My group tends to like more "freedom" and find subsystems, and influence in particular very restricting.

What i will do with Myth Speaker is tell them what is going to happen and try to keep as much of the system behind the scenes. They really hare metagaming and hints about what their character should do in order to progress more easily.
So this time i will not tell them what skills are easier, unless it's very obvious (like using athletics to climb or nature to sooth and animal) and let them roll with it. If they want, they can recall knowledge to get more info (kinda like discovery action).

I just think in Myth Speakers they went a bit overboard. Like the example i gave with the hind chase scene. That chase didn't add anything to the story like in chapter one.

Definitely good points, especially with how many Myth speakers has. It being too many for some groups is useful feedback.

One thing I like about having rules for things is that deciding to not use them if you don't want to is easier than having to invent rules when they don't exist. It's easier to go "this should just be a narrative scene or a simple roll instead of X" rather than "I need to invent a system for this on the fly because it's too complex for a single roll to really fit it but it's also not an encounter mode situation."

(Hell, sometimes I just remove a bunch of encounter mode and go to theatre of the mind if that makes more sense for the situation.)

I'm pretty sure that it's not intentional for a large creature to have 0' reach and the rules simply don't account for it in spells and such.

The rules that say Sprite PCs have no reach are in a section titled "Tiny PCs", and say this (emphasis mine):

PCs are typically Small or Medium size, but most sprite PCs are Tiny instead! Being Tiny comes with its own set of rules about space and reach. Your Tiny sprite can enter another creature's space, which is important because your melee Strikes typically have no reach, meaning you must enter their space to attack them. Like other Tiny creatures, you don't automatically receive lesser cover from being in a larger creature's space, but circumstances might allow you to Take Cover. You can purchase weapons, armor, and other items for your size with the same statistics as normal gear, except that melee weapons have a reach of 0 for you (or a reach 5 feet shorter than normal if they have the reach trait). Remember to adjust the Bulk of items and your Bulk limit for Tiny size (see Items and Sizes).

If you consider both the heading and that sentence, it's pretty clear everything in that paragraph is talking about a tiny PC. If you're suddenly not tiny, there's no reason it should apply anymore. (The Pixie Heritage makes you small, for example and there's no reason to assume a Pixie is intended to have 0' reach.)

This would get even sillier if you found an effect that makes you small/medium/large but doesn't add reach, since now you'd be too big to enter most other creatures squares but would have to do that in order to attack them.

Does "RAI" stand for "rules as I want them to be"? Just curious. ;-)

"Rouge". Heh.

You jest, but sometimes. ;)

RAI is "rules as intended". The problem with that is that we often don't actually know what's intended, and people project what they think is intended which just happens to line up with how they think it should work.

There are times when it is clear: Arcane Cascade was RAW broken for years because the stance ended as soon as you entered the stance, due to no longer meeting the requirements of the stance. That said, the RAI was very clear since "a stance that ends as soon as you enter the stance" doesn't make any sense and there's no way they would put that into the game intentionally.

Hm. Does the fact that the dual class option was not included in GM Core mean that the option is not available in post-Remaster games? From HeroLab Online: "Anything from pre-remaster books that has not been reprinted is still available and will remain so." So I guess my answer is "no". :-)

Well its already a variant rule, and a GM doesn't need Paizo's permission to use it. But yeah, generally anything that wasn't reprinted is still valid unless a GM says otherwise.

It also happens to be a game-warping rule that isn't remotely balanced and boosts some builds far, far more than others, but if people know that going in, it's their table. I suspect it wasn't reprinted because given the issues it causes, it probably wasn't worth page space (aka: money) to update/reprint.

With how many interactions there are in a game this big, ambiguity and edge cases are going to happen. As has been shown, even M:tG has it and has to have rulings in the giant PDF for those cases, despite the effort they put in to avoid it and how the game is more limited in scope of what interactions are actually allowed (there is no exploration mode in it, for example).

While tighter writing and being clear by formatting which parts of the text are actually mechanical and which parts aren't would help, there is also a pretty simple mechanism to address this:

An FAQ. Or a rulings page. Or hell, even the old days of a comment on a thread where someone says "yep, that's how it works."

I know someone probably can't spend all day every day patrolling the forum looking for questions to answer, but some of this stuff has been ambiguous for a long time and for anyone in Paizo that actually knows how its supposed to work, it'd take relatively little to clear up.

"Instance of damage" would probably take longer since it needs some more complex examples, but still.

We have a mechanism to resolve this already that doesn't require reformating books or telling the book authors they need to be technical writers: Paizo just adamantly refuses to use it.

And that's pretty sad since it was pretty clear Maya tried to address that, but it doesn't seem like xe got buy-in from the rules folks.

Your animal companion has greater independence. During an encounter, even if you don’t use the Command an Animal action, your animal companion can still use 1 action that round on your turn to Stride or Strike. It can do this at any point during your turn, as long as you aren’t currently taking an action. If it does, that’s all the actions it gets that round—you can’t Command it later.

That's the only thing in the rules about this, and nothing in that says the GM controls it.

In the absence of that, the player is assumed to control their own stuff. Otherwise, how is the GM supposed to know when you want the action taken, since the rule says explicitly that the action can be at any time during your turn?

They feature heavily in Night of the Gray Death, might wanna check that out

Yeah they actually feature in this one. Definitely the place to look in terms of existing usage.

You think the Oracle test is "wonky" because it's different to the other classes. Maybe it's the other classes that are wonky and the Oracle is right.

Oracle is wonky because it's literally saying two different things within the same paragraph, and one of those things is saying the same numbers that were already wrong once and errata'd. The other spontaneous casters don't have that problem.

Paizo needs to do a comprehensive errata on remaster Oracle to actually fix this stuff. The state the class was released in is simply below an acceptable standard.

If you're doing an Inventor thing that says class DC, you should be using Inventor class DC. A generic thing would use your higher class DC instead (like the Flail Critical Specialization). This can actually happen in the normal rules with archetypes anyway as some of them give a class DC (like Inventor).

As for RAW being the bible... well, dual class wasn't reprinted in GM Core and was super wonky even before it was dropped. If you're going to use a variant rule that warps the game as much as this one does, you're going to have no choice but to deal with the edge cases yourselves via GM rulings.

When I was young, my buddies and I used to love to go to the gaming store and see what new stuff came out, see if anyone was playing in the back room, and buy some new dice or figures.

I wonder sometimes if young people are still going to gaming stores to meet some fellow gamers and look at new stuff on the shelves or if that era is completely over.

We've already got that problem. I know finding new players is harder than it used to be. It used to be just go to the gaming store, put a flyer up, or run into people and chat them up. These days it's all various online tools and such and it's a real hassle.

We have more communication than ever, and yet we also lack community and feel more isolated than before.

I'm surprised Diamond has gone bankrupt. They were the big distributor in the market 30 plus years ago when I was looking to publish a comic book. Diamond Distributors has been doing business a long, long time. Not sure if Covid got them or just changing times with everything moving digital or some combination of the two.

If Diamond Distributors is going out of business, that hurts the overall small publishing business. Looks like they been in business since 1982. That is 43 to 44 years of business.

I know this hurts a lot of people, but I'm fairly certain Diamond did not want or intend this to happen. And it does look like COVID got them as it did so many other businesses that had been around a long time. That is too bad.

Diamond may be gone soon. One of the rocks of the publishing market brought low.

Looks like Diamond lost some very big customers during COVID. This may have been the start of the end of their business.

Diamond Distributors

Yeah, losing Marvel and DC hit pretty hard, and the COVID disruption also didn't help. Print costs have also gone way up in the last few years which is likely impacting sales volume.

It's not an easy business to be in right now. I know when I looked at Shining Kingdoms here it's $85 CAD before tax (so pushing $100), while Rival Academies is $65 at the same FLGS. That is a lot of money. Divine Mysteries is flat out over $100. Back in 2019 the Core Rulebook was less than that, and it's a gigantic book.

Folks only have so much money. I may wind up on PDF at this point not because I like PDFs (because I really don't for a lore book that I want to sit down and read through), but because I can afford them. Diamond and the FLGS get nothing from a PDF sale.

I'm sorry if I offended anyone. It wasn't intentional. I'm aware that my thought processes are unusual, and that this can often lead to communication difficulties — especially in online environments were facial cues and other aspects body language aren't available to provide me with immediate feedback so that I can correct misunderstandings as they occur.

No worries. :) People are pretty passionate about this topic!

A number of companies want to engage in a business venture together that each believes has the potential to earn them a profit.

They all hope that it will be a successful venture, but understand that there are a number of different ways that it might not turn out as profitable as expected or even fail completely: the product might not sell very well, the product might be accidentally destroyed or damaged before being sold, one or more of the parties might go into bankruptcy, new taxes might be levied during the sales process, costs of materials might rise, etc.

So in order for each party to be able to make an accurate risk assessment before committing to this venture, they create an agreement that defines the processes by which the assets involved in this joint venture will be divided up in the event that any of those forms of failure might occur.

All of the parties agree to the terms of the contract and they all sign on to it.

Eventually one of those failure points occurs, and under the terms that all of the parties agreed to, some property that formerly belonged to one set of companies, now becomes the property of a different set of companies.

For me, this transfer of assets doesn't qualify as theft in either a legal or ethical sense because the parties that had ownership before the property became part of this venture consented to this outcome when they signed the agreement.

The fundamental difficulty is that Diamond doesn't really own these books. They didn't pay to write them or print them. They didn't buy them. They have possession of them, but that isn't the same thing.

Diamond takes possession of the inventory so they can sell it and take a cut of the sale. If they don't sell it, they still don't own it: they send it back to the creator to deal with.

That's actually a pretty good system for everyone involved: small publishers don't have the capacity to do distribution to all kinds of different stores. Even bigger publishers like Paizo probably don't want to do it so they can focus on their core business. Diamond can combine inventory from a lot of publishers and get it to a lot of stores, giving publishers reach into places they may not have contact with on their own and simplifying it for stores, and Diamond doesn't have to do a massive outlay on printing costs to have that inventory to sell.

Overall, the system makes sense. While it's not risk free for Diamond (storing inventory they don't sell isn't free and neither is distribution), they're not taking the risk of printing costs upfront on a book that might not actually sell.

There's also clearly nothing in these contracts that actually spells out that Diamond can just sieze stuff like this, otherwise so many companies wouldn't be taken by surprise by it. It's instead something buried in case files and such that no one who isn't a lawyer can possibly be expected to understand. Small publishers likely had no idea that this was actually a thing that could happen simply due to not having the money to hire a lawyer to invest enough time to know and warn them about it.

The problem is when Diamond goes bankrupt and claims "we can still sell all your stuff that we're holding except we're not paying you for it." They don't own those things. They didn't buy them and they didn't pay the costs of production. They're simply seizing stuff in the warehouse and going "that belongs to a bank none of you actually dealt with now because we owe them money." THAT is where I have a problem.

Taking Paizo/Roll for Combat/etc property and using it to pay off a bank that none of those companies had any dealings or agreements with is simply unfair, and if an individual did that they would get treated entirely differently, especially if they were taking stuff from a bank. The legal system is rigged in favor of big players and the way this is all going down isn't at all ethical. It's legal, but as Asmodeus vs Sarenrae teaches us: lawful and ethical are not the same thing.

If they told the publishers "we're going out of business, if you want your stuff back you have to pay to ship it back"? Well, bankrupty sucks, the remaining money has to pay off creditors first. That's unfortunate, but it's 100% ethical.

Adding further to this is that in Roll for Combat's recent update, they point out that Diamond is actually still operating. They're not actually shutting down (another poster pointed that out as this is a Chapter 11). They're still selling stuff. They're still sending Roll for Combat sales reports. Hell, they're apparently still taking in new inventory. So while they're trying to claim they need to just sieze and sell everything to pay off creditors, they're actually still trying to operate and still requesting more inventory come in.

Those are just fundamentally incompatible positions and it's completely absurd for them to say "we're taking your stuff, selling it, and not paying you" while also saying "we're operating normally and could you please send us more stuff that we probably won't sieze and sell without paying you for?"

I've been pondering why I had such a visceral reaction to the use of the word 'theft' in this situation, and I think it is because it seems to argue that while agency, consent, and responsibility are valid legal principles, they are not valid ethical principles.

I find that very unsettling since they are core principles for every system of ethics that I would even remotely consider adopting.

Let's say that a couple gets married in a community property state. Neither expects that they will get divorced, but each understands that if they do, any assets earned during the marriage will be split evenly between them.

Ten years later they do get divorced. During the marriage, spouse A earned significantly more than spouse B did, so an equal division of assets will not correspond to the amount that each spouse brought into the partnership.

So in the divorce more of spouse A's earned wealth automatically becomes the property of spouse B than the reverse.

From my perspective, the ethics here are simple. Both people willingly agreed to this arrangement when they got married so each is responsible for upholding the terms of that agreement, and neither is acting unethically by insisting that the other person do so.

But many of you seem to view this differently. Apparently, under your system of ethics, although spouse B is legally entitled to that property, by insisting that spouse A abide by their agreement spouse B is acting unethically.

As I understand your point of view, spouse A is a victim here because this is the "legalized theft" of spouse A's property.

But that seems to completely devalue spouse A's agency. Since both people were mentally competent when they willingly consented to this outcome, I don't see why spouse A is absolved of all ethical responsibility to follow the terms of the agreement or why spouse B is wrong to insist that the agreement be followed.

Or we could discuss the ethics of completely disingenuous examples? And since you provided one, I will too:

Say for example you're doing a move, and I offer to let you store some stuff in my house until you get settled. I then sell the house along with everything inside it and keep all the money. Did I do something wrong? Or is that perfectly fine because you took the risk of putting things in my house while I was providing you the service of storage?

But getting back to the actual point: Roll for Combat's first video reaction to this made pretty clear that they actually had no idea this could happen. That's been a pretty common reaction. So the first question is if they actually even knew that. If we assume they should have known this was a risk, then someone is responsible for them (and a lot of others) not knowing that and I imagine there's going to be some hard questions put towards a bunch of lawyers about "why didn't you warn us of this or do anything to protect us from it?". But lets assume that they did, or should have known.

Even then, your example still doesn't work because none of them actually had any agreement with Diamond's creditors. Roll for Combat (and Paizo, and everyone else) had a deal with Diamond to distribute things for a percentage of the sales. That's it. Diamond never actually bought this stuff so ethically, they don't own it. They have possession of it for the purpose of facilitating sales, which they get paid for.

Effectively a third party that Paizo never made any agreement with is now coming in and claiming they should be entitled to simply take that stuff, sell it, and keep the proceeds themselves. You know what we call that when an individual goes somewhere, takes something that isn't theirs, and sells it for personal profit?

Theft.

A more accurate version of your example would be if B's new partner C showed up and claimed they're also entitled to a bunch of A's assets.

This motion feels short sighted from my perspective. If you expect to continue distribution once Ch 11 is completed, this action would seem to be lighting your company on fire. Paizo and these other companies are going to think long and hard about working with Diamond again in the future even once Ch 11 is closed. I wonder if they are in worse financial condition then they initially thought and they may be looking at converting the remaining divisions to a Ch 7. Just speculation.

Getting off my soapbox for a moment (because everything else I said in this thread was about the morality of it, not the legality of it) and just talking about practicality of it: I was wondering about this.

If the goal here is to keep operating, liquidating your supplier's stock and them getting shortchanged on it seems like a terrible idea. Who is going to want to supply Diamond more stock after that without cash up front?

A distributor that suppliers can't trust doesn't seem like a viable business.

But every spellcasting class other than Oracle starts out with both their spell slot count and their repertoire count being the same and matching to their spellcasting progression table. Only Oracle has any mismatch there, and the developers have tried to fix that mismatch once already.

This, for sure. This text has already been wrong once in exactly this way, and since it contradicts itself, assuming the number is just wrong for a second time is pretty reasonable.

(That it feels rasonable to make that assumption also says something about Remaster Oracle and PC2's general need of more editing than it got.)

NorrKnekten wrote:

Which lets be honest, people shouldn't need to go trough 2 hour VoDs for simple rules questions because the book keeps related rules in separate and unreferenced layers.

This is probably one major gripe I have with PF2. It used to be that the rules would often restate the "normal" way things operate or tell you to reference other rules bits. There was redundancy. A lot of that has been removed, making it harder to interpret the rules unless you read the physical book (I personally almost exclusively reference AoN) so finding the context is a lot harder.

I understand there are fair reasons to do so (page space being a big one) but it's less user friendly than it used to be in that aspect.

There also used to be a FAQ and dev participation here in the forums to explain a bunch of that, and almost none of that exists anymore. PF2 suffers for it because things that are unclear just stay that way forever (instance of damage has entered the chat).

That video for example is Mark answering questions after he left Paizo, which he did a bunch of times. I know Logan showed up on How It's Played now and then for a while too.

But the FAQ is seriously missed.

Tridus wrote:

Unexpected Transposition is great for this. I had a player use it when they were being attacked by a creature that was riding a dinosaur. Suddenly the player was riding the dinosaur. Good times.

I'm not sure that's allowed either, as riders are considered to occupy the same squares as the mount.

Unexpected Transposition is a different spell so the situation is different since its just "you swap places" and doesn't care about the space being unoccupied. That said, it was the dinosaur attacking and not the rider (they swapped with the rider so the rider was being attacked by their own dinosaur).

Using Collective Transposition it probably wouldn't work in the same way my question about a tiny creature going into another creature's space wouldn't work. And if it did, you'd have to secure yourself, etc.

I do think you could teleport the current rider off, and teleport an ally above the mount, who would fall and land on the mount. But they would need to spend some action to actually start riding the mount.

Of course, I can understand using rule of cool to say "it just works" since the difference is basically just 1 action. Depending on the size of the mount maybe sort of reflex save to stay on top of the creature.

I'm less worried about having to get situated on the mount again, but they definitely had to command it to get it under control (otherwise it would try to buck them off since they're unfamiliar). So actions were being spent just with a different explanation.

Tridus wrote:

Exactly. Creditors are charging interest for a reason: they're taking on risk. A situation where they get to profit but also get to outsource the risk to everyone else isn't the system working properly: it's the system being gamed to the benefit of a few.

The producer-to-distributor-to-buyer arrangement has risk. From the distributor's perspective, it's quite irrational and unreasonable to say that Paizo gets their share of the profit of that arrangement but none of the risk, right? That's rigging it in Paizo's favor, and thus unfair, according to your own logic.

Except Diamond makes money on every unit they do sell, without having to pay upfront for it. If they don't sell it, they just send it back.

So no, that's not my logic at all. That's twisting things to make it look like somehow this wasn't a good deal for Diamond when it was actually a mutually beneficial arrangement until the bankrupcy happened, and it's not like Diamond went bankrupt due to having to pay for inventory they couldn't move or something.

It looks like the way Pathbuilder is handling this is that the Wizard class itself is the remaster version. So if you create the character with remaster rules on, you get a remaster wizard and can't pick the old school options. As you noticed if you make a non-remaster character you can do it.

I tried "allow outdated CRB and APG", which you'd think is what would do it and is on the new character screen, but that didn't change anything.

I don't see an obvious way around that in Pathbuilder, it looks like internally classic/remaster Wizards are just not the same so unlike feats, the school choices simply don't mix.

I'd allow it. At the moment of resolution, no one moved into a space occupied by anyone else. If you assume simultaneous movement, at no point is the space occupied by more things than fit there. I feel like this is trying to prevent shenanigans like "put 4 players in the same space."

This does create some edge cases: can you move a tiny creature into a space with a medium creature you aren't moving, since that space is occupied? That's legal movement in that a tiny creature is absolutely allowed to be in that space if they had moved normally, but the spell seems to disallow that.

I'm imagining a scenario such as when a bad guy has pushed an ally off a cliff and they're dangling by their finger tips or some such; how cool would it be to turn the tables on said bad guy just as my ally's turn comes around?

Unexpected Transposition is great for this. I had a player use it when they were being attacked by a creature that was riding a dinosaur. Suddenly the player was riding the dinosaur. Good times.

There seems to be an assumption that the number of spell slots should equal the number of spells in the repertoire. I don't know why that should be the case.

It's because of this line in the repertoire section:

Each time you get a spell slot (see Table 2–3), you add a spell of the same level to your spell repertoire.

If you follow that, you're adding a repertoire spell every time you add a spell slot so they wind up in sync.

The very next line says something else, though, and that's where the confusion is:

At 2nd level, you select another 1st-level spell; at 3rd level, you select two 2nd-level spells, and so on.

These used to be in sync because the text about how many spells you get was also 2 and then 1, but that was changed to 3 and then 1 (to match the table). So now this paragraph is saying two different things at the same time and we can't tell which one is intended.

That's why I asked the question, since the tool consensus seems to be "it's the first one."

Also, you're a bard, you have composition cantrips to suck up your actions and instruments to fill your hands, why do you want to use a whip?

Reach Trip is a pretty solid thing to do with 1 action. I had a Thaumaturge doing it and it was really effective.

A Bard with the STR to do it could definitely help the party out with that action, because sometimes even Bards have a spare third action (if Linger is active for example). And Reach lets them stand behind the Fighter while doing it.

It's a pretty fun build, just not one for a -1 STR character.

Finoan wrote:

Tridus wrote:

It's completely morally bankrupt and is effectively theft.

Bankruptcy as a whole is morally bankrupt and is effectively theft. The only question is, 'theft from whom?'

But considering that the historical alternative is debtor's prison...

I wouldn't consider bankruptcy in and of itself to have moral standing.

Effectively you have more debt than you can pay, and you tell your creditors that "you're giving up". Sometimes that results in restructuring of the company and selling off assets and continuing to operate. And yes, it could be viewed as theft from your creditors, but I feel like that is the risk that creditors take. In my view, that is the risk they're taking and in the event of bankruptcy, they are the ones who should get screwed.

Exactly. Creditors are charging interest for a reason: they're taking on risk. A situation where they get to profit but also get to outsource the risk to everyone else isn't the system working properly: it's the system being gamed to the benefit of a few.

We've seen that over and over again, like how shoplifting is treated as a more serious crime than wage theft, or how "financial services" companies have a habit of getting taxpayer bailouts when they make ridiculous bets that go sideways because they're so well connected politically.

From the coverage of this and the reactions so many people involved have had, it's pretty clear a lot of folks had no idea that consignment would simply allow Diamond to size and sell off everything with no compensation to the actual owners of those books. That is simply not a fair system.

Legally it seems they can do, but what's legal and what's moral have very little in common. So I'm calling it what it is: legalized theft.

You're going to fail a lot. A moderate save on a level 16 creature is +28, so lets look at a DC 38 as a sample difficulty.

You're going to have +16 (level) +8 (legendary), -1 (STR), +2 (ABP item bonus) = 25. So that's a 13 on the dice to succeed against an on-level, moderate save. If you get something above level with a good save, that goes up real fast. ie: a creature 17 with a good save is DC 42 so now you need a 17, and I'm just assuming you never try this against an extreme DC.

Critical failure is actually a real threat for you, which is something to be aware of because it can be not great. In the first case you crit fail on a 3 and in the second case you crit fail on a 7 (this is more likely than success is).

With a +4 STR, that 13 changes to an 8 and the 17 becomes a 12.

I also don't recommend taking the Halfling ancestry penalty if you want to do this. Use the alternate ancestry boosts instead.

Either that, or get assurance and accept you'll only be able to do it against weaker enemies, but you'll always succeed at that.

My wife played an untamed Druid in Ruby Phoenix and we didn't find the forms all that powerful at high level. Versatile, definitely. She could do a huge variety of things. But when it came down to combat, it tailed off at higher level as she just had no way to keep up with the actual martials accuracy wise. So it didn't feel great when she couldn't really keep up with the others except as a spellcaster, which was definitely effective.

I'd love to see a shifter class archetype that buffs up the forms and reduces spellcasting so that kind of build feels better, since it's not really a power problem (Druid is pretty good), just that specific fantasy isn't well-served right now.

The second paint point comes with rituals, and it is that it is super easy to make them impossible to pass. Since rituals must have the correct number of secondary casters, and the secondary casters must crit succeed to give a +2 circumstance bonus but need only fail to incure -4 circumstance penalty, it becomes very easy to make the ritual impossible to pass. It's even worse if anyone critical fail, at which point rituals decrease their degree of success by one. This is "fine" when rituals is just an optional thing we do to resurrect our party members, gain undead minions, or some other downtime like activity that isn't crucial to the adventure's progression. But...

Yeah the way that rituals work is a huge problem in general, but especially if it's plot mandatory. I had the same problem in SoT: it wants the players to do a bunch of rituals with a bunch of secondary casters. Mathematically, with 2+ secondary casters, SOMEONE is failing. That -4 skews the math massively considering the primary check is already a very hard DC.

I know on one of them, we ended up with the primary caster needing a 16 on the dice to succeed, and that was the best in the party at it. If it's plot necessary you can't run it as written because players will fail/crit fail and need to try it several times. I had players fail one seven times before they gave up and asked an NPC teacher for help. To say the players are not enthusiastic about having to do another ritual would be an understatement.

I made a thread about it a while ago. I ended solving it by removing secondary checks: all secondary casters have the option to auto-succeed with no roll. That -4 is simply too punitive.

Additionally, if the ritual is plot mandatory, I just change the outcomes so it's fail-forward: the plot mandatory thing always happens and if you did badly, there will be some other consequence.

So yeah, good point: rituals as written that are required for the plot do not work well in APs. No ritual that must succeed to advance the plot should evert have a failure condition that prevents that since it just feels like a colossal waste of everyone's time to make them keep doing it (and keep gathering components to do it!) until the dice decide its okay to move on.

I hate it for some other ones too, like Heartbond: the way it's written the people being bonded effectively need to be trained and half-decent at diplomacy or society otherwise they're imposing severe penalties on the primary caster and screwing up their own bonding ceremony. Narratively I just hate how restrictive that is.

Tridus wrote:

So if you don't want to ignore that text you have to basically use the second meaning as the first one is a different condition entirely. And in that case, yeah suddenly someone could hide in plain sight against you because you're not aware of anything going on temporarily. But it works fine if you do. (Having been hit hard enough to suffer a severe concussion and lose awareness in real life, it definitely fits realism for me. That was a bad time.)

I'm sorry you had to experience that.

Thanks. I've recovered a lot over the years. :) It was really scary for a while, not being able to do things like get in a car without nausea or eve reading anything for any length of time. You know how much text is in this game? I never thought about it until it was suddenly a barrier.

Take care of your brain, folks. It's an easy thing to take for granted.

Finoan wrote:

Tridus wrote:

It's completely morally bankrupt and is effectively theft.

Bankruptcy as a whole is morally bankrupt and is effectively theft. The only question is, 'theft from whom?'

But considering that the historical alternative is debtor's prison...

Bankruptcy is an expected systemic risk in a free market that allows the process of creative destruction to occur in a capitalist model. It's healthy and better than the alternative.

It's not theft. It's business failure. If the business fails, the assets are sold off to pay debts according to legal priority as the business is liquidated.

Taking someone's product you don't own, selling it, and not paying the actual owner is literally theft. Because that's what this is: Diamond gets to take stock they don't own and haven't paid for, sell it, and send nothing to the actual owners.

These are not Diamond's assets. If you or I did that, we'd be in jail. But in the US, institutional theft is treated entirely differently.

Trying to dress it up as anything else is just corporatespeak for a system that is rigged for the benefit of certain parties over everyone else.

Tridus wrote:

It's completely morally bankrupt and is effectively theft.

Bankruptcy as a whole is morally bankrupt and is effectively theft. The only question is, 'theft from whom?'

But considering that the historical alternative is debtor's prison...

Well its not like corporations can go to prison, even when they're doing actually criminal things. Which this isn't.

Diamond's Creditors shouldn't get to simply sieze and sell other companies assets that Diamond never paid for. There's no world in which that's right unless you're an investment banker.

That’s utterly ridiculous

You'd be surprised how often laws have been carefully crafted over time to make sure that the banks come out ahead and everyone else gets screwed. That's pretty much what is going on here.

Legally it works. It's completely morally bankrupt and is effectively theft.

The boomerang argument was patently ridiculous at the time, and remains ridiculous now. From a mechanics perspective, people were arguing the weapon got the returning rune for free; nothing about the way we know the game balances weapons indicates a returning rune fits in the boomerang's power budget, and it certainly doesn't have any of the powerlevel cuts you would expect if a weapon were to get a returning rune for free. That argument doesn't withstand scrutiny, either mechanical (free returning rune is silly) or narrative (boomerangs don't come back when they hit something in real life).

It's still ridiculous but from the other direction: the thing flat out says it does something and people are arguing "it doesn't do what it says it does because of a bunch of other considerations."

It's bringing in a bunch of external arguments to try to create a case for it to not do what it says it does. It certainly wouldn't be the first weapon in the game that is not tuned correctly: Flickmaces got what, two rounds of nerfs?

That is a great example.

Who gets to decide when to cut off the description and say that part isnt rules its just flavor. It is subjective at that point. If we take the rules to mean what they say then stunned is actually very powerful.

Stunned
You’ve become senseless. You can’t act.

If that first line is ignored than stealthy characters cannot sneak off and become undetected from stunned creatures with just the sneak action. if a stunned creature is sensless then stunning has more value.

If you ignore the second line which some people have wanted to do in the past then we get into the discussion between slow and stunned again.

Lol and there is a possibility with some of these things in the game that many people have just been running them wrong.

Yeah this is the core problem. "You've become senseless" doesn't have a specific meaning or even a single one, since as a term it's used for being knocked unconscious but also just being hit so hard that you become unaware or disoriented for a moment.

So if you don't want to ignore that text you have to basically use the second meaning as the first one is a different condition entirely. And in that case, yeah suddenly someone could hide in plain sight against you because you're not aware of anything going on temporarily. But it works fine if you do. (Having been hit hard enough to suffer a severe concussion and lose awareness in real life, it definitely fits realism for me. That was a bad time.)

And if you start ignoring text... well, "You can't act" is clear and also a very different effect if you ignore it vs if you include it. In my experience folks generally include it since that's the big differentiator between Stunned and Slowed: Stunned costs you reactions. Without that, Stunned 2 could just be "Slowed 2 for 1 round" and it'd mean exactly the same thing.

As long as folks are giving feedback on the use of subsystems in Adventure Paths... I'd love to hear about more recent examples. Once we published the 2nd edition of GameMastery Guide (remastered into GM Core), we've tried hard to make sure the subsystems we use in adventures either come directly from GM Core, or are built on those bones (typically atop the Victory Points mechanic) so that GMs and players are, in theory, as familiar with those rules as they should be fore things like combat.

The influence chapter at the start of Spore War was super fun! I really liked having the whole group effectively forced to interact with one NPC at a time as it prevented the old standby of everyone splits up/attaches to a single NPC and spams their best skill. Since it also imposed a defacto time limit, folks had to get more creative in trying to use skills and also try things that were not so optimal. (Our Goblin Alchemist tried to impress one of the delegates with an impromptu indoor fireworks display using his Fireworks Performer background as the justification... and the fact that he had recently blown up a local warehouse by accident was looming over it. But he rolled a 19 and it went great.) These NPCs also felt very distinctive with the personality quirks and penalties. It's the best influence encounter I've seen in PF2.

When I GM'd Ruby Phoenix, the chases were well received, especially the race in book 2. Folks also had a good time with the influence in book 2.

I'm GMing Strength of Thousands and has a bunch of them come up too. Someone already mentioned the Tell a Tall Tale one, which was great fun to run. I used it as a framework to do some narration and let folks who are comfortable try to come up with a basic story via improv, and that worked great. Players uncomfortable with that spotlight were allowed to just roll, so everyone got to participate.

The only issue I've had elsewhere with these subsystems is that at the end of book 3 they can do practical research but don't have any obvious time pressure, which is effectively a "keep doing it until you're maxed or the GM invents some time pressure" situation.

Research feels similar to me: it works well provided constraints are put on it that make failure actually possible. If failure isn't an option and the adventure basically stops until the PCs find the information, I prefer a single check that determines how long it takes for that to happen, rather than "we're going to keep rolling until you succeed", you know?

This is something the rules touch on but don't expand a lot. ie: the research example in the book doesn't have any constraints at all. Constraints breed creativity and create a sense of tension, so they're essential. Chase and infiltration kind of have them baked in, but for the others it's important to make sure they're tuned so that the players have incentive to be active and try things without it being so tight that it feels punitive.

SoT also has a couple of "you can fail this, but you must succeed to advance the plot" points. Book 5 has a ritual you can fail, but success is literally required to advance the plot. So it's a case where I'm replacing that with a fail forward result instead: they do the thing no matter what, but their success/failure result determines how well it goes rather than if it happens at all.

My general experience with PF2 subsystems is that if they stick to the GMG framework and expand on it, I and my players are usually going to have a good time with it. It's when we get something entirely new that it becomes much more likely to be a frustrating experience. ie: Cirus rules in Extinction Curse, Kingdom and camping in Kingmaker (we quit before trying the army ones, but no one was enthusiastic about it).

Plus, at this point I can tell players "this is an influence" and while I'll give them a refresher on what they can do, they already understand the idea and it doesn't feel like a bunch of new stuff to learn for a one-off.

I still remember the discussion from a while back about whether a boomerang returns or not. The "flavor text" seemed to contradict the rules text and people swore you could have your cake and eat it too.

Yeah this is the one I was thinking of too. People saying it doesn't return back to you on a success. The description says this:

The boomerang is a carved piece of wood designed to curve as it flies through the air, returning to the wielder after a successful throw.

The whole thing was completely absurd and hinged both on "flavour text so it doesn't count", but also "successful throw isn't in the rules so doesn't do anything", as if the meaning isn't clear.

People try to hold up the rules too a technical writing standard and they're really not written that way.

Whether it's a problem or not is subjective, and the whole point of this thread. It does seem like I am in the minority, but personally I don't feel like half effects on a failure is enough to compensate for the potential and reliability of attack rolls.

Except Spell Attack rolls aren't reliable. That's the problem. They are the worst attack roll in the game.

It takes a LOT of work to overcome a baked in -4 on your accuracy, and missing on a die roll of 10 when that same roll is a hit for every martial in the game feels awful, especially when you had to use twice as many actions and a limited resource (a spell slot) to do it.

Spell Attacks are just penalized by delayed proficiency and lack of item bonuses for nearly the entire game and aren't balanced to account for that the way saves are. That's why save spells end up being better in play despite having to play the "figure out which one to target" minigame.

Yes but we all know the +2 weapon proficiency is very good however that was not what I was asking. Is there any way to increase how the Barbarian/Monk is being played? Is there any items, runes or different feats we could use to increase his effectiveness or is it just the fact his dice rolls are general between 5-10?

I mean if his dice rolls are ACTUALLY averaging 7.5, he is going to have a bad time. Over the long term, that's either memory bias or unbalanced dice.

Start recording every d20 roll he makes to see if it's actually this bad. If it is, change dice.

If its still like that, the only thing you can do is either change it so that he's doing things that don't require him to roll (ie: make enemies roll saves), or get bonuses on him so a low roll works more often (aka: add Fighter).

Would it be more advisable to tell him he is better off dropping Barbarian for Fighter and keep monk since most of his concept revolves around the Monk class.

He's better off dropping one of them for Fighter, yeah. Fighter is pretty much the best dual-class option for every non-Fighter martial because that proficiency bump is so powerful.

Of course, even that might not be enough. Dual-class is just inherently imbalanced at its core and some combos work far better than others. There's no fixing that except to play the strong ones to keep up with everyone else.

Tridus wrote:

Yeah the extra slots are a crutch: they shift the class power a lot towards "generic spellcaster" and away from "unique stuff". It feels like just stepping into Sorcerer's territory.

I'd be totally happy with ditching that and bringing back mystery benefits and the other unique things the class had. Was anyone really clamoring for "more spell slots but the actual distinct class mechanics are all entirely optional?"

Like, you can make a Bard that never uses a composition, but that's not the intended design, surely? Is there another class where "the class" itself is designed to be optional like this?

Technically Druid (see adjacent thread) but it has the advantage of more comprehensive focus spells and being the core identity of the primal tradition meaning a druid is always casting druid spells. In the meantime, a flame oracle doesn't have to cast a single fire spell and is probably optimal doing so currently.

Druid also isn't designed around the premise "we expect people to just not use their Order features and are basing the class around that." Which is an explicit design goal stated in the remaster Oracle preview: they literally designed it around the premise that people could simply play it without a curse existing at all.

I don't think any other class is designed that way. Like, its a thing you can do, but Thaumaturge is not designed around the idea that someone will just opt-out of using Implements.

Conceptually I like subsystems. They let you add meat to skill challenges and do some things that don't normally have rules. Chases for example do a good job of having a narrative chase, because going into encounter mode to chase someone down across a city is tedious and not very fun vs a more narrative way of running it.

The thing with these is that they're meant to be narrated. If you're just rolling and tracking points, they really aren't that interesting. People should be describing what they're doing with flourishes and the GM should be using it all as a narrative tool in order to build a story. That's where they really work, as they make the actual tracking of how you're doing pretty easy.

The big problem with subsystems is the AP specific ones because they're generally not playtested and thus they range in quality all the way down to "this is unplayable/broken", at which point they're actively worse than not having a subsystem at all. The most infamous examples are the Caravan system people have already mentioned and the PF2 Kingdom Rules.

"Failure You barely control the boat. The fisher takes a –1

penalty to their next check to Gather Fish during this run.
Increase the DC of subsequent checks to Sail by 1 for the
rest of this run."

This feels fiddly, for sure. It's a very specific thing to track and if a bunch of them pile up you'll need to track them all, which for something that you don't do frequently will definitely get annoying and feel like a lot of work. Hell, this isn't even using consistent modifiers: it's a penalty to one thing and a DC increase to another thing.

I generally don't like these kind of hyper-specific modifiers in general. I'd prefer something simpler like "Failure: You barely control the boat. If the next time this action is taken is also a failure, lose 1 success point."

Quote:

PRESENT A TALL TAIL

Auditory, Concentrate, Exploration
You present one aspect in your narrative about a meeting with a mystical animal. Each attempt takes 1 minute and requires you to attempt a DC 20 skill check. You can choose between describing the animal (Nature), inventing something supernatural about it (Arcana, Deception, or Occult), recalling past tales about the animal (Society), adding narrative drama (Deception or Performance), or connecting with the audience (Performance). You can’t take any of these options more than twice in the same story.
Critical Success You gain 2 Story Points.
Success You gain 1 Story Point.
Critical Failure You lose 1 Story Point (to a minimum of 0) and can’t retry the option you just attempted, even if you haven’t yet used it twice.

I had some trouble understanding the description of the activity, but I decided--based on the four NPC contestants having earned 7, 5, 4, and 2 Story Points each--that the storyteller gets up to five rolls: one for describing the animal, one for its supernatural powers, one for choosing an animal from familiar folktales, one for drama, and one for exciting the audience--using one of the skills listed. This might be wrong, because the line, "You can’t take any of these options more than twice in the same story," makes no sense in this interpretation, but the bard in the party rolled 8 Story Points, the kineticist and wizard rolled 5 Story Points each, and the rogue rolled 2 Story Points, so their results came out in the right range. (The magus did not participate, and the 2nd bard and the champion were absent.) Weirdly, many of the players' stories were retellings of encounters the party had with animals, but with the animals able to talk.

Just a note on this one: that limitation is effectively saying "you can't use a given skill more than twice". So you can't roll Nature 5 times. You can for example "describe the animal (Nature)" twice, then you must do the other things. Unless you critically fail on your first Nature and then you can't use it again.

I really didn't get the hate the AP got. I feel like people just get weird about things without context; my table loves Sakuachi and Deniigi has been the source of at least two squabbles (two party members really like her and are bickering over who she thinks is cooler).

I love Pathfinder but sometimes I feel like I'm playing a different game after hearing from other members of the community lol.

A lot of people felt like the AP premise and players guide promise one type of campaign and then the AP itself doesn't deliver that. Missed expectations do a lot to sour people and then that impacts their view of what comes later. If you look at the worst rated APs in the big survey done last year, several of the ones at the bottom share this trait of "they promise a certain kind of campaign and don't deliver it." (Second Darkness is notorious for this as well.)

Lots of players also dislike not being the main character of the story and escort quests. FFXIV is also discovering that as it's formerly stellar player reviews have absolutely tanked in Drawntrail, and a big chunk of that is that much of the story is "the player follows Wuk Lamat around on her adventure."

When you have both of those problems in the same AP, it's going to turn a lot of players off.

Another interesting aspect of the discussion is that regardless of which version of the Oracle people prefer, there doesn't seem to be that much enthusiasm over the class's fourth slot per rank: at best, it's not mentioned as a reason why people like the new class, and at worst it's cited as a design detriment, with plenty of unfavorable comparisons drawn with divine Sorcerers. I suspect that if you were to strip the class of that fourth slot per rank, most people wouldn't complain -- provided, of course, that you filled in that gap with something appropriate, like a mystery benefit.

Yeah the extra slots are a crutch: they shift the class power a lot towards "generic spellcaster" and away from "unique stuff". It feels like just stepping into Sorcerer's territory.

I'd be totally happy with ditching that and bringing back mystery benefits and the other unique things the class had. Was anyone really clamoring for "more spell slots but the actual distinct class mechanics are all entirely optional?"

Like, you can make a Bard that never uses a composition, but that's not the intended design, surely? Is there another class where "the class" itself is designed to be optional like this?

Attack roll spells -can- be reliable, but only with setup. It's situational and requires more teamwork than an equivalent save spell.

-You can't flank, yeah, but grapple and trip can still give you off-guard
-Sure strike/hero points are usable
-Can benefit from effects like fake out, and large penalties to AC like Synesthesia

Altogether, this can get you into extremely reliable territory, approaching 70%+ hit rate even on difficult targets. However... it's some "when the stars align" stuff.

Grapple/Trip probably require a martial to help you out applying them. If no one in your party is set up for that, a Cloistered Cleric probably isn't going to be great at it. If someone is doing it for you then it helps a lot, but that's a big if.

Sure Strike is 1/combat and hero points aren't exactly plentiful. So yeah, you can do it once a fight once you have enough spell slots to spend them this way.

Synethesia only helps the caster on a failure. On a success, it ends at the start of your turn so you don't benefit from it... and on a failure the creature is basically done anyway so you probably aren't going to hit it with any big spells (the Fighter/Barbarian will crit it into the ground in short order anyway).

I want to revisit part of this because the errata addresses the number of spell slots, but not the repertoire size. The relevant text from the class is here:

At 1st level, you learn two 1st-rank divine spells of your choice and five divine cantrips of your choice. You choose these from the common spells on the divine list or from other divine spells to which you have access. You can cast any spell in your spell repertoire by using a spell slot of an appropriate spell rank.

You add to this spell repertoire as you increase in level. Each time you get a spell slot (see the Oracle Spells per Day table), you add a spell to your spell repertoire of the same rank. At 2nd level, you select another 1st-rank spell; at 3rd level, you select two 2nd-rank spells, and so on. When you add spells, you might add a higher-rank version of a spell you already have, so you can cast a heightened version of that spell.

Now, that's not vague. You get 2 spells known to start, another at level 2, and then so it goes: 2, 1, 2, 1.

So, is that correct or not? Because folks don't seem to run it that way. Pathbuilder and HLO both start you with 3 spell picks for your repertoire at level 1 and likewise go 3, 1, 3, 1.

Did we just decide collectively that the text is wrong and the lack of errata is simply a lack of errata rather than intentional?

Player Core 2, page 130-131, oracle, 'Spell Repertoire':

> At 2nd level, you select another 1st-rank spell; at 3rd level, you select two 2nd-rank spells, and so on.

should be:

> At 2nd level, you select another 1st-rank spell; at 3rd level, you select **three** 2nd-rank spells, and so on.

(There is also an inconsistency where you start with 2 1st-rank spells at level 1. This used to be equal to the amount of 1st-level spell slots. That amount is now 3.)

Is it? I don't think it was ever clarified that the repertoire size was changing or not. I know Pathbuilder was updated and now gives the same repertoire size as the number of spell slots, but what's written here might actually be what's intended. There was a thread about it last year.

So this is a Rogue's Resilience situation: it's possible that we don't need errata (if the text is actually correct), but we do need confirmation either way on what the intention is.

Seriously, this. It drives me nuts when people claim "X doesn't work the way it says it does because that part is flavour text." What are you basing that on except that you want to argue the opposite of what the book says and the only way to do it is to just ignore that part?

I don't have a good track record for making topics like this but I'm going to give it a shot. Something that has been nagging at me for a while now is the lack of support for effects that target saving throws. I'm wondering if I'm in the minority as I see more people complaining about how bad caster attack spells are, whereas I feel they are more reliable than saves some of the time.

Mathematically speaking this is very rarely true. Spell attacks lag behind most of the game, and lag behind hard at some levels. At level 13 they are -4 vs a martial attack roll (-6 for a Fighter/Gunslinger) and there's just no making up that gap in this system since extremely few of them can benefit from things like Flanking.

Firstly is access to saves that can target all saving throws; casters like druids have a couple options but not much. Some kineticists are poo out of luck if they come up against a high reflex enemy.

I agree with this. Some spell lists are heavy on certain saves vs others, especially within certain level bands. People say "just use the right save", but its not like you're going to always have an appropriate spell that can target every save available. Especially later in an adventuring day when you've used a bunch of spells.

Second and probably my biggest gripe is the lack of bonuses and penalties. Attack rolls have easyish access in most cases to item bonuses (not so much for casters, but they do get shadow signet which is a whole other thing), status bonuses, and circumstance bonuses (aid mostly). Likewise, penalties to AC via status and circumstance are also easy to come by. Hell, attack rolls have things like sure strike and hero points. The only thing that saves have is status penalties, and extremely rarely circumstance (I think maybe only catfolk dance). So while an attack rolls can have massive numerical swings with things like heroism, flanking, aid, fury cocktail, frightened and a hero point, saves have status penalties and that's about it.

I somewhat agree with this. There's fewer things you can do to buff save things than attack spells, in particular the lack of ally buffs. No courageous anthem, no heroism, etc. That stuff just doesn't work.

So there's a bunch of cool parts of the system that casters only get to interact with in one direction: giving buffs to the martials. They can't give buffs to other casters in the same way.

(Debuffs are in a better spot since quite a few do work.)

Thirdly is that creatures themselves often play around with established rules saves are loosely built around. Some have overtuned saves straight up. Others have straight up bonuses vs magic, or immunities to things like fear or mental and a low will save which is nearly every will save. Some enemies might have evasion or similar ability too.

This doesn't bother me since the most egregous offenders like golems going "nah, casters can sit this out unless you have the one specific thing" aren't really a thing anymore. Some enemies have more resistence, but others have less, most save spells tend to do something on a success, so there's usually something you can do.

Having some variety here isn't a bad thing, really.

Agile Grace Fighter with twin picks is extremely good at this. High chance to crit, reduced MAP on subsequent attacks, Double Slice to get two attacks with that full crit chance, and Fatal. I had one of these in Ruby Phoenix and he absolutely wrecked things. Bonus points if you pick up Ranger Dedication for Twin Takedown because you can third attack for two more attacks (they're at MAP -6 with Agile Grace, but four attacks with 2 at full attack and 2 at MAP -6 is nothing to sneeze at).

2h Fighter can also get big numbers and big crits. My son played a Kobold Fighter in Extinction Curse with a Greatsword and Vicious Swing (Power Attack back then) and he still raves about it years later. Critting for 14d12 plus bonuses plus runes and such never gets old.

Barbarian is also in the picture (Giant Barbarians get absolutely huge damage bonuses and the size is very useful), and there's several others as well. But I've had people ask me as their GM for a straightforward, hard hitting melee character, and literally none of them have been disappointed in Fighter. It runs in and smashes things and it's really good at it.

If your GM lets you take Exemplar Dedication, then that's the best level 2 feat you can take pretty much if your goal is damage. (I ban it outright for that reason, but if it's allowed then welcome to flavour country.)

I don't think Intelligence is a product of Paizo wanting to protect the rogue's niche, but rather them trying to keep things as simple as possible. A "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" situation. Though I agree Paizo was certainly too conservative in the early days of PF2e and it shows when you compare new classes to old ones.

They actually asked questions about ability scores during the playtest. The challenge of course is the playtest community was mostly PF1 players (which makes sense) and PF1 players are very familiar with the ability scores. Making radical changes is hard, and making radical changes to something that familar with all they other stuff they were already changing would have been a very difficult sell. So having the same ability score array is a point of familiarity so it still "Feels like Pathfinder".

They asked a question specifically about having ability scores vs ability modifiers. Scores won, despite logically scores actually not mattering at all in PF2 because nothing uses them (unlike in PF1, where mechanics like drain do interact with them directly). That was also familiarity. The Beginners Box did away with them later and just used the modifiers... and then the remaster did the same thing. By now we're used to the modifier being all that actually matters so it didn't feel like a big change anymore.

I don't think they were "too conservative" in the early days of PF2. They were listening to feedback that a lot of us already felt a lot was changing and trying to find where the "too much" line was. It's pretty hard to know where it is until after the fact. I'm sure they'd make some more changes with the benefit of hindsight, but the system turned out pretty well. :)

I wouldn't at all be surprised to see changes in PF3 when its time comes, though.

Tridus wrote:

Like, if Battle was updated so the mystery grants Medium armor, a Martial weapon group, and Weapon Trance was changed to a +status attack/damage bonus, that would immediately feel way better.

Wouldn't this change just make battle oracle the best oracle?

If that was the only thing you did to the entire class, probably... but presumably every mystery would get a mystery benefit. It could also be tweaked if it's too much, but it's an example of a change that dramatically improves the feel of the mystery.

It's just showing that it doesn't take another massive rework of the class to fix some of the major pain points that exist now. Battle effectively needing multiple feats to be functional at the thing people want it to do (be a gish) feels lousy.

Life has the same problem, really. If it got back a bit of what it did before, like "you roll healing effects one die higher" so your Heal is d10, it's now suddenly doing something unique at the thing it's supposed to be good at.

^ Seconded. Formula are items. If the formula is common and at a level where you can get it, then you can get it unless your GM says otherwise.

Now that formula automatically scale up for items with multiple versions (such as Elixirs of Life), the level 1 versions are a great value.

For visualizing how DC by level impacts your success chances, ]I found this chart really helpful. If you're trained only and don't invest at all, it falls off hard... but if you're getting ability score boosts and an item you can actually keep it at a not awful failure rate for quite a while.

And of course, if you're investing in the skill aggressively you shoot way up.

Even if they don't actually touch Oracle ever again, this thread is still full of useful feedback for the next time they update a class. It's pretty clear that this change was very disruptive in a way that the other remasters weren't (aside from perhaps Wizard). Alchemist got a major revision as well but it doesn't seem to have garnered the same kind of strongly negative reaction, probably because it didn't downplay "using Alchemy frequently is the core class identity".

So it's still a useful discussion in that regard. If they do touch Oracle again, then it's pretty clear that there are some things people broadly agree are needed no matter their opinion of the remaster Oracle itself: mystery benefits, curse balance (which mystery benefits would help since they're a package), and distinctive cursebound actions. That stuff can be addressed without drastically changing the class again.

Like, if Battle was updated so the mystery grants Medium armor, a Martial weapon group, and Weapon Trance was changed to a +status attack/damage bonus, that would immediately feel way better.

Like, I don't realistically expect they're going to revert the whole thing and redo it. They just don't go back and update things like that, no matter how much I think it needs it. But even without that, there's stuff they can do that has broad support that would help fix up what we do have and make it a lot better.

Also, with the Astral Rune "Strikes with it deal an extra 1d6 spirit damage" which I would think applies to all applicable targets (i.e. more than just incorporeals), enhancing its general utility.

It does. Spirit Damage works on everything with a spirt, so "not constructs" is the main limitation. The fact that the rune is Ghost Touch + Damage makes it pretty attractive in any campaign where Ghost Touch is going to be relevant.

Lets say you have a system with 3 core attributes.

One for physical power one for speed and reflexes and one for mental stuff.

With that set up all caster types are going to draw off the same mental stat, there will be no differentiation based on core attributes for all the different kinds of casters you want in your game, that is unless you have derived stats that provide that differentiation at which point why not just start with more mental stats that lend the descriptive quality to them.

As others said, that won't really be true because with only 3 stats you can reorient them to mean different things entirely than just "physical, mental"... but even if it was true, does it matter?

Every martial in the game draws off STR or DEX and it's their class mechanics and how they interact with those that actually makes them feel distinct. Like, a melee Thaumaturge is probably using STR and they don't play at all the same as a Fighter who is also using STR.

Clerics being based on WIS gives them a better initiative than Wizards but it doesn't really impact how different spellcasting feels at all. Really, which casting stat you're using doesn't really impact how spellcasting feels at all: it just impacts where you have to point points to make casting work and thus what non-casting things you'll be naturally better at.

You could do that in a system with no ability scores/attributes at all, where everything is just skill based. And it would be significantly simpler by removing a layer of stats.