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I didn't see any rule that advertising something like this was not allowed, so let me know if I should stop!

So here's some shameless self promotion of the Venture Captains Youtube Channel,
the link to our latest Lorefinder Video, going over the Empire of Cheliax.

Feedback is very important to us! Let us know what you think.

Cheliax is personally my favorite location in Golarion, and HV has been one of the most fun Adventure Paths to play. While working on the episode I noticed how much this nation got screwed during the lifespan of First Edition. Is the time for a glorious comeback coming in 2e!?

I've been GMing Second Edition for almost a year now (going great!) and my #1 problem has been that whenever there's a loot drop, the game just grinds to a halt.

By the core rules, it takes 10 minutes to TRY to identify the properties of a magic item using Arcana/Occultism/Religion/Nature. Often, multiple small magic items drop in 1 encounter/treasure room, after that, the all items have to be individually checked for magic and then identified, usually taking over 30 minutes of in-game time and a buncha dice rolls. This has started to annoy my players as well, since they want to ID everything as soon as they find (otherwise they'll forget to do it later). This takes longer at the table than I'd like to admit, with 4/5 chars just twiddling their thumbs (They say they'll refocus or something).

I realize there's some value in not immediately telling them what each magic item is, so they can fail to ID an item and either experiment with it (they'll never do this) or be unable to use until they retry the next day. Sometimes this just feels like a relic of old school D&D and it's not adding a lot of value... If they don't ID the item on the first try, it just gets ignored, possibly forever.

Do any of you house rule this? How? I remember IDing was automatic in the playtest. I'm looking for ideas of what to do with this slow system. Perhaps only high-level items should require Identification, or maybe IDing takes just a few seconds if the item is low level.

Wanted to ask about all the rules interactions going on with this combo. I have a PC playing a Halfling Rogue with this Ancestry feat and this combo has beem coming up excessively. It seems that a Rogue with a shortbow (and distracting shadows) can stand behind some random PC, use the Hide action and then shoot. If they did well with the Hide, they become Hidden from most enemies and so they are flat-footed to these attacks. This can be repeated every turn for the entire fight if the Rogue is far enough in the back. With a shortbow it's just 2d6 damage (1d6 bow + 1d6 sneak), though the crits are extremely nasty. I think there is a -1 modifier to the attack from the Soft cover provided by the ally, but the flat-footed condition more than makes up for it.

This has become very boring, but it looks completely intended. Am I missing something?

Working on a new Lorefinder episode over here and I opened up Lost Omens: Gods & Magic to get the latest information on the Goblin Hero-Gods: Hadregash, Venkelvore, Zarongel and Zogmugot. Turns out they are completely omitted form that book, the book that is supposed to have all of the deities and even has some that are less relevant than the Hero-Gods.

I checked the old Inner Sea Gods to make sure I wasn't imagining those deities existing and they're still there, so this is a pretty glaring omission. I can understand not featuring some guys like Socothbenoth, but why would these be removed? With Goblins being a Core race now, one would think they'd be important to mention.

Are they just omited from the book or have they been retconned from the setting? An official answer would be very welcome since this is for an educational video and we don't want to add something outdated.

Been reading about "Precious Materials" for weapon and armor. Some of them offer multiple grades (low, standard, high). Increasing the grade of a material does two things: It increases the Hardness and BT (good for shields, useless for everything else ) and it allows you to put higher level runes on the item (useless for shields); but it also increases the cost exponentially.

So for a weapon or armor (not a shield), the main benefit is being able to put better runes on it, right? Does this mean that regular steel or wooden weapons and armor can't have runes higher than 8th level? Or does this rune restriction only apply to equipment made of special materials? In the latter case, why in the hell!? Precious materials are super overpriced for what they provide already (level 11-12 for a bit less bulk) and with the price scaling, they become extremely unattractive compared to just basic materials.

On shields, they're worse than equivalent sturdy shields regardless of material.

Been looking at the new GM's guide and the full monster creation rules. There's tables for all sorts of monster statistics at every level, going from LOW to EXTREME, with "High" often being the numbers for an optimized PC at this task (max STR fighter to-hit, Paladin AC, etc).

For the most part, this is pretty consistent across the board until you get to Spell Attack Rolls and DCs. The spell DC "High" column matches up well with what a Wizard would be doing (DC 17 at level 1, for example). The "Spell Attack" columns, however, have this same level 1 creature with a +9 mod to their spell attacks! As far as I know, a caster's Spell attack is 10 less than their spell DC no matter what (since there's no item/status/circumstance bonuses for them I think), but for monsters the difference is 8.

So why do they have a consistent +2 to spell attacks from what should be possible? This puts primary casters, such as Wizards, closer to the "Moderate" column than "High" in this aspect. Enemy AC keeps up pretty consistently with PCs so I don't see any reason why they get +10% chance to hit with any attack spells. Makes me jealous since those spells are super unreliable when cast by PCs.

Witches get the Cackle class feature at first level, giving them the Cackle action. It reads identical to the "Sustain a Spell" action with the following differences:
- Cackle has Auditory and Sonic traits and only affects targets that hear you.
- Cackle does not have the concentrate trait.
- Cackle only works on spell that have a target/targets (no summons)

I'm not seeing what the point of using Cackle over just sustaining a spell is. The concentration trait doesn't seem to affect non-Barbarians in any way while the Sonic trait comes with some limitations. You can later modify Cackle using class feats but what's the point? You're getting a weaker version universal action every spellcaster can do from what I can tell.

They get Effortless Cackle at 16 instead of Effortless Concentration that other spellcasters do, but still not seeing the difference. They should get this earlier imo, since it was one of their main gimmicks before.

This class, dunno, feels like went through a lot of changes and doesn't resemble what it used to be very much. Migrating PF1 Clerics to PF2 is gonna present some challenges.

There's now a no-armor white-mage cleric that seems new to the d20 tradition of games. It gets legendary spellcasting so it seems ok, I suppose. Their supporting ability doesn't seem specially notable since all the casting proficiency is important only for offense.
The actual Cloistered Cleric archetype in PF1 was really bad and nobody picked it, and the other no-armor cleric options were also quite rare. This is essentially a new class that didn't exist (though it was requested) that I suppose fits all those NPC Clerics that don't adventure who got a lot of baggage before.

Then the Warpriest is... The weird one. First, it doesn't really represent the PF1 Base Class of Warpriest, it's instead supposed to be the replacement for all the regular Clerics from before, right? Except it gets all Martial Weapons when it didn't before. This may do a number how they prioritize their primary weapon, though there's still good support for sticking to the Deity favored one.

The Warpriest gets Expert proficiency in weapons and armor at a very competitive timing, but then it never gets to master in either, while it's spellcasting starts really slow then it gets to Master by the end. This is really weird! This is a great melee combat class until like level 13+ when you'd expected a proficiency boost somewhere but it just never comes... But guess we won't find out how it plays until it's playtested at those high levels.

It does kinda suck this means we're not getting the old Warpriest Class, full of gimmicks as it was. You would need a way to get a bit more Fighter stuff, but Multiclassing fighter would also be VERY redundant.

What do you think?

Head over to https://www.twitch.tv/officialpaizo to see them talking about Jason's PF2 campaign (with the new rules). Should expect streams every Thursday at noon PST heading forward.

I searched for this and all I got was rulings on the effects of these feats from Champions of Purity, but not this. I can see that, by RAW, Celestial Totem only has a lv8 pre-requisite and doesn't mention having to also have the Lesser version while the Greater one does require having the regular one.

Is this an editing mistake or is this intentional?

The bestiary says that when you have parties larger than 4, you must increase the XP total of the enemies to compensate. There is a handy chart and everything, so it's pretty easy. But this also comes with a warning: "Add mooks instead of using bigger enemies or it can end badly."

From my experience, TTRPG party sizes are generally between 4 and 6 PCs. And all sizes in that range are decently represented. Let's talk about a hypothetical party of 6.

A lot of monsters in any RPG bestiary will be "solitary" encounters where you can't really add more creatures without screwing up the ecology or adding another member of the same species (which would make the encounter too hard). Good examples of this are Dragons, Manticores and Bullettes, to name a few iconic ones.

When a 6-man party is at the level where they could face one of these, the difficulty is going to be a lot lower compared to a 4-man party, so the GM should need to make some ajdustments. Since adding more enemies is out of the question, you need to power it up somehow or replace with a bigger creature. The Bestiary says this is dangerous, but it can be done in some instances.

The issue is that when you can do this is pretty inconsistent. Going +1 Level ont he bestiary may result in +1s across the board, which the larger party can handle, but at other times you also get a lot of +2 and +3 increases, the latter which can end in a quick TPK. The advanced template thing they got is also a pretty big boost to monster power.

So one issue here is that monster scaling is not linear or on a smooth curve, but instead has big spikes up in power at particular levels while it's linear at others. This means that if the 6-man party is at the wrong level, they could be horribly killed by upping enemy level by 1, whereas it works perfectly fine sometimes.

I think either the power curve should be smoothed a bit, or the GMs given more guidance on handling the scaling of solitary encounters.

The other issue that compunds it is the "tight math paradigm" people been talking about a lot lately here. That +3 wouldn't necessarily spell death in other RPGs, but in the PF2E playtest it is practically insurmountable because of the degrees of success system and few ways to gain boosts besides leveling up.

If the mechanics remain as it is, Adventures should be careful in the guidance they offer GMs for scaling encounters to challenge larger/smaller groups (PFS ones often do), or the XP budget system adjustments may need to become more nuanced for these edge cases.

As it is, straying too much from the 4-man party means your only real choice is to stick to groups of small enemies and adjust their numbers accordingly. Using big monsters just results in a mess.

If you've been on the Playtest forums since 2E was announced, I'm sure you have heard the developers talking about why some of the design choices were made. The original Pathfinder RPG was not a perfect game by any means, even if it is still a great game. It has some glaring issues that the developers correctly identified and then set off to try and fix for 2E. This sounds like a pretty good way to begin designing a new game, but I think some of that fell down the wayside at some point.

I will be looking at the "Promises" of PF2 and how the current playtest seems to be addressing the issues from Pathfinder 1st edition. I will be going 1 by 1, using the same format for all of my analysis. I'll go through them roughly in the order they appear in the playtest rulebook.

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**Ancestry Ability Scores**

Problem: The races in Pathfinder were quite distinct, but they shoehorned their members into certain classes because of how unforgiving the point Buy system was. Trying to raise the stat you got a -2 penalty on was a losing proposition and getting 18s without a boost was very expensive.

Promise: We would get floating Ancestry bonuses to allow characters to shore up their penalty or boost an ability they otherwise wouldn't be that great at, thus opening up a lot more build options while keeping the choice of ancestry more relevant than it is in Starfinder.

Solution Rating: Good

Opinion: While Ancestries are still limited by their attribute penalty, the new ability score generation system makes them a lot more flexible in what builds they can be good at. It's not too hard to get a 18 even on something your ancestry doesn't automatically boost. I'm fine with still being a bit restricted since it makes the choice of Ancestry meaningful, but not prohibitive.

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**Ancestry Feats**

Problem: Races were only ever important a level 1. Many of them offered some very interesting general feats unique to them, but most of the time they couldn't compete with other combat options you could take with that same feat. As a result, it was rare that characters would develop their ancestry past character creation. Additionally, the alternate racial feature system was rather inelegant and tacked in as a patch, even if it was pretty succesful.

Promise: Characters would get special feat slots that could only be used on those Ancestry feats, allowing developers to create powerful and flavorful abilities that were race-locked. Selecting your racial features at level 1 would be part of the universal feat system and more flexible at both launch and with future splats.

Solution Rating: Extremely BAD

Opinion: While maybe they fixed the second issue a bit, it just caused more Problems. They did not fix the first issue at all, and in fact, made it worse than it already was by a lot. Ancestries were gutted and recieve no abilities except senses and movement speed, everything else is a feat.
Characters indeed learn new Ancestry abilities as they level up, but instead of being those interesting feats from before, the majority will be spent just re-buying the ones you used to get automatically. some of those higher level abilities indeed exist, but most of the time you have to get the base versions of these instead with the super limited slots.
Letting you pick which abilities you get, combined with the very limited ancestry feat slots, leads to cherry picking and ignoring some abilities that were very flavorful before, such as Stonecunning or Elven immunity to sleep. Half-Breeds are also hurt in that they use up the 1 feat to even exist at all and can't benefit from their half-breed status until level 5.
I would propose rethinking this entire system and reverting Ancestries to having a lot of base abilities and using the Ancestry Feats to compliment them, not replace them.

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**Backgrounds**

Problem: Traits could make it extremely time consuming to build a PF1 character since there were a lot of them and you had to pick 2. Unfortunately some traits were better than others and most people used them for optimization and then ignored the background information they gave, thus defeating the purpose of their creation. Besides these, there was really no aid in developing character's backstories and previous occupation unless you used Unchained Background Skills.

Promise: You would pick a background that summarizes some aspect of the character's backstory during character creation (like in 5E) and it would give you some weak but flavorful skills and feats to flesh out your character. The limited size of the list would make it easy for an unexperienced player to just pick one and get something to work with. They would give ability score boosts to further push some classes into certain typical backgrounds.

Solution Rating: Decent

Opinion: Backgrounds do indeed work as advertised and I don't think it takes more than 5 minutes to pick one during character creation. They all follow a specific format with no variation, which ensures that they are mostly balanced with each other unlike traits. For an experienced player they seem kind of pointless, however, seeing as they amount to a Skill Feat + a Lore skill trained. There really isn't a lot to playtest about them and it would be nice to be able to make your own following the guidelines. They're just there.

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**Class Feats**

Problem: There really wasn't much of a Problem to fix, but instead just a need to formalize the class structure that was developed by Pathfinder for use in most of the classes. However, not all classes benefited from this design and were left really bare, such as Fighter, Wizard and Cleric. Fighter eventually go out of this with so many fighter-only options being created that they could use their bonus feats on.

Promise: Classes would get an ability unique to them every even level to let you customize them and increase build variety. The system would be universal and the "talents" would be divided into a lot more tiers than "basic" and "advanced" so they could be better balanced for the time they become available. Every class would have features to trade out for archetypes now. Analysis paralysis during level up would be mitigated by having the list start out small and then expand.

Solution Rating: Decent.

Opinion: This system does indeed meet many of the goals it was advertised to. All classes have a bunch of Class Feat slots to build the character they envisioned (Some classes are missing class feats randomly here and there, though). The list does start out small at first but it becomes pretty expansive later, which makes creating a character and leveling up quite fast.
I think there are 2 issues, however:
1- While most classes have great selections of Class Feats that reflect their old talents, the lists for martial ones like Fighter, Ranger and Barbarian seem to have some of what used to be General/Combat feats. This means that feats that anyone could take before are now limited only to some classes and this is glaringly obvious. For example, you can't make a TWF Barbarian (A build which is how many envision this class). Some of their feats should move to be general feats and replaced with truly unique stuff.
2- Splitting the list into 9 or 10 tiers (compared to 2 before) really limits what you can pick at low levels. A lot of the abilities that were available early before seem to be moved into higher levels just to pad out those tiers and not because of it's power, which results in not being able to build the character you want until medium levels for what feels like arbitrary reasons. I would suggest consolidating the lists into wider groups like 1-4, 5-8, and so on.

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**Skill Feats**

Problem: There used to be a lot of feats that improved skills in interesting ways, but much like any other feat, they were always ignored because combat feats were just too important to not take every time. No sub-system was developed to make taking these feats more attractive although some builds could use them to get insane modifiers if they knew what they were doing.

Promise: Skill Feats would no longer compete with feats that improve combat or class abilities so every character would be able to take some without fear of opportunity cost.

Solution Rating: Big Success

Opinion: Class feats set out to fix a pretty simple but annoying issue and they deliver exactly what you expected. The skill feat options we got aren't exactly mind-blowing until you get to the Legendary ones, but just having the system in place will eventually make all skills feel worth investing into. Every character can and has to take at least some of these.

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**New Action Economy**

Problem: The action system in PF1 started out pretty simple, but quite limiting. Then it developed into something very complicated and still quite limiting. On the positive side, actions had some sort of "tiers" of power, with standard actions being superior to move actions, for example. This let abilities be balanced based on the action they used, but it also made some clases start requiring flowcharts to figure out how to best optimize their use. And while characters could move and attack, many of them could do much more than this. At level 6+, Full Attacks discouraged characters from moving around too much if they wanted to maximize their damage.

Promise: The action system would be simplified so all actions would be of the same value and characters would get THREE of them, expanding what they could do before. Now you could Move -> Attack -> Move and other cool things like that. Also iterative attacks were available right from Level 1! Tactical choice would be expanded while keeping things simple.

Solution Rating: Good

Opinion: Indeed characters now have 3 actions and they can move or attack or whatever with each of them. Characters could try iterative attacks even from level 1 and the mysterious 5-foot-step was made a lot more clear.
Free actions were weakened, but still usable almost whenever you need them. It's really easy to figure out your actions in a given turn now. However, not all is perfect. A lot of things that use to be free or swift actions now suddenly have an action cost. In fact, many things have arbitrary action taxes that ultimately make you unable to do more than you could in the previous edition: Move + do 1 thing. The increased freedom is mostly limited to moving around and performing basic strikes, but that is probably good enough. The action required to reg-rip a weapon or use a shield might need to be looked at, however...

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**Multiclassing**

Problem: Multiclassing was very simple in 3E/PF and anyone could figure it out. However, in practice, it was quite tricky to use it to achieve the concepts you wanted. Multiclassing abandoned your original class for a while to get the low level abilities of others. Some classing had very strict scaling which would make their abilities extremely weak if they multiclassed (Mostly spellcasters), while others had amazing level 1-3 abilities that made it very powerful to dip in them. In the end, it was rarely used to achieve complicated character concepts and more for crazy optimization. Archetypes and the new classes were the primary way to achieve the concepts that multiclassing once promised.

Promise: A more robust VMC style system that would allow characters to get the abilities of other classes, even the higher level ones, while not compromising the scaling of their current class. No longer would there be dips that lead to amazing power or ideas that lead to pathetic characters.

Solution Rating: Okay

Opinion: The new multiclassing achieves what it promised! Characters can mix any 2 classes (Well, not all 12 yet) and be pretty decent at using the powers of both without needing Hybrid Classes. Unfortunately the new multiclassing also came with consequences that compromise some of the good things that old multiclassing could achieve. Characters can no longer change their primary class once chosen (not even with retraining). This limits a lot of organic character development concepts. So even though we have a lot of new builds, it also removed others. I still think we gained more than we lost, however.

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And that's it for my review, I hope you found it useful! I personally like the new chassis for Pathfinder and think they succeeded at many of the goals that were promised, but many came with unintended side effects that ruined them.

I certainly missed some concepts, such as Resonance, but I've not familiarized myself enough with them yet to say much.

If you disagree with any of my entries, feel free to post your own version, same if there's something I missed.

You know what I'm talking about. Character's AC doesn't increase with level except by acquiring magic items or other higher level powers, but even the lowly wizard gets an increasing BAB PLUS all of the same magic items and abilities that boost it.

What ends up happening is that a low level tank fighter (Say full plate and heavy shield) will have like 21-22 AC, which will be awesome for a lot of the early levels. But by like level 10, he is probably not gonna be that close to 30 AC (Add +2 armor, +1 shield, +1 deflection +1 nat armor) but his attack bonus will likely have increased by a more significant amount, often up to +10 difference.

What this causes is that, unless you're using some special build to get AC, monster attack rolls eventually become kinda autohit as they start getting like +20 on their attack rolls (Way higher at CR10) and they also start getting more and more silly natural armor bonuses to keep up with the rapidly increasing attack bonuses, while the PCs dont have this luxury.

What do you think 2E will to to address this issue? Some measure of bounded accuracy? Perhaps some way for AC to scale together with BAB?
Either way, It's a huge change in gameplay when PF starts with reasonable miss-rates but then becomes like an MMO with tank and spank boss fights and nobody missing.