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RPG-Geek wrote:

On the scale of RPG systems the Exemplar archetype is hardly a blip. In most systems, it would not even be noteworthy as an outlier.

But that doesn't really mean anything. Like, 'other system' is right there on the tin, an unintelligible unique set of rules. Giving a 5e character Pathfinder proficiency bonuses instead of their own would be really overpowered too.

Oh and Exemplar Dedication would be really broken in Fate Core, considering that attacks often do 1-2 damage and it's not uncommon to be rolling 3-4 dice on a fresh character if it's your main skill (or it might do nothing at all I guess if you don't interpret Fight or Shoot checks as weapon die).

... It's like, fundamentally nonsensical to point out whether an ability would be disruptive in another system.

It's not about porting the rules to a different system as is, but judging the impact of a small bump in melee damage in the grand scheme of things. If an archetype that grants melee martial characters +10-20% damage is what's going to break your experience it shows that PF2, or perhaps just its players, is a brittle system.

5e, for all the forumgoers here disparage it, is a far less brittle system. It does rely on a strong social contract and ensuring that your group wants the kind of game the GM wishes to run, but it is also a system that isn't derailed when a strictly better option is printed.

RPG-Geek wrote:

This community: PF2 is the best balanced crunchy TTRPG ever. It's GM-friendly so just run it stock and have a blast.

Also this community: This option is taken 2% more frequently than I'd like and that option is a 4% power advantage on a select range of classes. So out comes the ban hammer.

I've told you a billion times not to exaggerate.

Considering how many responses here to "wands of tailwind are overpowered" is something along the lines of "people actually use those?", this isn't a thing that exists.

The only things mentioned being banned significantly are generally Exemplar Dedication (because being literally the best feat available to every martial in the game is clearly out of line) and things like subsystem or AP backmatter things that don't tend to get either playtested or errata, and that's mostly a case of "I don't want to deal with it".

Me thinks the poster doth exaggerate the number of their admonitions somewhat.

That said, the point I raise is PF2's duality. It is balanced but has done so by excising things from its past edition. It bans entire concepts, like the traditional summoner style of play or undead horde necromancer, to achieve what it wants. Then it takes the things at the edges of what it can handle, encounter ending spells for example, and limits them such that many players find them so unfun as to not be used.

Yet even within these walled gardens the community debates if this construct of everything left after the least balanced bits of PF1 have been excised are themselves well balanced. On the scale of RPG systems the Exemplar archetype is hardly a blip. In most systems, it would not even be noteworthy as an outlier. Yet here, where things are close enough that what the feat provides threatens little in terms of upsetting the apple cart, players cry for it to be banned.

It is interesting to see the uproar a few extra points of damage can cause.

This community: PF2 is the best balanced crunchy TTRPG ever. It's GM-friendly so just run it stock and have a blast.

Also this community: This option is taken 2% more frequently than I'd like and that option is a 4% power advantage on a select range of classes. So out comes the ban hammer.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I attribute this to a younger generation of gamers that grew up playing 3E or PF1 or other skill based games like GURPs.

Ehmm.. Even rules-light narrative games use rolls. Though those rolls are mostly the same (not even for all such games, some still have a lot of skills) and consequences of failure are much more open-ended. Sometimes. Even reasons for rolls are the same "when stakes are high" in one way or another.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons explicitly had skills as optional rules and one of the methods for deciding what skills a PC had was giving them skills the player had. So if you go back past the late 90s you end up in a world before most games like 3rd edition D&D had standardized each character having a list of specific things they were good at. These systems worked just fine for a lot of people so pretending that RPing in this fashion is invalid just shows that you're very much influenced by "modern" d20 style game design.

As for diceless RP, I've done that since middle school in the early 2000s. You'd either take turns writing in a book or post to forums made to run certain games. You didn't need duce or stats, just creativity and the willingness to write collaboratively with friends.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Rolling dice for everything doesn't lead to much roleplay or character development or much thought. A player saying, "I roll my diplomacy check" without having to put any thought or effort into developing a good-roleplay scenario doesn't make for much character development.

I'm obviously not advocating for that. I'm advocating for "good roleplay". And that's where our definitions differ. The 10 Charisma no Diplomacy Fighter making a great speech is bad roleplay to me. It's using the player skills instead of the character skills, for me it's akin to metagaming. After all, if I can forgo the roll if I roleplay well, I should be able to forgo the roll if I know the Bestiary by heart? I'm sure you don't agree with that so why do you allow it for Charisma-based checks?

Deriven Firelion wrote:

That would be like going, "Mr. Player A, your charisma is only 10. You can't possibly come up with a great speech and deliver it well. Sorry you can had to spend your stats to make sure your Str, Dex, Con, and Wis were high enough so you didn't end up getting wasted by every monster with a save ability. You can't participate in the RP because of your 10 charisma."

And that's exactly what I've said to a player. If you want to be the one making great speeches, then increase Charisma. At the very least, grab Diplomacy. And don't tell me it's a problem to be Trained in one skill in this system.

Now, it doesn't prevent you from roleplaying.
Roleplaying is not just about convincing people, there are tons of roleplaying opportunities that are not gated behind a roll. You roll when you want to, mostly, convince people in a timely manner. But if you are just having fun with someone you don't roll, you don't roll to get new friends, you don't roll to find a romantic partner, etc...
There are also some interesting skill substitutions, like using Lores for social interactions with specific social groups, or even I could allow an Arcana check if the Wizard wants to interact with...

Do you also penalize characters with average charisma for rolling too well on charisma skills? If not, why wouldn't you treat that character giving a great speech about something they know well as that character rolling high on said check?

I mean, a definition like that gets really weird then, right? We have to figure out what the "least favorable AP by class" would be while ruling out home games. And then it varies on a GM by GM basis. It also means that characters who ARE considered optimal shouldn't be failing this test as well. Then we have a variable of what their party is doing and... like, I see what you're trying to say, but it doesn't click for me as something you can just measure and judge.

I think it's a test that could be run, in theory, but realistically it's not something worth the effort to test. The best use of this idea would be to think of the toughest tables and GMs you've experienced and ask yourself if your build would thrive in that environment. In practical terms this means that different players will find different things viable as a PFS only player will have a very different experience than a player who plays hard APs with a killer GM.

As for what I'd find "unplayable" that would be anything with AC or saves more than two points below max, that is the same threshold behind on attacks or saving throws, or a build that does the same thing as another build but worse. This means that I'd be unlikely to play a Wizard, Oracle, Investigator, Alchemist, Swashbuckler, Gunslinger, or Inventor as I don't see their flavor upside or mechanical texture as doing enough to offset bring worse than other classes the broadly fill their sane niche.

EDIT: Follow up question, do you see there being a build that you just wouldn't allow at your tables because it underperforms? I mean this as a player or a GM.

I'd never ban anything at my table unless the rest of the table asked me to. If the team wants the added challenge of carrying a less optimized build they're welcome to it.

Ryangwy wrote:

The issue is that your definition is so broad that short of games that let you literally cripple or kill your character in chargen, you could say anything is 'feasible' so long as it's buildable.

You may be misunderstanding me - while I do think it's truly difficult to make an unplayable build in PF2, you certainly could in the 3.X/PF1 days even if it was a solid idea. Dumb ideas like "a character with a 1 level dip in everything" were unplayable. Characters built to grab up grab up "social prestige classes" couldn't function outside of specific campaigns. I mean, there's even the debate of a pure martial being playable in PF1 if you have even a halfway decent spellcaster negating your existence (not something I agree with necessarily).

I say that to illustrate where I am coming from. If I have a concept, it's most likely going to work in PF2. Will it be optimal? Probably not. Will it be feasible? Probably!

Your strike zone for what is and isn't feasible seems to be larger than it is for much of this forums population.

Mine definition of feasible is that, at minimum, a character must be able to survive in the least favorable published AP for their class as run by a GM that isn't pulling their punches. And that a party of characters built to that level should equally have a high chance of doing the same. This leaves some room for suboptimal choices, but is a significantly higher bar than you seem to be setting.

I tend to prefer games with a tighter rules link between how PCs and NPCs operate than PF2 uses. It just makes the world feel more plausible when everything is built, more or less, the same under the hood. I am aware that this was always somewhat a fiction as monsters often needed bespoke modifiers to present even the ghost of a challenge to a well built party, but at least the NPCs with class levels were supposed to be 1-to-1 comparable to PCs.

If you're going to go for a narrative game, that still has more crunch than PBtA games, I find FATE does that very well. The fact that PF2 draws such a sharp divide between PCs and the rest of the setting harms my enjoyment of the system and it's setting.

In this proposed home brew, a sword that is flaming inherently does less slashing damage than a standard sword used by the same character. That is a weird narrative conceit to me. I understand that it is a product of prioritizing balance, but I rather like that a long sword with a flaming rune does additional fire damage, and if I was playing APB I would personally rather just get a free rune at x level than decoupling runes from their bonus damage.

If the damage type incongruity is your biggest issue with the proposed rule we can solve it. One way this can be done is by breaking the system into dice pools. Your weapon and its damage - including any additional weapon damage from runes - would be one pool and the additional d6s would be another pool. By default these all do whatever damage type your weapon would normally do.

Then, we could say that, as an action you can assign one of these pools of damage a different damage type gained by a rune. So you could have a weapon that deals 3d8+1d6 damage and that could be 3d8 slashing and 1d6 fire damage, it could be 3d8 fire damage and 1d6 slashing, or it could be 3d8+1d6 fire damage. This change would have an indefinite duration and could be changed in or out of combat.

This is just a spitball and I'm open to it not being a perfect fix, but I think we can both agree that this solves your issue while also giving a tactical option to players who realize that switching up damage types in combat might be worth an action.

I don't understand how people are doing such a bad job of understanding what Teridax has done with his idea. It's really simple:

Step 1: Decouple the extra +1d6 damage from runes like flaming. Now, runes which would add +1d6 [element] damage to a weapon merely add that element to the weapon as a damage type it can deal.

Step 2: Give this damage back to martial characters by adding runes that give an extra +1d6 damage decoupled from the need to add an element to the weapon.

Step 3A: Enjoy the fact that builds that used to have to pick between an extra +1d6 damage and a property that enables the build (ie. Returning) don't have to make that sacrifice anymore.

Step 3B: Enjoy the fact that this new damage progression can be easily ported into ABP at set levels.

There, I hope that clarifies things.

I'm playing a reach mutagenist in PFS (so it is not because of the party) and it's now level 7. And it's awesome!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't PFS games incredibly easy in terms of difficulty? If so, I'd rather see how well your builds hold up to tougher tests before trusting that said builds are awesome. I'm sure it's fun to play but from an optimization standpoint I need to know that it's been tested against the hardest the system can throw at you rather than the easiest.

nope. just nope.

it is mentioned quite numerous times that the book and the rules are written in plain english and not a codified programmer language.

This choice has led to many instances of confusion among the player base. Paizo should get technical writers on their staff to check statements for clarity to avoid this in the future.

when the rules clearly state as an example "you don't use fundamental runes" and that "you get the potency bonus instead of the item bonus of the fundamental runes" you have to willfully ignore the intention of the text to reach the conclusion "yelp, it says property runes specifically needs fundamental runes, even though i have this specific rules here that replaces exactly, so i can't use property runes"

RAW you still can't use those runes. You'd have to read things that aren't written to conclude that you can use property runes without having the required fundamental runes. This could be fixed by saying that weapons and armour automatically gain the effects of the appropriate fundamental runes for their level. It's a fix that takes up no additional space and provides clarity that is currently lacking.

Are there tiny problems? Things like having to adjudicate alchemist elixirs and such?

Sure.

An entire category of items core to how a class plays not working is something you class as a tiny problem to you. It seems like by those standards Paizo couldn't write a bad rule.

It could also be argued the polls were fine, people by and large like item bonuses/item progression, and ABP isn't nearly as popular a variant as something like Free Archetype for a reason.

It's almost like ABP needs to be given more than two pages to function correctly... *points to this thread and Teridax's points*

"I levelled up and my armor got tougher for some reason" is frankly weird and discordant with how the genre plays.

"I leveled up and increased the effectiveness of my armor by learning which angles work best to provide the highest level of protection", does work though and could easily be the justification for why a weapon performs almost magically in the hands of a skilled warrior.

Improving your gear is a core part of the experience. Removing that entirely makes it feel like a very different game and puts almost all power increases you get strictly on levelling.

Have you ever played an RPG without levels and gear progression? They exist, are rather popular, and place the focus more on RP and character interaction than being on a treadmill of false improvement where you get stronger only to face threats tuned for your new strength.

The idea that people didn't understand any of that when answering the surveys and they wouldn't have wanted it if they did is frankly absurd.

Except that we have people on these very forums who voted for items and didn't like the end product we got. This isn't a hypothetical. It's a plain fact that the poll was not as transparent as it should have been.

There was a specific reason why they went with items as they are now and not have APB as the standard:

The polls heavily weighted towards people actively liking the fact that they got a +1 sword, or that their magic sword dealt that much more damage rather than a run of the mill sword from the blacksmith.

The polls were badly worded and never really made it clear what the outcomes would be. It could easily be argued that people weren't aware of what they were voting for and that people who voted in favour of item bonuses were dissatisfied with the outcome.

That said, since (once more) APB or not, property runes are a thing, I don't see why you aren't seeing them as flavorful.

I think it's less that they aren't flavourful and more that they're also a straight power boost. There's also another issue with them: what happens when one has multiple elemental property runes? The flaming sword is easy enough to describe, but a flaming, icing, electric sword isn't something easy to conceptualize.

Same thing for plain-ol potency runes. You can say that it's a +3 greater striking sword, or you can say that it's a blade with gleaming runes on it, so sharp that it cuts through air itself, and that goes through stone like it's made out of butter despite being as light as a feather and as easy to maneuver with. Both are mechanically the same, but narratively different.

Light as a feather and as easy to manoeuvre with doesn't work as those traits would also suggest a decrease in bulk for said weapon which is not supported by the rules. Cutting the air itself is also something that could have a mechanical effect, cutting CO2 into C + O + O to create oxygen and remove a toxin which is again unsupported by the rules.

I'm sorry a couple of things, first if you are new to the system why would you be trying to play a variant version of the game? That leads to one thing Teridax keeps complaining about what if a new GM decides to use ABP, I'm sorry but that makes absolutely no sense. You don't know the system well enough to make the judgements and calls needed with ABP, and I say the same thing for any variant of the system. I can't muster up feeling bad because someone new decided to try a variant without really knowing or understanding the base game and how it works. Oh and immediately jumping to the worse possible outcome presented and ignoring the other possibilities is not having a discussion in good faith. It's been done several times in this thread.

I can see the appeal. Rather than worrying about when to hand out new magic items and customizing loot tables for your party, you can just remove the math-enhancing part of the loot. If you did this in an AP it wouldn't lead to many issues except that casters might be a bit under the gun regarding scrolls, which should hopefully get sorted as the group plays together.

The only situation where using ABP could make things worse for a new GM and their players would be a homebrew campaign where the GM is handing out vastly too little treasure and not adjusting encounters. It would be nice if we could close this trap and I think Teridax's suggestion that Paizo remove math fixing and raw power boosts from items outside the scope of ABP achieves that goal. This also opens up the ability to make more items more interesting such that they require creativity to use rather than a list full of duds and must-haves.

Even with ABP as the GM you could decide to decouple it from levels by shifting bonuses a half level earlier than they "should" be. This way, the party still get a raw mathematical power bump between levels even if the other items you give them are more fun or utility-focused. We don't need to act like there is no way to provide the party with a mid-level boost using ABP.

I don't really get this part of the complaint.

Like yeah the PF2 wizard is bland and boring with janky spell mechanics and no central theme, but so are the other wizards you mention. The biggest difference between them is that the latter are much stronger, but simply being overpowered isn't the same as being flavorful or interesting.

If anything, class feats, thesis, and school mechanics are a clear way to increase definition, even if I think some of them fall flat.

Obviously everyone has their own take, but it's hard for me to look at the 3.5 wizard, which doesn't even really have class features, and pretend it has a more fleshed out identity.

The 3.5 Wizard was the best meta magic user in the game if DMM was (correctly) banned or nerfed only to use base uses of turn undead. It also had schools with meaningful drawbacks, some of the best skills in the game due to maxing intelligence, and access to a spell list that hadn't been slashed to ribbons to make Occult and Primal spell traditions a thing. They were only really bland in the same way that every class in 3.5 was bland.

Tremaine wrote:

Kobold Catgirl wrote:

"Because putting out new under-reviewed content at a fast and reckless rate is a big part of how RPGs become worse over time," right? I mean, that feels like an easy one.

hard disagree, especially with the ease of publishing erratas in blog posts etc, any issues with that are more than offset by how constrained and weak all PF2 characters feel, not unplayably so, but this game is such a slog, with no 'g!%&*& I feel cool' moments that stand out to me, the fact that monsters are totally untethered from pc classes really doesn't help.

I'm sorry I couldn't hear you over the sound of the cleric nuking a 60ft radius circle 200ft away while the gunslinger triggers 5 crit effect off runes and their unique shooting action.

But also have you seen the speed at which major gaming companies publish errata, even for purely digital games.

Games workshop had vastly improved on their errata and balance cycles for a game with a lot of moving parts and no GM to adjudication things. Before they went under Privateer Press was also very good at managing a living ruleset.

[T]hat is a decision at the Paizo company level that should be guided by the narrative direction of Golarion, not some players’ desire to port in characters from other IPs.

Is it unreasonable to expect characters designed for Golarion as it existed in PF1 to have a home in PF2?

"Because putting out new under-reviewed content at a fast and reckless rate is a big part of how RPGs become worse over time," right? I mean, that feels like an easy one.

"I like options and would rather the developers give me more to work with and allow me to make balance choices that work for my table. I have the time and desire to filter through the PF1 model of content release and would prefer that rather than the current conservative paradigm that PF2 has adopted."

My issue with archetypes like this are that they don't really work to enable new builds. They're afterthoughts that very narrowly fit with some specific builds. If you want to play a thematic build, like a Swarmkeeper Druid, that's not on that narrow band you are actively hurting yourself.

They also close the door to a better version, like a new class or class archetype that might be a better chance to bring that concept to life.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Unicore wrote:

“Golarion exists in a world where there are 4 traditions of magic. Elemental magic, especially elemental specialization, is very much the domain of primal magic, and there are a lot of casters who do that well. Wizards are arcane casters. They dabble in many other types of magic, but can’t really specialize in magics from other traditions.”

Is pretty simple, honest and direct.

That runs hard into the objection, "But I was able to build this in PF1, why are my options so limited now?"

"Because PF2E has been out for five years, and isn't expressly backwards compatible with D&D 3.0/3.5 like PF1E was, which was also out for ten years" would be my guess, at least in part.

"If PF2 is meant to be better why does it have less options than the old version? I miss when we got more rules in more frequent chunks."

“Golarion exists in a world where there are 4 traditions of magic. Elemental magic, especially elemental specialization, is very much the domain of primal magic, and there are a lot of casters who do that well. Wizards are arcane casters. They dabble in many other types of magic, but can’t really specialize in magics from other traditions.”

Is pretty simple, honest and direct.

That runs hard into the objection, "But I was able to build this in PF1, why are my options so limited now?"

The guys in the 70s did it differently than the current system. You might have actually like it a little more than the current one as they gave weapons initiative modifiers if they were large and unwieldy. For a long time, two-handed weapons were not great to use because they were slow to bring to bear during initiative having a later segment modifier for initiative.

A lot of spells were this way too requiring a certain number of segments to cast. Initiative was divided up into 10 segments or something like that. I can't remember exactly. But lighter, faster weapons were easier to bring to bear and faster than their larger counterparts. That's why for a long time using a single one handed weapon was the best way to fight in the early days of D&D. Two-weapon fighting if you happen to roll ambidexterity was king.

I've read the rules for those older editions but never played them so they weren't top of mind when I made my comment. My understanding is that things were more interesting back then with Wizards needing their party to buy time and space for them to cast their spells, Clerics being offensive duds but supportive powerhouses, etc.

Two-handed weapons reached their current power in 3rd edition that removed any sense of how hard it was to wield a weapon in combat.

I think this simple and martial weapon designation started in 3E, but maybe 2nd edition. Not absolutely sure.

Most of 3rd evolved out of 2e house rules so it wouldn't surprise me if weapon categories existed in some late 2e splatbook.

----------

My quip may have failed, but the point that Paizo really should ditch the weapon and armor system cribbed from 3.x D&D already stands. A lot of the worst parts of PF2 come from wanting to cling to things people who played 5e D&D or PF1 would find familiar.

So what is the honest point of them? Are they only there for early game casters so they aren't spamming cantrips?

They're a lazy holdover inherited from D&D that didn't make sense then and which continues to not make any sense now. There are better ways to have weapons feel different without just lumping weapons into categories and gating using them behind proficiency.

I favour unlocking the ability to use weapon keywords behind the user's level of proficiency. Trained lets you swing a weapon for full damage, but you'd only get the most basic traits unlocked, Expert unlocks using traits like trip, Master unlocks critical specialization, and then Legendary lets you pick a trait from a list to give to that weapon which represents your unique mastery with it. Each weapon still has traits and some might be better in the hands of less skilled users, but no weapon is off-limits or gated behind a feat tax.

Why are you asking such an open-ended question? Real life and fantasy games are very different. There would be a lot of dependent factors in real life.

Simple and martial weapons is an easy way to demarcate different weapons in a fantasy game looking for easy rules to provide some moderately meaningful difference between weapons.

In real life, there is a lot more that goes into a fight between two people using highly different weapons. Absent any specifics, I would expect the sword wielder to win due to superior range as physical range is huge in fights for those that know how to use it which is why length and size are big in fighting sports. A skilled sword fighter should be able to strike and rip apart a knife wielder using the blade's superior attack range.

I was pointing out the absurdity of the current system. We all know that a sword is just a bigger knife and that a sword beats a knife 9 times out of 10 yet we turn that part of our brain off when looking at PF2's weapon categories.

In a more developed system, something that wasn't cribbed from guys in the 70's who didn't know a Katzbalger from a Morning Star, all weapons could be similar with weapon proficiency serving to unlock advanced techniques for that weapon. This would still get across the idea that a Wizard shouldn't be swinging a sword that often without the logic pretzels involved in the current way of categorizing weapons.

I think simple weapons is a good enough designation for weapons any person can pick up and put to use. Clubs, spears, maces, daggers. Easy to wield weapons requiring little skill to put to use.

Martial weapons require more training and skill to use with more traits for other uses in combat.

So if I ask you to pick up a knife and go against a person of equal skill and physical ability who is armed with a sword who do you expect to do better in the ensuing fight?

Darksol, you're looking at it backwards. Warrior Bards don't make Strikes just to proc Martial Performance. They make Strikes because they're Warrior Bards; Martial Performance is a rider, not a reason.

The Warrior Bard isn't casting spells every turn, and only throwing in a token Strike out of obligation every so often because they "have" to use the feat they're stuck with. The Warrior Bard is making Strikes when they have a good opportunity to do so already, with or without Martial Performance. They've already chosen to make both Strikes and spells, and will continue to do so even if you strip them of all their feats.

So, don't look at it as "wasting a turn to use Martial Performance vs. playing correctly to use Lingering Composition", because that's the wrong mindset. It's a question of whether a Bard that's already making Strikes still wants Lingering Composition, or whether the new Martial Performance will be good enough to let them forego it.

That just sounds like a worse way to play a bard. Support for a suboptimal option needs to be more than just a rider.

It is good for the game to be able to use different resources to get the same result. For example, investing in Battle Medicine, using magic or buying potions to heal in combat.

Giving it for free reduces the variety and thus the fun.

In combat healing with Medicine should still be a feat as it steps on the toes of entire character archetypes. I just want out of combat recovery to be decoupled from the need for one player in a party to invest in a specific skill.

In terms of fitting the narrative and not jarring players with something that feels too gamey, I'd frame it roughly like this:

"Even the rawest adventurer has faced their share of close calls and tight scrapes which is why every adventurer has some ability to tend to the wounds of themselves and their companions."

Then you make a single skill feat to improve you Medicine skill to where Battle Medicine has it now. It means that every party has the free out of combat healing that the system seems to assume they'll have while still having a cost to compete with a magical healer.

That's slightly harder to justify than perception. Everyone is to some degree or another perceptive. Not everyone has an MD, or even basic field surgery training. I certainly don't in real life.

Remember, this is one of the many things that made lots of people very angry about D&D 4e - the fact that out-of-combat healing was something everyone got in the form of healing surges. It was panned as being "unrealistic" and "overly gamist."

Pathfinder 2e has avoided this via (fairly unrealistic) Medicine rules. D&D 5e has avoided it via letting people spend hit dice out of combat to regain hit points. Which is basically the same thing as 4e healing surges, except it takes an hour rather than 5 minutes and goes down better with AD&D/3.x players who like hit dice.

I'd justify it as something that sets adventurers apart from normal folks who might brave danger. A soldier, might or might not have medical training but would usually have somebody they can turn to to heal them, but an adventurer used to long odds and being self-sufficient probably wouldn't last long without it.

It's more of a stretch than Perception, but if it's good for gameplay it's a change that can be justified.

Captain Morgan wrote:

For newb tables, it might work better if you just removed skill feats completely.

Errhm. No. You've just proposed to remove Battle medicine. There are at least some more very important ones.

I think the approach 'just take what's needed and don't worry about remaining ones' is good for skill feats.

If non-magical healing is that much of an auto include on at least one character in any given party it should get the Perception treatment and be given to everybody as a class feature.

I could see a Swashbuckler that's already boosting Charisma having fun with this idea.

Neither of those are better than fighters or champions though

I'm pretty sure the optimal Fighter build will take an archetype at some point in their career, but I'm not up on my PF2 Char-Op enough to know what that specific build would look like.

I would absolutely love it if no combination of later published archetypes ever let you build a more powerful character than what you could build with 0 archetype feats, just selecting your own class feats from the classes in the Player Core books.

I'm pretty sure that horse already bolted as archetypes like Sentinel and Mauler tend to be pure upside for the classes that use them.

Assuming this actually happened and isn't just fishing for engagement with a hypothetical scenario, why are you asking us? You're the GM, they're your players, talk to them about any issues with rules abuse and game pacing. Once you know what their reasoning is work with them to fix things so everybody is on the same page and having fun.

For me, I'd be happy if my sessions ran longer because everybody wanted to RP. GMing is fun and I get to have more fun if players are bouncing off an NPC I made or overthinking some lore tidbit I just dropped. If things get off topic or drag on well past the scene being interesting I'll insert some action to get things moving again.

If you're at a point where you view GMing as shift work where you want to clock out "on-time" after every session maybe you're not doing it for the right reasons.

For a four player party I feel like Paizo has done a good job of making sure you never have everything you'd want no matter how you build. That said, it seems like Fighter, Champion, Starlit Span Magus, and Bard would cover most of what you'd want.

Taking that party up an member I think a Druid would add the most. Going to 6 I'd add a Rogue.

Your base party has a pair of frontliners who can work together to maximize their reactions. While the backliners can focus on ranged damage and utility with their spells. Champion and Bard cover healing. There is enough skill coverage to tackle pretty much anything to a good enough level.

The Druid in a 5 man party would take a lot of healing pressure away from the rest of the party while bringing AoE damage, the ability to be a third man up on the frontline, and of course utility from being a caster.

The Rogue brings Legendary perception, covers skills well, and is a dedicated 3rd man in on the frontline.

I think there are other builds that can work, but this feels like it spreads out to cover just about everything a party actually needs.

I proposed a similar idea where the Guardian can spend an action to closely watch an enemy and shout a warning to his allies when the Guardian sees it start to do something threatening.

It would be 1 action, grant all allies with 30ft. an extra reaction against that foe attacking them, dealing damage to them, or forcing them to make a save. You could keep the current class DC based save from taunt and set the values for the reactions there, or set them to some flat bonus like an effective +1 AC, +1 to a single save, or some value of damage reduction.

Thematically it's you being vigilant and ready to call out a warning to allies too far away for you to body block for them.

Some rooms in AV are so tight that you might not even be able to get all your melee combatants adjacent to an enemy to hit them, which renders the ability to lock an enemy in a specific space almost meaningless. That's not where you want a core class feature to be.

Were these situations where the room was one Level +2 enemy or rooms where the Guardian could have switched targets and isolated a lesser threat 1-v-1 while the rest of the team cuts down the main baddy?

HeHateMe wrote:

RPG-Geek wrote:

I don't see what the Guardian is actively doing to stand out and take their share of the spotlight in battle.

That's what I've been saying as well. To be a priority target, you have to be some sort of threat, like a fireball-tossing Sorcerer or a giant raging Barbarian. Taunt isn't mind control, and any intelligent enemy can immediately dismiss the Guardian as a threat once that enemy has seen how poorly they swing their sword. An intelligent enemy would save the Guardian for last, after killing the rest of the party.

To really do their job as a Defender, the Guardian needs more OFFENSE.

What about stopping other threats from being able to do what they do to your party's fireball-tossing Sorcerer or a giant raging Barbarian?

I think there is room for a class that does that by reacting to enemies and shutting them down. It just would be nice to also get to punish them abit while you do it.

My issue is that reactivity and being on the defensive is usually a sign that something has failed. Planning to take hits for your allies and to redirect damage is essentially an admission that you don't feel like your party is capable of being proactive and forcing the enemy to dance to your tune. Even the Champion has an offensive game plan that revolves around enabling your other melee threats with reactive strikes and positioning to flank enemies.

The Guardian is trading too much offense and proactivity for defense and leaving itself as half a class by doing so.

I've read the thread and it seems like Taunt is a bit awkward and none of the fixes seem amazing.

My take is that Taunt is meant to fill the role of a way to interact with enemies outside of your immediate reach who are threatening your allies, so what if instead of doing that by trying to force enemies to change targets we instead shout a warning to our allies? Rather than Taunting you spend an action so you're ready to give a Vigilant Warning to your allies about action(s) taken by your targeted foe. Your make a check, as with current taunt, and grant your allies the option of taking a bonus to AC, bonus to a single save, or temporary HP. You lose the upside of sometimes redirecting the attack entirely and gain flexibility to defend your charges from different kinds of threats.

It's more what I'd picture a defender in a fantasy setting doing and can be flavored as a shouted warning, a distracting jibe, or any other action that can plausibly be credited with giving your team an extra fraction of a second to defend themselves. It also leaves you without any bonus defense and could still incentivize the enemy to hit you without needing to lower your defense to do so.

The thing that I find odd about the idea of a Tank or Defender class in the TTRPG space is that you can't find that many examples of them in fiction or reality and very few of those examples match what the Guardian is designed to do. IRL body guards do occasionally intercept fire meant for their charges, but more often they're a proactive deterrent sweeping the area or manning a checkpoint that a potential threat needs to pass through to interact with their charge. Most RPGs don't have dedicated tanks, they more often have bruiser type characters that fit the tough but slow archetype who hit hard but often suffer in accuracy or by attacking more slowly than their companions. The only places you see Tanks are in MMOs and MOBAs.

This lack of exemplars in fiction already makes it hard to picture what this type of class should be. Is a modern lightly armored guy in a black suit? Is is a knight in plate who specializes in defense? Is it a hulking bruiser who would tank hits well even if they weren't wearing armor? I can see the friction between these ideas in the various subclasses of Guardian people are asking for. What I'm not seeing is how you'd take the playtest Guardian and write them as anything other than the tough secondary character who dies halfway through the movie to show just how strong the main antagonist is.

I don't see what the Guardian is actively doing to stand out and take their share of the spotlight in battle.