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Dragonchess Player wrote:

I believe, as it was raised in the other thread, that the GM is confusing "meaningful" with "difficult."

TBH I think this is reinforced somewhat by how the game is presented. When's the last time an AP had a combat that wasn't just fighting a group of enemies in a box? Tougher is basically the only knob some GMs might realize exists.

For being such a combat focused game it's weird to me how little PF2 considers environmental design or alternative objectives or monster gimmicks when presenting combat design.

Well, my party is currently outdoors in Hurricane's Howl, so technically they are not in a box. However, the map the module provided for the most recent battle was a 175-foot by 120-foot rectangle of grass with two trees, one big rock, and an extinguished campfire. It might as well have been a box. The starlit-span magus Zandre prefers to shoot from hiding, but the only cover he had was the rock. I regretted that I had not provided a map with better terrain.

For example, for the encounter before that, I had uploaded a map of a full 12-tent camp with supplies, campfires, and lookout sites from the Internet. And before that, I uploaded a map of an 80-foot wide river because I had put bandits and their captives on a boat on the Terwa River rather than on foot as the module had. The players got ahead of the bandits via Umbral Journey/Shadow Walk, scryed their approach with Scrying Ripples, and ambushed them from shore.

A meaningful character story in that battle is the tengu bard JInx Fuun, who grew up on an oceangoing ship, flew over to the boat and took control of the rudder. She was a better sailor than the bandits.

An upcoming map called "Crossing the River" put an angry elite behemoth hippopotamus in a 20-foot-wide creek that they called the Terwa River. Yeah, the so-called river was only 5 feet wider than the hippopotamus. I moved that hippopotamus to the boat encounter where it caught up late in the battle. The party calmed it down after it ate a bandit. The champion had been shoving bandits off the boat.

Combat is meaningful when it makes a difference to the story being told. If in hindsight there was no change, no new, then the combat might as well have not existed.

I also believe that combat is for generating story, but sometimes the piece of the story is very small. I am currently running Hurricane's Howl. The module began well with the party traveling to the ruins of Bloodsalt for archaeology. It had two encounters on the road through the jungle to Bloodsalt. The story of the encounter against animals was only, "The jungle is dangerous." The story of the encounter with a small bandit gang is that the bandits were fleeing because a bigger bandit gang, the Knights of Abendego, wanted to absorb them. That was a moment of foreshadowing. My party laughed at them (the double-sized party reduced an intended Severe 8 down to Low 8) and gave them a map to Whitebridge Station where maybe they could find semi-honest work with the Aspis Consortium.

In addition, this journey was also the party's first time camping out at night and setting up watch, so I gave them a night encounter, too. It was only Trivial Threat, but the two PCs on watch had to deal with it alone for a round and protect the champion's mount from being eaten.

Putting meaningfulness aside, I'm more concerned with whether or not the combat is interesting, both as a player and as a gm, regardless of system.

="Deriven Firelion"] Combats are meaningful if they drive the story and/or provide a challenge.

Sometimes a combat is meaningful as a challenge rather than as part of the plot. This still builds story, but the story is about how the PCs handled the challenge. The way a PC fights can reveal their personality. The encounter during night watch had nothing to do with the plot of Hurricane's Howl, but it did relate to the overall Strength of Thousands story of the PCs graduating from students to researchers at the Magaambya Academy and learning practical field work.

And if an encounter would amuse my players, I will try to fit it into the story in some way.

Running an AP is often less enjoyable unless the GM alters combats because having a good variety of challenges that include things your good against and some your not is needed. Every combat being similar, IE only small numbers of +1 or +2 enemies per encounter, fails to give variety that spreads the challenge around. Having secondary or environmental concerns also add healthy complications to encounters.

Getting to know what the characters can do and who your players are to provide entertaining combats is part of a GMs challenge.

I have to routinely alter adventure paths because I run oversized parties of seven PCs. Against multiple enemies, I can simply add more enemies, but a combat against a single boss requires leveling up the boss or adding minions or having merely a Moderate-Threat encounter with the boss. Spoken in the Song Wind had two plot lines with separate final bosses. I swapped the order of the adventure, so they hit the 9th-level boss at 6th level and the 8th-level boss at 7th level. The challenge of the 8th-level rogue boss changed. Instead of stationary combat, he ran and hid in the forest. They had to spread out to find him, leaving them in a tactically more awkward situation where he could gain sneak attacks from hiding.

Putting meaningfulness aside, I'm more concerned with whether or not the combat is interesting, both as a player and as a gm, regardless of system.

I've long since found that, without a lot going against the party, moderates and below are simply unengaging from a combat execution perspective. They can be handled entirely on autopilot without a single daily resource being spent. That isn't to say that they can't be interesting or meaningful on a narrative level, but in that case there's no need to bother with the combat engine either.

My wife says that Moderate-Threat encounters are her opportunity to experiment with new tactics. The Severe-Threat encounters are challenging and require proven good tactics, but she discovers the good tactics for her current character at their current level by experimenting.

Speaking purely as a player, the advice I see some people give about throwing in lows and such to make the players feel good is positively insulting. The ttrpg equivalent of "this meeting could have been an email."

Sometimes, I throw a formerly difficult monster, which had been Level+2 on the first encounter, at the party after they have leveled up so that the monster is Level-1. This is to show them how much they have improved.

The topic of meaningful combat is interesting, but it does not help Seisuke. Therefore, I created a separate thread for that topic: Meaningful Combat.

A recent discussion in the thread Need help with spell casters raised the question of what makes Pathfinder combat meaningful. I feel that that topic deserves its own thread.

Seisuke wrote:

The actual problem might not even be the class balancing, but the encounter design our GM prefers. Our GM does not like meaningless combat. Which means fights need to be dangerous to a certain extend. Also book keeping lots of enemies is not really fun for the GM. It drags the length of combat. So in practice this often means we have 3 to 4 combats per adventuring day. Almost every combat is atleast a severe difficulty encounter with a few enemies of party level or fewer enemies above party level. Enemies of party level -1 we see rarely. Party level -2 enemies I have never seen in any serious encounter.

If GM is repeatedly applying Severe Encounters...

Severe Encounters (GM Core p75) wrote:

Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters have a good chance to defeat. These encounters are appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Use severe encounters carefully—there's a good chance a character could die, and a small chance the whole group could. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open.

...then what you describe is the system working as intended.

Perhaps your best argumentation is asking them: Q) Does avoiding "meaningless combat" mean every fight must be a "final boss"?

Seisuke stated that their GM believes that combat has to be dangerous to be meaningful, so the GM skips Trivial-, Low-, and Moderate-Threat combats.

I myself base the severity of combat on the setting. If the party is entering an enemy castle by climbing a wall and fighting the guards on watch atop the wall, then the guards are probably Low Threat because they were just keeping watch. When the party descends to the courtyard, all the soldiers in the castle have reacted and regrouped. so the party will face a Severe-Threat or Extreme-Threat challenge. I explained my philosophy in Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters, comment #2.

Raiztt raised the question of meaningful combat in that Encounter Balance thread at comment #58:

So, this is a sprawling discussion of math and balance, but I notice that something very important to encounter design is absent:

Is the encounter fun or engaging?

As a DM of almost 20 years, I can say that after you've figured out your math you've still got several important things to consider:

1.) Enemy motivation/goals - Alternate Lose Conditions
2.) Player motivations/goals - Alternate Win Conditions
3.) Unusual or impactful terrain
4.) Interactables
5.) Diverse enemy types/abilities

Without one or more of these elements, no matter how perfectly tuned your encounter is, it will be boring.

Numbers 1 and 2 are especially important. When I'm creating an encounter, I make sure that the encounter matters beyond whether or not the PCs live or die. If you're going to be running a long campaign, you need to have ways for your PCs to 'lose' that does not involve a TPK and the campaign ending.

I piggyback the importance of the combat encounter on the party's mission. I remember a time in the module Forest of Spirits when the party was supposed to go deep underground below the House of Withered Blossoms to investigate a mystery. The house itself was occupied by hostiles, but the party sent their stealthy characters inside and eavesdropped to learn that the hostiles had nothing to do with the mystery. So they skipped the house itself and went directly underground. Combat in the aboveground house would have been a waste of time and resources in my players' opinion.

Another time in Spoken on the Song Wind, second module in Strength of Thousands, they decided to conduct a sting operation to capture some robbers stealing musical instruments from street buskers. They teamed up with some buskers, advertised a performance by the buskers, and blended into the crowd. They jumped the robbers, captured two immediately, and sent their familiars to follow the others to their hideout. The plot as written in the module simply had them Gathering Information to locate the hideout, but my players' idea was more fun. This was an easy combat, because they caught only the two weakest robbers and others would rather escape than fight, but it was very meaningful. Further details are available at Virgil Tibbs, Playtest Runesmith, comment #8.

By Raiztt's five points, the robbers' motive was to grab loot and escape. Some failed at that and some thought they succeeded. The player characters' motives were to identify and capture the robbers, and they were on the path to success. The escapes were only a temporary setback because they had planned for their stealthy familiars to follow. The unusual terrain was a marketplace full of people, so no Fireballs. The robbers interacted with the loot, which was a cheap drum off to the side disguised as an expensive drum via Item Facade. This encounter had some fairly ordinary robbers, but due to the playtest I added a playtest necromancer at the hideout as an ally of the robbers.

On the other hand, the battle at the hideout was a Severe-Threat encounter. The module set it up as three separate encounters: Low Threat against the two missing robbers, Low Threat against the third robber, and Moderate Threat against the fourth robber, but I grouped the last two together and added the necromancer. It came out as only Severe Threat because the party had seven members and the playtest runesmith. I figured the battle would be more meaningful with the robbers fighting side by side.

When is a combat meaningful to your characters?

I also watched some of ThrabenU and Mathfinder's videos on spell casters. But these actually just confirmed my observations. There seem to be a few fall back spells that work at least for a round, change the environment to create some disadvantage for the enemies and some feat combinations to play the system better. But it looks like the class balance is finely tuned to work with a specific encounter design. One where fighting several severe fights one after another against fewer, stronger enemies should not be the norm.

On September 11, 2023, in Michael Sayre on Casters, Balance and Wizards, from Twitter, comment #114 Paizo design manager Michael Sayre explained:

pi4t wrote:

Can I politely suggest putting that information in the revised rulebooks somewhere? It's about half the number of encounters per day recommended in 5e or PF1, and I think groups coming from those systems try to run the number of encounters per day they're used to and end up finding spellcasters aren't able to contribute properly.

That's a broad generalization of the guidelines that are already in the rulebook.

Quote:

Moderate-threat encounters are a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely. Characters usually need to use sound tactics and manage their resources wisely to come out of a moderate-threat encounter ready to continue on and face a harder challenge without resting.

Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters can consistently defeat. These encounters are most appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources due to prior encounters can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open.

Extreme-threat encounters are so dangerous that they are likely to be an even match for the characters, particularly if the characters are low on resources. This makes them too challenging for most uses. An extreme-threat encounter might be appropriate for a fully rested group of characters that can go all-out, for the climactic encounter at the end of an entire campaign, or for a group of veteran players using advanced tactics and teamwork.

Generally that means that your party should be loaded with enough "ammunition" to successfully tackle 3 Moderate encounters. Low and Trivial encounters don't really require any resource expenditure.

There's a lot of possible permutations to the formula and no "one true way" to assemble encounters, which is why we avoid simplifying things to that degree in the rulebook. You can stretch or compress that number based on the type and severity of the encounters that you put in your adventure.

I have seen further explanations that that is why three spell slots per rank is standard for spellcasters. That is enough to cast one top-rank spell per tough encounter, because an adventuring day should have only three tough encounters.

My own players have mastered the art of resource management and can handle ten Moderate-Threat encounters a day. But a Severe-Threat encounter will consume a major part of their daily resources. They could reliably manage only two Severe-Threat encounters per day.

Spellcasters feeling weak or just not fun in these kind of combats, seems to be a mixture of statistical disadvantage and investment of effort. A martial swinging for 3 rounds and hitting nothing is bad luck, but nothing of importance is lost. A caster using his highest spell slots and seeing the enemy save 3 times feels real bad, because now your strongest resources barely did anything and you don’t get them back. The one thing to do in these situations are reliable buffs and heals or spells like Synesthesia or Slow that work at least for a round and be satisfied with that. Or maybe wall off half of the enemies to buy time.

Have you considered a 15-minute workday for your party? This is an old problem in Pathfinder 1st Edition and Dungeons & Dragons in which the party handles just a few encounters at nearly full strength, and then when their resources, especially top-rank spell slots, are depleted, they leave the dungeon and camp in a safe location for the rest of the day. Pathfinder 2nd Edition introduced more renewable resources--Treat Wounds to restore hit points, Refocus to recharge focus spells, and automatically heightening cantrips that never run out--to prevent the 15-minute workday, but it is a solution to the problem of every encounter being Severe. A 15-minute workday means that the spellcasters can cast all their top-rank spells in one or two encounters, retire for the night, and then do that again the next day.

The common Dungeon Master counter-reaction to a 15-minute workday is to attack the campsite. Back in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, parties used to "spike the door." They would go to a dungeon room with only one door and nail the door shut to prevent random encounters from entering the room. In the morning they would pull out the nails and resume exploring the dungeon.

By the way, "A martial swinging for 3 rounds and hitting nothing is bad luck, but nothing of importance is lost," is not just bad luck. It is also bad tactics. Three rounds of attacks with reasonable distribution of dice rolls is enough statistical data to demonstrate that the enemy's AC is too high. And that enemy is probably hitting back with plenty of critical hits. This is a time to run away.

Okay, Seisuke probably meant one of those combats where the unlucky player could not roll above a 10 on a d20 for each first Strike and not above a 15 for each second Strike. That has a chance of (10/20)^3*(15/20)^3 = 0.0527. That will happen one combat out of 20 for a particular martial character. It happens more often for a spellcaster who casts only one spell per round, (10/20)^3 = 0.125, one combat out of 8. But the tactics is that the spellcaster is supposed to need only one top-rank spell per ordinary combat, so why is the spellcaster burning themselves out by casting three top-rank spells in a single combat? At the very least, one of those spells should be the spellcaster's focus spell, which can be Refocused before the next combat. The spellcaster can reasonably say, "Hey, the dice gods are protecting the enemy from my spells, so I am saving my good spells for later and switching to cantrips." Or prepare Force Barrage in the lower-rank spell slots and avoid thosse dice rolls.

OP said he wanted help with spellcasters, but half the people in here tell OP to play something else instead.

This is really bad behavior, the kind of obnoxious stuff you see so much on Reddit. No matter how well-meaning the intentions, please don't do that.

If OP asks about non-caster options, then feel free to recommend your Maguses, suggest your Kineticists, and advertise your Thaumaturges.

Magus is a spellcaster. They are a wave caster, which means they lost their low-level spell slots as they gain new spell slots past 4th rank; therefore, I call them a secondary spellcaster rather than a primary spellcaster. Summoner is also a wave caster.

Kineticist and thaumaturge do not cast spells, but the kineticist's impulses are similar to spells and the thaumaturge has magic effects that care about similar weaknesses that spellcasters care about. They offer similar game experiences as spellcasters and that might be close enough for Seisuke.

But as long as OP asks for things like this – "So I hope maybe the wiser Pathfinders here can point out some practical advice to play spell casters in these kind of adventuring days, that I am missing." – it's best to keep it to such advice on spellcasters.

Seisuke is right about the weaknesses of spellcasters, especially given the GM's playstyle. Thus, I see four paths.

1. Optimize the spellcaster to be so strong that the weakness areas are merely lackluster rather than disappointing. Other people are giving advice about this, so my only reminder is that each class has many different ways to optimize it.

2. Play a secondary caster whose non-spell abilities make up for the spellcasting weaknesses, such as a martial/spellcaster hybrid Magus or a summoner aided by an eidolon. This would teach Seisuke enough about spellcasters to optimize a primary spellcaser later.

3. Create a primary spellcaster who serves other roles besides taking down foes personally, so that weakness in combat does not hurt as much.

4. Change the nature of the encounters either by persuading the GM to branch out or by adopting new combat tactics. For example, in my current campaign, the rogue with both Sorcerer multiclass archetype and Gelid Shard archetype used her roguish skill increases to also become an expert in tripping enemies. She figured on using that at low levels to make opponents off-guard when she had very few spells. But the -2 to AC was so good for the ranged attackers in the party that the rogue kept doing it for them, even at 9th level. Debuffing the enemy makes teammates, including spellcasters, more effective. this could combine with path 3 in that the spellcaster could do the debuffing themself.

I am running a Strength of Thousands campaign in which the PCs started as students at the Magaambya Academy, a school of arcane and primal magic. We have 3 primary spellcasters (2 bards and 1 wizard) in the 7-person party and most of the rest are secondary casters (magus, champion, kineticist, and eldritch-trickster rogue). So I have seen primary spellcasters in action effectively, though as a forever GM I have played only NPC spellcasters.

Primary spellcasters are not main damage dealers. Spells are ranged, so Paizo developers set their damage to match a generic ranged martial character. And they lack perks such as the Hunter's Edge of archer rangers for additional damage. They do have the advantage of spells that deal damage in an area of effect, such as Fireball, so can deal with a mob of minions. Thus, spellcasters can take the ranged attack role in a party. We call these builds "blaster" spellcasters.

Blaster spells that have a save rather than an attack roll almost always use a basic save plan: Critical success means no damage, success means half damage, failure means full damage, and critical failure means double damage. Seisuke described the GM as typically using foes of party level or higher, so this means that most blasters spells would face a successful save for half damage. That is still damage, but the player of the wizard Idris in my game routinely describes Idris as "nibbling away at hit points" rather than dealing serious damage.

This nibbling is handy at 1st level. While the martial characters will often miss against a higher-level opponent, a spellcaster with a save-based damage cantrip, such as Electric Arc, reliably deals half damage over and over again. The damage from cantrips scales upward as the caster levels up, but it does not increase as fast as enemy hit points do, so cantrips become reserved for easy encounters at high levels, saving the serious slotted spells for difficult encounters.

The magus Zandre in our party is a damage-dealer. As a starlit-span magus Zandre delivers her attack-roll Ignition cantrip with arrows, using her martial attack bonus. For playing a spellcaster that deals damage, I recommend playing a magus. She also prepares area-of-effect spells for groups of enemies. Kineticists serve well as blasters, too, but technically they are not spellcasters.

Further action-by-action accounts of my PCs can be found at River Into Darkness Revisited and Virgil Tibbs, Playtest Runesmith.

Summoner is also a possibility for a damage-dealing spellcaster, but they are more complicated to handle. A summoner has an eidolon to deal melee damage while the summoner themself throws spells, too. The two sources of damage in one character add up. Likewise, an Animal-Order druid has an animal companion to deal melee damage. But Pathfinder 2nd Edition does not let animal companions become powerful enough to help in combat past 10th level, so after 10th level the best use of a companion is as a mount.

The divine spell list has some good self-buffing spells, so a cleric or an oracle with battle mystery can self-buff and step up as a useful melee combatant.

Spells lend themselves to other roles, too: buffing, debuffing, battlefield control, healing, and utility. The wizard Idris researched buff spells that last 10 minutes or longer, casts them at beginning of combat, and then uses cantrips for the rest of combat. He also uses divination to spy on enemies for effective ambushes. This is not dramatic, but it is helpful. The bard Stargazer buffs with the Courageous Anthem composition and uses her spells for battlefield control to keep some enemies at a distance while the party takes down the nearby enemies. The bard Jinx buffs with the Triple Time composition cantrip and heals. Since the party intended to arrest their in-town opponents rather than kill them, she cast Stabilize on them.

The best description of battlefield control are the wizard guides by Treantmonk, such as Treantmonk’s Guide to Wizards, Being a god (5th edition). His introduction points out that his party thought his character was weak, despite his actions preventing their previous regular Total Party Kills. All of the non-blaster roles are support in which the martial characters deal the death blows, so the spellcaster does not claim the spotlight. However, by not providing low-level opponents Seisuke's GM is already denying the party the glory of mowing down a horde of minions like a scythe through wheat. The glory against higher-level opponents is the clever teamwork required to take down someone that tough and dangerous. Support is a key part of teamwork glory. This creates the engaging fights that Finoan mentions.

I think proficiency gating for tasks exists primarily for the rogue and investigator to have a unique niche, and I am ok with that. A lot of traps and haunts are designed with the expectation they go off. Finding the hazard is already a kind of win because it means they can be evaded. With potentially 4 PC rolling, a DC 20 is actually not that hard of a DC to reach. Again, PCs picking other exploration activities than search is a meaningful choice on PF2 and a big part of why Trap Finder is such a good feat.

Without proficiency gating, every PC pretty much should always be searching in exploration mode. With proficiency gating, there is a reason why that is not just always the best exploration activity.

I asked my wife about hazards. She said that they gave the rogue something to do. She had played the trap-finder rogue whom was downed by the Hundred Arrows Trap.

Checking the classes, the ones that start trained in Perception are: Alchemist (expert at 9th), Animist (expert at 9th), Champion (expert at 11th), Cleric (expert at 5th), Druid (expert at 11th), Exemplar (expert at 9th, master at 17th), Guardian (expert at 7th), Inventor (expert at 13th), Kineticist (expert at 9th), Magus (expert at 9th), Monk (expert at 5th), Oracle (expert at 11th), Psychic (expert at 11th and the developers called the increase "Extrasensory Perception <grin>), Sorcerer (expert at 11th), Summoner (expert at 3rd), Witch (expert at 11th), and Wizard (expert at 11th). The ones that start expert in Perception are: Barbarian (master at 17th), Bard (master at 11th), Commander (master at 13th), Fighter (master at 7th), Gunslinger (master at 7th, legendary at 19th), Investigator (master at 7th, legendary at 13th), Ranger (master at 7th, legendary at 15th), Rogue (master at 7th, legendary at 13th), Swashbuckler (master at 11th), and Thaumaturge (master at 9th).

I feel hazards aren't really such a big part of the game that every party makes sure they get a legendary Perception class just to pass the detection gates. It doesn't seem to make weaker classes like the Gunslinger or Investigator that much more desirable, nor is it really a major reason why strong classes like the Rogue are strong in my opinion. I don't get the feeling removing that gating would meaningfully affect party choices when determining their compositions most of the time.

The trend that I notice is that classes that recieve a lot of skills also get expert perception. That feels like that if perception were a skill in PF2, then these people would have used their skill increase on it. An exception is Fighter, a class that recieves training in Acrobatics or Athletics and 3+INT skill, but still gains expert perception. Their promotion to master perception is called Battlefield Surveyor, so the fighter's preception is flavored as battlefield awareness. The Commander class, another expert in perception, says, "You use your keen perception, trained across multiple battlefields, to watch for ambushes and plan tactics that are useful for your current environment." But the similar Monk and Magus classes start with only trained perception, until 5th level and 9th level respectively.

Gunslinger is another anomaly. I recall that in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign, the gunslinger Boffin used a character trait (sort of a mini-feat) to gain Disable Device as a class skill and served the rogue lock-picking role in that campaign. Maybe gunslingers are thematically similar to rogues.

As for the hazards' proficiency gates, let me sample the simple hazards in GM Core:
Hidden Pit 0 Stealth DC 18 (no minimum),
Snowfall 0 Stealth DC 16 (trained),
Hampering Web 1 Stealth DC 18 (expert),
Poisoned Lock 1 Stealth DC 17 (trained),
Slamming Door 1 Stealth DC 17 (trained),
Poisonous Mold 2 Stealth DC 21 (trained),
Spear Launcher 2 Stealth DC 20 (trained),
Electric Latch Rune 3 Stealth DC 20 (trained),
Scythe Blades 4 Stealth DC 23 (trained),
Titanic Flytrap 4 Stealth DC 25 (trained),
Fireball Rune 5 Stealth DC 24 (expert),
Spectral Reflection 5 Stealth DC 26 (expert),
Ghostly Choir 6 Stealth DC 20 (expert),
Hallucination Powder Trap 6 Stealth DC 24 (expert),
Pharaoh's Ward 7 Stealth DC 25 (expert),
Bottomless Pit 9 Stealth DC 30 or detect magic (no minimum),
Bloodthirsty Urge 10 Stealth DC 31 (trained),
Hammer of Forbiddance 11 Stealth DC 30 (expert),
Polymorph Trap 12 Stealth DC 34 (trained),
Planar Rift 13 Stealth DC 35 (trained),
Vorpal Executioner 19 Stealth DC 43 (expert),
Armageddon Orb 23 Stealth DC 10 or detect magic (no minimum).

Out of the 22 hazards, only 8 require expert perception, including Vorpal Executioner at 19th level well after everyone is expert. The difference between trained and no minimum is, "If the hazard doesn’t list a minimum proficiency rank, [the GM should] roll a secret Perception check against the hazard’s Stealth DC for each PC. For hazards with a minimum proficiency rank, roll only if someone is actively searching (using the Search activity while exploring or the Seek action in an encounter), and only if they have the listed proficiency rank or higher." Requiring characters to be actively Seeking is a big obstacle for a hazard where no-one expects a hazard.

No proficiency gates required master in the above list. Let me check the complex traps, too.
Summoning Rune 1 Stealth +7 (trained)
Drowning Pit 3 Stealth +10 (trained); DC 22 (expert) to notice the water spouts once the pit opens
Quicksand 3 Stealth +12 (trained),
Spinning Blade Pillar 4 Stealth +11 (trained) or DC 26 (expert) to notice the control panel
Wheel of Misery 6 Stealth +16 (expert) to detect the magical sensor; noticing the wheel has a DC of 0
Eternal Flame 7 Stealth +18 (expert),
Confounding Betrayal 8 Stealth +21 (expert),
Poisoned Dart Gallery 8 Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (master) to notice the control panel
Flensing Blades 12 Stealth +25 (expert),
Dance of Death 16 Stealth +32 (master).

That lists two hazards spotted only by master proficiency, though I am confused how, "Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (master)," is supposed to work. For hazards like Spinning Blade Pillar and Wheel of Misery the hazard is obvious, but the deactivation switch requires Seeking.

#2 is just an issue with all encounters in this system as long as they're not embedded in a time-sensitive context, not just hazards. Problem with APs is, the writer doesn't know whether you're going to have e.g. a water/wood kineticist in the party to keep everyone topped off rapidly, or whether the best you've got is someone making a Trained medicine check per person every hour. Since this introduces an atypically large difficulty gap compared to other aspects of the system (relative class power etc, which is much closer together) they typically don't include fixed time limits, timed events, and such.

I developed a habit that a fight in a dungeon could be heard from adjacent rooms, so the PCs were under time pressure to defeat the enemy in that room before reinforcements from another room arrived. My party can handle back-to-back Moderate-Threat encounters, but two Moderate-Threat encounters at the same time are an Extreme-Threat encounter.

The Centipede Carcasses Trap that Ascalaphus mentioned was in a 15-room dungeon and my 7-member party had only one bard as a healer. Furthermore, because of the party size, I doubled the number of animal-intelligence enemies. This crowded the dungeon so that reinforcements from adjacent rooms were inevitable, unless the party had cleared the adjacent rooms already. To ensure that they had enough healing, I added a healer NPC to the party (Spoilery Details), a phoenix-bloodline sorcerer with rejuventating flames and medical training. Even with the healing NPC, they retreated twice to the first room for extended healing.

They encountered the Centipede Carcasses Trap by going down a third exit from the first room after their second retreat, so they were at full hit points. They sneaked into the room, examined the traps without touching them, and set them off from outside the room with Ray of Frost and Needle Darts. The quick pings of high-velocity shrapnel did not alert the animals in adjacent rooms. The party never rolled initiative for that encounter. So the trap served as flavor rather than risk.

Reading benwilsher18's six points, I realized that I had houseruled most of them away. My hazards still suffer from Point #1: if a hazard is the only threat, then the worst case of taking full damage from the hazard is simply resolved by Treat Wounds afterwards. Because of that, I typically use hazards only for flavor: a treasure vault will have traps and sometimes the outdoors has environmental hazards ("Don't climb the cliff there. You would trigger a rockfall.").

When I converted the Ironfang Invasion adventure path to Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules, I replaced its PF1 hazards with PF2 hazards. Enemy-occupied Fort Nunder had an armory at the end of a heavily trapped twisty corridor, but ordinarily the party would deal with the enemy before trying for the armory. I replaced the CR 6 Lunging Strikes Trap with a Hundred Arrows trap, hazard 6. I cannot find this trap in the Archives of Nethys, so I guess I designed it myself.

HUNDRED ARROWS TRAP hazard 6
MECHANICAL TRAP
Complexity Simple
Stealth DC 25 (trained)
Description A hidden panel (also a pressure plate) pops up in the last one third of area K9 and a hundred arrows shoot the length of the hallway NW from there. Anyone on the hidden panel is safe.
Disable Thievery DC 24 (trained) to disable the trap at the hidden panel or Thievery DC 30 (expert) Find hidden off switch before the pressure plates.
AC 21; Fort +12, Ref +8
Hardness 12, HP 48 (BT 24); Immunities critical hits, object immunities, precision damage
Many Arrows [reaction] (attack); Trigger Pressure is applied to any floor tile in area K9. Effect Arrows +19 Damage 4d8+14 piercing; no multiple attack penalty.
Reset The trap can fire twice without reset. After 2nd firing, the wood golem in area K11 comes out, opens the hidden panel safely, and reloads it in 100 rounds (1 minute 40 seconds) with arrows from its endless quiver. The golem will attack if it finds any intruders unaccompanied by Chernasardo Rangers.

Note that this hazard summons a guardian--the wooden golem further down the corridor around a corner. This would have created time pressure (Point #2) with the party forced into a fight while still injured from the hazard. Except that one of the party members was a Chernasardo Ranger in training and wearing the right uniform.

The trap-finder rogue Sam in the party did spot the pressure plates, but failed the Thievery check to deactivate the pressure plate or find the hidden off switch. So Sam used a pole to trigger the pressure plates from an adjacent square, with others behind him. They learned the hard way that the arrows went down that entire straight section of hallway. The trap rolled a critical hit on Sam, who dropped unconscious. That did give the trap a moment of seriousness.

Further ahead, a side corridor had a key on the wall behind a hidden pit trap. Sam spotted that trap, too. While the party was discussing how to disable the pit trap, the champion Tikti simply climbed along the wall to bypass the trap and fetch the key. She was a monkey goblin with a Climb Speed.

That's my first houserule about traps: if the players invent a plausible alternative method of disabling the trap, then I allow it. The DC might be higher than the default DC, but it will probably play into the PCs' skills better. This fixes Point #3 because of the dynamic discussion to invent a way to disable the trap and Point #5 about having the wrong skills. This method, however, does require experienced GM skills to invent the DC and other conditions on the fly.

One complaint in Point #6 is requiring multiple checks to succeed. No, I always rely on single checks. Pathfinder is built around the difficulty classes being linear, so that a -1 mean 5% worse chance. Requiring two success changes that linearity to quadratic, three success change that to cubic, etc. So a -1 would mean a 10% or 20% worse chance. It creates a threshold in which a +10 could have a high chance of failure and a +12 could have a high chance of success. I simply dislike that math, so I use single checks. If I don't want repeats to make the check easy, then the single check can be conducted only once.

Something I've always wondered is if Leshies are a golarian-only thing. Primal magic is accessible anywhere in the Universe, presumably, so I reckon you could pull the ritual off to create a leshy anywhere with a plant.

My campaigns have developed a private mythos about that. Independent leshies had been rare both on Golarion and off Golarion. They became more common on Golarion recent indirectly due to the Darkness following the Earthfall of the Starstone. The gods invented the new profession of Druid to preserve nature during the Darkness (and also kami over in Tian Xia). The druids often created leshy familiars. Over the millennia, a few nature spirits that had once been leshies for the lifetime of one druid remembered the experience pleasantly, volunteered to become familiars again and again, and eventually developed the ability to become leshies on their own.

The leshy water-and-wood kineticist Monet in my mini-campaign Playtesting in A Fistful of Flowers with 7 Leshies made gardens that would encourage nature spirits to become leshies. They were part of a leshy community in the Verduran Forest that cared for young leshies.

This talk of precision-damage PCs unprepared for precision-immune opponents make me take mental inventory of the PF2 rogues and swashbucklers in my campaigns (no investigators yet).

My PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign had a rogue with sorcerer dedication named Sam and a sniper rogue named Binny. They mostly fought humanoids, but I do remember a fight against a gelatinous cube at 3rd level and against a pair of specters at 7th level. The cube was defeated by the party ranger rupturing it from the inside, so the damage of other people was not significant. At 7th level, Sam attacked with cantrips with sneak attack via Magical Trickster, but without the sneak attack damage, the cantrips still dealt reasonable damage. Binny was weak in the battle against the specters, but that was just one battle.

My mini-campaign that began with A Fistful of Flowers had the pregenerated rogue Reaching Rings and a swashbuckler Blade Slinger. A Fistful of Flowers had a hazard with precision immunity, but the party members with ranged attacks broke it from a distance.

My current Strength of Thousands campaign has the rogue Roshan with both Gelid Shard and elemental Sorcerer archetypes. Roshan does not depend on precision damage. The player realized at the beginning that the spellcasters and the archer in the party would not provide flanking, so she trained Roshan in Athletics to grapple or trip opponents to make them off-guard for sneak attack. However, in the long run, the ranged attackers appreciated having their opponents off-guard, so Roshan became a debuffer via Athletics rather than a main damage-dealer. In the "Oozing into Trouble" mission in Spoken on the Song Wind the party did battle several Ochre Jellies and Verdurous Oozes. The party kept their distance and Roshan attacked with her meager supply of spells. Roshan might be shifting her focus back to precision damage by taking Analyze Weakness feat at 8th level.

I would slip in plans for One Thousand and One Golarion Nights. The frame story of this book is that three newbie Pathfinder players and one wise and experienced player Scheherazade are playing a rather haphazard Pathfinder campaign under the gamemaster Shahryar. The game sessions are one hour every night for almost three years. Shahryar is willing to kill off player characters, but Scheherazade helps the newbies build their characters to survive. They start with simple scenarios but improve to advanced tactics later. Some nights are simply Shahryar sharing interesting Golarion lore with the party for a break from the grind. One Thousand and One Golarion Nights is secretly a primer in Pathfinder builds and tactics.

I wrote my second review, this time for Lost Omens Legends.
This time I noticed a media feature on the review page:

Add media
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Do you have any advice about that? I am way too accustomed to working by words alone.

Mathmuse wrote:

Finoan wrote:

* The primary attack you use should be something that your class is good at. (No, a Bard is a spellcaster, not a melee weapon user).

A bard is trained in martial weapons and light armor, so with DEX +4 and a finesse martial weapon or STR +4, DEX +3, and a martial weapon, the bard could function in melee combat. They lack the fighter's expertise in weapons, the barbarian's Rage, the ranger's Hunter's Edge, and the Swashbuckler's Panache, but they could make up for that by buffing themselves with spells such as Runic Weapon and Courageous Anthem. Their moderate 8+CON hit points can be halfway corrected with the Toughness feat. This is a non-standard design, but it is workable. A melee spellcaster has the advantage that if forced into ranged combat, they don't have to switch to a ranged weapon. Instead, they attack at range with cantrips.

That is advanced tactics for players who are very proficient or even expert in the game mechanics. Not good recommendations for new players.

I recruit a new player or two into my campaigns. In 75% of the cases, my tactical regular players have the new player applying advanced tactics by 3rd level.

Advanced tactics are more fun than clueless tactics, and not just because winning is fun. Instead, the PCs can express their characters via their tactical choices for more roleplaying. The new players want to join in that fun.

Consider Foxfire Inferno's fellow players. Foxfire Inferno will have little success with a, "Here is some advice on the Paizo forum about not losing." But a discussion of what the players want their PCs to be can excite players. Perhaps the elf fighter was modeled after Legolas from Lord of the Rings. Since Legolas was seldom in melee, the player might have no idea how to play the elf in melee, so the player panics. Pointing out that actor Orlando Bloom who played Legolas also played swashbuckling blacksmith Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl would give the player a model for melee combat.

Greek mythology makes centaurs mostly archers. Back in the days before stirrups were invented striking with a heavy blow from horseback could unseat the rider, so horse riders--whom the centaurs were based upon--used bows. Thus, a centaur archer is a classic and could adopt classic Greek tactics. Or Apache Indian tactics, since they also rode without stirrups. The choice of Hunter's Edge could define a style: Precision Edge is about one good shot, Flurry Edge is about shooting often, and Outwit Edge is about knowing the land.

The bard player might be stuck in the 25% who do not master tactics, so the party could just let the player continue with an inept build and design a team tactic, such as bard as bait, that makes the bard serve some practical use. And the player would get to feel important.

This sounds like a problem of players building characters that go against their class's design. That doesn't work in PF2. Class determines how a character fights in combat. Your skill choices and description can be fairly independent of your class and make your character feel a lot different in role-play or skill encounters than a stereotypical caricature of that class. But class determines effective fighting styles. A Ranger focuses on one target until it is dead and then moves on to the next. A Bard is a spellcaster. A Fighter uses their preferred weapons to attack anyone that comes nearby.

Some of my players like experimental designs that go against the standard class design. For example, my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign,had a high-dexterity champion who wore light armor and at higher levels no armor. She had a velociraptor animal companion who attacked for her: the champion played defense and the animal companion played offense. In my current Strength of Thousands campaign the same player plays a rogue with two spellcasting archetypes. Strength of Thousands Player's Guide recommends a free archetype, so she can afford two archetypes. That rogue is built around Athletics, grappling and tripping opponents to enable her teammates to hit them. The Athletics maneuvers were supposed to be a low-level measure until she could function as a spellcaster, but it worked so well in a party of mostly spellcasters that she kept it up, now at 9th level.

But design that goes against the standard has to be carefully optimized to function. Wielding a battle axe with STR +0 is simply a bad choice.

Also, Fighter class is designed for either a Strength build or a Dexterity build. An archer fighter is a standard designs. The running away from melee is the non-standard part.

* The primary attack you use should be something that your class is good at. (No, a Bard is a spellcaster, not a melee weapon user).

A bard is trained in martial weapons and light armor, so with DEX +4 and a finesse martial weapon or STR +4, DEX +3, and a martial weapon, the bard could function in melee combat. They lack the fighter's expertise in weapons, the barbarian's Rage, the ranger's Hunter's Edge, and the Swashbuckler's Panache, but they could make up for that by buffing themselves with spells such as Runic Weapon and Courageous Anthem. Their moderate 8+CON hit points can be halfway corrected with the Toughness feat. This is a non-standard design, but it is workable. A melee spellcaster has the advantage that if forced into ranged combat, they don't have to switch to a ranged weapon. Instead, they attack at range with cantrips.

Mathmuse wrote:

Maya Coleman wrote:

Hey Mathmuse! I'm going to investigate for you how to do markup in these reviews, and thank you for doing them! Thank you also for the feedback of this process!

Thank you.

I have heard back from the team! They let me know that the new store reviews are plain text only!

That means that I don't have to experiment. I was going to try HTML next.

4) The weird solution: keep the characters the same, but change your mindset and behavior.

Let me explain that fourth one. It's more of a "strict in-character" approach. Instead of saying "we the players should build suitable characters", you start by saying "these are the characters playing this adventure; it's tough for them, so what do they do then?"

That is what my players do. They build characters that are fun to roleplay or an interesting experiment, then they design tactics around what those characters like to do, and as they level up, they improve their abilities for their preferences that have proven to work well with the rest of the party. They end up with fantastic tactics that steamroll through some encounters by sheer cleverness. (Nothing steamrolls through all encounters.)

shroudb wrote:

well... to start with, convincing the bard to at least switch to a finesse weapon instead of an axe with +0 Str could help.

But from the get go, with such a composition and such (as you put it) "negative mastery", the best you could do is working with the GM to convince him to target Summons more, and then use more Summons yourself as the sorcerer just to put extra bodies on the battlefield for the enemies to whack. Illusionary creature could work similarily.

but it still needs to gm to have the enemies focus more on siad summons rather than the squishy actual casters that are handling the frontline.

Agreed. That bard is going to get mashed otherwise. If it wasn't for the bard, the rest of the party could do well with kiting and distance tactic.

A distance tactic requires persuading the enemy to not close the distance. Foxfire Inferno's sorcerer learned Entangling Flora for that purpose, and other people recommended summoning creatures, but since the bard wants to engage in the middle of everything, let's take advantage of that. The bard serves as bait.

The bard can make big flashy attacks that attract enemy's attention (in reality, that means the GM has an excuse why the enemy does not chase after the ranged characters who are dealing damage more damage than the bard). Damage won't be the bard's purpose, but persuading the bard's player to try a debuff like Trip would be handy. The bard might prefer the Battle Axe because it is one of the few one-handed weapons that deals 1d8 damage. But the Khopesh and Temple Sword also deal 1d8 in one hand and they have the Trip trait. Or point out that PF2e Remastered no longer requires an empty hand for spellcasting, so the bard could upgrade to a two-handed weapon such as a Guisarme or War Flail. If my guess about damage dice is correct, then the bard's player will object to the lower damage dice of a finesse weapon.

Then the bard has to try to stay alive. A shield cantrip is not as good as an actual shield, but it does not use up a hand. Protection stacks with the shield spell. Defended by spirits, an uncommon spell from Lost Omens Shining Kingdoms would take advantage of the bard being a melee target. The sorcerer is already casting Fear to debuff opponents. Blur, false vitality, and maybe legacy mirror image are available as 2nd-rank spells.

The elf fighter and the centaur ranger can stand at a distance and shoot arrows. A ranger not having to worry about opponents might develop a habit of remember Hunted Aim. If you can persuade them to Hide (might be tough for the large centaur), then they can take advantage of off-guard opponents. On the other hand, if the bard is tripping people, then some opponents will be off-guard regardless.

Alas, with a setup like this, the only blasting the sorcerer will get to do are cantrips and area-of-effect spells. Otherwise, the sorcerer will have to focus on battlefield control to help the bard stay alive and look like the obvious target. Grease next to the bard would both protect the bard and give the bard easy targets, especially with a reach weapon. Runic Weapon on the bard's weapon will make the bard both happy and a target for enemies. Enlarge is even more dramatic.

Hey Mathmuse! I'm going to investigate for you how to do markup in these reviews, and thank you for doing them! Thank you also for the feedback of this process!

Thank you.

I prefer simplicity that avoids an excessive number of die rolls. The character can push off the rock wall with their legs, so they can jump. Or they can pump their legs like on a playground swing for momentum if hanging from a rope. If their destination is only 10 feet away, they can Leap. They will need an Athletics check for Grab an Edge to grab onto their destination rock wall.

On the other hand, they cannot use Long Jump because they cannot Stride 10 feet--unless they have Quick Jump. A quick Long Jump has its own Athletics check for distance.

I returned to this thread when answering Ravingdork's question How do I leave a product review? So long as I am here, I should point out that I have not received any more emails about leaving reviews. Perhaps that is because I did write a review.

logsig wrote:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the product page in the store (past the bit where the social media icons are) there is a section titled "Customer Reviews" and a big button which you can click to add a review.

Where exactly is that "big button"? I don't see it anywhere on any of the product pages. I've checked in a number of different browsers and all I see are the little "Write a review" links for OTHER products at the bottom of the page; and clicking on them doesn't seem to do anything.

Could my ad block be censoring it maybe?

When I go to that Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscription page, I see the same thing as Ravingdork's image, except that above "Your Account" is "Hello! Erin" meaning that I am signed in. I have no ad blocking.

On the other hand, I do not have a Lost Omens subscription and the reviews are supposed to written by people who have purchased the item. Could that be the factor? I went over to the product page for Lost Omens Firebrands, one of the few Lost Omens lore books that I have not purchased. Nope, below the product description is the customer reviews section:
Customer Reviews
picture of stars
We’re looking for stars!
Let us know what you think
Black rectangular button with text, "Be the first to write a review!"

I have clicked that button for Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-03: Godsrain in a Godless Land, and written a review there. That page under Customer Reviews now has a star rating, a chart of star ratings, and a black rectangular button to the right of the chart that says, "Write a Review". I wrote about my review there in Paizo Plus Email Invitations for Reviews. I repeat the warning I gave: the product reviews don't use the BBCode markup language used in the Paizo forums, so my markups just clutter the review.

I have altered my curriculum spells to use Loreguard's idea of not restricting them to curriculum slots but instead enhancing them in curriculum slots. Which means that I had to diminish them so that their original version becomes the enhanced version.

* Very Short Gate now transports only the caster, except in the curriculum slot. Since a wizard going into a room alone would be terribly risky (except at the College of Dimensional Studies), the spell would be mostly used for a Step onto difficult terrain. I renamed it Gated Step.
* Coax Monologue gained the incapacitation trait, except in the curriculum slot. Not only can it substitute for Recall Knowledge, it can deprive strong opponents of an action.
* Liberating Step now no longer triggers against attacks; instead, it triggers against area of effects and grabbing. In the curriculum slot, it will trigger against attacks. I renamed it Emergency Yank.
* Share Skill no longer grants proficiency in the skill required for the skill feat, except in the curriculum slot.
* Spellsurge takes two actions to cast, but still only one action in the curriculum slot.
* Workday now only doubles the duration and can affect only the caster's own spells, except in the curriculum slot. I renamed it Double Duration.

Gated Step [one-action] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Teleportation
Based on PF1 Time Flicker
Tradition arcane
Access Wizard in School of The Boundary only.
You step through the ethereal plane. You Step through an ethereal gate to an adjacent square, bypassing all obstacles, such as walls, except for force effects. Treat the destination square as flat terrain unless the square cannot be safely occupied. This square can also be 5 feet up or down from your current level. If the square cannot be safely occupied, such as filled with solid rock, occupied by another creature, atop a fall, or the square is blocked by a force effect, the spell fails. If you prepared Gated Step in your curriculum slot, you can cast this spell with two actions so that the gate endures for 1 round and you could retreat or others could follow through the gate.
Heightened (3rd) The destination square can be 10 feet away rather than adjacent. Stepping or otherwise moving through the gate still counts as one square of movement.

Coax Monologue [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Incapacitation, Linguistic, Manipulate, Mental, Subtle
Based on Suggestion Player Core pg. 360
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Defense Will; Duration 1 round
Access Wizard in Emerald Boughs branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
A simple query leads a creature to talk more than it intends. The target attempts a Will save against responding. The target will respond in a language you understand, if they can. If you prepared Coax Monloogue in your curriculum slot, the spell loses the incapacitation trait.
Critical Success The target is unaffected.
Success The target spends one action on its next turn on Demoralize.
Failure The target spends one action on its next turn describing information that you would have gained from a successful Recall Knowledge check to identify it.
Critical Failure As failure, but the target provides critically important additional information.

Double Duration [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Manipulate
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets One arcane spell you cast with duration of at least 1 minute and at most 1 hour.
Access Wizard in Rain-Scribes branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You reinforce a spell to last twice as long. The duration of target spell doubles. If you prepared Double Duration in a curriculum slot, you can target spells cast by anyone and the duration lengthens to the next common duration longer than or equal to double duration: 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours.

Emergency Yank [reaction] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Liberating Step Player Core 2 pg. 92
Tradition arcane
Access Wizard in Tempest-Sun Mage branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Range 30 feet; Targets one target creature
Trigger Your ally is in an area of effect or has been grabbed or restrained by an enemy
You nudge an ally out of danger. The ally can attempt to break free of effects grabbing, restraining, immobilizing, or paralyzing them with a +1 status bonus. They either attempt a new save against one such effect that allows a save, or attempt to Escape from one effect as a free action. Whether or not they needed to escape, the ally can then either Step as a free action if they are able to move or else gain resistance 3 to the damage of the triggering effect. If you prepared Emergency Yank in a curriculum slot, an enemy damaging an ally with an attack can also trigger this spell, and the ally can both Step and gain the damage resistance.
Heighten (+1) The status bonus to break free increases by 1 and the damage resistance increases by 3.

Share Skill Spell 1
Uncommon, Linguistic, Manipulate
Based on Share Lore Divine Mysteries pg. 259
Tradition arcane
Cast 1 minute
Range 30 feet; Targets up to 3 creatures
Duration 10 minutes
Access Wizard in Uzunjati branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You tell a story that provides temporary enlightenment about a skill. Select a skill feat you know that requires a skill proficiency in its prerequisites. The target creatures who satisfy the prerequisites of that feat gain that feat for the duration of the spell. If you prepared Share Skill in your curriculum slot, the spell also grants them your proficiency rank in a skill required for the skill feat.

Spellsurge [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Haste Player Core pg. 335
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Duration until the end of your next turn
Access Wizard in Cascade Bearers branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Your research enables more flexibility in spellcasting. The target creature gains the quickened condition on their next turn and can use the extra action for only a Sustain action or in a Cast a Spell activity. If you prepared Spellsurge in a curriculum slot, it takes only one action to cast.

If curriculum spells become more desired, then wizards might want access to curriculum spells from other schools. I myself attended three different universities in earning my Ph.D., so if those were wizard schools, shouldn't I have the curriculum from each of them? Thus, we need feats to gain a second school. Golarion lore has some people, such as Kassi Aziril from Lost Omens Legends and Izem Mezitani from Secrets of the Temple-City, who attended more than one university. I am surprised that the Remastered wizard feats did not already include any feats about attending multiple schools. In the pre-Remastered schools of abjuration, conjuration, divination, etc. I can understand schools being exclusive, but the Remastered schools are institutions that take in students.

Additional Curriculum Feat 4
Wizard
You study the curriculum at another school of wizardry. Select an arcane school other than your own. You gain access to all spells from that school's curriculum, and you learn one spell of each rank that you can cast from that school's curriculum. As soon as you gain a new rank of spells, you learn one additional spell of that rank from that curriculum. You can prepare curriculum spells from that school in your curriculum spell slots. This does not increase your number of curriculum spell slots.
Special You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, you must choose a different arcane school.

Additional Schooling Feat 4
Wizard
You study the unique magic of another school of wizardry. Select an arcane school other than your own. You learn the initial school spell of that school. You can take Advanced School Spell feat more than once. Each time you gain the advanced school spell of one arcane school for which you know the initial school spell.
Special You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you do, you must choose a different arcane school.

Breadth of Schooling Feat 8
Wizard
Based on Bloodline Breadth Player Core 2 pg. 181
Prerequisite You have Additional Curriculum and Additional Schooling for the same arcane school
Your continued studies have expanded your magical capacity. Increase the number of your curriculum spell slots by 1 for each spell rank other than your two highest wizard spell ranks.

Ok, by saying it can only be prepared in a curriculum slot you are sort of creating something akin to a daily use focus spell tied to particular spell schools.

My intention was spells that act like an old-fashioned once-per-day ability, nothing related to focus points. This is a first draft of the notion, so I expect to have to alter it in more drafts until the flavor feels properly wizardly.

I love the idea of more spells, but more spells with them only being usable by a small subset seems like something people may feel isn't good use of Paizo's time.

It is an interesting potential however if you had the spell be uncommon tied to the school, and had a 'heighten: Curriculum spell slot" entry that gave the spell a boost if cast from a curriculum spell slot? Alternately I'd considered having it have a trait that if present needed to be cast in a curriculum slot for full effect, and if cast in a different slot, gave a result as if a spell a rank lower, making the spell still usable by others, but less efficient/desirable.

What if you added a Curriculum heighten to some of the summon spells which allowed a Summoner school to change the spell's duration 1 hour sustained. This could allow them to pre-summon a creature in a tight exploration environment which they expect to encounter combat situations. And giving them something akin to a shields up exploration activity that is named something like Direct Summon.

Spells that are stronger if cast from a curriculum slot is more elegant than spells that can be prepared only in a curriculum slot. However, an improvement of heigthening beyond their actual level would be confusing and might be lackluster if heightening does not seriously improve the spells, such as with Spellsurge. I should instead write a sentence about an additional benefit.

I need to alter these spells to no longer be troublesome, since any wizard whose GM lets them fudge access (I myself have done that repeatedly in Strength of Thousands) will be able to cast them. Then I have to add an additional benefit if cast from a curriculum slot. The redesign will take at least a day. Well, Spellsurge is easy to modify. Since it is about action advantage, making it require two actions to cast makes it less troublesome.

Spellsurge [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Haste Player Core pg. 335
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Duration until the end of your next turn
Access Wizard in Cascade Bearers branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Your research enables more flexibility in spellcasting. The target creature gains the quickened condition on their next turn and can use the extra action for only a Sustain action or in a Cast a Spell activity. If you prepared Spellsurge in a curriculum slot, it takes only one action to cast.

Giving uncommon (because exotic, not because troublemaker) spells to schools is an easy way of making the school offering a bit more special. Jealousy between wizard academies for each others' special techniques is a strong trope.

I have some recent thoughts about these uncommon spells, inspired by Loreguard's comment. But I am going for troublemaker spells, bwahaha.

I'm one who thinks the idea of having new additional Arcane (non-focus) spells that are uncommon and unlocked by specific schools.

I think in the past I actually suggested that one thing that could get tied into school spells would be having certain schools have 'variant' versions of a spell in their domain. Wizards of the school can prepare the spell and can cast it as normal, or cast the variant as a choice at casting time.

These variants would otherwise be uncommon spells. And guess what, these uncommon spells, as they are created, also provide additional content that Spell Tricksters can choose to pick up. ...

I mixed Loreguard's ideas with a little implausible detail about the College of Dimensional Studies and a realization that I could make an arcane school spell especially powerful if I added the restriction, "This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot." Except that I am not going for raw power; instead, wizards as masters of reshaping reality need game-breaking options but not too many of them.

Pathfinderwiki's entry on the College of Dimensional Studies says that Dark Markets, A Guide to Katapesh, said,

One of the most unique features of the college is its lack of doors. All students are expected to possess an array of travel magic and are expected to be able to teleport between rooms. Students of the college are also expected to create scrolls of transport magic as part of their payment for the college's unique education.

When I read that, I thought that that must be awfully tough on the 1st-level students, who have no teleporation spells. They would have had to take their lessons in an outbuilding with doors. But what if the wizard School of the Boundary provided a 1st-level teleportation spell?

Very Short Gate [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Teleportation
Based on Magic Passage Player Core pg. 342
Tradition arcane
Range touch; Area 5-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall, 5-foot-deep ethereal passage
Duration 1 round
Access Wizard in School of The Boundary only.
You can step through the ethereal plane to bypass obstacles. You create a gate through the ethereal plane to an adjacent square. You can see through the gate to that adjacent square and then you may Step through the gate. The gate is flat terrain for Stepping regardless of the terrain on the adjacent square. If the square cannot be occupied, then you remain in the gate and are returned to your original square when the gate expires. The gate remains open until after one more person, including you making a return Step, passes through it.
Heighten (+1) One additional person can pass through the gate before it collapses.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

"Prepared only in a curriculum slot" is a tough restriction. 1st-level students at the College of Dimensional Studies would use a buddy system: one student wizard would open a very short gate for both to enter a doorless classroom and the other student wizard would open another very short gate to exit the classroom. A 1st-level adventuring wizard and his barbarian teammate could gate through a barred door and unbar it to let the rest of the party in, messing up a simple obstacle in a 1st-level dungeon. So the spell is troublesome but it would be troublesome only once per day until the wizard gains a 2nd-level curriculum slot.

Nonetheless, a wizard of the School of The Boundary being able to pass through the ethereal plane at 1st level is very flavorful.

I am very familiar with the Magaambya due to my Strength of Thousands campaign, so let me try creating a special spell for each Magaambya branch.

Coax Monologue [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Linguistic, Manipulate, Mental, Subtle
Based on Suggestion Player Core pg. 360
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Defense Will; Duration 1 round
Access Wizard in Emerald Boughs branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
A simple query leads a creature to talk more than it intends. The target attempts a Will save against responding. The target will respond in a language you understand, if they can.
Critical Success The target is unaffected.
Success The target spends one action on its next turn on Demoralize.
Failure The target spends one action on its next turn describing information that you would have gained from a successful Recall Knowledge check to identify it.
Critical Failure As failure, but the target provides critically important additional information.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Liberating Word [reaction] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Liberating Step Player Core 2 pg. 92
[b]Tradition arcane
Access Wizard in Tempest-Sun Mage branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Range 30 feet; Targets one target creature
Trigger An enemy damages, grabs, or restrains your ally.
You free an ally from restraint. If the trigger was an ally taking damage, the ally gains resistance 3 to the triggering damage. The ally can attempt to break free of effects grabbing, restraining, immobilizing, or paralyzing them with a +1 status bonus. They either attempt a new save against one such effect that allows a save, or attempt to Escape from one effect as a free action. Whether or not it needed to escape, the ally can then Step as a free action if it's able to move.
Heighten (+1) The damage resistance increases by 3 and the status bonus to break free increases by 1.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Share Skill Spell 1
Uncommon, Linguistic, Manipulate
Based on Share Lore Divine Mysteries pg. 259
Tradition arcane
Cast 1 minute
Range 30 feet; Targets up to 3 creatures
Duration 10 minutes
Access Wizard in Uzunjati branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You tell a story that provides temporary enlightenment about a skill. Select a skill feat you know that requires a skill proficiency in its prerequisites. The target creatures who satisfy the prerequisites of that feat gain that feat for the duration of the spell.
Heightened (2nd) The spell grants them temporary trained proficiency in a skill prerequisite to the feat to help satisfy the prerequisites.
Heightened (3rd) The temporary proficiency is expert.
Heightened (4th) The temporary proficiency is master.
Heightened (6th) The duration increases to 1 hour. The temporary proficiency is master.
Heightened (8th) The duration increases to 1 hour. The temporary proficiency is legendary.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Spellsurge [one-action] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate
Based on Haste Player Core pg. 335
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets 1 creature
Duration until the end of your next turn
Access Wizard in Cascade Bearers branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
Your research enables more flexibility in spellcasting. The target creature gains the quickened condition on their next turn and can use the extra action for only a Sustain action or in a Cast a Spell activity.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

Workday [two-actions] Spell 1
Uncommon, Concentrate, Manipulate
Tradition arcane
Range 30 feet; Targets One 1st-rank arcane spell with duration 1 hour.
Access Wizard in Rain-Scribes branch of School of Rooted Wisdom only.
You reinforce a spell to last through the entire workday. The duration of target spell increases to 8 hours.
Heightened (any) Workday can be cast on a 1-hour arcane spell of Workday's rank or lower.
Special This spell can be prepared only in a curriculum slot.

The 1-hour 1st-rank arcane spells are breadcrumbs, charm, fashionista, glowing trail, illusory disguise, instant pottery, invisible item, item facade, negate aroma, nudge the odds, reed whistle, tailwind, and unbroken panoply.

Thanks for the summary of schools, Mathmuse. Did “Rival Academies” list all the current schools at the time of its printing? If not, that is long overdue, especially if any future Paizo publications have a significant amount of spells or added schools.

No, Rival Academies did not list all the schools.

After the first chapter "Welcome to the Convocation," the lore book had one chapter each devoted to the main sponsors: Academy of the Reclamation, Cobyslarni, Kitharodian Academy, the Magaambya, Monasatery of the Unbreaking Waves, and University of Lepidstadt. The next chapter "Invitees" listed individuals attending from other academies: Acadamae, Academy of the Sublime, Arcanamirium, Bloodstone Conservatory, Dacilane Academy, Divine Conservatory of Magic, Hall of Lambent Oaths, Halls of Revelation, Indraracha Institute, Kimanéz University, Proving Grounds, and Synostosis Academy. The Sidhedron Spires had their own chapter next to highlight the Runelord archetype and the wizard school of Thassilonian Rune Magic. The last chapter provided guidelines for running an adventure at the convocation.

Put Player Core had mentioned other academies as inspiration for the wizard schools. The School of Ars Grammatica is taught at Pathfinder Society's School of Spells. The School of Battle Magic mentions no individual academies. The School of the Boundary is taught at the College of Dimensional Studies in Katapesh. The School of Civic Wizardry is taught at Manaket’s Occularium or the Academy of Applied Magic. The School of Mentalism is taught at Farseer Tower and the Stone of the Seers. The School of Protean Form is taught at Kintargo’s Alabaster Academy and the Fleshforges of Nex. And the School of Unified Magical Theory mentions self-study. Comparing the lists, none of them are invited to the Convocation of Rival Academies. Nor are the Player Core wizard schools mentioned.

The backstory of the rogue PC Roshan in my Strength of Thousands campaign is that her mother works at College of Dimensional Studies in Katapesh. Roshan was borh a kitsune and became a fleshwarp with ifrit versatile heritage and an embedded Gelid Shard due to a lab accident involving the Elemental Plane of Fire. I had the mother, Setareh, visit the Magaambya campus once. She simply teleported over. Another semester, infamous medical researcher Kassi Aziril from the Occularium in Manaket, Rahadoum, served as a visiting professor at the Magaambya. So the College of Dimensional Studies and the Occularium are significant in my campaign but snubbed in Lost Omens Rival Academies.

I am returning to the original topic to respond to a good comment by Ascalaphus. I replaced their bullet marks with numbers for easier reference.

All that to say, curriculums really need to be published with a good starting set of spells in order to get off the ground, because they probably don't get a lot of extras later on.

I think the curriculum class feature had a lot of potential. You could write a bunch of generic, fairly setting-independent curriculums and then also make some really specific ones for specific guilds in your setting. All you had to do was make sure you put a good selection of spells in it...

What makes for a good selection of spells?

(1) They need to be broadly useful during an adventuring day. If you aren't regularly using your curriculum bonus slots because all the spells are terribly niche, then they're dud bonus slots.

(2) You need spells that age well in low-rank slots. A damaging spell doesn't age well in a low-rank slot because they need to be heightened to do enough damage to justify the action economy. Nor does a counteract spell from a low-rank slot. So you need some of those spells that stay relevant, like Sure Strike or Laughing Fit.

(3) You need the curriculum to be special. Other wizards from different schools, and even other spellcasters, should be curious about the secrets of your school. So "uncommon because it's exotic" spells (not "uncommon because it pulls the rug out from under your plot", please). Or maybe spells that aren't normally on the arcane list. I mean, sorcerers get out-of-tradition blood magic, clerics get odd spells from their deity, oracles have a way to dip into other lists, and so forth. It's an easy way to make the other wizards envious of your school's curriculum.

I feel like this has largely not happened. Some vaguely thematic spells got shoved into a curriculum with little attention paid to usefulness or excitement value.

The D&D/PF1 wizard schools of adjuration, conjuration, divination, etc. were designed to offer specializations to wizards. I remember the gnome illusionist in AD&D, a wizard that specialized in illusions. A wizard would have a specialty school and lacked two forbidden schools. Their justification is that different schools of magic required learning different magic. But as D&D advanced into new editions and into Pathfinder, the exclusivity of the schools faded, and the specialty school just became a line of bonus spells. Fortunately, since the bonus spells covered one seventh of all arcane spells, it was easy to satisfy Ascalaphus's first two points. The third point about curriculum feeling special was mostly satisfied by that curriculum being a fundamental division of arcane magic.

In contrast, the curriculums in the Remastered Player Core wizard schools felt generic to me. They failed the third point.

I presume that that was a deliberate design choice to allow the Player Core wizard to fit into many different campaigns, but the result lost a lot of flavor about attending the school itself. Furthermore, the spells chosen for many schools often often had only a loose connection to the school's theme, diluting the impact. This might be because of the limited number of spells in Player Core alone, but the designers could have made more effort to include the arcane spells that are best for each school.

School of Ars Grammatica had verbal spells, either speaking such as command or writing such as runic weapon. This theme was not a playstyle based around effects, but more an academic style about a minor feature of the spells.
School of Battle Magic is about spells for war. This is a coherent theme that any damage spell will fit into. Good for a blaster wizard.
School of the Boundary had spells built on teleportation and extraplanar travel. This was a coherent playstyle, but the 4th-level translocate is the first spell that is solidly in that theme. The lower rank spells feel like filler.
School of Civic Wizardry has a construction and demolition theme. But most of the curriculum spells did not fit the theme, so the list has lots of filler. What do 2nd-rank revealing light and water walk have to do with construction?
School of Mentalism focuses on mental spells. This theme is coherent, but bards and other occult casters feel better at it.
School of Protean Form has a transformation theme. This is a coherent theme with some good representative spells, such as pest form and enlarge. But the self-only transformations lead the wizard, with only 6+CON hit points, to risk themselves in melee. The 10 temporary hit point of 5th-level elemental form don't last long against 9th-level damage.
School of Unified Magical Theory gains a 1st-level feat and extra uses of Drain Bonded Item instead of a curriculum. This is a nod to the previous universalist wizard, but its theme is a lack of a specific flavorful theme.

My Strength of Thousands campaign began in March 2024, so those were the Remastered options available for playing a student wizard at the Magaambya Academy. Instead, the player of wizard Idris chose a pre-Remaster divination wizard. Idris has used his free archetype for two Magaambya-centric archetypes: Magaambyan Attendent and Halycon Speaker. Idris has been roleplayed as a dedicated student who spent most of his time in the library learning new spells. His spellcasting favorites have been divination, hour-long buffs, and illusion spells for his theater classes. Idris also learned a lot of self-protection magic because he had fewer hit points than the bard/druid's animal companion. None of the Player Core schools fit Idris.

The first new school was Red Mantis Magic School from standalone adventure Prey for Death August 2024. I don't own that book, so all I know about it is its Archives of Nethys entry: "While any thug can commit a murder, proper assassination requires finesse and guile. Deep within the Crimson Citadel, the Red Mantis assassins have developed a specific selection of spells they teach to all magically capable members. These spells complement the assassins’ clandestine and deadly methods." The spells in its curriculum fit that assassin theme.

Paizo released Lost Omens Rival Academies in March 2025. This lorebook tells of a convocation of six magic schools at Nerosyan, Mendev: The Academy of the Reclamation from Sarkoris Scar, Cobyslarni from the First World, Kitharodian Academy from Taldor, the Magaambya from the Mwangi Expanse, the Monastery of Unbreaking Waves from Jalmeray, and the the University of Lepidstadt from Ustalav. Some less prominent school participated, too, such as the Bloodstone Conservatory from Irrisen, the Academy of the Sublime from the plane Axis, and the Sidhedron Spires from New Thassilon.

The book is very flavorful about the many academies, but it provided only three new wizard schools.

The School of Rooted Wisdom for the Magaambya is split into five branches. I am very familiar with those branches from my Strength of Thousands campaign. The Cascade Bearers focus on arcane research, and their wizard school forces on telekinesis. That is a mismatch, but the telekinetic theme is coherent. The Emerald Boughs focus in studying culture and society, and that includes serving as spies. Their wizard school goes for the spy theme with illusion and scrying magic. Rain-Scribes are the experts in exploration and logistics. Their wizard school focuses on staying equipped and comfortable on the road. The Tempest-Sun Mages are the defenders of the Magaambya and their wizard school offers combat spells. The Uzunjati are the storytellers and historians. Their school has two new buff spells designed specifically for them: Kgalaserke's Axes and Ibex's Harvest. The rest of the Uzunjati curriculum spells are mostly telepathy.

These five curriculums have coherent themes, despite two mismatches with the branch themes.

The Academy of the Reclamation offers the wizard School of the Reclamation. "Your study of magic in the service of rediscovering lost knowledge for the Sarkoris Reclamation has taught you that much that was once lost can still be found,..." declares a theme of archaeology in hostile territory. And its curriculum gains the four new spells mental map, overwhelming memory, bridge of vines, and restore ground. They and the other spells fit the theme.

The School of Thassilonian Rune Magic is associated with the minor academy Sidhedron Spires, but Thassilonian sin magic is well established in Golarion lore and I am unsurprised that Paizo developers granted it a school. Like the School of Rooted Wisdom, the School of Thassilonian Rune Magic is divided into branches. These branches conver the seven cardinal sins. The common curriculum offers some scrying and combat spells. Envy offers debuff spells, including the new thief of fortune. Gluttony offers ghoulish spells on a devouring theme, including the new devouring void. Greed is less focussed in its theme, offering illusions of treasure, ways to carry real treasure, and the new spell chrysopoetic curse, which hinders weapons and armor by tempoarily transmuting them to gold. Lust's curriculum is loaded with charm and suggestion spells. including the new spell love's sacrifice. Pride's curriculum is loaded with illusion spells. Sloth's curriculum offers sleep-themed debuff spells, such as the new indolent haze, and spells that summon creature for work and comfy shelters for rest. Wrath's curriculum offers damage spells.

The Archives of Nethys currently lacks the branch details of the School of Rooted Wisdom and School of Thassilonian Rune Magic.

Imagine Idris built with School of Rooted Wisdom. Idris joined the Rain-Scribes branch in my campaign. The player explained to me that this was to represent Idris being a small-town anadi who was more comfortable in the countryside than in the city. Idris is largely a Boy Scout with the motto, "Always be prepared," so Rain-Scribes fits.

Common Magaambya Curriculum
cantrips: detect magic; 1st: alarm; 2nd: dispel magic; 3rd: safe passage; 4th: mountain resilience; 5th: control water; 6th: truesight; 7th: energy aegis; 8th: quandary
Rain-Scribes Additional Curriculum
cantrips: light; 1st: mending, summon animal; 2nd: shape wood; 3rd: cozy cabin; 4th: liminal doorway, unfettered movement; 5th: magic passage, summon dragon; 6th: chain lightning; 7th: planar palace; 8th: earthquake; 9th: metamorphosis
School Spells
initial: halcyon mists; advanced: call the ten

Detect magic and light are commonly-used cantrips, though light assumes the character lacks darkvision. At 1st level, alarm represents camping out--odd that it comes from the Magaambya curriculum rather than the Rain-Scribes curriculum. Mending is useful for repairing non-magical gear in the field, but fails Ascalaphus's point #2 because it ages out since higher-level gear is magical. Summon animal does not fit the Rain-Scribes theme of exploration, because explorers discover native animals. A Rain-Scribe could use a good pack horse, but not one that lasts for only one minute. 2nd-level shape wood could make a ladder or a shelter, but the shelter usage will be superseded by the 3rd-level cozy cabin, which in turn will be superseded by the 7th-level planar palace.

Ascalaphus's point #2 is hammered home by the Rain-Scribes curriculum. We have a nice chain of getting better spells for shelter on the road, but what would the Rain-Scribe wizard do with the lower-level slots afterwards?

Practicality is best measured in actual gameplay. Currently in my campaign the 9th-level party is chasing 8th-level bandits. The exploration and logistics of Rain-Scribes should be good for such a quest. In a homebrew scene, the party used a bard's Umbral Journey to get ahead of bandits in a stolen boat and ambushed them on the river. Idris provided divination on their location and buffed the party as the boat arrived at their location. Only two 5th-level curriculum spells, control water and summon dragon, would have helped. Maybe an alarm spell planted upstream would have warned of the boat's approach, but the chance of false alarm would be high. For the other group of bandits on foot, Idris could summon a tracking animal such as a bloodhound to follow their trail. mountain resilience does fit Idris's self-protection needs. Utility is there, but less than I hoped.

June 2025 saw the release of two more sources of wizard schools.

School of Gates from Lost Omens lorebook Shining Kingdoms is inspired by the elf gates of Kyonin, but it is basically a teleportation school like the School of the Boundary. It was newer spells, some new ones along side it in Shining Kingdoms. One of those new spells, 2nd-level warping pull is what I would expect from a solid teleporation curriculum.
School of Kalistrade also from Shining Kingdoms is about putting on a good show as a wealthy mage. The spells are good choices for the theme, but I suspect that few player characters will find that theme to be practical.
School of Magical Technologies from To Blot Out the Sun in the Shades of Blood adventure path I know only from its Archives of Nethys entry. The curriculum spells on the theme of magical technology are merely conjuration of objects, but they are reasonably useful spells. They also include mending, which would be useful at high levels if the wizard used non-magical technology.

The more recent schools are closer to satisfying Ascalaphus's three points, but they do not meet the mark.

I wrote up my experience in playing the Pathfinder 1st Edition Beginner Box with some 10-year-old children at Beginner Box in Sunday School. The Beginner Box has changed for 2nd Edition, but perhaps you can gain some insights from my report.

Trip.H wrote:

The issue is unavoidable at times; adventures will take you into regions where these trees exist, as in Strength of Thousands.

Our GM read the info on the screaming jungle, then a few seconds later, the recognition dinged for us to check the price.

I just read that part. Unless I missed it Duskwood is not mentioned at all.

In my childhood I played in a forest in Michigan, and I know that trees are hard to identify. I can distinguish between a maple and an oak, but most fruit trees I would fail to identify unless the fruit is hanging on them. Fortunately, a Strength of Thousands party is likely to have a druid who can identify trees. The party will be 14th level when they enter the Screaming Jungle, so a druid is likely to have Nature +25 (14 level + 6 master rank + 5 wisdom). I would view a duskwood tree as an 8th-level identification challenge, with +5 adjustment for rarity, so DC 29 to identify. No problem.

Secrets of the Temple-City says, "The trip through the Screaming Jungle takes several weeks on foot, and even with their adventuring prowess, the heroes are still bound to encounter a few notable dangers along the way." Several weeks means lots of opportunity to encounter a rare duskwood tree, even if the party is not searching.

The module does not mention duskwood nor darkwood (I word-searched the PDF). It does mention Kilia Mwibo trees, so those odds of encountering strange trees works against the party, too. Lost Omens The Mwangi Expanse also does not mention duskwood (or darkwood). In contrast, Lost Omens Shining Kingdoms mentions Darkmoon Vale as a source of duskwood five separate times (no mention of duskwood in the Verduran Forest). The Pathfinderwiki page on Duskwood credits Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, published August 2008, as the source for duskwood trees in the Screaming Jungle. That was back in the days when Paizo adventures set in the Mwangi Expanse treated the expanse as unexplored territory to be exploited for its natural resources and ancient ruins, based on 19th-century European tales of Africa. Nevertheless, a precious material mentioned in the GM Core should have a source on every continent, so I favor finding duskwood in the Screaming Jungle.

I asked my wife, who plays in my Strength of Thousands campaign, what her character would do if the party found a duskwood tree, whose branches could be sold for 500 gp. She said she would mark its location and report it to the Magaambya for future research. My Strength of Thousands campaign has a weird attitude toward loot and wealth. I have all their gear, except for a few personally-owned items, on loan to them from the Magaambya Academy for their mission. They will be fully equipped with 14th-level gear for the trip through the Screaming Jungle without having to spend a copper piece of their own. They will be carrying a 14th-level item costing 4,200 gp and some 12th- and 13th-level items costing 1,600 gp and 3,000 gp, so a duskwood branch worth 100 gp (I will correct the price) will look minor to them.

Upon further thought, the Magaambya has had sent researchers into the Screaming Jungle for millennia. They probably harvested seeds and have their own secret duskwood grove somewhere near Nantambu. Xhokan in the supply center will ask the party in advance to collect seeds and cuttings if they find a duskwood tree in the Screaming Jungle to compare the Magaambya's domestic variety to the wild variety.

shroudb wrote:

... The way I would "handle" PCs trying to harvesting it for profit would be fairly simple: Earn Income, of a sufficient high level Task, with maybe a big circumstance bonus on the roll due to the availability of the rare material to begin with, and then the result would be simultaneously how much "usable" wood is both harvested and you found a buyer for.

also do note that the "branch" is not a small twig, given that a 1 bulk object (which is alredy processed) is only 350gp, it's safe to assume that the "branch" refers to one of the main branches of a tree at least.

If I came across a whole g++$#*n dusk wood tree and cut off some seven foot long hunk of branch, I would just quit if you told me I somehow only harvested 28gp worth of duskwood. If you’re going to b@*&~*@% that hard don’t have the f@!!ing tree in the first place. Don’t jangle it in front of me like shiny car keys and joink it away with some b+$!+@!$ subsystem roll that doesn’t model the in world situation in the slightest.

I had to improvise mechanics for harvesting raw materials in my campaigns. One factor that shroudb overlooked is that the Earn Income downtime activity is for a downtime job that typically spans weeks. Imagine someone with a job as a duskwood lumberjack. Duskwood trees are rare. Their locales are guarded: the Verduran Forest is tended by druids who make treaties with lumbering companies, Darkmoon Vale is inhabited by kobolds, dire wolves, and werecreatures, and the Screaming Jungle is a deadly jungle flanked by natives who dislike outsiders. Thus, seeking duskwood as a job would involve a great deal of time negotiating with the natives and then searching for a duskwood tree. Finding the tree is a jackpot, a payoff for weeks of work, say 5 weeks. Thus, 34 days of no harvest followed by one day of 35-fold harvest. An 8th-level master of Nature would earn 3 gp per day, so multiply that by 35 to get around 105 gp, about one branch of duskwood (the druids wouldn't let the lumberjack cut down the entire rare tree).

But if an 8th-level adventuring party ran into a duskwood tree as part of their adventure, such as the tree serving as a landmark on a treasure map they had obtained at great risk, then they get the 105 gp each (420 gp total) in a single day without spending the 34 days prospecting the forest.

The math breaks down in that a tree can have its location recorded and a lumberjack can be sent out once per year to cut off a branch. With 52 trees known, the lumberjack could harvest one branch every week (mostly travel time). That comes to 105/7 = 15 gp per day, which is 13th-level income on the Income Earned table. This does not happen with precious metals mined out of the ground, since ore does not grow back. I won't worry about the re-harvesting flaw in my math, because adventurers have to finish their quest and won't return. And the rules are for adventurers rather than for lumber companies.

Yesterday, I wrote:

A duskwood branch can be used to make a duskwood shield, an 8th-level item, so the branch is an 8th-level item, too, costing 500 gp.

Today, I realized that Paizo's math is wrong. 500 gp is the price of an 8th-level permanent item. The duskwood branch is a consumable item, since it is consumed in making a shield, armor, weapon, or other object. (It can also count as a trade good, which affects resale price.) Consumables are cheaper by level. An 8th-level consumable item costs only 100 gp.

So part of the shocking price of a duskwood branch is an error.

Ironically, this error does not affect crafting with duskwood. Duskwood is not measured by bulk for crafting. Instead, the duskwood items measures duskwood by price, such as "The initial raw materials must include duskwood worth at least 200 gp + 20 gp per Bulk [of the armor crafted]." If a duskwood branch cost 100 gp instead of 500 gp, then the crafter would need 2.2 branches for one-bulk armor rather than 0.44 branches.

The Duskwood material entry in Archives of Nethys leaves off the size of a duskwood branch and duskwood lumber, but the GM Core says on page 254: Type duskwood branch; Price 500 gp; Bulk L; Type duskwood lumber; Price 5,000 gp; Bulk 1. Needing 2.2 branches for a suit of armor does sound more realistic. Otherwise, we have as shroudb said:

also do note that the "branch" is not a small twig, given that a 1 bulk object (which is alredy processed) is only 350gp, it's safe to assume that the "branch" refers to one of the main branches of a tree at least.

The other precious materials in the GM Core are metals sold in light-bulk chunks and one-bulk ingots. Adamantine and dawnsilver are also 8th-level materials, and they have the same 500 gp for a light-bulk chunk error. Cold iron and silver are 2nd-level materials, and they cost 10 gp per chunk. 2nd-level consumables typically cost 7 gp, but 10 gp is closer to that 7-gp consumable price than the 35-gp permanent item price. 17th-level orichalcum is the other precious material and costs 1,000 gp per chunk. 17th-level consumable items typically cost around 2,500 gp, and 17th-level permanent items typically cost around 13,000 gp.

I deal with the issue by never using precious materials in Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

This is in contrast to my PF1 Iron Gods campaign. The seven skymetals--abysium, adamantine, djezet, inubrix, noqual, orichalcum, and siccatite--are important in that story. The PCs soon acquired adamantine weapons in order to cut through the hardness of robots. They never had to worry about the price of those materials, because the metals could be found in the crashed spaceships that they explored and the PCs could craft the items themselves (Iron Gods has a lot of downtime between modules.) Later, my NPC party member Val Baine eventually made herself a mithral armored coat for weird rules reasons discussed at PF1 Bloodrager Val Baine Converted to PF2.

PF1 Val's armored coat was a weird story that lost its weirdness in PF2. She decided to try a technological scatterlight suit for armor against energy weapons. The suit was merely +1 armor against physical attacks, so she wore a PF1 armored coat over it for its +4 armor bonus. But an armored coat was medium armor, and her PF1 sylph's Wings of Air let her fly only while wearing no armor or light armor. So she would take off her coat and carry it in her arms for non-combat flight. She gave up on the scatterlight suit and switched to a Robe of Arcane Heritage under her armored coat. And she made a mithral armored coat that counted as light armor for movement purposes, such as flight. PF2 Val kept the armored coat to maintain her style, but had no reason to make it out of mithral.

The ridiculous price of duskwood comes from the ridiculous economics of Pathfinder, which were copied from the similar economics of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Magic items and precious-material items are level capped. We don't want a 1st-level wizard becoming overpowered by casting 3rd-rank spells from a wand nor a 1st-level fighter becoming especially hard to hit with +2 fundamental armor runes. But rather than making a blatant rule that player characters cannot buy items higher than their level, the rules hid the restriction by making those items too expensive for the low-level characters to buy.

The price of items from 2nd level and up is based on their level, not on the difficulty of crafting them or the cost of materials. 2nd-level permanent items cost 35 gp, 3rd-level permanent items cost 70 gp, 4th-level permanent items cost 100 gp, 5th-level permanent items cost 150 gp, 6th-level items cost 200 gp, 7th-level permanent items cost 300 gp, 8th-level permanent items cost 500 gp, etc. The prices vary within a band of prices, and consumable items have their own cheaper price schedule. The prices roughly double every 2 levels, just like experience points from defeating a Level+2 enemy, except that the developers like round numbers for prices; therefore, over 6 levels the multiplier is 10 rather than 8.

A duskwood branch can be used to make a duskwood shield, an 8th-level item, so the branch is an 8th-level item, too, costing 500 gp. Strangely, an 8th-level duskwood shield requires only 55 gp of duskwood, so that branch provides enough material for 9 shields. Equally strange, an 8th-level duskwood shield has the same stats as a 0th-level steel shield rather than a 0th-level wooden shield.

But why is a duskwood shield an 8th-level item? What marvelous advantage does it give? Its only advantage over the 0th-level steel shield is lightness, bulk L rather than bulk 1. If we go back to PF1, the Darkwood entry says, "The armor check penalty of a darkwood shield is lessened by 2 compared to an ordinary shield of its type." And as a reminder about PF1 armor check penalty:

Armor Check Penalty: Any armor heavier than leather, as well as any shield, hurts a character’s ability to use Dexterity- and Strength-based skills. An armor check penalty applies to all Dexterity- and Strength-based skill checks. A character’s encumbrance may also incur an armor check penalty.

Shields: If a character is wearing armor and using a shield, both armor check penalties apply.

Duskwood is 8th level because it reduces a shield's armor check penalty that does not exist in PF2. An equivalent bonus in PF2 would be, "Duskwood is so light that Raise a Shield with a duskwood shield is a free action," but no-one wrote that rule.

In contrast, PF2 duskwood armor does offer a real advantage in a very narrow niche: "It’s easier to wear than normal wood armor, reducing the Strength modifier necessary to ignore its check penalty by 1 and reducing its Speed penalty by 5 feet." Thus, a character trained in light and medium armor but with low attribute scores of STR +1 and DEX +2 could upgrade from Studded Leather Armor (+2, dex cap +3, STR req +1) to Duskwood Wooden Breastplate (+3, dex cap +2, STR req +2) to increase their AC by 1 without an armor check penalty. I don't know why anyone would build a character with such stats, but it might be plausible for an Inventor or Thaumaturge.

Your PCs should talk to their dorm-mate Strands-of-Golden-Dawn Tzeniwe and learn friendfetch. That spell is one of my players' favorites because it is great at getting an ally out of a deadly situation. For example, I added a battle against five Giant Hermit Crabs to Spoken on the Song Wind, and whenever a crab grabbed a person in their big claw, the party friendfetched them to safety (Virgil Tibbs, Playtest Rune Smith comment #16). friendfetch has a range of only 30 feet, but that distance enough to move an unconscious party member away from the enemies for safe Battle Medicine.

My players frequently used friendfetch before our Strength of Thousands campaign and they were delighted to discover that the spell had been invented as a flavorful spell for Tzeniwe.

Repositioning an unconscious ally can also move them 10 feet away from an enemy. I have an example of that at River Into Darkness Revisited comment #3.

My tactically-savvy players know to retreat their character when their hit points fall one critical hit away from unconsciousness, so we seldom have an unconscious party member on the field. Occassionally, an opponent delivers a critical hit and a regular hit on their turn, so the party has to deal with unconsciousness. Then the party springs into action to distract the opponent while a spellcaster casts Heal or Soothe. In a pinch, the cantrip Rousing Splash can get a PC back on their feet for 1 minute.

Whenever my players plan an encounter against tough opponents they also plan a retreat. In Strength of Thousands adventures they sometimes rescue people in danger and get them to safety via their retreat plan. One bard is fond of Cyclone Rondo to discourage enemies from closing in on the party.

But the biggest aid to a party's retreat is the enemy's true motives. Only two enemies in the first two modules have had the death of the party as their goal:

A few weeks ago, on a jungle road in Hurricane's Howl, the bard cast Phantasmal Protagonist to aid in a battle against a single large monster. The monster, by lucky rolls, defeated the phantasm and then dragged off its illusory body to eat, leaving the rest of the party behind.

The teacher of the Escape class can illustrate the value of prinal wall spells and arcane illusion spells. (The two bards in my campaign are unusual as occult spellcasters attending a school of arcane and primal magic.) So the lessons of the class could be:
1) Protect the injured before they fall unconscious.
2) Distract the opponent while rescuing the injured or unconscious.
3) Rescue with minimal risk, such as by friendfetch. (Maybe have Tzeniwe as a teacher's assistant for this part.) Waking up an unconscious ally is easier than dragging them.
4) Cover the retreat with walls, illusion, difficult terrain, or other obstacles (Castilliano suggested closed doors.)
5) Judge how relentless the enemy will be in pursuit.

All I know about Paizo Plus is from two web pages: Paizo Blog: Introducing Paizo Plus and the Paizo Plus page itself. I was surprised when I received emails from Paizo Plus reminding me of my purchases and suggesting that I could write reviews. Those two sources had said nothing about email invitations suggesting that I write a review.

The first one was Wednesday, November 19:

Your Recent Paizo Purchase

Hello Erin!

Thanks for your recent purchase of Pathfinder Battlecry! PDF. We'd love to have you review that product for other players!

If you are a member of the Paizo Plus program, you will earn 5 gold for each review you complete (up to 5 gold/week). If you're not a member yet, just click the Paizo Plus link on the main store page.

Thanks again for supporting Paizo!

followed by an interactive form for submitting a review.

I have not yet read through my copy of Battlecry!, so I did not write a review. The second email was on Monday, November 24, and it suggested that I write a review for my purchase of Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-03: Godsrain in a Godless Land.

I did write that review. I tried to submit it via the form in the email, but the next page glitched. It demanded that I fill out the number of stars, but I had already done so. But I had written the review in a separate text file, an old habit from relying on buggy computers. So I submitted the review on the purchase page for Godsrain in a Godless Land. Soon I received an email, "Please verify your review," and I did so by clicking a button.

Nothing happened for a day. The next day, the review appeared and my Paizo Plus page displayed that I had exactly 5 gold. Technically, having exactly 5 gold was a glitch, too, since some of my other actions should have provided more gold. That has been repaired and now I have 245 gold in Paizo Plus.

I have also learned that the reviews do not apply the BBCode markup used in the Paizo forums, so my review has gratuitous i's and /i's instead of italic text and b's and /b's instead of bold text. And it lost all my line breaks, so the paragraphs run together into one big block of text. Can anyone tell me how to format text in Paizo product reviews?

I will write reviews in the future. My reviews will be odd for Pathfinder Society materials because I bought them to supplement my Strength of Thousands campaign rather than playing them as is. I wonder how far back the email reminders will track my purchases and whether they will mention my purchases of especially old materials such as GameMastery Module W2: River into Darkness.

It's just nonsense that spell attack rolls start of kinda great thanks to Gouging Claw, TK Projectile, etc, and slowly get worse and worse across the game.

There is no reason for that kind of "creeping failure" and we all know exactly why it happens, once upon a time playtesters didn't like the lack of magic weapons affecting core math, so the Paizo devs reworked their system to add weapon runes. Unarmed attacks were thereafter blursed with needing Handwraps; even if it's an ancestry spit attack, gotta wrap those hands.

But oops, Paizo forgot about spell attacks.

No, the original Pathfinder 2nd Edition playtest included runes.

RUNES

Some magic weapons and armor gain their enhancements from potent eldritch runes etched into them. These runes allow for in-depth customization of items.

Runes must be physically engraved on items through a special process to convey their benefits. They take two forms: potency runes and property runes. ...

In fact, the potency runes in the playtest went up to +5. Furthermore, extra weapon damage dice was an automatic effect of the weapon potencty runes.

The spellcasters never had a PF2 item to improve their spell attack bonuses or spell DCs. I think that the playtest was experimenting with spells that have a short-lived result on a Failure, so the developers wanted the spell DCs to stay low for the playtest. I guess they were satisfied with the experiment and decided that low spell DC were fine.

Mathmuse wrote:

... After 2 pages of establishing this plot hook, the scene jumps 75 miles north to deep in the Fangwood. My players objected to that, because that 75 miles would be heading through territory conquered by the Ironfang Legion and they wanted to fight the legion on the way north. So I wrote new material for that journey.

Perhaps author Amanda Hamon Kunz skipped that journey to reduce the page count. Or maybe she skipped it because she would have had to review the first three modules and the overall invasion plan in order to write material that fits the main theme of the adventure path but would be only a side theme to Prisoners of the Blight.
...

It was handwaved on p8 "At this point, the PCs likely have access to magical means of transportation, such as greater teleport or overland flight."

Expectation IMHO is that if the party didn't have access to that sort of magical transportation, that Karburtin could play Uber-driver for them.
But yes it did seem like a big assumption and side quest.

I converted Ironfang Invasion adventure path to Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules, which has more restrictions on teleportation. Teleport, spell 6, can transport only 5 people. The party had 7 PCs and 2 animal companions. Furthermore, both full-rank spellcasters had primal tradition, which is worst at transportation. They typically summoned Phantom Steeds for long-distance travel.

Nevertheless, I did provide alternative transportation for reaching the Fangwood. After the players negotiated peace between Kraggodan and Molthune, General Cadmius Ortho offered the party a ride on a Molthune ship down the Inkwater River to the Fangwood. The party accepted the offer, except that they asked the ship to make a side trip up the Platter River so that they could free some villages from Ironfang control. They wanted to fight the Ironfang Invasion on the way north rather than effortlessly reach their destination via a spell or a ship.

I have noticed that Paizo modules assume that the PCs seek adventure for the sake of adventure. The modules skip the mundane stuff, such as routine travel, or spice up the routine with random encounters. My own players, in contrast, adopt a goal, Adventure is only the means. Their goal in Ironfang Invasion was to free Nirmathas from the invasion. Their goal in Strength of Thousands is to apply their growing skills as students and researchers to help common people. Their goal in Starfinder's Skitter Shot series was to run a successful salvage and rescue business. They immerse themselves in the narrative and find excitement in pursuing a theme that is not pure adventure.

exequiel759 wrote:

Aristophanes wrote:

Trip.H wrote:

I'm still having to explain here just how bad Gaze really is, because Exemplar's spark mechanics obfuscate that travesty that much more than normal.

Because Gaze is a Trans ability, it triggers the 1 per turn lockout.

If an Exemplar instead spends 1A to Shift the spark back to a weapon, then they could then pop the weapon's Trans ability that same turn, and that Trans itself is a damage boost far more potent than Gaze.

Geez Trip, stop with the wishy-washy ambiguity!

Tell us how you really feel.

Just spitballin' here: What if it were 1d6 per damage die, then at 10th it goes to d8s, and 18th to d10s?

I doubt nerfing it would make it better.

How is 1d6 precision per damage die as opposed to a flat 1d6 for Trans Gaze nerfing?

Gaze Sharp as Steel's Transcendence currently starts with an additional 1d6 precision damage to the next successful Strike. This damage increases to 2d6 at 10th level and 3d6 at 18th level.

Aristophanes' sentence is easily misread by missing the "per damage die" part, especially since the usual phrase is "weapon damage die." That misreading would be 1d6 to start, increasing to 1d8 at 10th level and 1d10 at 18th level. That would be a nerf.

I think Aristophones' intention was start with 1d6, increase it to 2d6 precision damage at 4th level by putting a Striking rune on the weapon, increase it to 2d8 at 10th level, to 3d8 at 12th level with a greater Striking rune, to 3d10 at 18th level, and to 4d10 at 19th level with a major Striking rune. That rate of increase seems awfully irregular, so perhaps the d8 should be moved to 8th level and the d10 should be more to 16th level to even out the gaps between increases.

I myself am disappointed that the precision damage in Gaze Sharp as Steel as written does not increase until 10th level. For comparison, a rogue's Sneak Attack Damage starts as 1d6, increases to 2d6 at 5th level, to 3d6 at 11th level, and to 4d6 at 17th level.

I am still embarrassed that I missed the line, "You can Spark Transcendence only once each round," in the Transcendence trait sidebox. I checked the War of Immortals playtest document and the sentence is there, too. I just did not notice that my playtesting player was following a rule that I had missed. Paizo gave redundancy in the playtest document because Spark Transcendence also said, "Frequency once per round" there.

And now I agree with Trip.H. Limiting Transcendence to once per round makes Gaze Sharp as Steel a lot less attractive. I considered redoing my calculations under the correct rules, because I noticed the word "successful" in Gaze Sharp as Steel, which makes the Transcendence less likely to fail when used alone.

But Exemplar now seems less fun, so I lack the enthusiasm to go over the numbers again. Being able to combine Transcendences in a single round was more playful. In Pathfinder design, limiting Transcendence to once per round makes it easier to analyze. Fast-paced combinations are harder to balance. On the other hand, a great moment of fun of Pathfinder combat is setting up a situation for a decisive blow, such as a rogue moving into flanking position for a Sneak Attack. Preferably, the setup and the payoff happen on the same turn, because letting a round pass between the setup and the payoff is likely to change the situation enough to deny the payoff, such as the opponent Stepping out of the flank.

In a basin between two mountain ranges, where the wind blows from one range to the other, the clouds seldom rain. Nevada in the United States between the Sierra Nevada range to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east is an example of this. Belkzen has this geography, too, resting between the Mindspin Mountains to the west and the Tusk Mountains to the east.

In addition, Belkzen is fairly far north. Its northern edge is the frigid Algid Wastes. Such a location often means a short growing season, though in real-world geography warm trade winds or warm ocean currents can extend the growing season. The mountains around Belkzen prevent such warming.

The river down the middle of Belkzen is called the Flood Road because it is dry 10 months of the 12-month year. And its banks are unstable for the wet two months, which makes irrigation of adjacent land via water channels difficult.

You can Spark Transcendence only once each round.

I had missed that. The once-per-round restriction is not mentioned under the Spark Transcendence feature nor under the descriptions of the Ikons and their Transcendence abilities. Instead, it is mentioned under the Transcendence trait.

Thank you, Zalabim, for clarifying the rule. Other people were criticizing my ideas as infeasible without mentioning that rule, so I could not see what I had done wrong.

Mathmuse wrote:

It does look like you might have gotten close to finding the breakpoint.

I had assumed before the calculation that two Gleaming Blades would come out half a damage point ahead rather than half a damage point behind. When two options are that close, other considerations such as roleplaying drive the decision.

Your example uses a 15% accurate max MAP attack, which seriously skews the result to favor Gaze. That detail alone is getting close to dishonest territory, TBH, as that's too unlikely a scenario.

And it lacks any other damage source, such as runes or weakness...

I wanted minimal additional effect both for my convenience and to keep the analysis short. I put the exemplars at 1st level, so no striking runes.

However, I did make a mistake. I forgot to add the damage from critical hits. Adding in the critical hits gives two Gleaming Blade swords 13.3 damage on average and Gleaming Blade and Gaze Sharp as Steel 13.5 damage on average, much close to each other.

And it is a 1 turn comparison, when the whole point of double weapon Ikon is that the 2 turn rotation keeps the offense up...

I set up both exemplars with a 1-turn rotation for simplicity. I am inexperienced with exemplars, so I don't know the rotations that most people use. I saw exequiel759's comment, "The exemplar I want to play is going to take Gleaming Blade, Gaze Sharp as Steel, and Scar Of The Survivor," and decide to go with those three ikons.

I am unlikely to gain experience with exemplars this year. I am in the 3rd module of the Strength of Thousands adventure path, which was written before War of Immortals, so it has no exemplar NPCs. I have not yet found a reason to add one. I did add Mkosa, a 5th-level halfling druid with Mythic Sage's Calling, for a little practice with Mythic Callings.

Basically, I'm saying that yeah, if one needs that kind of unrealistic comparison to get Gaze to appear as one single 1/2 a dmg point higher, then Gaze is very much trash.

(still can be worth it for the RP, but it's numbers really are joke-level horrible)
____________________

The more realistic white room would be 2A for offense across 2 turns.
Gleaming Blade & Gleaming Blade |versus| Gleaming Blade & 1 Gaze + Strike.

I also failed to notice that Mathmuse used Gleaming's & Gaze's Trans effects for their example, which already required the previous turn, and makes that example that much more inaccurate/non applicable, lol.

The Exemplar class says under Shift Immanence, "In addition to the above usage, you can also Shift Immanence as a free action triggered when you roll initiative." So the exemplar can start with their ikon where they want it. I suppose in an actual game rather than a white room, both exemplars would start with the spark in their Gleaming Blade ikon. On their 1st turn, they would Stride and Flowing Spirit Strike. The exemplar with two Gleaming Blade ikons would end his turn with the spark on his other Gleaming Blade. The exemplar with Gleaming Blade and Gaze Sharp as Steel would end his turn with the spark on his Gaze. That sets up their 1-turn rotations, assuming that they can stand still rather than chase after opponents.

Is this unrealistic?

The third ikon has a cost, its power budget. I don't see exactly why you seem to think that if the exemplar lacked a third ikon that its power budget wouldn't be spent on either a new combat feature or buffing an already existing combat feature. Ikons are where most the budget of the class is located, and all ikons are designed to be used in combat, thus they are combat features. This isn't like taking away all the extra skill feats and skill increases from the rogue to double their sneak attack or something like that. If anything, it would be closer to what barbarians got in the remaster when they lost deny advantage in favor of furious footfalls.

Pathfinder does not have power budgets. It has selection budgets. For example, in character creation the player can select one Background. Different backgrounds, such as Laborer boosting Strength or Constitution and training in Athletics, offer more power for a particular class, such as Fighter which loves Strength and Constitution. Seeing a Fighter with Street Preacher background, which boosts Wisdom or Charisma and trains in Religion, would be unusual. Likewise, at a level when the character can gain a skill feat, the character can select only one skill feat, but some feats are more powerful for that particular character than other feats.

Instead, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a power cap. Class feats are generally increase power, but none will suddenly make the character 50% more powerful. If a spellcaster takes Cantrip Expansion, then the caster could become slightly more powerful by adding a long-range damage cantrip that they had passed up before, but that cantrip was sixth on their list of cantrips they wanted. And during a particular very dangerous combat, the spellcaster would probably be casting spells from their spell slots rather than cantrips. Maximum power inches upward constrained by PF2's tight math.

As far as I can tell in reading over the Ikon rules, an Exemplar could chose Gleaming Blade ikon twice. Imagine an exemplar wielding a pair of agile swords. He selects Gleaming Blade ikon twice, one for each sword. The Gleaming Blade Immanence does not double, because each Strike is only with a single sword. The Transcendence does not double, because the exemplar can make a two-action Flowing Spirit Strike only one per turn. The only two advantages of two Gleaming Blades is that the spark moves to the other blade, so the Immanence can be used on a third-action attack with the sword in the other hand, and the other-hand sword is ready for Flowing Spirit Strike on the next turn without having to Shift Immanence.

But is that better than taking Gleaming Blade on one agile sword and Gaze Sharp as Steel? With one sword and both Gleaming Blade and Gaze Sharp as Steel ikons, the exemplar could start each turn with his spark on Gaze Sharp as Steel and spend one action for A Moment Unending for 1d6 precision damage on their next Strike. A Moment Unending transfers the spark to the sword for Flowing Spirit Strike, and Flowing Spirit Strike transfers the spark back to the body for A Moment Unending. That is also a useful combat routine.

Let's crunch the math. I assume a 1d6 weapon with 55% chance of hitting on an unpenalized attack and STR +4. Two Gleaming Blades would deal (55%)(1d6+6) + (55%)(1d6+6) + (15%)(1d6+6) = (1.25)(1d6+6), average 11.875 damage. A Gaze Sharp as Steel and a Gleaming Blade would deal (55%)(2d6+2+STR) + (55%)(1d6+2+STR) = (1.65)(1d6) + (1.1)(6), average 12.375 damage. And the Gaze-and-Gleaming exemplar also has a free hand and could apply A Moment Unending to a ranged Strike with a bow.

The player of an Exemplar in my playtest did tell me that Exemplar relied on knowing how to play PF2 well.

I also feel its not honest compare the heal spell to Gaze Sharp as Steel when heal is one of the best spells in the game that just happens to have a less useful secondary use while Gaze Sharp as Steel was designed to be a backup option. I think it would be much more fair to compare the healspell with the victor's wreath ikon since the latter its mostly used for its immanence effect but it also happens to have a fantastic situational trascendence effect as well.

I making an analogy matching the individual effects of Heal to the individual effects of an entire Transcendence rotation, not directly comparing Heal versus Gaze Sharp as Steel as if an exemplar had a choice between the two. Casting Heal to heal is the analog to Flowing Spirit Strike and the side effect of also hurting undead is the analog to gaining the benefit of A Moment Unending by using Transcendence to move the spark back to the Gleaming Blade weapon instead of simply using Shift Immanence.

You said it yourself. The steamer in your kitchen is there because you sometimes want to eat steamed vegetables, but why would I choose Gaze Sharp as Steel for a reason other than flavor when I could choose two weapon ikons that do the same thing but better? You don't even need two weapons AFAIK since based on the exemplar's feats a single item can have multiple immanence and trascendence effects. This is why I think Gaze Sharp as Steel is bad, because its only use case is totally situational and even in those sitautions there's still other ikons that can do pretty much the same thing but way better.

A "totally situational" use of Gaze Sharp as Steel, such as using it with a non-ikon bow, is the match to me cooking steamed vegetables once a month. Situations come up about once a month.

I'll explain my rationale with an example.

Imagine you go to a restaurant where you must choose three different dishes for them to prepare for you. After a short wait, the dishes arrive and you start eating. The food is great, but you’re already full by the time you reach the third dish, so you leave it untouched. You enjoy the place so much that you keep coming back at least once a week. However, every time you visit, the same thing happens: you can never finish the third dish because you’re always full by then. The restaurant has a policy of throwing away any leftovers, so each visit ends up costing them money since that uneaten dish is wasted every time you go.

With that said, I want to ask; why does the restaurant keep preparing three dishes for every customer if most people only end up eating two?

This is a bad analogy because the aspect that makes the three dishes bad is not an aspect of the three ikons. The third dish has a cost to prepare, so ignoring that dish wastes money. The third ikon has no cost, so ignoring it merely means you would rather use other ikons.

Let me change the analogy. Suppose I have three pots in my kitchen for cooking on my stove: a pan, a pot, and a steamer. I use the pan every day for frying eggs and cabbage for breakfast. I use the pot often for making soup and stew and mashed potatoes. I seldom use the steamer, because I use that only for steaming vegetables about once a month. Should I complain that I own a steamer?

In Pathfinder 2nd Edition, the spell Heal is used primarily for healing allies. But it can also damage undead opponents. I almost never use Heal to damage undead, because my weapon does that job just fine and I want to save my Heal spells for healing. Should I complain about the extra feature on Heal that harms undead?

I suppose someone could imagine that if the Exemplar lacked the third ikon, then the Exemplar could get a new feature to replace it. That would give the ikon an opportunity cost. But that is not how Pathfinder design works. Each class is designed for an exact degree of combat effectiveness by level. If the alternative feature would make the Exemplar more effective at combat than the standard, then the developers won't give the Exemplar that extra feature.

The steamer in my kitchen is there because I sometimes eat steamed vegetables. The harm-undead feature in the Heal spell is there because the heal font cleric has twin themes of preventing death and defeating undead monsters that represent death. This is about flavor of my meals or of a Pathfinder class, not about power.

The flavor of the exemplar is that they are empowered by a spark of the divine. The ikon represents that spark mechanically. Due to the power cap by level on all character classes, the ikon is limited in its power. Transcendence lets the exemplar exert a little more power in a carefully limited fashion to give the ikon more drama. Making transcendence more convenient would require putting a different limit on the effectiveness of transcendence, and that different limit might diminish the divine-spark theme of the exemplar class. Having a third ikon that is not used as often as the other two does not increase power, yet it still highlights the spark, so it plays to the theme of the class.

I haven't had to fix too much in PF2. But I do have a handful of house rules that fix some abilities. We did the same fix with Nimble Dodge as Ectar.

The character Roshan, who uses Assurance, also learned Nimble Dodge. I posted in our Discord group asking whether we should use Ectar's houserule. She replied, "We've already been doing it that way."

Roshan's player is my elder daughter and has played in my Pathfinder games since I began gamemastering in 2011, until she moved to Seattle. She rejoined my Pathfinder games when we went online in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I guess I lost track of my houserule decisions over the 6 years since we began playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

So, the concept is kind of silly.

They are a group of young women who do pagents around Avistan (and northern Garund). One of their friends is missing, and her mother dead, so they set off to find their friend. Hence no one is too bulky or overtly defensive, and why there is probably a bit of an emphasis on Charisma without a bard.

That party reminds me of my current Strength of Thousands party. They are students at the Magaambya Academy, and due to the two bards in the party they act like Theater majors. The champion Wilfred in the party is bulky and defensive, and the rogue Roshan is strong (though a Eldritch Trickster racket rather than a Ruffian racket), but the other five are spellcasters and a kineticist. Their theatric style means that they usually try to befriend opponents, but they are also good at manipulating the battlefield.

What are the theatric specialties of the party members? The leaf druid could have their familiar perform with Accompanist or Skilled familiar ability, the thaumaturge could train in Performance to benefit from their charisma, the cleric and swashbuckler gain Performance from their divine skill or swashbuckler style, and the monk can dance and tumble with Acrobatic Performance.

Okay, so

Cleric (Cloistered) of Shelyn
Druid Leaf Order
Swashbuckler battle Dancer
Thaum definitely has the tome
Monk as an acrobatic performance skill feat, and Reflective Ripple stance.

The cleric is unarmored with 8+CON hit points, the druid and thaumaturge have light or medium armor and 8+CON hit points, the swashbuckler has light armor and 10+CON hit points, and the monk has unarmored expertise with 10+CON hit points. The cleric should avoid the frontline, but the others, especially the monk and swashbuckler, are reasonably well defended. And a few domain spells, such as Darkness domain's Cloak of Shadow, Luck domain's Bit of Luck, and Trickery domain's Sudden Shift can help the cleric protect themself, but that would require the cleric to worship a different god, such as Grandmother Spider.

The party can defend themselves by staying mobile rather than by a front line protecting squishy characters. Anyone too hurt can retreat. Therefore, the party does not need a tank.

I worry about damage dealing. Dexterity-based martials gain little damage from Strength bonuses. The swashbuckler is designed to make up for that lack with panache, so that will work. But the monk will need a boost from other party members, such as a Runic Body spell from the cleric. The thaumaturge and druid have their own ways of dealing damage. I think a cloistered cleric of Shelyn should save their slotted spells for buffing the party and throw 60-foot-range cantrips, such as Needle Darts, for damage.

Two questions:

1 - Which party member is providing the Deception/Diplomacy/Intimidation type skills?
2 - Which party member is providing Stealth/Thievery?

You can do ok without Deception, Intimidation and Stealth, but a lack of Diplomacy and Thievery will probably bite you on the butt.

I'm not familiar with Druid orders, but maybe replace him with a primal Sorcerer?

Thaumaturge class has key attribute Charisma, so they can do well with Charisma skills, such as Deception, Diplomacy, and Intimidation. Also, leaf druids are trained in Diplomacy.

Swashbuckler and a lean Monk have key attribute Dexterity, so they can do well with Dexterity skills, such as Stealth and Thievery.

Many players have pointed out that gaining an advantage out of Assurance is difficult to manage. Gaining a 10 instead of a d20 roll would be nice and assuring, but losing all bonuses except proficiency (which includes level) means that the attribute modifier bonus no longer applies. Ordinarily, Assurance could worth using only when a really low roll would be a disaster or to ignore a very heavy penalty, because Assurance is worse than rolling a natural 7.

Assurance Feat 1

Fortune General Skill
Source Player Core pg. 252 2.0
Prerequisites trained in at least one skill
Even in the worst circumstances, you can perform basic tasks. Choose a skill you’re trained in. You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonus (do not apply any other bonuses, penalties, or modifiers).

[/b]Special[/b] You can select this feat multiple times. Each time, choose a different skill and gain the benefits for that skill.

On the other hand, the rogue Roshan in my current campaign took Assurance in Athletics because she was maximizing her Athletics proficiency. She added Assurance and Automatic Knowledge in Nature, Society, and Arcana so that she can tell which creatures are better to Grapple and which creatures are better to Trip as a free action if their level is low enough. So not all players are disappointed with Assurance.

The feat Seasoned perplexes me as written, but maybe I just don't understand the rules.

Seasoned[/b] Feat 1

General Skill
Source Player Core pg. 262 2.0
Prerequisites trained in Crafting, Alcohol Lore, or Cooking Lore
You’ve mastered the preparation of many types of food and drink. You gain a +1 circumstance bonus to checks to Craft food and drink, including elixirs if you have Alchemical Crafting and potions if you have Magical Crafting. If you are a master in one of the prerequisite skills, this bonus increases to +2.

The perplexing issue is what are the Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules for Crafting food and drink? The usual Craft downtime activity takes "2 days of work setting up, or 1 day if you have the item's formula." Using that method to Craft food would have everyone waiting at least a day for dinner. I presume most people simply ask for a Crafting check after an hour, but that is a houserule. My own houserule is to make a Survival check for preparing food and drink, since Survival already has a Subsist activity to feed oneself.

Furthermore, even with quick Craft for food and drink, does a player character who qualified for Seasoned based on Alcohol Lore or Cooking Lore have to roll a Craft check or can they roll their Lore? I would just replace the word "Craft" in Seasoned with "make."

Culture as defined by Schien is made of Artifacts, Espoused Values and Basic Assumptions. Artifacts are the physical aspects one notices, music, stories, sporting games, clothing, food, manner of speaking, etc.

Espoused Values are the direct morals and teachings that make up a culture.

Basic Assumptions are the deep unwritten and often unspoken shared zeitgeist members of a culture have.

I looked up Edgar Henry Schein and found descriptions of Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture.

I used to work for a United States government agency and we had subcultures inside the bureaucratic culture to protect our people from the flaws of bureaucracy. No culture is monolithic.

As an example I would point to the Aztec Indians. We can talk about the brutality of their sacrifice but from their perspective their culture demanded this. They felt there was a need for wide spread bloodshed through human sacrifice or the world would not continue.

From this they justified raids and forced tribute of slaves and the sacrifice of slaves as required for various things.

Now based on critical deconstruction we must accept this as their culture and somehow not judge it against other cultures. I would submit this overlooks the reality of where that culture drove them.

My players and their characters judged the culture of the Ironfang Legion and found it wanting. The halfling rogue/sorcerer Sam had grown up as a slave in Nidal. The Bellflower Network rescued him and relocated him to Nirmathas. The others followed Nirmathi espoused values about independence.

What I am getting at is what shorthand can I use to define the basic assumptions of the culture of each group that is shown in the game.

This is because trying to write up each individual culture for every race and monster would be overwhelming

It would be overwhelming for a single person, but Paizo has teams writing the Lost Omens lore books that describe cultures for regional groups on Golarion.

Currently I am running the Strength of Thousands adventure path, in which the PCs start as students of the Magaambya Academy of Arcane and Primal Magic. The 1st module occurs on campus, the 2nd module moves out to the city of Nantambu surrounding campus, the 3rd module is an archaeological expedition to Bloodsalt that ends up visiting other nations, too, etc. The 1st module sends the PCs on many service projects, because the Magaambya has a culture of study and service.

In the Magaambya, it’s said that a wizard learns both by reading and by doing—a philosophy sometimes termed “the Word and the Way”—and thus to shut oneself off from the world in perpetual study is at best counterproductive, and at worst miserly. In [founder] Jatembe’s tradition, study is ultimately less important than using what you learn to serve others.

The Magaambyan emphasis on service is the source of Nantambu’s strength, with the resident mages ensuring that no invading force has ever managed to come within 20 miles of the city.

Descriptions of the Magaambya can be found in the Lost Omens World Guide, Lost Omens Character Guide, Lost Omens The Mwangi Expanse, and Lost Omens Rival Academies.

Nantambu has a separate culture, since they are not a college devoted to the study of magic. Instead, they are a cosmopolitan democracy reaping benefits of working with the Magaambya.

One the other hand no short hand what so ever means a lot of work to classify it ahead of time. Creatures will have a cultural set of beliefs which define them. Even if they break from the norm it would define that break. Maybe the best way to handle this is have the gods each have their own philosophy tied to the religion they preach and this formulates the ideologies which then defines the enemies and allies of each god.

The edicts and anathema of each god serve as a shorthand for their philosophy.

For example, at the moment Uvuko (The Diamond Ring) is important in my Strength of Thousands campaign. His edicts are, "Embrace change and the future, master adversity with flexibility, foster freedom and progress for others." His anathema are, "Allow yourself and your surroundings to stagnate, crush an egg, use vile or cruel language." The party met some Mbe'ke dwarves whose great-grandparents migrated from Cloudspire and one is a cleric of Uvuko. The party is studying the ruins of Bloodsalt, a dead city that once had several Dragon Disciples. An archaeological secret I am adding is that the city was settled by human and cloud dragon worshipers of Uvuko to embrace a future in which dragons and humans work together. The city is in an area of natural disasters, which spelled its doom, but they were hopeful that the interspecies cooperation could overcome the disasters. The anathema against crushing an egg is symbolic, because to dragons their eggs represent the future, but it resulted in the weird custom that followers of Uvuko do not eat eggs, not even chicken eggs.

A bigger plot about the philosphy of a god was my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign. The Monster Division of the Molthune military, led by hobgoblin General Azaersi, rebelled against the Molthunes, who treated them as third-class citizens, and sought to carve their own nation of monstrous humanoids out of parts of Nirmathas and Molthune. Most of her hobgoblins followed Hadregash, the Lawful Evil barghest hero-god of tyranny and slavery. The other three hero-gods and their boss Lamashtu were Chaotic Evil, but tyranny controls through lawful authority. The campaign was supposed to end with a treaty between Azaersi and Nirmathas, but my players rejected any truce while the Ironfang Legion still held war captives as slave labor. I had to enact cultural change on the Ironfang Legion by letting the party defeat Hadregash himself to strip slavery from his domains. Amusingly, the Remastered PF2 version of Hadregash is no longer a god of slavery, but still has chain and manacle as his holy symbol.
Edicts Conquer everything you see, rule with an iron fist, fight tactically
Anathema Bow before others, let others control your actions, permit insubordination
Areas of Concern Conquest, invasion, war
Domains ambition, might, pain, tyranny

PathfinderWiki has a list of the Lost Omens lore books at https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Pathfinder_Lost_Omens. And PathfinderWiki is also a good source of lore.

The Lost Omens World Guide is the first of the Pathfinder 2nd Edition lore books and a solid introduction to the most familiar countries of Golarion and a review of its history. Its nine chapters divide the continents of Avistan and Garund into nine regions.

The ninth chapter "Shining Kindgoms" and the book Lost Omens Shinging Kingdoms covers the nations of Taldor (old empire that is the source of the Taldoran common language), Andoran (democratic nation), Druma (mercantile theocracy), Five Kings Mountains (dwarven kingdom), Kyonin (elven kingdom), and Galt (permanent French revolution).

Three other books that cover the same territories as chapters of Lost Omens World Guide are Absalom, City of Lost Omens, Lost Omens Mwangi Expanse, and Lost Omens Impossible Lands.

Lost Omens Tian Xia World Guide amd Lost Omens Tian Xia Character Guide move to a third contient, Tian Xia, based on Earth's Far East.

The Remastering of Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules renamed the terminology borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons so the lore books published before 2024 use different names for mechanics than the lore books published 2024 and later. This matters more for rule books than for lore books, but some lore books have new ancestry and background options, so they present mechanics for them.

Lore books written for Pathfinder 1st Edition have valid history but their presentday is set a decade in the past. For example, Wrath of the Righteous adventure path closed the Worldwound, but PF1 lore has it still active and PF2 lore has the location rebuilding itself as Sarkoris Scar.