Tridus's page

I'm pretty sure its deliberately vague so you don't run into situations like in PF1 where a party could teleport somewhere unless someone plays a large PC and then suddenly they can't. What counts and what doesn't will be up to the GM.

Once you get a few levels, 3gp to buy them is trivial. Talisman Dabbler is only to get them free at low level. You can skip it and just buy a bunch of the talisman once you gain a few levels as the cost becomes utterly irrelevant.

Wealth in PF2 scales at a much faster than linear rate, so it very quickly becomes easy to afford a Predator's Claws every single fight. Buy a bunch, throw one on while focus are healing/refocusing, and you're good to go.

Mauler is a good dedication but it's hard to justify just for the critical specialization. There's probably something else you can get more use from.

Shifter is one a lot of people have been asking for because it would fill a gap right now: the fully focused on forms frontline martial. Druid doesn't really do that because Untamed Form just doesn't keep up and the class is still heavily invested in spellcasting. Its a good versatility option but not a good "this is my core thing" option.

I wish they'd done it instead of Daredevil and Slayer TBH. But I'm confident it'll happen one day.

I think it's worth asking, if Paizo is still dependent on keeping rulebooks flowing (which I believe they are with no sign of that changing any time soon) what strategies could they employ to extend the lifespan of the edition, which may be a good idea for: being able to capitalize on the cultural cache growth they're seeing with different forms of media, allowing SF2 to get a fair shake, and keeping the growth in 3rd party market going, which helps keep the playerbase fertile.

If they're not dependent on rulebooks, would we really be getting Daredevil and Slayer?

Honest question, because to me those feel like new classes for the sake of new classes, since books sell better with classes in them.

APs are the core business I think still, but APs require a game to play them, and keeping people interested in the game is a virtuous cycle that helps both sides of the equation. But Paizo's revenue is driven primarily by selling books.

D&D is in a different spot because of D&D Beyond and ongoing subscription revenue from that. They make money even if they don't release anything in a given month. That doesn't encourage them to release tons of new material and it REALLY doesn't encourage them to want to change editions quickly. 5e blew up and Hasbro seems utterly terrified of releasing anything new that people don't migrate to because it's not familiar, hence their desperate and ultimately futile attempts to get the playerbase to not use terms like "5.5" for the recent update.

There's plenty of life left in PF2 before its time to think about a new edition, but it will happen at some point. We don't really have the data to know when a good time to do that is, so its hard to predict it. D&D isn't a good comparison because their business model is significantly different at this point.

(Hell, the data I've seen is that D&D 2024 physical books sold relatively poorly. Beyond has no doubt cannibalized some of that business.)

I can't see this making sense in a lot of cases, but Oracle could probably make use of it to stack up low level feats. There's a lot of good low level Cursebound abilities, and if you want to pick up a Domain the first feat is also low level. The low level feat list is quite strong and picking more of them can make sense for versatility of options. (High level tends to have a clear standout at every level so you're not missing out there.)

Wouldn't be the strongest thing you can do, but having the option to use all of Nudge the Scales/Whispers of Weakness/Foretell Harm/Oracular Warning/Knowledge of Shapes certainly gives you a plethora of single action/free action options!

Here's what the rules say about "specific skills":

Using an applicable Lore to Recall Knowledge about a topic, such as Engineering Lore instead of Crafting to find structural weaknesses in a bridge, typically comes with a lower DC. Your special interests can pay off! In some cases, you can get the GM's permission to use a different but related skill, usually against a higher DC than normal. The GM might allow checks to Recall Knowledge using other skills. For example, you might assess the skill of an acrobat using Acrobatics. If you're using a physical skill (like in this example), the GM will most likely have you use a mental modifier—typically Intelligence—instead of the skill's normal physical attribute modifier.

That says that it may typically come with a lower DC, but not what that lower DC is, and it's not guaranteed to come with one at all. In cases where the skill isn't appropriate, you might get a higher DC instead if you're allowed to attempt it at all.

But when it comes to identifying creatures...

A character who successfully identifies a creature learns one of its best-known attributes—such as a hydra's head regrowth (and the fact that it can be stopped by acid or fire) or a manticore's tail spikes. On a critical success, the character also learns something subtler, like a weakness that's not obvious or the trigger for one of the creature's reactions.

The skill used to identify a creature usually depends on that creature's trait, as shown on the Creature Identification Skills table, but you have leeway on which skills apply. For instance, hags are humanoids but have a strong connection to occult spells and live outside society, so you might allow a character to use Occultism to identify them without any DC adjustment and make using Society harder. Lore skills can also be used to identify a specific creature. Using the applicable Lore usually has an easy or very easy DC (before adjusting for rarity).

Note that "easy or very easy DC" are mentioned here specifically. So sites like AoN are not pulling this out of nowhere: the rules say there's cases where that applies.

Of course, if it applies at all and which one applies is entirely GM fiat, RAW. You don't automatically get -2 for using literally any Lore skill. In fact, if your Lore skill is a poor fit and the GM is letting you use it anyway, you may get a higher DC instead, per Player Core.

This leads to some table variance in determining what is specific enough to get the benefits, so you need to talk to your GM about that.

The other aspect of this is how to calculate DCs:

On most topics, you can use simple DCs for checks to Recall Knowledge. For a check about a specific creature, trap, or other subject with a level, use a level-based DC (adjusting for rarity as needed). You might adjust the difficulty down, maybe even drastically, if the subject is especially notorious or famed. Knowing simple tales about an infamous dragon’s exploits, for example, might be incredibly easy for the dragon’s level, or even just a simple trained DC.

The first part of that is what AoN/Foundry are doing: using a level based DC adjusted by rarity.

The trouble is that they don't do the second part: adjusting it to be easier if the thing is well known. GMs often overlook that part, but some RK is supposed to be really easy because the subject is famous. I get why they don't do it because it's basically impossible for different settings to know what is famous and what isn't.

The downside to those numbers being there is some folks just use them blindly as gospel without understanding the rules around when they should be used and when they shouldn't.

But it's unfair to say there's no rules basis for those numbers, because there definitely is rules support for them as a common case baseline.

Playing the swarm's advocate here, is there enough commonality to lump swarms together? In many cases "being a swarm" is more a mathematical simplification for a horde, a mechanic more than a distinct thing in (super-)nature to study. Yet sometimes it's very intrinsic, like a Worm that Walks. Or one might study hive minds, much like studying starlings, if looking at swarming behaviors; yet IMO that'd leave out some Swarms, add in some larger entities. And focusing on just swarms without knowing much about the entities that form them feels more like a player recognizing that Recall Knowledge vs. Swarms is one of the best instances of monster-IDing in the game.

If you look at it that way, maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you look at it in the direction of "this character has a fascination with swarming creatures and studies them regardless of type", then it makes perfect sense as a lore category.

People in real life have all kinds of oddly specific interests, and this fits perfectly as one of those. If you look at it that way and compare to other creature type lores given as examples, there's really nothing out of line about this one.

The gamers' mindset might be the greatest culprit. With time, people get used to new ways of playing and will not be interested in an outdated system.

And then sales dip and it's time for renewal.

Even if its not outdated, eventually you run out of things you haven't done that you still want to do.

I'm in that spot with PF1. There's tons of stuff I haven't played... but I don't really want to play the vast majority of it. It's not interesting to me, or too fiddly, or has power scaling issues, or I just don't like the aesthetic, etc.

The amount of stuff left in PF1 that I want to play that I haven't played is a very small list now. It makes character creation difficult because finding something I'm actually excited about doing is really difficult.

I don't have that problem in PF2 right now, but given enough time it'll probably happen, and then I'll want a different system where I can do things I haven't already done or do things in different enough ways that they feel new.

If there's no PF3 for that, then I'll be playing something else.

(Some people never have this issue and either can always find something new to play, or don't mind playing a similar thing again. People are still playing AD&D 2e, after all! but there's not much money in selling material for a system that most people don't find interesting anymore.)

I've seen Library Lore being used as an option for research subsystems in adventures, for example Malevolence.

Yeah Library Lore comes up multiple times in PFS scenarios and such when there's a research task in a library.

I suppose it could also be used to learn about a creature if that creature is a librarian or a book mimic. ;)

I've got one in my SoT game. Seems fine.

RAW, your only recourse is to not sustain the spell so it drops and you can try to Escape. RAI? I mean... we don't know what they intended. But it's exceptionally bad that a defensive spell results in Grabbed being worse like this (and Restrained even more so since you can't do the one action you're still allowed to do!).

It'd be a pretty reasonable house rule to allow Escape while the spell is up, and as a GM I'd definitely allow it. It makes sense since you're quasi-corporeal that it shouldn't make escaping harder. If anything it should make it easier.

Having already the clumsy condition (why such a punitive curse…?), i thought it would be really hard for my oracle to escape the grapple, so I opted to cast Ancestral Form to defend myself.

No one knows what they were thinking with this curse. Remaster Oracle has some pretty "WTF?" decisions and the Ancestors curse being so punitive is at the top of the list.

I'm playing a Cosmos Oracle in Spore War and two weeks ago I was Cursebound 4 (which didn't matter in the slightest). Can you imagine doing that on Ancestors? It's practically begging to be crit.

of course using a 5-10 pound guideline it puts the bulk between 5-10, which is a very significant range in and of itself.

On the other hand I have watched 14 year old boys haul 50 pound bags of dirt or other supplies for 4 hours straight. It certainly shouldn't be something that is reaching into the strong man definitions.

You really need to stop treating that 5-10 pound suggestion like it has any meaning. It doesn't. The game ignores it constantly in its own definitions of bulk of different objects. Like, if it actually followed it, a horse would be 100 bulk instead of 12.

Throw that 5-10 pound suggestion away entirely, never think about them again, and compare bulk of things with the relative bulk of other things. That is the way to go about having this function.

Bulk and encumbrance are extremely abstract systems in PF2. If you try to make real world sense of them, you will have problems. I've explained why before in this thread.

Your options here boil down to "don't equate bulk and PF2 encumbrance/fatigue with real world equivalents because it's too abstracted for the comparisons to work well", or "homebrew something that makes more sense to you."

It's in the Runes section of the rules.

Explorer's clothing can have armor runes etched on it even though it's not armor, but because it's not in the light, medium, or heavy armor category, it can't have runes requiring any of those categories.

So you can put a property rune on it that is "etched onto armor", but not one that is "etched onto light armor".

That paragraph is basically verbatim from the original CRB when Gi and Scroll Robes didn't exist, so although it's not explicitly stated that those follow the same rules, it makes sense to run them as if they do.

I see a lot of discussion for how PWL affects combat, but what about non-combat skills? I'm planning a colonization/fleeing the apocalypse game, where most of the challenges will be about finding and managing necessary resources (without making it a sim), and I'm kind of ambivalent about how much level seems to dominate everything with the standard rules.

Disclaimer: I am also a recent convert to PF2e remastered, so my impressions are mostly from reading and modeling the rules. That said the idea that someone has +18 to a craft skill because they started the game with it trained and never used it but spent 18 levels slaying monsters while someone else invested the time to train it up to master level but is level 7 only has a +15 kind of feels wrong...

also contemplating removing the level limits for skill improvements...
or the possibility of using different rules variation for different skill groups.

Skills get weird because PWL's listed DCs are too high relative to skill modifiers under it. So things like high rank master/legendary actions get substantially harder under PWL as written. It also effectively breaks Assurance, which in normal PF2 can hit the "Master Simple DC" of 30 fairly easily but can never hit the PWL "Master Simple DC" of 25.

Medicine is especially hit by this, as it has a lot of simple DCs and it's a skill where Assurance normally has real value. An archetype feat like Resuscitate is extremely hard to use under PWL as written.

If you really want to do PWL, I suggest looking at Flatfinder, which is a homebrew package designed to improve on and fix PWL's issues.

Like all variant rules, PWL is there for folks that want to use it, but the game isn't built assuming it or tested for it, so the GM will need to adjust as necessary from what the rule say.

WatersLethe wrote:

Those "does the character die or not due to persistent damage/poison after the combat is over" are some of the most gripping moments in the game. When the GM has you stay in initiative because moments matter... that's so much fun to play out.

Post combat rolling is fun for the 1-2 players that have helpful actions. Maybe the 1 player with the persistent damage.

Absolutely abysmal for everyone else, because there is absolutely nothing they can do.

There's lots of moments in a game where one character is going to get to shine because they happen to have the right thing to do when no one else does. That's how it goes. The key is to spread those moments around.

If someone invested enough into these skills to be good at this situation? Great! Let them have their moment trying to save another PC. It doesn't actually take very long to resolve these situations after combat as it is.

Besides, someone else could help out if they thought to bring a Blood Booster/Quenching Potion/Antidote as appropriate.

(And yeah, these actions are usually not worth using in combat. That doesn't mean they're worthless. They matter a great deal when someone is already a mess and has persistent damage ticking on them.)

I think Spore War had some of this as well. It's definitely a good place for a Victory Point system. Archery could use attack rolls against various DCs (higher DCS for more distant/moving targets that are worth more points), and skill checks for other types of competitions.

For something like a grappling tournament you can do best two out of three type matches where the PC rolls and if they beat the DC two out of three rolls they advance to the next round. Have say four rounds and see how well they do.

Best way to handle it in my experience is to mot make the rolls overly complicated. Do a roll, narrate how it goes, and such. Let the players come up with creative ideas to try different skills or to get bonuses, and have fun with it.

Issues with Immobilized

"If you're immobilized by something holding you in place and an external force would move you out of your space, the force must succeed at a check against either the DC of the effect holding you in place or the relevant defense (usually Fortitude DC) of the monster holding you in place."
What if the effect moving you is a save spell, like Pushing Gust?
What if it is a Spell without save, like Friendly Push?

This comes up in multiple places for other things and works the same as those: you can use the caster's save DC - 10 as the modifier on a roll for the check. In this case, that also happens to be the spell attack modifier of the caster.

Various Engulf/Swallow whole issues

Line of Effect:
Logically being inside a creature should break line of effect to everything outside (and possibly even other things inside, in case of some swarms or oozes).
But it isn't stated anywhere.

It doesn't need to be stated because it's obvious that you don't have line of effect through something like that. You even said as much.

Helping from outside:

The biggest problem is that there is no way for creatures from the outside to help. Affirmatively breaking line of effect actually makes that work.
One houserule my group tried was "3 attacks from the outside that overcome the rupture treshold free the creature".
Maybe something around that? Like maybe a Free Action/Reaction Escape attempt, if a external attack overcomes Rupture Threshold?

This is an interesting idea and would best be fleshed out in its own thread. :)

A power boost is very debatable. Flexibility absolutely without question. The math of the system keeps the power mostly in check.

Flexibility IS power. Having a bigger toolbox gives you more options in any situation and thus better odds of having good options than you would otherwise have.

And that's not to mention the cases that flat out add power, because there is no world in which adding Champion's Reaction to a character is not a power boost. Or things like Medic which are straight up "bigger healing numbers, more often, with action compression."

It's not even remotely debatable.

We started book 3 and it got off on the wrong foot, unfortunately. War Interludes and Triumph points are what did it. After we wrapped up book 2 and transitioned into book 3, we had 5 war interludes to do. The last one was a problem.

This pissed off the entire table. The whole problem with this mechanic the entire time is that as I mentioned in the first post, we don't really have a good understanding of it. We only know that spending them usually either causes good things to happen or prevents bad things, can help us in certain scenarios, and that how many we have left over at the end is a factor in how things end up (so you don't want to just spend them all). But we don't have any specifics.

So, this specific outcome felt like the game itself pulling a "gotcha!" moment because by not spending 1 point, we're effectively penalized 3. There is no case where it EVER makes sense not to spend one in this case since the only value in not spending one is for the ending score, and this one punishes you far more on that then spending it would. It's not an interesting decision: it's effectively a trap that we fell into only because we don't get to know how any of this works.

It undermines the entire premise of saving them being a thing worth doing since we were just actively punished by doing so by having a lower "remaining score" than if we'd spent it.

I don't know if this is RAW in the book or if the GM has changed stuff, of course. But this one left a pretty sour taste in everyone's mouths because of how the game effectively punished us and undermined the entire premise of the decision by guessing wrong when we had no information to go on. It felt like the AP itself was trolling us.

At this point it sounds like from now on we're just always going to spend them because saving them is a fools errand if you'll effectively get triple penalized for doing so.

Then yeah, I think a Monk/Alchemist dual class with high STR is probably going to get you closest to what you're looking for. :)

Carl's stats through book 3 are here. It gets harder to track after that as the books don't mention the raw numbers as often so I haven't seen a more updated source.

Carl doesn't translate well to PF2, since his class is a Compensated Anarchist (which would be a Rogue/Alchemist hybrid) and his subclass is Agent Provocateur, which covers is bomb focused and includes wide area ordinance that is simply beyond what PF2's balancing allows. Meanwhile he really likes being in melee due to his high STR and the AI's obsession with his feet.

Dual class could cover that first part, since that's a better representation of how Carl's class works than making one a weaker archetype does. Or just give Carl massively accelerated/cheaper crafting like the setting does, since he doesn't actually tend to whip bombs up on the fly: he made them in advance at his table/bought them/found them. In that case you can skip Alchemist entirely since PF2 alchemy mechanics don't really fit Carl's vibe.

There's still issues, though. Like, the bombs Carl's making in book 7 are orders of magnitude beyond anything in PF2.

He's also getting a lot of bonus ability points from class abilities, items, the Ring of Divine Suffering, and such, and there's no way short of house rules to express that.

(Wisdom is also a hidden stat in DCC, but given Carl's ability to make his bonkers plans actually work, it feels like his Wisdom is probably higher than you'd think.)

With a bunch of house ruling and a custom class you could get something that would look similar, but I don't think you can capture the feel of DCC in PF2. DCC is a very over the top setting where the power scales are totally out of whack, you can have any skill you put effort into, item boosts are far more powerful, and in general it just flies in the face of the mathematical balance that PF2 wants to impose.

Giving this some thought it sems to me that he bulk system as written has two major flaws:

1st, the equation of 5 lbs=1 bulk. This means that with a maximum bulk of 5+str and beefy starting character can only carry 45 pounds. I have worked jobs where the minimum requirement for physical capability was the ability to lift 40 pounds with a single hand. This is a far cry from the "epic heroes" the system is supposed to model, and bulk 1=25 pounds would make much more sense, which also then would put a bulk:6 human at 150 lbs, which comes out about right. The other point is that bulk for larger creatures should multiply by 4 per level instead of two- so a small character would be bulk 2, a tiny would be L, a large creature (like a horse) would be bulk:24 and so on.

That 5 lbs = 1 bulk equation is 5-10 in the book, so it's pretty broad. Even then it's frequently not used by the rules themselves, since an adult human is usually not 60 pounds and a horse is not even close to 120 pounds. (For a horse, it's really 50-100 pounds = 1 bulk than it is 5-10 pounds = 1 bulk.)

Likewise it overestimates weapons: a 1h sword like a longsword is not a 5-10 pound weapon for any of its real world equivalents. A 5 pound weapon is almost certainly meant to be used 2 handed and that's heavy for even some of those (that's like claymore weight).

The game itself doesn't really use that formula and it's not particularly practical for anyone else to use it either. That's one of the problems with estimating bulk of objects: you're trying to guesstimate "how hard is this to carry relative to other things at a given bulk value". But that's the only way to do it that gives outcomes that make some kind of sense relative to other objects in the game.

agoak wrote:

Giving this some thought it sems to me that he bulk system as written has two major flaws:

1st, the equation of 5 lbs=1 bulk.

That's not an equation (in rules). But more importantly, who even cares about this? (Not even talking about who cares about pounds? Don't know what it is) In all these years I play this game nobody ever asked a question how bulk and real weight related. It's not important at all.

Your players have never said "hey I want to carry/drag/throw that random object in the scene"? Because as soon as they do that, the bulk of the thing becomes relevant, and it's an absolute PITA to estimate a lot of the time because it's not connected to the real world at all.

At least with weight I have something grounded to work with.

Tridus wrote:

It's not useless since if you need to make an elixir or something you can use it for that, then use a normal action to activate/use it. Still leaves you with 2 actions left.

It's not great, for sure.

Nope, it specifies a "quick vial" which means no "create consumable" allowed.

Oh wow, that's super lame. :\

It's not useless since if you need to make an elixir or something you can use it for that, then use a normal action to activate/use it. Still leaves you with 2 actions left.

It's not great, for sure.

With the exception of APs, it doesn’t feel like new class feats come out randomly though. They are usually thematically connected together in the new book they are released in. As both a player and a GM, I usually prefer characters have a reason for accessing content outside of core. If I don’t have the book and the player doesn’t either, then we don’t usually allow it because there is usually context lost about those abilities/options and certainly flavor/narrative purpose.

Battlecry added Thaumaturge shield implement. The thematic reason is pretty obvious (it being a war book), but there's nothing about it that should say "it's not core so you can't have it". There's no context to it at all, it's literally in the "additional stuff" section of the book along with a bunch of things for various classes.

This philosphy makes more sense in an AP where stuff probably does have a theme, and it doesn't make a ton of sense for someone to have Maaganbaya specific abilities in Sky King's Tomb, but a lot of stuff doesn't fit into that at all.

You don't need a free hand, but you do need use of your hands. The difference is you can be holding something (like a staff or a shield) and still have use of your hands to cast a spell. Legacy had a rule for this under Somatic components, but the remaster doesn't have Somatic components so now its really more the lack of a rule saying you can't.

You don't have use of your hands if you're Restrained or otherwise can't take Manipulate actions (though can still cast spells without the Manipulate trait as they don't require your hands at all).

An exception is if the spell has a locus:

A locus is an object that funnels or directs the magical energy of the spell but is not consumed in its casting. As part of Casting the Spell, you retrieve the locus (if necessary, and if you have a free hand), and you can put it away again if you so choose. Loci tend to be expensive, and you need to acquire them in advance to cast the spell, but they aren't expended like costs are. Unless noted otherwise, a locus has negligible Bulk.

Another is if the spell explicitly says so, like Slashing Gust.

I actually like the different names for the features for each class. They provide a little extra flavor for each class that I appreciate, even if it does come with a cognitive load.

Edit: Come to think, that is the downside to the standardized feats that is a bit of a bummer, but is also unavoidable. You lose a little bit of the flavor baked into the ancestry's or class's feats because they're not being described in full and lack the flavorful preamble that each feat tends to get.

It also avoids situations where you get the one version of it that's worded slightly differently than all the others, and now everyone has to figure out if that's deliberate or not.

That's not a hypothetical: that happened with Greater Mysterious Resolve:

When you roll a success on a Will save, you get a critical success instead. When you roll a critical failure on a Will save, you get a failure instead. When you fail a Will save against a damaging effect, you take half damage.

Compare most of the other versions of this:

When you roll a critical failure on a Will save, you get a failure instead. When you roll a failure on a Will save against a damaging effect, you take half damage.

Is that difference intentional? Does it mean anything? How is anyone supposed to answer that, assuming they even read it enough to notice its different instead of just going "oh that's resolve" and not bothering to read it closely because that's how it works for literally every other instance of this class feature?

This is the kind of problem that comes up when you reword the exact same feature constantly: it's an opportunity for subtle errors to creep in. That doesn't happen when a standard thing just uses a single, standardized definition (like basic save on spells).

And the player of the wizard Idris talked me into letting Idris select the Magaambyan Attendant archetype as his free archetype, since Idris was literally a student at the Magaambya Academy. That archetype is built to lead into the Halcyon Speaker archetype.

SoT's Players Guide also gives people Maaganyban Attendant Dedication when they reach rank 3 in their branch. So you didn't need to be talked into anything there unless you had changed that part.

Tridus wrote:

Going to try to get back on the rails here...

Um, which rails? I thought the OP was asking about what people wanted in an Unchained book. Continuing the debate about the value (or not) of abilities seems like it should be a different thread.

The ones where we're talking about the game itself. There's no reason why an attributeless system couldn't fit under the umbrella of an unchained book, so it applies. The real world stuff really isn't related at all.

Going to try to get back on the rails here...

I just don't understand the concern around attributes. You have everything determined in advance, you maybe have a couple of buffs to add in before you roll. It seems so straight-foward and frankly simple to me.

Sure, I could make up a situation where 3 or 4 conditional buffs or debuffs apply, but those situations come up so rarely that I wouldn't design a system around them.

To me attributes are a way to say that this character has made choices that determine what they are better or worse at. And that commitment or investment is part of what defines the character.

I get it that when my character with a low charisma has a clever social idea, I don't have very good chance of pulling it off once dice are involved. But another character isn't strong enough to push that heavy door open. That's a diversity of options across different characters that I enjoy. I think that creates an interdependency among the party members.

So, why so much hate for attributes, even if hate may be too strong a word? :)

"Hate" is too strong a word. Attributes work fine. But if we're talking about radical ideas for the game, I'd ditch them for sure. At a fundamental level: they're not interesting.

Sid Meier famously said that "A game is a series of interesting decisions." This is where attributes fall flat. If you're making a character like a Barbarian or melee Fighter, your decisions are largely made for you in that you're going to max STR, get a bunch of CON, and probably some WIS. You need that for your character to feel good in play. You repeat this pattern for... well, most characters, really. Bards/Oracles/Sorcerers are all going to have max CHA.

There's only a few cases where you get to actually do interesting things:
1. You've got more boosts than your core stuff actually needs, like Guardian with boosts. If you go STR/CON/WIS you're pretty much covered and the 4th boost can do a bunch of different things. That's the interesting part, but the first 3 aren't really interesting. They're automatic and basically necessary.
2. You go do something interesting on purpose, like my +5 INT Oracle. I can get away with that somewhat because I don't care about STR in the slightest (had a -5 Athletics on Sunday!) and I've decided not to try to get 5 CON or DEX, when I could have gotten one of them. That might get me killed considering how often I wind up tanking in this campaign as the only spellcaster, but being a smartypants has been pretty fun. That's an interesting choice.

So, I don't need attributes to do #2 at all. If we just had more granular skill/ability progression instead, I'd have put some of that into the "INT based" stuff I wanted that way and gotten to the same place.

As for #1, that's kind of what happens a lot and it's not interesting. It wasn't interesting in PF1 either, and PF2 giving out 4 boosts instead of 1 was an improvement in that regard since you were more likely to have an "extra" one to actually make a choice with.

At this point attributes don't really fit the modern game that well anymore. They're from a time when you rolled ability scores, after all, and the randomness was part of the point. You rolled and you made a character based on what you had. That was part of the appeal back then, but the system has moved away from that design in general. With how the system is designed now where attributes are deterministic and the system engine's core math expects certain things to be at certain levels to actually deliver a good game experience, they just don't do what they originally did.

Tridus wrote:

Easl wrote:

I have no problem at all with it being a feat. I have a quibble with it being an exclusively fighter and champion feat. A much better gate would have been something like "trained proficiency in martial weapons".

Yeah, that makes sense. :) PF2 just doesn't have a good way to express "this class feat is open to anyone with X proficiency". It'd have to be a general or skill feat right now.

There's probably design space there, like having a pool of generic combat style feats that are open to any class and count as class feats but don't require archetypes.

A similar example might be Nonlethal Spell, which is Wizard only for some reason that I can't fathom except "we didn't have a way to make it more generic", and which causes all kinds of grief in campaigns where taking people alive is important.

This is EXACTLY what I want to see in the future, even if it has to wait until 3E. The Starfinder team introduced Standardized Ancestry Feats in Galactic Ancestries and its a truly fantastic way of allowing a bunch of those samey feats across ancestries to come all from a single column and for access to be a brief paragraph in each Ancestry entry before getting into their more unique and interesting feats.

Makes sense!

I would love that for Class Feats too, so many get reprinted over and over again across different classes and archetypes, and some are just the same feat by different names (Whirlwind Strike vs Avalanche strike with very minor differences, or Quickened Casting vs Spell Acceleration) that it results in a lot of needless page bloat that eats up space for potentially cooler options. Plus, it's better for future-proofing when you can introduce new Standardized Class Feats in other books and just have a page or two for the classes with very concise lists of which gets access to the new goodies.

Yeah, for sure. Hell, Paizo went backwards on this in the remaster in one regard: premaster we had class abilities like "Juggernaut/Evasion/Resolve", that all did the same thing. If a given class had Resolve, you know instantly what it does and if you tell the GM they know instantly what it does.

In the remaster there's a different name for that on every class, and it just makes everything more annoying when I have to go check if I have Resolve, realize I'm looking for "Oracular Clarity", and then have to explain to the GM what Oracular Clarity is because why would they know that?

Page space is expensive, so you'd think standardized names for cut & paste things would be the way to go and that we'd see more of it instead of less.

(Though don't get me started on Non-Lethal Spellshape, I HATE that it's a 2nd level feat and not 1st as opposed to Reach and overall really hope Paizo breaks away from the tired D&D trope of making the options for non-lethal styles of combat needlessly narrow and obnoxious. Just let players choose on the fly without needing to jump through hoops, please.)

Yeah I don't understand it at all. We've got APs that encourage not killing things and the options to do that for casters are extremely limited and fiddly. It's already a feat and an extra action, why is it so limited?

This is definitely one that should just be open to every caster.

Gortle wrote:

Paizo tried to hint that a +3 is OK in a offensive ability score but the optimzer community and most of the player base haven't embraced that.

Well of course not, the math is linear. +3 to +4 is exactly as useful as +2 to +3, and if they try to tell folks different, nobody's going to buy it.

Yep, this is the real answer on attributes. When it's the roll you're making the most frequently, it working is essential to your character feeling good, and more of it increases your chances of getting a crit on a die roll other than nat 20, folks will always want more of it.

Taking less of that in exchange for a point in something you're doing significantly less often doesn't make much sense when it's so fundamental to your character both working, but also feeling good.

Like, if a party has two Barbarians, and one crits on a 19 on the dice while the other doesn't because one maxed STR and the other didn't? That second player is going to have regrets. Pretty much nothing they could have put that point into will make up for it because the ultimate goal of the class is "hit things hard" and rolling giant fistfuls of dice on crits is very fun.

Paizo can claim it doesn't matter all they want and for half the level range they're right (because of how partial boosts work), but it does matter for the other half of the level range and it's pretty clear how the community feels about it.

If they *really* want to change the relative value of attributes, change the standard roll from 1d20 to 2d10.

Bingo. But the d20 is a sacred cow, it'd be really hard to remove even if it would give the outcome people claim to want.

Kind of like how in the playtest folks didn't want to get rid of ability scores. Then the Beginners box did it and everyone went "oh actually that's fine, because this 18 means nothing in PF2 anyway." And now that's how the whole game works.

Some of this stuff is kept not because it's actually the best way to do it, but because of resistance to change. And that's a very human reaction, we all do it. Part of making a sequel to a game system is managing that.

Characters can take one of these as a free feat at level 1 if and only if they don't have a +4 ability score.

I like it. It doesn't change the base Pathfinder system and is consistent with previous theming where one ancestry (typically human) gets a jack-of-all-trades sort of concept.

Though I think your specific feat ideas may be too strong. They are generally objectively superior to a +1 attribute, so they would simply drive optimizers to always take those instead of always taking the +4...but not increase the variability of character concepts. Example, your strength feat gives +1 to attack, damage, and Con. This is strictly superior to the +1 to attack and damage that a bump to Strength would give you, so why would anyone ever bump Strength up to 4 in your system? They wouldn't. So you'd simply be replacing "all fighter players feel obligated to take Str 4" with "all fighter players feel obligated to take Str 3 and the strength feat."

Vancian casting is good. Case and point: People like sorcerer but dislike wizard. Why? Because sorcerer has better abilities.

Both spontaneous and prepared casting in PF2e is vancian, however PF2e made it so there is no benefit to being a prepared caster by nerfing everything that made it good.

For certain definitions of "Vancian". Sorcerer is much less Vancian than Wizard is, since the original Vancian magic was pretty much how Wizards work. And with how PF2 works, that model just isn't as good in play as spontaneous casting is.

Casters are kind of the only per-day power system left in PF2 (along with Advanced Alchemy). It's already limiting to have a limited amount per day while everyone else is per-encounter, and it feels really bad to not get to use your per-day thing because you picked the wrong one in a previous game session with no idea what would be happening.

That's the core problem, and that's why D&D fixed it by making their prepared casters less Vancian.

How to fix it in unchained: A prepared caster may modify 1 spell in each of their spell ranks to have a spellshape that they know as they prepare. The spell's action cost do not increase. Ex: A level 2 caster can add 1 spellshape to a rank 1 spell, A level 4 caster can add 1 spellshape to a rank 2 spell and 1 spellshape to a rank 1 spell. The benefit here is that by preparing the caster is able to save up actions during combat that the spontaneous caster cannot.

This leads to a fix to an unchained metamagic thesis wizard by letting them modify 1 extra spell per rank. Which also highlights "wizard is the academic of casters".

That doesn't really fix it since the core problem is "if you picked the wrong spell that slot isn't usable".

We quite like foundry in that respect. Not just for Guidance, but all the bonuses - it tells you when they made a difference. Definitely pleasing to see it pop up that your off-guard guidance demoralize turned a miss into a hit. Our GM likes it too, and he regularly points out when this happens.

100% those callouts make characters doing those things get their moment in the spotlight. I had a player once who didn't feel like it was that effective until I pointed out "that creature's attack would have been a crit, but it's a hit thanks to X."

I have to say, though, that in our group nobody really complains about Guidance being wasted. It's true that most of the time it doesn't make a difference. But I think everyone in our group is cool with the idea that it could, and is sometimes more relevant than the alternative uses of that action. You are buying improved possibility for an action, and both our martials and casters like that. Our GM is a bit of a stickler on what counts as Aid though, so that may be a factor at our table which improves it's relative value for us - Guidance just works, no descriptive acrobatics needed to justify the bonus and no GM "no", which ultimately means more rounds and scenes per hour of game time and less time rules haggling.

Yeah, same. I think Guidance is fine. You use it when you want to try to get an extra edge. It does its thing without fuss.

Tridus wrote:

They understand it just fine: they didn't implement it because one part of it contradicts another part of it. If you actually follow through with both tables, you don't get the stated outcome of a creature of a given size should be able to carry the equivalent gear in equivalent bulk as a creature of another size.

And to that I say "So what?" There's nothing stopping them from implementing it other than themselves.

Not incompetence; just a lamentable choice.

"The rules contradict themselves so we're not implementing the contradiction" is a pretty good reason to stop.

I can't tell if you're serious and just don't understand the problem or if you're being deliberately obtuse.

Not sure if this is related, but I feel it kind of fits in. I had a player who felt like they were not contributing to the party, because every time they aided another PC, they felt they wasted their action because the PCs receiving the bonus to their roll either failed despite the bonus or succeeded on their own, not needing the bonus. I guess this is more aiding forward than failing forward, but there is a lot of overlap. This can happen with aiding another, guidance, or other ability or spell that gives a bonus to a roll.

This is a bit of a different thing, since sometimes a bonus won't make a difference. You can't know that ahead of time (usually). Aid for +1 isn't great in general because it often won't do anything and you should have something better to do. That can change in skill challenges where maybe for whatever reason only one person can attempt it, in which case someone else doing aid to give them a bonus is basically all upside.

Of course when it does matter, it matters a lot. Courageous Anthem is +1 but it's pretty good. The key thing there is to make sure players know when that +1 does swing an outcome. It feels great when you turn a miss into a hit or a hit into a crit, but only if you know that happened. Foundry has a module to automate it, but it should be pointed out in person as well.

As for guidance... well, one of the reasons I like Amp Guidance so much is that you know it works because you can only use it when it would change the outcome. It's never wasted. Also it's +2 at level 11.

I kind of feel that succeding to only do nothing at times, can feel, worse than failing to do something. I'm wondering if something like using guidance to help someone with a strike, but when they roll high enough on their own, instead of that +1 to hit being meaningless to strike, it would then be applied as a +1 to damage instead, would help.

I feel like in a situation like this the answer is "get yourself something better to do with that action". That character should have something they can do themselves to help win the fight rather than trying to spam Aid for a +1 to hit. "Add attack and damage for 1 action" is literally what Courageous Anthem does, after all, and that's a class ability so probably shouldn't be something everyone just gets.

moosher12 wrote:

Temperans wrote:

She's a barbarian and has a PF2e sheet, Valeros does not have a sheet and would stand to reason he would go for similar stat distribution he previously had which was slightly lower than her.

Regardless the usefulness is not between two character that are close, but between two characters that are apart. Ex: Tristian (+0) and Amiri (+5).

Just to add some extra context: Both Amiri and Valeros do have sheets, actually. From the Society premade character sheets. Both Amiri and Valeros have Strength +4. (Amiri also has the same stat spread in Kingmaker's Companion Guide as the Society Sheets)

Amiri: 4/2/2/0/0/1
Valeros: 4/2/2/1/0/0

Physical stats match, the main difference is Amiri is more charismatic while Valeros is smarter.

Ah okay, a case of AONPRD not having the sheet then, got it. They have the kingmaker sheets.

My overall point still stands.

Your overall point was directly refuted, so no, it doesn't stand.

With a couple of class exceptions (like Thaumaturge), pretty much every character has max KAS. The overwhelming majority of martials have it. Almost without exception all casters have it. It's too important not to.

PF2 gives you more attribute boosts than PF1 so you get to choose what to boost instead of "your key thing every time", but there's no real story being told here because almost without exception every Barbarian will be exactly as strong as every other Barbarian at the same level.

There's no real thought in it at all. Barbarian? Max STR. Fighter? Max STR/DEX as appropriate. Cleric? Max WIS. Oracle? Max CHA. Wizard? Max INT. The game mechanics pretty much dictate it.

Dumping this system entirely would open up more freedom for expression since you're removing the bane of oddball character concepts: dump stats. Right now if you want to make a "smart, bookworm Oracle" you probably want high INT. Except you require CHA for your spellcasting to work properly, and DEX/CON/WIS are key defenses. So you can't just do something odd and fun here without compromising either your ability of your spells to work, or survivability.

Remove the ability scores and just have investment for things like skills and such, and now there's no "INT based skills" so I can just pick whatever I want without needing to bump a secondary axis of ability scores to be good at it.

I have no problem at all with it being a feat. I have a quibble with it being an exclusively fighter and champion feat. A much better gate would have been something like "trained proficiency in martial weapons".

Yeah, that makes sense. :) PF2 just doesn't have a good way to express "this class feat is open to anyone with X proficiency". It'd have to be a general or skill feat right now.

There's probably design space there, like having a pool of generic combat style feats that are open to any class and count as class feats but don't require archetypes.

A similar example might be Nonlethal Spell, which is Wizard only for some reason that I can't fathom except "we didn't have a way to make it more generic", and which causes all kinds of grief in campaigns where taking people alive is important.

I've seen plenty of nested modules and formula references in codebases--this is no different. It's just inventory math with a size axis. Claiming it's "too complicated" for software underestimates how straightforward conditional logic and data-driven design actually are.

This is a completely disingenuous argument that takes the actual issue and contorts it into "the Foundry devs didn't implement it because they're incompetent."

They understand it just fine: they didn't implement it because one part of it contradicts another part of it. If you actually follow through with both tables, you don't get the stated outcome of a creature of a given size should be able to carry the equivalent gear in equivalent bulk as a creature of another size.

If you actually follow both tables RAW, tiny creatures can carry substantially less equipment even when it's sized for them. As that is explicitly stated as not the intention of the rules, the rules contradict themselves.

So they implemented the part that makes sense. It's laid out pretty clearly in the github issue linked here if you bother to read it.

(This is also the only part of the rules where PF2 mentions size of items mattering at all. Like a tiny maul and a gargantuan maul do the exact same damage and are functionally identical in all ways except when dealing with bulk and price, and the nonsensical outcomes caused by one scale going up by 2x while another is going down by 10x at the same time.)

If guardian's intercept attacks, do they also take the grab / trip follow-up abilities from the creatures attacks? I assume so since you "intercepted" the original attack.

RAW - no. You take the damage and nothing else.

It's always felt weird that it worked that way given the ability name and narrative description. And the whole "you can step next to them if you want", which doesn't actually seem to be necessary either.

A clarification of intent would be welcome, for sure.

That was raised in the playtest as well because it does feel weird.

The feat "Shield Wall" is what you're looking for. It gives cover as an added benefit when you work with others, which is quite good and seems to me to be a reasonable in-game version of realism, so that's a positive. The negative is, this is a good example about how Paizo sometimes gates something everyone can learn how to do behind a class feat or ability for balance or just flavor purposes.

That's like saying they're gating "stick the pointy end of a spear into someone behind a class ability" because its proficiency based.

Fighting in formation properly is a skill that you have to drill. You don't just do it automatically and not everyone has that training. That's what taking the feat represents.

And really, if that's not a reason to have things gated by feats and balance isn't a reason to have things gated by feats... why have feats at all? "I took a feat and now I can do something I couldn't before" is kind of a central premise of the whole feat mechanic.

The correction here is that those are issues with how Pathfinder wrote Bulk to be ambigious and probably largely miscommunicated or even ill thought out like in many other cases where old rules text still linger, Not how bulk/slots and similar capacity works as a games concept which is what I understood the discussion as being about.

Though I do not understand what you mean with "magical resizing", Its rounding. We both agree that half would've been better than 1/10th but I do believe theres reason for 1/10... mostly alchemist and just holding alot of small items in general.

It's magical resizing when X = 2Y when one character holds them, and X = 20Y when another character holds them. That's not how physical objects work. Longswords somehow magically shrink to take up a fraction of the space they used to while longbows don't because reasons.

That's not about rounding at all, though the bulk rounding rules are not intuitive either.

The most absurd example I've seen is much more contrived, but it's actually on topic for how this thread started: a human is 6 bulk and a halfing is 3 bulk. So if you try to carry them, 1 human = 2 halflings. Reasonable enough.

Get a gargantuan creature to pick them up and 1 human = 60 halflings. I don't know if they're compressing the halflings into a human size box or if they're being carried on a keychain or what, but makes no sense whatsoever.

Also do you need to recalculate the bulk of their gear since most of it will now be L since a bigger creature is carrying it, or does armor take up more bulk if you're carrying a halfling that is carrying the armor vs if you're carrying the halfling and armor separately?

The whole table 6-19 on how objects are worth different amounts of bulk on creatures of different sizes is completely nonsensical if you think about it at all. The Foundry devs just came to the same conclusion when they said "we're not implementing that because it contradicts the other table."

Another question comes to my mind.

IF you are giving a free Archetype allowing the feats when the level is met. I assume that is how it works. What if instead of doubling up on a feat from the same archetype the character takes feats from another archetype.

Would that be wrong somehow.

So I am a wizard and I take the Witch feat as a free archetype getting primal magic and then a sorcerer archetype getting divine magic, etc. Just to have a character casting spells from three lists, etc.

The only limitation is needing 2 additional feats before taking another dedication (usually).

Aside from that you can take feats in any archetype that you've got the dedication for. There's a character in my Strength of Thousands game whose goal is to be able to cast all four traditions of magic. He's a Cleric/Wizard/Psychic/Halcyon Speaker or something like that.

As you said, "that's how it goes unfortunately". I'm not interested in playing PF1 mechanically anymore, especially as a GM, but even as a player. The playing field was far too uneven between characters depending on class and player knowledge.

Now (in PF2) there's not really a secret treasure trove of knowledge that will make your character twice (or more) as powerful as other characters. A highly optimized character might be 20% better than an unoptimized one, and you have to actively work against expectations to make a bad character, and even novices should generally recognize when they're doing that.

Ultimately for me, if a player decides they don't like the baseline of PF2 (which I do alter with house rules but not in a major way IMO) they are free to play in another game with another GM. I won't be upset that they decided my game wasn't for them.

Yep, absolutely. We had the same group together for an extremely long time. Eventually someone didn't want to play what the rest of the group wanted to anymore. Wish them well and everyone moves on.

I don't want to play PF1 a whole lot anymore either, and I absolutely refuse to GM it. I am still in one game because the GM is running the whole "Runelords" saga and doesn't want to convert (which is totally fair). But once we finish Return of the Runelords, I think that's it for PF1 for me.

I also get being annoyed that their character can't do the same things (because of the idea of consistent lore), but also I can look at the different editions mechanically and say that for the most part, it's for the best.

It's for the best since new edition creators can't be constrained by a requirement that every character from the last edition be a valid character in the new one. That's not a viable way to design a new system since one of the biggest upsides of an edition change is being able to cut a lot of baggage loose.

Some folks can separate the editions in their head, and some folks don't think that way. There's no right or wrong answer there, since it's just about player preference and how a game feels. So I absolutely get how those folks feel because my favorite PF1 character wouldn't work the same way in PF2 either and in my head the PF2 version just feels "off", even though she's actually a pretty good character in PF2.

Is it common in your groups to look at stat blocks of enemies of a campaign you are playing, let alone the end boss?

It would be a great no-no for me or any of the GMs i play with.

It's worth pointing out that Treerazer was in the original Bestiary as the biggest creature. A lot of folks would have looked at it as an example of a BBEG because it was the only one in the book.

This AP also telegraphs pretty clearly who the BBEG is. Hell, LO: Shining Kingdoms even talks about the aftermath.

So while I don't think its normal to go look up the BBEG, this is not a normal situation in that regard. It appears the GM also specifically told OP that Treerazer would be hard to hit and that's what set this off, it's totally valid for OP to consider that.

Attributes aren't really doing anything that can't be done without them. You're usually taking attributes that make you good at the things you want to do a lot, and you get enough of them to cover most of those fairly easily.

The same thing could be achieved with a more robust skill/proficiency system. Want to be really good at Diplomacy? Invest more into that.

It's effectively the same thing as right now except right now you're doing it in two places (Attribute and Skill) instead of just "invest in skill, get better at skill".

I know theres nothing explicit in what "treated as L" means for the raw with the exception that a large creature treats 10 bulk items as 1 bulk.

But does 10 daggers take up half as much relative space on a creature when its affected by enlarge. That to me sounds nonsensical, perhaps even more so than 10 normal longswords taking up as much space as 10 large daggers while the bow which takes half as much relative capacity on creature twice the size it was made for. Does it also make sense that when a large creature wears a breastplate its 3 bulk but its 1 for a medium creature.

I believe the intention is that when you take a creature and scale it and its gear up then the relative bulk of what is being carried shouldn't change, Which is why I rather enjoy Foundry's interpretation that bulk is relative to the creature carrying it and what they treat as 10L actually amounts to 2 bulk towards their total limit. as thats all done in "Equivalent Bulk"

I'm not talking about the creatures gear, though: it's looted gear. You presume gear for the creature itself is the same size, though the rules get vague on just how that works too in places. But if you assume that, that part at least makes sense.

But if it's stuff you looted, it shouldn't magically be resizing to make the bulk rules work. And those rules very quickly lead to nonsensical situations.

Some of the foundry devs outlined it rather neatly within this github issue

Yeah, this illustrates the problem with bulk perfectly: they just didn't implement a bunch of it because it's self-contradicting and doesn't make sense.

When the premier VTT for the game throws its hands up and says "we're not implementing these rules because they contradict themselves", that says a lot about the problems with the abstractions not really working, doesn't it?

"Abilities designed to enrage your GM for $200, Alex."

I'm really leery of this one. Anything that generally doesn't let the GM play the game is risky because you need those people also having fun to, you know, have a game.

Start landing this in a boss battle and it'll be a real bad time.

Light is useful if you're going against enemies who like to create darkness, otherwise I'd probably go with a torch or, if I was a bit more seasoned and had a little more cash, an everlight crystal.

Torches require some way to carry them though, and I'd rather have the hand for something else. Everlight crystals are fine, but Light can have mutiple instances at once and lasts all day. It's great.

Why is Read Aura useful? For the +2? For everything else Detect magic is enough.

Yeah, for identifying. If someone has it the whole party gets the bonus any time anyone is identifying anything.

Though in Shadows at Sundown it came up explicitly as a "if you have Read Aura, you can decipher this hidden magic writing" situation. I'm not sure I've seen that anywhere outside of that one specific adventure.

As for this "armour loophole"... if anyone tried that at my table I'd honestly stare at them like they're an idiot. Throwing common sense that far out the window to claim such an obviously nonsense exploit works because there's no specific line preventing it is pretty clearly trying to treat the rules as if they're code and this as a video game.

WatersLethe wrote:

10. Enshrine "Automatic Rune Progression" into text

11. Adjust wealth chart to make sure players have enough money to spend on fun items and sidearms.

Since you made the OP and I am still a little confused about what we are talking about in this thread, I wanted to ask about number 10 especially:

My understanding of an unchained book is that it is a book of variant rules. Are you asking for a different version of ABP or more like an AP where it was fully built in, with considerations for how to not have ABP penalize casters who don’t want to use a weapon and would otherwise use that wealth on spell casting items like scrolls and staves?

I ask because I am not a fan of the ABP variant rule myself because it takes choice away from players on how to spend their gold and what to prioritize. I love casters and typically don’t spend any gold on weapons at all and will use spells to cover item bonuses to armor until pretty high level so ABP is pretty punishing to my play style.

Automatic Rune Progression (ARP) is a variant of ABP that gained popularity when a Foundry module implemented it. IIRC, it grants fundamental runes automatically and does nothing else.

So unlike ABP, it doesn't break large swaths of Alchemy and doesn't grant all the skill boosts and such. It has a much smaller effect on the game but does remove the need to keep upgrading fundamental runes on weapons & armor.