Ascalaphus's page

Ascalaphus wrote:

Do you really need Int? If you're not asking for saving throws, you don't, really.

I thought it was rather a nice little trick that the magus doesn't really rely on caster DCs. If you can just hit you can make the spell stick. You can use cantrips from a multiclass or ancestry just fine.

Well, you need one or the other - either INT to direct cast your damage at your enemies, or to Spellstrike them as often as possible. Otherwise why are you playing a Magus? Without one or the other, you would be doing better with a Fighter and a spellcasting archetype for the buff spells you want to use.

What I mean is that spellstrike with spell attack spells doesn't care about your intelligence. Even more now that the remaster removed ability score from cantrip damage.

You can play an Int 10, Wis 14 magus with cleric multiclass and use divine lance with holy damage, for example. (But I don't think you can cascade into holy damage anymore.)

I don't know if they improved in the remaster, but they were unusually awful monsters before that at least.

Have been for years actually. I remember in D&D 2e realizing that I'd put the level 4 party against a monster they couldn't see or in any way hurt. And that was flying faster than they could run. And that was by nature not going to let them get away. When D&D 3e hit that was when I realized how useful it was that monsters had a challenge rating telling you how powerful they were.

But still, WoW and a couple of other monsters (poltergeist) are way off the normal curve for how nasty they are.

Do you really need Int? If you're not asking for saving throws, you don't, really.

Although the remaster reduced the number of spell attack spells a bit. That's actually something that needs attention. Either the magus needs to rely less on those, or we need more spell attack spells.

I thought it was rather a nice little trick that the magus doesn't really rely on caster DCs. If you can just hit you can make the spell stick. You can use cantrips from a multiclass or ancestry just fine.

I used to use Adopted Cantrip to get Divine Lance (good) before the remaster, Arcane Cascade and then Flurry of Blows to try to get a lot of hits in. (I had items and dedications giving me 14 different cantrips. For sure I had the thing the enemy was weak to.)

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I think magus is interesting because many of its problems can be fixed by publishing a few new spells.

- Reactive Strike got you down, because it's uncommon, but not uncommon among bosses? Write a cantrip without manipulate. That'll be your boss-cantrip then.

- Running low on spell attack spells? Write more spells.

- Action problems getting Arcane Cascade up and running? Write a one-action cantrip to do something clever at the start of combat. Maybe a mobility effect?

I'm dubious about whether moving enemies up into the air with Acid Grip is RAI. Because if you can lift someone 10 feet they'd also drop prone. Which feels like a good enough side effect that the spell should say it directly, rather than leaving it as a secret trick to find out.

I think it's possible the writer just meant in any horizontal direction but didn't realize they needed to be more precise.

I'm intrigued by the spell because it seems like at higher levels, this would essentially be a cheap utility effect. For when you need to move someone around a bit (into a flank, off a ledge, whatever) but it doesn't require your top rank spell slot. If moving them even 5 feet would be enough, it's quite reliable.

Also it's pretty reliable for stopping troll regeneration at least 1 round. I'd definitely consider packing at least a scroll of it.

I think there's better ways to balance the magus than "let's force them to use a spell and then use an action to have access to most of their features". If people praise Starlit Span is because it "fixes" or rather avoids these problems because they since they have to move way less and don't really need Arcane Cascade for anything make them the easiest one to play.

I don't think it's just about balancing.

I think they simply didn't want you to spellstrike like clockwork every round, because they don't want people to do the same "rotation" every round. So they put in obstacles: you have rounds where you need to move to get to enemies that aren't in melee, or where you want to change your arcane cascade to hit a weakness.

I'd say the Starlit is actually "broken", rather than "fixed", because it doesn't participate in enough of the "other things to do than spellstrike" parts of the class.

However, I think the other things to do than spellstrike could have been feel-better than they are.

Arcane cascade isn't really a very big bonus. The things that you need to be in cascade for tend to be things you want to do early in combat (like move fast, for laughing shadow), so you'd have to go into cascade before your first spellstrike. It sort of works with buff spells, and Jump (1 action to enable cascade and move) but your spells per day are limited. It'd work better if there was a good start of combat cantrip. Also, buff spells don't really tend to give you a wonderful damage flavor on cascade to trigger weakness with. I got more value out of it with my magus that used Flurry of Blows a lot though, since more attacks per round means the bonus is leveraged more.

The focus spells you get out of the box have MAP, which fits the goal of encouraging you to use them on rounds you're not spellstriking. But the conditions when you can use them to good effect are a bit limited. I tended to mostly use Force Fang as free damage in between spellstrikes.

Magus' Analysis feels bad as a feat. The #1 thing I want to do is recharge spellstrike, getting Recall Knowledge is #2. But getting #1 depends on succeeding at #2 which you're not automatically great at, since Intelligence isn't even your key stat and a lot of monsters are actually based on Nature/Religion->Wisdom.

Basically, the improvements I want are to make you feel better about what you're doing when you're not spellstriking. I support the goal that you shouldn't be doing the same thing every round. But the "off" rounds need to be cooler.

I think the designers intended for the magus to have a complicated action economy. The target audience for the class is people who think "walk up to enemy, hit with hammer" is not complicated enough.

Combining your Abilities

As a magus, you have multiple special actions and abilities that can be used in combination with your spells. You can enter your Arcane Cascade stance with either Spellstrike or a normally cast spell, so it could be in your best interest to cast a spell to buff yourself at the beginning of a fight and enter Arcane Cascade, rather than going for an early Spellstrike. You can usually stay in Arcane Cascade for a long time, though if you find out an enemy has a weakness to a certain damage type, such as fire, you might want to refresh your stance with a fire spell to take advantage of the bonus damage. It's often worth it to cast your conflux spells and make a Strike either on a turn where you can't make a Spellstrike, or as the last action on your turn after a Spellstrike. Sometimes, it might be worth it to cast a conflux spell even if you think you'll miss, because it can still recharge your Spellstrike for your next turn. Since a lot can ride on your Spellstrike, which uses your multiple attack penalty, it's much better if used as the first attack of the turn!

That sidebar to me says a lot about what they were trying to achieve:

I don't think they succeeded 100%. Spellstrike is still the eye-catching feature of the class. Cascade on the other hand seems so small fries that you don't always bother spending an action to activate it.

I'm hoping when it eventually gets a remaster (probably as side effect of a book that remasters rune magic) they iron out a few of the kinks of the action economy. Some things could do with some smoothing out, for example the Magus' Analysis feat - you're probably more interested in recharging spellstrike than in recalling knowledge, you're not even in the top 5 of classes that are good at recall knowledge. Since the creature becomes immune anyway, maybe it should just always recharge spellstrike?

I'd also like it if they got a some more 1-action things to do on turns when you're not spellstriking. Give some more things that feel good if you can't spellstrike every turn.

Overall I'm expecting the class to always stay a bit fiddly with action economy because that's how it's supposed to be. But I want it to be fiddly and not clunky. A fine line but an important one.

I like the idea that you can reprogram a wand with a few days of downtime crafting. That also fits wands that used to be high level for you, but that you're growing out of. You can then turn them from an attack spell to some utility spell that doesn't care as much about being max rank. It makes finding a wand of a level-oriented spell (like an attack spell or a Heal or such) feel better.

Not sure I'd do that with scrolls though. Overall I encourage people to not sit on consumables for too long, but to just use them when the situation seems good for it. Because if you wait a few levels, they're just not strong enough anymore, relative to your challenges.

In my own games, I'd probably stick with 1e rules since it's what we know, what we're used to, and is the only official precedent we've got. If it's a hard corner that fills up the square, you can't move diagonally past it. If it's a creature, a creature is not a hard corner and typically does not fill there full space, and so you can move diagonally past it. You can move diagonally past lined creatures as well if they are not formed up properly to fill the gaps; I don't like that, but we need to draw the line somewhere and at least it's consistent with the first two rulings.

That's also what I've seen most people default to.

The gaps in the diagonal line of creatures are ugly, but arguing against them also is ugly. A diagonal line of four squares counts for 30 feet of movement, would be weird if you could block that with 4 creatures while a regular horizontal 30 feet line would take 6 creatures to block.

This is a side effect of trying to grid space. Whatever grid you choose is going to be ugly in some way. Square grids are bad at these diagonals, as well as drawing nice 10ft AoO circles. Hex grids are ugly at mapping indoors locations.

I played a starlit magus in a campaign where the rest of the party were a fighter, witch, sorcerer and a swashbuckler who made it to sessions irregularly.

Although the forums talk a lot about how good the action economy of turret like Starlit is, I actually found it much more effective to join the melee front row after 1-2 rounds to put pressure on enemies and give some breathing room to our own back line. Overall that made our party stronger even though my individual damage might have lagged.

(It didn't hurt that I multiclassed Monk for flurry as well as taking AoO.)

Overall I find the various sidebars in the magus class hinting a lot that the design intent wasn't that you'd be spellstriking every round. But that the magus class was very much aimed at people who enjoy puzzling out what to do with a tricky action economy, as each particular combat develops.

Let's see the paragraph as a whole instead of fragments of a sentence.

Usually the creature or effect forcing the movement

chooses the path the victim takes. If you’re pushed or
pulled, you can usually be moved through hazardous
terrain, pushed off a ledge, or the like. Abilities that
reposition you in some other way can’t put you in such
dangerous places unless they specify otherwise. In all
cases, the GM makes the final call if there’s doubt on
where forced movement can move a creature.

Push and pull don't have a keyword definition for this, so we should treat them as plain English. A synonym for push or pull should still count. We're looking at whether the effect could reasonably be considered pushing or pulling, not only if it literally uses those words.

A good example of something that's NOT pushing or pulling would be Leading Dance. It's literally forced movement (as per the critical success condition) but the foe is making the steps in tandem with you. This would be a clear case of an effect where you couldn't dance someone off the ledge.

"Muscling" someone around is a lot more into GM decision territory. It could be a synonym for pushing and/or pulling someone. The GM clearly has the final call on that. Since you're physically forcing someone's movements, I'd lean towards allowing it.

Another class I see compared with swashbuckler is the thautamaturge.

- Swashbuckler prefers "fencing style" weapons. Thaumaturge prefers "one hand free" weapons. That can end up looking pretty similar.
- They both have an "activation sequence".
- Both tend to emphasize charisma.
- Both kinda middling armor classes.
- Both struggle a bit with action economy (recharging panache, not attacking after a finisher, having to exploit new enemies..)

But the thaumaturge seems to be getting a better deal:
- The activation sequence works even on a failed check.
- The activation sequence is based purely on the boss level based DC, not on whether your preferred skill meets the boss' good or bad save.
- The activation sequence can give the rest of your party some really good info especially against otherwise difficult (rare, unique) enemies.
- The bonus damage is more reliable (implement's empowerment is not precision damage, and weakness is fine too). You also don't depend on enemies having a mind that can be affected.
- Your activation skill auto-scales on level up.
- You don't expend your exploit on a big hit, unlike a finisher. Actually the damage per regular hit of a thaumaturge isn't far off from that of a finisher for a swashbuckler.

I've played two APs to 20 so far and rocket tag hasn't been a problem like it was in PF1.

Well, at some point their current print run is going to run out. When that's coming into view, Paizo needs to decide to either do a second print run, or make plans for a new book for the niche.

If they do a new print run, I expect they'll convert it to remaster rules. While there's plenty of references to positive/negative/evil in it, I don't think it'll be that difficult to revise. Positive/negative is just a matter of replacing words with new words. Evil is a bit more work, but still pretty clear how you'd convert it. Overall, the conversion is much easier than a book about law/chaos creatures would have been.

Is there going to be an errata to for Book of the dead to make it Remaster Compatible?

I would say that right now the book is "compatible", about as compatible as PF1 books were with D&D 3.5 back then. They're not exactly the same thing, but they can be used together without too much trouble.

If you run into a spell that hasn't been printed in remaster, or been renamed, you can just look it up in Archives of Nethys.

If you run into something that required good alignment, it's a bit trickier, but the GM could decide that requirement is now something like these:
- "must be sanctified holy"
- "must be able to sanctify holy, but doesn't have to actually do it"
- "must not follow anything that allows you to sanctify unholy"
- "must not be sanctified unholy"

Yeah, of course the smith still needs to actually have that metal. Not every smith has some scrap orichalcum lying around.

To me it's clear these spells care about respecting whether you have access to uncommon metals, and maybe you can do a little sidequest to get a sample. But that's the rarity system working as intended: you want something unusual, you do a sidequest for it, or find it as loot or something.

Ascalaphus wrote:

1 SP or 10 GP isn't really the sort of cost difference that game balance depends on, anyway.

Then why the wording in Needle Darts? What is the purpose of having it worded that way?

Why not just have Needle Darts say that it can do damage augmented by any metal material trait of the player's choice when the spell is cast?

The requirements for the different metal spells are actually not very consistent:

You briefly swap the outer surface of the metal in an object with a suitable amount of a common precious metal from the Plane of Metal. You can instead choose an uncommon or rare metal if you have access to it or the GM has given you access to it.

- Only cares about access, you don't actually have to own it.

You grind a chunk of your choice of metal to fine dust between your hands

- Mentions chunks, which have specific rules meaning.

You shape three needles out of a piece of metal in your possession

- Only mentions a "piece", and a silver piece is by definition a piece of metal.

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I don't believe the writer(s) of the spells were trying seriously to balance or restrict these spells by monetary cost. There's not enough effort going into that.

The spells do respect item rarity, since none of them let you use a metal you wouldn't have access to in some form.

I think the big missed opportunity is for the school curriculae to get you a few spells from beyond the arcane tradition, or maybe just unique arcane spells that are unique to that school. "The secrets of our school" is a big theme for wizards.

Also, consider that other classes do LOTS of borrowing from other traditions. Sorcerer bloodline spells, with lessons, psychic conscious minds, cleric deity spells, oracle mystery and divine access..

The only caster classes that stick closely to their own spell list are the wizard, magus (wizard that goes to the gym) and bard.

1 SP or 10 GP isn't really the sort of cost difference that game balance depends on, anyway.

I think the problem with exploration is that it has two different ideas going into it.

The first is an attempt to streamline repetitive stuff like "I search for traps, I move 10 feet, I search again..." or "I keep casting detect magic every 15 feet".

The second is trying to turn exploration into its own minigame where there needs to be something valuable to do for everyone.

The first idea is pretty successful. Exploration mode has streamlined a tedious aspect of PF1. (To be fair, it's officially codifying something that some groups had already started doing.)

The second idea isn't really successful. The activities are not really comparable with each other in value. And if you look closely, there's particularly few valuable things to do for the back row of the party. Since Searching has a maximum range, you sorta need to be in front to make sure nobody else in front of you walks into a trap before you have a chance to find it. Defend doesn't really reach its maximum potential either if there's three people between you and the enemy.

I think the easiest thing to do is just accept that exploration tactics are only a time-saver and it's not important that everyone is eking out maximum optimal results.

If you really want the second idea minigame to work, I think you may need to come up with better alternative activities. For example, why can't Detect Magic find any hazards with a proficiency tier? Why doesn't it let you make an Arcana check as an alternative to Perception (and checking expert/master in the skill)? Even so, I think it'll be hard to come up with enough interesting things for the back row to do.

The Lost Omens books are primarily setting books, not rule books. So they don't lose a lot of relevance with rule updates.

Rage of Elements is 99.99% remaster rules.

Secrets of Magic: the main impact here is on two bits: runelords and magi.
- Runelords focused heavily on schools of magic. Since runelords are big deal for Paizo I expect them to get a remaster version at some point. Probably turning their schools into curriculums.
- Magi had a bit of interaction with spell schools for arcane cascade, and are affected by their being fewer cantrips with spell attacks. They're still playable with some light modification, but could do with an update.

Dark Archive: main impact is on the psychich whose gimmick of extra focus points is a bit snowed under by everyone else also being better at recovering extra focus points. Still playable, but could use an update to make the psychic shinier again.

Guns & Gears: not really impacted all that much.

Gods & Magic: technically a Lost Omens setting book but with a lot more mechanical crunch in it than most. This one is impacted heavily by alignment changes as well as the upcoming divinity war stuff.

One interesting thing I've noticed a lot in ambushes, is that tradition 1E surprise rounds actually didn't always work well for ambushers.

Imagine you have a tiger. To make a good attack it needs to close in to melee, then do a bunch of attacks. With 1E surprise rules, it would only get a standard action, so that's not gonna work just like that. Okay, but tigers are ambush predators, so they get Pounce, which allows them to do a charge plus full attack as a standard action. But the problem is that charge can only be done in a straight line. But to be hidden from people you need some cover or concealment to hide behind, so that straight line is not so easy to achieve.

If you tried to build surprise rounds in 2E by giving people one free action at the start of combat, you'd end up more or less with the same problem. One action isn't enough to get to melee AND do some good attacks.

But it also starts to show a better solution: make it so that the ambushing side does better in melee. That means they get to move first and attack first and try to gain some advantage. Meanwhile, the surprised people might not have their weapons ready which also costs an action. (And can provoke reactive strikes, since Interacting to draw weapons has the manipulate trait.)

Now I don't think it's a good idea to make it so the entire ambushing side automatically wins initiative. Because then you get all the enemies, and then all the PCs. You often get focus-fire situations one way or the other that are too extreme.

A more balanced approach is to give enemies a bonus to initiative rolls, so on average more of them will be earlier in initiative than the PCs, but not all of them.

So then we get to where it's actually pretty simple to run ambushes:

- If enemies have excellent preparation, give them a bonus (say, +2 circumstance) to their Stealth rolls that they use for Initiative. Also, their Stealth score might be their strongest skill to begin with.
- Ambushing enemies tend to have weapons already drawn. If the PCs are completely unsuspecting they're in danger, they probably don't have weapons ready yet.
- People who like to ambush often have abilities like Pounce (lots of big cats) or Surprise Assault (rogues) that work better if you win initiative. And remember, winning initiative is actually the same thing as successfully surprising people.

No free extra action. The GM Core says this:

When do you ask players to roll initiative? In most

cases, it’s pretty simple: you call for the roll as soon as
one participant intends to attack (or issue a challenge,
draw a weapon, cast a preparatory spell, start a social
encounter such as a debate, or otherwise begin to use an
action that their foes can’t help but notice). A player will
tell you if their character intends to start a conflict, and
you’ll determine when the actions of NPCs and other
creatures initiate combat.

The next page has a long and somewhat rambling paragraph about hidden enemies, but that doesn't change this.

Let's dissect why the rule is like it is, because it's a good rule.

The first attack you do each round has no MAP. For enemies, it's likely to be at a high attack bonus, because enemies tend to have high attack bonus to begin with and if there's some kind of ambush, the one making the first attack is probably not the junior enemy. So getting two attacks in a row would be really brutal, potentially two crits in a row.

How could you imagine this happening? Well, someone who's got the element of the surprise should probably be going first. Unless of course their ambush is kinda clumsy and they're so deep in the bushes that they actually waste some time getting loose enough that they can take a shot. That uncertainty is what you simulate by having everyone roll initiative. Maybe the people being ambushed react faster than their ambushers!

So are there no mechanical benefits at all to laying an ambush? Actually, there are a couple of significant ones:

1. The rogue Surprise Assault ability. If a rogue is using Avoid Notice and beats someone's initiative, that enemy is off-guard to the rogue. So you can do ranged sneak attacks, or sneak attacks when your allies haven't set up flanks yet.

2. If you're ambushed, you might not get to use reactions before you've had your turn:

The GM determines whether you

can use reactions before your first turn begins, depending
on the situation in which the encounter happens.

Some people still think that it's a standard rule that you never have reactions before your first turn in combat. That's wrong. The rule is that the GM decides based on the circumstances. Getting surprised is a reasonable circumstance not to get reactions in.

3. Time to prepare buff effects. Like spells that last a minute or 10 minutes, or drinking some mutagens.

4. Positioning. You can start the fight when enemies are in a weak position. Maybe even with some traps around.

So altogether, ambushes and surprise attacks are still pretty nice. But no free attacks/surprise rounds.

Feats like Nimble Hooves that increase your speed have specific language saying they don't stack with other ancestry feats that increase your speed.

That language has popped up in a couple of places, usually things like versatile ancestries that you could combine with other ancestries like Elf that also have feats that increase speed. It's been repeated enough times now that it doesn't look like an accident. In PC Core 1 it's used for Nephilim but not Elves.

That they specifically mention other ancestry feats means that they could stack with other things, even feats that increase your speed (like the Fleet feat), just not ancestry feats. If untyped increases could never stack, there would be no need for mentioning this specific restriction, and it also wouldn't make sense for the restriction to be that specific.

Yeah, the encounter building system is supposed to help the GM estimate difficulty. It's not a "budget" system where "you're only allowed to use a level X creature here, so could you stat out this creature as X+2 but call it X so I can use it here and have it be more powerful than I'm allowed to use?"

If you want a memorable dragon, use a dragon of party level +3, not +1. Don't say that you're using a level+2 dragon but use the stats of a level+4 creature. You're just lying to yourself (and as a writer, to editors and GMs).

Ascalaphus wrote:

I consider subclass archetypes more of a holdover from 1E than anything else. 1E classes had more stuff baked in that you'd switch out with archetypes because you were trying to specialize in something else.

It took a long time between them writing rules for subclass archetypes, and actually publishing a subclass archetype that uses those rules. Because as it turns out they weren't really that necessary in 2E.

I don't really agree. There's plenty of room to do things with subclass archetypes. Paizo just hasn't wanted to.

There's room to do those things, it's a tool they could use. Runelord is a good example of something that's supposed to be really specifically wizard and school focused. Going in directly and changing the wizard class chassis makes sense there.

But for a lot of other things, it turned out they could achieve them with more generic archetypes, so strict subclass archetypes weren't needed. For example the Magaambya archetypes - those work for much more than just wizards or druids.

That wasn't something they could easily do in 1E; 1E prestige classes were very hard to make workable in a way that kept your original class a bit on track. In 2E that works better because archetypes don't replace your main class chassis.

So subclass archetypes are a bit heavy-handed tool that is only needed in a few cases. Much of the time, generic archetypes will be sufficient, and those are usable for more classes.

So it looks like for most creatures the change was:
- remove the separate alignment damage die
- increase the damage die size to compensate for losing the separate die
- give them a holy/unholy trait so their damage can trigger weaknesses

The net effect of that seems more that neutral PCs now take a bit more damage from fiends that good PCs used to already take.

I've had good results with Wand on my Strength/Melee thaumaturge. It gives me a ranged option based on Charisma, not Dexterity.

I consider subclass archetypes more of a holdover from 1E than anything else. 1E classes had more stuff baked in that you'd switch out with archetypes because you were trying to specialize in something else.

It took a long time between them writing rules for subclass archetypes, and actually publishing a subclass archetype that uses those rules. Because as it turns out they weren't really that necessary in 2E.

I feel ranger's problem is that the way enemies scale doesn't gel nicely with hunt prey action economy.

The common wisdom is that it's better to scale up encounter difficulty by adding more monsters rather than making a solo monster tougher. Because the math of the system gets more painful when there's a big gap between levels. So PFS scenarios for example tend to scale for extra players by adding extra monsters. And this is also advice that GMs often get when they ask how to adjust adventure paths for five or six players.

But this is not so good for rangers. If there are more enemies then they need to hunt prey more. Also, more players tends to mean that everyone is focus-firing more on the same enemy. So either you fight the same enemy as the rest of the party (and have to hunt prey again soon) or you go deal with one enemy while the rest of the party focus fires down other enemies. Of course rangers have trouble with stronger solo enemies in the same way as everyone else.

As a GM, if there was a ranger in the party and I had to scale up enemies, I'd consider giving the enemies a lot more HP instead of raising the level or amount of enemies.

I've seen the one handed fighter build used to very good effect. The build is roughly:

Weapon: short sword is a really solid option because it's agile and the specialization effect works well with a fearsome rune and shatter defenses. But it works fine with other weapons too, like some bludgeoning weapon and a crushing rune.

1 Snagging Strike
2 Combat Grab
4 Good choices include Intimidating Strike and Sudden Charge
5 Maybe specialize in swords
6 Shatter Defenses works well with intimidating strike, your grabby feats, sword specialization, battle cry or a fearsome rune.
8 Blind-Fight
10 Disruptive Stance
12 Tactical Reflexes
14 (free space, maybe an archetype?)
16 (free space, maybe an archetype?)
18 (free space, maybe an archetype?)
20 Boundless Reprisals

So what's the general idea? Control! Move up to an enemy, snagging strike to make them off-guard, combat grab to keep them that way. If you already had enemies flanked, open with intimidating strike instead and perhaps move on to shatter defenses to make the frightened stick longer.

Disruptive Stance and Combat Grab are a nightmare for enemy casters. If they cast while grabbed you can attack them while they're off-guard and if you hit you disrupt the spell (not just on a crit). Even if they survive that, they still need a flat check to do manipulate while grabbed. They can't step back first, they're an action short to Escape, Step, and cast a typical spell.

I've seen this played in campaigns heavy in enemy casters/cult leaders and so many of them ended up "swooning" to death in the fighter's arms.

It's also a very party-friendly build, because you're dishing out a lot of debuffs to enemies and keeping them locked in place, so it's good for protecting back row casters and making enemies off-guard to rogues and ranged attackers.

So, not the highest damage, but the control is really strong.

So, this is speculative, I haven't seen PC2 yet but I've seen Paizo's modus operandi for a decade.

- The designers most likely thought Synesthesia was too good to be true. A mistake in the old CRB.
- They don't consider it "iconic". It's not an essential piece of any class identify, it's just really powerful.
- It might get brought forward in PC2, probably nerfed.
- If it doesn't, then it's essentially "dropped". That's not the same as errata. Ray of Frost got errata for it's damage dice. Synesthesia just disappeared without a trace.
- If dropped, it won't show up any more in new books, NPCs won't have it, you won't find a scroll of it in loot, it's not going to be on a staff etc.

So, in a home campaign, does that mean it's "banned"? Well that's really up to the GM. At some point the remaster books basically completely replace the legacy books, and it's up to the GM to decide what do do with any options from the legacy that were dropped.

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What about PFS? PFS has made strong statements that old options that haven't been reprinted remain available in their old form. PFS is actually a pretty permissive campaign that allows a lot. Consider how many home campaigns allow that many wacky ancestries? Does every GM allow guns?

So PFS, in the name of "whatever Paizo book you bought, you can use" and "if it was legal once, we really hate revoking that" will continue to allow Synesthesia if it doesn't get remastered.

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What should the GM do? IMO, as a GM I'd treat everything that hasn't been remastered as being under suspicion. Basically, every option that clearly could have been remastered but wasn't, is not Common anymore. It needs players to ask permission. Like, the obvious books to reprint Synesthesia are PC1 and PC2. If it's not coming back in PC2, then I think the wise thing as a GM is to treat it as a Rare spell.

This could result that even really popular spells like Synesthesia was fully removed from the remaster and maybe don't return even in PC2.

What do you think?

Yeah, I think that's entirely possible.

I don't think it'll be many things that get removed like that. I think most of the things that get removed are things that are just really close to WotC stuff and it's more trouble than it's worth to restyle it.

Synesthesia seems like it was far above the curve, too good to be true. The way the forum talks about it definitely makes it seem that way.

Of course a powerful option is going to be popular with players, but is it also good for the game as a whole? Designers might decide that it's not, that it's crowding out other decently powerful things because this is just so much more powerful, so overall bad for the game.

I don't think there are many options that are so beyond the curve powerful that the designers do this. There's plenty of options perceived as strong that didn't get changed - popular feats like Double Slice, or even spells like Sure Strike.

I don't find staves completely useless, but I'm decidedly underwhelmed.

Let's think first about what a staff could be good for;
- rounding out versatility on a spontaneous caster
- rounding out versatility getting back lower level slots on a "wave" caster (magus)
- lots of extra castings of low level slots (true strike)
- extra castings of "sometimes you need a lot of these, usually you don't" spells for prepared castings. Like, some days you have three encounters with invisible enemies.

Stave spell ranks tend to lag a bit behind your own maximum rank. A level 6 staff will have rank 1-2 spells in it. Overall the rank of a staff's spells seems to lag 3 levels behind the max rank of a full caster.

Finally, there's a soft requirement that a staff has a coherent theme. "Fire" is a coherent theme. "Archmage with lots of classic spells" is also a theme apparently, but I don't quite know why.

Keeping all that in mind, what kind of spells do we want in a staff? I think the big theme is: not blast spells. Blast spells whose rank lags 3 levels below yours are not what we get excited about. A fire-themed sorcerer who finds a staff of fire is not going to get excited about the staff throwing fireballs either, the sorcerer can already do that.

Also not: incapacitation spells. Since the rank of the spells in the stag lags behind you, these are pointless.

Also not: counteract spells. The lagging spell rank makes these not quite pointless, but not very pointy.

What we want is is spells that tend to stay good even when they're not at your highest level. For example:
- Slow
- Haste
- Jump
- Sure Strike
- See the Unseen
- Fly
- Laughing Fit
- Translate
- Enlarge
- Acid Grip (for its control effects)
- Revealing Light
- Invisibility
- Wall of Wind
- Gust of Wind
- Fear (rank 3)
- Unfettered Movement
- Resist Energy
- Stupefy
- Enfeeble
- Ghostly Weapon
- Tailwind (rank 2)
- Darkvision
- Shape Wood
- Water Breathing
- Water Walk
- Speak with Animals
- Speak with Plants
- Shape Stone
- Speak with Stones
- Entangling Flora
- Mist
- Aqueous Orb
- Enervation (because of the Drained effect)
- Telekinetic Maneuver
- Cantrips (since they auto scale)

So there really are plenty of spells that would be good on a staff, and enough to choose from that you can give the staff a coherent theme. But most staves are filled with dud choices.

I'd even rather that high levels staves just add more and more low rank utility spells than more poorly-aging mid and high rank blast spells.a

Is there something specifically for the pocket remaster that needs its own errata?

A level -1 creature going from 4 to 14 HP by adding Elite was a bit intense yeah. That took skeletons from "okay, the resistance is annoying, but just punch them" to "oh that really is harder than a same-level zombie".

Yes, in legacy rules, the incorporeal ability gives resistance to a lot of things and usually doesn't make an exception for alignment damage. The champion is out of luck. (So is the cleric who relied on divine lance and didn't prepare disrupt undead.)

In the remaster, what used to be alignment damage is in most cases replaced with spirit damage (with a holy or unholy trait), which incorporeal creatures almost by definition should not have any resistance against, since spirit-without-body is all they really are.

Champions of course haven't been remastered yet so we don't exactly know how divine smite will end up working in the future.

The GM Core section on designing creatures still has them, just with a few tweaks. For example:

Demon

Traits fiend, unholy
Languages Chthonian, telepathy (usually 100 feet)
HP typically high to account for their multiple weaknesses
Weaknesses cold iron
Sin Vulnerability Demons each represent a specific sin, like
envy or wrath, and have a special vulnerability based on
the sin they represent. This should be something the PCs
can exploit through their actions, which should then deal
mental damage to the demon. The amount of damage
should be based on how easy the vulnerability is to exploit.
Divine Innate Spells usually 5th-rank translocate and at-will
4th-rank translocate
Rituals usually demonic pact (Monster Core)
Sin Ability Demons also have a special ability based on the sin
they represent, which either makes them better embody the
sin or instills that sin in others.

(The "multiple weaknesses" also refers to devils also having the fiend type, which brings weakness to holy.)

So yeah, the general theme of demons and devils (and daemons) is still there.

I didn't see roadmaps for oni, divs, rakshasas, asuras and sahkils there. I think sahkils are pure Paizo invention though, so I don't those were cut for cultural reasons. More likely that they're being saved up for monster core 2.

Ascalaphus wrote:

The reasonable thing is to check when the suppression ends, whether the original cause for the effect is still valid.

If your friend was immobilized by being stuck under a boulder, was Sure-Footed, and walked away, then they shouldn't become immobilized again. Because the boulder can't do that at a distance.

If your friend was immobilized by magical goo, got Sure-Footed, walked away, but the goo is still on them, then afterwards they get immobilized again.

But then you are basically rulling that you fully counteracted the effect and not merely suppressed it.

Especially since the suppression effect mentions that the condition reappears without time having elapsed.

Not precisely.

Suppress it for long enough, that with another action, you can indeed get out from under it. So there is a cost, it's not free. But the pricing is indeed attractive.

No intention. You're not supposed to know the specifics before applying.

You're supposed to apply where you want the xp, not have to carefully boon plan. If you do want the boon rewards somewhere specifically you can always move around with Bequeathal later.

I think that's exaggerated.

For PFS scenarios you're not supposed to boon-hunt to try to play a specific scenario with a specific character because you know the reward.

But these are APs we're talking about, you don't play them with a PFS character anyway, so that reason isn't relevant.

I think this is more a side effect of just habit/technical limitations, than the result of a specific intention.

Laughing Fit (previously: Hideous Laughter) could be an interesting one.

Unless the enemy critically succeeds, this prevent the enemy from using actions as long as you keep sustaining it. That could be useful against an AoO-happy enemy that's harassing your spellcasters.

In general I'd be looking for Will save oriented spells, because enemies that you get close to in melee will often have good Fortitude or Reflex.

The reasonable thing is to check when the suppression ends, whether the original cause for the effect is still valid.

If your friend was immobilized by being stuck under a boulder, was Sure-Footed, and walked away, then they shouldn't become immobilized again. Because the boulder can't do that at a distance.

If your friend was immobilized by magical goo, got Sure-Footed, walked away, but the goo is still on them, then afterwards they get immobilized again.

They should all work the same.

Keep in mind that hardness is quite rare on monsters. Hardness is something objects have, monsters would usually have resistance. There is one monster that does have hardness that you run into in quite a few adventures, and that's the Animated Object. But you can imagine why that one has hardness.

You can sort of see behind the curtain that the devs were trying to balance all these abilities. They all focus on characters that hit often, for smaller amounts of damage. As compared to someone with for example a greatsword or a polearm that hits fewer times, but for more damage at once. For both of those kinds of characters, weakness and resistance should matter, but not be too good or too awful. So if you hit more often, you don't get to trigger weakness more often; but you also don't get punished by resistance more often.

So you can draw that RAI forward to hardness: it makes sense that for hardness they'd want things to work the same.

Also of course, hardness is done all the way at the end of the damage process, after the damage had already been merged. It would be extra work to un-merge it for hardness, and what would be the point of doing so? Punish some classes for no reason?

Yeah, shield block happens very late in the damage sequence, after the damage has already been merged for processing weaknesses and resistances. At that point it makes no sense to split it up again into separate pools to use shield block against one or the other or both.

Well, the GM is sorta right, that the writeup of Free Archetype in the GM Core is written in that vein.

If the group all has the same archetype or draws from a

limited list, you might want to ignore the free archetype’s
normal restriction of selecting a certain number of feats
before taking a new archetype. That way a character can
still pursue another archetype that also fits their character.

But the writeup in GMC takes up just a bit more than a quarter of a page, and is mainly concerned with use cases such as "you're all apprentices at a magic school", but requiring everyone to spend class feats on multiclassing into wizard would be a bit hefty for people who want to play a rogue or fighter. So it's very much a sketch for what the GM might do, not a full and hard rule system.

This means on the one hand that the GM can't really say "but RAW says I must handle it this way" because it's very much up to the GM's own decisions. On the other hand, you're already getting more freedom in archetype selection than the GMC is suggesting.

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In practice, most groups that I see on the forums talking about Free Archetype fall into two main types:

- People playing the Strength of Thousands AP where everyone is supposed to have a dash of primal and/or arcane magic flavor in their character. This one suggests using the "specific archetypes list" approach.

- People playing free archetype "just because". There might be some combinations of archetypes that the GM bans for power reasons, or to avoid monotony of everyone taking the same strong choices. But apart from that, the restriction of branching out into the next archetype for the free archetypes is generally considered to be in a separate silo from any archetypes you take with your "paid" class feats.

In other words, most groups using Free Archetype don't seem to be doing it exactly RAW.

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Personally I think the RAW rules are a good common ground for starting a discussion, but especially in these kinda sketch-like rules, I think as a GM you shouldn't actually hide behind RAW. You should own your preferences.

Ascalaphus wrote:

There's the procedural element - Force Barrage says to combine damage for missiles aimed at a single target, so that you can't for example get an absolutely massive boost on a single target from bardic music or unleashing psyche. So the damage is already combined for that, you shouldn't split it up again.

But there's also the fuzzier "too extreme to be true" argument - there's no good reason why this spell should be far far deadlier than other spells in the same level band. If it was supposed to be super deadly, it'd have the Death trait. Since the designers didn't put a "this should be extra deadly" signal on it, we should choose the more moderate interpretation.

Nah, there are enemies immune to effecra with the Death trait, so putting it on a spell like Force Barrage when a spell like Disintegrate doesn't have it falls under TBTBT.

Disintegrate doesn't need the death trait because it says "A creature reduced to 0 HP is reduced to fine powder; its gear remains."

Creatures with immunity to death effects are mostly undead and constructs which are destroyed at 0HP anyway, so don't interact with Dying rules at all.

I don't buy that force barrage was intended to be far deadlier than other spells. If that was the intent, there would be flags and sirens on it saying so.

There's the procedural element - Force Barrage says to combine damage for missiles aimed at a single target, so that you can't for example get an absolutely massive boost on a single target from bardic music or unleashing psyche. So the damage is already combined for that, you shouldn't split it up again.

But there's also the fuzzier "too extreme to be true" argument - there's no good reason why this spell should be far far deadlier than other spells in the same level band. If it was supposed to be super deadly, it'd have the Death trait. Since the designers didn't put a "this should be extra deadly" signal on it, we should choose the more moderate interpretation.

So, I can see you used the GM guidelines for monster creation, the numbers are overall in the normal ranges. Let's look at some details then.

Nitpick: You wrote Initiative instead of Perception.

AC is moderate, HP is low, and saves are high/moderate/low - overall this makes the creature a bit fragile.

As for attacks, you used the Moderate to hit and Moderate damage.

The buzz-by attack is probably supposed to work with its fly speed, but technically speaking, a Stride is only land movement. You might want to look at the Zephyr Hawk for how you could word the ability for flying.

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Overall, I think you might have lowballed this monster a bit. It has only moderate offense, and is a bit weak defensively. You can probably afford to make it a bit more powerful in one area.

You could use the Base Roadmaps (GM Core p. 115, or GMG p. 59) to figure out a good combination of strong and weak points.

Yeah, the roadmaps based on creature type (undead, demon..) and role (soldier, spellcaster, ambusher..) are basically the new templates.

The background from PF1 was also helpful in this regard. The idea that PCs and NPCs aren't really the same thing is true in terms of what we all see on-screen. Perhaps there is a half-measure that will satisfy both desires at once! And, thankfully, as I have no intention of creating anything new in my initial campaign and am not merely re-writing racial stats, I have some time to consider it. The idea that "yes, I am merely constructing an illusion, and you know very well that's what I'm doing" doesn't sit well with me at the table. Of course that's always what we are doing, but we don't say it, and we do pretend otherwise for the sake of immersion. I shall ponder this deep and hard and to much excess and eventually come up with a solution that I will probably hate but which I'll go along with anyways!

Yeah, I've found this is pretty important.

As a player, I know that low-level NPC "rogue" that we're fighting isn't built with the actual rogue class. But if he turns out to have both sneak attack and attack of opportunity, I'm still going to feel like he's breaking character.

In RPGs, immersion is being willing to be fooled, for your own entertainment. The whole game is make-believe. But willingness only goes so far.

If an NPC wizard starts casting a whole lot of divine spells, there had better be some story behind it, such as that she's actually a priest pretending to be a wizard. Of course, under the hood, the NPC is actually neither a PC wizard or a PC cleric. But that doesn't matter as much as the consistency.

It's a bit more niche than the others, true. You need to actually have a plan to exploit the debuff, such as:

- You want to Feint and the lower Perception helps. I'm not sold on it because Feint is okay but there are just so many even easier ways to achieve flat-footed.

- You or a teammate is gonna target their Will save, probably with spells or Intimidate. This can be good especially against mooks. If you have an enemy where Will wasn't their best save to begin with, you debuff it, then it becomes quite likely that a spell like Fear or Calm Emotions can really wreck them. Given how quickly mook HP goes up at higher level, Will spells can be the fastest way to remove them from the fight for a while.

Another point is that it's relatively cheap. It's just a skill feat, it doesn't commit you to a class or archetype. And Diplomacy is one of the more useful skills to have for other things already. And Bon Mot doesn't require a free hand or a particular kind of weapon. So it doesn't really interfere with the rest of your build very much.

Sometimes as a player I grumble a bit about "so they have that rogue thing and that fighter thing as well, isn't that convenient for them..."

And yeah, that's partly because NPCs don't truly get built like PCs. They're just a sort of hollow outer shell that looks like a PC class, with just enough class ability sauce to be convincing stand-ins.

But on the other hand, that's also part of the brilliance. It saves heaps of time, and guarantees that you get to a much more on-target balance result.

One of the tips in the monster design guidelines I particularly like is this one:

Avoid abilities that do nothing but change the creature’s math, also known as “invisible abilities.” These alter a creature’s statistics in a way that’s invisible to the players, which makes the creature less engaging because the players don’t see it using its abilities in a tangible or evocative way. For example, an ability that allows a creature to use an action to increase its accuracy for the round with no outward sign (or worse, just grants a passive bonus to its accuracy) isn’t that compelling, whereas one that increases its damage by lighting its arrows on fire is noticeable. These both work toward the same goal—dealing more damage this round—but one is far more memorable.

This sounds really reasonable and obvious when you read it like that. But when you start putting it into practice, you notice it's really powerful advice. Compare this to a lot of PF1 monster design that actually had a lot of "internal" creature design just to satisfy getting to required numbers, but that was pretty invisible to players.

This also pairs well with another part of PF2 monster design philosophy: think about how much the monster has to show off. Most monsters aren't going to last more than 5 rounds in combat. Giving a monster more abilities than it can possibly have time to use, is a waste of design time. And it makes the statblock overly complicated for the GM to use. Harder to see what's important.

Some abilities don't need to be in the statblock at all. Basically anything the monster does that won't happen during combat, doesn't need to be in the statblock. It can (should) go in the description as flavor. But it doesn't need to be mechanical.

To contrast that to older design: in PF1, some of the bad guys in Iron Gods had a quarter page devoted to item creation feats that they had, and tech items that needed multiple rounds to draw and use. But they lasted for two combat rounds because they just didn't have level-appropriate stats.

The "hollow" design of PF2 monsters means you don't have this problem anymore. If the description says they can craft tech items, I'll believe it. I don't need to see them spend feats on item crafting. And I don't want their combat stats to not actually match the threat level they're supposed to be because it was all spent on item crafting feats.

Once you decide that the statblock is just for combat, not for what they can do off-screen in their own villain downtime, it's massively simplifying and liberating as GM.