The Narration's page

Also why are there so many feats that require you to create a thing using Quick Alchemy?

Agreed. And unlike all the abilities other classes get that require them to spend Spell Points, those abilities don't grant any extra Resonance to offset the cost.

Why is it not possible to create a smoke bomb during your downtime? Or one that just produces smoke and doesn't deal damage so that we can use it to give our allies concealment instead of the enemy? When the ninja yells, "NINJA VANISH!" and throws the smoke bomb to escape, you don't then hear them go, "AAAAAAAH! I SET MYSELF ON FIRE!" as they're running away. :-P

A) No... even in those conditions, it is not. Get assigned items by level, rather than by price, is not "the local blacksmith won't sell you other stuff" any more than getting a big pool of coin and being told "you can't spend more than X on any one item" is - your character is allowed to buy what they can afford, but "afford" means "assuming they budget their wealth intelligently instead of buy the most expensive singular thing they can with their money"

B) No rule ever written, past present or future, can prevent GMs from making a bad choice. The issue will always be those GMs making a bad choice, though, not with the rules of the game.

A) Have you actually looked at the Wealth By Level table on page 348 of the Playtest Rulebook? Because you don't seem to understand how it works. When you're creating a character above 1st level, how many items you have of each level is predetermined. There is a small amount of loose cash that is not enough to buy a non-consumable item of a higher level than those predetermined. The rules do not allow a 4th level character to start with +1 heavy armor.

B) If the GM following the rules is a "bad choice" then that indicates that the rule is not working and needs to be fixed. This playtest is full of rules that don't work as intended. The whole point of the playtest is to point them out. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going, "Nah nah nah nah I can't hear you!" doesn't help make the game better.

Drake, can you name one person in this thread who has agreed with you? What do you think is more likely? That everyone else is somehow confused and you're the only person in the world who can see the truth, or that a single person is mistaken?

The Narration wrote:

thenobledrake wrote:

And as to your "but if you build your character at exactly level 4, what level 3 item do you pick?" there is no point to answering that question because there is no single correct answer that would apply regardless of campaign details.

This is laughably untrue. <argument about how true thenobledrake's statement is>

Um...

In what way does what I said support his thesis that some characters not being able to get +1 to their armor at 4th level when the game's math assumes that as the default isn't a problem?

If it's that I said that everyone in my group of PCs had +1 armor, it's because none of them played a class with heavy armor proficiency in the first place. Frankly, they're all avoiding heavy armor like the plague even when they do play characters with proficiency because they're terrified of the penalties.

That's weird... I've got my players complaining about how many times I roll a nat 20 in a night (it's a lot, usually 8+ times in a 4 hour session), and no characters hitting 0 HP since the 1st chapter.

No one went to 0 HP but they all came awfully close, and would have gone down if their AC had been even one point lower (because the 30 attack from the manticore would have been a crit if their AC was 20 instead of 21) or if I had run the manticore more aggressively. They had to burn all their healing and resonance after that single fight.

I was also trying to puzzle out the "Does splash damage apply to the target?" question a couple days ago when I way running the playtest and one of the PCs was an alchemist. The way the rules are written sure seems to imply that it doesn't, even though that means that Calculated Splash means that you'd almost do more damage on a miss than a hit.

I still think, that Alchemists need a "all day" resource.

I agree on this one. Bombs only do about as much damage as a cantrip without being unlimited use like cantrips are. You can basically take an ancestry feat that lets you do as much damage as an alchemist's best weapon all day. Once they've used all their Resonance-made bombs, an alchemist is basically just a rogue without sneak attack and half the skills.

I like DEX-to-damage options because I like making Dex-based warriors, because I think it's way cooler to play a swordsman who's quick and mobile and skilled than a big, limbering brute.

That said, I feel like getting Dex-to-damage for free is too much. PF2 seems to be trying to do away with dump stats, so there should be some cost for dumping Strength.

And the rogue's whole shtick is supposed to be that they don't normally hit hard but they can destroy stuff when they arrange things to get their sneak attack. Giving them the same damage bonus as a fighter without having to spend any stat points on it just seems way too good.

I didn't want to run the playtest with an undersized party because I was pretty sure it would be a bloodbath if I did, which is why when only two people were still willing to play after seeing the rulebook, I had them make two characters each so we could have a full party of four.

That said, if the monster can hit on a 4, I feel like that's not really an issue of party size or composition. That monster is probably going to score two crits in a round, or a whopping three crits if it uses its agile tail attack. That means it's going to average 150 damage per round, which even a max-Con dwarf fighter couldn't survive at 9th level.

When monsters are already over-tooled to have a roughly 50% chance of hitting an equal-level PC with max AC, then using higher-level monsters as solo boss fights means that their hit chances get pushed up from "high" to "overwhelming" and the odds of critical hits become substantial. It was the same with the manticore in Pale Mountain, who was only two levels above the PCs but knocked off most of the hit points of every member of the party and exhausted all their healing resources and then some.

As it stands, PF2 has been a brutal meatgrinder of constant damage and frequent resting due to exhausted healing resources. Maybe there are GMs out there who like to run that kind of game, but I'm not one of them.

Anecdotally interesting, just last night I heard a player complaining of how using circle of protection felt "useless" because the +1 AC it provided didn't happen to stop any hits from being hits, nor any crits from being crits.

If you want to bring in anecdotes, I ran the first half of Pale Mountain yesterday, and even with the best AC they could manage, the entire party lost most of their hit points. At least once someone only avoided being crit on by a single point, so if they hadn't gotten +1 armor, they would have dropped.

I'm pretty sure that the only reason that the Heal skill was Wisdom-based to begin with was because they assumed that clerics would be rolling it. And this then got carried over to non-D&D D20 games like D20 Modern and Star Wars, where Treat Injury was Wisdom-based.

You could make an argument that empathy is an important part of diagnosis and treatment, but it's still a bit weird that doctors aren't expected to be smart.

It's like fighters gaining proficiency in Martial weapons but not simple weapons.

I'd argue that it's even worse than that, because martial weapons are at least ostensibly better than simple weapons (putting aside oddities like the lack of a martial finesse bludgeoning weapon), but what armor is best for you is entirely dependent on what your Dex bonus is, and heavy armor is arguably the worst of the bunch because it has a high ACP and speed penalties.

In Shadowrun, counterspelling isn't a specific spell, but just a thing that spellcasters do as a reaction to their teammates being attacked with magic. It's one of the main reasons to have a spellcaster on the team. I don't know if that paradigm is right for PF, but I don't see any reason why it should be impossible to protect against 1st level magic until 5th level. That doesn't seem to fit with the pattern of "counter spell with equivalent level spell" established by divination vs. illusion and light vs. darkness. It might even be worth making Dispel Magic a cantrip that autoscales.

And as to your "but if you build your character at exactly level 4, what level 3 item do you pick?" there is no point to answering that question because there is no single correct answer that would apply regardless of campaign details.

This is laughably untrue. Enemy attack rolls are assigned to have a 50% chance of hitting a PC if they have the maximum AC for their level. If a PC lags behind the AC curve, they will get hit and crit more often and take a brutal beating.

The second adventure of Doomsday Dawn is for 4th level PCs, and said PCs get to start with one 3rd level item. So this specific question is highly relevant for those of us running the playtest.

Everyone in my game (except the monk, who had to use bracers of armor, which were available a level earlier) chose +1 armor for their 3rd level item. I suspect that's probably going to be the overall trend. Other options aren't going to be an option until after you've secured a level-appropriate AC and saves. Because if you don't, you'll die.

I'm not sure why shields even have proficiency ranks in the first place. Because of the way the rules are designed, your shield proficiency will never apply.

Saga Edition is also an option. It condensed 9 classes down to 5 (and frankly could have done with only 4 by combining Scout and Scoundrel) and had the new classes absorb the options of the cut classes. If martials are all one class and can learn special abilities like "rage" or "ki strike" you don't need to figure out what the Fighter is.

Saga Edition is fantastic, because it only had five base classes and never added any more, but each one got to choose from such a wide variety of talents and feats that they were infinitely customizable; you could have four PCs of the same class in a party and every one of them would play entirely differently.

When Paizo started talking about getting to pick class feats in PF2, I thought they were moving in a similar direction, so I'm rather disappointed that they're making the classes much more restrictive than they were before instead of more open.

I really wish that the proficiency ranks reduced Armor Check Penalty and other negative consequences of wearing armor, like Armor Training did in PF1. Being able to run around and do backflips in full plate would be a lot cooler than just getting +1 to AC.

Because everything in the game is balanced against the assumption that the players have the highest possible bonus for their level, every monster attack is going to be calculated to hit the character with expert/master/legendary armor prof 50% of the time, which means that anyone who isn't a fighter/monk/paladin is going to get hit a lot more.

And I really don't like the idea that fighters and paladins only get higher proficiencies in heavy armor. I'd rather choose what armor is best for my character than have it chosen for me. Not to mention that the fighter gets expert heavy armor at 11th level. By that point the fighter has gotten two stat increases. Even if they started at DEX 12, they're probably at DEX 16 by then, so heavy armor doesn't even fit them anymore.

I think it would be fine for Crossbow Ace to add full WIS mod and Propulsive to add full STR mod. Rogue gets to add their full DEX mod to damage, so I don't see why everyone else who gets to swap out a damage stat has to settle for half.

I don't see any reason why Hunt Target couldn't just add a +1 to attack. That way it has value even if you don't have enough actions for multiple attacks. You can't argue that would be too good when the fighter gets that same +1 to attack from their expert weapon proficiency against all targets without needing to spend an action.

As it stands, Hunt Target not only isn't very good statistically, but it doesn't synergize with the other Ranger feats at all.

Drizzt didnt use one.

Drizzt didn't, but his fighting style was supposed to be unique, not a benchmark for all other rangers going forward.

Drizzt's ranger mentor did use a shield.

I hope the pre-embedded grids don't mess things up for Roll20!

I had to do quite a bit of re-sizing by hand, but I was able to get your grid and theirs all lined up. It's not like I didn't have to do the same thing with the "official" map for the tomb that I copied out of the PDF. Took a few hours but I'm all set up with maps, monster tokens, etc. to run the game on Friday.

What's weird is that Paizo released a free map pack for Doomsday Dawn to use with Roll20... but it only contains four of the twenty or so maps in the adventure. So I'm still going to have to copy, paste, upload and re-size most of the maps for the campaign myself. At least I taught myself enough about how it works that it hopefully will be easier going forward.

Thanks again for the maps!

Did you notice that the distance a human character in heavy armor can move in a single round and still make a single attack has actually increased relative to Pathfinder 1?

Did you notice that the distance that a human character NOT in heavy armor can move and still make a single attack has increased even more relative to Pathfinder 1?

A character in light or no armor can now move 50 feet and a character in medium armor can move 40 feet.

Did you notice that the distance that a character NOT in heavy armor can move and still make two attacks has increased, from 5 feet to 25 feet?

Did you notice that the percentage of your movement speed that you lose due to wearing heavy armor has increased, from 33% to 40%?

Did you notice that the percentage of your skill bonus that Armor Check Penalty costs you is much higher now than it was in PF1 because total skill bonuses are lower? The highest possible skill modifier at 1st level is +5. Full Plate reduces that to +0.

Did you notice that skill DCs in Doomsday Dawn assume that the players have a maxed out skill bonus to have even odds at succeeding? Or that having a low bonus means that you'll probably critically fail and harm yourself? So that a fighter who tries to make an Athletics check to climb something with the penalties of heavy armor will probably fall?

Did you notice that the Fighter in PF2 no longer gets an ability to reduce Armor Check Penalty like they did in PF1? And has to wait until 17th level to be able to reduce the speed penalty of heavy armor, as opposed to 7th level? Did you notice that the Fighter doesn't get higher proficiency in light and medium armor like he does in heavy, even though by the time he gets it at 11th level, there's a very high chance his Dex will be up to 16 and he'll be better off switching to medium armor?

"Heavy Armor was terrible in PF1, too!" isn't an excuse. Heavy Armor was terrible in PF1 and 3.X, so terrible that I never wore it. They should take the opportunity of a new edition to fix that instead of blindly repeating the same mistakes. And at least in PF1 they didn't charge you more for the magic bonuses on your armor if it was heavy.

The cost of consumable healing dosn’t really matter.

If it cost too much then PCs will just take more full rest and parties will have to have a healer.

This is true. It's also a serious problem.

If the game only works if someone is playing a cleric to be able to dish out enough healing, that's bad game design. And players having to constantly stop to rest is terrible from a narrative standpoint.

The D&D paradigm of constantly taking damage and healing every round, of having one player be a dedicated healer, of having to stop to rest for 8 hours mid-adventure because you used up all your healing for the day... these are relics of a bygone era that most tabletop RPGs in the 21st century have moved away from. And rather than taking the opportunity of a new edition to change with the times, Paizo has decided to double down on them by causing PCs to take more damage, need more healing, and have more daily limits on healing resources. It's a massive step in the wrong direction.

If you want people to stop buying wands of cure light wounds, then maybe you need to examine what it is about your game that made people want to buy them in the first place and change that.

Getting a 12 dex is a very low-opportunity-cost investment, and it's all you need to have the best AC from heavy armor.

Except that's not true at all, because wearing heavy armor a) requires heavy armor proficiency, which currently only two classes have and b) carries massive and crippling penalties to skill checks and movement speed. Including the only skills that the classes with Heavy Armor Proficiency are capable of maxing out, STR and DEX-based ones.

Heavy Armor shouldn't be treated as a more powerful item than other armors, because it's not. As the rules stand, heavy armor is a punishment for low Dex characters, not an advantage.

2. Replace: Crafting w/ Tradecraft

"Tradecraft" already means something else.

Add me to the list of people confused about this, because there are magical effects saying they can be dispelled, and listing a dispel level of (1st) or (2nd), even though there is no Dispel Magic less than 3rd level. And why does it also have a DC that you have to make on a spell roll in addition to a minimum level spell you have to expend? One or the other would suffice to set a minimum requirement.

Not to mention that requiring expert Thievery to disable a 3rd level trap is outrageous in its own right. At 3rd level you can only have one skill at expert rank, two if you're a rogue. If you chose anything other than Thievery to be your best skill right out of the gate, then there's no way to not set the trap off.

This isn't just, "Bring a rogue or you're boned." This is, "Bring a rogue, and there's still an 80% chance that you're boned."

Thanks for these. The fact that they didn't include maps for half the encounters in the adventure was extremely annoying. I've got enough on my hands familiarizing myself with the module, the monsters, the NPCs and the new rules without also needing to draw a bunch of new maps. It wouldn't be an issue if it were an IRL game where I was drawing with wet-erase markers on a battlemat, but running it on Roll20 makes drawing new maps a major pain.

Is there a larger difference than the +2 skill difference between an Expert and a Legend?

They'd be locked out of any skill feats that required expert or master proficiency, and certain skill checks might require higher proficiency to even attempt (although at this point the rules have no provided many examples of those).

If doing an "average" task assumes:
A) Max ability mod for your level
B) max proficiency mod for your level
C) max item bonus mod for your level

Then, it's no longer "average".

Not only that, but it might not be possible to have A and B at the same time, such as how no class that can get max WIS also has the max Perception proficiency. You can only have A in one stat out of six, only have B in up to three skills out of sixteen, and probably can't have C in more than a few.

At the moment, the only thing I can think of that would make other classes able to compete with a healer Cleric is to find a way to give them Channel Energy - or something similar.

Angelic-blood sorcerer can get Channel Energy, but only once per day.

If I remember correctly from an earlier thread, a developer mentioned the DC20 door was put intentionally there to see how players reacted to am out-of-level challenge. It's been weeks though so don't quote me on this.

The problem with that idea is that the core book's equipment chapter says that simple locks normally start at DC 20. So apparently 1st level characters with maxed-out Thievery are supposed to find it nearly impossible to open even the most simple of locks.

Bad rolls happened (and there were still rules for breaking lockpicks), and in PF1 there wasn't really anything you could do short of just busting down the door.

Um... no? Disarming a trap had negative consequences if you failed by 5 or more, but picking a lock didn't. Picking a lock in PF1 allowed retries and you could Take 20. That was why the lowest lock DC was 20 and the really good ones could be as high as 40: because if all else failed you could spend two minutes working at it until you got through.

If one of your weapons has the Parry quality, you could use your third action to defend with it and get +1 AC. Later on you could take the fighter feat Twin Parry to do the same thing, or to increase the bonus to +2 with a Parry weapon.

(You could make a shield your off-hand weapon for the same effect, except it isn't finesse.)

If you don't have someone to flank with, then Feint is probably a good option to get the target flatfooted.

Agreed. Non-rogue martials have way too few skills, especially when some of the caster classes are getting way more, and Signature Skills as they currently work are way too restrictive. They're both basically a step backwards from how it was in PF1 instead of a step forward.

For 3rd Ed/PF1, currently, I houserule it to be a bit like SWSE, so you start with a number of trained skills (never less that 4) from your Class list, and a number of trained skills = to you Int modifier from any list. So a a Rogue with a 16 Int would have 11 trained skills (8 from the Rogue list, and 3 from any).

Interesting idea. SWSE was my favorite D20 system game. One of my few complaints about the skills was that you weren't allowed to be trained in non-class skills at all, which was odd given how much freedom the system gave you in building a unique character in all other respects. I just houseruled that people could take whatever skills they wanted, but your solution is also pretty elegant, since it allows for taking non-class skills but makes taking class skills slightly easier. I assume that skills gained from Skill Training would also be unrestricted?

There's a wizard feat that increases it to level x 2, but I feel like most attacks will still do more than that.

Maybe it was a house rule but it seems like you were able to do this in PF1. What I'm wondering is possible is playing a dragon sorcerer who uses the Dragon Claw to hit AC instead of TAC to do the extra damage along with the spell. Is that possible or would it be too much in this system?

When I was running the first part of the playtest, I let the halfling sorcerer with Dragon Claw use it to deliver a shocking grasp to land the finishing blow on the boss monster. I had no idea if the rules still allowed it in PF2, I just decided to allow it because it seemed cool and I didn't want the player to feel like having the claws was useless.

If they do allow touch spells to be delivered with a weapon Strike, then it'll be easy to make a quasi-magus in PF2. If not, then I'm a little sad at the loss of something fun and flavorful.

It seems like Skills really work in a system based around them (no classes), hence why they never seem to quite work as they should in D&D, just an impression/feeling I have developed over the years.

Having played both skill-based and D20 RPGs over the years, I don't think this is necessarily the case.

The big differences, I think, are that in skill-based RPGs you get way, way more skills (except for Savage Worlds), that there are no restrictions on what skills you can take, and that the progression happens more slowly and individually.

You usually start out more generally competent in skill-based RPGs, with some key skills that are elite-tier and quite a few things that you are at least decent or passable at, but improve rather gradually after that, and likely do more broadening of your skillset rather than pushing your best skills up to the max, since the increases usually get more expensive the higher the skill rank you already have.

The big problems with D&D and skills, I felt, was always how incredibly stingy they were with the skill points if you weren't a rogue (2+Int is a joke, especially for a non-spellcaster), and how rigidly they limited what ones you could have to try and keep everyone in these narrow little niches. There's also the issue of how easy it is to get an outrageously large bonus, but if we're limiting item and circumstance bonuses more and tossing Skill Focus then I think that issue's already substantially reduced.

My last couple PF1 characters were a slayer and a stalker (from Path of War), both of which had 6+Int, and I felt like they both managed to have a pretty decently broad skillset with that amount (plus the extra skill point from favored class and two free Knowledge Skills from the optional Background Skills rule). And PF1 isn't too restrictive in terms of what skills you can take: if it's not a class skill you miss out on a +3 bonus (unless you take a trait to make it a class skill), but it's nowhere near as bad as 3E (where you could only get half as many ranks at twice the cost in cross-class skills) or PF2 (where your advancement in non-Signature Skills is capped at 3rd level).

The main things that D20 needs to do to make skills more workable, I think, are to give way more of them to most of the classes (especially non-rogue martials) and loosen the restrictions on what skills you can take based on class. I feel like PF2 took a step backwards on both of these rather than a step forward. Also, that skills that mostly just provide character flavor like Knowledge, Craft, Profession and Perform probably shouldn't come out of the same pool as skills that you actually use to do cool things, like Acrobatics and Stealth and Perception. They're really just not on par in terms of how often you can use them, so taking a skill for flavor winds up costing you heavily in encounters. PF2 takes a small step in this direction with the free Lore skill from Background, for what that's worth.

(More specific to PF2, there's a serious problem with a lot of the DCs appearing to have been copied over from PF1 without accounting for the lower bonuses in this system, resulting in a lot of the skill checks being unreasonably difficult, combined with critical failures and the loss of Take 10 and Take 20. See the stories of people breaking twenty or thirty lockpicks trying to pick the lock in Doomsday Dawn for more details. But that's not a problem with the skill system in general so much as a math problem.)

Nothing about healing is fun. It is way too big a part of the game.

In movies and television, including fantasy, where melee or ranged combat occur, heroes don’t take significant damage very often. If they do take significant damage, it’s in the climactic battle, or it affects the story in a significant way. When real fencers get better, they don’t get more “hit points” to take more damage, they get better at getting through defenses and more importantly, they get better at blocking damage. Ranged combatants get more accurate but also get better strategies at using cover and getting around opponents protections and at getting opponents to expose themselves to attacks. Maybe we don’t need combat to always be inflicting massive damage on player characters. Maybe we could make combat itself more fun and make those attacks that get through mean more instead of whittling characters down in health in combat like Thanksgiving turkeys.

I'll absolutely agree with this part. I'm not a huge fan of D&D/PF's "get hit every round, take tons of damage, use up healing spells" approach. Most tabletop RPGs don't operate on the assumption that PCs will get seriously injured on a regular basis, and while a character might have a healing spell or skill, there won't be a party member dedicated to healing like in D20 games or MMOs. Pretty much every non-D20 system has armor soak damage to some degree, so you can shrug off a lot of the lesser hits or only take minor damage from them, and only get badly hurt on rare occasions of bad luck or particularly dangerous foes, at which point being so badly hurt is serious business (and thus dramatically appropriate).

I'm not sure if I agree with the idea of rolling for defense. AC is already basically taking 10 on the proposed defense roll (and it finally has a skill component to it in PF2 now that you're adding level rather than basing it entirely on magic items), so it seems like it would slow the game down unnecessarily and add an extra element of random chance. Yeah, a lot of other RPGs have defense rolls where you basically determine if you hit in melee with opposed combat skill checks, but those RPGs were designed with that in mind and the degree of success usually determines damage so it matters a lot more. Attacks in D20 are more of a binary pass/fail unless they crit, where the amount of damage dealt has nothing to do with the accuracy or skill of the attack.

Vic Ferrari wrote:

Yeah, which is a current problem, where are they getting these bonuses? Monsters don't have to be built like PCs, but some sort of sense of where these bonuses are coming from would be nice.

I think this is legitimately the wrong way to look at things. NPCs give up a huge amount of the flexibility that PCs enjoy in exchange for certain numbers (and only certain numbers) being higher than their stats would indicate.

An NPC 'Warrior' class that traded most stat-bumps, Feats, and other options a PC gets away for a flat bonus to-hit and to certain skills is not hard to imagine, and in many cases basically what's happening. I'm fine with that.

My concern is with the final numbers. The method of getting there is not a huge deal, IMO.

I'm going to disagree with you here. While I don't think NPCs and monsters necessarily should be made the same way as PCs in terms of how many feats and skills they have, I think making their bonuses arbitrary like this creates three very serious problems.

1. One of the changes in PF2E that I really like is that everything is scaling at the same rate of +1/level instead of the wacky mishmash of +1, +3/4, +1/2, +1/3, etc. in PF1E. It keeps things balanced. But these arbitrary bonuses are breaking the scaling system and upsetting the balance. An extra +1 is valuable in this system, so much so that they cut down on ways to get them substantially. Getting Feats doesn't really outweigh those higher bonuses, especially when some of those Feats are "get +1 on a single attack roll if you critically succeed on a Knowledge check" or "get +1 on a single attack roll if you spend a Spell Point."

2. You pointed out before that "feels bad" is a valid concern for game design, and these arbitrarily-high bonuses are demoralizing for the players. A player goes to the trouble of maxing out their Strength or Dexterity and being a fighter for the expert proficiency and is the best warrior a 1st level character can possibly be... and the 1st level orc warrior is better than him with his sword. And at Athletics. And ignoring the armor check penalty of that breastplate somehow. Is the orc stronger than him? No, the orc only has a Strength mod of +2. Is the orc more skilled? No, they're the same level and the orc has no expert proficiencies. At this point, the player wonders why they even bothered. Martials are going to get one-upped at attacks and skills by equal-level creatures, so why even bother being one? You're not actually good at the thing you specialized in. How can you be if you're not even on par with generic goblin mooks?

3. It's immersion-breaking. That orc or that goblin has a low Wisdom? That means that they're easy to fool, right? Nope, their Perception has nothing to do with their Wisdom, and is probably higher than your fighter's. That ogre is clumsy and slow with his low Dexterity? Doesn't affect his Acrobatics or ranged attacks or Reflex saves. You might as well take ability modifiers out of the game, because they don't actually do anything. And every monster of the same level starts to look identical. That ogre is huge and strong, so it's much more of a melee threat than a hobgoblin, right? Nope, same attack bonus for both, and the hobgoblin actually has a bigger damage bonus for no reason! Players know the rules of the game and they know when the monsters are breaking them.

Unfortunately, not everybody working on the rulebook seems to have looked at that chart, because the Equipment chapter says that a standard lock is DC 20 (beyond extreme difficulty at Level 1, and still severe at Level 4) at pretty much exactly the point at 1st Level where you're as likely to critical fail as to succeed, making it dangerous and unwise to even try.

The Lock DCs appear to have been ported straight over from PF1E without accounting for the fact that skill bonuses are lower and you can't Take 20 anymore.

I just don’t see it’s value as a feat when taking 10/taking 20 was a reasonable method of adjudicating exploration previously.

We're agreed there, then.

One of the uses of Acrobatics is "Tumble Through" which lets you move through an enemy square (but no mention of past it) and says that it triggers an Attack of Opportunity on a failure, which seems to imply that it doesn't on a success. If so, it really needs to be rewritten to make that more explicit.

If you can go through an enemy square, then it seems reasonable to assume that you can go past it, but it doesn't actually say that anywhere in the rules.

It's to hedge against critical failure, not to pass trivial DCs (which the game gives to you automatically, as you go on to say:

If Assurance can't let you pass non-trivial DCs, then it doesn't matter if it keeps you from critical failure, you still fail and have no chance of succeeding and moving forward unless you actually roll and take the risk. So it's useless.

Also, even with Assurance you'll still critically fail if it was DC 20, because Assurance just gives you a 10. Picking Locks starts at DC 20, and so does using Battle Medic, so if you have Assurance in those skills you will break your lockpicks and kill your patient.

Assurance is a useless feat that serves no purpose.

There was a reason that skills didn't auto-fail on a natural 1 before and Take 10 and Take 20 existed. It was to prevent exactly these sorts of slapstick fumbles.

So I just finished running the first adventure of the Playtest a few hours ago, and neither I nor the guy playing the cleric realized that Guidance made the target bolstered, so he was using it quite a bit. Not that it made much of a difference.

I don't feel like letting it be used an unlimited number of times would be unbalancing. Spending an action to grant a +1 isn't even as good as taking the Aid reaction.

There's no point in this being a cantrip as it stands. Cantrips are supposed to be spells that you can use all day. You can only use Guidance as many times as you have party members.

A couple of additional bits of information:

After the Playtest Rulebook came out, a lot of people lost interest, so I only had two players, who each made two characters. The cleric and wizard were one, the fighter and sorcerer were the other.

I did not realize that Guidance resulted in the target being bolstered against it. The cleric was spamming it like crazy. Not sure what point there is in a cantrip (which is supposed to be unlimited use) that only works once per party member.

... Why does an immobile lump of fungus anchored to the walls and floor have a Reflex of +4...?

Agreed. Inanimate objects should automatically fail Reflex saves.

So, me and a couple of the guys from the Sufficient Velocity forums decided to run the playtest, since both of my IRL groups are already doing campaigns and don't want to drop those for beta testing.

We're getting kind of a late start because we had to cancel twice due to schedule conflicts, so we're just now doing The Lost Star. So yes, I'm aware of the irony that Sufficient Velocity is running late.

Despite not being super-enthused with PF2E, we wound up having a decent amount of fun.

Time to play: approximately four hours, including having trouble getting my mike to work on Roll20.

Number of times players had to rest: once, because the cleric was out of heals and the mages had burnt most of their spells.

Number of deaths/reductions to 0 hp: none. But some PCs got pretty close.

Doomsday Dawn Part 1 Open Response Survey

* 1. While participating in Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn, were you a player or the Game Master?

Game Master

2. Please give us any feedback you have about the narrative structure of Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn.

There was a lack of information on how to handle the players pursuing non-combat solutions, interrogating captured goblins, or at what point the goblins should break and retreat. It also doesn't provide any guidelines for how they should react if the players attack and then retreat to rest: do they not consolidate their forces or otherwise react to being attacked? That the players needed to stop to rest partway through a dungeon this short because they were out of healing seemed awkward for the narrative.

3. Please provide any feedback about the play of specific encounters in Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn.

A1: Sewer Ooze was a poor choice for the first combat of the playtest, as it's immune to critical hits and basically give no opportunity for the players to show off.

A2: Players won initiative on the goblins and took them out reasonably quickly, taking several hits in the process. Players took one goblin alive with Sleep, interrogated him. Module didn't not provide information on what he should share in this circumstance.

(I forgot to include in the survey: rules did not provide any circumstance bonus for Intimidation when the target is tied up and has a halfling sorcerer's dragon claws in his face. Not that it mattered because he rolled 16 against the goblins Will DC 10.)

A3: Players did not enter this room. If they had, it seems likely that the centipedes would have done them substantial harm.

A4: Odds of making a critical success on the Medicine check while examining the bodies are extremely slim. It's also strange that recognizing that it's not the work of a vampire wouldn't be a Religion check, since it's about knowledge of the undead.

A5: Players didn't enter the room as soon as they realized it was full of fungus. If they had, it seems unlikely that they would have been able to disarm it.

A6: Took two times through the room to notice the idol, then used Mage Hand to remove it from the pool, removing the need for a Thievery check.

Players did not bother trying to unlock the door in the south and just bashed it down with an axe. Even if they had Thievery, the odds of succeeding at three DC 20 checks before breaking their pick are almost nil.

A7: Players came to this room on the second day. Halfling sorceror snuck into room and was only noticed by Goblin Commando, then ran back to the party, who were waiting to ambush at the other end of the passageway. Module text said that goblins should wait for players to come to them and trigger trap, but I didn't want a long stalemate where neither side moved. Goblins pursued, Goblin Commando and two Goblin Warriors were killed, inflicting some damage on the fighter in the process. Last Goblin Warrior and Goblin Pyro retreated back into the room and waited by the trap, but players did not pursue and instead tried to shout demands for surrender. Eventual stalemate, players never entered room.

A8: This was the last room that the players came to on the first day. They burned the last of their healing spells after this room, and still weren't back to full, so they went back to rest. Hard to keep track of six creatures with three attacks each; almost forgot one a few times. Combat started at close range, so skeletons got all three attacks often and it seemed like every time they hit with the first two. Skeleton resistances barely slowed down the fighter's axe hits, but rendered the sorcerer's cantrips pretty useless; he had to resort to Magic Missile. All of the wizard (enchantment school)'s 1st level spells were useless against mindless undead, but he had Telekinetic Projectile so he was fine.

Given that Pathfinder Society Hopeful is a background for this adventure, it would have been nice to know what information Pathfinder Society Lore could have provided about the dead Pathfinder in this room. There doesn't seem to have been any opportunities for players to roll their background-granted Lore skills.

A9: Gnome wizard player wanted to try knocking over hourglass with ten-foot-pole before halfing sorcerer reminded him that he had Mage Hand. I let the sorcerer use his spellcasting modifier instead of Thievery to remove the hourglass; nothing in the rules about it but I wanted to give them a sliver of a chance. Sorcerer was going to crit fail, but used Lucky Halfling to reroll and succeeded.

A10: Players passed up their door on the first day because it was stuck, went through it on the second day after facing the goblins from A7. I assumed Drakus would have heard the fighting and thus was hiding next to altar. Dwarf fighter and human cleric rolled well and saw him. Cleric used Summon Monster. 1st level Summon Monster options were a bit thin and didn't include anything with a celestial flavor, so the cleric summoned a pig in the square in front of Drakus. This blocked dwarf fighter from reaching Drakus; I suggested that he could jump onto the altar but he noted that would be an action, so with the move before and after the jump he would have none left to attack. Dwarf moved up to just behind the pig instead. Drakus spend two actions making claw attacks/grabs on the pig, taking it out, third action to suck its blood for terror factor. Halfling sorcerer unleashed three magic missiles. Gnome wizard cast sleep, Drakus saved, save success effect on Sleep is -1 Perception which is pretty useless if you're already in combat. Cleric cast Disrupt Undead, confirming Drakus is not undead. Dwarf fighter Stepped up, Double Sliced, one crit and one hit. Drakus revealed his true form, then attacked with longsword and claw, one hit and one crit. Huge attack bonus plus bonus from revealing true form made his attack so high there was almost no chance of missing. Halfling sorcerer used scroll of Shocking Grasp from A8 and Dragon Claws to finish Drakus. I handwaved the action cost of running up and jumping onto the altar as just one action and the combining of Shocking Grasp with a natural weapon because it was cooler that way.

4. Please provide any feedback about the player characters and how they interacted with Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn.

Player character AC ranged from 12 (cleric without shield) to 13 (wizard, sorcerer) to 14 (cleric with shield) to 16 (fighter). With all Level 0 monsters arbitrarily having +6 to attack regardless of ability scores or proficiency, PCs were getting hit rather often.

Fighter's player was somewhat demoralized that maxing out his stat and having expert proficiency only got him on par with goblin mooks, and the cleric and mages didn't have a very good chance to hit.

Cleric almost never used his shield block reaction when his shield was raised because he was afraid of breaking his shield. It's immersion-breaking that the hardness of wood suddenly plummets when it's used in a shield instead of a door.

Cleric avoided medium armor and fighter avoided heavy armor due to fearing the speed penalties. Even in breastplate, Armor Check Penalty entirely negated the fighter's Strength advantage on Athletics checks.

Fighter used dwarven axe and clan dagger, a fun and versatile combination. Fighter's player praised the interesting variety of weapon abilities.

Gnome wizard (enchantment school) complained about the number of enemies that were immune to enchantment. Cleric complained about area-effect heal doing too little to be worth using.

Problem arose when mages couldn't Ready to cast spells because you can only Ready a one-action activity.

Several complaints about having to spend action to do things that were free actions previously.

5. Please provide any feedback about the monster, hazard, and treasure mechanics in Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn.

The players stayed out of the room with the mindfog fungus as soon as they identified it, which is good because there was only a very slim chance that they could have disarmed it even with trained Survival and a buff from Guidance. DC 19 is much too high for 1st level.

No member of the party had Thievery or dispel magic (which isn't available at this level), so we had to get creative to disarm the Sands of the Boneyard trap using Mage Hand.

If it were not for lucky rolls, the players would have missed out on a fair bit of treasure. Needing to crit on a DC 10 check (i.e. DC 20) is very unlikely at 1st level. It wasn't until they went through A6 again on the second day that they made the DC 15 check to notice the Lamashtu idol in the fountain.

Monsters having three attacks and arbitrarily-large attack rolls means they'll likely damage the players every round and run a good chance of damaging them seriously. It results in burning through a lot of healing spells. Without a cleric, I don't see how this could have worked.

6. What was your favorite aspect of Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn?

RPing goblins during the times that players interrogated or negotiated with them. Drakus eating that pig in front of the PCs and getting his heart ripped out by the halfling sorcerer's shocking/icy dragon claws.

So... basically the parts I adlibbed.

7. Were there any aspects of play in Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn that did not live up to your expectations?

Information was not terribly well organized, had to go looking through a lot of text for answers to player questions. Lack of morale information on goblins, or how to RP them.

Spellcasters didn't feel like they got much bang for their buck when they used their 1st Level spells, compared to just attacking with their cantrips or the cleric's scimitar.

Lore skills from the backgrounds never got an opportunity to be rolled.

Non-linear layout made it a little too easy to accidentally skip straight to the boss fight.

8. Do you have any other comments, feedback, or concerns relating to Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn?

Was not the brutal slugfest I expected from other people's reports of TPKs, but players avoided some of the worst fights and got lucky on others. I didn't play the monsters very tactically. It's still troubling that they needed to rest during such a short dungeon because they were out of healing from taking so much damage. Wound up going off script on the module a lot for the sake of letting the players do whatever creative idea they had instead of sticking rigidly to the playtest.

Assuming 4 Free ability boosts and using the stat creation from the rulebook.
Characters will have 14 14 14 12 12 12 average stats.
at 5th that's 16 and 5-14s,
at 10th that's 5-16s and a 14,
at 15 only 3-18s and 3-16s,
at 20 you have 5-18s and one 19.

In PF1 this sort of balanced approach would be fine, but in PF2 all the skill DCs and monster stats are calculated to give the player even odds of success if they've maxed out the relevant stat, so this sort of jack-of-all-stats approach would result in failing more checks than you succeeded.

I think a big part of the problem is that skill DCs appear to have been ported directly from PF1E without taking into account that skill bonuses are lower now, or that lockpicking DCs in particular were designed with the assumption that you could take 20 if you had to because there was no penalty for failing.

With PF2E, your odds of crit failing a DC 20 are as good or better than your odds of succeeding, turning it into a Sisyphusian limbo of non-progress.

Concerning Battle Medic specifically though, if Assurance was any more powerful you're looking at automatic critical success in most cases.

What? To crit succeed on Battle Medic with Assurance, you'd have to be Legendary in Medicine (DC 30). To even succeed you'd have to be Master (DC 20). If you're Expert, you'll fail. If you're Trained, you'll critically fail and kill your patient.

You can't even succeed to perform First Aid with Assurance unless you're Expert (DC 15).

For that matter, what are these fixed DC skill checks that Assurance's DC 10 result can make? The only ones I see are pulling an arrow out of a wall, Long Jumping 5 feet, Recall Knowledge to recognize a Legendary Performer or Professional and Aid if it's "a particularly easy task." That's it.

I can't quite think of something that might fit Armor as an automatic Proficiency bonus,

How about reducing the Armor Check Penalty, much like how fighters had Armor Training in PF1? Eliminating speed penalties? As it stands, the downsides of wearing heavy armor are pretty brutal.

So, instead of your sword's +X bonus determining how many dice you roll, make it based on Proficiency.

This idea has been floating in other threads, and while I love the idea of making the damage increase tied to level progression instead of magic items, basing it on proficiency has a ton of problems. Proficiency increases are wildly uneven across different classes, and only the fighter gets Legendary weapon prof. You're going to wind up with huge variance in the damage between different characters, even martial characters.

My preference would be to add proficiency bonus (including level) to damage like we do to every other stat.

Couldn't you say that about every character and every class, that everyone wants to have something outside of their iconic skill set to make them unique, including classes like fighter who have only 3 trained skills?

Yes, absolutely. The fighter needs to have more skills. 3 + Int in this system is basically the same as what it had before (when you account for the extra skill from favored class), which I know the devs know is too few, because after the core book they never made a martial class with no spells that only had 2 + Int skills ever again.

The ranger's particularly problematic because it actually had its number of skills reduced while the bard became a full caster and had its increased. There just seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Honestly, I think there needs to be a lot more skills in general, because with the exception of Savage Worlds, D20 system games are by far the stingiest RPGs when it comes to skills that I've ever played. But non-spellcasters need to have more skills than spellcasters, because spellcasters have spells to let them do nearly anything, but skills are the only versatility that other classes have.

The last time I can recall that my gaming group rested mid-dungeon was fifteen years ago while playing 3.0, and that was a huge dungeon that killed 80% of the party.

I don't remember it happening at all while we've been playing PF1.