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I'm starting to build a personal list of Feats and other build items that seem incredibly underpowered or situational at best. For a min-maxer, these would never be chosen. For players more interested in flavor, taking them seems to represent a significant loss in balance or effectiveness.

Battle Assessment was my most recent choice.

As some point out, as written, this seems like information that would be gathered from an appropriate Recall Knowledge check against the enemy type. Oh - that's a Water Elemental? My Arcane (or whatever) knowledge tells me that they tend to be immune to Sneak Attack, Criticals and fire-based attacks are severely weakened.

Furthermore, most DMs I've played with freely share combat-related strengths and weaknesses of enemies as we play (we see that cold doesn't seem to do much against an enemy after the first relevant strikes). Even general knowledge of an enemy is going to increase over time - we've fought Zombies before and slashing weapons didn't seem to be as effective...

Finally, many enemies simply have no special weaknesses and saves are sometimes nearly equivalent.

I think Battle Assessment should keep the effects as written - after all, why make two checks to determine this stuff - but also should add a situational or conditional attack or damage bonus for the combat given a successful check. The Rogue, after considered study, has found a 'chink in the armor' of an enemy warrior, granting the party +1 conditional attack bonus for the duration of the combat or Lvl rounds or whatever.
A Critical Success might even grant both attack and damage bonuses.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

John

I think the current implementation of kits is unwieldy in most cases and bugged in a few; I personally feel that the basic toolkit requirement should be completely dropped and reworked as a bonus option at Basic/Expert/Master levels.

I fully understand the need for resource management, but all toolkits are currently overpriced and overly bulky for many starting PCs. Many character types absolutely need to start with at least 1-2 toolkits; thieves, healers and repair the most common toolkits, with alchemist and others in certain special cases. The Snare kit is entirely broken at 3-4x the Bulk of all others.

That means that 30-70% of starting wealth must either be taken up by these mandatory kits to enable related skills or you chose armor/weapons and cannot use your skills.

Skill monkeys have it worse; it is nearly impossible to build a starting skill monkeys PC without at least 2-3 skills nerfed because they cannot afford all the Kits.

What I'd like to see is a revamp of all skills currently requiring Kits to drop that requirement and simply state that the DM may require a -2 to -6 circumstance penalty if the necessary materials or equipment are not readily scrounged or carried. Or lab/smithy/etc. rental fees may be required.

Then you can add in all costs as-is to give +1/+2/+3 circumstance bonuses if the appropriate Basic/Expert/Master kit is available.

To fix the Bulk issue for Skill Monkeys, I think you could either sell a "multipurpose" Kit that covers all skills at 2-3x Bulk and Cost or allow a similar discount to reduce Bulk and Cost for each Kit after the first.

That would fix the issues with low-level characters while still allowing the flavor and bonuses for higher-level PCs and low-level specialists willing to shell out for a Basic Kit.

Thoughts?

-John

I think you've misunderstood how DCs are supposed to work. The level of a challenge is not the character taking it on, rather it is the level of the obstacle/challenge as assigned by your GM. You can have a level 3 trivial tree to climb >> dc 12 for all characters, or a lvl 17 severe smooth glassy wall >> dc 40 for all characters.

You're right - I did misread the challenge DC table. But that seemed like an easy mistake given current wording. With the use of keywords and traits throughout, maybe Paizo needs to explicitly clarify Threat Level vs PC Level.

-John

They are UNTRAINED. They SHOULD! fail tasks on a regular basis.

That is what untrained means.

I agree 100% and personally like a "Lvl-4" proficiency penalty for Untrained, Trained at "Lvl", Expert at "Lvl+1" and so forth. Each add in skill training represents roughly a 5% bump in success, but untrained should be substantially less capable; -20% sounds about right.

And DCs should not scale with level for same things

That is just desperate absolution of +1/level treadmill.
A lock is a lock. if it is the same type is has the same DC for 1st level character and 17th level character.
It cannot get it's DC raised by 20 in any logical way.
A DC20 wall to climb is DC20 wall to climb for everyone.
The wall does not ooze out grease because it knows that a 15th level character is trying to climb it and not a 3rd level character.

Absolutely true; if the math doesn't work out, then the proficiency advancement should be something like [Lvl/2] or whatever divisor is required to make 20th Lvl characters still have a chance to fail at some Skill Checks that a 1st, 5th or 10th level character would see challenging or near impossible. However, it should be much more trivial for the higher level character than the lower level characters.