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If the text only existed for the Gliminal, that's one thing. But PFS uses that description of modified rolls for ALL situations where a player would willing be a target of a roll, not just when fighting a Gliminal. It's in the Paizo FAQ for official organized play.

The text does only exist for Gliminal, though. PFS rulings are effectively GM rulings: they only apply in that campaign.

Lots of GMs use them and they're often pretty useful guidance, but they are explicitly not the rules of the game and they only apply to the campaign that GM controls (PFS Organized Play) unless your GM adopts them.

PFS does this a fair bit. They made Manifestation of Spirits limited (which is a defacto ban) because they felt it was overpowered. That doesn't apply to the core rules either, but a GM can also adopt it.

In other words, altering a degree of success is how Healing Bomb should work in official games, but lacks the RAW to support that for most tables.

It's not how Healing Bomb works in the rules. PFS effectively house ruled it to make it functional in the PFS campaign. I highly encourage GMs to do the same thing (or house rule it in some other way) because the official version of the feat is awful and feels bad in play. "The Bard cast Rallying Anthem to bolster my team's defense and that makes them harder to heal" is not a good mechanic.

The intent of the remaster Healing Bomb nerf may (or may not) have been because the Gliminal rule being applied in pre-remaster organized games made it so that it was guaranteed not to critically fail, so it always (except on an unconscious target who cannot be willing, but was still -6 AC from unconscious/flat-footed) always healed the full amount of the elixir. Which deserved a nerf.

We can only guess at why they nerfed it, but I sure hope that isn't the reason why because nerfing a player option in the core rules because of a suggestion for a single creature in a bestiary is definitely a choice. If I had to guess, I'd say it was probably just a mistake on someone's part who didn't think about it a ton and moved on.

The Flickmace is a great weapon, and leaves a hand free for shield or something else. Flickmace + Shield is a strong front liner as you've got reach and strong defensive options. It even has a good critical specialization.

Starting stats are based on that, really. If you're using the Flickmace, you want full STR and heavy armor. If you want to throw the Starknife as a regular thing, you'll need more DEX. This is about how you intend to play the character and is an impactful decision. As a first time player, my advice is the Flickmace + Shield because it's going to do reasonable damage and leaves you able to take a hit. Carrying a ranged weapon (like some Starknives to throw!) is a good idea for cases where you can't close to melee, but as a Champion you want to be near enemies to use your reactions anyway. This is a class that shines on the front line.

Note that ancestries can always ignore their ancestral boosts/flaws and just get two boosts with no flaw. So you can take that option to get a STR boost and no flaw.

Beyond that you have a bunch of options, really. CON is good because it's HP and a save, and you're a front liner. Will is good because it's a save and perception/initiative. DEX is a save, but you can get away without it if you're in armor like full plate. INT/CHA are useful if you want to be using skills that rely on them.

Gnome has lots of fun feats and they can work pretty well no matter what you're doing. Note that if you get an offensive cantrip, it will use CHA as its casting stat, so if you intend to use something like that you'll want some CHA. If you take something without a save/attack roll then it doesn't really matter.

If you have Diplomacy, Empathetic Plea is really funny if you're not going first. Gnome Obsession is fun to know about stuff, and Gnome Polyglot gives you a LOT of languages. But if you're using the Flick Mace, Gnomish Weapon familiarity is your first pick.

I think the blessed armaments all have their place. This is my favorite ones in order:
1. Shield is great if you want to focus on shields, as it lets you block more damage with your shield and opens up very powerful ally protection options like Shield of Reckoning.
2. Weapon/armament is more offensive, and obviously better if you don't have a shield. The extra rune can be really useful if you know what you're doing that day.
3. Swiftness helps you keep up with faster allies, but as a status bonus it doesn't stack with some other ways to get speed boosts later. I think it's taken less for that reason. It's got its uses, though.

For devotion spells, Shield of the Spirit and Lay on Hands are both good. One gives your allies a defensive buff, the other is healing.

Don't stress too much about getting it perfect! If you've got a good weapon, a shield, heavy armor, and high STR, you're going to do fine.

You are wildly underestimating what can slip by even good QA teams. Not to say the errors aren't bad or shouldn't be fixed, within the context of how much had to change in such a short time under the duress of the remaster, it's crazy to expect perfection even if the error seems obvious.

My best friend did video game QA for an AAA studio for years. Whenever someone would ask "why didn't QA catch that?" when a big game would launch with a pile of bugs/issues, his response was simply "what makes you think they didn't?" It's entirely normal in that space for stuff to be released to meet a deadline with known issues because marketing has a target date/ stores were paid for shelf space/there's promotional partners ready to go/ management wants to meet this quarter's sales targets/etc. That meant known broken stuff would get released and then people would blame QA for not finding it when QA absolutely did find it but QA has absolutely no authority to do anything unless the problem is going to cause a game to fail console certification (and even then they don't have any power, but that is a big enough problem that it draws attention).

And that's for places that have QA. Paizo does their best, but we know stuff gets put out that for one reason or another was never playtested (like the Kingmaker Kingdom Rules). But there's degrees to this:
- Overpowered options will always exist in a game like this, though PF2's definition of "overpowered" is pretty tame in most cases.
- Situational options will always exist, and they're largely fine as long as the situation is something that actually happens with some frequency.
- Weak/poor options will also always exist in a game like this.
- Options that just flat out don't work or are nonsensical are where the problem really is.

And that's going to happen, because that's kind of how it is... but when they never address that stuff it turns into a bigger problem. I point to Remaster Oracle a lot as an example of this because it was such a flagrant problem:
- PC2 released with Remaster Oracle having two different numbers of spell slots. It took 5 months to get a correction, and that's literally the most basic function of a caster class in a core book.
- Remaster Oracle still to this day isn't clear on the size of the spell repertoire, with the text on one line not matching the text on another line of the same part of the book. This is actively confusing the community (to the point that Pathbuilder recently changed which one they think is correct, partially because it's easier to do the other one if folks disagree that way), which wasn't addressed in the first errata and is still a problem nearly a year since then and well over a year since release.

"How many spells do I know?" is among the most basic functions of a spellcaster, and this is a class in a core book. For this to be not sorted out after this long is an example of why people are frustrated with the lack of QA/QC at Paizo. At some point it cases being "mistakes happen" because the lack of willingness to address it isn't a mistake: it's a deliberate choice.

Mythic also has a bunch of this, both in terms of "this feat doesn't appear to do anything" like Mythic Strike's whole deal about your attack bypassing mythic resistance (if you have Mythic Strike you're already mythic and already do that) to "if you run mythic resilience on creatures the way the rules tell you to, casters will have a miserable time", to "Beast Lord doesn't give animal companions any way to bypass mythic resistance so they're basically incapable of doing damage against any creature with it."

And of course, the infamous Kingdom rules have so many problems that there's multiple packages of house rules and alternatives to try and salvage them. James was open about what happened there and I respect that, and I get how it happened. But at the end of the day people are paying for a product and expect a certain standard of quality. If they consistently don't get it, they're going to stop buying. And that's not a good thing for the health of the game or the company.

It feels like Avenging Runelord was made such that non-spellcasters could also get something out of it with how the innate spells work, but that leads to a very silly outcome where it's better on a typical Thaumaturge than a typical Runelord Wizard.

Would definitely be a good fix to let this work with their primary spellcasting ability score for spellcasters.

I stopped lurking just to agree with this. If you look at the PF2 sub-Reddit the idea of homebrew seems to repel people and there are very few meme posts. It's a self selected mechanically focused group of players, these forums are also very self selected to consist mostly of people who don't ruffle the feathers of established posters too much. Outsiders with radically different views don't seem to stick around very long.

That's a good point. Some places are much more homebrew friendly than others and some communities have a "norm" that folks don't like to deviate from. It's something regular posters need to be aware of.

I do know some PF2 communities that are pretty homebrew friendly, and I know I use a bunch of homebrew (like I just flat out changed the ritual rules so my players wouldn't have a bad time). And I know of some that are... not. heh. I think homebrew is great as long it's spelled out. "Surprise homebrew" that changes how someone's character works without them realizing it can be pretty frustrating.

On topic this idea of power without narrative scope and narrative scope without power is at odds with the core of what D20 fantasy is. Most players enjoy gaining more ability to impact the world as they level and can handle the added mental load that comes with that.

Yep. This is a power fantasy game at the end of the day. That's what levelled scaling proficiency is, after all: you grow rapidly in power as you level and simply outclass things that weren't a challenge for you before.

The Wheel of Time is an example of a story like that: early on, a single trolloc is a severe threat and a fade is something you run from. Later on, they can fight single trollocs. Then they can fight groups. Then they can fight fades. Eventually these are trivial threats and they're fighting enemies like the Forsaken with world-altering magic using their own world-altering abilities.

So, this isn't going to happen. Having weapon size not impact damage was a deliberate change to simply how the game runs, along with size impacting fewer things in general. Changing it is a big deal because damage dice impact a lot more things and are a much bigger part of an average PF2 character's damage than in PF1 (where it's basically a rounding error for some characters and for others it gets put into some busted feat chain to get multiple size increases), and just lowering die size would be such a severe hinderance that it would effectively break martials that use smaller weapons.

Weapon sizes in PF1 are really janky and you need a lookup table to deal with them effectively, so they require significantly more system mastery to deal with than PF2 wants in its game (and even more to take advantage of to cheese).

Fundamentally, this is at odds with how the system wants to work and that was deliberate, so the odds of an official rule for this are approximately 0%. House rule it if it's important to you.

I don't even know how to reply to all the commentary because after all the years we've had of listening to PF1 players complain about PF2, this doesn't crack the top 5. I don't know how you're quantifying that the PF1 community is growing, but it doesn't line up with what I'm seeing, especially with how much harder PF1 is to get into (it's an actively new player hostile system).

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

Not even remotely true. PF1 ran with the assumption that everything was allowed and the GM had to actively ban stuff. While the GM can do that, it requires the GM to:

#1 punishes GMs who don't have more system mastery than their players do. #2 is just something a lot of people find difficult because it makes them the bad guy.

Putting that stuff behind a system that makes "No" the default means a GM will have it blocked by default if they do nothing, has cover from the system to keep it that way (because the expectation changed), and gets to be "the cool GM" if they decide to say yes and allow it.

These are entirely different, and the community expectation changed around it because the system set different expectations upfront.

Rarity in PF2 is used for too many things (which is a different issue), but the idea is a massive improvement over PF1's "an AP published a spell that a Runelord knew 10,000 years ago which means RAW a random level 5 Wizard can just get it at level up" approach.

This is one of the single best things PF2 did.

I personally don't like the idea of 1hp enemies. It can feel pretty deflating when you realize anything could have killed them.

Good news: PF2 subverts this on the Necromancer with 1HP allies instead. ;)

I also really like the Bloodied functionality. It is an awesome narrative tool and opens up all kinds of modularity, excitement and even surprises throughout battles.

Bloodied as a concept seems to have stuck around pretty well even if it mechanically doesn't do anything, just as a descriptor for how beaten up a target is. I think some of the folks using it don't realize where it originated.

Definitely a cool mechanic, would love to see it make more of a comeback, but the concept is alive and well in gaming circles from what I've experienced.

That alone is just clumsy design, not a deal breaker in any way. But then we remember Rewrite Fate.

Rewrite Fate wrote:

Trigger You roll a skill check or saving throw and don’t like the result.

Destiny, fate, or some other force bends around you as your mythic power swells, manifesting in a flash of light or visible surge of energy emanating from your body as you cast aside the chains of fate. You expend a Mythic Point and reroll the check or save with mythic proficiency, taking the new result.

So there is literally NEVER a situation in which you want to use your mythic calling's special MP spend, because Rewrite Fate is just superior. You don't even have to fail the roll to enable R.Fate, lol. Holy s@#+.

I touched on that in my comment, yeah, with the mention at how most of what you're doing with mythic points is rerolls. That's Rewrite Fate, and 100% agree that it's totally out of whack.

You don't need to fail, you don't need it to be one of your calling's mythic things... you don't even need to be trained in the skill. You can try athletics untrained, fail, and go "k I'll reroll and now my proficiency modifier is better than the Fighter that has actually invested 3 skill boosts into this." It's bonkers.

That's the part that I hate the most: it warps the game by having cases where your character's training and proficiency is irrelevant to the outcome. Rewrite Fate takes a character that knows literally nothing about a skill and temporarily makes them among the greatest on Golarian at it.

Multiple levels of proficiency and how going from trained to expert/master/legendary actually matters is something PF2 does really well. Mythic going "well sure you don't know anything about Arcana, but you spent a mythic point so now you know everything about it for the duration of this action" is... I don't even know what word to use for what it is. But I sure don't like it.

And how Rewrite Fate makes the Calling mythic skill options (and feats that let you roll with mythic in some case) obsolete is also a huge problem. You're right: there's no reason to spent the mythic point up front when you can just choose to do it if the first roll fails.

(speculation on WoI development)

I don't really know what happened, but considering it came out during the time of remaster related compression/extra work and the quality issues we saw due to that, I'm guessing it was a lack of time. It certainly doesn't appear to have been playtested very well. It does seem like multiple authors were involved, because something like Mythic Strike only makes sense if either multiple people were writing it, or one person ran out of time.

Spend a Mythic Point and then Strike a creature with a weapon you’re wielding or an unarmed attack you have available. This Strike is made at mythic proficiency, and the weapon or unarmed attack counts as a mythic weapon for the purposes of overcoming mythic resistance or mythic immunity.

It's a mythic feat, so you're already a mythic character if you're taking it... which means that the last part about mythic resistance does nothing. Mythic creatures already bypass mythic resistance. So the only way that text does anything is if a non-mythic creature gets this or mythic resistance doesn't work the way the book says it does. That suggests it was changed late in development and this wasn't updated, which would fit a compressed schedule. (I'm also pretty sure that's what happened to Remaster Oracle in regards to the spell slots/repertoire contradictions.)

It also has the inverse-scaling issues inherent to mythic proficiency: when you get this feat using it is for most martials a +6 (+4 for Fighter/Gunslinger)... but three levels later it's gone down to +4 (+2 for Fighter/Gunslinger).

Having things that actively get worse because your character is getting better at stuff just doesn't feel right.

Mythic just being flat bonuses over equally leveled characters is just making the characters higher level for that task, nothing else. I am glad that they didn't take a "more numbers" approach to Mythic.

Except they did because that's what Mythic Proficiency does. They just did it in a weird, occasionally on way, where it does nothing most of the time but then occasionally suddenly gives you a +8 if you're trained, and scales that down the better you are at the thing.

The numbers are still there, they're just usually off until they turn on for completely out of whack bonuses at low level (and at things you're bad at).

PF1 Mythic was the end of my table playing pathfinder until 2nd edition came out. We really, really wanted it to be good and played through the first 3 books of Wrath of the Righteous before it became clear that what mythic did was exacerbate all of the existing problems with 1st edition into a completely unplayable mess. Mythic can't just mean "higher level challenge." PF2 is already really good for simulating that kind of power difference. You just use higher or lower level opponents depending on who is supposed to feel awesomely powerful.

PF1 mythic was a mess to GM, for sure. But it was also pretty fun as long as you kept the tier level in line. Going to high tier basically broke PF1 even more than it already was. I GM'd it and while I'd never do it again because its so difficult to make work, the campaign was a blast.

PF2 mythic forgot the fun in a lot of ways.

[quiote]Mythic needed to not be "You are awesomely powerful," at least not with raw numbers. It needed to be "you interact differently with the world."

I don't think they succeed at that either, for the most part, since the most typical thing a mythic character is doing, especially at low level, is rerolls.

I actually think the mythic defenses work really well for that, as long as they applied very carefully and mythic creatures still have some form of glaring vulnerability. It seems like James Jacobs and the adventure writing team understand this, so I anticipate the official mythic APs to be well balanced around creature's mythic abilities and nature.

I really don't agree with this. Mythic Resistance does literally nothing to most mythic PCs (and if it's a mythic campaign, you're probably a mythic PC). If you're a Fighter, this mythic defense doesn't exist. It only really hits animal companions, eidolons, and classes like Kineticist. While a GM can house rule all three of those, the fact that we've talked about one of these and we're already in house rule territory is a bad sign.

You can't use Mythic Resilience as War of Immortals tells you to because it's such a bad time for casters if you do. James pointed out that they're avoiding it in Revenge of the Runelords, which is good, but it doesn't say much for the WoI mythic rules that it's necessary to do that.

Mythic Defense is just anti-fun, since crits are fun and against the strongest creatures already hard to get.

Mythic Immunity is irrelevant to PC casters, and for PC martials will force a GM to make sure they have mythic weapons because it's an absolute hard counter if they don't. So it won't exist for them either, because the options are "you ignore this" or "you can't deal damage". Poor, poor animal companions are hit by this again and require another house rule to be able to attack.

That's kind of the problem with these defenses. They tend to be very binary: they either don't exist for you, or they're severely punishing without much you can do about it.

For introducing new narrative changing systems (like Mythic) it kinda feels like the base rules have to come out, and then, like 2 years later, the GM focused book that will help guide GMs using that system should come out that can incorporate that system. I know that it would be best to just be able to play test the rules for a really long time before launching them, but casual gamers are not going to be a part of those play tests, so many usability and complexity issues would probably be hard to assess.

No playtest can catch everything, but some of this stuff would have been caught extremely quickly. Like some of the stuff I'm bringing up was noticed within hours of WoI coming out.

I kinda think the main mechanical core of mythic acting as a way to overturn the already strained success/fail roll math was a very misguided idea.

I understand that it is a word count short way to implement something like that, but imo it just interacts with too many things (renders other considerations irrelevant) to ever work right. It feels bad to have all the normal investments become temporarily irrelevant, and even screws up the notion of niche protection. It's genuinely a thing where the once-per-session odd skill check can be cheesed via existing mythic roll, and I'm kinda baffled that was allowed, though at least the severity of that fades as levels go up.

Me too. I especially hate it with things like rituals, where we went from "you must be legendary in Religion to even attempt this ritual" to "well you attended Sarenrae 101 and you're mythic, so whatever, you're exactly as good at it as someone who is legendary in Religion ."

It warps the entire skill system in ridiculous ways, and then has that bizarre inverse scaling where the benefit from it goes down the better you are at the thing you're trying to do.

... and Rewrite Fate is even worse, since that's just "oh Bob was untrained in Athletics when he attempted that jump, but he spent a mythic point and is now suddenly Hercules for exactly 6 seconds."

Like, Mythic letting characters do things they couldn't normally do is fine, since that's kind of the point. But it strains verisimilitude beyond all reason that a characters skill and training is totally irrelevant because they spent a mythic point.

If they instead designed mythic power to not be as in-the-moment game changing, it could have given mythic PCs more long-term powers to better alter their "base feel" compared to traditional PCs.

Yeah that's kind of what I expected them to do. Like if your Calling skills give you a +2 "Mythic" typed bonus, you're better at them than anyone else of equivalent skill all the time, rather than "you're a normal character until you're suddenly temporarily godlike at it".

The actual spending of mythic points can let you do special abilities and powers and such. It shouldn't touch Proficiency at all IMO.

A GM also shouldn't be required to design adventures so that PCs can constantly regain mythic power otherwise they're just mundane PCs.

It'd be a challenge to design a good mythic system, but I think they massively missed the mark on this one.

I believe some of the lead developers(designers?) of PF2E quite literally worked on 4e. That's why we got the commander and the guardian. Which are 4e classes with new names

And I'm glad we did because Commander is awesome. My favorite class added to the game in quite a while.

I feel like Guardian would have happened even if 4e never existed though, simply because "I want to play an all defending class like Champion but without all the divine stuff" was a recurring request since PF2 came out.

I just think it’s ridiculous and moronic that Paizos success came from presenting an alternative to the worst d&d edition ever published, and then they decided to give a big middle finger to all the fans of the game by making their 2nd edition essentially a clone of 4e. You exist because of how bad 4e was, and you did a 180 and made your own version of it.

As was mentioned way back on page 1 six years ago: both games are trying to solve the same problems from 3.5/PF1. It's not surprising they came to similar solutions.

Besides, the market shifted substantially after PF1 came out. Particularly after 5e came out. The market for games like PF1 shrank considerably, so making another game with all its same issues wasn't really going to fly commercially. That game already exists for folks that want it.

So the release of the newer wizard subclass and schools isn't addressing what people feel the class was lacking?

Weak schools is one thing people complained about, so better schools do help that... but Wizard's issues are pretty systemic so that alone won't do it.

I would be extremely careful as a company too if my player base would read something posted on discord by a single designer and suddenly that becomes canon for the entire game.

There's a big gap between "giving a casual answer and having that treated as final" and "it's been over a year and we still don't have consensus on the number of spells in Oracle's repertoire because the book contradicts itself."

It seems like it should be pretty straightforward for the designers to figure out what the intention is there and provide an answer. Just like it should have been for spells per day, which took 5 months. (PFS had a ruling out pretty quickly and why the rules folks at Paizo can't do the same is the big question.)

This isn't some edge case interaction between obscure AP backmatter entries that are both rare and were never intended to appear in the same campaign. It's the most basic part of how a core spellcasting class works. If expecting a straight answer on something that basic is asking too much, then something is horribly wrong in Paizo land.

All Maya would have to do to have the player base suddenly posting something as canon is talk to one designer, get some casual answer to a question, post it, and that would suddenly become canon even if it wasn't an official ruling.

And if it turned out to be wrong, the designers could issue an errata later that says "no, this is the real answer."

And there's still a lot of daylight between not giving casual answers and not giving answers at all. Some of these things have been confusing people for multiple years. That's how we ended up with Foundry as a defacto source of truth for some of this stuff like instances of damage and IWR.

I would be very careful about making things canon after what happened in PF1/3E where rules lawyering became a thing that appears to be gone in PF2. I'm happy for it. I want my game to be my game. I don't care what someone else does in their game.

DMs should have the power, not some perfect or official interpretation of the rules.

Counterpoint: PFS exists and needs the rules to be clear because the whole point is consistent enforcement. Two DMs can read Oracle right now and reasonably give different answers to the repertoire size, leaving a player having to deal with a character being ruled illegal at one table and legal at another.

Hell, even Korakai (the iconic Oracle) doesn't clear this up because he's got multiple errors on his sheet and has different repertoire sizes at different spell ranks (or is using a third interpretation that isn't in the text). This is not something that should take a year to fix and the idea that Paizo can't get an answer for it because players might get the wrong idea if someone actually answers it is a really poor excuse now that we're going on 14 months.

Also, DMs of home games should be able to know what the rules are. What good is buying a rulebook that gives you unclear rules and says "I dunno, figure it out for yourself?"

That's not a quality product. It also does nothing to end rules lawyering, because now we have rules lawyers trying to parse out and argue their case for what the rules actually are. That's not at all better than "the rule is clear but I don't like it so I'm going to house rule it".

James Jacobs gave a very interesting answer to my query here

That's great news! They need to fix mythic monster creation in War of Immortals to limit it like that since it's telling GMs to use Mythic Resilience much more freely, but this restrained usage is going to help a lot.

Even if they had auto-scaling, I think there should be a rule for lores to be used as replacement for certain skills at GMs discretion. For example, if you have the merchant background you can use merchant lore to ask merchants for a discount instead of Diplomacy or things like that.

This is already a thing, even though the Lore skill only hints at it with this line: "If there's any doubt whether a Lore skill applies to a specific topic or action, the GM decides whether it can be used or not."

- Subsystems like Influence and Research directly reference Lore skills as being usable, and the example of how to create an Influence encounter has one in it. Gnomish Obsession + Dreaming Potential is a power combo in a long running influence/research because if you can choose what you want to work on, you can show up with the appropriate lore every time.

- Vehicles just straight up say Piloting/Driving lore can be used to operate the vehicle.

- APs and PFS Scenarios frequently mention Lore skills for various tasks. I've seen it for a lot of different tasks for things like Warfare/Herbalism/Scouting/Library (and in PFS, Pathfinder Society Lore since every PFS character has it).

So while the Lore skill itself doesn't say "if you have a Lore in X you can use it to attempt a task" explicitly, everything else in the system points pretty strongly to it being a thing the GM should allow.

Hm, digging up that old link also provided Tridus's PF2 playtest suggestion Should Background selection be divorced from Ability Scores? Tridus foresaw Trip.H's attribute-boost complaints back in 2018.

Wow that takes me back!

I stand by it today. It happens a lot that background are at odds between "this is narratively appropriate for the character" and "this has the ability scores I mechanically need."

Yeah, this is a case of your PCs happen to have good counters for the enemies, and combined with some luck made it roll their way. But your BBEG is lower level than the party is, so it's not really a "BBEG". This is a big enemy pack fight, and AoE is really strong in those.

A Creature 5 is only crit failing on a nat 1 and will be able to hit back a lot harder.

It's good to mix up the type of encounters you have. Your players pretty clearly enjoyed this one and it's fun to feel effective. It just happened to suit them. They won't be so fortunate against every kind of enemy.

Once again, "it's not as bad as it used to be" is being used as an excuse.

Once again, the fact that some options are better than others and that players are allowed to do something "wrong" is being used to falsely claim that Ivory Tower game design exists in PF2 using your redefined version of the term.

You're literally arguing that all the guidance the system gives doesn't count and the real problem is that players are allowed to pick ability scores at all because some of them might pick something suboptimal.

A game that doesn't allow that is a completely different game. It's totally fine to prefer that type of game, but it's not Pathfinder.

Ivory Tower pain is all about not having the info you need to make informed decisions (but knowing that the info is out there somewhere).

Ivory Tower design is hard-baked into the bones of pf2 thanks to systems like Archetyping. Any time you could take a class feat, you can instead take a dedication feat to start an archetype. Knowing when it's helpful and which ones to pick is Ivory Tower.

Quote:

You're grossly underestimating how much worse it was. [...]

So no, PF2 isn't Ivory Tower Design.

This math doesn't add. No, another game being worse in the past does not remove its existence from pf2. Yall have got to stop falling for that impulse to wallpaper over this very real source of anti-fun.

No, you're literally redefinining "Ivory Tower Design" to mean something completely different and then using that new definition to try and make your point. That doesn't fly.

What you're describing and what PF2 is occurs in any game where there's meaningful mechanical build customization. Every game that does that will have better and worse combinations because that's just the reality of allowing for so many combinations of different things.

Ivory Tower design is when you deliberately add trap options so that people can make wrong choices, wind up with a bad character, and then gain the system mastery to know not to do that anymore. PF2 goes out of its way to not do that and tries really hard to steer people into making functional choices, even if it allows them to do something else.

Like, you can dump your KAS if you want to. The game lets you do it. The game also actively encourages you to not do that by telling you it's a key ability for your class and giving you a bonus in it that you can't change. That's the opposite of Ivory Tower design.

Feats being silo'd so you can't use a class feat on something that actively does nothing for your class without going out of your way to do so is another example. Sure, the game lets you pick a useless archetype instead of taking a class feat if you really want to. The game also doesn't encourage it, putting the class feats right up at the front of the book in the class itself while telling you that you can archetype at all is a couple hundred pages later in another section.

This is as opposed to 3.5/PF1, where the feats you want are in a list of 3000 feats, most of which are useless to you and some of which are actively trying to trick you.

You also don't seem to know what you're talking about when it comes to how the 3.x design worked in comparison to what we have now.

I know a few people who bounced off the system entirely because Ivory Tower creates a "smell" that players are quick to pick up. When they see another player (probably me) do some nonsense combo like snap their fingers to 0A draw scroll from a Retrieval Belt --> 2A spellcast --> ect --> etc.

The term you're looking for here is crunchy. It's a crunchy system with lots of stuff, some of which gives you extra things if you take it. That's how a crunchy system works.

And some people don't like crunchy systems. That's why so many other types of systems exist.

That's not Ivory Tower design. Your deliberate attempt to change the definition to suit you is absurd.

That's where the name came from. It's the appearance of players being segregated between those in the know, and those who realize that they are *not* in the know.

The name came from Monte Cook, who defined it in the essay already linked in this thread.

That is a *huge* turn off for a lot of folks, who are quick to peace out. They are playing to have fun, not to do homework.

Even something like discovering that all FP classes have at least one Focused item that is designed specifically to appeal to them with a 0A FP regain ability is a big turnoff to a lot of players.

That's crunch, again. Totally fine that it's not for some folks. There's games even crunchier than this one and I have nothing to do with them for that reason. It's just too much.

It's still not the same thing.

Pf2 has Ivory in its bones, but that doesn't mean the system has to let it kneecap the play experience. Things like AoN and Pathbuilder do an amazing job of helping where they can. But only Paizo can do something like the "pending errata" page and help mitigate it that much more.

What does errata have to do with this? The lack of errata is a support problem, not an Ivory Tower design problem.

Even the trait system itself is an Anti-Ivory measure, btw.

Yeah, because PF2 deliberately moved away from the Ivory Tower design of PF1. That's the point everyone else is making.

I can totally believe that older D&D may have been worse, but is it just completely disconnected from reality to claim Ivory Tower design doesn't exist in pf2. It is rampant, and grows a little more with each book.

You're grossly underestimating how much worse it was. PF2 has this because in any game with this level of complexity and buildcraft, power combos will exist and some stuff will be better than other stuff. Especially with Paizo's general lack of post-release support.

But you can play a sub-optimal alchemist and it'll work fine. I know someone who plays a Fighter in PFS that uses a regular old staff as a 2h weapon. This is hilariously not optimized. The character still works fine. My son's bomber alchemist doesn't use any of the tricks you mentioned and isn't at all optimal. Plus it was built by an 11 year old. It works fine and he's having a great time playing it.

It's so much better in PF2 that entire concepts from older editions don't exist anymore. PF2 class tier lists are about "which class is best."

The 3.5 tier list was literally "you can't put classes more than 2 tiers apart in the same party because the game will flat out not work." Tier 1 classes in 3.5 were so powerful that they warp the game, being the best at everything and having the ability to solve every problem. They're better at other clases than the thing that class is supposed to be the best at, while also doing their own thing. Like it was easy to make a Cleric that was a better fighter than Fighter, while also still being a Cleric (one of the strongest classes in the game). Some classes didn't work properly at their stated thing at all.

3.5 has feats literally put into the game specifically as traps for people that didn't know better to be punished for taking. There's "I Win" buttons littered throughout the spell list if you know what splatbook to find them in.

PF1 inherits a lot of that, though they tried to sand the worst parts down.

The key difference is that in 3.x/PF1, it's deliberate. It's Ivory Tower Design because the design is specifically trying to do that. The bad stuff is there as a trap, and the good stuff is there to be game breaking as a reward for figuring out how to break the game (and you flat out could break the game). You can make a bad character very easily despite making what appear to be entirely reasonable choices, and a bad character is so bad that you'll watch other people solo the game while you do nothing on a routine basis.

PF2 actively tries to steer people toward having a character that can participate in all aspects of play in any party and carry its own weight. It doesn't always succeed at that, but the design is specifically trying to do it. The power combos can almost never break the game without "creative" interpretation or things that are clearly unintended/errors. You have to make really hard mistakes to make a truly bad character in PF2, and the definition of "bad character" has changed significantly as a result of that. It's almost impossible to make a character in PF2 that's as bad as a bad character in 3.5, where it was easy for a newbie to do it because a bunch of classes were in that position.

So no, PF2 isn't Ivory Tower Design.

Pathfinder offers many ways to deal with Swallow Whole, but the ability is sufficiently rare than no-one routinely prepares for it. Swapping abilities after recognizing a creature with Swallow Whole would be a strong tool for surviving Swallow Whole. A monk could say, "I had trained in Dragon Stance for bludgeoning dragon tail attacks, but given that a swallowing creature is ahead, I am swapping Dragon Stance for Tiger Stance."

I played in a 3.5 game many years ago where we were spies on a convert operation in hostile territory, with a list of targets. That meant that we usually had foreknowledge of who we needed to attack and could go learn about them before doing it.

We had spellcasters, two Artificers, and my lockdown Crusader. So most folks could pretty easily adapt their toolkit to what we were fighting as we could plan ahead.

The net result of that was really long planning sessions and combat being over before it started because we won it during planning. We'd show up having already hard-countered what the enemy could do, then I'd get them in lockdown (because Lockdown Crusader), and that was it. By high level we had lists of buffs and things to do written all the way down a 2x3' whiteboard (that was also our combat map) and we'd spend more time planning and preparing for encounters than actually doing them. This required poring over books and material looking for the specific things we needed each time.

The GM had to massively overscale anything to actually challenge us or outright change it so it could do things we had no way to know about... which became a huge problem when he ambushed us and dramatically over-estimated what we could do without advance planning. That led to an equally lopsided encounter in the other direction and then a Deus Ex Machina to get out of the situation because there was no real way we could possibly survive.

This was also extremely not fun for the players who didn't have the system mastery or interest in doing all this planning and wanted to, you know, play D&D. We spent more time planning encounters than doing meaningful actions in them. Our ability to do that raised our power level so much that it warped the whole game.

That's absolutely what would happen in PF2 if everyone could swap abilities out at will in preparation for any given encounter. It's also what happens in video games where you plan for raids and have specs and such: people respec for a given raid to get the optimal output on it, which means that becomes the expectation and new difficulty floor in future raids.

If the players can plan to counter everything a GM can do in advance, the GM has to step it up if they want an encounter to feel challenging. This is bad for the game, especially for players with less system mastery who won't know "oh I see X, so I need to go grab Y ability" who will fall farther behind in power. It's pushing the game back toward Ivory Tower Design as Monte Cook defined it because it's making system mastery more powerful.

It's also punishing classes that have versatility as part of their power budget, like Alchemist's ability to pull out whatever they might need on demand if anyone can simply rebuild their character on the fly to always have what they need. It also rewards hyper specialists over more versatile builds in general, because versatility right now is power as you'll have a good tool more often. If that doesn't matter, why not hyper-focus?

Plus, it's actually fun to not have optimal tools and have to figure out how to use what you have. That's where the memorable stories come from: the cases where players took a difficult situation and managed to find a creative way out of it.

tl;dr: This is a bad idea.

Trip.H wrote:

This would mean that Paizo quickly became aware of the error after/during publishing, but has chosen to not admit to the error, and has made no public effort to correct it.

This is unacceptable, telling us that Paizo is not willing to spend the effort/capital to fix an error that is harming their own product.

Or, just maybe, Paizo is aware of the error, and some developers would like to fix this error in errata, but that errata hasn't released yet, as the G&G remaster released only shortly before the release of this year's spring errata. I don't think this is really "unacceptable"; the sky isn't falling and the whole game isn't on fire from this one otherwise obvious oversight. It is a mistake that ought to be corrected, for sure, but the fact that it hasn't been fixed on the spot yet isn't some damning indictment of Paizo's competence as an entire company or its developers' willingness to design good game content.

Sure, maybe. But Paizo's error correction in PF2 has been so bad for a while that they completely lost the benefit of the doubt.

- It took literally years to fix Arcane Cascade. It was fortunate that it was just so flagrantly, obviously wrong that everyone collectively house ruled it and moved on.
- It took 5 months to fix Remaster Oracle's spell slots, where the class details directly contradicted themselves on what is the most basic function of a spellcaster. We're at 14 months and counting to get the same fix for repertoire size. (And in this case we have folks like the Pathbuilder dev flat out going "we don't know what's correct here so we're picking one and here's how you can do the other in the app".)
- We're going on a year for some of the more glaring issues and points of confusion in Mythic, though I'm not sure they're ever going to actually fix that stuff given how mythic was received.
- There's a long list of outstanding points of confusion where people just don't understand how something is supposed to work, and how the way most folks are doing it is different than what the book seems to say. IWR and instances of damage is a glaring example where it's never been clear. This is something Paizo did better in PF1 with the FAQ. (In PF2, we've kind of got "do what Foundry does" instead.)

There's tons of examples of this going all the way back to the release of the game, but I really feel it got a lot worse with the remaster's compressed schedule. PC2 had a lot of really glaring errors for a core book, and we can at least assume stuff in a core book might get fixed. When this happens in an AP or a Lost Omens Book? Good luck.

So yeah, they might fix Firework Technician at some point. But if people don't give them the benefit of the doubt at this point, I totally understand that. They haven't exactly been doing anything to demonstrate why they should have it when it comes to post-release support for their products, as that has been awful for quite a while.

And yes it has been 53 days since the first complaint on the changes on this thread and the most we have heard from them is Mr. Jacob's reassurance that they are discussing our feedback. While I appreciate Mr. Jacob's speaking to us, the longer the silence the less contented I am about it.

Have they been in talks for 50 days? Have they made a decision? Are they going to tell us if they did? Or can we expect 7-09 to land without any more acknowledgement.

It was probably always to late, 7-09 and later scenarios were probably to far along to do a major rewrite for normal level bands from the day the announcement was made. Paizo made their decision, and there wasn't anything more to say, because they waited to late for feedback to matter.

They did a new blog post organized play update and none of this was mentioned at all.

At this point, lack of a response is the response.

My Oracle feels pretty complex. I've got piles of spells to work from, focus spells, cursebound abilities, archetype stuff, ancestry stuff, skill stuff... I have three reactions plus any that I prepare as spells, too. Oh, and I have items that do all kinds of things, some of which even I don't remember (including another reaction!). There's a LOT going on.

I wanted that, so it's fine, but if I were to miss a game night I doubt anyone at the table could play my character effectively (except the GM, who is very experienced) because there's so much going on.

But a fair bit of complexity is opt-in. One of my Abomination Vault players isn't engaged with PF2 mechanically but really likes playing with his friends in my game (and he's really fun to have around). I helped him build a Human Fighter. Very little complexity here: he walks up to things, crits with Vicious Swing, and has a great time. While he does have other stuff he can do, he doesn't really need to in order to feel effective.

That doesn't even change much later, and it's one of the things I really like about PF2 Fighter. It can do a lot. It doesn't have to, and for someone that wants a mechanically simple character, it can carry them a long way even with a basic understanding of the game. My son played one in Extinction Curse and he was like 7 when we started. He primarily remembered he could do 3 things: Kobold lightning breath, Swing big 2h sword, and Intimidate. He did those 3 things basically all the way to level 20. He smashed stuff and had a great time doing it. Meanwhile someone else in the same party was a Shield of Reckoning Paladin who depending on the situation would use a rapier/longsword/empty hand to grab, had to judge positioning correctly to protect a 5 person party (the rest was a Medicine Ranged Investigator and two Bards), and in general was using a much larger array of tools than the Fighter was.

Hell, I know someone who plays a fighter in PFS that uses a regular old staff as a 2h weapon. Why? Flavor. While it's clearly not as good as the optimal options, they carry their weight with it. That the game lets them do that and have it not massively drag them down is great.

I think the issue with casters is that casters just have less leeway to do that because for a lot of game, they're already harder and more complex. They need to juggle having the ability to target multiple defenses because otherwise they hit enemies that are extremely hard to do anything to, and the fallback option in Spell Attack options are just mathematically awful. So you need to be able to target every save all the time, and you need to have some way to know what save to target in the party otherwise you're guessing and wasting actions/spells. You need to ration spells for much of the game. Some classes you need to pick ahead of time what spells you'll have and if you pick wrong you've just lost those resources.

And since what really matters in player psychology is feeling effective, that really makes life harder on casters. A Fighter played suboptimally is still a Fighter and is going to be pretty decent. A caster played suboptimally can quickly find themselves accomplishing nothing over an entire fight, and that just feels bad.

Far as mythic goes... yeah, mistakes were made there. I think the inverse scaling on mythic proficiency was a huge mistake because it warps the game massively at low level and at high level is a comparatively very minor bump (unless you're bad at the thing you're using it for, perversely). They also seemed to be trying to go for balance by keeping things reined in, but that's kind of antithetical to the idea of "mythic play" where the whole appeal was just how over-the-top-anime-like the player could feel.

I GM'd a PF1 mythic game and while it had its flaws, it succeeded at the goal of "the players feel like absolute big-deal badasses beyond ordinary heroes." PF2 doesn't succeed at that... but the mythic stuff we got is also so imbalanced with itself that the attempt to keep it balanced and reined in didn't deliver that.

Depends entirely on your table's play length. While those Adventure Paths came out 6 months apart, not every table's game had 6 months of in-world time passing. Some would have had years. Of course, some would have had weeks. Very variable, but depending on your table's past, potentially doable.

6 months? I thought Return of the Runelords was several years after Shattered Star?

We always run them based on release date of the AP, and I plan to use my Crimson Throne character as the Sihedron Hero in Return (GM said I could since Korvosa is in the area and it's my favorite PC in 30 years in this hobby), so we'd be looking at like 9 years having passed by how we reckon it.

Long enough for a human to have children, but I'm not sure I want to have an 8 year old as one of the PCs. Their mom is a level 18 Bard and would never allow it! ;)

Come to think of it, I guess I just took that for granted without stopping to think that maybe we just made that timeline up ourselves. Oops!

More so in 2E since the game doesn't have minimum ages or adjustments to stats due to age (in either direction). We generally try to avoid doing stories where kids are put in danger, but there's plenty of evidence that young kids going on dangerous fantasy adventures are a viable option for stories if your group is okay with the kids in danger trope.

It's a good idea to not have that baked in the AP. After I had kids in real life, I absolutely do not like it in my fantasy because if I fail to save them I'm going to feel awful (and if there is no possibility of failure then it diminishes the stakes).

I just had a thought....what is we did kill Vancian casting in a way. What if we just remade the wizard to be a bit like the Arcanist of PF1.

What if wizards prepared a number of spells known per day, rather than individual spell slot. The wizard memorizes X many spell per rank per day, and can cast any of those spells out of their slots.

I think the whole "I forgot my spells" thing as soon as they were cast was something that most people didn't actually like.

Everyone wants that, though. It's one of the things 5e does that actually works better than PF2. If I were doing a PF3, Vancian casting as we know it in PF1/2 wouldn't exist.

And while this would help Wizard play better, it's doing so by reducing the burden of preparation rather than by giving some advantage to preparation.

I'd quite like spell substitution as a default class feature instead of arcane bond on the Wizard, but I think the fundamental difference here is that the Wizard is otherwise the polar opposite of the Fighter: whereas the Fighter is an extremely focused class that pays a significant cost in versatility for their above-average Strike accuracy, the Wizard is meant to be an extremely versatile class with lots of different tricks up their sleeve. If the Wizard gave up a lot of their existing power, I could see that justifying better spell accuracy, but I also don't think that's necessarily how everyone would want to play the Wizard either. More broadly, the question of "What if the Wizard were X" tends to never draw much agreement, because there are so many different expectations going around of what the Wizard is supposed to be that orienting them in one specific direction is likely to always upset more people than it would please.

This is the real problem. If you ask 10 people "what should Wizard look like", you're getting 10 answers. It's a class with a ton of history and different ideas on what it looks like, which means it doesn't have a singular strong identity.

The remaster cost us one of the big identities it did have: the spell school specialist. That was a Wizard thing for a long time and it doesn't really exist anymore since the schools in question no longer exist (being a specialist in the "School of Ars Grammatica" is not really the same thing as being an Illusionist was).

PF2 itself cost us another one, which was the idea that Wizard is a master of magic, having the biggest spell list in the game, faster access to it than Sorcerer, and abilities like Spell Substitution (which you can get, but have to pick now). If your goal in PF1 was to have access to the most and strongest magic available, Wizard was a natural fit. Other casters gave you other stuff with tradeoffs, but no one was really matching the raw magical access Wizard was bringing to the table.

In PF2, a lot of that doesn't exist anymore and a bunch more of it doesn't matter because of the other changes to how spells work. I honestly couldn't tell you what PF2 Wizard's identity is, except that it exists because it's an iconic class in the history of the game. But in this edition the class has really lost its way.

* An anime that made the guy with bubblegum powers one of the main villains because he used it in all kinds of deadly ways.

Anime does that all the time. The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic comes to mind as a good example. Hell, we have an anime about a super powerful dungeon explorer vending machine.

There's lots of anime stories you can tell really well in PF2 (Solo Levelling as an example), but there's also these other ones where you really can't (at least not without massive homebrew and some handwaving).

ALTA is an example of something where the story its telling is just a bad match for PF2 as a system. Which is fine, since PF2 is good at the stories it wants to tell.

Agonarchy wrote:

The fire kineticist is a better example of what can be done, but misses things like fire-powered punches, melting terrain and objects, stoking the internal fires for an exhausting burst of energy, etc. which could allow a more varied set of options.

But that isn't the problem of a fire-themed focused caster, the problem is that in PF2e classes don't receive any support whatsoever after release.

If wizards (or casters in general) worked similarly to how the kineticist works in that they could choose one or a few "themes" to build around, even if certain options didn't exist right away they would probably exist at some point, assuming Paizo would print new ones every other book like it happens for spells currently.

That's one of the problems, yes. But in general Pathfinder is a very specific/proscriptive game. Spells do X, and if you want to something thematically related to X that isn't X, you probably need another spell. It's very inflexible in terms of the example above of all the different types of Fire Benders and how varied their abilities are despite it all being the same kind of magic.

The closest thing to that in PF2 is Kineticist with things like Base Kinesis, which is less proscriptive in what it does and opens up some variance.

If you were to make all the Fire Benders listed above in Pathfinder, you'd need a huge list of extra feats to enable it all and create the variance. That won't happen because as you pointed out: classes don't tend to get support post release. Splatbook classes more so, and Kineticist is the worst offender (Mythic for example doesn't really acknowledge Kineticist exists). But even if it did happen it's a ton of extra stuff, and past a certain point too much stuff becomes bloat.

To do it in a more narrative game, it's super easy, barely an inconvenience. You add a feature/aspect/whatever the system calls it to enable the things that make that character's fire bending different from "baseline", and you're done.

Of course, changing that makes this a totally different game, and there's upsides to things being detailed that you lose in a different style of game. It's also easier to sell lots of books since you can't print lists of extra feats/spells/etc in books if all that stuff is doable in the base rules.

Virellius wrote:

the one where you're the child of a previous runelords adventurer.

The WHAT!?!? Is that an actual adventure, if so, what is it called????

Return of the Runelords, though playing a child of a previous PC is pretty hard unless that child was already born when the previous PC was active.

But that players guide explicitly calls one of your previous characters back into things, and one of the traits gives you a special connection to them. It's a really neat concept.

Unicore wrote:

It just seems like it will be harder to get the numbers to run those except at large conventions.

Maybe in person, but these will fill up fast on Warhorn.

... great? I sure hope "this is fine for online play so it doesn't matter what happens in person" isn't a decision point.

And if anything, highlighting these power gaps emphasizes Paizo's (likely) reasoning for tightening the level bands.

I'd imagine so. And having a 1st and 4th in the same group presented some challenges.

It's still preferable to "I can't run this at all because the band is so narrow there's not enough characters in it."

Course, if Paizo had replied to any of this they could have said as much. But I think at this point it's safe to assume that won't happen.

Tridus wrote:

Disappointed in the lack of response to all the feedback from the August update with the changes to how PFS is going to work.

After this long, it's pretty hard to not take the lack of response as the response, if you know what I mean. :-/

Yeah, that's exactly what it means. Especially after James said it was being discussed. I guess we know the outcome of that discussion.

It's disappointing, but not surprising.

Cutting the lists would be cool.....provided it didn't further damage a caster's ability to target all three saves. That's already a tall order on some lists, but further pruning can really hamper the one recourse casters have when going up against these large enemy save numbers.

Mythic Resilience made this far, far worse too. Going up against high saves is hard, but if you have to, it's at least doable. Going up against Mythic Resilience feels like the creature is just straight up countering you and you have to use another option to not feel like you're throwing a hail mary.

With that existing, being able to effectively target all 3 saves is necessary for a caster to function in any kind of offensive capacity. Otherwise you'll run into fights where your character simply doesn't work.

And yeah, Spore War has a lot of "mental effects need not apply" situations that hit some lists far harder than others. But I still think lists should have an identity and theme, and giving every spell to all 4 lists dilutes that. As Teridax mentioned though, Arcane doesn't have much of an identity right now.

It certainly wouldn't break the game if Wizard had an option like Mysterious Repertoire to be able to grab a spell and go "I treat that as Arcane because I've done extensive theoretical analysis on how to replicate it."

The challenge with tying to school choice is that they have to go add it to all the old schools based on whatever the limiter is (if it's by trait or something). If they just add it as a feat, it's probably a must take feat but that doesn't require any errata.

At this point something that is practical is better than nothing, even if it's not the way you'd do it if you could do the class over again. The reality is that Wizard probably isn't getting another do over.

Then the game doesn't need a proliferance of items. I small bundle of things you can keep is better. Adjust the gold tables accordingly

This, lol. One of the things I like less about PF2 over time is that as they keep adding more content, it's getting bloated with "stuff" the way PF1 was. Accessability for new players goes down over time because instead of a table of weapons that fits on a page in a physical book, AoN's base weapon table is 300 entries long. Alchemy is 776 items long. These lists are HUGE and trying to find stuff requires system mastery that a new player won't have.

I know when my son made a bomber Alchemist for Spore War, I didn't even attempt to have him pick formula that way. I pulled out Player Core 2 and Treasure Vault, and said "look in here for things that look interesting to you." Those are also large lists, but they're substantially smaller (and also easier to read, but that's the upside of a book with layout meant for that vs a website that's meant to be used as a lookup resource, no shade on the AoN folks because its an invaluable tool).

I know the game design is structured around having lots of specific items instead of a narrative game style of "the item is a narrative tool so you write it on an index card and hand it over", but there's a point where more is not better. PF1 definitely crossed over that point in its lifetime. I feel like PF2 is getting there as well.

Well, people were infamously claiming "You can't act" was flavour text in Stunned not too long ago...

Its hard to remember the cases of this because the argument is often used to try to rules lawyer something that shouldn't work by dismissing the part of the rule that says it shouldn't work. A current one I've seen argued lately is witches getting their familiars killed and then trying to argue that this basically doesn't impact them at all.

Why is finding a level 4 demon mask (worth 85gp) at level 3 worse treasure than finding an art object worth 42 gold and 5 silver? If you wear it for 2 or 3 levels and use its activation a couple of times while the DC is worth it, then sell it, you got more value out of the mask than a lump sum of treasure. Maybe somebody in the party values intimidation enough that they hold on to the mask well past level 6 or 7 where the DC falls off into irrelevancy, because it is just a +1 at that point. If casting fear regularly was this awesome thing for the character, they’ve had 4 levels to find another source for that ability and it will have only gotten worse than a multi class casting archetype in the last couple of levels.

The Demon Mask is useful for the item bonus to Intimidate if someone has the skill. That's it. If someone wants to be good at the skill, they'll take the item for the item bonus. In this case it's better than finding art.

The activate ability is irrelevant and without the item bonus, no one would use the item. In this case it's exactly the same as finding art since both are getting sold.

But that's the whole problem: this item is useful and valuable based entirely on the item bonus. The activate ability is functionally worthless in that players would not spend gold on it.

And even if a player WANTED it to be a big theme for their character that they were this frightening mask... well the ability is useless for a while, then they can get an upgrade for a couple levels, and then that's it for the entire rest of the level range.

You can't build a story around these items even if you want to because the game's math is built around item churn. PF2 fixed that with weapons via runes: you can use the same weapon from level 1 all the way to level 20 and be effective with it, making that weapon a major part of your story.

You can't do that with most other items.

I think the general issue is players approaching magic items as character defining game elements and that is very much against the design philosophy of PF2. Those kind of items are a part of a class kit like the exemplar. There are mandatory magic items for keeping up with numbers, but those items enable your class abilities (like weapons, shields, armor, etc). They are not character defining by themselves.

Players get to define what is character defining, at the end of the day. And the way people reject these kinds of items where the ones with item bonuses and the ones with utility activates that don't go obsolete are the ones that get used, shows what players think.

This is a case where the design philosophy of PF2 is simply out of touch with the stories players want to tell. In fantasy stories, characters have iconic gear and things they use for a long time. They're not replacing their entire kit every book.

(As a non system mastery example: my wife got an Astral rune for her Thaumaturge, finding the special effect on it really exciting... and it literally never came up during the level range where it would actually work. Now it's just extra damage. Extra damage is always useful, but she was disappointed that the actually cool part of the item was possibly useful for so short a time and now won't function even if the situation does come up. That's the game design fundamentally smashing player expectations for a thematic and neat upgrade into the dirt of item churn.)

Disappointed in the lack of response to all the feedback from the August update with the changes to how PFS is going to work.

"You can polish a shield so it functions as a perfect mirror that somehow never gets impacted by being used as a shield in combat". And you say other people are inventing things that don't exist?

You're doing some classic rules lawyering to create an interaction that doesn't work and clearly isn't intended to. It absolutely doesn't work. We've already been through this ad nauseum.

It works perfectly well when your shield is the mirror implement.

No it doesn't, especially not now that there is an actual shield implement. Don't confuse them by starting this up again.

Then there are the players that hate consumables and just don't use them ever and only ever want items that they can use a really long time. I get that desire, but if you look across the game, consumable versions always get the better damage and better DCs, so the DCs of permanent use items should be behind what you get for consumables, and probably should be behind what you get from your class abilities. Permanent items are not designed to be character defining items. Some classes have items that enable specific playstyles, but that is not DC items, that is items that allow worse options to be more feasible for what a character does (like doubling rings and bandoleers.

So consumables should (and generally do) have enough levels to be "upgradable" by just using them when you get them and then getting newer, higher level ones when you can. Permanent items should have slightly behind average DCs of class abilities at most levels (like it would be fine to find an item a level early that has a equal or better DC for a level or 2), but have enough upgrade options that a player that really wants to do that thing the item does can do it at around the archetype level of either a full rank behind on damage, or a DC that is usually a couple behind.

Honestly, the biggest problem I see players running into with consumables is that there's just too many of them. Trying to find the ones that are actually relevant to you is hard, and finding ones that are relevant to your situation is even harder. It takes far more system mastery to do this than it does to just get a small number of reusable things and rely on them. Even more so when consumables get out-levelled and you have to find a replacement because there isn't a suitable version anymore.

Alchemy is one of the better implemented versions of this. There's a lot of alchemy and it does a ton of things, but there's some pretty standard items that have versions frequently enough that players get to know them. Need a way to have damage types you don't usually do in case of things like regeneration? There's probably a bomb for it, and there's enough versions of the same bomb that you can usually get one reasonably levelled. (Plus for the goal of "doing damage to break regeneration/hit a weakness", older bombs don't really stop working. All you have to do is not critically miss to get the splash damage, after all.)

Healing? Check. Protection against some afflictions? Check. Buffs? Check.

The alchemy list is huge and bloated, but it's got some core stuff that works well and that's what most players tend to use. Even if there is an alchemical item for some less common situation, a huge swath of the playerbase will have no idea it exists because they can't find it amid the 776 Alchemical items on Nethys.

Talismans are on the bad end of this, too: there's too many of them, they're too niche, and too many just aren't relevant often enough for players to really get used to using them. Even the ones that are good are an uphill battle with people because they need to carry a stack of them, reapply them, and such. The only time I ever see them used is when someone makes it a build defining thing, in which case they can use the same one repeatedly and will carry a LOT of them. It becomes treated like ammunition.

But in any other case? I've tried many times, but the niche ones get forgotten about before they're useful, and that's happen so many times that people at this point often don't bother unless its something that is obviously useful (like an Alloy Orb).

Hell, I've been GMing and playing this system since the playtest and if you asked me off the top of my head, I doubt I could name 10 out of the 176 talisman in the game. I could maybe tell you what 5 do, because those are the 5 that actually get used now and then. That's not even a judgement of power level: there's some really good talisman in the list. The list is just too bloated with too many niche items and it makes hard to use for players who don't want to invest a ton of effort into consumables, so they don't bother. And a lot of those don't even really have DC issues, they're just too niche in general.

Items that have static DCs are like bombs, except worse. There isn't nearly enough versions of them to keep them relevant, so rather than being something people rely on, people just don't bother. Like, if you removed the activate DC 20 Fear from the Demon Mask, would anyone care? Would it make someone who would have bought it not buy it? Probably not, right? Let's be honest: the Intimidation item bonus is why people are buying this.

Now remove the item bonus instead? Does anyone still want this item? It's basically obsolete three levels after you get it (generously), and you're waiting 3 levels after that for an upgrade, which will again be obsolete in 3 levels. No one is building their character planning to rely on this, and once your character is built to do certain things, you're probably not going to significantly alter your routine to stick an item activate Fear in there for 3 levels, only to go back to what you were doing before. Why bother?

Having more "all numbers are on the exact same treadmill" doesn't sound interesting to me and that is pretty much what would happen if item DCs were set by players DCs, whether that be class, or save or whatever.

I think there are some parallel issues that make it feel like the issue is static DCs, but it is perfectly fine if the DCs are a little powerful for when you first get them and underpowered by the time you can get the upgrade, as long as there is an upgrade and there are enough intermediary steps for it to be worthwhile.

Scaling DCs are a way to fix it, because it's less complicated than "add more upgrade levels of every item players might want" into an already bloated item list. It's not really an ideal solution, but the status quo mostly results in a gigantic list of items that don't really get used because they're useless for most of a typical campaign and there's no suitable replacements.

Spellhearts are kind of a perfect example of the problem: the extra spells in the expensive versions are very rarely worth the cost becuse most of them go obsolete so quickly. The real value in a Jolt Coil is Electric Arc, and you get that in the base version.

glass wrote:

If making the DC non-terrible means that players stick with older items, then that just shows that they were not excited by the new items' effects. So it is a good thing that they were not forced to change to them! EDIT: IOW, they will be selling them either way, even if only to buy upgraded versions of the items they already have.

1) But then how does the GM continue to provide treasure that interests the players? Shiny New Loot™ is fun. If players constantly get new loot only to find that they prefer their existing items, you begin to pavlov yourself into Shiny New Loot™ not being fun, because you expect the new loot isn't going to be worth swapping to.

How does the GM provide treasure that interests the players when the players see a fancy item, see a static DC, and go "we won't use that while its relevant, sell it"?

Because that's what happens now with the system training players that static DC items just don't stay useful very long. At this point half my players don't even remember their items have activate abilities with DCs at all because they're irrelevant so quickly. They're stat boosters at this point.

The ones that people like more are the ones that don't have DCs (because the effect doesn't need one) or otherwise keep up in some way.

A lot of the items in question only have 2 or 3 versions for the entire game, and that's not nearly enough for static DCs to work.

I only just became aware of it today but Breath of Life was changed in the remaster from this:

You can't use breath of life if the triggering effect was disintegrate or a death effect.

To this:

You can't use breath of life if the triggering effect was a death effect or an effect that leaves no remains, such as disintegrate.

That doesn't really change Breath of Life at all, but it has a severe side effect on Resurrection and Reincarnation. If Disintegrate's ash no longer counts as remains, a PC killed by Disintegrate can't be brought back until rank 9 Resurrection.

I have a hard time believing "a common attack spell should force a PC to make a new character" is intentional, but that's exactly what happens for several levels between when when creatures can have Disintegrate and when it's actually feasible for PCs to get rank 9 Resurrection.

Yeah I'm not sure how you're using the mirror and a weapon when one hand is full of shield, unless you're using a buckler and that really isn't worth the actions. The only time a shield is worth using on Thaumaturge is if its the Shield implement in Battlecry.

You need to give yourself something else to do. My weapon/tome Thaumaturge was really good at Athletics, and I'd go around tripping things (standing up provokes, and the ranged Rogue really loved the prone enemies). Could do it at reach with a Whip, and that had a Shifting rune on it so if I needed some other weapon type I could easily have it.

That's not the only option, but it sounds like all you're doing is raising shield and striking. Use some skill boosts or an archetype to diversify your options somewhat.

You can do exactly the same thing with power word stun and there's no way to cope your way out of it without fixing the underlying problem: Being stunned during your turn obliterating your turn. Power word stun even works on bosses, unlike stunning blows, and does so *automatically*.

This is an old thread, but yeah, the core problem is Stunned.

The sensible way to run it is "if it happens on your turn, pay the actions immediately and carry on." That's not RAW, but it works far better than "stunned 1 on your turn can cost you up to 4 actions and an entire round of reactions", which really doesn't feel like what's intended.

Edit: or of course, just use a pregen” will still be an option and making more levels of pregens is a relatively easy thing to do.

Not really, because folks would rather play their own character than a pregen. It's better than nothing, but it's far from ideal.

But if that's what we're going to be stuck with, I hope they make good pregens. Every time someone plays Harsk, the inevitable question gets asked "why does a Flurry Ranger use a Crossbow with a reload time?" It makes no damn sense. He doesn't even have Running Reload. It just feels bad in play that they give you a ranged weapon that actively does not work with your Hunter's Edge.

I generally wind up having to explain to new players after they first learn how crossbows work "ignore that the crossbow exists and go into melee" so it at least feels like Hunt Prey is doing something. This has happened at least four separate times, as new players seem to want to do ranged combat when they start relatively far away from an enemy (not an unreasonable thing to do, to be fair, if you're not familiar with PF2 Flurry Rangers and Crossbows).

(And it'd be cool if they fixed Korakai too since he's just straight up incorrectly built.)

Right now it's not an option since pregens stop at 5 and so in these new bands, we just don't have enough characters to run anything at level 7+ since the group that can do that is spread out between level 7 and level 9.

EDIT: I am not an expert on alchemists. After reading Tridus's comment below, I checked the rules on mutagens and found, "Source Player Core 2 pg. 289 1.1

Mutagens are a special type of elixir that temporarily transmogrify the subject's body and mind. Typically, only alchemists have the expertise to craft mutagens."
Looks like Alchemist Multiclass Archetype is necessary for Silvertongue Mutagen.

SECOND EDIT: Further research revealed that alchemists have feats to get more out of mutagens, but non-alchemists with Alchemical Crafting can still make mutagens. Anyone know for sure?

I hate using the words "flavour text"... but that's the only sentence anywhere in the rules that suggests there is a limit on crafting them, and I have no idea what "typically" means or what an atypical situation would look like.

I guess it is fair to say that "typically Alchemists are the ones with Alchemical Crafting"? But I can't find anything to actually stop a Wizard who takes the Alchemical Crafting skill feat from crafting mutagens if they want to.

I treat them like any other alchemical item: you need alchemical crafting to create them and usual rarity rules apply. That means if you have alchemical crafting, you get the formula, and you're the appropriate level, you're good to go. That's Alchemists (or Alchemist archetype) a majority of the time, but if someone else does it I don't see why that sentence would actually stop them.

Would I need to take any other Alchemist feats beyond the dedication feat to be able to eventaully get access to crafting the Major mutagens?

Technically no, but the Dedication only gives you Quick Alchemy so they'd only last a max of 10 minutes.

Taking the feat to gain Advanced Alchemy lets you create ones with full duration.

But Alchemist archetype no longer has a reduced recipe level limit.