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Frightened 2 and Fleeing makes them skip their turn. You could get a +20 to Intimidate as a fighter/paladin/Ranger With 20 Strength 18 charisma at level 10 with Intimidating Prowess. If you compare that to a lot of monsters that is a very favorable chance of critical success. My rogue in Mirrored moon had a similar setup to the one described and scared the Rocs in that chapter several times thereby negating their turns.

Colette's Playtests have read like the party is really in dire of need anything to shift the balance in their favor so I imagine every action counts.

You can start the game with Splint Mail,Longsword,Heavy Wooden Shield and 5sp left over for food,pouches,torches.

Further more basically any class that starts with better than Light armor can have maxed out AC for their level from level 1. This might require making sacrifices somewhere whether that be in equipment,race, or tertiary stats. Equipment might be the harshest of the penalties for a melee combatant since splint mail locks you out of having 3 weapons off the common table, any non-free ranged weapon, and a handful of the uncommon weapons.

The ow we can throw the other barbarian's sillyness into the mix: the acute vision giving access to scent, and the shoggoth-animal barbarian randomly growing new appendices every 30 seconds. Is there something else i miss? Maybe some way to combine Animal skin with bracers of armor to get the best possible AC, but only at high level so you have to change your build once more?

Best. Class. Ever /QUOTE]

Said nothing about changing your build. The simple fact is that optimization must be looked at in the context of what level the character is. This is due to the way stats work with odd stat points being wasted potential. This holds true across all classes.

Con is always a trap over raising Ac. The advantage a character that starts with 16 con vs one that starts 14 is a that they will hit +5 con at level 15 rather than 20. The low levels of health offered before that don't outweigh the benefit of higher Dex.
At level 6 you could build for being level 6 rather than starting at level 1. This build is possible as a dwarf or a Human.
Str 18
Dex 16
Con 18
Wis 14 (+2 as dwarf)
Ancestry dex con, background str con, str class, pick the 4 above at level 1 and 5. Also available to either barbarian or fighter so the difference between them is 2hp/level( 16 vs 14) which is 15% more hp and the difference in armor is 5% so they take 20% more damage over a full attack when accounting for crit.

If you want to make fights harder you should a) use grouped intiative b) intensely focus fire c) use their skills

Relating to skills ghasts have a +9 to athletics which hits fort DC. At level 5 the pcs have at least 5 in fort but a max of 10. So a ghast has a decent chance of grabbing even your healthiest party member which will flatfoot them, cause them to be unable to move, and give them A 25% chance to lose any action that isnt escape.

Most of yall are jumping the gun. If you had actually read the provided reports you'd realize the way collete's games go is thus. Monsters go, they focus fire a dude either dead or nearly there, dead dude uses a hero point or is healed to get back in the fight, his slowed self gets his teeth kicked in a second time, if he was healed they then start beating on the healer, whack-a-mole commences until the healer goes down, the fight then rapidly spirals out of the players control, TPK.

"Forcing TPK" if you are stabbing downed players under the old rules you are actually handing the remaining players an easier victory. This is due to the front loaded nature of monsters damage and the fact they are only advancing the dying track by one which will be negated by heroic recovery or healing. They are effectively skipping their turn and only vary large group of concurrent enemies will be able to stab them to death before they can recover. Letting them recover to slowed 1 or 2 will be better for the enemies as the injured party member is liable to burn through the healers resources and actions so he doesnt get immediately whacked again.
Under the new rules if you get up twice from healing and then one enemy thinks to himself "I wonder if hes still alive? One stab won't hurt" You'll be dead and ill honestly think the monster was in the right. This isn't an Anime its Pathfinder.

Anyways regardless of wether he did or not so people know the score.

Lost Star - They were killed by Drakkus
Pale Mountain - shoved off a mountain by gnolls who were trapped after being let go by the manticore who ran out of spikes(but otherwise could have killed them) which is why these count as two tpks each
Shrieking peak - cheated(I believe) against the minotaurs
Arclord's - punched to death by a golem(berserk)
Sombrefell - Elite Wights and Poltergeist after losing someone to the ghasts.

These all seem like particularly vicious fights with a space horror that is killing his underlings, desperate gnolls, Minotaurs that know you to be honorless, a raging hulk of flesh that "attacks the nearest living creature", and then undead who know for a fact you aren't dead becuase you haven't risen to join their ranks.

Phone posting so please excuse any spelling errors i may have missed.

Not to derail this but lets put the facts out...

ASVAB What the test is, is in the very name of its self, "Vocational Aptitude".

Understand that the ASVAB is not an IQ test. It does not measure your intelligence. This battery of tests was designed specifically to measure your aptitude to be trained to perform specific military-specific jobs

Every test is a defacto IQ Test as IQ effects how much you can learn in a given time span as well as how quickly you can apply it. If it's a timed test it's an IQ test. An Asvab score of 31 roughly corresponds to an IQ of 80-85.The military used to actually give IQ tests and at that time it was illegal to allow someone with less than 85 join. They rescinded this briefly during Vietnam in what's called "McNamara’s Folly". Those soldiers ended up experiencing a 5 times mortality rate of other soldiers.

Being enfeebled over 4 (9 in the case of the paladin in question) was in fact a case of a general rule being over ridden by a specific as greater shadows emfeebled condition stacks with that of ones applied other shadows (greater or otherwise).

That is a lot of enfeeble! At least the paladins hit the cap on the actual conditional penalty after the -4, but still.

Technically, they are not minions since they don't have the minion trait, so they could all be attacking, but then again, the little ones canhave some trouble hitting level 7 characters, even with TAC.

Ah i had missed that it caps at 4 that is a rule that might be good to repeat multiple places.

I had a question when running Affair at Sombrefell regarding the shadows shadow steal. What are the rules for running the newly spawned shadows? Do they act like summoned monsters? Minions? Normal monsters?
During play and needing a quick answer I ruled that they worked like minions since they were "under the control" and would become "fully autonomous" when their orginal owner died. This ruling meant there was no great need for the shadows to bother spawning even more as they didnt have enough actions to really command them.

The fight was still relatively tough for the party of 2 paladins and 2 clerics. One of the paladins hit enfeebled 9, the other enfeebled 7, and a cleric got down to enfeebled 3.

And you are optimizing now by giving the Rogue a Wis of 16. Now your starting character scores are 18,16,12,12,10,10 or 18,16,14,10,10,10 or 18,16,14,12,10,8. Under the character creation mechanics, the first is the only possible outcome if your ancestry is human. The last one is as close to min-maxing as you can get by the rules. Then you are further optimizing by increasing the Rogue's Wis instead of Dex at Level 4.

I would call this a fringe build, but YMMV. And it more or less proves my point: you have to optimize and do something counter-intuitive to make this make sense.

Why would they not be Optimizing for something you stated they wanted to be the best at? Regardless what the math indicated is that a rogue building for it with 0 feat support ties the cleric at level one and outpaces him as soon as additional boosts come into play. That means someone not optimizing for 16 wis but 14 instead can just take trap-finder to tie the cleric for the only thing that is going to matter.

How many days does it take before he has 2 useless sticks and 2 less items than everyone else? There is a big difference between a one shot and a character you're playing from level to level.

You would hope the other party members would help you buy more sticks.

(I am converting +4/+5 into an additional d8 of healing below)

Buying 40 1d8 healing potions costs 120gp vs the 72 of the wand
buying 13 2d8+4 costs 104gp vs 72 of the wand
buying 10 3d8+5 is 200gp vs 72

Minimum efficicany is 3d8+4 or 30d8+40
2d8+4 gets down to 10 for 80 vs 72 the others aren't close

So if you are buying consumable healing I'd skip more than a single potion and invest in a wand instead. Clearly though a Cleric is worth his weight in gold since all you need to do to keep them precious heals flowing is a good night's rest

Until a paladin takes Imposing Destrier at level 10, she can't even do a regular ride-by attack without giving up the ability to raise a shield. Assuming the Ride feat (without it, using a lance is pretty much impossible), she can Command her mount to Stride, then make a single lance attack, then Command the mount to Stride again. Its not exactly game-breaking to give the rider the option to raise a shield if they actually decide to stay put.

Imposing Destrier leads me to believe you are talking about the paladin using an animal companion. If so you are completely wrong as Animal Companions fall under the category of "minion". When you command a minion they get two actions. Therefore a paladin could certain Command their horse, have their horse move, make a lance strike, move their horse again, and finally have a third action to do whatever with. Though probably not raise a shield as they still need both hands on the Lance

Considering that a lance is such a specialized weapon already, in the likely event that a cavalry-type character picks up a magical weapon, they will always be better of using a +! longsword, or even a +1 dagger, or a mundane lance because the Charge ability offers absolutely nothing to recommend a lance over literally any other weapon on horseback. Even a mundane glaive is better, as Forceful is probably going to be more generally useful than Charge.

You are going to want to re-read Charge again. It gives the lance +1 damage PER DIE. This means that after moving 10 feet the lance is on average similar to a d10 weapon. The horse work together Gallop gives any weapon charge and doubles the damage from charge if a weapon already has the ability. So in certain situations the lance average damage is comparable to a d12 with it's maximum damage comparable to that of a d10 weapon while also being more likely

I should note it's not 6/6 TPKS for that one gm. It's actually 8/8 TPKs 2 each in Lost Star,Pale Mountain,Shrieking Peak, and Arclord's Envy. If I remember right the fights in question are Drakus,Manticore/Gnoll Chief, the 2nd Fight, and the fight in the shop.

In Pathfinder 1st a +1 equates to 5% chance to hit which is 5% more average weapon damage. In 2e this holds true as well except when you cross the 10-to-hit threshold at which a +1 becomes 10% more average weapon damage because the only number you are really adding is an additional crit value. There is a reddit post where someone calculated the average AC of monsters and it more or less worked out 1-6 Trained hit on 10, 7-12 Trained hit on ~11, and 13-20 Trained hit on 12.

With that in mind a fighter can expect to a hefty percentage more than a trained individual (barbarian below level 13)

For a Full 3 Strike round
at level 1
.10+.05+.05 for +.2 Average weapon damage

at level 3-6
.2+.1+.1 for +.4 Average weapon damage

7-12
.15+.1+.1 for +.35 Average weapon Damage over trained

13-20
Same verus Barbarian as the last as both stepped up by +1 and Ac of monsters by +1

vs trained though
.2+.15+.15 for +.5 average weapon damage

Also, enemies explicitly don't run off the same system as players now, as seen with +6 to attack of the lv0 Goblin Warrior. (+5 is the best I can manage even for a 1st level PC Fighter)

You should be able to get a +6 with a fighter due to them starting at expert Weapon training.

I'll tell you I would like the numbers at least on monster Ac adjusted some. Looking at the supplied chart of average monsters it seems that for the first 6 levels the game is balanced around a Trained combatant being able to hit an enemy on a 10 ie 55% hit chance. Then at levels 7-11 the averages are all over the place(9,11,12,9,12) but the average over those 5 levels is 10.6. Then at level 12 it's a firm 11(50/50) followed by 12(45%)at level 13 that tracks till the end of the game.

It seems to me that the ramp up to level 13 is to deal with the fact that Martials almost universally get their final proficiency upgrade there but that just seems real lame to me. It's just running as fast as you can to stay in the same place. I'm fine with the game tracking with me to a certain extent but it doesn't feel grand to get an ability that is functionally useless. Especially if you are a Rogue or Barbarian.

So my suggestion is mostly to keep the Bestiary entries balanced around the idea that trained get to hit on a certain number(10 or 9 would be my preference) and have it more or less consistent throughout. Do not ramp up when Martials get nice things like +1 to hit just let them have it. Obviously individual monsters would be harder or easier to hit as appropriate.

John Lynch 106 wrote:

That said, an alchemist and bard should be enough to keep the party alive.

We took SO much damage in the first 2 encounters that we ran out of resonance, used every life potion and ran out of spells and my familiar had to end the second fight because we were all KO'd... We then crawled back to rest up... Then the quasits alone did the same, nearly killing us all. the boss though, he killed us all but good. So about 1 trip back to town to rest up per 1.5 encounters... well before dying.

You know I've read that journal and also played through the whole first playtest adventure and your GM seemingly forgot several things to your detriment.

So even though yall couldn't see the sensed goblins and were flatfooted y'all should have been +1ac with a 25% miss chance to the majority of the goblins.

The way it went for my party the rogue scouted ahead(darkvision) and then went back to tell the other what was in the room. Went back into the room with instructions that he'd shout as he opened fire. First attack was a crit against the goblin and then everyone proceed to come into the room and take cover behind pillars getting a total of +5 to Ac. So the goblins had to come to us and we shanked them to death

To help with the math, provided your secondary attacks can crit miss on something higher than a 1 but lower than 11 then it will always add .45(minimum damage)to the base DPA(damage-per-action) which is a pretty big boost still.
So at 10th level it should add 3.6, with forceful 4.95 on the first iterative and then 6.3 on any additional. At level 20 it should add 5.85,8.55 if forceful 1st iterative, and 11.25

Certain strike gets worse if you have a high chance to hit on your iterative or a high chance to crit miss

Go back to page 89 of the playtest and read the side bar on Press attacks.

Press attacks
1) Can only be used on attacks with a MAP of -4 or greater (usable after two attack with agile grace or one normal agile attack)
2) Do not generate their failure effect on a CritFail

So this means that your certain strike data is going to be off.

Taking the fighter from the 10th level example

hits the average 27ac enemey on an 8 and would critfail on a theoretical -2

That means his secondary is going to critmiss on a 3 or lower ie a 10% less chance of doing the minimum 8 damage than you had calculated

The third attack will then critmiss on a 8 or lower for a 40% less chance of doing the minimum 8 damage.

These hold pretty steady for the optimized fighter with a non agile weapon and the ones for an agile weapon are similar 5% closer to the value of them always working.

For an agile weapon with agile grace you'll have to completely redo it i'm afraid as you will only be able to press when the MAP is -6