4. If none of the possible ending squares are legal to end a move in (because there's other characters standing there for example) the enemy would stop in the last square they could legally end in.

5. If there are people in the middle of the route that don't want to let the enemy past, that would block the enemy there, because you can only freely move through the space of willing creatures.

6. If you're flying, sure, you can pull them up. They'd immediately start falling though since there's no clause about "unless their next action..." like you have in many Jump-like effects. You don't really get a chance to hit them because you don't get another action before they fall, and forced movement doesn't cause reactive strikes.

I feel fundamentally, adding rarity modifiers to RK was a bad idea. Most of the time the monster you really want knowledge about is 1-3 levels above you so the level-based DC is already tough. So it makes RK just really hard.

It's worse with bosses because the boss monster is the most likely not to be common. A level +2 rare boss is about 8-9 above the normal level based DC for your level. For example, a level 1 party trying RK about the rare level 3 boss monster is rolling against DC 23. If the boss is unique then it's actually DC 28 which even on a nat 20 a level 1 character (+7 mod) will still fail.

I don't think the game becomes more fun when RK is extra hard. Because it means RK often just doesn't work. So you don't have special information about how to fight the monster and the most important fights are the most likely to be "I dunno, have you tried just rolling really high on to hit and damage?"

Actually finding actionable information on monsters and changing how you fight them is more fun than not doing that. So RK really shouldn't be facing some of the highest DCs in the game.

If you just ignored the rarity modifiers to RK it would still be tough just by the monsters you really care about being higher level than you.

AoN is great as a reference, but I think the books work better for seeing the overall structure of the rules. With AoN you can dive right to the part you're looking for, but you might miss the stuff a little further around it that you should also know exists.

PFS has to walk a line between adapting what really needs to be adapted, but it also has to avoid becoming too complicated with "special PFS rules" that people have to learn on top of regular game rules. You have to look really critically if it's truly necessary to make a class function in PFS.

Because commanders have a fair amount of adaptability already built in, I don't think this is strictly necessary.

I'm curious though what peoples' experiences with commanders in PFS have been. Have other players struggled to really make use of tactics? I'm planning to make one of my own and put big (A5) reminder cards on the table to let people easily read what a tactic does and which ones are currently available.

I think SuperParkorio has a point.

Suppose an enemy hit you with two poisons, one which has an interval of 1 minute and one with an interval of 1 round.

You wouldn't insist that the 1-minute poison triggers again at the end of your next turn, and your turn after that, and the one after that, because then clearly you're not getting the poison ticking in 1-minute intervals.

But there's no language there saying 1-round poisons should get different interpretation from 1-minute poisons.

I think it makes more sense to decide that the mention of afflictions there is vestigial, from an aborted attempt to make the timings of all things work the same, which turned out to be not really possible. I mean, most negative spells will still end at the start of the caster's turn when their duration expires. So a very large category of bad things aren't going to end on the victim's turn anyway.

Exploration activities take too long to be feasible in encounters. Not the other way around. Opening a door is an Interact action, so otherwise your exploration won't get very far.

Most exploration activities are things you're doing every round, this one would be less frequently, although if you're doing it only once per minute, you might happen to go into combat with only 1d10 rounds remaining. As a GM I'd offer the following compromise:

- if you're not expecting combat, you start with 5 rounds remaining, because you top up occasionally. If you're expecting combat, you can have the full 10.

- it doesn't take up your exploration activity, but you have to be adjacent to your anointee in the marching order.

- you can do it as your only exploration activity, and in that case you need to be only within 1 Stride distance, not adjacent

This is all my opinion.

Item DCs (and spell attack modifiers if targeting AC) are fine. If players want magic items that provide scaling DCs and/or spell attack modifiers on produced effects, that's what staves and wands are for.

Trying to use "fiddly trinkets" (items that are a few levels below the character level; essentially, inexpensive relative to the character's current wealth) to gain a similar benefit as the caster classes or those that invested in an archetype to gain casting is not balanced. It's an attempt to "exploit" the PF2e system.

Note that staves actually don't work all that well with this. At higher levels you're rarely gonna want to use low-rank blasts from a staff. The spell DC might scale up but if the damage doesn't scale up it's still not worth doing. Yeah, you can upgrade the staff to get higher rank effects, but the low rank effects become wasted word count on the staff.

Wands are a bit better. A rare few remain good at low level forever (rank 2 tailwind) but for most of them, the problem isn't the spell DC but again the spell rank. A wand with rank 1 Force Barrage is a nice bit of extra daily juice for a level 3 caster, but at level 9 you're not gonna bother anymore. But, you can upgrade wands because we have a pricing table for that.

I agree that you shouldn't be able to scale up item DCs for free, because that would cause imbalance with cheap low level items that do some useful effect that doesn't depend on level. For example, an item that causes Slowed 1 is still going to be good at high level if you can get the effect to land, because opponents don't get many more actions at higher level than at low level.

But I think we could work out a pricing formula that goes something like "if you raise an item's level by X, that costs 2^X of the original price and increases the save DC by X * 1.25".

I'm using Trip.H's numbers for the DC and wildly guessing at the pricing formula. Although I suspect it's exponential to some degree. I think Paizo likes to limit math to nothing more complicated than addition and multiplication, so maybe it should be presented as a lookup table that says "+X item level, +Y DC, *Z price".

This sidesteps trying to have a generic DC by level table that doesn't respect that some items have higher or lower DCs. We instead work with a DC change proportional to the level change.

I'd use the sparkblade from Troubles of Otari as a reference to make this argument. I'll avoid spoilers in case someone is playing the adventure.

The sparkblade you can get in the 1st chapter of Troubles of Otari is not the best weapon in the world, but because of the method that you acquire it it can potentially become a martial's main weapon for the rest of the campaign because it can have a ton of emotional value if the players invest into its story. The problem with the sparkblade is that it has a unique once per day action that allows its user to deal 2d4+4 damage to two foes which have to make a DC 19 Reflex save (it kinda works like electric arc). That's already kinda meh for 3rd level, but it becomes absolutely thrash at 5th level and above.

Yes, its still a shortsword so it will still be relevant since you can etch fundamental runes to it, but since I kinda think its likely for someone that gets this sword in Troubles of Otari to carry it on into Abomination Vaults I feel it kinda misses the point to restrict yourself from using property runes just to deal 2d4+4 on a DC 19. I know a sensible GM can fix that if a player wants to keep using the weapon (I did it) but I think the system should support this in some way.

Continuing on this, maybe if the effect deals damage, that should scale as well when you pay to increase item level. We can look at the typical scaling increases that cantrips, focus spells and spells from slots get, and compare that to how frequently you can use the ability.

Maybe sparkblade's damage should go up by 1d4 per item level, since it's a daily ability which means it's comparable to spells from slots (which tend to go two dice per rank = one die per level).

Another item with a damaging ability that can be used every round would be closer to one d4 or d6 per two levels (like a cantrip).

You wave your hands, mumble some incoherent phrases and fire appears in the distance. But it's utterly unbelievable that you could do that without looking?

I don't really know if the game really locks down the idea that you aim by looking and sort of throwing, or that you might as well just close your eyes, point in a direction, and say "50 feet in that direction"? Or "where I just heard that noise", because an enemy wasn't bothering to Sneak, so is only Hidden anyway?

The wording is a bit awkward but we should remember that abilities are meant to work. You have to read the text in a bit forgiving way so that it can accomplish what it's intending to do.

When I play a magus I usually use my slots for buffs, utility and AoEs. Spellstrikes, I'll do with cantrips. At that point, DaS isn't really all that useful because I'm not that worried about missing and "wasting" a cantrip.

I've played investigator/eldritch archer, and it was pretty awful. Your action economy is very lockstep.

Okay, this certainly looks quite interesting. I'll have to dig into this a bit deeper when I have time.

Tridus wrote:

(I also know in at least one of my games, the other players would react badly to what this player is doing. Animal cruelty is just a hard nope and it would turn into an out of character problem

I know that behaviour like this would definitely drive me from a game.

The player is either treating her character as a cartoon with no feelings or like a psychopath. I've got better things to do than spend my gaming time with a scumbag like that.

I've seen a lot of new players go through an initial psycho phase, and then settle into being normal fun players. I think it's part of figuring out just how free you really are in a tabletop RPG. So I wouldn't judge the player's entire personality on it.

But, that doesn't mean I want it happening in my real campaign because it's pretty disruptive to the story and can be immersion-breaking for other players: "why would our characters want to associate with this maniac?"

I feel like PF1's "We be goblins" adventures were a nice way for people to get stuff out of their system. Go play pyro psycho baddies for a bit and have fun, and after that we can talk about a campaign with more composed personalities.

I also feel Assurance could have been simplified if instead of the complicated "no bonuses or penalties" they'd just phrased it as "Take 7". (But, now you do get to add your ability modifier etc; it's a normal roll, just pinned to a 7.)

If all the feat did was allow you to Take 7 on that skill, I think it would have been pretty transparent when it's good and when it's not. It's clearly only good for reliably doing tasks that you usually succeed at anyway.

It'd no longer be a weird MAP trick, but still good for climbing, swimming, or deciding to not take the hardest DC at Treat Wounds/Battle Medicine.