Depends on how you define "contradiction", which I guess is somehow appropriate for a rules thread. ;)
But it's definitely a source of confusion, since "heals allies" is a valid targeting term mechanically. "Heals creatures" is also a valid targeting term mechanically. They do not mean the same thing (since one is a subset of the other).
Having them both in the same description is making things less clear than if it didn't have the first sentence at all, because since those two targeting terms don't mean the same thing, both of them can't be the actual spell targeting mechanic at the same time. Thus it is contradictory since it's telling us two game terms and one of them isn't correct.
I wish they wouldn't do this, honestly. Or if they want to have descriptive text, put it in italics so its clear that it's narration and not mechanics. Then if this happens we at least know what the intent is. Because right now there's no way for us to know if the intent was actually "waters of creation only heals allies" and someone just put the wrong term afterward, or if the intent was creatures like the spell does and someone wanted to add some narrative flourish.
Clarity should be the goal here, and they didn't really achieve it by using two different mechanically significant terms.
If they were just simple maps that have been walled and lit, actors with passable tokens, and a serviceable journal all at a reasonable price, I think most of us would be okay with that. In other words, the society modules don't need anywhere near the same treatment as your adventure paths for Foundry if the price felt better.
Fwiw, the society modules already have "simple maps" that are walled and lit-- not re-drawn maps. Im not sure bringing the tokens from their current state to "passable" tokens, or changing the journals from current state to "serviceable" are going to be huge cost savings like you seem to think.
Yeah one of the challenges with Society map packs is that you've got a lot of smaller scenarios/maps/journals, etc. It's quite a lot of content, and unlike an AP, it's entirely likely not all of them get used as someone who is GMing PFS a few times a year won't use all the scenarios they get right now. If you only plan on actually running 4 scenarios, the season Foundry pack is very expensive for how much you're using it.
Since if you're playing an AP you'll be using however much of it you run (hopefully all of it!), they tend to be a better deal in terms of how much content you're paying for vs how much of it you're using. That ratio is only going to even out for very active PFS GMs who run most of the scenarios in a season pack, and I don't know if there's enough of those also running in Foundry to make it make financial sense. The APs are just an easier sell, market wise.
(I know if I were to start GMing PFS at cons again, I'd be doing it old school offline and wouldn't be using Foundry. Whereas I run APs in Foundry, even for in person games. So one of these products is a lot more appealing to me than the other.)
We are about to finish the Year of Shattered Sanctuaries using PFS and it has gone really well. In fact, I think many of my players may want to continue with their characters. It is easy to have them start at level 10 or 11 and move into Spore War. But the question is: What is the "hook" that gets them involved? Would the Pathfinder Society get involved in this war? Would their help be requested? Or is there another way to get this group into the story?
There's no way to answer that without spoilers, so...
Book 1:
Book 1 doesn't start with the "spore war". It starts with the Whispering Tyrant launching an attack, and the various nations around Lake Encartha trying to negotiate an alliance against him.
If the PCs are there for the initial attack and jump in (because that is what Pathfinder agents would probably do), then maybe they get asked to help with the negotiations as accomplished Society members and local heroes, they're well regarded or something.
Once you get them involved in the negotiations, things just kind of happen and it's easier after that. But that's the hurdle for a party that isn't from Kyonin.
It's easier to do if everyone is an Elf or has ties to Kyonin, but half the characters in the game I'm in were from an abandoned Kingmaker game and we got over that "why are we involved in the first place?" part, the rest has been pretty easy. We solved that as two of us travelling there to negotiate a trade deal when stuff happened, and then we stayed to help out because we wanted that trade deal... and then we were too deep into it to back out.
It helps a lot if players are the types to "say yes" and go along with the hook easily, rather than making a big fuss how it's kind of a stretch at first. Because that is true initially but that gets resolved pretty quickly.
Much like how undead can't benefit from Elixirs of Life, so too does Whispers of the Void only affect enemies, and Waters of Creation only affect allies. "Flavor text" is rules text. But clearing it up with an errata wouldn't hurt, either.
Except when the game wants something to only target allies, it says that. "restore HP to allies in the area" is how this would be worded and is how it's done on other effects that work like this.
Waters of Creation says one thing and then does another, and its hardly the first time that's happened. But "restore HP to creatures in the area" is explicit in what it does and it's not "allies only".
This is a classic case of a spell having contradictory flavour text and mechanical text. I really wish they wouldn't do that, but they do. And in that situation, the mechanical text always wins.
It should be errata'd though because it is contradictatory.
If it was triggered by "You roll initiative", it would be explicitly spelled out as such.
What part of "When you roll initiative" means something other than "triggered by rolling initiative"? That's some very fancy wordsmithing.
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This wording was used specifically to avoid interfering with Free Actions that do have the Trigger : "You roll initiative" while complying with the one Free Action per Trigger limit.
Citation Needed.
The other explanation for why they didn't include the action/trigger line in the stat block is because Battle Cry has a second usage case that is a reaction instead.
You seem to have taken a formatting decision and assumed intent from it.
Which is a very drawn out way of saying: I'unno. When somebody at Paizo feels like it, I guess. Might be they're holding back spoilers, might be they're more willing to put out previews for Lost Omens books because there aren't the sketch and pocket covers to fill out the docket.
There's also a whole bunch of stuff going on internally right now and it's possible they just haven't gotten to it yet.
Well all of this sucks. :( Diamond and the investment banker parasites that took it over have done tremendous damage. The court system is bloated, ineffecient, and rigged in favor of big money.
This should have been resolved long ago but it's in the interest of lawyers and people with deep pockets to drag it out as long as possible.
I really hate how good people are made to suffer from that nonsense. Hopefully it can get sorted and Paizo can recover.
Shame about the Foundry scenarios, but I get it. The market buying the Foundry packs for them is probably smaller than the potential adventure path market is.
Oh, come on. The single most common C1 effect is weakness 2 to a specific subset of incoming damage, and any resistance or immunity to that type is suppressed.
It is absolutely legit to point to that pattern, and realize that Finoan's idea actually matches.
Meanwhile, the idea of having that standard weakness 2, plus also adding all of the general "spell immunity" mechanic would greatly deviate from the pattern.
Except that for this "pattern" you're pointing out to exist, you have to ignore a bunch of other cases that don't fit it. Oracle is full of those.
There is no actual pattern here. There's a pattern if you cherry-pick a couple of options and declare "that's the pattern and thus X is outside of it so it must be wrong." When Y, Z, and A also don't fit the pattern, X is not an outlier anymore and the whole argument falls apart.
People are trying to glean intent here in order to push a non-RAW argument but with how completely unbalanced the curses are, there's no way to do that. You can't claim the intent isn't to make a too bad/too good curse when those already exist on the class, survived multiple errata cycles, and arguably were made worse by the remaster itself.
Spoken in the Song Wind. 2nd module in the Strength of Thousands adventure path, has an opportunity to learn a ritual.
They also simply get taught one in book 5 after performing a service to the people that know it.
Extinction Curse also has a ritual in book 4 the PCs can just learn directly from an NPC who wants them to do something.
Rituals are very much a "it's available however the GM wants it to be" type of thing. Nothing says you can't buy access to them, but there's no standard rule for how you get them.
Spells have an easier time wounding you. You gain weakness 2 to any damage dealt by a spell. Any immunity or resistance you have to spells is suppressed.
IMO, that's enough context for me to change my view on what the RaW is, and that the scope of that immunity & resistance is narrower than I had thought; imo it is specifically talking about damage, not effects.
The real bugbear is that while it is entirely possible for some like Finoan or myself to think the context of the "damage" part applies to the immunity line, it's also totally valid for others to think it's a disconnected rule.
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TBH, I don't think that curse is even intended to prevent the "spam prevention immunity" of incoming harmful spells like Blindness.
That would make that mystery's T1 cursebound effect waaaaay worse than all the others.
Oracle curses vary so wildly in how bad they are that "this one is really bad so it's probably wrong" doesn't mean anything. This is the same class that thinks Enfeebled and Clumsy are equivalent on a spellcaster, after all. It's also the one that gives Life Link to the one that also has Resistance to healing in amounts far beyond any of the weaknesses that other curses give. Like, one of them is Weakness 2 at Cursebound 1 and the other at equivalent Cursebound is Resist Healing that goes all the way to 20.
The relative impact of a curse means absolutely nothing on Oracle because the curses are so all over the map on it already that there is absolutely no baseline to judge from.
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It's also just unintuitive and hard for the GM to work with. Questions like: Are foes supposed to know that this one PC is not immune to repeat castings in the middle of combat? etc.
There's a bunch of things in the game that already work like that, including on this class. A GM has to know that anyone with Nudge the Scales might actually have void healing today, or that a Tempest Oracle wearing a Jolt Coil has Resist Electricity 2 while Cursebound 0 but loses that (and gains Weakness 2 instead) at Cursebound 1, which is not how it would work for any other class that has both a resistence and a weakness.
That's just the reality of GMing a complex game like this. Players should also know that they're not immune, though, and if they're using the "not immune to sure strike cooldown" part it shouldn't be that hard to remember they're also not immune to any other spell effects that they would normally be.
Medic is good since it boosts a 1 action heal (Battle Medicine) and lets you do it while also moving (Doctors Visitation). That leaves 2 actions free to do something else like cast an offensive/debuff/support spell (or Heal on someone else if things are REALLY dire). This is "more healing", but its also faster healing, and having an option that can be done in a single action opens up flexibility to do something else on your turn.
Otherwise it depends on what you want to gain the ability to do. In additon to what's already mentioned, Oracle would get you an extra pool of abilities from the Cursebound feats which is quite nice. Any caster archetype can get you more spells, including ones from another list. If you want a third action attack, grab something like Archer so you can more effectively use a bow. If you have STR, Champion to get armor proficiency is nice (though Sentinel can also do it, Champion is the better archetype). If you want to have some additional buff options, Bard is good.
Alchemist is a good archetype for almost anyone because Alchemy is extremely versatile, but requires INT.
I don't even know what to say right now. Life clearly hasn't been very fair to you.
At times like this I think I know why I play so many healers in games like this: because they'd know what to do right now and aside from offering sympathy, real life me has absolutely no idea.
I did look over some of the stuff in the links and there are some interesting ideas there.
"A ritual is an esoteric and complex spell that anyone can cast." -- Pathfinder Player Core, page 389.
Apparently Paizo disagrees with you.
Fair enough. :) Though a Diplomacy based "spell" that doesn't follow the spellcasting rules and doesn't use the spell per rank DCs is my least favorite kind of spell.
Ed Reppert wrote:
It seems to me that a description of a spell or ritual, including instructions on how to cast it is, in-game, a formula of sorts. Not "formula" as the rules use the word, perhaps, but it's the same concept.
It is, yeah. Instructions on how to do the ritual are functionally a formula even if they're not officially that. Though there's no reason why you can't treat them as that.
Hence why I was speaking of the default situation.
If NPCs casually follow the Dying rules same as PCs, it is definitely a houserule with big impact and that should be mentioned to players before they even start building their PCs.
This is a detail of how a table is run, and you're right that a GM should be clear on that with players so everyone is on the same page. Surprises in how this stuff works are not what you want during a game.
It is not a house rule, however, and I wish people wouldn't use that term for things that aren't house rules. It's right in the rulebook:
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The GM might determine that villains, powerful monsters, special NPCs, and enemies with special abilities that are likely to bring them back to the fight (like ferocity, regeneration, or healing magic) can use these rules as well.
RAW lets the GM choose to use the dying rules for any creature in pretty much any case where it could be even remotely relevant. Including "an NPC in this fight has healing magic or even stabalize".
Pathbuilder does allow it, but you have to turn on a specific option. I think it's called "allow outdated CRB and APG." I can't figure out how to do it on an existing character, but it asks you as part of creating a new one.
I'd be surprised if HLO didn't allow it in some way as well, since spells like Death Knell are still legal in PFS. For a home game it's a "ask your GM" situation since some run remaster only games now.
1. It seems to me that rituals are spells, so learning a rank 3 ritual should cost the same as learning a rank 3 spell.
Except that they're explicitly not spells, which is why someone with no spellcasting ability whatsoever can do them. Butterfly Bender for example doesn't even use any spellcasting tradition skills (it's Medicine and Diplomacy).
I think most people view them as "more complex spells" and it would probably be neat to have a ritual system that did work that way, but it's not what we have.
Spellhearts are fun. More of them are certainly welcome.
I just hope they add language allowing spellhearts to be attached to Explorer's Clothing (& Bands of Force).
Everybody already runs it that way, but strictly RAW Explorer's Clothing isn't armor and you can't attach spellhearts to it. It's just silly that most casters can't use spellhearts RAW except by attaching them to weapons like gauntlets or shield spikes.
Yeah, agreed. The restriction makes no sense. You don't get armor, so you also don't get as many spellhearts, despite most of the classes without armor proficiency also being the ones that would want spellhearts the most.
I think most people just treat it the same way armor runes are: if it just says "armor" it's good, but not if it says light/medium/heavy. Having that be the rule here would be a lot more consistent and make a lot more sense than what RAW says.
The tricky part of this is that unless you want it to be obviously false, it's going to be adventure dependent. Like, if you're playing Abomnation Vaults, throwing in notes or information about shady dealings in the Koros island logging industry actually fits with the setting and even though it might have nothing to do with the adventure at all, the players will see it as at least possibly relevant and might actually find it interesting enough to investigate. (And if you use Abomination Vaults Expanded, there's a whole sidequest about that.)
Whereas if you give that same note in Fists of the Ruby Phoenix, what does it have to do with anything?
I find doing this well tends to be context specific so I find it hard to give advice on a generic situation... with one exception. All of my games have an in-world publication called "Divination Daily". It's a tabloid. Canonically, they get their info via divination magic and thus sometimes they only get partial information or mishear things and they run with it anyway.
This gives me a reason to tell the players that rumours around town today are whatever I want, including things that are absolute nonsense... and also things that actually have some truth to them. Like in SoT an article ran about forces gathering in Vidrian to liberate Mizali, which wasn't actually true... but there were some operatives working in Mizali independently from there and it gave me a hook to create a sideplot with Ignaci. The Investigator PC decided to look into this and they were able to seperate fact from fiction after some effort.
Aside from that, it helps to have some names already ready. If you're improving a piece of information, having a list of names to yank one from helps a lot to keep things flowing. You can then write a note in your own GM notes about what you told the PCs and go from there.
This reads like a conversation that was had with some GM, somewhere, and that spawned a stream of consciousness barrage of posts.
I'm just so very confused as to what you're actually trying to say. Which is probably a bad thing if you want Paizo to hire you: their writers need to write stuff that their customers understand.
Cosmos is still not comparable as you do not get any benefit from being Cursebound so there is no game/gain from it.
Except for all the things I already enumerated that gain benefits from being Cursebound. Including Oracular Warning, which Cosmos gets automatically at level 1. Giving the whole party a +4 bonus to Initiative that stacks with Scout is pretty sweet when people are rocking high level abilities and we need the Thaumaturge to tell the Alchemist what of their many elements triggers weakness.
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BTW even if the PC does not care about Enfeebled (check your Speed and Encumbrance though), they still get the penalty vs Forced movement.
Enfeebled does not impact Speed or Encumbrance at all. You don't roll for either of those things nor do they have a DC.
For that matter it doesn't impact the most common forced movement either, as things that do that tend to go against Fortitude DC which isn't impacted by Enfeebled either.
Literally the only thing this impacts is Athletics checks, and being a Gnome with -1 STR at level 19 I'm not succeeding on those anyway so I just avoid rolling them whenever possible (which at this level is generally pretty doable). I cannot overstate how little impact this curse actually has. And it's not like "caster that dumps STR" is some edge case build.
Battle Cursebound 1 isn't super bad, but it is doing something negative, and Battle Cursebound 2 is significant. Let's not pretend it's actually meaningless as a curse when there's an actually meaningless curse sitting right there that all the unarmored casters can archetype into and have it do nothing.
Not comparable to the Battle Oracle though as the latter's valuable trick is easily grabbed through archetype and can be built around for max gaming of the "curse".
I mean... my Cosmos Oracle in Spore War was recently Cursebound 4. The only negative effect this had was that I couldn't use more Cursebound abilities. Am I "gaming the curse" by having a character on which Enfeebled is utterly irrelevant so the curse does nothing?
Oracle Archetype is really good for a lot of classes and picking a curse that doesn't hinder you much is pretty much part of the package with how the class works.
Battle happens to be one worth picking in some cases, but its not like there is no downside to it. Going to Cursebound 2 is a pretty legit curse, and cutting yourself off from that in order to avoid it limits how much you can use some pretty good abilities. I don't really view this as any worse than every character that doesn't care about STR just taking Cosmos and effectively not having a Curse at all (except for the upsides like feat scaling).
Remaster Oracle has absolutely messed up subclass balance. It's among the worst in the game, easily. Given that, players are doing entirely predictable things by picking the good ones for their build.
I wouldn't lose any sleep if they errata'd this Battle case, but it very clearly works RAW, we can't glean intent since the class breaks its own stated design goal multiple times already, and we certainly can't fault players for picking a good class option.
The oracle remaster divided the benefits and drawbacks of cursebound abilities: Using the ability gives you benefits, your cursebound value gets up which gives you drawbacks.
I think the intention is pretty clear, you do not get an advantage by being cursebound.
If you're in a dark room and your Flame Oracle's cursed "flames shed light like a torch", are you able to see, or would that be an illegal advantage from being cursebound?
If you're dominated by an enemy and forced to spill your party's secrets, but your Lore Oracle's curse is at stage 4, are you still unable to speak, or would that be an illegal advantage from being cursebound?
If you're paralyzed in a dangerous position and an ally tries to reposition you out of the way, but succeeds only due to your Cosmos Oracle's cursebound value, are you moved, or would that be an illegal advantage from being cursebound?
As these examples show, you can always find a case where your curse actually has advantages, and ruling otherwise would be absolutely silly. So I don't think your argument makes much sense.
Not to mention that the class itself violates the premise on a regular basis with abilities scaling by Cursebound including Oracular Warning, The Dead Walk, and Conduit of Void and Vitality. Hell, Water Walker & Lighter than Air require Cursebound 1 to work at all (and scale up at higher Cursebound).
"Cursebound is strictly bad" was the stated premise of the remaster's design, but one of the flaws of the remaster is that it doesn't follow through consistently on its own premise.
I get the reasoning being stated here and I definitely agree that "being Cursebound lets me spam spells I'd normally not be able to spam" doesn't fit the stated design goal... it's just that a bunch of the class itself also doesn't fit that design goal, which undermines the argument.
Zon'Kuthon is "The Dark Prince". Asmodeus is "The Prince of Darkness®".
Mortals that get this wrong and pray to the wrong entity may find themselves visited by a Solicitor offering an agreement to waive any right to sue over past trademark infringement in exchange for very reasonable go-forward terms and bunch of boilerplate fine print that probably isn't important.
Are you saying that Yivali misinforms us? And what's worse, maybe even Pharasma?!
Also, solicitors are one thing, but what could visit from the other side is probably not better at all.
The Lady of Graves cares not for trademark law, for all things end and are judged by her.
I want to make a brutally tough solo monster that uses no magic, doesn't need the environment, and is just a big brutal monster that uses physical attacks to win. Think of a hulk or big old giant type of creature. I want it to pressure a PC group that has access to magic while it doesn't.
This has been one of the big issues with these types of games for years across editions. You have this big, physical monster that's supposed to be this awesomely powerful creature, but once it runs into PCs with a mix of strong martial capability mixed with magic they turn the fight into a fight against a kitten.
It would be like watching a movie with Godzilla or King Kong, but if they showed up they would get slowed, tripped, then beat to death like they were nothing.
I want to make a brutal physical monster with no magic that isn't in some special environment a tough fight that pressures resources for a high level PF2 group of mixed capability without making them immune to everything.
It's much easier to make a magical combatant tougher by adding some really tough magical capabilities that allow them some sort of defensive or offensive power that messes the party up. But that big dragon or giant or kaiju that should be able to go toe to toe with the PCs in a brutal physical fight that lasts and makes the PCs feel threatened has been tough to do at higher levels.
I'm landing on the best way to do that is give them an immense amount of hit points to take the punishment the PCs dish out while unleashing its powerful physical attacks to pressure their hit point pools. In the books and movies, these types of creatures don't really so much dodge or completely resist attacks from the heroes or opponents, they're so brutally durable and huge they can take immense amounts of punishment. I imagine hit points are the likely way I can mirror that with maybe some damage resistance.
Were I trying to make a "Godzilla" style BBEG fight, I'd be bending and inventing some mechanics. Just brainstorming here so the specifics are probably not well thought out:
1. Give the creature a signature, telegraphed attack that is straight up lethal if PCs don't take any steps to defend against it. Mortals don't defeat Godzilla by tanking Atomic Breath: they get the hell away from that and attack when it's recharging. In the case of a troll this is probably a massive hulk smash attack that the PCs need to get away from or mitigate in some way (maybe a raised shield deflects some of it, or something). Either way, give it an offensive ability so powerful that PCs just staying in there swinging isn't viable when this attack is coming while also giving them a chance to get to cover (and then go on the offense while its on cooldown).
2. Give it some kind of recovery ability the PCs need to stop. This is a troll, right? Maybe give it something where if it has someone Grabbed at the start of its turn, it gains its Regeneration benefit no matter what by drinking their blood or something. So preventing this is really important so it doesn't regain those HP and thus spending an action to do something like Aid Escape becomes a good idea (and Unfettered Movement is a big help).
3. Give it an ability like Inexorable that some worms have where it can simply shrug off some effects on its next turn, so you can't just land a lucky Slow nat 1 and the fight's over. (A Mythic Resilience style ability also does this, but that also means most spells simply do nothing whereas Inexorable still lets things work for some time before they can be shrugged off and thus feels far less crappy. I cannot stress enough how much I hate Mythic Resilience.)
4. If you want to make it REALLY scary, give it the PF1 Mythic Agile ability: where it gets to be initiative twice. Given how PF2 works, you probably want to penalize that second one in some way like it only gets 2 actions or starts with one MAP.
Your group is full of optimizers and high level standard PF2 mechanics don't really keep up. So you need to go outside the box a bit and give it some abilities that make it a real threat.
(I remember my son once designed a level 24 "boss monster" and he was super excited about it. Then we ran a playtest and we kind of smashed it. He was disappointed, but it was a valuable lesson about just how powerful level 20 PCs are.)
Zon'Kuthon is "The Dark Prince". Asmodeus is "The Prince of Darkness®".
Mortals that get this wrong and pray to the wrong entity may find themselves visited by a Solicitor offering an agreement to waive any right to sue over past trademark infringement in exchange for very reasonable go-forward terms and bunch of boilerplate fine print that probably isn't important.
I want it clarified too. How would people whe have not followed the playtest even know about this ?
I read it as you intercept the attack, take the damage and are considered as having been struck by the attack instead of your charge for all rider effects.
Not just take the damage, because that makes no sense to me.
It's the same wording as Protector Tree, effectively, and that's been around for years.
If you're reading it as doing anything other than "you take the damage", you're reading something that isn't there. It says you take the damage, full stop. I mean, what do you want them to clarify, exactly? That it does what it says it does?
Why it works that way is a good question, but that one was asked in the playtest more than once and the fact that they left the wording exactly as-is makes it pretty clear it's deliberate that only damage gets blocked.
Christopher#2411504 wrote:
Tridus wrote:
Christopher#2411504 wrote:
It needs a clarification in either direction, since my groups have played it both ways. Errata are for resolving "suggested" things into hard rules.
I mean, that sounds like a you problem, to be blunt. It says perfectly clearly what it does. The text is not vague or contradictory.
Errata should be for things that are unclear, contradictory, or don't work. This is none of those. You're just running it incorrectly in one case. It's not the first time in these threads, either. You post a lot of things in here that should just be questions for the community instead because they have an answer already.
It is a you problem that you think all my errata requests need to be discussed, argued about or justified to you. All because you have a house rule for your tables, that you agree with.
What is literally written in the rulebook is not a "house rule". Words mean things.
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As was established multiple times already, this thread is not for discussion or argument about the validity of a request.
It's also not the place for every question that springs to mind. When 1/3 of the entire thread is you asking questions, several of which already have answers, something is off. There's a rules forum for this stuff for a reason.
The Exemplar archetype however is much much rarer. You can get it once on one of your PFS PCs and that's it. Better choose carefully.
And that is definitely once too often. We can disagree about how powerful the archetype is in a general game but it is definitely SIGNIFICANTLY overpowered in the PFS context.
Only played once so far with a character (rogue) with the Exemplar archetype. It outdamaged the barbarian that was a level higher than the rogue. The barbarian player seemed to be not all that impressed.
I kind of wonder if they put these limits around the boon only being available for exactly one character because they didn't want to just come out and ban it entirely because it'd be a bad look.
Like, they PFS ban spells and such, including in a couple of cases because the spells were just overpowered for PFS, but I wonder if they hesitated to do it for an entire multiclass archetype because it would effectively be Paizo telling Paizo "you screwed up real bad on this one."
I meant the last part about fear of overpowered spellcasters and lack of cool toys for casters.
I mean, that's kind of a defining thing about PF2. Most of the narrative power casting had was removed, and they even did more of that in the remaster by removing "The GM might allow you to try using Miracle/Wish/etc to produce greater effects than these, but doing so may be dangerous, or the spell may have only a partial effect" text when creating Manifestation which is just baffling, and replaced it with a ritual that is so impractical that it'll basically never show up in actual play.
Spell attack rolls have been garbage since the system was released.
They tend to be really conservative when adding new things that spellcasters can do or defenses against it are disproportionally strong (Mythic has entered the chat, both on Mythic Resilience vs Mythic Resistance but also in just how generally lame caster mythic destinies are).
They've overcorrected for the problem in more than one case, and at some point that starts to look like fear.
As a GM, I would absolutely never let a player cast wall of water on a sleeping enemy and have that instakill them with no save, because I would get physically assaulted if I did that as a GM to players.
"If this obviously cheesy tactic works for you, then it also works for your enemies" is always the best way to get players to rethink if they REALLY want to set this precedent or not.
I don't see the point of the rare tag other than to allow a DM to disallow the class based on the rare tag.
This is the only point of the rare tag in any context. It's about worldbuilding a la "spells that are only found in ancient Jistkan libraries are not available anywhere else" not any guarantee that those things are useful or powerful.
When something is rare, and not especially powerful, that makes it more likely for the GM to allow it when it doesn't clash with anything else the GM is up to. Like asking "hey, can I be someone who got splashed by godstuff?" is roughly as big an ask as "hey, can I play a Minotaur?". It's just that there are a lot more Minotaurs on Golarion than there are people who got splashed with godstuff.
Remember how people in PF1 wanted to argue that their Sorcerers could have access to Blood Money because "my spells just pop into my head because I'm a sorcerer" despite that spell only existing in two of Karzoug's spellbooks and nowhere else in the universe? This sort of thing is specifically the problem that the rarity system is designed to solve. Even if Blood Money was terrible and nobody would want to cast it, you still shouldn't be able to get it unless you got it out of Karzoug's spellbooks.
That last point 100%. Stuff like that is why the rarity system exists. PF1 didn't have it and it led to all kinds of nonsense "because the rules say I can just learn it at level up somehow".
Same with Gunslinger: it's uncommon because it lets the "I don't want guns in my fantasy" people have that as a default, and everyone else can just go "yep it's allowed, have fun!" and be the cool GM for saying yes instead of the mean GM that banned stuff. (Nevermind that they're practically speaking the same outcome: psychologically speaking players don't react the same way to banning something the rules allowed than if you just don't allow something the rules already disallow.)
Exemplar is rare in part because of the class description itself making them an abberation in Golarian, but also in part because a lot of people (rightly or wrongly) think it has "main character energy." If you're not one of them (and I'm definitely not), it's pretty easy to allow. If you are one of them, the rules give you cover to disallow it.
The Dedication feat itself is busted, but that's an entirely different conversation. The class itself is fine.
It needs a clarification in either direction, since my groups have played it both ways. Errata are for resolving "suggested" things into hard rules.
I mean, that sounds like a you problem, to be blunt. It says perfectly clearly what it does. The text is not vague or contradictory.
Errata should be for things that are unclear, contradictory, or don't work. This is none of those. You're just running it incorrectly in one case. It's not the first time in these threads, either. You post a lot of things in here that should just be questions for the community instead because they have an answer already.
So a McGuffin except a spell instead of an item. That's... underwhelming. We already have rituals for that. I honestly can't think of a less interesting addition to the system at this point in its life than "something the GM adds specifically because the plot requires you to have it at some point, except as a spell."
It sometimes feels like Paizo has bad memories of overpowered spellcasters in PF1 and is utterly terrified of giving them cool toys in PF2.
Don't you think it's almost completely unrelated? And unfair? I fully expect a bit of spells in such book, they should work as cool toys. Whether these new impossible spells are something interesting and more than any GM can think on the spot is another issue.
No? the thing I was replying to was describing a McGuffin. PF2 already has multiple ways to do that and "another one, except a spell" isn't even remotely interesting to me.
Now, it's entirely possible people misinterpreted the teaser and that's not what these spells are. That would be great. But that wasn't what I was replying to.
Late game you can get Legendary Sneak and as that doesn't require cover/concealment at all, it makes the whole question moot. I had a player literally using Hide in the middle of a wide open arena in the Ruby Phoenix Tournament with over a thousand people watching them. (This makes Sniper Gunslinger a LOT stronger, let me tell you...)
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To sum up most of the previous discussion,
whether it seems to work at all seems GM dependent; There has been no consensus.
Yep, that's about it. This is going to be a "ask your GM before making this character" question, unfortunately.
I feel like on the balance, RAW does lean toward it working given that having a sense listed in the "special senses" sidebar is the single strongest point here.
But I've also never seen anyone run it that way, for what that's worth. I could probably be persuaded by a player to at least try it, so I don't have a visceral hatred of the idea heh.
Could be a good candidate for the errata thread as it might get a clarification in the future if you add it there.
Guardians Intercept Attack only mentions that you take the damage.
It does not mention secondary effects: Poison, who would be the target of a follow-up (improved) Grab ability, on-hit saves or conditions, pushback.
Could use a mention of secondary strike effects in either direction.
Maybe a "You take the entire attack or effect with the same degree of success, but otherwise apply your own Immunities, Weaknesses and Resistances" could do?
This isn't an errata issue. "You take the damage" isn't vague or unclear. It does exactly what it says: you take the damage. You don't take anything else.
This was raised more than once in the playtest and the fact that it wasn't touched at all suggests its deliberate.
With a exceptionally low chance of receiving Errata.
This is the kicker. Items in core books might get fixed at some point, whereas AP items are basically guaranteed to never be updated.
It's not really that APs have tons of broken items (there are some standouts but also lots of bad items), it's just that an obviously broken item in a core book is a lot more likely to be corrected.
The spells were described as fitting in the "we must find such-and-such spell to defeat the wicked so-and-so!" vein, and being the spell equivalent of artifacts. So I think they're intended to be used in a campaign with a particular purpose already in mind.
So a McGuffin except a spell instead of an item. That's... underwhelming. We already have rituals for that. I honestly can't think of a less interesting addition to the system at this point in its life than "something the GM adds specifically because the plot requires you to have it at some point, except as a spell."
It sometimes feels like Paizo has bad memories of overpowered spellcasters in PF1 and is utterly terrified of giving them cool toys in PF2.
But... Foil Senses itself points at the Detecting with Other Senses sidebar, and it treats Vision as the primary precise sense and any other one is special. So by that, nothing Vision related is impacted by Foil Senses at all.
On the balance? RAW looks like it would work. RAI I'm really not sure.
Item scaling is great for characters that have a thematic item and want to keep using it, which is REALLY hard right now because any item with a DC becomes obsolete after a handful of levels.
Giving GMs a framework to improve those, even if it still requires some manual "think about this before allowing it" work is a big step forward. So I'm pretty excited for this one since this is a gap in the system right now and a toolbox to help fill it would be greatly welcome.
I had only glanced at Doorway to the Red Star since my campaign is still in Hurricane's Howl, but the Table of Contents struck me as odd. Pages 5-18 are a semester at the Magaambya Academy. My players like events at the Magaambya, but a quarter of the module's adventure seems excessive. Pages 19-23 deal with the Iobane, the guardians of the doorway. That seems reasonable, but I would have assumed that the Magaambya would have maintained a good relationship with them rather than an unfriendly relationship. Pages 24-33 deal with the undead that Trip.H complains about. Undead do not seem the appropriate theme for a last obstacle, and 10 pages feel excessive when the Red Star is just ahead.
This whole section feels kind of weird because there's also plot things going on that the Maaganbaya should know about but don't seem to, so its left for the PCs to realize the problem exists before solving it.
I didn't mind the "life at the school" interludes at the start because I wove them into the research part, so it flows fairly well (and some of them are pretty interesting). But there are more of them than are needed, for sure, and it takes time away from other stuff.
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In another thread, I saw a complaint about a ritual, DC 40 Arcana or Nature, required to open the doorway. Assuming the primary spellcaster is legendary in Arcana or Nature, their bonus would be +8(rank) + 15(level) + 5(INT) = +28. That player would have to roll 12 or higher, a 45% chance of success. The ritual is only one hour with no penalty for repeated tries, but repeating the ritual will rob the experience of opening the door of much of its excitement.
That's also assuming all the secondary casters succeed. If even one fails, the primary caster now needs to roll a 16 or higher. If one critically fails it's now a nat 20.
That's why I house ruled secondary caster checks out of existence.
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I was mildly disappointed in Hurricane's Howl for similar unexpected priorities. Pages 5-11 happen at the Magaambya, which is fine since they are newly appointed to lore-speaker status. Pages 12-23 cover an archaeological expedition to the ruins of Bloodsalt, which is great. The PCs conduct real field work for the Magaambya. But then the rest of the module, pages 24-67, deal with a bandit gang called the Knights of Abedego. What does this have to do with being a Magaambya lore-speaker? Bandit fighting is what any good-hearted adventurer would do. Two-thirds of the module has no Magaambya flavor except what the players themselves bring to it.
On the other hand, Strength of Thousands is highly rated among the adventure paths. I guess that sometimes losing the Magaambyan connection and becoming a standard Pathfinder campaign fighting bandits or undead is tolerable to most players.
My experience with Kingmaker going sideways tells me that a lot of people who sign up for a Pathfinder campaign want to play "classic Pathfinder". Those folks can pretty easily adapt to the AP theme having to get twisted up in some way in order to make that gameplay happen, because they like that gameplay and will readily make the leap to do it.
If the AP theme gets in the way of that kind of gameplay for too long, then that becomes a problem. SoT in my experience as a GM does this part better than say Kingmaker does: it's more willing to bend the theme to get some dungeon crashing in. And I think that's probably why it worked better for my group ultimately: Maaganbaya school stuff is a thing that comes up to remind you of the theme now and then, but you get to spend plenty of time "playing Pathfinder". Kingmaker, OTOH, spends huge swaths of time on something that just doesn't feel like Pathfinder at all, and it was just too much. Of course, if your group actively wants the theme all the time as its top priority, then that becomes a problem in itself.
That said; SoT is definitely an AP that requires GM intervention. If you just run it directly by the book you'll have problems. I've been making a lot of changes and additions to take the base AP and make it work for us. But it's hardly the only AP with that situation, and they give you some pretty good material to work with.
That is why I think those last two sentences of the “Fail forward” section of the GM core are so important, because it’s much more of a “can you do this easily as a GM with what you have prepared? Great! If not, don’t worry about it. Just move on.” People arguing that every roll has to matter or it shouldn’t happen are putting way too much pressure on themselves as GMs or (worse) other GMs to always know, before any dice are rolled, what new situation is going to be created by all 4 possible outcomes. Sometimes those consequence are obvious, and then it’s easy. Other times, it’s not and trying to force it can create problems much bigger than “oh nothing happened except some time passed? Should we just try again?” The GM can then reassess the current situation the party is facing and wing it from there whether to give the success because there are no possible consequences that feel worth adding to the scene, or to pull in anything from random encounters, to a quick comedy of errors monologue to move things along and that is fine for the game. This is true well beyond the lock picking activity.
It is fun when die rolls matter, but making a big deal out of every die roll can get awkward and ruin fun much more quickly than just moving on.
If a roll doesn't matter, why are you rolling it at all?
Presumably the players are trying to do something causing that roll. If roll doesn't matter, there's no reason to roll anything.
Thus if you are rolling something, presumably its to make something happen. If the outcome is "nothing happened, roll again", all you did is waste time. You're going to roll it again so you're still relying on the dice to give an outcome, you just have a dead zone where those numbers on the dice don't do anything.
Like, you're making a big deal out of something that works literally the same way in the end: you're going to get a result that does something at some point. If it's fail forward, you get that in one die roll. If it's not, you might do four die rolls before you get that.
But you're acting like this somehow requires the GM to do a much more complicated thing. It doesn't make any sense.
A caper in which the lock must be opened before a guard shows up on their regular rounds makes more sense than opening a locked door during a combat encounter. A failure would mean that the party retreats to a hiding place to wait for the guard to pass and then returns to the door.
Yeah, exactly. This makes perfect sense in an Infiltration challenge since "pick the lock" can be one of the ways to overcome the obstacle, and not getting past it that round increases Awareness. That works great.
Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:
Anyone else ever get kind of jealous about whatever's going on over at Mathmuse's table?
They do seem to be a great GM!
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That aside, the only time I can recall anyone bothering with a lock during encounter mode was actually in the playtest adventure, Doomsday Dawn. Even then, I don't remember precisely what happened, but iirc after failing a couple times the player gave up on the lock and rejoined the fight.
That said, I think I'll have to agree that the baseline rules for the Pick a Lock activity don't inherently need to be redesigned to Fail Forward... but then neither do I think that picking a lock mid-combat is a common enough experience to justify that being codified as the default. Rather than designing locks so that even a simple lock requires 3 turns at a DC 20, I would rather see combat-scale lock scenarios (i.e. the manacles etc) attach onto the Disable a Device if it even needs to be a bespoke activity (also takes 2 actions, thematically appropriate) and the activity for getting through locked doors can take a couple moments in Exploration rather than rolling 2-6 times in a row even assuming only successes without interfering with the narrative need for quick lock-picking.
Yeah, this makes sense. Even if pick a lock itself isn't fail-forward inherently, any situation where it's been put in as a challenge should be. And since AP writers are often the ones doing this wrong, that's still a Paizo issue. It's just in the scenario writing rather than the rulebook.
Feels like a 3 to me. 2 feels too low since control weather is 8, but this is a lot more limited in what it can do .
Still 8. Yes, more limited, only rain. But otherwise effect is the same or stronger. Control weather doesn't allow downpour in Summer for some reason!
But also Control Weather is 1 day cast and this one is only 2 hours. Though CW is free and this costs money (even if irrelevant at higher levels) and some blessing from gods/spirits.
And this fall into the whole problem with rituals in PF2: That is so high level and high DC for what it does that it will basically never be used. The only time this will ever get cast is in a high level game where three characters each have a very high investment in a specific skill (including a Lore) and the GM contrives a reason to make them need to do it.
Like, this is level 15+ stuff and it'll be difficult even at that level. That's a very high level requirement for "make it rain less", and with quite possibly greater than 50/50 shot of doing the opposite of what you intend.
I've been playing this game since the playtest and GMing it since release. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone picking a lock in encounter mode. The circumstances where it makes sense to do that are so hyper specific that it almost never happens, vs the more obvious solution of "deal with the immediate threat so you're out of encounter mode." (This is as opposed to disabling a haunt/trap where the thing is an active threat itself.)
If someone actually does do it in encounter mode, then there's time pressure (presumably your team would like you have you helping with the encounter) and so failure doing nothing is fine. But almost all locks are picked in Exploration mode, where failure often doesn't mean anything. And that case is the problem.
We're like four pages into this thread and people are still hung up on the difference between the case where failure matters and where failure just means "keep rolling until you get a different result."
The best place for information on these products is the Pathfinder/Starfinder on Foundry discord.
Discord is an absolutely awful method of communicating updates on anything unless you're big time into the community in question (in which case it's fine). For anyone else it's terrible and gating information behind Discord is one of the best ways to ensure the information doesn't exist to most people.
"Go find the right discord server, then find the right channel, then the right pin/post". Ugh. This is a commercial product, this information should be findable by Google.
The Paizo forums are at least as niche as the discord server for the Foundry system,so not sure where you want the niche communication to occur?
Paizo blogs are pretty easily findable by search engines so anyone can find it if they're looking for it. Even the forums are. Discord isn't. If you're not a part of that specific server, the information doesn't exist and you'd have no way to know anything about it.
Hell, even a blog anywhere would be preferable than the current situation.
It's largely based on what it does. If the ritual provides something that is really useful to level 5 characters but pretty useless to level 10 characters, setting the rank and DC so high that only level 10 characters can cast it defeats the point.
A lot of rituals suffer from that problem due to how high ritual DCs are and how secondary caster checks make some of them extremely hard to actually do. By time you can do them reliably.
Beyond that it's a bit of an art form, but high level rituals should be something truly dramatic or major.
If you have an example we can probably brainstorm some rank ideas. :)
For conditions there's the condition card deck, which you can just hand to a player as relevant. Though I find players learn conditions pretty fast, especially the common ones, so it ceases to be an issue after a while.
There's likewise bestiary cards for creatures but with the sheer number of creatures it gets very expensive so I don't really recommend it. Pulling up the relevant creatures on AoN is generally effective.
It's hard to avoid page flipping for pen & paper play, though. You can only summarize so much after which you're going to need to go to the relevant page.
I actually run Foundry VTT locally as a GM even if players aren't using it, and run the creatures and such there. If it's an adventure that is available in Foundry, that also means every room has a journal entry for that room, so instead of flipping, I click the journal entry and everything for that room pops up. It's quite nice. That only works for stuff where you don't have to load it all in yourself, though, since that would be even more work.
I feel like one of the easiest ways to implement Fail Forward that escapes the binary tree is simply by scaling the result--rather like a basic save, in a way.
If the PCs simply must get through this door (or past this obstacle, this NPC's approval) then the die isn't being rolled to find out "Did they get through the door or not" but rather "When they get through the door, what does it cost them in terms of resources or consequences?"
Yeah, exactly. One of the original complaint points was the SoT book 5 ritual that must be done to advance the plot. This requires a success or better to advance the plot. Failure stops you cold. There's also some minor penalties, but since the plot can't advance until you succeed and there's no real time sensitivity, you can wipe them away before trying again, however many times it takes. It's just making a bunch of rolls until the dice say "the plot is allowed to resume now".
Later in the thread someone posted a Myth Speakers version of the same idea (a ritual that must advance the plot). This version addressed the problem: the plot mandatory thing happens no matter what. If you critically succeed there's an extra good thing that happens, and there's consequences for doing poorly. But there's never any case where it's "just try it again tomorrow and hope you get a different number."
The latter version there is what I'm looking for. You're only ever rolling for that ritual once, and whatever happens, happens.
To put this into picking locks: if getting past the door is plot mandatory then there should be complications if you do badly at it but just stopping the entire plot is a problem. Of course, the best way to fix that is to make the lock one option to get into the room rather than the only option, because failing at it now means the players need to try something else the may have wanted to avoid doing instead.
If it's not plot mandatory, then potential failure outcomes are "you set off a trap", "you alert the creatures in the room", and of course, "a failsafe activates and you can't get this lock open no matter what you do."
Failure is entirely allowed, here. What's not allowed is "nothing happens, roll again until you get a different number."
This push and pull comes to a head when a GM wants to wrench the gameplay out of the players' hands and break their expectations to push the narrative in a preferred direction. When you have an appropriately-leveled combat, you give the players experience for that. If you don't, you took that away from them, and you'd better have a good reason. I don't think, "You failed to pick the lock I wanted you to pick" is a good reason to take that away from them.
What does this have to do with anything? A GM that wants to tell their own story no matter what the players do isn't stopped in the slightest by XP being involved. If you have an adversarial table, the GM is going to win that anytime they want to because they have an infinitely sized toolbox of ways to beat the players.
What you're describing here is an adversarial GM. It's got nothing to do with how level ups are determined. (Especially since even XP doesn't stop that. A GM can get around that by using slower progression or just under-reporting creature levels so the encounter is worth less XP than it should be if their goal is to do that.)
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And since we're already off-topic, to touch on my issues with Milestone leveling for a bit - Experience is a useful, mutually-agreed-upon system by which players can measure progress and keep the GM honest about how much adventuring they've done, and how rewarded they should be in player progression. It is a points-based system for rewarding the players for following along with the narrative tying things together. Ditching it for "you level when I say so to meet the needs of the story" is an option, but in my opinion makes things feel a little arbitrary. It leads to the PCs being the toys of the GM to tell the story, rather than a cooperative game at a table where everyone plays by rules.
Well its fair to say I disagree with all of this, especially the idea that milestone somehow makes the players the GM's toy. That is not how it works at all and it's a misrepersntation of what it is to claim that.
That'd be roughly the same as me making a bad faith argument like "XP serves no purpose except to act as a dopamine hit for players that require a number going up to stay engaged." Which I'm not.
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I feel there's a good design reason that AP's keep experience as the measure of success rather than strictly milestones, beyond just experience being a sacred cow. But I'd be happy to be corrected!
For some APs, there is. The more open ended ones it makes sense. XP works best in an unpredictable, non-linear campaign because it acts as a way of tracking progress that works in basically any situation. It also works great in drop-in games like PFS since it's predictable and people can go at their own pace. Since the early games where these systems were originally created were all homebrew and much more improvisational than an AP, it makes sense they'd have evolved in a way that works well for that. (And if you're running a homebrew sandbox campaign, XP is an effective system.)
The problem with a "typical" AP is that they're linear: they follow a set of events in a set order. If the book doesn't give enough XP to reach the next level or the players miss/skip stuff entirely and don't get the XP for it, they're not at the level the linear adventure wants to be at. The standard fix for that is to throw meaningless random encounters at them until they get enough XP and the story can continue.
And in one infamous case the book gives too much XP and tells the GM to block levelling (or rescale a bunch of encounters).
XP is a bad match there because the linear story being told is being run in a system with very heavy level scaling, and it expects a certain level. If the players aren't that level, the AP either gets much easier or much harder depending on which way they're off and it can make it impossible. So at this point the GM has to just throw XP at them to get to the required number, which is only necessary because XP adds an arbitrary number requirement before you can be the level the story requires.
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I can't help but feel I still have some solid questions that haven't really been answered. How do you accommodate the binary tree problem? How do you avoid rewarding failure? How do you design a better game in the first place? And is it worth going through all that effort of implementing Fail Forward Design when it can lead to additional content the players may never see simply because they accidentally passed a check?
The fundamental premise of Fail Forward is "a roll should result in something happening." 'Something' is very broad. It could be good. It could be bad. It could be both.
It can't be "nothing happens, but you can just keep rolling again until you get a number that results in something happening." That is just a waste of time.
There's lots of games that already do this, it's not like I'm inventing anything novel here. Pretty much all of the narrative focused, rules light games work this way. Since you only pick up dice in those when trying to do something that changes the narrative state in some way. A result that doesn't change the state at all is no different than if you never tried anything in the first place. That's why my specific target issues were a plot-mandatory ritual that requires success before the plot advances and can be repeated until you get a success, and skill checks that result in failure with no consequence.
A failure that results in something going wrong did change the narrative state, and that's perfectly fine. Likewise with a failure that results in losing time in a time-sensitive situation.
But the plot should never be blocked until you roll a 16 on the dice and you have infinite retries. What's the point of making you roll 7 times until you get the magic number in that situation?
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The latter I'm specifically reminded of with regards to an adventure I've only heard of second-hand, so my apologies of the details are a little fuzzy.
The players arrive at a wizards tower, and are expected to trust some character at the front door - he departs for a moment, or some skill check is necessary to convince him, I'm not sure which - after which he leads the players up to the tower to set up their meeting with the wizard to accommodate their quest.
But if the players choose to be impatient, or fail the skill check to convince him, they are rewarded with an entire wizard's tower of monsters to fight, experience to gain, loot to obtain, etc. All of this is skipped if they "fail" the social encounter (except wherein the players just gain the experience for having skipped the tower as if they had defeated it.) I see this as the end result of correctly implemented fail forward design, and I can't help but think how much more interesting it could have been if the face of this event was a roadblocking lock (which enables all parties to participate in this content) rather than a doorman.
And if you say, "Well, if it didn't result in a good thing, then it wasn't correctly implemented," it starts to sound like there might be no true Scotsmen left in the world.
If that resulted in a good thing or not depends on if the players want that fight, I suppose. I have a group that pretty much takes every way out of a fight possible, so avoiding the fight is a success to them.
A party that wants to loot the place can choose to do that no matter how the skill check goes. It sounds like what this story is really about is just giving the players an excuse to loot the place without feeling like the bad guys. And yeah, you can do that more easily with a lock than with a social encounter.
But that comes down to what kind of game you're running: a dungeon crasher adventure should set that up so that it's there to be fought. One focused more on diplomacy and such shouldn't.
I don't see how its much of a commentary on fail forward design except that there's no case in this where the players roll and the result is "nothing happens", which is really what this thread was originally about.
