Razgriz 1's page

You won't won't lose these things when you fall, no. But because you never had anything supernatural in the first place I'm not even sure if it counts as falling.

It's like joining a order of paladins to learn how to fight and saying "so long suckers" after getting trained.

You take the 35% chance of failing the first.

Then you calculate 65% of 35% which gives you 22.75%. This is the chance that you'll get less than 8 the first time but then get 8 or more the second.

Now you either add 65% + 22.75% or you subtract 100% by (35% - 22.75%). Both should give you 87.75% which is the total chance of you succeeding at either roll.

Would spells feel better if they only had a binary system: failing the save gives the failed result without a chance for critical and a successful result does nothing? Because that honestly seems a lot worse to me, but it would get rid of the perception that spells are meant to fail.

I don't think the sucess result is what makes it feel like the spells are meant to fail, it's more the different results plus the rate to hit spells versus at level enemies. Even the lowest save will have better than 50% chance to resist a spell many times. In a sense they are meant to fail (and the failed result still be useful).

To keep using your example, if you remove the crit fails and made a sucessful save make a spell do nothing, the spell would be underpowered and increasing the chance for the spell to hit would make it balanced again, and that would make the spell not look like it was designed to fail even if it would introduce other problems (more binary gameplay and making incapacitation spells even more useless versus bosses, because the incapacitate would always bring the failure into a sucess, that would then do nothing).

A player arguing with the GM after he decides to ban something seems more like a player problem than a rule problem.

I feel like the same thing happens with these players regardless of rarity:

GM bans for the aforementioned reasons, player complains, GM > Player so the rule stays, player then decides if he plays anyways/looks for another group/doesn't play Pathfinder at all.

What continues to bother me, especially as I've read through the two Lost Omen books is that people buy these books. Pay 40 dollars a book for things they can't use unless the GM says so. There is no wholly player facing product anymore. Its all on the GM which means that the GM either bears a higher expense or you risked buying a fancy book of neat Schrodinger's Character Options.

It doesn't solve the problem of someone buying product they can't use. It doesn't solve the issue of new rules options being put into the adventure backmatter.

It was always like this, if a DM felt like something was too strong or didn't fit the campaign in a expansion book he'd just disallow it, if he disliked a big enough part of the book he'd just ban the whole book instead of picking and choosing the parts he wanted.

But all three answers below are equally valid and reasonable:
* "yes"
* "no"
* "maybe"/"don't know"/"haven't decided yet"

In the last case the player will simply have to suck it up. After all there are rules for retraining available if the feature ends up not being introduced after all.

In short, it's perfectly understandable if you tell your player not to build a character reliant on any uncommon features. In fact, that's very good advice in general.

Yeah but in the third case scheduling downtime for retraining is also a resource like most things in this game, so while is understandable for a DM to say that it's also understandable for a player to be slightly annoyed at it.

That does mean that your advice to not plan around uncommon things when the DM says that he isn't sure if he'll put them or not gets even more reasonable though.

I believe the +8 to healing would be too strong to put it in the AoE variant anyway.

This way it is now the spell is incredibly flexible, imagine if the different action versions of heal/harm were different spells entirely that you'd need to choose from with the limited number of spells slots in 2E.

I kinda prefer how it is now.