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

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

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

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

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

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

Tridus wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was making an archer animist, that circumstances made me had to switch to a thaumaturge, and it made me realize, would be nice to see Thaumaturge have an avenue toward two-handed weapons. Or at the very least 1+ handed weapons.

You're not prohibited from using those. You're proficient (martial) and exploit weakness works just fine. It might be a bit difficult to activate exploit weakness because you need to be holding an implement for that, but you could do that just fine if your weapon implement has the two-hand trait.

What it doesn't let you do though is implement's empowerment with a 2H or 1H+ weapon. The probable reason for why it was designed that way, is that IE is meant to compensate you for the lower damage you do because you need a hand free to hold implements/esoterica.

IE is roughly comparable to 2 damage die sizes, which is also roughly the difference between 1H and 2H weapons.

If you found a way (like, a weapon implement with two-hand trait) to hold implements and use a 2H weapon, then you wouldn't need to be compensated anymore because you aren't actually falling behind in damage.

I think it's more a case of people having mental holdovers than an actual rule. They've seen an object once that had crit immunity and now think all objects should have crit immunity. I really dislike it.

There are object things like wall spells that have really low AC and immunity to crits. That's very reasonable. But if a hazard has high AC and significant hardness and HP, it needs an actual good reason for having crit immunity.

This is PF2, the design paradigm of things having lots of immunities "just because" should stay in PF1/D&D3.x

Also, as a player, it's not a great thing to build around, since:

- It wouldn't be useful against the many, many, many monsters that just don't need gear.

- You'd be destroying a lot of loot and making yourself poor.

You generally can't. You need specific abilities that allow you to directly attack an attended object. (Even attacking unattended objects isn't that well supported in the rules.)

I think it's a deliberate design choice in the game to discourage attacking gear. It's hard to balance properly, because either it doesn't really work, or it works too well. Items don't have the sort of AC, hardness and hit points that make sense if they were really something that people could target directly and attack.

You can see in the Disarm action that it's supposed to be pretty hard to actually disarm someone outright.

I think "stick this on any random skill" was not a great way to design this. A specific "first, do no harm" Medicine skill feat, or a "steady as she goes" Athletics feat focused on simple DCs could be tailored better toward the specific skill and convey a better idea of what it's for and when it's meant to be used.

I think Recall Knowledge needs a very different approach at all. The DCs for any RK check to identify an enemy you really care about tend to be for monsters 1-3 levels higher than you, perhaps uncommon/rare/unique. I spent yesterday grinding my teeth at multiple combats where we just couldn't succeed because the checks just get really hard, and we were left wondering "what would get through the broad spectrum defenses of this nasty monster?" Anyway, Assurance doesn't come near to being good for this.

I think the problem with Assurance is that it works fine for some really specific things, but that's not how the feat "sells" itself; it sells itself as being far more generally applicable.

There are backgrounds that give you assurance in skills that don't really work with it (Student of the Canon, Religion). There are skill feats that let you use assurance with Recall Knowledge, which would fail to identify any monster of high enough level compared to you that knowledge is really important.

Abilities that can't do what they promise are not fun design. The ability might be okay for other things, but then the promise should be more tailored to not give you the wrong expectations.

There's a couple more ways you can do this;

* Changeling with Slag May lineage feat, gets cold iron d6 claws that are not agile. This can work if you want to do a barbarian. Stick the versatile heritage onto a reptilian ancestry and you're on your way.

* Instead of going barbarian and getting frustrated that your claws are too agile to work well with rage, don't go barbarian. Go another class that can take a smaller attack and add a lot of damage bonuses, like rogue, exemplar or thaumaturge.

Ascalaphus wrote:

Have you encountered actual play where Ready was too powerful to leave alone, or is this disallowance preemptive?

It's absolutely a preemtive one. I'm fairly sure that I would really dislike it if this became a repeated thing in my games. Yeah, it's quite a visceral dislike.

You can try it in your games of course. Maybe it turns out to be fine. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it turns out you're having a good time but other people are frustrated. You won't know for sure until you try.

You asked if anyone had any experience or prior thought about this, and yes, I see it pop up in rules discussions periodically as someone discovers these rules. I've given you my rules perspective which boils down to:

* Ready isn't like the other, more narrowly defined reactions. It's much more subject to GM say-so. Including "for the good of the game, I'm just not going to allow that particular ready".

* Ready, as an essentially free ability, shouldn't overshadow other reactions that you have to pay for. If Ready mimics one, it should probably do so in a weaker way.

* Unexpectedly invalidating enemy actions is really powerful. We consider Slow to be a good spell because even on a successful save you've traded two of a PC's actions and a spell slot for one boss action. Given that encounters are often decided in a few rounds, wasting one or two critical enemy turns really is very powerful.

The thing is, discussions about this topic tends to come down to a "but RAW I can do this" vs the GM's "but I really hate it if you do it in MY game" argument. That's not an argument you can really win. Even if you browbeat your GM into accepting it, if it's ruining their fun then you're reducing the life expectancy of the campaign.

So sure, give it a try and see how people react, but it's best to not over-commit and build an entire character around it right away.

I am also wondering if anyone has experience with this or similar Ready use, as well as if this has been banned / greenlit at tables you have encountered.

It's an idea that gets brought up by someone on the forums at least once a year. At first, it seems like solid RAW. However, it tends to immediately make people think "that can't be right" or "that's seriously irritating" or "this is really cheesy" or "I don't care what RAW says, NO!".

But let's try to do a bit better than a knee-jerk refusal.

If you look in the GM Core, for Ready it has a section of advice:

The Ready activity lets the acting person choose the trigger for their readied action. However, you might sometimes need to put limits on what they can choose. (...)

It goes on to give some reasons for limits, but doesn't quite state the one I'm gonna bring up. That's actually covered one section later in the same chapter:

This section covers a few ground rules for how to best respond to PC tactics, when to apply ad hoc bonuses and penalties, and when to use certain tactics for NPCs. When PCs put effort into getting advantages against their foes, there should be some payoff, provided their tactics make sense in the narrative. Ad hoc bonuses and penalties give you some mechanical tools to emphasize that. Also keep in mind that you can change the flow of the story to respond to tactics as well. Altering an enemy's behavior can be a more satisfying consequence than just getting a bonus.

When you're determining whether to grant a special bonus that isn't defined in the rules, including when a player asks you whether they get a bonus for doing something, ask yourself the following questions.

* Is this the result of an interesting, surprising, or novel strategy by the character?
* Did this take effort or smart thinking to set up?
* Is this easy to replicate in pretty much every battle?

If you answered yes to either of the first two, it's more likely you should assign a bonus—typically a +1 or +2 circumstance bonus. However, if you answered yes to the third, you probably shouldn't unless you really do want to see that tactic used over and over again.

I think this advice is also sensible advice for adjudicating Ready.

Ready isn't really like most other reactions. Most other reactions are a lot more locked down in exactly what they can do and why. To me that suggests that Ready should be run more cautiously by the GM. If there are regular reactions that do a particular thing, that you had to pay feats to get, then a "free" ability like Ready should not be miles better than that.

This would in many occasions be better than actual "dodge" abilities that tend to do things like "Step and gain +2 vs the triggering attack", or even Shield Block.

So when as a GM I'm looking on whether this should be allowed, I come around to the Too Good to be True principle. Accepting this interpretation of RAW would result in an ability that's too good to be true, and also really annoying to play with. So I feel justified in disallowing it.

So suppose you do what most of us seem to want to do, and provide players with a mechanism to upgrade the items they already have, instead of constantly trading in for new shinies.

Now you run into some new loot. Previously, the job of that new loot would be to replace your no-longer-relevant-DC loot with something new and fresh. But you're committed to keeping your old stuff and upgrading it.

Does this cause problems for keeping loot interesting later in the game? If your investment slots are kinda maxed out and you're mostly just "polishing" the stuff you already have to higher level versions; do you look at all look through a "what can I sell that for" lens? (Or were you always doing that anyway?)

Basically, do we make it hard to give cool rewards later in the game by doing this?

That's interesting. I suppose leveling up speed also influences the appetite for this.

I recently started GMing Strength of Thousands and Sky King's Tomb and I've actually been startled at how fast they're going (at the beginning). We play 5H sessions and don't particularly rush the story, but after three sessions in SKT the players just hit level 3 (by chapter milestone) and in SoT they hit level 2 after session 2 as well.

So that's actually considerably faster than in PFS. I doubt it's gonna continue at exactly that speed, but I've also hit a stride of leveling up every 2-4 sessions as a player in Age of Ashes and Agents of Edgewatch.

Traditionally I think home campaigns tended to move really slowly, I know mine did. If it takes a long time to gain a couple of levels, then I agree you'd like more choices to make when you do level up. PF2 does a bit less per-level than before, but it makes sure there's something every level and the levels seem to come faster.

I think there's a noticeable gap between how (some) players like to do their items, and what game designers think you should be doing. Note that I said "some" because it's possible that there are plenty of players that aren't so bothered. But I've seen plenty that are bothered. There's some common threads:

- People value permanent items much higher than consumables
- People like item continuity, instead of trading for a new thing

This was really noticeable in Starfinder 1 where you had to switch armors and weapons every 2-3 levels to stay numerically up to date, but the higher version of the particular weapon or armor you liked might not be available until 5 levels later.

I think to some degree the aversion to consumables isn't really rational; if you think about it, any permanent item that doesn't level up with you is also a bit like a consumable.

Although I also think that consumables aren't quite priced right in terms of purchase cost, sale value, action cost, and effect. A healing potion that costs a noticeable percentage of your wealth and takes an action to draw and an action to drink and you might need to spend actions regripping weapons, and then could end up healing only 1HP - why would you buy that? Even if you found it, would you use it? Or does it make more sense to sell for half price?

Note that SF1 let you sell stuff back only for 1/10th the sale price. I think for consumables definitely the sell-back-price compared to utility ratio leans far toward selling back.

A lot of the new talismans are a happy change in that regard. They're things that make sense buying a few of and restocking occasionally. I think that's the price point to aim for: that consumables are something that you'd buy some of, but not so good that you'd spend all of your money on consumables and not care about permanent items at all. But right now there's only few consumables (mainly talismans and lifesaver utility scrolls) that I'd consider buying.

Coming back to item DCs: I think scaling the DC on those should come with a monetary cost, but that pricing formula should be available. If there's a kind of consumable that helps you make a nice character build, that should continue to be viable across more character levels.

Free archetype allows for a lot more character customization and options. Without it, it can feel like you're just picking from a few pre-fabricated versions of your class. Relatedly, it's also something that's more valuable for players who aren't new to the game- trying out PF2 Fighter or Thaumaturge for the first time, the new system provides some of the novelty. Once that wears off, I find free archetype helps keep things fresh and varied.

If the group enjoys free archetype that's fine of course. But I don't agree that it's required to overcome this staleness problem. I think the root cause of the staleness problem is people feeling that some of their main class feats are already locked in. That you couldn't take a "paid" archetype because you MUST take so many of your regular class feats.

Can't you live without them? Doesn't the "paid" archetype give you something comparably good?

I'm having trouble with the idea that on the one hand the archetype isn't good enough to take if you had to pay for it, but on the other hand that without it the game isn't fun enough. Is it valuable or not?

(I'm not against enjoying free archetype, but I'm skeptical of "needing" it.)

IMO the best option is to simply houserule things to allow items to be upgraded by crafters, using similar rules to Crafting, adjusting gold costs and time (depending on rarity).

That way, there is a way to keep certain items the party wants, but it requires investment - so new items have a way to shine too.

Yeah, something along the lines of "if you upgrade an item by X levels, the DC goes up by Y, at a cost of Z". And if you upgrade an item the level of the next "official" version of the item (if any) then it becomes that.

Calculating X and Y is fairly straightforward, with some study of DC tables. Figuring out how to calculate Z would take some more research but it should be doable too.

Free Archetype as a quest reward is an interesting one actually. I'm thinking about that for my other AP

While that archetype can make sense for some characters at that moment, I don't think it'll make sense for all of the characters. But only giving it as a freebie to some characters would feel uneven, so I'm not sure what I might give the others.

I don't think free archetype is going to completely break your game. The extra power you get from it is real, but it's not so much that the game can't handle it.

However, you may get the feeling that characters are a bit more samey if the players all move toward the same archetypes that seem really optimal. Also, it can be fun if characters aren't flawless - they can't cover every angle, for some things they're gonna need help from another PC. Free archetype can get in the way of this if you use it to sand down any rough edge and fill any gap yourself.

I really don't agree with the theory that FA isn't a power increase. Yeah, you can take some archetypes that don't move the needle much. But there are also really straightforward choices that do;

* Pick any martial archetype with a "resiliency" feat. You just increased your average HP/level by 1.5. Better than Toughness, which tends to be rated as a good feat.
* Rogue, Barbarian, Swashbuckler, Monk and probably others can get another saving throw to Master. How is a +2 to saves anything else than vertical power increase?
* Rogue dedication is pretty bonkers: pick up light armor (good for low level casters), surprise attack, go on to Mobility (great for casters that need to exit a nasty melee enemy), Dread Striker, Gang Up and Opportune Backstab; add Skill Mastery, Uncanny Dodge and Evasiveness.
* So is Champion: heavy armor, a feat to reduce the action cost of using a shield while striding around, a free reinforcing shield rune, extra reactions for shield block, your pick of the champion reactions which are phenomenal, lay on hands, and all your strikes potentially being Holy
* What about exemplar to just get +2 damage per damage die?

Those are the low-hanging fruit I can think of right away, but there's a lot more. Yeah, you need to be a critical customer because you can only spend so many actions. But many of the things I cited don't cost you actions.

I'm not saying you're lying about how you experience and enjoy the game. But I don't agree with your analysis, and I think you worded it very strongly.

It's just fundamentally a better way to play Pathfinder.

Calling that hyperbole is reasonable. You like it more that way, but you say it as if it's an absolute truth for everyone. That's a fast way to get geeks arguing with you :P

I think the design intent is to make sure you eventually move on to new items as the old ones fade. That way, you'll actually care about new treasure, instead of going "yeah but all my investment slots are already taken".

Telling people to like it doesn't mean they end up liking it though.

I would really like a solid formula for "how much gold do I need to pay to upgrade this item's DC to the DC appropriate for my current level?"

I think some of the stuff said about it is a bit overblown.

I don't really know how many groups use it vs. not use it. PFS doesn't use it however and that alone makes for a big chunk of people who get by without it. It's clearly not necessary for the game to be playable and enjoyable, with the tens of thousands of people playing PFS as evidence. In home groups it seems to be not all that unusual though.

I've played two campaigns 1-20 so far without it and that worked fine too. I did use archetypes that I had to "pay for out of my own pocket" in those. There are plenty of archetypes that are good enough that you'll still consider taking them if you don't get them for free.

It's more of a horizontal versatility boost than a vertical power boost. But it definitely can also be a vertical power boost; you can end up with more HP, damage bonuses, better saving throws, more expert/master skills and so forth.

The most negative stories I've heard were from campaigns where almost everyone ended up playing a fighter (because you can't get the +2 to hit otherwise) with archetypes to get some class flavor from other classes.

I'm using FA in one of my campaigns (Strength of Thousands), but it's limited to wizard and druid archetype. Because the theme of the campaign is that everyone is in magic school, but it doesn't require everyone to play the same class. With free archetype everyone has enough reason to be in the school without limiting character building too much.

FA with significant campaign-thematic restrictions, instead of just total free choice, is a totally legit way of doing it.

There's a part Claxon quoted that I think needs emphasis: the player can decide to abort spending the action if they don't like their skill options.

You see a weird beastie. You propose recalling knowledge, thinking your Nature is pretty good and it's probably some kind of Beast. But the GM says you're gonna need Religion for this. You don't have Religion and there's no way you're gonna make the check rolling bare wisdom. Now you can decide that's not worth spending an action on.

Okay, so what changed for blasting (divine) with the remaster? A lot.

- Alignment damage turns mostly into spirit damage. This is big for clerics of neutral deities. Previously divine casters struggled against neutral enemies and struggled if their deities were neutral. Not an issue anymore. Only constructs are problematic now.

- Many of those spirit damage effects got a clause saying they only hurt enemies. This distinguishes divine blasting because it's way better at point-blank blasting. Compare that to a fireball you have to awkwardly place because your martials are trying to flank the enemy.

- Non-cleric casters no longer have an automatic path to trigger weaknesses of fiends. Previously, if they'd worship the right deity, they could do so. Now, they may actually get a cleric or champion dedication to get sanctified. Considering that fiends are a common enemy in many APs, this is a significant damage issue.

Overall I think the changes especially benefit clerics. Other classes need a bit of effort to capture the sanctification benefits, but it's not too hard. But divine went from a list that struggled with narrow damage types that many enemies were immune to, to a list that can hurt most enemies very reliably.

If it's 3:00:55 o'clock and you wait "an entire minute", is it 3:01:00 or 3:01:55?

That's the question.

Another way of phrasing it is that an entire round has passed when initiative has come round to you again.

Okay, I don't have that much abstract theory to share, but I have been playing a blasting oriented sorcerer through Prey for Death using remaster rules. And the experience has been pretty good.

Some context: Prey for Death starts at level 14, and everyone is aligned with the Red Mantis Asassins. I made a divine dragon sorcerer with a dedication as cleric of Grandmother Spider, who has a weird sort of fellowship with Achaekek. It also means I pick up the Holy trait which allows me to use the sanctification on my divine spells.

Spells that have worked quite well for me have been:
- haste 3 and 7
- roaring applause 3 and 6
- heal (signature)
- divine wrath (signature)
- divine immolation (signature)
- crisis of faith
- heroism 6
- divine decree
- resist energy 7
- summon elemental herald
- DRAGON BREATH

There's some others that I was expecting a lot from but that I didn't get around to using, like vampiric exsanguination and canticle of everlasting grief.

The dragon breath has been doing some heavy lifting. By now (level 17) it's a focus spell that does a respectable 17d6 in a 30ft cone, and of course I recover focus points really easily.

Divine Wrath is extremely cheap. Any combat where you run into 3+ enemies it's a great opening move because if even one enemy crit-fails they're sickened 2 and slowed 1 until they completely remove sickened, which is a big neutering.

Divine Decree is also great, because if you have a fight with a bunch of fiends, just whack and whack them with it. The critfail effect can just immediately dispose of a mook that might otherwise have 200+ HP.

Elemental Herald is weird but very flexible. It's very good at only doing damage to enemies, has tons of damage types, can be positioned quite neatly, and can also push enemies around.

Overall I made a nice build with a few clever bits in it, but the main driver is just what the sorcerer class just does. And it's worked very well. It's not unusual to end up doing 50-200 damage with a focus spell in fights with multiple enemies.

Remaster's changes to the divine list are really game-changing. I've played a cleric to 20 in Age of Ashes and it was plenty effective. But remaster has a lot of quality of life. There's no more "neutral" enemies; your best blasts tend to just hit all enemies and no allies. I would say divine blasting has two special sauce spices: doing holy damage, and being really good at avoiding friendly fire.

I disagree.

The magus misusing it isn't really a concern of the main-class psychic. It's a concern for how you write the multiclass archetype, but magi could also get Fire Ray through several different dedications which scales almost as fast. It's a problem with the magus that people don't find its native focus spells attractive enough. That problem needs to be solved inside the magus, not by causing trouble for the psychic.

So, looking at the psychic: imaginary weapon could be nerfed, but actually the psychic isn't doing enough damage as-is. Yeah, it's a cantrip, because you're "the cantrip class" that gets fewer normal spell slots than normal. So these cantrips need to be really really good to make up for that. If you don't get the flexibility of having a decent amount of spell slots, then what you have left should be more powerful than a more flexible caster. Like a sorcerer or oracle. You deserve a LOT of oomph for having only half those spell slots.

Things that I think can be improved on the psychic, without really tripping over changing page count;

- Change a few words in the various emanation feats and spells so they no longer cause friendly fire. The psychic does not have the class chassis to run into melee alone. But if a typical round 2 of a combat is that enemies have closed into melee for the front row martials, the psychic unleashes, and then uses nasty emanations that hit those enemies, that's kinda neat.

- Either unleashing needs to be much more potent, or the stupefy afterward needs to go away. A cooldown of 1-2 rounds without Stupefied would be acceptable.

- For psychic to be "the cantrip class", the cantrips just need to do a whole lot more. If you compare to a dragon sorcerer, their breath weapon scales up at 2d6 per spell rank. And they can get focus back easily and do this 1-3x every encounter. Encounters generally don't last long enough for "yeah but cantrips don't run out" to really matter compared to "you need to make real impact in the first few rounds". Maybe psychics need their own flavor of Sorcerous Potency that only applies to cantrips, but gives them a big enough damage boost that they're really competitive.

A more streamlined version of this would be (but harder to smuggle in without changing page references):

- Psychic Potency is always-on and causes the damage of psychic cantrips to be close to spell-from-slot amounts. Something in the direction of +4 per spell rank. Maybe even more.
- Unleash Psyche gets cut entirely. The psyche trait on various abilities just requires that you cast a psychic spell on your previous turn.
- Again, the emanation spells and feats should not cause friendly fire.

This feels a bit like Raging Intimidation. In general it makes sense that Demoralize has the concentrate trait, but specifically for barbarians it gets in the way. And it doesn't make super much sense that raging makes it hard to be scary. So you pay a feat tax to stick the rage trait on Demoralize, but that's a very poor deal so you also get some bonus skill feats to make it more reasonable.

Maybe the solution here is a barbarian feat that adds the rage trait to the Command action, and also gives you some other useful thing.

The design challenge is mostly, how do you time the feat/level for games without free archetype? Because if you got a Beastmaster dedication at level 2, and had to wait until level 4 before taking a barbarian feat to effectively command it, that'd be lame.

I think Divine Wrath is pretty spectacular and on its own elevates the divine list;
- Spirit damage is a solid damage type
- Sanctified means with fiends etc, even when they make the save, they still take full weakness damage
- The sickened doesn't depend on it being heightened, and takes enemies work to get rid of. Compared to rank 3 Fear, rank 4 Divine Wrath stacks up fine just as a debuff.
- It only targets enemies. Unlike a fireball, you can just drop it wherever. This is really handy for catching enemies that are currently flanking your allies.

It's one of the few blasting spells that remains good at low rank even when you're higher rank, for those fights where you don't need to commit top rank slots but don't want to plod along with cantrips.

Well it'd work if you had Quick Alchemy, and it'd work with anyone's Advanced Alchemy daily items.

Alchemist dedication on a commander looks pretty interesting.

Paizo's done a fantastic job making classes for people who want to delve into complexity (alchemist formula selection) and people who want something simple (barbarian smash).

What I don't like about the current summoning situation is that to make it work well, you really have to go through the bestiaries with a fine-toothed comb to make it work well. It's fine if you do enjoy that, and I don't want to take that away.

But I also want an option for when you don't want to do that. The idea of "conjured" creatures where the template is basically right there in the spell description is good for that.

And yeah, interesting to see how the necromancer shapes up. Maybe it'll be a case of "that, but with a different flavor of creature, not so undead"?

Teridax wrote:

Ectar wrote:

Accuracy buff?

Ancestral Memories.

Oooookay. Imperial, not Arcane.

Poor poor Arcane Draconic bloodline.

So talking about blasting, draconic sorcerers actually have it pretty good. I'm really enjoying the focus spells;

And in the case of the arcane draconic sorcerer: repeatable Force blast in a decently big cone. Not bad at all.

On top of that, solid bloodline spells too.

I'm trying to find the best way to combine alchemy with Alley-Oop

Planted banners are a bit of a new issue. Previously you could ignore a lot of issues by saying "yeah, but those items aren't gonna be unattended".

I think there's something to be said for not being too consistent for your own fun. If you have a fight in a library it should be obvious that throwing fireballs would have consequences. But using a fireball in general shouldn't result in the GMing going "tut, tut" and calculating that you just melted several magic weapons into slag. (PF2 items are noticeably less sturdy than in PF1.)

I think Blue_frog's reading is more reasonable. If it had said "persistent damage equal to and of the same type as the bomb's base splash damage" then it would have clearly been Trip.H's way, but that's not what it says.

I suppose it's a matter of how you read the sequence of events;

You make the Sticky Bomb first. At that moment, the bomb itself is locked in and finalized. The extra spinny throw making the acid more potent after it's already been brewed makes no sense.

I see it differently:

As for bonuses not doubling, yes they do all the time. Any time you'd be

Nothing in the entire pf2 system multiplies / double dips damage boosts like that.

Critical hits multiply all of the damage bonuses too, so actually this is really common in the game.

Especially not one that is 0 resource, every turn, 0 risk.

It does cost a resource; you can't do this with quick vials.

And there's not 0 risk, since you can't do this while shrinking the splash area. Which means that if your allies are in melee contact with the enemy, there is risk. And if they weren't in melee at round 1, they'll probably be in round 2, so it's definitely not 0 risk every turn. You could use Directional Bombs but then we're already at a 3 feat combo.

Aha, interesting. Yeah, Recon is kinda another minigame-that-should-exist. It exists a bit as the warmup phase that you might get before an Infiltration, but it hasn't really been worked out very much as a standalone thing.

Players actually often want to "scout ahead, see what enemies are there, and then we can come in with the right tactics". But it's quite hard to actually do in a happy way using the regular stealth mechanics. The odds are that halfway through you're gonna be spotted and the rest of the party will be far behind and your scout is on their own in the middle of a fight balanced for a whole party. Or it takes really long and the other players are groaning about one player taking a lot of time while the rest wait.

If the regular mechanics don't manage to model well a type of scene that we want to do, then a minigame makes sense. I don't quite know yet how a Recon minigame might work, but it's something that I think has a right to exist.

The way you make it sound, everything is really close together. Yeah, there's a few rounds in between reinforcements arriving. But a realistically loud fight should alert all enemies in the building.

So to me this doesn't really sound like Infiltration is really the model for doing this dynamic dungeon. Doesn't mean you can't do dynamic dungeon, just that Infiltration isn't the model I'd pick.

It reminds me of a scene from when I was playing Agents of Edgewatch where we raiding a gang hideout. We were police and we got a lot of extra consumables for the raid, but there was also real time pressure. From the moment we ran into the outside sentries (who, in typical PF2 fashion have way too much HP to quietly kill by surprise), it was basically an ongoing encounter. There were a few pauses where you had time to chug potions, but no 10m rest segments anywhere. Because we took out the sentries, then went into the main room, fought the people there, fought the people joining, then went into the boss' room where he was busy burning evidence.

It was a really fun session. Not your typical clean isolated PF2 encounters setup. Also quite nonstandard resource and consumable usage from the party.

There doesn't exist a "Raid" minigame, but maybe there could be something like that. Kind of the opposite of infiltration: you're trying to maintain an element of shock and pressure that allows you to confront and overwhelm enemies before they manage to regroup. I'm not sure how I'd mechanically want to scaffold that. But I think it's a valid concept of how some scenes should play, just needing good mechanics to back it.

Interesting. I like "recon points" as a name. I'd been thinking about what the players might be getting as they get more into the dungeon and start to figure out how it works. That's a good name for it.

I like your description of the environment, but 10 rooms seems very few. Now, 10 rooms that actual encounters/hazards could be in, plus lots of corridors, broom closets etc to put a bit of distance between encounters, that seems better to me.

I'm really interested in how this will pan out. I think the "dynamic dungeon" where encounters somewhat flow into each other but in a balanced, doable way, is something PF2 hasn't really given a good recipe for building yet. But when they accidentally happen and go right, they're often the most memorable dungeon crawls.

What exactly do you mean by resisting? As in, the weapon is hard to damage with that energy type? Or that it gives resistance to the person wielding the weapon?

PF2 doesn't do damage to weapons very often. There's probably no more than 10 monsters of all the ones published that do it, usually oozes that do acid damage to weapons you stick into them. So giving the weapon resistance to en element might not matter very much in practice.

There's a wrinkle though -

Incorporeal creatures usually have immunity to effects or conditions that require a physical body, like disease, poison, and precision damage. They usually have resistance against all damage (except force damage and damage from Strikes with the ghost touch property rune), with double the resistance against non-magical damage.

Not included in that list: spirit damage.

While most undead incorporeals tend to also have positive damage go through, it actually because kinda hard for divine casters to handle non-undead incorporeal monsters because a lot of their force effects were converted to spirit.

I still maintain this is a bug and spirit damage should normally be effective against incorporeal enemies.

I think if you want to make a character that has an "officially called Ninja" class or archetype, that should be compatible with both the magically themed ninja and the more historical nonmagical ninja.

On the other hand, if we're looking for mechanical niches that seem big enough to build something in, the best so far looks like a much more magical cousin to the rogue. The eldritch trickster racket appealed to a lot of people but mechanically it was kinda shaky - didn't play well with other things like ancient elf, took several levels to get online, and sneak attacking with spells didn't really keep up with sneak attacking with weapons anyway, since your proficiencies lagged behind. But the idea of a more magical roguelike character got a lot of people excited.

The ninja does a lot of the same stuff as a rogue. Walking through walls, all that sneak attack stuff and so on. We don't like two classes that feel like they're poaching each others' stuff too much. But the ninja would do too much different to fit it all into a racket. So I'm coming around to the idea that you could it with:

- A rogue class archetype that locks you into a specific racket (eldritch trickster 2.0) and sacrifices some of the regular class features.
- Spends some budget on making sure spell-based sneak attack actually keeps up well across later levels (fixing the to-hit accuracy and action cost, and difficulty with using ranged sneak attack spells).
- Has some skill-archetype feats similar to Runelord 2.0, so you can "graduate" relatively early.
- Is designed to be a good entry class for "other country, but sorta ninja" archetypes like Lion Blade and Red Mantis Assassin.
- Overall, the class-archetype isn't too tuned to a specific culture. It might be called "ninja" or it could actually be "eldritch trickster".

You can then pair that with making one or two specifically Tian flavored archetypes that focus on more local-culture adaptations, sort of the local counterpart to the Lion Blades/Red Mantis. Some sponsors of ninja clans could be:
- old Minkai anti-Oni resistance movements
- Oni with local informers/infiltrators
- Golden League Xun assassins
- Way of the Kirin vigilantes

The point of these archetypes is that (1) they're very compatible with the Trickster 2.0 rogue, but not locked in totally, similar to how fighters and rangers also make good Red Mantis characters and Lion Blade plays fine with bards too. And (2) that these are the very very culturally oriented archetypes oozing with local flavor.

Hmm, maybe I should take another look at a PFS animist with focus on "so what's missing in today's party?"

I wasn't that impressed with the PF1 Medium which also tried to do the "what build am I today" but most of them that I saw ended up locked into the same build every day. Maybe PF2 does it better though.

So I look at this a lot through a PFS & AP lens, cuz that's what I've a played a lot in the last decade. And standalone uninteresting simple traps haven't really happened often enough to be much of a problem. But, Teridax has a point that they're a story trope that's a bit hard to mechanically deploy in a satisfying way. So instead of them not getting used because they're not good enough on their own, maybe we can make them good enough to use?

One gripe I have with simple hazards is that they tend to be very binary. Either you find them or you don't. And then they might make an attack roll and miss or hit you. If they hit (or crit; even on-level "trivial" simple hazards have higher to-hit than a fighter) they do a lot of damage, because they only get one shot at it.

Sounds a lot like the design problem of 1E save or die effects doesn't it?

The ones that use basic saves are already a bit better. They could still be impactful with a bit lower damage, because even on a successful save they'll scrape you a bit (until Master saves kick in). But if you have plenty of time to heal up, it's not good enough. So we need different consequences.

Maybe that's a good way to design: every standalone trap (actually, maybe every encounter ever, but that's a longer story) should have a Consequence for failure. Don't just plunk down a trap and call it quits. Pick a Consequence from a list of suggestions or come up with your own. For example:
- Inflict a short-term debuff. In one PFS scenario failing some jungle exploration skill challenge made you start the next fight Sickened 1.
- Miss out on some treasure/consumables that get crushed by the trap as collateral damage.
- Raise enemy alarm, giving them a bonus to initiative during later fights.
- Raise awareness points.

I like Unicore's suggestion of a alarm/clock system inspired by the Infiltration and Awareness mechanics. I normally feel Infiltration is a bit rigid, but you could loosely apply it to dungeoneering. For example:
- Triggering a hazard increases awareness
- An encounter with creatures that you make sure don't escape, still increases awareness
- Taking breaks after encounters, or maybe more than a single 10m break after an encounter. This probably needs to be not precisely a +1/10m formula because that could go too fast.

As awareness goes up, things get a bit harder. Enemies get bonuses to initiative, they start sending out patrols to look for the PCs, or they know well enough when the PCs are due to arrive that they can use prebuffing accurately. As the players roll initiative, you move few more pawns into the encounter with enemy reinforcements. It's important that you make it visible to the players that this is extra, because enemies are responding to them.

Sometimes the players will have a good run and not increase awareness very much. You can't avoid it entirely when every fight adds a point of course. But players should be able to sense the difference between doing well and doing poorly, even though both are still within tolerance for appropriate game difficulty.

Thaumaturges are expected to have a hand occupied with an implement (to use the implement, and Exploit Vulnerability). That means they could only use a one-handed weapon in the remaining hand, which tends to have a bit low damage. To compensate for that, you get Implement's Empowerment.

If you have a bastard sword weapon implement that you're using in two hands, you're not actually stuck with a low-damage-die weapon situation, so you also don't get/deserve the compensation.

Note that other thaumaturge abilities work fine when you're using a big weapon, like Exploit Vulnerability. It's just the compensation you get for being forced to use a one-handed weapon that you don't get.

I think we have fairly limited evidence for what a magic warrior "must" be. It mainly boils down to wearing a fancy animal mask which makes it harder to use divination magic on you.

But this is contradicted by the later Magaambyan archetypes and Strength of Thousands writing in which people don't always wear their masks and don't keep their masked and unmasked identity separate. The masks are described as allowing you to more fully express your complete identity, particularly for ceremonial purposes.

My take on it is that the magic warrior archetype can represent a historical time when the 10MW fought the King of Biting Ants and they needed to hide their identities to prevent the King from going after their families etc., but that after he was defeated this wasn't so important anymore. It's a canonical point that armies don't make it to Nantambu because the Tempest-Sun have very sufficient firepower.

So most Magaambyans use the "new" mask practice of using the mask to express themselves. The "old" tradition of using the mask to disguise still exists, and might be useful to agents operating further afield in hostile territory.

The strict rules about wearing the mask all of the effin' time I think just need to go. That might be the propaganda, while in reality you can just be minding your business as average Joe, step around a corner, slap on the mask and be completely unrecognizable. That would play the archetype more into a vigilante/superhero role. I think that's got a lot of potential for Magaambyans interfering in countries like Mzali where operating an open identity is not viable.

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Another take on it is that the King of Biting Ants might have been really dangerous with mind control. If he knew who you were and could just target you by name, he might be able to dominate you from afar and wreak havoc. I mean, he's able to control vast swarms of insects at long distances too, he could probably handle some people too.

So then the mask goes a bit more in the direction of anti-control effects. Maybe treating the results of saves against effects that give the controlled condition as one step better.

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So for me, the point of the archetype isn't to turn into an animal, or to make you a martial. It's about being able to be a resistance warrior against evil overlord wizards. Pretty agnostic about your underlying class. Maybe the point of using a fanciful, weird-color animal mask is to present an "impossible target". There is no such creature as an "azure leopard", therefore it's really hard to target someone wearing an azure leopard mask.

And just as a fringe side benefit, you can lean into some of those abilities and do a bit of shapechanging, but that's more a side effect of leaning into a weird identity than the main point.