Squiggit's page

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.

I can understand a trap being gated behind perception proficiency, even if I'm also not a fan. Traps are meant to be hidden; an obvious trap isn't much of a trap.

I mean isn't hiding the trap what the dc is for?

Perception gating doesn't mean it's hard to detect the trap, it means you are literally not allowed and utterly incapable of detecting the trap if you decided to play a fighter with a gun instead of a gunslinger even if you beat the dc by 10 or 20 or 50.

Diagetically you can only really describe it as some sort of divine intervention, not the trap being designed more sneakily.

having guaranteed damage in your pocket for when you run into low hp enemies can be pretty great, tbh. More than a few times bad MAP or just luck has given like a 2 hp enemy an extra turn.

And while the damage looks abysmal on paper, it's actually not quite as bad as it looks when you normalize for accuracy.

Also being one action just makes it kind of a convenient for helping manage action economy.

It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures.

Old D&D had lots of bad rules, yeah. This isn't one that needs to exist anymore.

No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank

Anyone can be a healer with a little bit of feat investment in PF2. Having fast proficiency track is a choice of playing one of a very few specific number of classes with very specific mechanics and themes.

If having someone with high proficiency is intended to be an adventuring requirement, Canny Acumen needs to give master perception and legendary at 13.

Telling someone that a party must have a gunslinger or rogue or whatever because someone at Paizo decided to hard gate this one specific type of check is a clown show.

To be honest I think hazards are only part of it. Hazards are uniquely problematic because of how much they centralize mechanics (a hazard tends to stand alone a lot) but like-

In general I feel like PF2 APs do a shockingly poor job of thinking through their combats. So many fights lack any dynamic components and tend to be wildly all over the place balance wise.

I was recently chugging through an AP that kept insisting on using encounters with one or two level -1 enemies against a full party of people. So I'd send everyone to a battle mat, they'd all roll initiative, kill the enemy in a single hit before it could take a turn, and then move on. There wasn't even like a narrative pretense or mechanical gimmick to it the creature could only strike for like 1d4-1 damage and had no bearing on the plot.

I've been playing APs since PF1 and across like a dozen of them I think there are maybe like... four or five good encounters across all of them.

For how combat centric the game is there's a shocking lack of thought or effort put into fight design.

I guess that biases me a bit in the direction of simple hazards over complex ones. Or treating complex ones as simple ones as soon as the party finds a solution, like "let's step back out of the area and wait it out".

i think simple hazards make the problem even worse, because a lot of simple hazards are just one shot maybe a party member takes a huge amount of damage and then it's over. The time decreases, but the interestingness craters even more.

For me the best hazards are complex hazards with some interesting gimmick or important narrative feature to them. Since you can kind of play around hazards since they're stationary you want them to be something that entices the group in some way. Simple hazards tend to be the worst at this because it's just like... you open the door and the trap rolls high and now you're at low HP or maybe dying (... hell, one of the early PF2 playtest adventures had a trap that could massive damage someone to death if you found it early).

* APs are written once for any possible party composition. Skills used for hazards cannot be tailored to expect characters of a particular type. It is possible for a party to have no characters trained in any given skill.

This flies in the face of the fact that hazards often have proficiency gating that sometimes means certain parties cannot solve the problem. You can run into a trap that nobody is allowed to detect because nobody decided to play one of the small handful of classes with high proficiency. So that's just not true.

Besides, the solution to that is to make the hazards more dynamic and have more ways to overcome them.

If the choice is between errata and people getting paid a better wage, I'm not going to go to miss the errata lmao.

Luckily it's kind of hard to argue that's even a real choice to begin with. It's not like Paizo had some reputation for agile, responsive, and comprehensive errata in 2022 or 2021 or the 2010s that suddenly went away. Bringing up the union at all just feels like weird agenda pushing.

Squiggit wrote:

Why circumstance bonus instead of just plain additional damage? Additional damage is already the default way to handle martial gimmicks, and making it a circumstance bonus would just make rogues and investigators not benefit from a handful of feats and buffs, which doesn't feel necessary.

This is perhaps my own excessive personal tendency, but I'd prefer it if bonuses were more consistently typed and tied into existing systems, as it would limit stacking and allow existing effects to be stronger if needed. Strikes in 2e I feel already have a bit of an issue with tracking in that they eventually end up with this rainbow assortment of damage from property runes that can each trigger different weaknesses, resistances, immunities, and other effects. Although I know of several different status bonuses to damage, I'm struggling to think of that many circumstance bonuses to damage besides the forceful or twin traits, though this is likely more my own ignorance than anything else, as those feats and buffs likely do exist.

There's a handful of specialty feats, most notably like ancestry feats that give you a circumstance bonus against a certain type of enemy. It's not common though.

While I agree broadly about limiting stackability, I feel like it's not a bad design principle for martial class features to be uncategorized because they're more about the baseline assumptions of the class. Sneak attack, rage, exemplar immanences, etc. aren't really buffs they're core to how the class operates. Creating scenarios where rogues can't use the twin trait feels janky to me rather than sensible, even if it's somewhat of a niche issue.

Real OGs are nodding their head to memories of the old FAQ button on forum posts, the highly sporadic answers, and then its silent removal without any explanation or replacement for the longest time.

50 page thread with hundreds of FAQ requests where nobody can figure out how a certain ability works that gets hit with a "no clarification needed" post after like three years.

One problem with assigning like, prescriptive benefits like that is that players don't have that much control over their builds. You can't choose to switch out your precision damage for something slightly worse or different to better handle oozes, you just don't get your damage... and precision damage isn't widely available enough that balancing how much to invest in it is a consideration you can even make.

Plus enemy typing just isn't consistent enough to even be able to make those balance calls. Many campaigns will never encounter precision immune enemies in any serious encounter. Some campaigns will be stuffed full of them such that you're advised to just not play those classes at all, so it doesn't really work as a balancing measure.

Like an Ooze's statblock could just say "takes less damage from rogues, swashbucklers, and investigators" (maybe a couple other things that I'm missing) and practically very little would change. That's kinda stupid.

The communication is a bit of a bummer. I mean I will always want more rules discussion and errata and am somewhat confused by what Paizo's workflow looks like with the way some questions get handled.

But finding out it's been canceled only because a CM started digging around, only a few days before the last possible interpretation of fall, when the implication seems to be that they decided against publishing Fall errata a while ago but didn't want to bother saying anything is kind of a bummer. Especially considering the last errata was on the small side, and that this whole periodic errata thing was an idea the company itself put out there and has already seemingly decided to move on from.

Everything else aside, the vibe I keep getting that like... every few months we send Maya into the offices to skitter around looking for clues to bring back to us is jut a little... weird? There has to be a better way to deliver information.

What does everyone else think about precision immunity?

Bad mechanic that just makes certain classes weirdly terrible in certain encounter setups.

PF2 doesn't have the per-character tactical nuance to make this kind of encounter fun, so you end up just feeling s!#$ty whenever this happens.

Same reason premaster golems sucked, because if you were the wrong kind of caster you could easily end up with just a fight where you can't meaningfully participate.

And once again, all of these issues completely vanish if we just redact a single dev forum post and have bonus damage *not* create separate instances.

But in turn your proposed change has other knock on effects, like letting you resist more damage than you take (if an enemy has fire resistance 5, adding 1 fire damage to an attack is actually a debuff), makes creatures with previously stackable weaknesses stronger and ones with previously stackable resistances weaker, and makes the thaumaturge notably worse by making their martial buff compete directly with other forms of weakness.

It's definitely a solution, and maybe even better overall if implemented properly, but it's not some consequence free panacea either.

The first problem alone I know has been enough of a dealbreaker in previous discussions to just leave some people playing it the other way instead.

If that procedure is being run without special pleading hypocrisy, then every type-instanced bucket is genuinely a separate instance, and each one gets reduced by the Holy resist independent of each other.

I think one of the reasons you tend to have so much difficulty with the rules is that you like to get away from arguing the actual point of contention and instead create these fanciful edge cases that do not actually exist to debate instead.

Like, nobody does this and there's no RAW or RAI anywhere to suggest you should apply the same resistance ten times to a single attack or whatever. It's not a thing.

When a major component of your rhetoric involves inventing positions that nobody made to argue against, it might be worth reconsidering your approach, because it means you're either building a strawman or fundamentally misunderstanding the entire topic. Neither of these are great things for building understanding of the game.

I'd be kind of fascinated to sit in at one of these tables where a dude with trick magic item, alchemist and psychic dedications is completely trivializing the game because it's so far away from any experience I've ever had as a GM or player, but some people here seem to swear by it.

It gives you a LOT for a single feat, including the signature ability of the class.

I don't agree with the 'signature ability' part. Amps are a unique presentation of the mechanic, but focus spells are basically never gatekept. Being able to pick up a psychic's focus spells via dedication is wildly unremarkable, you can do this with almost any caster.

The bigger problem with the Psychic itself is its innately better focus recharging is relatively much less valuable post remaster and Unleash simply does not carry weight for the class' inferior spellcasting and weak chassis.

But no amount of nerfing the dedication will improve those things.

So when the first line says 'foes' in the first line, that isn't the game term of 'enemy' used when talking about ally and enemy.

What do yo think the word means, then?

In addition to issues with the mechanics definitions and errata, it's also just sort of awkwardly implemented and leads to odd scenarios that feel more like clumsy happenstance than well thought out design by making class feats and archetyping awkward, and interacting weirdly with certain items or features that key to class DC.

It just doesn't feel like intentional or clever game design when a druid passes over on something because it uses the class dc that doesn't scale for them, or when a high level artifact with a class DC feature is best used by a Soldier or Kineticist.

It's also not really a diegetic feature and nothing you can ever improve directly, so a lot of times when I'm actively dealing with class DC it's in an instance where an unclear interaction or dumb quirk causes it to make the game worse in some small way.

they also alter it so that it can't be used with Focus spells full stop.

If the concern is magi archetyping too much a better fix would be to add an in class focus attack spell. That would take pressure off archetyping without gutting certain cool build designs or any other fallout.

Man Class DC really is such a terrible mechanic.

But for the others its exactly what i'm describing, its "best in slot" (depending on your character) because its gives you way too much for no investment.

I mean to be clear, psychic dedication is a feat for a focus spell. That's a very nice feat, but not particularly out of bounds with other focus granting options. It's op compared to fighter dedication, but only notably good when we focus on feats that people actually want to take. Do you want Blessed One nerfed too?

Alchemist shouldn't give you full alchemy that easily.

I admittedly don't quite get this one. Alchemist archetype never gives you full alchemy. You can sink as many as six feats into trying to upgrade your alchemy and still only have a fraction of the crafting power and wore DC scaling than a normal one. That's a far cry from full alchemy for no investment.

I'm not sure broad changes are warranted here. Psychic dedication is cool and unobtrusive in many of its use cases. Removing the amp makes a lot of nonproblematic builds worse and less interesting, while also doing nothing to buff the psychic itself either.

The problem here is the very specific mix of imaginary weapon on a starlit span magus. and even that is more about starlit span and the magus' limited good internal focus options (really the magus in general) than it is about IW (though IW's amp is obviously still a lot for them).

Nuking psychic dedication just feels like a lot of extra collateral damage and doesn't even really solve either of the big problems here.

I'm guessing however that your plan was to make the wand give you a per-casting discount as if a bulk scroll.

In PF1 a wand costs 30x what a scroll costs. There's a pretty notable bulk discount there, but that also makes them rather pricy.

Ported 1:1 into PF2, a wand of a 1st level spell would be priced similarly to a 4th-5th level magic item, and a wand of a 4th level spell (the cap for PF1 wands) would be priced like a 12th level magical item. That means they aren't super affordable until you radically outlevel the spell being cast. On level magic items are pretty pricy from a wealth perspective too, so you're looking at waiting even later before they become particularly affordable.

This makes the PF1 wand mostly useful for a spell you want to spam but has enough of an evergreen effect that you don't mind if the spell itself is way out of date. The classic PF1 example is cheap wands of healing that you can spam to quickly get people to full hp, but that's less enticing (though still somewhat appealing) given how many other forms of cheap healing exist in PF2... though I guess you could flip that around and say that something like this means a mid level party would be less pressured to have feats invested in out of combat healing. PF1 wands were also good for very low end utility spells with static or semi static effects where you didn't need any kind of scaling. A lot of these don't exist in PF1 (heightened awareness, rope trick), or would be better as PF2 style wands (2nd rank tailwind, alarm), but there's still some stuff that might be appealing (like fleet step).

In PF1 that's kind of where the value of wands ended, because DCs rank based and boosting CL on wands was expensive... but PF2 doesn't have CL and proficiency gives spells automatic scaling, so PF1 wands in PF2 would be really good on spammable buff/debuff spells. A wand of third level fear would give you 50 castings of a reasonably good AoE debuff. A wand of first level bless would let you stand in for a Bard, a little bit. Stuff like that.

There's definitely some edge cases that might be weird and toe-stepping here, but potentially you can also kind of see a way in which these wands might let you use low level spells to stand-in for certain party composition features, once the party is high enough level to make them cheap, at least.

One upside to focusing on inter-class balance and putting things in unique buckets is that it sort of limits the amount of damage a single flawed option can cause by making it not load bearing. Like, bad balance sucks, but having a really bad option within a class is somewhat mitigated by prioritizing some level of functionality between the classes, since it's more likely to just kill a specific idea than kill an entire class. Balance within each silo is definitely PF2's weakest area... and sometimes I really wonder how they justify publishing certain options that seem so much worse than their counterparts.

PF1's problem was largely in the latter respect, where at some level certain classes or concepts couldn't avoid a bad option because the good option didn't exist.

Like:

On the one hand, yes I do believe that PF1's ability to make Level 20 Angel Summoner as well as the ability to make a Level 20 BMX Bandit to be a strength of the system rather than a weakness partly due to the system being more simulationist and based on a player's freedom of choice to build their character however they want. But

I mean this is kind of a lie, isn't it? They can't "build their character however they want" you can build a character to whatever standards of content Paizo chose to publish, with certain characters having more of a gradient than others.

The ultimate tragedy of the whole Angel Summoner/BMX bandit thing is not that the Angel Summoner can be strong, but that there's an arbitrary cap on how good the Bandit is allowed to be. You can build Angel Summoner down to a level of acceptable play to be nice to the Bandit, but you can only build the Bandit up to a certain point, after which no particularly empowering options exist.

There's no mechanical or narrative necessity to this, merely a quirk of the fact that the company publishing the game didn't write similar options for the Bandit.

To a player who "wants to cast spells" those classes represent the same thing but take different levels of player effort to get the same in character results.

.. Do they thought? The underlying mechanics are similar but the fantasy and type of things being done between the two classes are significantly different. Very little I want to accomplish by being a Wizard is redundant with what I want to accomplish as a Bard. Asking me to play a Bard instead of a Wizard does nothing for me if I wanted something similar to the Wizard.

The fact that as recently as the Tian Xia Guide, Paizo is publishing completely trash feats like Fermenting Liquors is an unprofessional joke.

IDK I feel like this assesment comes on a little strong? It's not a good feat, and I'm a little bewildered at who decided it should be 1/day. It definitely should be 1/hour or 1/ten minutes or something but... I'd probably still pick it over Inured to Alchemy.

Arguably the worst thing about this feat is that Guidance exists which makes any other form of +1 to skill checks feel kind of redundant. Though even then an hour long bonus might be okay if you're making checks frequently.

...The biggest turnoff of PF2? Really? I can think of like a dozen better reasons and I like PF2. I don't think any of my friends who prefer PF1 have ever mentioned weapon size even in passing.

the complaints of 1e GMs who came to Paizo complaining that their players had too many ways of affecting the narrative in any meaningful fashion.

This is such an oddly antagonistic way to describe the GM-player relationship.

Plus you realize a 1e GM can effortlessly stop you from doing anything they don't want to at any time too, right? You're always constrained by what the table will allow you to get away with in every system.

These kinds of commenters aren't unique to PF2E. What's unique to PF2E, though, is the quantity and concentration of them.

It's... really not. Like even remotely. 5e forums are this way. Lancer communities are this way. PF1 and 3.5 were this way when they were more popular. Even more expressively narrative systems like World of Darkness get this kind of talk. "TTRPG company released something that's really good/really bad and people are talking about it" is just like, a standard component of discourse in these kinds of games. The variance you see is mostly a matter of how crunchy the system is, you see it more in PF2 and less in PBTA, because the system rules are more/less weighty. But like... people talking more about the crunch of a crunch heavy system than a system that isn't meant to be crunchy also is kind of a self evident revelation.

Like IDK you're just describing one of the most normal aspects of online discussion for crunchy TTRPGs and then framing it as something special about PF2. The reality is this is just how people talk about games like this. Like people complaining about how bad the 5e ranger is is basically its own meme.

The balance-heavy ethos draws in a crowd that's fairly picky about how different classes and options stack up against each other; a single option out of whack really starts to dominate the discussion.

I'm really confused as to why you think this is some special feature of PF2. Like I can't really think of any crunch heavy, splatbook based tabletop where people don't talk about new options in a power sense if they're really out of line one way or another. It would be really bizarre if people didn't. The only TTRPGs where this doesn't feature prominently are ones that aren't mechanics forward and/or don't rely on splatbooks (and even then you'll still find mechanically minded discussions on stuff, just less).

If I were paizo, I don't know if I'd want to make another system where I'd have to keep such a tight eye on the content of every single splatbook to keep those more vocal parts of the playerbase from being annoyed

.. I also don't really get the suggestion that quality assurance is primarily an issue of staving off angry fanboys. Do you think there isn't any inherent value in trying to deliver a well written product?

.. I'm also not even sure if the idea lines up with reality. Paizo gets dinged in community circles arguably even more often for being too conservative in its design choices, not too out there... Paizo products also come out with a lot of editing mistakes that sometimes get corrected very slowly. Not that they're releasing bad products, but it doesn't really suggest there's some intense hypervigilance in QA and editing that's being implied here.

It's that unarmed attacks are not weapons, natural or otherwise.

They're also not attacks... and they function like weapons in every way except in ways specific to weapons themselves.

The terminology is kind of terrible, tbh. Can't blame people too much for struggling with the wording a bit.

I kind of really dislike the notion that because they primarily use as same language they "never progressed as a culture" as if they're like fundamentally stunted in some way.

Language is an important part of culture, but there are dozens of societies both in game and in real life that share languages in common while still having deep and rich cultural uniqueness. I really dislike and vehemently disagree with the suggestion that not having a unique language makes some group culturally stunted or lesser.

There is no way that a class that has access to supernova and black hole at level 4 can be considered undertuned (I strongly suspect the scaling on supernova will be scaled back at some point).

I sort of disagree. Supernova is a nice feat, but I also think that if broadly speaking a class doesn't work right unless you take certain specific load bearing feat choices it's still probably fair to call the class generally undertuned. The really good classes in SF/PF2 have a wide variety of options because they just work on a basic level.

Like there's no way we can call a class healthily balanced when the advice starts with picking some very specific feats and probably ignoring a bunch of your core class features in the process.

But in this edition the class has really lost its way.

I mean let's be real here, it never really had a way. The biggest thing PF2 did to destroy its 'identity' over older editions was make it less overpowered, which says a lot about what the class actually does.

That said, having a class that's generic and self referential isn't necessarily bad. The wizard is mostly just a little bit underbaked and saddled with a terrible casting mechanic.

Yeah, any recall knowledge about the tenets of your own faith should qualify, sill doesn't matter. It only specifies the action and subject.

The fact that people deride the attempt to structure arguments and cite rules is insane. For me, any attempt to state what is RAW with no reference to actual rules text is a big red flag for 'this is just my opinion/homebrew'.

Think there's something about stones and glass houses here, since most of your position is kind of just... vibes based and has nothing to do with RAW.

Don't get me wrong that's a fine way to make judgements on ambiguous stuff like this for your games, but it's weird to try to assert some sort of moral superiority about RAW here when you're drifting off into irrelevant tangents about real world historical techniques and 'metas' that don't really have anything to do with rules either.

You just have to have it match your class fantasy.

TBH I think the class itself has some issues with fantasy.

Like at first read the Thaumaturge sounds very technical, a weird scrappy occultist martial with a collection of esoteric gimmicks, but in practice it's still just very much a kind of standard PF2 martial.

I've had more than a few players like the OP jump on the class with some wild ideas and then get frustrated by how much they end up being just a regular martial striking things.

It's a good class but I think there ends up being some mismatched expectations with the way it sort of looks on the surface.

Magnetic Pinions lets you target up to three creatures with an attack that does 1d4 bludgeoning and 1d4 piercing. There's no described mechanic for altering the way it does damage.

... So yes, you can target just one person with the ability... for 1d4 bludgeoning and 1d4 piercing damage. That's all the ability does and I'm not sure why your player thinks there's some hidden second effect here.

- There are three or four times as many PF2 classes as there are SF2 classes. The result would be that people would go in interested in playing SF2, only to find that it's just PF2 2: Now Electric.

I mean it is, but also the opening premise of this was a player who didn't want to play any of the Starfinder classes. So this reads more like a solution than a problem.

The systems do have different balance and assumptions.

Marginally, but mostly in terms at what levels certain options come online, and most of those options favor Starfinder anyways. The underlying math and most of the mechanical guidelines are literally the same. The idea that they're operating on totally different wavelengths is super overblown.

It's a means a lot of system bleed.

Is it system bleed if we're just talking about two different things built for the same system?

Like it sounds like you're just sort of arguing against splatbooks in general.

Your issues with Dex aren't really going to be solved by just more classes, it's kind of baked into the system, Dex was a key stat in PF2 and it's only exacerbated by SF2's extra emphasis on ranged.

I also feel like any potential discussion of class options here is going to get clouded by your very offhand subjective assessments of things. I feel like you either need to explain your thoughts more, or maybe not talk about that at all since which sublcasses are good doesn't really seem to be like the meat of what you want to talk about.

I do generally agree that six classes is kind of a sad opening for the system, especially with some of them not having a lot of built in build variety making them pretty narrow.

... but I guess it's also worth pointing out that there are 27 other classes made for the same system you can go add to your games if you want. That would help variety a lot while waiting for more dedicated SF options.

TBH that's kind of my trouble making a definitive ruling here. The argument against spends a lot of time inventing concepts that aren't in the rules. Disentangling this. Isolating that. Toying with order of operations rules that don't exist. We're less in the realm of discussing concrete rules and more devising convenient inferences in order to reach a predetermined goal.

FWIW, metamagic already works like that - there's no case of a compound action involving Casting A Spell also benefitting from metamagic or catalysts, and items that Activate to cast instead of flat out having Cast a SPelldon't count either

I can't think of any metamagic feat that you use after casting a spell. Do you have an example of the interaction you're talking about?

Man I'm not going to lie. Inclusivity is important but if someone sat down at one of my tables and hit me with the whole "humiliation of being forced to pledge servitude to the divine" thing I think it would be pretty hard for me not to be suspicious of them.
Particularly the combination of strangely self-inserting language (the phrasing of some of the comments suggests the player themselves feels like they're being forced to join a religion) with the whole 'demanding to play a cleric but I fundamentally hate clerics' thing along with the goalpost shifting, I'm just a little worried about what their table behavior would be like even if I gave them their way.

Not to mention that Pathfinder religion doesn't even really resemble real religion contextually in the first place, so the whole frame of reference and constant nods to 'real world' issues feels out of place and damaging.

I'd probably suggest they find another game. Like, not to try to gatekeep but I genuinely don't know how someone that antagonistic could function properly in a tabletop setting, especially one that so prominently features the thing they're so antagonistic toward.

No, the perception and detection rules starting on p.424 go into more detail about dim light and darkness. Shadow connection doesn't say it works against darkvision, so we have to assume it functions as usual

I don't agree.

Darkvision defeats the normal effects of dim light, but the Shadow connection explicitly gives concealed as an additional effect, which Darkvision doesn't interact with at all.

If the intent is for someone with darkvision to bypass the concealment that sentence should be removed because that's just how dim light works normally.

They probably wanted to leave open a means for reloading to be a part of the game that matters.

It's possible, but that just makes it weird that laser weapons get bigger rather than the other way around.

I think it's a little unfair to assume people who dislike a certain anathema design are only mechanically focused. Sometimes the problem with an anathema is that it limits or overly prescribes certain roleplaying options.

A big part of it imo comes down to how much does the restriction logically follow some element within the setting. Secondarily is how much does that restriction connect to a core ability that has mechanical or thematic significance. There is a mechanical element, but I think the bigger concern is how strong the mechanics-roleplay alignment is vs how arbitrary it might feel.

So I think a cleric's deity anathema works fairly well because the versimilitude is high, it connects directly to an in universe force with a congruous nature and (in one of the most incredibly bizarre D&Disms there is) your choice of deity has weirdly little mechanical significance.

But like-... the premaster Dragon Barbarian gave you two options for defining your relationship with dragons. You either revere and can't defy them, or you hate and must kill them. A mechanics only player can simply choose to hate an evil dragon because that's pretty safe and not worry very much, but anyone who has a roleplay concept that doesn't fall within those bounds just doesn't get to make their character, and unlike say... a druid being told not to pollute the thematic pull of the anathema was pretty weak.

The champion example is interesting, and definitely ties to mechanics more, but I do think it comes down a lot to the way those limitations are defined.

Like Justice = Retribution is a very specific (and somewhat awkward in modern contexts) relationship that can feel a little bit constraining... though admittedly the current anathemas are pretty soft. This was more a problem premaster when these abilities were tied to alignments, which effectively gave each alignment one specific way to be a champion which was a little not great.

There is, but the mechanic isn't codified. It's "you piss off your patron or work against their goals." Your patron can withdrawl their power at any time for basically any reason.

Sort of, yeah. As a GM I can ad hoc stuff like this and I agree that the game is better for having it this way, but in terms of rules and mechanics Witch has about as much related to losing their powers as a Fighter does, which imo feels a little bit odd design wise given the way anathemas were being used at the time.

It's less that this is bad, just to me there's a funny incongruity between some of the highly prescriptive CRB anathemas and then the Witch dropping not that long after without even a nod to the idea of losing power.

I think it depends a bit on the context, like I think they work okay for clerics because buying into the anathema is a core thematic tenant and has good flavor/mechanics harmony... and for the most part most mainstream anathema are not written to be stupid or obnoxious to follow. Plus like, since a significant part of choosing a deity is roleplay to begin with, having those restrictions doesn't feel as bad. Like if I'm choosing to make a cleric of a certain deity the idea that I'd want to abide by their tenants sort of follows naturally, which diminishes how much friction the anathema create.

I dislike anathema that don't seem to clearly come from something or tie into a core theme. Premaster Barbarians had anathema and they always felt really strange to me because the Barbarian's power source is so nebulous, and the anathema didn't always necessarily tie to a central theme that made intuitive sense.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Barbarian, I'm happy they don't but Witch always stood out to me as kind of an odd counter example because there's no class in the game whose power source relies more on a direct link to a being of power. Your familiar is explicitly an agent of your patron and hex spells are explicitly favors provided by your patron to you... yet there's no mechanic at all for a Witch losing their power. Comparatively it's a little bit odd.

I think the other GM is definitely more right here.

You activate the ability after you've already concluded the attack, and it specifically says "damage dealt" not damage you would deal or damage roll.

I mean think about it from a plain language stance: Your damage roll is a 6 and the enemy has weakness 5. If someone asked how much damage you did, I think 11 is clearly the more correct number to offer.

The trouble with Only the Worthy is that gear is so easy to destroy if you let it be targeted. The moment that becomes an option for the enemy the feat loses most of its mechanical value (and you might just ruin the exemplar depending on which ikon they dropped) and it's already somewhat of a niche thing.

I think you'd be better off just banning it ahead of time than surprise exploding a critical piece of gear.

Detonate Magic damaging the item puts it pretty squarely in the realm of PF1's Disjunction: PCs are destroying their potential loot by using it, and GMs can wreak absolute havok on characters by using it on key items.

Sort of. PF2 loot is pretty disjointed from enemy equipment though, since monster damage is standardized separate from loot. It was a big deal in PF1 because 'armed' enemies were expected to have some parity with PCs, but in PF2 it's not entirely rare to have enemies wielding mundane weapons that still hit like they have runes.

I'm normally a more options is better thing, but I agree this is a concept space better held by an archetype.

For the necromancer specifically, there seems to be an intentional design choice to steer it away from some of the traditional conceptions about Necromancy. Giving it innate access to Unholy sends the wrong message.

I think it'd also just be kind of odd and athematic for an explicitly occult class to suddenly have deity-based feat choices.

The trouble is the phrase "threatened" is used only twice in rules elements in SF2. In Dance partner, it might describe your melee reach. In the other it unambiguously refers to the weapon's first range increment. So hopefully the errata clarifies how Dance Partner is supposed to work.

I think it's good that the Starfriends continue the radical and controversial stance in post-Remaster PF2E that maybe your ancestry should be FUN. Maybe it should fulfill your fantasies, gave reliable abilities, and inspire fun roleplay.

If that was the actual design principle I would be all on board, PF2 ancestries are kind of bare bones and that's a bit of a shame. The trouble is it's not, instead we just haphazardly get a couple of notably overloaded ancestries among the pile of pretty bland CRB tier stuff.

There are some rough edges but so far I've seen nothing that is particularly egregious. Every class and ancestry is playable and none dominate the game.

I mean yeah but "everything is playable" is a pretty low bar. Most modern systems manage that much, even ones with egregious balance concerns.

But that doesn't change like, obvious gaps in design like here with ancestries.

But do NOT start with a mixed Pathfinder/Starfinder game.

I mean you don't need to mix systems to run into most of these concerns though. It's also worth pointing out that ancestries like Human and Ysoki are nearly identical to their Pathfinder counterparts, so the whole "Starfinder ancestries are on a different level and you can't compare them" thing falls a little bit flat when that's exactly what Paizo did.

but on the subject of mixing, my experience has been the opposite. Allowing both types of content improves the balance somewhat, especially because Starfinder right now is so small it's difficult to have access to secondary options to help patch some of its shortcomings. You lose tons of quality of life improving archetypes and other options if you omit 80% of the system like that.

Like some ancestries will have two or three significantly powerful features and another ancestry might have only one or very little.

Dragonkin and Vesk are both 10 hp and 20 feet of movement... but Dragonkin have flight and darkvision and their partner bond while Vesk only have low-light vision.

I know flight is considered cheaper in SF but it's still a very good ability.

Astrazoans have low light vision and almost unlimited shapechanging, humans have no features, a hearing/sighted vlaka has less hp and a cool but somewhat situational skill feat, kasatha get four arms and... an extra language for some reason?

Some of these aren't huge on their own but in general it seems like ancestry bonuses are really haphazard, with some ancestries getting multiple high powered features baseline and others getting almost nothing without any real clear advantage in any other way.