Ascalaphus's page

The only real issue I see with this is the interaction with Thaumaturge.

It's not just the thaumaturge.

You also have for example the champion whose strikes are always sanctified, who then doesn't really want a cold iron weapon to fight demons anymore because most fields have at least as much weakness to holy as to anything else.

It's a problem as soon as some damage type is very often a weakness (so, holy if your campaign has a lot of fiends; cold if you play a fire-themed campaign like Age of Ashes).

It also affects the magus, at least in their current design. Arcane cascade doesn't have much going for it, but at least you can use a spell with the right damage type, switch it to that and then go on using different spells but keep tagging the weakness.

Your bucket approach handles this better than just applying one weakness per attack, but it seems like a bit of an unnecessary complication.

"Every weakness applies only once" is a really simple rule to apply. Sometimes that does a bit more damage than the old situation, but not as much as the errata version.

I think the goal is that a battle form gets you 90% of the melee power of a martial with far, far less investment. You can be a druid that ignores strength but turn into a gorilla that still hits just as hard.

The change I'd personally like would to to make Untamed Form a 1-action spell. It feels like right now it just takes a bit too long to get started in combat if you decide to brawl it out, compared to slinging spells. Making it 1-action would allow you to transform, move and strike in one turn.

The Thief rogue is generally regarded as the most straightforward and powerful racket. Dex to damage is very good. That said, the benefits of Thief rogue are at their peak at low level when that bonus from Dex is a big part of your total damage. At later levels Striking runes, extra Sneak Attack and weapon specialization also start adding up, and the Dex part of the pie is relatively smaller.

Also important is that the rogue overall is a really solid class, so all of the rackets are still playable.

One key feat is Gang Up (level 6). If you have 1-2 other melee characters in the party it makes flanking much much easier, which I think steals a bit of thunder from scoundrel. But shutting down enemy reactions can be a game-changer particularly for the casters in the party.

Rogues aren't the very best class for Athletics/Trip although it's not totally off the table. The obvious way is ruffian and go hard on strength. But ruffian weapon options aren't really better than the weapons all rogues can use anyway. And dexterity + light armor is overall nicer than medium armor, because you end up with better reflex saves and thievery/stealth skills.

So another option could be to go scoundrel, go mainly dexterity but also invest from your 4 boosts at level 1,5,10 into strength. You won't be the absolute best at athletics but you'll still be solid at it, and keep more of the traditional good rogue stuff (skills, defenses). You could use for example a kukri (finesse agile trip) and a shield and be really obnoxious to enemies.

I've played a thief rogue with bastion archetype to get more shield reactions and it was pretty effective, I was really hard to hurt.

Interesting that they also talk about Flurry. It seems like if you go with the "old compromise" approach where each damage type becomes an instance, but only one damage instance per different type, the amount of weakness/resistance applied is more or less what we're used to.

But if you go from two standalone strikes to a combined Flurry using the new errata, the amount of weakness/resistance procs changes much more radically.

@Trip.H: that might be the solution, although it seems a bit buried in the text. I don't like rules to be quite so subtle. Rules should be really clear and obvious.

You can have weakness to types and traits, and even to things that normally don't do damage. That's pretty clear.

You can have resistance to types, and then the text goes on to say that actually means "types and other traits". Then when it comes round to resistance to all damage, it's only talking about "types" again without mentioning traits.

I think a reasonable interpretation of that is that when you have a damage calculation, (almost) every ingredient of it has a type associated with it. That 2d8+4+2 damage from the sword + striking rune + strength + specialization would all be slashing. The 1d6 fire from the flaming rune would be fire. Most flat bonuses you can point to what base ingredient of the calculation they apply to.

There are a few odd cases. Some barbarian instincts change the type of their additional damage from rage, like Dragon. Others don't, so what was the type before? I think a reasonable default is to say it was the base thing you were striking with. So a dragon barb that chooses not to use their extra damage from instinct would just gain the +2 rage damage as part of their slashing sword. But if they choose to tap into their conspirator dragon aspect it becomes poison damage.

So if that barbarian was fighting a champion using their reaction, that would make the difference between resist all reducing damage once (just the slashing sword) or twice (the slashing sword and the poison rage).

However, when the champion is using their reaction against a rogue doing sneak attack damage, it'd trigger only once, because the slashing damage is a type, but the precision damage is very clearly listed in the book as not being a separate type.

That does create another odd case, if you had a monster that was resistant to slashing and precision damage it'd resist more of the sneak attack than if it had resistance to all damage.

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It still feels a little fiddly to me, resistance to all damage becomes quite different from regular resistance that way.

And I'm not sure then how you'd handle "resistance to attacks from demons". Would that trigger once for the demon trait, or for every type of the demon's damage ingredients?

Ascalaphus wrote:

Okay, I'm sort of convinced that this errata isn't really working entirely as intended. That said, getting all the intended things working was pretty hard.

If yall want to get to the platonic ideal of Mark's post on weak/res rules, I can get you there in 2 tiny steps. Creates no edge cases, legit butter smooth table play.

Define instance of damage as the impact, Strike, spell boom, etc. If an effect creates a new boom, like Fire Wisp, that's a new instance. If it adds additional damage (add dmg into what?) it's only adding damage into an existing instance.

Edit the "only the highest" rule, replacing it with:
"Each individual weakness only contributes damage once per instance of damage."
And mirror this for resistance.

And that's it, you've re-invented the weak/res rules into a better, less buggy state that what the community has been playing with for years. You still get some amount of explosive weakness damage by hitting multiple different weaknesses, but you've also added that "each only once" rule that the community pretended was there for 7ish years.

Foundry tried to get there, but didn't commit to inventing the fantasy community safety rule, so you could multi pop trait & custom weak/resistances under a lot of circumstances.

I like it in broad strokes, but I don't think this fully covers all edge cases.

For example, the cold iron slashing weapon. With the current errata those are a single instance, and that matches what the book is talking about; combining a type and a trait. So, should that trigger both weaknesses? on a fey plant critter that's weak to cold iron and slashing? It'd be one way to get a simple consistent system. It's still a change, but could be a change we don't mind so much.

Another one: how will "resistance to all damage" work? If you get hit by a flaming cold iron slashing weapon, should it trigger once, twice or three times? What about damage from some spell that happens to have ten different traits? Does resistance to all damage trigger ten times?

I do wonder if it would have been easier if level ranges had been:
1-3 (centered on level 2)
3-5
5-7
7-9
etc.

By making all the tiers overlap slightly you'd be easing things. Also, you could assume a party of mid-level characters playing the normal difficulty. If you had mostly characters in the lower part of the range you could switch to the easy mode and if you had mostly higher level characters you'd switch to the harder mode.

The web pretty much has to be an unarmed attack because otherwise it'd be a weapon, and you can't use those while raging (which is the only time you could use webs). The missing unarmed trait has got to be a mistake.

I would read the line about the critical specialization as applying to melee attacks only, so the web wouldn't get it.

Okay, I'm sort of convinced that this errata isn't really working entirely as intended. That said, getting all the intended things working was pretty hard.

* It hadn't occurred to me that you could put multiple flaming runes on a single weapon. I'm skeptical that's really intended to be possible.

* It does seem intended that a champion using a cold iron sword should be able to trigger both weaknesses on a demon.

* I think abilities that create new weaknesses in monsters are a relatively new design niche that wasn't used much originally. But that design pattern now needs to be reevaluated for power against this new errata. When a rule "cuts" a lot of design space, that's a red flag; the rule might not be good. Basically, this sort of errata means we can't have shiny symbol things.

* Excessive weakness stacking isn't really desirable.

* Using the same weakness stacking trick against most monsters really isn't in the spirit of PF2. PF2 doesn't like one-trick ponies and leveraging the same tactic against everything. It wants you to try different things now and then.

I'm leaning more and more in the direction that Foundry allowing every weakness/resistance to proc exactly once might have been the right call, even though it's hard to perfectly square with the whole "instance" logic.

* That would allow the champion to hit both holy and cold iron weakness.

* That doesn't make the thaumaturge look stupid for bringing the actual right kind of weapon a monster is weak to, because you can benefit from both weakness and personal antithesis.

* It actually makes Arcane Cascade reasonably useful because you can keep tagging weaknesses without having to use the same spells every time.

* But, it prevents excessive piling-on.

I guess it's not expressly forbidden but I'd discourage it.

PF2 game design tries to lean away from doing the same rotation every round. Optimizers try to do the optimal rotation every round.

Chill out. You'll do fine with varied rotations :)

Nobody at Paizo on any let's play I can find has ever played it that way. And the creators have said that damage = per type.

Let's Play broadcasts have a bit of a reputation for the GMs just "deciding something" if an unclear rule comes up, or allowing things that aren't strictly correct but are cool in the moment. Which of course is fine, that's what you should be doing as a GM running a fun game. But it does mean it's not a great source from which to infer "what the rule really is".

Creators have said things unofficially, and really not even all that often, everyone keeps bringing up the same couple of instances from years back. And then other people complain that it doesn't count because it's unofficial or doesn't answer all the questions.

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I personally think the approach they ended up taking makes sense. It basically boils down to "can you clearly identify this part of where the damage is coming from? Then it's a separate instance".

Like, if you have a D8 cold iron slashing weapon with a flaming rune. You can't point to part of the D8 and say "that part is slashing and that other part is cold iron". But you can say "that D6 is fire damage and that D8 is the cold iron slashing damage". So you can tell apart the instances.

It does have consequences - being able to stack a whole lot of the same damage type against an enemy weak to it. I think that's generally not a problem, if there's enough variation in enemy weaknesses and resistances. It becomes a problem if you have a campaign where most of the enemies have the same weakness. Or if the party can actually cause enemies to gain a substantial weakness.

If this clarification had dropped earlier, maybe that would have caused writers to be a lot more cautious about abilities that cause weaknesses. So better late than never, but better early than late.

Reading this my impression is that Shining Symbol is strong, but it's kind of exceptional. The other ways to impose a weakness I've seen suggested so far don't give so much weakness that this really gets out of hand. I mean, yeah you're doing damage through a fun combo, which is nice. But you also have to put in work to switch the combo on, which could have also been used to do damage in other ways. So it's nice but so far looking reasonably balanced.

Am I overlooking something?

Although you could just simplify that to "how viable is exemplar multiclass" :P

Well I played a wolf stance monk levels 1-11, and Wolf Drag proved really hard to use. Because very often you're spending an action to go into stance, and an action to move. Or an action to move, and then you have to choose between a Flurry plus another action, or Wolf Drag. It worked out a few times, but I don't think I've ever managed to crit with it. (Yes, I'm really looking forward to stance savant.)

Slam Down also works with reach weapons, so a fighter could move up to a non-reach enemy, slam them down, hit them when they get back up, and then they'd still need to move closer to the fighter before they can strike back. It's a sweet deal. Also it works with d10 and d12 weapons which is nice.

Instead of telling you "these are the rules" which you've already heard, let me try to explain what I think is the "why". (This is just what I believe; I wasn't there originally when it was first conceived.)

PFS grew out of Living Greyhawk which existed from around 2000 to 2008, and was probably based off earlier living campaigns. People definitely thought a bit differently about gaming back then, and LG had quite strict rules about replaying. I think it was very much rooted in a sort of "sports" kinda attitude, that once you've played a scenario you know what's going on and if you did it again you'd have an unfair advantage. In LG I believe you weren't allowed to play a scenario after having GMed it, so often people had to do some complex coordination to make sure they got to play, GM for people, then those people could GM, and so on.

PFS has over the years gradually loosened those rules, introducing a few replayable scenarios in PFS1, and a lot more in PFS2. I remember back in PFS1 days there was a very strong suspicion of replayable scenarios both from GMs but definitely also from Paizo. There was a big concern that it would cheapen the gaming experience. I guess times change, and the constant pressure of people being unhappy with not having scenarios to play also had an influence. PFS2 had a lot more replayable scenarios, as well as replayable bounties and quests.

With SFS2, everything is replayable by default AND you can start at level 1,3,5 or 7 as you like. So it's a very long way away from those LG days where it was like "no, a high level character is something you really need to EARN".

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Where does (re)playing for no credit fit in?

The rules don't actually handle non-replay for no credit. Sure, it does happen sometimes - someone shows up, gets a pregen, plays a session, but isn't long term interested in PFS and nobody needs to go through the rigmarole of setting up an account to report one game ever.

But there's "replaying for no credit", which basically means there's a table with not enough characters, and instead of a pregen, you bring a PC. Maybe your PC is better designed than the pregen, maybe you just like your PC more. You can't earn any gold or XP, but your character can lose money and get hurt and die. It's not a great deal.

But I think the reason behind it is that Paizo doesn't want some of the players to have something at stake, and others nothing at stake. If you're playing without taking credit, what happens if your character gets killed? Do you say "well if I don't get paid I also can't die?" What if there's a fight that's going badly, do you fight the rearguard action so the rest of the party can run away, because hey if you die it doesn't matter?

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I'm not saying these somewhat abusive feeling things really happen in practice. Maybe they did, here and there, but I've never seen it. However, I do feel part of the draw of PFS (RPGs in general) is that as a group you decide on some game rules and all play by them - play well and you advance.

If some people start saying "meh, I don't want credit, I don't want to do bookkeeping" that's one thing. But then if a couple weeks later there's some higher level scenarios, are they gonna come up with "well, I never got any XP, but here's my level 9 character" how does that work with the other players who had to "work" to get to level 9 the regular way?

So I think your VC was correct in strongly discouraging. Playing the occasional pick-up game with no bureaucracy afterward is a perfectly good way to have fun. But it chafes a bit with what Organized Play tries to do with having rules for leveling up your character from session to session and playing with lots of people all using the same rules.

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Oh, also, doing things like a module or AP where only some of the players are interested in getting a chronicle afterward, that's totally fine, that doesn't really cause any friction with the organized play system.

Also the new weakness / instance of damage rules are just dumb and exploitable as hell, lol.

I think Paizo forgot that players can add weaknesses to foes, which uh, yeah, that's as cracked as it sounds.

On the easy side, anyone with alchemy can throw an inflammation flask to add fire, acid, and slash weakness to the hit foe for 3 turns, no save. Don't even need to spend a class feat on a focus spell.

Once the Fighter tosses an opening bomb, everyone with a flaming corrosive slash weapon is already popping all three of those resistances. Before the energy mutagens, rainbow vinegar, etc kick in for even more.

Yeah, I genuinely wonder if Paizo is going to walk that back and errata their errata, rofl.

Meh, I think Paizo just picked the interpretation of instance of damage that a lot of people, and notably Foundry, had already converged on. It feels like a natural conclusion also with how the remaster distinguished damage types and traits on damage more than before.

It shifts the balance a bit but not really that much, because this was the interpretation that was already used in many places.

The inflammation flask is a bit much, but feels kinda typical for an AP item. A lot of APs have wonky alchemical items. It's on you as a GM if you allow players to shop around in the catalog of other APs than the one you're playing. (And note that the item isn't available in PFS.)

Apart from that - I think Paizo might have decided to just roll with it. As a player, actually finding a weakness on an enemy and exploiting it is fun. Getting high damage because you chose the right attack for this specific enemy, is more the style Paizo promotes than just picking a weapon with high general damage and using it for e-ve-ry-thing.

So I don't really expect them to walk it back.

I legit am struggling to actually navigate the errata (their search is hella broken on my browsers), but Firework Technician looks like it still has killed the Alchemist class by granting recharging VVials.

As far as I know, alchemy benefits still combine.

Guys, this is really bad. Recharging alchemy was the one chassis thing of significance exclusive to the Alchemist Class.

To be clear, F Tech alone cannot easily abuse their recharge. But any PC with another form of VVials, such as via Alchemist Dedication, will still gain recharging VVials from F Tech.

new Firework Tech wrote:

You gain the quick alchemy benefits (Player Core 2 174), creating up to 4 versatile vials during your daily preparations. Your versatile vials are pyrotechnic, so they have the fire trait and deal fire damage instead of acid. You can use versatile vials only for the Launch Fireworks action (see below) or with Quick Alchemy to create fireworks consumables, including doses or rounds of black powder, the sparkler item (Treasure Vault 55), and other items determined by the GM. You can replenish your versatile vials during exploration the same way an alchemist can (Player Core 2 59).

Another way to read it is that if you wanted more flexible flexible vials, you should avoid firework technician like the plague because once you take it you can't use the vials for anything else anymore.

Think of it like this. The thaumaturge class got loaded up with a lot of stuff to hold in your hands that get in the way of holding a 2H weapon, dual wielding, or sword and shield. Like, you're holding chalices, amulets, lanterns and all that. As a result, you're a bit behind other martials who can devote their hands fully to weapons and shields.

Implement's Empowerment is a compensation for that. It gives a one-handed weapon about the same damage as a two-handed weapon. But if you could actually find a way to hold implements and also fully use your hands for weaponry like other martials, you don't need this compensation anymore.

Well, lines and cones not starting at you is pretty unusual, so if the spell doesn't call it out, I'd be wondering if it was a mistake too. Notice how Telekinetic Bombardment explicitly explains the unusual line placement.

That said, I agree that if it didn't have range, 15 foot cone seems absurdly small for a rank 6 spell. On the other hand, a cone starting out there at range IS weird and not super well explained by the spell why this specific spell can do that. "You launch a cone" sounds more like you'd have a cone starting at the caster.

If you want to house rule something more "sensible", you could go with a 10 or 15 foot blast at 60 feet range instead, or even a 60 foot cone starting at the caster. Those would not be out of line for a rank 6 spell.

Yeah it's unclear, but I also believe Tridus' interpretation best fits the intent of the class feature (making simple favored weapons just good enough to seriously consider).

Battle forms are confusing. The rules seem straight forward but anytime you try and add things to them things get shoddy. I have a couple questions for those of you who have more experience than me and/or just know the rules better then me.

Say I'm a Monk with Clinging Shadows. I use an action and focus point to assume the stance either by item (like Saurian Spike) or spell through a multiclass dedication assuming a battle form through Dinosaur Form.

The Dinosaur Form specifically says I can only make strikes related to the form I choose. Ok. Battle Form rules doesn't say I end effects currently on me so it does not make me leave my stance. Ok. Can I then use the reach grapple granted by Clinging Shadows and strike with a Jaws attack? Does Battle Forms lock me out of Monk class abilities like Flurry of Blows? If not, could I in this example, if I had the Flurry of Maneuvers feat flurry for 1 action to reach grapple with a shadow and bite with an unarmed jaws strike?

So, battle form doesn't end stances because it doesn't say it does. However, it doesn't let you make any strikes other than the ones granted by the battle form.

A grapple isn't a strike, so it doesn't prevent you from using the clinging shadow tentacles to grapple with. However, if your battle form granted you an athletics bonus, that is the one you have to use for it. This means that the grapple trait on the tentacles doesn't let you add your handwraps item bonus to it.

The reach from the tentacles doesn't apply to your bite attack, they're totally separate things.

Using flurry of blows/maneuvers with a battle form is generally fine because they're not listed as any of the special statistics that you can't modify. So grab with a tentacle then strike with a bite is fine.

In defense of the laughing shadow magus, I actually see the focus spell working out well quite a lot.

I wonder if sparkling targe should take a page from thaumaturge shield implement/champion defensive advance and compress raising shield with another action (entering cascade, striding a bit, or recovering spellstrike)?

My suspicion is that they're missing some optimizations for repeated images, like page border decorations. When I run ghostscript to optimize with medium settings I can reduce file size by around 80% consistently without it looking any different to me.

Regarding "does losing a space battle mean TPK" - a solution from SF1 forum days was making escape pods a standard part of any ship design. And they're not worth points, you can't remove the space pods to buy more guns or shields.

Also, escape pods are designed to be really hard to find with (enemy) sensors, but respond to the coded frequencies of allies. And they just put you in stasis or life support with virtual reality entertainment. So basically, losing a space battle might mean losing the ship, everyone going in an escape pod, and waiting a few days or weeks for rescue.

Waiting to be rescued could still fail you the current adventure, but it allows the occasional really dangerous fight.

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I also like the idea of making fleeing easier than catching, as a matter of rule design. If both you and the enemy are by default capable of escaping if it looks like you can't win anymore, then you have less battles to the death and more about achieving specific things.

An enemy might want to prevent you from landing on a planet and exploring it; you might have to drive off a patrol ship. Once you've "persuaded" them you're too tough to stop, they flee. Now you're on a clock to do your mission, because maybe they come back with reinforcement.s

Or you're trying to blow up some satellites and they're trying to make things rather hot for you. But if you blow up the satellites, they might decide it's not worth sticking around anymore.

An actual battle to the death would require both sides to have a reason not to flee when they're losing, which makes things more interesting.

I don't consider this an error needing errata. These aren't two character options that you're pushed to use together; if that was the case then it would really be an error and should get errata.

But they're just two standalone options that don't really go well together. There's a default outcome of "well that just can't be done" as well as the standard escape hatch of "First Rule, the GM is fine with it, go".

I feel like Starfinder (2E) wouldn't be complete as a game if there were no starship combats in it, but I didn't like the original 1E version. I haven't played the latter variants so can't really speak to those.

But I think the biggest issues that need to be fundamentally addressed before you can start building any kind of rules are:

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* What happens if the players lose a starship combat? Is it TPK? Or adventure failure?

If we compare this a bit to other minigames, like Infiltration or Chases, when you're designing one of those scenes, you also need to think about it. If the players fail the chase, what happens? Can they go on with the adventure? Do they get caught and eaten by the Illumantula? If an infiltration fails, does the alarm go off, base goes on lockdown, and everyone is basically dead?

You could legitimately say that yes, the stakes are that high. Combat has high stakes; an (unrealistically) large amount of combats are just plain to the death. But the players are also massively in the advantage. Any Moderate fight the players are expected to consistently win without casualties, and even Severe fights are expected to be won most of the time (but sometimes with casualties). Extreme fights are more likely to have casualties but are mostly reserved for adventure-ending confrontations so you're not losing out on half of an AP book if you fail them.

But if the stakes are going to be that high, that has some consequences for how you can use them.

1) PCs should be in massive advantage most of the time, just like in regular combat. (If you think about it, most dungeons would also stall if you can't get past the Moderate encounter somewhere halfway through.)

2) Every class should offer something built-in to make you useful in starship combat. In SF1 there were plenty of ways to build a character that was useful in regular adventures but couldn't do anything useful in starship combat. A class-based character creation system should give PCs strong support to prevent that bad situation.

3) If the danger for a particular starship combat is low (mid-adventure, can't afford to have it derail the rest of it), then for it to be worth playing out, the mechanics themselves need to be fun.

4) If you're going to use a starship combat as the last encounter of an adventure then you can have higher danger level/stakes. But it still has to be fun and it becomes even more important that everyone has something valuable to do, because the climax fight of an adventure should really involve all the players.

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* If space combat is going to be its own miniature-based game, does everyone get a miniature of their own?

I think this is important because one of the frustrations in SF1 was that only the person (pilot) moving the ship got to really make a lot of choices. As a gunner you're just rolling dice and hoping to roll high, but you're not making many interesting choices.

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* How long is a space combat supposed to take?

If a minigame is fast and furious, you can actually get away with the rules design being a lot less sophisticated. Chase rules for example I find to be a lot more fun if you run them fast (10-20 minutes) than when people take their time and do painstaking worker placement optimization.

I think for space combat I could just run it similar to a chase minigame and that'd be fine. I could also run a space combat as being basically an entire Star Trek episode where every other scene you actually see some ships moving on camera, but a lot more of it is a scene in engineering with some clambering to fix a broken part, a social challenge to taunt the enemy or pry some information out of them, a boarding action when some of them beam aboard etc. It's technically a space combat but it's really more a framework story and the amount of time that's directly space combat isn't that much, and it's spread out wide.

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TL;DR - I think space combat design needs to start out by thinking a lot about what wining and losing means for the adventure. Provide build advice for GMs on how to use low and high stakes space combat. Especially for how to make LOW stakes space combat work because that's what you need the most of.

What's the homebrew part? Every RPG has edge cases in the rules, or situations that just aren't quite covered by them. Then the GM makes a ruling that they find reasonable, fair, and fun.

RAW has your back on this:

Sometimes a rule could be interpreted multiple ways. If one version is too good to be true, it probably is. If a rule seems to have wording with problematic repercussions or doesn't work as intended, work with your group to find a good solution, rather than just playing with the rule as printed.

If there's a rule where you find that the wording has problematic repercussions (which this is a nice example of), then RAW is that you should work with your group to find a good solution. Sticking to the printed rule and insisting that it's all broken, that's actually not what RAW is telling you to do.

So what's a "good" solution? That's ultimately a GM decision (see "The GM has the final say" rule). The GM might decide to stick with the apparent game design tendency of not too many archetypes at once. Or the GM might find that's not really so important, cuz they're running free archetype anyway, and just let you do that.

It is vague and confusing. There's nothing that prohibits a level one character with a class archetype, there's no rule in the game that prevents it (if you believe there to be, please cite it). It's a completely legal character build, and one that a new player could easily make not knowing that it becomes illegal at level 2 just by wanting to play a guardian warmage or whatever. Or maybe the campaign was only supposed to be a first level oneshot and got extended.

So you're left with the question of how to resolve the level up. And there's no straightforward unambiguous answer between the "cannot take any more dedications" and "must take this one dedication" we both got at level one.

You're clutching at straws here. It's a problem by level 2 even if you talk yourself into believing it's borderline admissible at level 1. So as a GM it's totally fair to say that given that situation, you're also not going to allow it at level 1.

I mean, if the point was that you wanted to play a really old elf, you can also do that with a different heritage, doesn't have to be ancient elf. You can just write in your backstory that you're really old. If it's the mechanical effects of having both things at the same time, the GM can just make a decision to say "well, the rules strongly indicate they don't want you taking so many dedications all at once".

Or, the GM can allow it. Based on the First Rule that's also a totally RAW thing to do (just about anything is..) But I think it's just not reasonable to say that this some kind of unresolvable paradox.

AP Edgelord wrote:

Exploration Activities wrote:

LINK

While you're traveling and exploring, tell the GM what you'd generally like to do along the way. If you do nothing more than make steady progress toward your goal, you move at the full travel speeds given in the table.

So, for those that think "a" is the best approach (see OP), what do you make of the bolded text?

Just ignore it?

Why?

Because you're making more out of it than is reasonable.

It just says that the base overland speed is based on your speed, assuming nothing else special is going on. It then goes on to give a list of special things that could be going on that have a specific impact on your speed. Most of them slow you down by half (Avoid Notice, Search), some by more than that (Squeeze) and some actually speed you up (Hustle).

But an alchemist gathering materials doesn't have any text saying it changes your speed, just that it doesn't take so much effort that it gets in the way of doing anything else. Likewise, a sorcerer doesn't need to do anything special to Refocus, so could also be doing that while just walking along at normal speed.

I think it's totally fair to compare them because they're spells from the same bloodline. I don't think the design intent is that once you got the second one you'd stop using the first one. I get that that's a thing for regular spells from slots - you're sort of nudged away from Breathe Fire when you get Fireball. But you can prepare something else in the Breathe Fire slot. Bloodline focus spells are a bit more precious, you can't trade them in for something else.

I think it's more like feats - Sudden Charge doesn't stop being a good feat at later levels either. You'll sometimes use other feats, but it wasn't design intent that you'd just forget about the low level feats.

I don’t know if I will have time to deep dive the math, but a quick look tell me that flurry of claws that does double damage on a crit is equal to fire ray damage wis, but would be trading 30ft of range for the ability to do twice as much damage when you can manage a second target. So the decision is, is that a fair trade off?

Another point of comparison would be to look at where flurry of claws with double damage on a crit compares directly to a spell slot spell like Breathe Fire, which is also pretty likely to hit 1 or 2 targets most of the time it is used. The damage is the same base but I would look at the accuracy map in a couple of different situations, including where there is are bonuses to attack in the party. Focus spells should come in better than a cantrip, but not as good as an equal ranked spell slot spell that is heightened to a top slot.

Fire ray is not nearly as good as Thunderstrike or Horizon Thunder Sphere.

I don't really agree here. I'm playing a couple of dragon sorcerers and the 10 foot range really is quite restrictive. Even enemies who happen to be diagonally flanking one of your friends are already 15 feet apart.

And I think the spell to compare against is the dragon breath focus spell that the same bloodline can get at level 6. That one easily outpaces Breathe Fire, just by area. It would be really poor design if it also left dragon claws so far behind that the new focus spell meant you'd never bother with the old one anymore.

That's a thing though with tabletop game rules.

Suppose you're the developer of this spell, and in your mind it deals double damage on a crit because it's an attack. You playtest it a bit, and you realize that having the enemies standing within 10 feet of each other actually is somewhat restrictive, so the spell feels pretty balanced. You send in your draft and it gets published.

Except that you wrote attack, not strike, and you didn't explicitly write that it doubles on a crit. So strictly speaking it wouldn't be doubled. But it did in your mind, and when you were playtesting it. There wasn't a claxon that went off with "YOU'RE PLAYTESTING IT WRONG".

Now if you were doing this in Foundry and coded in the spells, that might have made you notice it, that it wasn't doubling like you expected it to. (On the other hand, you might have given up in screaming frustration trying to get the two-target selection thing as well as multiple damage types thing properly automated for something you're just trying to playtest.)

I am curious to see what everything thinks on these two points.

What is functional to hit for spell attack?
What is the acceptable crit chance on a spell attack after including the best common case for teamwork math swings?

Depends on the damage, and relative to save spells.

The expected damage of a to-hit and save spell should be about the same. However, most to-hit spells don't do any damage on a miss. This means that the damage they do on a hit/crit needs to be higher than that of a save spell.

There's a few rare spells that still deal damage on a miss (horizon thunder sphere) that skew this a bit but they're exceptional. If we stick to the paradigm that a to-hit that misses does almost nothing, then the results of a hit need to be bigger than a failure on a basic save. That, or the chance of hitting needs to be much bigger than the chance of an enemy failing a save. (Which, I don't think is the case?)

So either to-hit on spells should go up, or damage should go up, by a lot. I'd be quite okay with to-hit spells being the all or nothing high risk high reward option. But currently it feels like high risk average reward.

Maybe there should be a "complicated" trait for monsters. These are monsters that if you use their abilities in the way they were meant, are not a straightforward fight and done with. They're monsters that will escape, will attack you in weird ways, cause long-term damage that affects other encounters, can't be fought if you didn't bring the correct specific tools and so forth. Such as:

* Liches
* Vampires
* Cave worms
* Maruts
* Rust monsters

and so forth.

It would help advise the GM to be careful putting it on a random encounter table. Because either the encounter is a lot more involved that it was supposed to be, or people feel deflated that this special monster went down so un-specially.

The equalizer in the stat block is -5 int and a GM realizing this affects how to run it.

The problem with that is that it's vague. It's similar to the question of just how dumb a mindless creature is. If there's a pit in between you and a mindless creature, will it walk around it or straight at you? If you Hide and Sneak away so you're Undetected, does it forget you were there at all?

My experience with GMs playing monsters "dumb" is that it's really really hard for GMs to really do to a significant degree. Even if they in the abstract agree that it's appropriate.

It's great for comedic effect. It's just not something you can really rely on to balance out hard numbers or an ability with poorly defined limitations.

I think making all the conflux maneuvers based on things with MAP is fine. It's a clear setup for making it less of a "the only way to play" is spellstriking every turn.

Dirty Trick does fit in there very nicely. (Note that Laughing Shadow looks very dexterity-focused but actually has no problems being used on a strength build.)

Maybe for Starlit Span the maneuver could be a trick shot of some kind, that inflicts a minor condition instead of damage? Something like the bow crit effect (pinning people to the ground), that requires enemies to Interact to get themselves unstuck?

I think the new alchemist mechanics have a lot going for them in a sci-fi setting. That doesn't mean that we must port over the class directly. And there are some rough spots on the alchemist that could be fixed if we built a new SF2 class that just took the good stuff.

Features that I think are worth taking:

* Formulas. Finding an uncommon/rare recipe, or actually going on a mission to steal a recipe from an R&D facility seems like it fits sci-fi really well. Also, the remaster take on formulas where you don't have to keep re-buying them at higher levels is a nice improvement.

* Daily items as well as items that you replenish between encounters. This gives the (alchemist) nice flexibility in producing the right thing for the situation, as well as a bit of daily customization without getting too far bogged down into choice paralysis.

* Ad-hoc throwables with extra options based on your research field.

* A fair amount of thought put into "but what if the enemy is immune to poison/my favorite energy type".

Things that we should take the opportunity to revisit:

* Make sure all the other fields feel like they got just as much love as the bomber field.
* The (space chemist) not getting stymied by SF2 having more long-distance fights. Maybe just have action-efficient guns for shooting chemicals at range.
* Setting the healing output to not look ridiculously feeble next to a mystic.
* Thinking about construct creatures (creatures that don't swallow, and don't care about poison) being far more common both as players and NPCs. Maybe think more in terms of oils and acids than potions and poisons.

Most every GM I know would run a cave worm lethally like that (with either sky spitting or with burying).

I don't much understand why many of you wouldn't expect that more often than not.

Yeah I don't think this is such a weird thing to do. The weird thing is that it makes the monster OP.

They have the spitting ability clearly called out in their stat block, so it's not weird for a GM to use that ability. "Try to have the monster show off its unique abilities before it gets killed" is pretty normal behavior for a GM. The problem with the spitting is that it doesn't have reasonable numerical boundaries built into it.

The tunneling thing is something that might just happen by accident. A worm shows up, eats the barbarian and the wizard, and then takes enough damage from the rest of the party that it makes sense to flee. Well, it doesn't want to be killed so it chooses NOT to leave a tunnel. The barbarian would have liked to try to rupture out but he's used to big non-agile weapons, and probably doesn't do the large amount of damage in a single hit with a small weapon that you need. The wizard might have gotten some kind of "need to breathe" consumable but doesn't have any of the (uncommon) spells that let you teleport out when you can't see the destination.

Neither of these required the GM to be particularly evil. They can happen when you're playing the monster doing normal monster things.

If you say that spitting a creature has a max range of one increment and that the worm can't tunnel when it still has prey fighting back in its stomach, these problems go away.

I think being extreeeeemely hard to kill is a good gimmick for maruts. They'd be going in the category of unusually tricky monsters, like wily cave worms and vampires that actually play smart. Things that you don't just simply fight and kill.

However, you do need a way to end an encounter with it for parties that don't have the silver bullet (yet). 10m reboot sequence if you sufficiently trash it sounds reasonable. Or maybe you can banish them once they're down.

I can also imagine that they may be something that you really almost can't destroy, but there's instead a sort of protocol ritual to get them called off your case.

Maybe Axis just has only so many maruts and doesn't like it when they get stuck on a case for a millennium because the backlog of other cases just keeps getting bigger. If you get someone to file the proper paperwork for your case they pull off the marut to work on other things while they process your files first.

My impression was that Paizo was trying to make some classes intentionally less complex in the remaster, and others more complex. Because some people want simple and some people find complex entertaining.

Barbarian in the remaster dropped various "conditional" things, like Deny Advantage ("does that apply this time or no?"), penalties to AC that you sometimes have, rage that isn't always on yet and so on. Now it's just, roll for initiative and just start using your raging stats and your AC stays the same, and being flanked is just bad. For someone who wants to play a "simple, just hit stuff" class, barbarian got better.

Alchemist is the total opposite, they got more complex with the "promise" that any new book with more formulas in it adds more things you can play with. Because the alchemist has the breadth of a prepared spellcaster with the freedom of a spontaneous one. A player who enjoys scouring the archives for the perfect formulae for every situation is gonna get a lot out of these rules. So for that audience the new alchemist is better. But that's a specific audience they picked to focus on. If you mostly were looking for an uncomplicated bomb thrower then this is a bit much.

But yeah, I'm happy with it because I like that complexity.

I feel spell attacks are in a weird place and not entirely satisfactory.

1. It's a bit off that they start out the same accuracy as weapon attacks but then fall behind.

2. There's not really all that many of them. Compared to how many spells target saves, it feels like spell attacks are a small minority that could have been just absorbed into the other types.

With saving throws you know that saving throw numbers are modeled significantly on what numbers monsters need to balance well against casters. With AC you know AC is mostly balanced against martials because those are the biggest group rolling against AC.

I feel we'd be better off by either leaning more heavily into spell attacks (and adding some accuracy boosters there) or by removing it from the game and converting those spells to saving throws instead.

It's also a problematic creature because it really isn't guaranteed that anyone in the party can actually do chaotic damage. Unlike say, fire, which you can probably improvise with a torch or something after you've beat a troll unconscious. Parties (pre-remaster) may have made sure they can do good damage because it's effective against fiends. But preparing for inevitables is not really something people normally have top of mind.

It's cool to tell stories of the unlikely and horrible situations your characters got into and (maybe) made it through. But it's more fun if there were actually chances of getting through. Maybe your luck ran out, or you took too much risk, and it ended badly. Can happen.

But it's not so much fun if all it takes is for you to die was not having perfect luck the whole time. The cave worm is very good at biting and grabbing and swallowing and it's not so easy to get out. If a level-appropriate challenge just needs to get 2-3 decent d20 rolls to kill a character, it probably WASN'T level appropriate.

And it's mostly not because of the numbers of the worm - those are in line for a creature of it's level. It's the corner case abilities like tunneling with swallowed creatures or spitting someone for 6x its normal damage on second/third action. The ones that feel like someone didn't quite math their way through the consequences while designing.

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I think you can keep cave worms cool and scary without making them unfair and unfun with a few tweaks:

- Can only spit one range increment high. That gets you back to "high" damage for the fall. Which is still good for something that can't fail even when you have MAP.
- Can't burrow underground while it has "struggling" people in its stomach. It needs to digest you first. Once you go unconscious it can burrow again. If it really wants to burrow earlier, it can spit you out.

I'm set on playing exemplar, I like the character concept.

Anyway while we are on the topic of things we want to see changed in pf2e. I would like them to get rid of what I call staggered proficiency progression as a balance method in favour of a static relative proficiency progression balance.

What I refer to as staggered proficiency is the bit where proficiency ranks increase for example 2 levels earlier or later than other classes with the reason given that this class gets other things so we have to make them a bit worse at this. or the other way around. think magus. they are good at swords and stuff, so they get their magic proficiency 2 levels later than regular casters. Or casters with their spellcasting proficiency at lvl 7 rather than 5, which is combined with the lack of attack runes one of the main reasons they feel especially bad at attack rolls. or say warpriest which gets weapon proficiency 2 levels late because they also get spells, and about those spells. let's give their upgrade to expert at lvl 11 because we did give them the weapon proficiency increase early. what warpriest is not very good? don't worry we're giving them master weapons at lvl 19, 7 levels later than regular martials. or how spellcasters get weapon proficiency at lvl 11 rather than 13.

The goal here is clear I think. there should be tradeoffs to being good at certain things. you aren't supposed to be abpe to do apl things super good. But this 2 level delay here 4 level delay there approach is in my humble opinion the single worst way to do this. Because it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. the class is still just as good at the thing outside of the 2 levels where it is delayed. Those two levels now just become a feel bad moment where your class is suddenly worse relative to the rest until they get past those 2 levels. (this is why attack spell rolls are at their worst on levels 5,6 and 13,14). Or in the warpriests case. it is just bad at both being a martial, and being a caster due to not getting either in the name of tradeoffs. Armor proficiency have this as well.

I think the goal of staggered proficiency is something else actually.

A common complaint about 2E is that leveling feels like a treadmill. You go up a level, the monsters also go up a level, everything stays the same, you don't really get more powerful.

Staggered proficiency I think is meant to take that smooth line and make it less smooth. Suddenly, at level 5 the martials get a bump to hit. Meanwhile the casters get rank 3 spells like fireball, which is one of the first solid large area long distance AoEs. Then at level 7 the barbarian starts to do a lot more damage while the champion races ahead in AC.

Some levels, one martial will be ahead of other classes in to-hit, and other times someone will be ahead in AC. I think Paizo intentionally creates some minor imbalance to make things more interesting.

Ranger is pretty interesting yeah.

I do think I'll stick with the hammer since it's also a nice melee weapon and you can only have so many ikons. And I've got the boomerang in mind for a club fighter.

My impression about attributes is that people allow themselves a lot less freedom than they could. For example:

Secondary stats are solved. If you don't have a primary stat that works with saves, you'll boost the stats that help you make saving throws. Otherwise, you'll either boost Str or Cha because Int is a complete dump stat in this edition. You can choose to deviate, but doing so will make you weaker than you could be.

Variants of this you'll also run into are "if you don't put all your stat boosts into saving throws YOU ARE SO DEAD".

Of course picking saving throw stats makes you more likely to pass saves, and that matters. But the way the game is set up, you're still going to fail some saves. We're talking about the difference between passing maybe 70% of saves instead of 60%. But PF2 is balanced so that you can't have a Sure Thing on checks the game really cares about.

PF2 is very much about trade-offs. Do I care more about saving throws or more about having more skills? My int +3 fighter/wizard has frequently been the one carrying the PFS party through skill challenges because I actually HAD skills. Which meant we got more treasure, which made us more powerful. But yeah, my constitution could have been higher and that's sometimes painful.

But the character is eminently playable. I think people give themselves a lot less freedom to pick alternative attribute spreads than the game is willing to give them.

I feel with regards to rolling dice to heal up -

1. Either you're not in a hurry, it might take a bit longer or shorter if you roll well or poorly but eventually everyone will be back at full health. In this situation, it's reasonable for the GM to just say "don't bother rolling, everyone is back to full health".

2. Or, you are in a hurry, and it IS important whether each roll is good or bad, and you can't make all that many rolls.

As a GM it's good to notice if you're in situation 1 or 2. Making people painstakingly roll everything in situation 1 is just self-inflicted boredom.

My biggest issue with PF2 casters is the way their spell slots scale. PF1 casters started with a few, and then scaled up to so many slots that there was barely a restriction (which was lucky because the cantrips were terrible). PF2 tried to fix the huge number of spell slots at higher levels, by starting even lower but still scaling up quickly. Whereas I think the number of spell slots should start more generous, but scale up much less.

Spells per day is still a bit annoying to me, because fewer and fewer classes have a "per day" based resource. This creates some odd choices, generally not happy ones.

Is your cleric out of healing spells? Okay, everyone else is still good to go, but they probably would rather sleep on it and have that big safety net again.

But it also happens the other way around: we had a party with a ranger, fighter, water kineticist and a sorcerer. The water kineticist could deliver lots of out of combat healing, so the only one who'd really run out of resources was the sorcerer. This was a big dungeon, the kind where each floor is a level worth of encounters, and the story made it seem like we had to make haste because a friend was going to be sacrificed to demons soon. So this put pressure on the sorcerer to then just make do with cantrips for the rest of the day, which isn't that fun.

I would prefer moving mostly away from per-day resources entirely. We can create tension by having encounters closer together with less time to heal/refocus/repair shields. Daily resources for only some classes make it harder to balance things like overland travel ("you travel for a week and have one random encounter") with dungeons ("there are 13 encounters and you're in a hurry to save your friend").

Then there is the rigmarole of Medicine checks after each fight. Which is more annoying than PF1's happy stick dance, because it takes longer at the table and distorts the character build of which unlucky player drew the short store more. Don't get me wrong, I like that Medicine is a viable option now; I just wish that a) it was a bit less fiddly, and b) it wasn't the only option.

It's far, far from the only option?

I probably missed a couple more.

So I pioneered my new examplar in yesterday's PFS game and had a good time. But a light hammer with hurl at the horizon still has only 35ft range increment.

What are some ways to extend that range?