Party concept, curious about how many possible combinations of the below there are.
But I don't know off the top of my head how to math it and don't have the time to dig around on Google right now to try to figure it. So maybe one of y'all can help me:
Concept: Party of six, with all 6 Ancestries and all 12 classes! (6 base, each with one of the other 6 as a multiclass archetype.)
Wondering how many possible parties that would make. (Don't want to mess with heritage, subclass, background, or other choices bc that gets too big and the point here is just to capture all Ancestries and all classes bc of the convenient 6/12 number.)
The goal of this thread is to serve as a central index of sorts for whatever we learn about PF2 between now and the August 1st release date.
As someone pointed out in another thread, it can be tough to keep up because these bits of information are scattered all across the internet: tucked away in threads here, comments on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter, in interviews with various media outlets, etc.
So in the spirit of the excellent "When's the Next Blog?" thread that we had going ahead of the playtest release, I'm hoping that this thread can serve as a central source to link to new information as it comes out.
I'll kick us off with a comment Erik Mona posted on Reddit summarizing some of the big-picture changes since the playtest.
Erik Mona wrote:
A fair amount of stuff has changed, yes. We've been working hard to address playtest feedback and finish the rules since the day the playtest released.
We released something like nine updates to the rules that give a pretty sprawling view of some of the stuff that has changed, but it's admittedly a bit of a chore to sort through all of that stuff.
We'll be talking a lot more about specific changes in the time between now and the release, so we'll be providing more succinct answers to this over the next few months.
Math has changed so it's not quite so tight. Some elements of proficiency (especially as it relates to the associated bonuses and especially to untrained characters) have changed, in the direction most playtesters wanted.
Biggest class change is the paladin is now the champion, and you can play LG, NG, or CG. The LG champion is called the paladin.
Resonance is completely gone.
Spells are beefed up considerably.
You get more from your ancestry at first level.
There are generally more choices to make for each class, in terms of type (leaf druid/storm druid, etc.) and in terms of class feat selections.
Overall I'd say skill feats are more interesting and impactful.
The book has been completely re-designed to improve cross-referencing and ease of use.
The character sheet is completely different.
Chapter 1, which covers a summary of the rules concepts and character creation, has been completely rewritten and is much more user friendly. Making a character should be considerably easier this time.
Lots and lots and lots of general "quality of life" improvements, mostly as a result of playtester feedback.
It's 210 pages longer, give or take.
Those are just a few of the big changes off the top of my head.
To fill in the "what we know so far" picture of changes since the playtest, check out these two post-playtest discussions with Jason. These provide the most detail that we've seen so far, I'd say.
It took me a minute to figure out where a couple threads had disappeared to. So just to point everybody over there, since I don't see an announcement yet, you can find the new Second Edition forum HERE!
So, doing a bit of math, I figured out that by making only 5 mechanical choices out of the Core Rulebook, none of which are deity, feats, spells, or gear, you can create over 42,000 different characters in Pathfinder 2nd Edition!
By comparison, if I got the exact same point in character creation in Pathfinder 1st edition, using only the Core Rulebook, I would only be able to make around 150 characters.
Notes on Jason Bulmahn’s Know Direction interview just now (might be up on the twitch channel?). Quote marks aren’t necessarily precise quotations but my best attempt at paraphrase/capturing the main point (the perils of typing while watching live!).
I thought this was a very informative interview for hearing “where we’re coming from” from the lead designer. (And I’ve followed a lot of the PF2 news very closely. But this is the first substantive chat since the playtest closed—and definitely the first since PF2 was mostly final!, see below—so there’s a certain freedom to talk that wasn’t there while stuff was still being tested.)
**********
First meeting about PF2 started around 2014. Very preliminary starting to think about it. But really some ideas go all the way back to 2009, 2010—as soon as you send a game to the printer you start saying, “oh we should’ve done.” Interviewer notes that some ideas in the playtest seem to hark back to the original Pathfinder playtest. JB confirms that he wanted to try some of them out again, in more revised form, and see if it was a better time for it.
What was the main “oh dang” regret in PF1? Fractional math. Couldn’t get rid of it at the time—couldn’t change too much, and PF1 was rushed out with very few resources (Paizo was tiny and Jason had very little backup)! But from the beginning JB knew it would be a struggle to build around that 3.x fractional +level math. And it was a struggle! “Over time the game became more and more crunchy and more and more crusted with things that were really just trying to fix what was fundamentally a flaw with the math.” This is why high-level play has some fundamental problems in PF1.
Surveys for resonance. They weren’t terrible, they weren’t great. They were in the middle. “The last thing I want is the lukewarm response. I’m okay with people hating the thing I do as long as there’s people who love the thing.” Surveys were “meh” on resonance. “Even the second implementation was just too techy for people to grok.”
Ultimately what helped us decide that was the survey question, “Do you care if wands work this way as opposed to another way?” “We looked at that and were like, Wow, people really don’t care! I must have spent a good half hour looking at this and trying to figure it out.” The solution–cross-tabbing by age! Young people didn’t care at all, older people did care. Young crowd (1) played less 3.X, which is where the spells-in-a-stick concept came from; (2) grew up on Harry Potter, with wands as implements that help you cast spells. JB says he’s not sure that’s what they’ll do with wands, but it’s important that the audience wasn’t insisting on spells-in-a-stick so they’re experimenting.
Resonance survey results “were not as overwhelmingly negative as the message boards would have you believe.” JB: “this might even be the story of the playtest itself.” Because only a very small portion of the broader audience participate on the messageboards—the surveys captured a much broader, “much cleaner picture of what was actually happening.” The boards had people who were very upset, who didn’t want to see change. We always knew we were going to encounter that (after all, PF started with folks who didn’t want change!). But the surveys showed a very different picture than the boards. There were “an awful lot of people, a ridiculous number of people” who tried the playtest at home, enjoyed it, and went on with their lives!
That’s not to say the playtest didn’t need a lot of work!!
“We just recently started internal playtests with what I would call the final set of rules. [might want to check phrasing, this is a paraphrase and it was a little more nuanced re ‘final’.] And, whoo!, smooth as butter. I haven’t been this excited in so long. I’m just like, giddy, at some of the cool things that are in there that I can’t wait for people to play with.”
One reveal re monsters. Skeletons. Ability to take off head and throw it at you to make ranged bite attack, after which it rolls back to the skeleton (though blinded till next turn). Lots of stuff like that. Fun, silly. Who knows if that will make it through but it’s fun.
One limit of the playtest was because so focused on stressing the rules, didn’t play around with all of the cool fun new monster abilities the new monster paradigm allows. The people talk about how the PFS scenarios leaned into the fun, inventive monsters a lot more.
JB: “Doomsday Dawn was intentionally written with a lot of repetition built into it.” The best way to get consistent data both between groups and between adventures with the same group.
. . . [I missed some conversation here but I don’t think it was too important?]
JB: There’s part of me that just wants to release Burnt Offerings, but honestly we don’t really need to do that. We put all the monsters out there, you can run it.
Grumbles a bit about how the more-rigorous, data-gathering goal of DD made it less fun. “You didn’t tell me to put together a marketing campaign, you told me to put together a playtest. So that’s what I did.”
How much will the game change? If you’re familiar with the fundamental main structure of the game, you’ll understand the final. But don’t get hung up on the precise details of any one thing—lots of little adjustments. “On the whole much of the game will feel very similar to the playtest.” But took a lot of feedback where folks thought things were counterintuitive, or awkward or not working well, etc, and addressed. E.g., folks felt Legendary wasn’t a big enough difference, intuitively, so now it’s bigger. Example of armor check penalties applying to Strength check to break a door. JB: no longer applies to maneuver like breaking a door, but will apply (e.g.) to climbing a mountain.
JB: Likely to be some kind of conversion guide, but some rules elements are easier to convert than others so.
What are the goals of PF2? What would be a success in your eyes? JB: To create a game that I can teach someone to sit down and play in a few minutes, but in time they’ll see there’s more and more and more to it. [That old Othello tagline: minute to learn lifetime to master?] Easy to explain the fundamentals—there’s one universal system for making checks. Once you have that, I’ve basically described the core engine of the game. But where’s more? That’s where *your* choices come in: you get to pick what abilities you have, how you use your actions beyond the basic actions. The complexity is what you build into your own character. You get to decide how complex of a character you want and you play just fine next to someone who built a much more complex character.
JB: “I love PF1, but I can’t pretend to myself that it was a game that was easy to learn. It really wasn’t.” Doesn’t meant the playtest was perfect! Lots to improve! E.g., this is why Chapter 1 was one of the first “we have to fix this” after the playtest: “it wasn’t doing what we needed it to do, it wasn’t explaining the game to the new player.”
JB: “I’ve only played second edition a couple of times. I have officially played games that were built entirely with rules that we have said are final for second edition. I’ve played a scenario that I had also played with playtest rules. The changes were subtle but when you saw what they were the difference was stark. Oh!, that is cleaner, that is better.” Just ran a few people who didn’t do the playtest through it. Got them into playing the game, rolling dice, playing their characters, within 10 minutes (suggests this may be quicker than average for a fully new player).
The playtest had a math model that performed kind of as we thought it did, but it didn’t deliver the experience we wanted to, so had to adjust the math.
Which systems were deliberately taken to the extreme? Resonance, obviously. Archetypes. “We thought people really weren’t going to like them. But most people liked them just fine.” (But everyone hated the pirate archetype.) Fix: archetypes now have other types of feats internal. I think he means(?), spend the class feat to buy into pirate, but then you can spend a skill feat to get a pirate-specific skill feat, instead of everything running through class feats—the customization bottleneck discussed on here.
Was there a backup plan for archetypes? There was an opportunity to possibly go back to PF1-style multiclassing. This system would be more forgiving, but still some of the same problems: not good at the job your party needs you to be good at while still not being good at the job you’re trying to pick up . . . unless over time we release a lot of broken bits trying to fix that. JB talks about swapping out class feature archetypes as very possible to build in in the future, but the point here was to focus on class feats since that’s new and needs testing and that’s what you’re supposed to spend to customize your character and express your character idea.
. . . I missed a bit here but nothing important I don’t think . . .
JB: If I had to do it over again I’d maybe do 5 parts instead of 7 so they didn’t have to go so fast. But overall I think it was pretty close.
Does the adjustment to DCs include armor class? Yes. On the whole one of the things we’re looking into doing. In the playtest, DCs and bonuses marched more or less in lock step. It meant if you weren’t improving you were falling behind. And that’s not what we wanted to play (though it was kind of how we wanted to test—I lost some details here). Now that we’ve changed proficiency numbers we have more latitude to differentiate legendary and ordinary. My goal is that, at least at high levels, if you’ve invested somewhat, you’ll at least be able to keep up without embarassing yourself (but you definitely won’t be the star of that challenge!) (but not if you’re a fighter in full plate trying to sneak). Some chance you’ll succeed, though some risk. But if you’ve invested, “you should absolutely crush it. And the playtest wasn’t doing that. And that should be for everything, not just skills.”
Bestiary won’t be 500–600 pages. It will be big but not that big. Core rulebook is a big book. It’s a chonk.
“Champion” confirmed as what used to be paladin, with “Paladin” for the LG variant. You’re a champion of a cause.
Casters seemed weaker in playtest. Will that change? Yes. Math/proficiency adjustments affect saves too—monsters won’t have as elite saves as they did in the playtest, especially if they have a weakness with that one save. We’ve also gone through and looked at all of the spells and casters. The damage ramping at the end of the playtest may have been too much—damage wasn’t the real issue, it was the non-damage spells, and the chance of success, but that was too difficult to tweak mid-playtest. E.g., some durations of 1min really could’ve been 1hr, especially if they’re signature spells.
Book organization. Playtest was organized to help create a character. Ch 1, play chapter, prime targets for rewriting/reorganizing.
“Focus spells” (playtest “powers”) that can only be accessed through classes are organized separately from general spells. The “powers” terminology wasn’t working. So “focus spells” use different resources than your normal spells, and are organized differently in rulebook for ease of use. [I will take credit for confirming that! It was my ‘hey wait’ in chat that got that confirmed.]
Secret rolls? Still a thing, kinda. But clear language that it’s up the GM whether to roll it herself or to let players roll it. The same as PF1—do whatever works for your table.
Orc ancestry in CRB? “We did not add or remove any ancestries from the playtest. We have made sure that half-orcs and half-elves have more robust options. The change with heritages (a choice, not a feat) helped a lot there. Heritages are a lot thinner in terms of their rules expression so it made sense to put them there.” Heritages are still physiologically themed, so half-orc/elf makes sense there, while other ancestry feats are more culturally themed.
Confirming that ancestries (other than heritages) are still feat based. Surveys showed lots of satisfaction with having ancestries being relevant as you level up. But did want to make sure that heritage and more cultural feats separate, and to make sure that ancestry feats were more even in their power rather than clear “choose this first” priority. Each ancestry has 4 or 5 separate heritages to choose from.
Customization bottleneck and archetypes putting big demand on class feats. JB: Some archetypes “want to” have skill based things, some even ancestry based things, really. And it didn’t make a lot of sense to spend a class feat on something about, say, swimming. So confirming the above hint, that archetypes give you access to whatever is in the basket: skill feat, ancestry feat, class feat, whatever. “Giving us permission tools,” kind of like the rarity system. New player doesn’t need to learn everything, just the core knowledge and the specific basket of what’s available to them at lvl 1. Over time, that basket expands.
JB talks a fair amount about the value of permission tools in allowing the GM to craft the game that makes sense for the table. If you aren’t playing a horror adventure, you just don’t have access to the feats in the horror adventure book (all GM’s discretion, of course, but the idea seems to be to make these permissions easier to manage for groups).
Concentrating on spells. JB: To the best of my knowledge, still require an action to maintain. But I think what we tried to do was try to cut how many of them there are. But the spells chapter is sitting in my living room right now so definitely not done there.
JB: “We are deep, deep, deep into the process of making second edition the final edition that we want it to be. Very stressful time for us. We are looking forward to showing that game off in the coming months. We are not ready to talk about how. We’ve said we’re going silent, and that’s what’s happening now. Until we’re done, we’re just not in a position to talk about it! It’s all subject to change! But once that’s all locked in, you probably won’t be able to get me to shut up. And we will be showing it to you. All the time. We won’t tease it out in 12 predictable blogs. What we’ll be focusing on is, what’s new about this game.”
Here are my notes from Friday’s Twitch stream (November 9th). I haven’t seen a thread with watch notes yet and had a little time this morning so here you go. “Quotations” are not word-for-word accurate, just my best attempt to capture while typing along.
Where we’re at. Data from players will be collected till the end of the year. The “official” follow-along period of the playtest is coming to the close and the design team is now able to shift gears and “knuckle down and get a better focus on the things we need to do to get the game done.” More on this later.
*****
Surveys. They’ve just broken 30,000 survey results (total, across all surveys). Jason wants to talk about some of the general surveys (e.g., rules presentation). 7 observations, counting down:
7) Icons. 85% really like the icons. But common feedback that Reaction and Free Action aren’t easy enough to distinguish. In-house feedback on the surveys mirrored public feedback: a little skeptical at first and then after a couple weeks totally taken for granted and wished-for.
6) Organization. Number one feedback: conditions need to be in the back of the book! So that’s happening. (75% or more, overwhelming.) Powers will move out of the Spells chapter (this has already happened in the internal documents).
5) Monsters. 75% really love the new way of building monsters (i.e., not trying to mirror player stats). 95% love the unique monster abilities (e.g., steal shadow). “We think that the monster paradigm itself is on track” but the numbers need adjusting. Common feedback from Doomsday Dawn is that combats can be a bit of a slog because monsters are so resilient, so tough, so hard to kill. (Really?? *Not* my group’s experience!)
4) Spells. Many folks think that the Playtest went too weak on the spells. Many folks want more power for spells. Asked how to change spells, #1 response is to make spells have a higher success rate. #2 response was to enhance power of individual spells. All other responses were “leagues behind.” What spells were missing? Animate Dead was #1. Was written as a ritual but cut from playtest to save space (rituals lost 4 pages close to the end). Jason laughs about a forum joke about a spell called dinosaur fort, says that he will find a way to get this into PF2, maybe as a magic item, who knows—but at some point it’ll get into the game.
3) Magic items. Which item types are missing? Greatly requested: Artifacts and “Relics” (items that scale in power with you, Jason spoils the name for the system). Jason: “I thought people cared really an awful lot about how wands work. And a lot of systems were built on that assumption.” But the vast majority of people went “meh, not really” when asked. Players want wands in the game but don’t care about the “scrolls in a stick” format. So the design team is looking at that.
2) Resonance/Focus. Folks didn’t like the original system. Feedback on the Resonance/Focus test was very fractured, all over the place as to what folks liked and didn’t like. Jason: so if none of these options is attracting overwhelming support, then none is the obvious right choice. They might end up going with one of the options they’ve floated, but they’re going to take a hard look at it and see if it’s something we’ve seen or something else. They’ve got a couple “solid leads” and are working on it.
1) Yea or Nay? When asked, overall what’s your optimism for PF2, in light of the playtest rules and all updates through the playtest? Currently, only 4% of responses are negative about the direction things are going. 66% of responses are overwhelmingly positive. Jason says he’s pretty confident in the accuracy of that small 4% number.
*****
Once the playtest is done, Jason wants to do a major survey about the playtest itself and how it went. Also a macro survey about the playtest rules as they stand at the end of the playtest.
Talks about how they failed to communicate the nature of the playtest. “I’m worried some folks came to this thinking they’d be playtesting what was basically a finished game.” Wishes they’d just released Burnt Offerings (which they did internally) as a fun, relaxed adventure to go along with the stress-test of the rules like Doomsday Dawn.
Where we’re at. Been gathering feedback for three months now. Design team has been working hard to collect all feedback. Cataloguing every single problem that folks find. Some of the changes were big enough or testable enough that they went into update documents. Others couldn’t go into updates because either they were isolated “oh we need to fix that” or too big to release mid-playtest (e.g., fixing the underlying, fundamental math of the game—impossible to change because affects everything).
About a month ago, multi-day design meeting cataloguing every single problem each design team member had found by that point in all the feedback. This master list of problems has been maintained on an ongoing basis. Jason added something to the list “yesterday” based on forum feedback.
They know about the math problems, exploring some ideas (including based on some forum ideas they found “very interesting”).
Jason: I get the owners of the company coming to my office saying, what are you doing with this system? What are you going to tell the fans? But he doesn’t want to interfere with the playtest process by talking about next-steps when they haven’t gathered all the data they want from the playtest itself.
The updates “are such a small part about what we’re doing.” Just what they release for further testing. Behind the scenes, they’re at the point where they’re transitioning away from using the playtest rulebook itself because the game has changed so much.
Jason: Once the playtest is over, folks can expect us to talk much more freely and openly about what direction the game is taking. I almost want to do a “what have we learned” stream, and use that to springboard into showcasing what we’re doing for PF2. The playtest is not second edition!
*****
Stream transitions to Q&A.
On track for August 2019? Jason: nothing about our initial plan has changed at this point. There’s a *lot* of work to be done. Right now, on track. But if they can’t meet the deadline they’ll look to adjust.
Skills & +1/lvl? Jason talks about the fractional formula math in 3.5/PF1, add your level or a fraction of your level for everything you do. Easiest way to solve the problem caused by fractional math was to get rid of fractional math. There has been some negative feedback and they’re thinking about whether/how to change. E.g., they’ve looked at what happens if untrained doesn’t add character level. Would that be a dealbreaker? “The answer might not be no.” But they’d have to make sure that no critical defense is based on something that could be untrained. E.g., can’t have any attack target your Acrobatics DC if that would be 10 if you’re untrained. So would require adjustment but might be worth it for players’ sense of verisimilitude (I’ve never trained stealth—why at a high level am I suddenly good at stealth?)
Skill ranks? Jason: No. Not going back to skill ranks. (Maybe as an optional system later.) Everything in the game works off of proficiency, don’t want skills to work on an entirely different system. Makes onboarding for new players much tougher. Says the unified proficiency system has been *great* for new players learning. Weird for PF1 players because different from what we’re used to, but better for the game overall.
Animate dead? Looking at possibilities like the PF1 Troop rules. Talks about PF1 problems of controlling a ton of summons, dramatically slowing down play. (Jason: I wrote the summoner, blame me.)
Spells beyond 3 actions? No, we can’t allow in combat spells that take more than 3 actions to cast.
Dan complains a bit about how he didn’t have social media reach at the start of the playtest and it took a while to build up the visibility of the playtest. Says he should have started building out the online presence 6 months earlier. Jason: “There was a turning point that happened a few weeks in, folks started watching the twitch stream and live posting to the forums.” That’s when it started to break out a little bit.
Ancestries? Jason: what we’re going to look very hard at is making sure that every feat or option is worth taking. We just took the PF1 races and broke them apart and says, “that does it!” But the options are wildly variable in power. EVERYONE takes Halfling Luck. The split between heritage and ancestry was a step in the right direction. But need to balance the options against each other, make sure that each is “sexy enough for everyone to want” rather than some not being worth the investment to take.
Monday—No update or anything. There will be a blog recapping some of this, but Paizo has the day off for Veteran’s Day so it’ll be pretty light.
These are rough notes. Check the stream for what was actually said! The rules discussion starts about HERE, when Jason joins.
This is the big update. This is the one you want to grab.
New update will be 13 pages of *new* material
Rogues: instead of just Finesse Striker, you can choose one of three different paths (finesse, brute, feinter)
Ranger: double slice is dropped for 2 feats: one makes you better with two weapon fighting, one makes you better with ranged (fire twice, if both hit add together)
Proficiency: untrained is now (lvl - 4). Also, skill DCs are adjusted, and lowered overall. Net result: as you get better and better you get more and more certain of success. Every skill DC in Doomsday Dawn updated to reflect
Death and dying: getting much more deadly. New condition, “wounded,” you acquire when you are healed back up from 0 hp. Next time you drop to 0, your wounded value is added on to your dying value. And since you die at dying 4 ... this can mean insta-death if you’re doing too much up-and-down.
Mundane Healing: Medicine gets a new function: Treat Wounds. This removes Wounded and also heals damage. Cures (healer’s lvl) * (your con mod) hp. Makes out-of-combat mundane healing very possible, making magical healing more for in-combat, mundane healing for out-of-combat.
Shields: no multiple dents. One dent and then the rest of the damage goes to you.
Identifying magic items: doesn’t take as long. I wasn’t clear on how long it will take in new rules, but works with someone else using Medicine to heal everyone.
ALL 12 MULTICLASS ARCHETYPES. Goal: you can do this class thing, but you can’t just be a better Barbarian than the Barbarian herself. The 4 we have are rebalanced. Biggest change to Fighter, which a *lot* of folks had been grabbing for armor proficiency. Now it will just step up your armor prof to the next level. (If you want more armor proficiency from archetype, try Paladin ... if you meet those restrictions.) They will keep a close eye on this. This is a separate pdf to put all multiclass together, easier to reference.
The Monday blog will have more details.
### RESONANCE ###
*Not* for Monday’s update (1.3), but for future: Working on the update to Resonance. They’ve been meeting every week to talk about it, waiting on data. They’ve been seeing problems in the data. They rethought from “what did we want this to do?” They arrived at a different strategy. It was trying to do too much in one system.
Resonance shifting to just a system to manage permanent magic items, replace slot system. “The moment we tried to tie it to consumable usage and things like that, that’s when we started to have problems. Because those two things were competing with one another in a way that was unsatisfactory.” So resonance will just fix the slot system, which was a big problem. Worn items resonate with each other and don’t work together if you wear too many.
But something else to manage how you use magic items. “But we don’t want that system to be one that cuts you off from magic.” That wasn’t fun. Looking at ways for characters to focus on magic. Stuff about some default baseline and then, if you focus on things, getting more above-and-beyond benefits. (This is kind of unclear to me.) “I want to stress ... that we’re still in the design phase” on this.
They want to thoroughly test by rewriting the PFS module Raiders of the Shrieking Peak as a specific test of this. “This might take us 3 or 4 weeks to get ready.” Still in the process of designing the system, then probably some internal testing.
New character sheet. Minor adjustments, including senses line.
Suggestion for the treasure tables starting on p. 349:
Please include higher-level mundane items, like higher-quality weapons or tools or armor (p. 190).
When creating fourth-level characters, my group missed the possibility of using our 2nd-level item "slots" to purchase expert-quality weapons or armor, which contributed to a feeling of "I don't have a lot I can actually get with these items."
Including higher-quality items etc. would also help gamemasters picking treasure to hand out to players. So it would save both players and GMs from having to cross reference to the equipment chapter to remember where high quality goods fall.
And it wouldn't add a lot of space to the table, I don't think.
Does sneak attack damage multiply on a critical hit? Unlike PF1, I can't find any rule that says it does not multiply, so I'm posting here to check whether I've missed something.
The question comes up because my group is in the middle of Doomsday Dawn Ch. 2 and the party's level 4 Rogue got a +1 rapier and is murdering everything with his sneak attack crit of 6d6+1d8+4 damage (avg. 29.5).
(He's gotten lucky on some rolls and has a party that's been very helpful in inflicting flat-footed to get the sneak attack—but even against an AC 18, pretty standard for level 4, he crits 20% of the time if his target is flat-footed.)
Two big questions here. Just reading on my phone so I may have missed some things ... Help!
Dying (Rules, not the condition) wrote:
When you lose the dying condition, you regain consciousness
Unconscious wrote:
When you’re unconscious and at 0 HP but no longer dying, you naturally return to 1 HP and awaken after sufficient time passes. The GM determines how long you remain unconscious, from at least 10 minutes to several hours.
Stabilize wrote:
The target loses the dying condition, though it remains unconscious at 0 Hit Points.
Administer First Aid wrote:
The creature at 0 Hit Points loses the dying condition (but remains unconscious)
(1) The dying rules say that when you lose the dying condition you wake up. But (2) the dying condition itself doesn't say that. And (3) stabilize and first aid see the contemplate a PC losing the dying condition but remaining unconscious. And (4) the unconscious condition also contemplates that.
But then you have the odd circumstance of being able to "roll to consciousness" via recovery saves if you're dying but not if you're stable. So what, you yell at the Cleric "don't stabilize my fighter! I want to wake up!" That's confusing!
Now, that reading see to undercut the stated goal of getting PCs back in the action more reliably. So I would have thought it an oversight. But the stabilize rules explicitly call it out! So how's all this supposed to work?
*****
A separate confusion is that if you roll to consciousness you're awake and acting at 0hp, which under these rules seems to mean that you're invincible, since dying only triggers when you're "reduced to" 0 hp or take damage while unconscious. So *definitely* don't heal that fighter!
Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders! Here's a thread to collect my playtest thoughts and impressions. While I've chimed in here or there on the forums, now that I have a group running through Doomsday Dawn I thought it might be useful to have one location to keep track of everything that comes up in play. We just finished Chapter 1 last night, and will kick off Chapter 2 next week (though we may end up spending our time next week creating characters without getting into the adventure).
Background. I've played a fair amount of PF1, including a lot of PFS play. I was active on the forums for a while, but when I moved to a new state in 2016 I never found a regular gaming group in the new place. So I wasn't playing much Pathfinder and was off the forums for as well. I've been back online following the news since the playtest was announced, and I'm looking forward to playtesting the new system.
My group. I'm starting Doomsday Dawn with a group of 3 players (I'm running a fourth character to round out the party). All of them have some experience with PF1 but not all that much. They are not especially optimizing or strategic players. I'm taking a pretty hands-off approach in that regard, since I imagine feedback from the perspective of more-casual players can be helpful for the playtest and that it's more helpful to get everyone's honest experience with the rules themselves rather than distort it through heavy-handed GM advice. After each session, I've been asking them for their thoughts on what they enjoyed and did not enjoy so much, and I'll be posting those here along with my own thoughts as we go through the adventure. I will also encourage my players to fill out the surveys when we finish each chapter of Doomsday Dawn.
Approach. Much to my dismay, my order of the playtest books was affected by the difficulties at launch. (Ultimately, I had to cancel my order with Paizo and pick up the books from another retailer.) This meant that my first pass with the full ruleset was trying to learn it from the pdf, which I found to be a very frustrating experience. So rather than trying to learn the rules in advance, I did an initial skim to try to situate myself and then have been learning in play, looking up each rule or system in more detail as we encounter it. My players are also "learning by doing," and are generally less familiar with the rules than I am. They also got annoyed trying to learn the rules from a pdf, so we all said, let's just create characters and figure it out as we go. (This got a lot easier once we had a couple physical books, which I picked up after our initial character creation session.)
The upshot of this learn-by-doing approach, of course, is that issues that arise in play could be issues with the ruleset itself or just issues that come up because we don't understand the rules or missed the relevant rule somewhere. Whenever a question comes up at the table I'll spend a minute looking through the book and index to see if I can figure it out and if not just rule and move on. So if anything comes up where it looks like I've mistaken the rule, please let me know. As part of my feedback here I'll be noting questions about the rules that stopped play at the table and especially questions that ultimately stumped us, where we couldn't find an answer or were confused about what we found.
That's it for an introduction! In the next few posts I'll work through our experience with the Lost Star.
In PF1, raising Con or Int as you leveled up had retroactive effect, granting additional hit points and skill ranks as if you had enjoyed the higher ability score from level 1.
But I don't see anything to that effect in the Playtest rules.
Is that correct? Are the benefits of these increases only prospective, not retroactive?
If so, that significantly affects character planning, making it much more valuable to invest in Con/Int at level 1 and "catch up" your other scores later. For that reason, I'd prefer that the ability boosts do have retroactive effect.
The Adopted Ancestry feat, as written, seems to stymie rather than support many adopted-PC stories.
Because it is a general feat that does nothing other than give you access to ancestry feats of your adopted culture, the earliest any PC can take it is 3rd level (or 1st level if Human using the General Training human ancestry feat)—and then the earliest a character can actually take an ability or feature from their adopted ancestry is 5th level. That doesn't make much sense to me: if a character is raised by Dwarves and trained in Dwarven weapons, shouldn't she be able to use those weapons from level 1?
The feat is also just pretty disappointing in general: a feat that lets you take another feat two levels later. It might only really make sense if you retrain into it at the same time as taking an ancestry feat from the adopted ancestry, but should the feat really require that kind of tinkering to get its basic flavor?
This connects to what looks like a general problem with ancestries that folks were worrying about from the previews: that the selection of benefits is so limited at 1st level that pretty basic concepts like weapon training can't come online till your character is quite far along.
For reference, here are my notes on last night's Paizo Friday chat with Logan.
Divine spell list (09:22):
Clerics “get to choose from everything on the divine spell list” like in PF1
Anathema (11:40):
“Any of the classes that have a stricture on their behavior will have anathema” (“this applies to a lot of classes”)
Violating Anathema (13:24):
“For most of the classes if they’ve got magical abilities they lose some or all of them. We kind of suggest, this is what typically happens.” But for Clerics, especially given the multitude of gods and shades of grey and to allow flexibility between campaigns, “we didn’t want to go, you do these five things and you can’t cast spells anymore. We didn’t want to go too exact with it because you’ve got your Gamemaster there, and you are going to have to deal with things that aren’t cut and dried sometimes. So we wanted to give you a really strong framework for how it works but not make it overly restrictive by saying, ‘here are your deity favor points and they tick down by one every time.’ But we do give a pretty clear portrait of like, typically you’re going to lose your spellcasting and your Cleric magical abilities when you fall out of favor with your god. And alignment affects that to. Because each deity allows certain alignments.” Talks about specifying alignments each god allows (can’t worship Asmodeus if you’re neutral).
10th-Level Spells (20:18):
Access with a 20th-level feat to get a 10th level spell. Some of them are the ultra-powerful Wish, Miracle, etc. from PF1. Can cast once a day, doesn’t have the expensive material component anymore. There are also new ones. E.g. Avatar, become an avatar of your deity. “You just hulk out and become a kickass avatar of Gorum, or not-as-kickass avatar of Shelyn. You kind of embody your deity for a little while.” “There are also a large number of spells that you can heighten to 10th level for extra effects and ridiculous things.” There “aren’t a whole lot of slots for them, and we kept the number of 10th-level spells relatively small especially since the playtest document had limited space. But there are a lot of things that you can heighten into those slots that can really kind of blow your mind a little bit.”
Spell Slots for Clerics (28:20):
Some interesting talk from Logan about the designers’ perspective on the reduced number of spell slots. The only newsworthy bit I caught: Logan mentions feats that grant more spell points and feats that grant more cantrips.
Proficiencies (32:20):
At 1st level, you start out Trained in a bunch of stuff. Your skills, your armor and weapons. There are a few classes that start out with some Expert proficiencies (the Cleric is not one of them), e.g. Fighters are Expert with weapons from the jump. A 1st level Cleric is Trained in her spell rolls: She adds her proficiency modifier (= level since she’s Trained) + Wis mod. “Anything that’s using proficiency is always using your character level.”
Deities & Domains & Spells Teasers (37:03):
“I grabbed a couple deities who have similarities in their domains but are very different in their attitude.” Iomedae and Gorum, who share three domains: Confidence, Might, and Zeal. Iomedae also has Truth where Gorum has Destruction.
Deity spells. Sarenrae gives you fireball. Nethys “is going to be really interesting. I think some people are going to flip their wigs when they see what Nethys gives.” Iomedae gives true strike, paralysis, and fire shield. Gorum gives true strike, enlarge, and weapon storm (new spell: “you take your weapon and swing and make a cone of weapon attacks, you wreck a whole bunch of people”).
The Confidence domain has veil of confidence as its initial Domain Power and delusional pride as its advanced Power (you have to feat into the advanced Powers). Might has athletic exploit and enduring might. Zeal has weapon surge and prepare for battle. Destruction has destructive cry and destructive aura. Truth has word of truth (you cast the spell and say something that you believe to be true, a symbol appears to verify to others that you are speaking honestly—or at least believe you are—your deity vouching for you) and glimpse of truth.
New divine spells. Crisis of faith: cause target to have a crisis of faith, mentally hurt them—if they crit-fail, they can’t cast divine spells for a while. Disrupting weapons: turn a bunch of allies’ weapons into ones that can disrupt undead and deal more damage to them (starts with 2 weapons, heighten to affect more). Revival: (9th level) heals in a burst, temporarily brings back to life dead people (with temporary hit points and a time limit before they go back to being dead).
Favored weapons. Nethys’s favored weapon is the staff—not the quarterstaff. “We looked at how the quarterstaff is working and were like, ‘how many Wizards will actually want this?’” The staff is a one-handed weapon that does more damage if you use two hands if you want to.
Items & Magical Properties (43:50):
Logan mentions the returning property: “you throw the javelin and the javelin returns to you, you don’t have to spend an action drawing a new one.” News: “There’s a new category of items that could make an item like that return once, that we’ll probably be talking about more when we talk about magic items. But there’s kind of ways to play with some of your gear using a specific new category of item.”
Cantrips & Heightening & Dispelling (45:52):
Question: how do non-damage-dealing cantrips heighten? Logan: depends on the cantrip. E.g., the sigil cantrip (replacing arcane mark) lasts longer; detect magic gives more information. There are a few that don’t really scale up, like prestidigitation—“there’s not really a lot of places for it to go.” One of the main things about spells is that the level matters more for dispelling, higher level dispels lower level. For categories of spells that auto-dispel each other, like light & darkness spells. So your light cantrip gets stronger, you can use it to dispel magical darkness just by casting light if the darkness is a lower level.
Magic & Alchemy (47:10):
Question: “Where does alchemy end and magic begin?” Logan: general thematic line between the two, Alchemy is typically something that a chemical reaction could do, though in some cases (e.g., mutagen) that’s pretty extreme; making someone levitate is more like magic. Alchemy could do that kind of thing only in a very specific, special case.
Weapons (48:20):
Since magic weapons do additional dice of damage, what happens to weapons that do multiple dice of damage? “We don’t have any weapons that do multiple dice as their base damage. So the greatsword is now a d12.” Weapons on a more strict 1d4 to 1d12 scale. The weapon traits make a much bigger difference for how the weapon functions.
Potions (50:15):
If potions are no longer spells-in-a-can, what do they do? Depends on the potion. “They’re all written from scratch.” Scrolls & wands are still just spells. Didn’t want to have those and then also potions doing the same thing. For potions, there’s a shrinking potion, a healing potion, a dragon breath potion, stuff like that. A bunch of different options. A lot more flexible now. Still a few that work pretty much like spells.
Magic Weapons (Runes) (51:50):
Are proficiency runes limited by item quality? Logan discusses potency runes. Can transfer from one item to another by re-etching them. Can upgrade them by altering the runes. “They are limited by quality. The total potency you can have on an item depends on the quality. You have to have a Master-quality weapon or armor to put, I believe, a +3 or +4 on it. Expert-quality for anything lower than that.” Another category of runes: property runes. Same concept as weapon properties in PF1. Quality of the weapon limits how many property runes it can have. So quality is a cap on potency and on the number of properties. So it has to be a pretty high quality weapon to be both flaming and frost. And even higher to have both of those and vorpal. — Can upgrade specific weapons (e.g., flametongue, celestial armor) by increasing potency, but can’t add properties.
Quick Draw (54:36):
Quick Draw feat to draw weapons still a thing. Does it affect other items? “I don’t remember.” But there is such an ability for the Alchemist, who can pull bombs and [Logan makes a repeated throwing gesture with his hands] and pull two alchemical items at a time.
Resonance (55:34):
Resonance determines how many magic items you can use safely in a day. If you run out of resonance you can try to use more items, but each time there’s a greater chance that the item won’t function for you or that you won’t be able to use any more items that day. “Usually you’re only going to push your luck if you need that healing potion really badly ... We really want to see how that playtests.”
Proficiency & AC (56:30):
How does proficiency interact with AC? “The same way as with everything else. If you’re wearing armor you’re untrained in you’re going to add your level minus 2.” If Trained—your level, 10, and your Dex. If Trained in armor and Untrained in shields, and “trying to wear a shield, you don’t really know what you’re doing so you’re going to use Untrained for your AC because you’re wearing one thing you’re Untrained in.” Most classes that get armor, especially the better armors, are going to get shields at the same rate.
Arcane Spell Failure (1:00:00):
Is arcane spell failure still a thing? “It was for a long time, and then at one point we just kind of said, ‘These are the only people who are worrying about this. Do we really need it?’ So we are playtesting without arcane spell failure. So we’ll see if there are a bunch of Wizards who buy into heavy armor and run around wearing full plate. We don’t know if that’s going to be an exciting enough use of their feats to do that and we kind of want to find out.”
Resonance (1:00:30):
Resonance uses Charisma from PF1 precedent around Use Magic Device, spell-like abilities, and with the Sorcerer. If magic relies on innate magical power it uses Charisma. That kind of thing. One exception (i.e., the Alchemist).
Tonight's Twitch stream just wrapped up. For the Playtest it was just 10-15 minutes at the end with Erik Mona. But there were still a few tidbits worth sharing. (I didn't catch anything else that sounded newsworthy but I might have missed something.)
Erik said:
1) "I think" that all of the classes that cast spells have Spell Points
2) "We're finishing the Playtest rulebook essentially today. It goes to the printer next week."
3) Can now confirm that Wayne Reynolds is the only interior illustrator for the Playtest rulebook. They just got a big package full of art today that they're fixing to scan at publishing quality to drop into the book.
I’m guessing that Playtest Archetypes make a lot out of the fact that (afaik) the Playtest rules put every character on a standard progression: Class Talents (aka Features) at these levels; Class Feats at these levels; Skill Advancements at these levels; Skill Feats at these levels; Ancestry Feats at these levels; etc.
By having that standardized baseline, any Archetype can plug into any character regardless of ancestry/background/class: you lose the features gained at levels XYZ and in their place you gain 123. And then the designers can just add prerequisites to the Archetypes that they want to be more restricted.
One wild possibility is that this kind of Archetype could also cover multiclassing in a semi-VMC kind of way. I’m speculating here because of Logan’s comment that Playtest Archetypes are “more experimental” and cover “a few different concepts that were kind of all pointing at the same type of character customization.” And the comment that multiclassing will refer to a single character advancement table.
Thoughts?
=====
For reference, here are the bits I’ve seen so far regarding Archetypes. The fullest discussion is in the Erik + Logan Know Direction interview. The specific segments that discuss Archetypes run from 24:20–25:23 and 29:10–31:22.
Erik comments that Archetypes are part of “what made Pathfinder Pathfinder” and complaining that because they were added on and the Core classes weren’t built with Archetypes in mind, the PF1 Cleric wasn’t Archetype-compatible—it had nothing to swap out, so just couldn’t really take Archetypes. He says that making sure no PF2 class is denied Archetype access by mistake is a main goal of building Archetypes into the PF2 core.
Logan says:
Logan wrote:
It’s not that much like Starfinder and it’s not that much like first edition. It’s kind of one of the more experimental parts of the rules ... I will say we’ve taken a few different concepts that were kind of all pointing at the same type of character customization and kind of said, that’s all under the archetype umbrella. So we’re interested to see how people react to that, for sure.
When asked whether it would be “class-specific” or “a broad concept that multiple classes can qualify for,” Logan answers:
Logan wrote:
It’s going to be a broad concept but we can also do whatever prerequisites we need. We’re sticking with pretty broad ones in the playtest book just because we only have a small number of them. But if we wanted to do a Wizard-specific one there’s nothing stopping it.
Also, Jason mentions Archetypes over here, teasing:
Jason Bulmahn wrote:
Characters in the new edition have MORE options in most cases than they did in the previous edition . . .
Beyond skills, every class now has its own list of feats to choose from, making them all pretty different from one another and allowing for a lot of flexibility in how you play. And just wait until you see what Archetypes can do...
[When you level up, you] get to make the choices for your new level. What choices? Those are all covered on your class’s class advancement table . . .
(Wait... what if I multiclass? We’ll cover that in a future blog, but let’s just say you’ll still be referencing only one advancement table.)
One thing we knew we wanted to include in the new edition was a good number of choices for all characters. In first edition, this could be pretty unequal. Even though over time, the game incorporated more ways to customize any type of character, we wanted to build in more robust customization into the structure of every class. That’s why every class gets specific class talents (which include spells for spellcasters) at 1st level and every other level thereafter, increases to skills every other level, and feats at every level!
Has there been any news regarding virtual tabletop support (or lack thereof) for the playtest/playtest adventure?
I've been away for a while so I'm not sure what the current state of Pathfinder VTT support is. But I imagine that VTT support of some kind would help facilitate the playtest for a lot of people. For example, I'd love it if I could purchase a VTT package with the playtest adventure preloaded. (I don't know how feasible this is for the VTT companies and for Paizo—maybe it requires too much backend work for one or both of 'em?)
I'm putting together my first Inquisitor for an upcoming campaign, and I'd like to check in with everyone to get feedback on my build. Straightforward melee guy; the party's a bit weak in Knowledge so I'm spending a feat for Improved Monster Lore. Starting at level 5.
### The Build ###
Half-elf Inquisitor, no archetypes
[0th] Create Water, Detect Magic, Guidance, Read Magic, Sift, Stabilize
### Questions ###
(1) I'm concerned that my AC will be rather low for a melee guy, with access only to Medium armor. Is this a reasonable concern? If so, how should I address it?
(1a) Heavy Armor Proficiency (I'd probably drop Combat Reflexes?)
(1b) Swap over to Human, dip 1 level Fighter (gain heavy armor, 2 feats, +2 Fort)
(1c) Swap over to Human, dip 1 level Unchained Armored Hulk Barbarian (gain heavy armor, 1 feat, +2 Fort; probably spend on Extra Rage)
(1d) Something else?
Comment: (1b) and (1c) would also allow me to shuffle my stats some, dropping Dex to 12 and boosting Str to 18 to start, so all told I'm pretty attracted to them I guess
(2) Any great character options (spells, feats, etc) that I'm missing?
Looking for feedback on a new character I'm starting to draft, one centered around a few newish rules elements that have recently caught my eye. I may want to play this guy in PFS, so let's stick to PFS rules and plan to level 11.
The Elven Branched Spear is *great*! A finesseable reach weapon? Yes please! The +2 on AOOs provoked by movement through threatened squares is just gravy. Combine that with Unchained Rogue's Dex-to-damage and you've got an interesting reach melee rogue.
Elf, dipping one level in <Vanguard Slayer> for martial weapon proficiency and a few other nice things. Lvl 1 Rogue, Lvl 2 Slayer, everything else Rogue.
Figure I'll go with something like this for the stats: Str 12 Dex 19 Con 13 Int 12 Wis 12 Cha 07
I haven't given much thought to the feat or talent build out yet. Figure I need to grab Combat Reflexes, Phalanx Formation, Power Attack, Weapon Focus (perhaps via Weapon Training talent) ... But haven't done any more planning than that.
Suggestions welcome! I'll come back and update as I work, but it'll be pretty slow over the next few days.
#### (1) Introduction: Testing the Unchained Monk ####
Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders!
So I picked up Unchained on Wednesday, and all together I quite like the book. There’s a lot of very good material in there that I’m excited to implement in my home game (e.g., automatic bonus progression, background skills, stamina, variant multiclassing). I’m really very happy with most of what I’m seeing, at least on a first pass.
This purpose of this thread is to help me work out my thoughts on one part of the book that has excited a bit of forum controversy since the earliest previews—the Unchained Monk. I want to figure out what I think about the class, so I’m posting this thread to do my thinking out loud and together with anyone who’s interested in having that conversation.
I approach the Unchained Monk with a bit of an unusual perspective, or at least one that seems to be a bit rare in the arguments about the class that are going on in the dedicated thread. I’ve never actually learned the Core Monk! It’s a complicated class and I just hadn’t got around to it by the time I heard about Unchained. So while I was always aware that the Monk had a rather poor reputation, I never really tried it out to feel that pain myself.
And now that I have the Unchained Monk in-hand, I’d like to work through it pretty carefully to see how I feel about it. The test: Will the Unchained Monk successfully fulfill the role of a martial arts melee combatant in a Pathfinder party?
In answering that question, it works out as a benefit that I’m unfamiliar with the Core Monk and the debates around that class. Being mostly without preconceptions about the Pathfinder Monk, I hope to be able to evaluate the Unchained Monk without pre-judgments and with fresh eyes.
What I’ll be doing here is “thinking out loud,” recording my thought process as I put together a couple basic and straightforward Unchained Monk builds and as I evaluate the class on the basis of these builds. I’m making this record mostly for my own sake, to help me clarify my thoughts on the class, but I hope it might also help the ongoing forum conversation on the Unchained Monk.
In the posts that follow, I put together two basic, straightforward, and flexible Unchained Monk builds, one focusing on unarmed strikes (Unarmed Oona) and the other focusing on using a weapon (Temple Sword Tina). I then then compared the performance of these two builds to my previously-assembled <Reference: Basic Fighter Builds> as a reasonable benchmark.
Reviewing my findings, I’m led to conclude that the Unchained Monk is a successful class, and it may be fair to say (if my builds and numbers are approximately correct) that it is even a very successful class
Before I get into the builds, I will first articulate the principles guiding my builds and evaluations.
This thread is inspired by Cheapy’s excellent basic Fighter numbers posts <here> and <here>.
I find myself referring to Cheapy’s numbers regularly as a point of comparison for melee builds I’m experimenting with, but I use the numbers often enough that it’s time for me to put together full builds to
My goal for this thread is to put together, for my own reference and for anyone else who is interested, full builds of a roughly-optimized Core Fighter and a roughly-non-optimized Core Fighter. (Let’s follow messageboard tradition and call them Falchion Fred and Longsword Lou.) I find myself referring to Cheapy’s numbers regularly as a point of comparison for melee builds I’m experimenting with, and I’d like to have a set of more complete builds for more robust comparisons.
## Principles ##
What I’m looking for here are some standard reference points in evaluating melee builds. This suggests certain build principles.
1. PFS Core Rules. Most of my play is in PFS, and in any case it provides a useful standard ruleset for the sake of comparisons, which is the target here.
2. Yes, CRB Plus Basic Traits Only. I’m looking for simple, standard comparisons. Not even using the Advanced Players Guide.
(NOTE: I forgot that feather step slippers aren't Core. Didn't realize the mistake until I was in the middle of posting everything, so too late now! Discount the slippers. Let's say that that 2,200 gp goes into a +1 longbow instead.)
3. Simple Builds, Some Flexibility. Since I’m looking for simple, standard comparisons, I figure I should choose the most straightforward, basic builds, and I should try to leave some flexibility in the builds—they shouldn’t need every last character option to be *just so* in order to arrive at their numbers. A set of numbers like that wouldn’t be as useful for the sort of basic reference I’m after, I don’t think. For one thing, using such a fraught build for a basic reference would tend to suggest that there’s only one “correct” way to build a class, since any alternate build would be in constant danger of falling below a “minimal standard of effectiveness” in order to pick up whatever interesting option or theme it might be going for. So I prefer to build in a bit of flexibility. In any case, it’s easy enough to see where and how we could raise the numbers if we wanted to.
4. Human. It would be best to build out with several, or even all, of the Core races for complete information, but Human is good enough for a simple, standard reference point.
5. Standard Array. The Elite array adjusted to 20 point-buy: 16/14/14/12/10/8. Simple and standard.
6a. Levels 1–11. PFS levels, the levels of most play. Plus, I’m putting in enough effort here I figure it’s excusable to limit it to these levels at least for now. If I want to expand on the project later I might go out to level 17 or so to capture the range of most APs.
6b.Testing at Levels 2/5/8/11. Four comparison points, ignoring the highly-variable level 1 and split evenly across the rest. This should be a good-enough set to have for now. Again, I might expand eventually if I have the time.
Motivation: I'm fairly experienced with Pathfinder, but never really got to know the Druid class. It's complicated! An unfamiliar spell list, the animal companion, wild shape ... that's a lot of moving parts to learn, so I haven't ever bothered. But now I'd like to fill in the gap in my knowledge of the game. To that end, I'd like to build a Druid for play in PFS Core, to minimize the complications. And I'm turning to you for help!
Goal: I want to change shape and smash things! The goal is to keep things as simple as possible as I get to know the class. Wildshape strikes me as the weirdest part of the class to get to know, so I'd like to skip the animal companion to keep it simple and focus on melee and wildshape.
Parameters:
PFS Core. So, 20 point buy, no resources outside the Core Rulebook except basic traits. All the other usual PFS limitations.
Non-human. Almost every one of my characters is human. I'd like to try something different. Plus, (i) if we can make the build work without the human bonus feat it's always easy to switch back and (ii) a 20 ft. move speed, usually why I skip Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, isn't as much of a handicap once wildshape comes into play.
Domain, not animal companion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm skipping the animal companion.
Melee focus. I want to smash things!
Thoughts? Suggestions? I'd especially appreciate advice on wildshape. What should I know about the ability? What Bestiary 1 shapes will be especially useful? How does wildshape affect my choice of equipment or feats?
(I'll post my preliminary build and thoughts and questions in a day or two. Want to leave it open-ended for now.)
I'm planning an Investigator for my new character, and need some way of casting detect magic at will to get around the annoying fact that I have the Spellcraft skill but no way to ID magic items etc. without the spell.
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Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders!
An interesting discussion came up in my PFS lodge a couple weeks ago that I'd like to follow up on here. One of our GMs was reviewing the swarm subtype and noticed that it seems as if, as-written, swarms can't change their shape—that they're always a 10-ft square. Now, this goes against the way I've always seen swarms played, but in the discussion I was persuaded that he had it right.
Which strikes me as odd, since it seems pretty clear to me that swarms are intended to be able to change shape. If it's correct (a) that they're supposed to be able to reshape but (b) that, as-written, they cannot, then this seems worth an FAQ or errata to clarify.
(In the meantime, unless I'm persuaded otherwise, I'll be running my PFS swarms as unshapeable, since I'm persuaded that's rules-as-written and since I believe in erring on the side of the generous rules interpretation in organized play.)
But maybe I'm just missing something! Curious to hear your thoughts.
A swarm is a collection of Fine, Diminutive, or Tiny creatures that acts as a single creature. A swarm has the characteristics of its type, except as noted here. A swarm has a single pool of Hit Dice and hit points, a single initiative modifier, a single speed, and a single Armor Class. A swarm makes saving throws as a single creature. A single swarm occupies a square (if it is made up of nonflying creatures) or a cube (of flying creatures) 10 feet on a side, but its reach is 0 feet, like its component creatures. In order to attack, it moves into an opponent's space, which provokes an attack of opportunity. It can occupy the same space as a creature of any size, since it crawls all over its prey. A swarm can move through squares occupied by enemies and vice versa without impediment, although the swarm provokes an attack of opportunity if it does so. A swarm can move through cracks or holes large enough for its component creatures.
A swarm of Tiny creatures consists of 300 nonflying creatures or 1,000 flying creatures. A swarm of Diminutive creatures consists of 1,500 nonflying creatures or 5,000 flying creatures. A swarm of Fine creatures consists of 10,000 creatures, whether they are flying or not. Swarms of nonflying creatures include many more creatures than could normally fit in a 10-foot square based on their normal space, because creatures in a swarm are packed tightly together and generally crawl over each other and their prey when moving or attacking. Larger swarms are represented by multiples of single swarms. The area occupied by a large swarm is completely shapeable, though the swarm usually remains in contiguous squares.
In our discussion, several folks were leaning on that last line in an attempt to establish that all swarms are shapeable. Argument: The text mentions "a large swarm", this must refer to size-Large, all typical swarms are at least size-Large. Therefore all typical swarms must be completely shapeable.
But the argument doesn't quite work, because the "large" here does not refer to size-Large. Rather (1), as its position shows, it refers to the "larger swarms represented by multiples of single swarms" in the previous sentence. And (2) this is confirmed by the fact that "large" is not capitalized, since it is convention to capitalize creature size labels (as is shown at the start of the same paragraph with Tiny and Diminuitive). So (2a) if the line *were* just a poorly-placed rule intended to cover all swarms, it would have to read: "The area occupied by a Large swarm ..."
163 people marked this as FAQ candidate. Answered in the FAQ.
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Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders!
Now that the Advanced Class Guide has been officially released, we can get the more in-depth discussion threads going on specific issues. One of the good questions that's been getting play in the advance threads has to do with the Pummeling Style feat (p. 154). I thought we could move that discussion here.
Question: Does Pummeling Style work with all weapons?
Here's the summary from the table:
ACG p. 140 wrote:
Pool all unarmed strikes into a single powerful blow
And here's the full feat text:
ACG p. 154 wrote:
Pummeling Style (Combat, Style)
You collect all your power into a single vicious and debilitating punch.
Prerequisites: Improved Unarmed Strike; base attack bonus +6, brawler's flurry† class feature, or flurry of blows class feature.
Benefit: As a full-round action, you can pool all your attack potential in one devastating punch. Make a number of rolls equal to the number of attacks you can make with a full attack or a flurry of blows (your choice) with the normal attack bonus for each attack. For each roll that is a hit, you deal the normal amount of damage, adding it to any damage the attack has already dealt from previous rolls (if any). If any of the attack rolls are critical threats, make one confirmation roll for the entire attack at your highest base attack bonus. If it succeeds, the entire attack is a confirmed critical hit.
42 people marked this as FAQ candidate. Answered in the FAQ.
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Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders!
First, the plain question. Then, the explanation.
Q: Does a Reach weapon double *all* increases to the user's reach, or only some? Which ones?
An interesting disagreement, soon to be more prevalent with the release of the Advanced Class Guide, came up in another thread (HERE) over how reach weapons interact with reach-increasing measures other than enlarge person. Specifically, the Lunge feat, the Aberrant Bloodrager's Abnormal Reach ability, and the long arm spell (the latter two from the ACG).
The disagreement centers on the following text from the Equipment chapter of the Core Rulebook:
Reach Weapon wrote:
A reach weapon is a melee weapon that allows its wielder to strike at targets that aren't adjacent to him. Most reach weapons double the wielder's natural reach, meaning that a typical Small or Medium wielder of such a weapon can attack a creature 10 feet away, but not a creature in an adjacent square. A typical Large character wielding a reach weapon of the appropriate size can attack a creature 15 or 20 feet away, but not adjacent creatures or creatures up to 10 feet away.
[EDIT — Changed presentation to lead with Abnormal Reach and long arm instead of Lunge, since they're better examples of what's in question here.]
Consider these two new abilities from the Advanced Class Guide, the Aberrant Bloodrager's Abnormal Reach ability and the long arm spell.
Abnormal Reach wrote:
Your limbs elongate; your reach increases by 5 feet.
Long Arm wrote:
Your arms temporarily grow in length, increasing your reach with those limbs by 5 feet.
These can both be plausibly described as increases to "natural reach," but does a reach weapon double them? Compare.
(A) Doubling *All* Increases:
Double Everything wrote:
5 ft. base reach
+5 ft. enlarge person
+5 ft. Abnormal Reach
+5 ft. long arm
---------------
20 ft. "natural" reach
x2 reach weapon
---------------
40 ft. reach
+5 ft. Lunge
---------------
45 ft. reach
(B) Doubling *Some* Increases:
Double Some Things wrote:
5 ft. base reach
+5 ft. enlarge person
---------------
10 ft. reach
x2 reach weapon
---------------
20 ft. reach
+5 ft. Abnormal Reach
+5 ft. long arm
+5 ft. Lunge
---------------
35 ft. reach
(Notice that I’ve assumed Lunge [CRB] is added after everything, on the grounds that it doesn’t look like an increase to “natural reach.” One argument might have it doubled along with the others.)
I'm inclined to the second reading, with the reach weapon only doubling the reach from enlarge person, on the grounds that out of these effects only enlarge person does anything to increase the size of your weapon. Lunge, Abnormal Reach, and long arm do nothing to make your longspear any longer.
But not everyone buys that interpretation, so I thought the question would be worth bringing up in its own thread for folks to discuss, especially since the question will likely become more prevalent (including in PFS) with the release of the Advanced Class Guide. (I'm also flagging this for FAQ to get it on the designers' list in case they think it worth an official ruling.)
Turns out I just couldn't wait for the Advanced Class Guide release to start planning my next PFS character. This thread is to solicit your expert assistance in plotting a sword-and-board Slayer. I'm sure the final version will change based on what's in the book, but I'd like to have a preliminary plan in place.
Here's what I've got so far. Input appreciated, especially on gear selection.
Human Slayer 11 Str 18 Dex 14 Con 14 Int 12 Wis 12 Cha 7
Had a couple Barbed Devils come up in a game I was running last night. Wanted to double-check that I ran the impale ability correctly, for the future. I don't have a lot of experience running high level games, and was a bit surprised with how badly one of these guys shredded the party Cleric.
Melee 2 claws +18 (2d8+6/19–20 plus fear and grab)
CMB +22 grapple
Grab (Ex) A barbed devil can use its grab attack against a foe of up to Medium size.
Impale (Ex) A barbed devil deals 3d8+9 points of piercing damage to a grabbed opponent with a successful grapple check.
As I understand it, that combines to produce the following full-attack routine: Claw-Grab-Impale-Release, Claw-Grab-Impale-Release, for 5d8+15 damage on each successful claw-impale combo (average 37.5 each, average 75 for both). More (+8 damage each claw) with the devil's power attack if the target looks extra easy to hit.
Does that look right? Or should Impale only trigger on the next turn if the devil successfully maintains the grapple? I ran it like Constrict, but maybe that wasn't correct?
A creature with constrict deals this additional damage every time it makes a successful grapple check against a foe. This includes the first check to establish the grapple (such as when using the grab universal monster rule).
Could anyone please point me to a dedicated wand/consumable tracking sheet? My characters tend to keep plenty of wands on-hand, and a dedicated sheet would be very helpful. I'm sure someone must have made a good one by now but I haven't seen it, so I'd appreciate a link. Thanks! :-)
I'm not as familiar with Golarion lore as I'm sure some of you are, so I'm hoping you can help me figure out the precise timeline for the AP background. I want to have all my details on-hand to help anchor my players (pretty much all new to PF and Golarion) in the world, and it would help to have the dates ready for when they're needed. Right now I'm a bit frustrated flipping around in "The Half-Dead City" and finding very little that's solid—and no mention at all of what year it is "currently"!
So the main question: what year is it currently on Golarion?
Here's what I've got so far for the general timeline (SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY).
* Wati founded: -1608 AR
* Hakotep I rules Osirion: "over 6,000 years ago"
* Plague of Madness strikes Wati: 2499 AR ("over 4,000 years later")
* Wati lies abandoned: "for over 450 years"
* Church of Pharasma reclaims Wati: 2,953 AR, "over the next 30 years"
* Present Day, generally: "over the next 1,700 years ... and today" [= 4683 AR?]
* Khemet III opens Osirion's tombs to exploration: "7 years ago"
Any opponents hit by your shield bash are also hit with a free bull rush attack, substituting your attack roll for the combat maneuver check (see Combat). This bull rush does not provoke an attack of opportunity. Opponents who cannot move back due to a wall or other surface are knocked prone after moving the maximum possible distance. You may choose to move with your target if you are able to take a 5-foot step or to spend an action to move this turn.
Two questions:
(1) Do I not get a choice whether or not to bull rush? As-written, it doesn't look like it. But that seems to make the feat a trap.
(2) How does the moving-with work? Is it just a poorly-written reminder of the standard limitation on moving with a bull rush?—"You can move with the target if you wish but you must have the available movement to do so." Or is it meant to offer free movement? (I assume the former.)
Here's the case I have in mind: full attacking without having taken 5-ft step prior, second attack shield slams for a 10-foot bull rush. You "are able to take a 5 foot step ... This turn", because you haven't taken one prior, but you're locked in to your full attack so you don't have a standard move remaining. Shield Slam says you can move with, but if you choose to move the target the full 10 feet can you go the full way (free movement) or can you only go 5 feet (standard bull rush limitation)?
Question that has come up fairly regularly: if my Paladin smites evil, do I know immediately (before attacking) whether the smite works or not?
This comes up from time to time in parties with multiple Paladins or a Paladin with Aura of Justice. If the first smite fizzles on a non-evil enemy, can that Paladin warn off the others not to waste their smites?
I'm looking to play a standard TWF Rogue sometime soon. Two daggers, stab stab stab. What I'm looking for is advice on equipment choices. That's one aspect of the game that I'm not very familiar with yet (how to pick the best equipment, what are some good choices). So I figured I'd consult your expertise.
Let's take the Rogue at level 11. Following the CRB, expected WBL for lvl 11 is: 82,000 gp. As I understand it, I should take off 10% for consumables along the way (is that correct?), leaving me with 73,800 gp to play with.
Looking at the PRD in the Chrome app on my Android phone, if I try to scroll down the page will almost immediately refresh and jump me back to the top. This means that the PRD is functionally unusable from my phone. :-(
A quick search of the forum did not find other reports of this behavior.
Background: Nexus 5 phone, Android, Chrome app. I just switched to Android from iPhone, hadn't had the problem on the Chrome app there. So this should have something to do with the browser (I've been told that the iOS Chrome app is really just a skin for Safari).
Quick notes on a playtest scenario. Party: 5 PCs, all lvl 4. Bloodrager, Skald, Swashbuckler, GI-Cleric, Valeros. 2 veteran players (Bloodrager and Cleric), 3 newbies.
Players enjoyed the playtest classes a lot. I enjoyed running for them. These three classes were a bunch of fun to play with and all have great flavor potential. Most of the points that came up as problems or potential problems have been flagged on these boards, but it's worth noticing that they *did* come up at a playtest table, and one mixed between veterans and newbies.
The biggest thing that stood out to me was the roughness with the Skald's ragesong. That might be because I've been worrying about that in the Skald's thread for the past few days, but my worries were definitely borne out at the table. It was just difficult enough to manage to be a pain, and didn't let my player really feel as useful as would have been good.
***
Feedback/issues:
SWASHBUCKLER:
* Panache. Not an especially optimized Swashbuckler build (Dwarf wielding pick), but player felt pinched for panache. He didn't end up using any at all, not wanting to lose his constant boosts. At the end of the game, he was disappointed that Swashbuckler is so strongly geared toward a single sort of build. At the very least wished it would work a bit better with non-huge-threat-range weapons.
* Mobility. He enjoyed his high Acrobatics rolls, but was frustrated by standard new-player problems with action economy: moving, managing equipment, etc. (We try to give some help without running the new guys' characters for them.) When I mentioned that folks on the boards had been suggesting the class might need more mobility options he was surprised to learn that *any* such options existed in PF (I though combat just was this clunky!), and took it for granted that the SB should have them.
SKALD:
* How it plays with others. "I didn't feel especially useful," the new player said, looking at how the Cleric and the Bloodrager kept turning down her raging song. See Bloodrager for more.
* Range. Dealing with the 30-foot range was a tactical pain in the neck, as I'd feared. There were a couple times when combat got messily tangled that she found herself practically forced to move in such a way as to drop a fellow party member from the ragesong.
BLOODRAGER:
* How does it work with Skald? It was a disappointment at the table that the Skald and Bloodrager didn't really interact in any way. There was a desire for *something* so that the Bloodrager would want to take the Skald's ragesong.
* What's the Bloodrager's Caster Level? I ruled Lvl-3, but the question did come up.
* The player (a veteran) felt the Bloodrager was *super* powerful. He was running an Aberrant Bloodline, not especially optimized build, and goodness that extra reach killed (especially + enlarge person). Other bloodlines look quite powerful as well. He's worried about that.
* Player asked about how Bloodrager and the Skald would work with all the rage feats from Orcs of Golarion. He saw much potential for abuse.
When browsing the forums on my phone, I can't see the number of times a post has been flagged for FAQ. The text is hidden under the left-hand pane instead of wrapping. This most often happens when the post has also been favorited: "X persons marked this as a favorite" is quite a string of text and shoves the FAQ number well out of sight. It bugs me that the information is hidden and completely inaccessible from the device I most often quick-check the boards with.
Blade Sense (Ex): At 3rd level, a knife master is so skilled in combat involving light blades that she gains a +1 dodge bonus to AC against attacks made against her with light blades. This bonus increases by +1 for every three levels, to a maximum of +6 at 18th level. This ability replaces trap sense.
Question: what counts as a "light blade" for the purposes of this ability? Specifically: does a rapier count?
It's not clear to me whether the ability refers [1] to the "light blade" category from the Fighter's Weapon Training ability (in which case the rapier would count), or [2]to any light weapon with a blade (in which case the rapier would not count).
Weapon Training wrote:
Blades, Light: dagger, kama, kukri, rapier, sickle, starknife, and short sword.
Rapier wrote:
You can use the Weapon Finesse feat to apply your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier to attack rolls with a rapier sized for you, even though it isn't a light weapon.
[EDIT: It looks like there's a third option for what "light blades" *might* refer to, [3] tothe following list of specific weapons from the archetype's sneak attack ability: "a dagger, kerambit, kukri, punching daggers, starknife, or swordbreaker dagger." See this post for elaboration.]
I'm considering allowing my 5-player party to use 25-point-buy for a new AP (haven't decided which yet). If I do it, what would be an appropriate CR boost to adjust the challenge?
They're competent players who enjoy a challenge so I'd rather overshoot a little at first then underestimate.
Thanks!
[Phone post. Please forgive any infelicities in composition.]
36 people marked this as FAQ candidate. Answered in the FAQ.
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Ahoy, fellow Pathfinders!
I submit for your consideration an FAQ continuing The Great Theurge-Palooza of Summer 2013.
Can a Mystic Theurge with two spontaneous spellcasting classes use the Combined Spells ability to cast with one class spells known by her other class?
For example, could a Sorcerer/Oracle/Mystic Theurge ("SOMT") who knew bless as an Oracle cast the spell as a Sorcerer via Combined Spells? – As written, she cannot. So this FAQ is one of those "do the rules mean what they say?" questions. Click that FAQ flag to find out!
Combined Spells (Su): A mystic theurge can prepare and cast spells from one of his spellcasting classes using the available slots from any of his other spellcasting classes. Spells prepared or cast in this way take up a slot one level higher than they originally occupied. This ability cannot be used to cast a spell at a lower level if that spell exists on both spell lists. At 1st level, a mystic theurge can prepare 1st-level spells from one of his spellcasting classes using the 2nd-level slots of the other spellcasting class. Every two levels thereafter, the level of spells that can be cast in this way increases by one, to a maximum of 5th-level spells at 9th level (these spells would take up 6th-level spell slots). The components of these spells do not change, but they otherwise follow the rules for the spellcasting class used to cast the spell.
Spontaneous spellcasters can only select spells that they have prepared that day using non-spontaneous classes for this ability, even if the spells have already been cast. For example, a cleric/sorcerer/mystic theurge can use this ability to spontaneously cast a bless spell using a 2nd-level sorcerer spell slot, if the character had a prepared bless spell using a 1st-level cleric spell slot, even if that spell had already been cast that day.
So as written, the SOMT cannot use combined spells. Now, when this question has come up in the threads discussing Theurges, I've seen two replies: (1) the rules mean what they say, the SOMT can't use Combined Spells; (2) because the Oracle class did not exist when the Theurge was published, we should be flexible and allow the SOMT to use Combined Spells. Those both seem to me like reasonable enough answers, so it seems to me worth an FAQ. Especially since there's divergence on the question and it's central to a build I expect we'll be seeing some of now that we have the spell-like ability FAQs.
But just in case one or the other of these options seems so obviously correct to you as to make the question not worth an FAQ, let me suggest some additional reasons why you might wish to click the FAQ flag anyway.
(1) If #1 seems obviously correct to you, don't hesitate to click the FAQ flag. Because you know folks are starting to experiment with Theurges and you know folks will be trying out SOMTs. I've seen several state their intentions to try a SOMT in PFS play, for which a ruling would be especially helpful. Also, if the Design Team wants to stick with option #1 it will be minimal effort on their part to answer this FAQ–they won't even have to type out a response, all they'll have to do is mark this post "no reply required." So click that FAQ flag!
(2) If #2 seems obviously correct to you, don't hesitate to click the FAQ flag. Because that's not what the rules say, and because #2 looks a lot less obviously correct when you see how JJ addressed this question (with admirable caution) last night:
James Jacobs wrote:
Sporge wrote:
So I was considering trying a Sorcerer/Oracle Mystic Theurge out... and realized that the combined spells ability is worded in a way that seems to hate a dual spontaneous caster. I was wondering if that ability, since written before there were any spontaneous divine casters (Oracle and Inquisitor), ever got errata or if that combination just does not get to use that ability at all.
As far as I know it's not been given errata, but not every class is designed to be the perfect choice for every combination.
So it's by no means guaranteed that Combined Spells will be expanded to allow the SOMT to use it. So click that FAQ flag to find out!
I'm starting up a home game soon. I've heard (endlessly) on here that the Rogue class is underpowered. I don't like that, so I'm looking for some small ways to boost the class's power without dramatically changing it.
The game is Core Rulebook (CRB) and Advanced Player's Guide (APG) only, and the Base Classes from the APG are disallowed. (Just to keep things simpler. It's my first time GMing and several of my players are new or returning to pen-and-paper RPGs after many years away.)
*****
Here are a couple things I've thought of. I'm not set on any of them, they're just thoughts.
* Allow the skill bonuses from Trapfinding to apply to all Perception and Disable Device checks, not only checks made to find and disable traps
* Fold the Trapspotter Rogue Talent into the Trap Sense class ability, letting the Rogue do its trap-finding thing and freeing up a Talent for something else.
* Maybe boost the Rogue's hit die
*****
So, do I even need to boost the class? Or is the Rogue not as bad as everyone seems to think?
Are the above possibilities good ideas or bad ideas? Do you have any suggestions that I could try instead?
Again, I want to boost the class a little bit without dramatically changing it, so small things like this, close to the class abilities as listed, are about the scope of what I want to try. And I guess I don't mind if I overshoot just a bit and give the Rogue a few too many nice things. If that happens, I'll just up the encounter difficulty or have baddies target the backstabbing one, as needed.
I'd appreciate whatever help you can give me. Thanks!
