Unicore's page

A number of threads about the Animist have claimed that it is good at blasting. I don't see it for more than 1 encounter a day, which kind of feels like the animists thing to me, you have a ton of flexibility that isn't going to last very long or hold up to difficult encounters, but its flexibility works well for filling a role that will particularly shine in a specific situation.

This got me thinking that a number of old ideas about blasting might be ready to revisit and rethink as some basic elements of casting and limits of spells have changed.

People say Divine spell list is now good for blasting...I can't rate it in the top half of traditions for blasting, but it might have gotten better than occultism, and it is good for specific kinds of campaigns with lots of Undead and/or outsiders that are opposed to your sanctification.

Spell attack roll spells are much harder to have in your back pocket for boss fights.

Arcane sorcerers exist. Are they over powered as blasters, has anyone seen it?

I have some math to do to demonstrate some basic principles of blasting, and a lot spiel to write about how the most important thing to figure out is what kind of campaign you'll be playing in and how length of encounters, encounter difficulty, and likelihood of collapsing encounters changes everything about what kind of damage spells are going to be most effective in your play experience, but I don't have time for those tonight. I am curious what questions, concerns or ideas people have about blasting in this remastered and beyond cycle of PF2 design and balance?

I am a GM and have a level 2 adventure where the party is about to enter a dungeon. This is a relatively small dungeon with about 10 rooms, but it is set in a dilapidated 2 story urban building where half the rooms are above the first floor of rooms with a lot of open holes and even missing floors between the rooms. It is a very 3 dimensional dungeon with extensive opportunity for encounters to collapse onto each other. To help offset the lethality of that scenario, the dungeon only has about 6 creature/combat encounters, 2 of which feature enemies unlikely to move, and the 2 most difficult encounters feature creatures that hate each other and can possibly be manipulated into fighting each other if the party is able navigate the dungeon in a certain way without being overly hostile to some of the inhabitants. The environment itself is complicated and full of very low threat hazards/inconveniences likely to present some challenges to the party as well.

Basically, it is a set piece dungeon with 2 factions.

Faction 1 has occupied the building and made it their base. The boss had visions of creating a great criminal empire in the city, but acquired a treasure that makes them appear very strong, but also has occupied their focus so heavily that their ambition is almost entirely gone outside of retaining their treasure. The faction is small and doesn’t have much reason for loyalty, except most of them have no where else to go in the city, are safe, and have treasures of their own in/about the dungeon that keep them happy enough until something seriously changes about their situation. The faction is strong enough, in a poor enough part of town that I am assuming they can send out one encounter’s worth of members about every three days to gather food and have internal access to a way to recruit new/lost members at least one time (might have a percent chance for adding more later if the party stalls out more than once) if the party ends up retreating for the day.

All together the faction is about 300 xp, with the boss encounter weighing in at 120 xp, and the possibility of about 100 xp of the other encounters moving around and stacking on in waves.

Faction 2 is completely outside the dungeon, but wants the bosses treasure. They too can go and get more help, but the present boss of this faction is a sub commander that doesn’t want to look incompetent if they can avoid it. They, as a group are the strongest encounter group in the dungeon, but not strong enough/well prepared enough to beat faction 1 out right, at least not without taking way more risk than the sub commander is interested in taking (basically they are , as a group a 140 xp severe encounter for the party.)

This is a complicated scenario to run, and in the past I would have done it all just by feel as a GM, keeping the tension high with the party having no consequence for retreating, as faction one would just assume they beat off some potential rivals for their turf unless given reason to assume anything else.

Faction 2 is also not in a hurry (their boss won’t care if they don’t come back at all and will just send another group out in about a week if they never hear back), and if they win/get the treasure, their goal is escape, not murder and the whole adventure continues on just fine.

Instead of just winging it though, I think this dungeon might be a lot more fun to run as an infiltration-like subsystem, with each faction having their own awareness level of the Party and hidden level from the party.

The boss of faction 1 can be entirely swayed through an influence encounter if they can be found and reached, with or without concern for how much of the faction has been defeated before hand, but fighting through the faction and the boss is very likely to put the party in a position where faction 2 easily swoops in and steals the treasure at the end, and multiple members of faction 1 can become valuable resources later on in the campaign (granting access to uncommon and rare items and feats) if they are still around too. The players know this is a campaign about accomplishing goals not killing enemies, so I think the General buying will be there, especially if they start to get clues that someone is paying attention to their progress through the dungeon.

With faction one, awareness of the party just means “gather up the gang, retake lost territory and then replace fallen defenses and members as time allows.” I don’t think I would need 8 awareness points, with 8 being the full faction going out to kick out the invaders, 4 being, fall back to the leader’s position and wait and see, and 2 being, send out one low threat group to investigate. Maybe 6 would be enough with each level at 2 then?

Meanwhile, the party can gain recon points that reveal different encounter groups and locations, occasionally interrupted by combat encounters where that makes sense, also boosting the awareness of faction 1 to the party.

For faction 2, they start out across the street from the dungeon building, staking out the dungeon. The party doesn’t know they exist to start, so their awareness level will be less about knowing where the party is, but will be about what they learn about the party as they watch the party progress through the dungeon, and the party will have the opportunity to gain clues they are being followed/observed, and then even figure out who is doing it, and how that information could be used to sway the boss of faction 1.

I am not sure about how I want to dial in the numbers and rewards for faction 2, or exactly how to handle the rewards for the party of infiltrating the dungeon without fighting all of faction 1.

We are still a session or two away from getting to this dungeon, so I have a little time to sort it out. I will report back how it goes and what I did, but if people have ideas, questions or advice related to making this operate smoothly and with more consequence than me, the GM, just arbitrarily deciding when to collapse encounters and reveal faction 2, I’d be happy to consider them!

It’s been a really bad last 2 days for me. Is anyone complaining boiling notes about Gencon reveals? Or is that all happening in specific product threads?

This may not be a popular suggestion, but it feels like there are enough classes in the game now, and so many newish ones to support with additional content, that trying to jam 2 in every new class book is going to lead to newish classes remaining pretty shallow with options, especially with ones like commander and runesmith basically getting a totally unique thing that doesn’t share or play nice with any other class. I like the idea of new classes having a unique mechanic and not being just a hybrid of X and y options, but, like the kineticist, I think having only one new class per book, with more support options for other classes and deeper class options for the featured class feels like it will be better for however many books come out after Impossible.

As it stands, it is hard to imagine either commander or Runesmith getting many new options past the books they come out in.

So I know there are a lot of potential debates about whether PF2 would benefit from having a full class for the old PF1 ninja, but I think a better starting place for figuring out how such a class would benefit the game is by really trying to dial in what unique mechanic the class would have, and then it would be much easier for people to move past debating whether the class is just a rogue archetype or not?

I think an issue with the unique mechanic thing is that sneak attack is a very powerful, heavy lifting combat mechanic that is the rogue’s thing. If the Ninja has that, it is a rogue. Having a unique class that does something like have sneak attack but trade skill progression for spell casting is archetype territory with a very dialed down version of both.

There are some ways I could see the shadow dancer as having some start of a ninja-like class in it (moving away from performance) but that is a high level archetype and I still don’t see a unique mechanic that would make the class shine.

I have read some of the past threads about Disappearance as a spell, and I agree that it did, and still does, have some outstanding questions about it. I have also been running a Fist of the Ruby Phoenix campaign and the spell has caused a number of problems, especially in the tournament-style encounters where lots of onlookers are present.

Any way, here are some of my questions about the spell and how it has been used in my campaigns. I am looking both for what people think is RAW/RAI, but also am happy to hear, "this is how we have handled it..." regardless of whether it is RAW or not.

1. Does a caster who cast disappearance become immune to having spells identified/countered? The character cannot be detected by any sense, right? So when they speak loudly to cast spells, can others hear them? Does the spell seem to be coming from everywhere/nowhere?

2. Can a PC under the effect of disappearance do anything to make themselves easier for their allies to find? Does it have to involve interacting with physical material? Can they even really communicate with their allies at all anymore?

3. I think I still have all the same old questions about how it interacts with spells that counter invisibility as a condition, but I don't think anything with the remaster has changed or clarified any of that. However, it would seem that, related to question 1, there is no "true hearing" type of spell, so even if a Truesight spell worked at counteracting a Rank+2 spell, it seems like there should at least be some kind of penalty for trying to ID a spell being cast by visual movements alone right?

This is hands down the meanest and most annoying spell to give any NPC. Not only to the PCs, but also for yourself as GM. It lasts long enough to be a real pain, and the amount of times you have to make arbitrary calls about whether there are even enough environmental factors present to allow for seek checks to work gets very old, very fast. I would not recommend doing it more than once a campaign.

Let me start off by saying that I really like the mechanical space of magic that is variable action (1 action to start, second to make ranged) and gives a temporary passive effect and a way to invoke the magic later with more actions for another effect. It is great design space and is incredibly dynamic with PF2’s action economy.

But if runes get class locked into a class ability, few players will get to play with them and we won’t see a ton more support for them later. If “rune” was just a type of spell that had the rune trait, and they worked a little like incarnate spells, with an initial effect that default lasts until the end of the next round, and an invoke ability that cost additional actions, then you could still have a runesmith class that can cast runic spells from any tradition and use class features to do stuff like etch a rune spells to last indefinitely, or use the invoke action for multiple rune spells with one set of actions. This would let this really great mechanical game space be open to way more characters, while still allowing a class to focus on them in a way no one else will be able to. It would also allow for way more runic magic to come into the game later and not be incredibly niche content locked to one class.

There can be runic cantrips to cover the “unlimited use” angle, and the rune smith could be a traditionless wave caster that can’t cast any non runic spells to still get a more martial chassis.

It didn't exactly strike me as a problem with the commander playtest for some reason, but Runes being an entirely new thing, is making me aware of how we are starting to get a whole lot of unique categories that are really going to complicate character building, especially with the Free archetype variant.

Oracle abilities
Commander strategies
Runesmith Runes

on top of focus spells and there becomes a pretty intense metagame of maximizing what resources are available to a character.

It also tends to undermine the modularity of the basic system in my mind.

Oracle abilities have their own set back with the curse, so I didn't find that one problematic, and I maybe just liked the commander strategies enough to not feel off about them, but couldn't "rune magic" essentially just be a new tradition of magic and use spell slots and cantrips to do everything the Runesmith class does, perhaps making the class a wave caster to keep the martial chassis?

It feels like doing otherwise is kind of just repeating the mistake of the kineticist neither casting spells not making strikes.

I just ran my party through a chase in the second book of Fist of the Ruby Phoenix. It was fun, tense, and pretty well balanced but there was one major issue that jumped out to my players, and it feels like a fairly common one in the various Victory Point systems outside of social/influence encounters.

First the good: Things moved quickly so we could get through many rounds in not a lot of time. The pacing of required points for each obstacle compared to the DCs for harder and easier obstacles felt really good for the party. It was refreshing for some DCs to feel like "hey, we can crit that, maybe twice this round!" vs "This one is tough, do we have any spells/consumables we can throw at this for a guaranteed point?" That really kept the different sections of the chase fresh and kept the players creative.

The "this feels like it could be better" stuff: Rolling a D4+2 for each other team in the race/chase, no matter what obstacle was being faced, no matter the average level of the other team made it feel like player's team was just racing a set of dice, and not unique other teams that they have been interacting with now for a book and a half of adventuring. Like one of the teams is at least one level behind the party and yet was able to fly through an obstacle with very high DCs (that the party really struggled with) when the party knew that no one in that team had the skills to do well with the challenge. This happens with a number of the VP systems in APs I have seen that (as an adventure writer myself) I understand why it happens, but it feels like pre-written adventures could probably take care of for GMs and make a little smoother.

Which gets to the rub: So many of the rules of the game are written almost explicitly for combat encounter mode, from activities to the feats that modify them, that players are almost always hoping that every aspect of the game can take place at that pace, even if they realize that for many kinds of encounters, that leads to incredibly slow, monotonous play, that almost certainly falls apart because dice will be dice and a D20 means that even one party that is good at stealth is going to raise the alarm eventually in a infiltration encounter, or a party with a lot of face skills is going to upset someone in a social encounter...things the VP system is really good at fixing (specifically letting entire chapters of an adventure/scene rest exclusively on one die roll).

So for example with this race/chase in the second book of the Fist of the Ruby Phoenix: We get an entire, detailed stat block for each character on each team, that gets used multiple times for various other encounters in the book...but none of that rich detail informs any of the VP systems used in the book. As a GM, it would have been really cool in advance if each team even had different dice to roll, or penalties and bonuses for each obstacle based on the skills of their team. That would have been additional work, for sure, which is why as a GM, I didn't do it myself, especially as I didn't realize it would play a factor until we were basically in the Chase and I would have been having to do all of it on the fly...but it doesn't feel like it would take up a lot more page space to add a section to each obstacle stat block telling us what teams would get bonuses or maluses navigating through them. That is work that feels like it could be done on the front end of adventure writing that would really help GMs sell these VP systems in play without significantly slowing things down.

I guess the trick to this suggestion is that specifically applies to this one "Big Race" style chase encounter, but wouldn't necessarily apply well to every kind of chase encounter, so how valuable is it to spend time thinking about this? I just know my players always tend to get skeptical when I say "this is going to be resolved with a VP system" and then their eyes gloss over when I am trying to explain how the rules will work for this specific encounter, that fly in the face of how they have spent months thinking about their character, and so when there is an opportunity to add more logical narrative connective tissue between the general game mechanics and the specific VP subsystem, it could go a long way to selling its value to the players.

What do you all think?

Caveat 1: My tables and I tend to play slow so I haven't read deeply into Curtain Call yet. Some of this might already be happening.

As I near completion of converting Curse of the Lady's Light to a remastered narrative framework, I have decided that the easiest way to handle many aspects of the Runelords: from their schools of magic contain every spell to the way they tried to define and take power from sins...is that, as brilliant and powerful as many of them were as wizards, their conceptualization of arcane magic is more like the stuff of weird conspiracy theory cult esoterica, than actual useful or true information.

Like, the idea that each of their schools of magic actually contained all of the possible spells that fit into one of eight categories of magic is a pretty fantastically bold claim to have been able to make...but it could have just been the case that the Runelords spell books were particularly impressive, but their disciples mostly just had 2 or 3 spells at any given level that each of them thought were the defining spells of their school, and which spells actually belonged in the school was something that got fought over and changed frequently. So historically, it might look like there were dozens of spells that were in each Runelord's school, but in reality it was more like there were dozens of schools in each Runelord's empire, and that the Runelords were so jealous and secretive about their magic that they didn't really share their knowledge as rigorously or freely as would have been necessary for the schools to exist with set rules across an entire empire.

This seems likely when you look at how terrible the Runelords were as nation builders. The only thing really holding their empires together was how ridiculously powerful each leader was. In all the ruins of Thassilon, all the imagery is centered upon Runelords themselves and never competent generals or administrators...unless a story is being told about those underlings being controlled or abused, or revolting and overthrowing a past Runelord. Each Nation existed almost exclusively to serve the needs and desires of one person only, and none of them really seemed to care much about their school of magic being their legacy. They all just seemed to use their school to accomplish their own ambitions.

This allows for opposite schools of magic that wizards "just couldn't cast" or could only cast with more difficulty to be cultural and social constructs instead of actual magical realities. And when a wizard who can turn you into an undying expression of pure rage tells you that a certain spell is impossible to cast...well, you can argue that case at your own peril.

This also makes everything about the 7 sins social constructs instead of inherent, metaphysical realities in Golarion, which I think is going to be pretty essential to Runelord stuff ever getting much more play time in the future. Like, no game today really wants to be running with "lust is mortal sin" on a metaphysical level, but having an ancient civilization that spouted that to control a population and give a leader the ability to use people's fears and shame about their own sexuality and sexual desires to maintain authority there is a much easier history to reconcile and use in a game setting.

It is very easy for very smart people to end up holding beliefs and ideals that are messy, contradictory and wrong...especially when the underlying purpose of these systems is not exploring truths and revealing knowledge, but controlling others and keeping oneself in power. I think taking that approach to Runelords schools of magic really works best for squaring all the past lore into the more open-ended and pluralistic Golarion of pathfinder's remastered future.

What do you think? For me, this is the easiest, and maybe only way I can feel really comfortable having the Runelords take up so much of the narrative space of a Campaign that I am going to run. The players can learn the lore and have fun thinking about how that lore affected how each individual Runelord ran their empire and designed their twisted dungeons, but can also feel free to point out hypocrisy or find fault in even their mechanical logic without it being a sign of some weakness of the game itself or the campaign. Fundamentally, these Runelords were very powerful people who were completely self-absorbed and willing to burn the resources of entire nations to stroke their own egos and preserve their own power. They completely corrupted the ideals and principles of the school of magic that created all of them to this self-serving end, and these incredible flaws in otherwise brilliant intellects makes them all more interesting and compelling as villains.

I am curious how many other GMs have made much use of the Research Subsystem, especially as it has been developed in the GM core?

I am guessing not many, although it is something getting more and more baked into APs, so maybe (hopefully?) that will be something changing over the next couple of years.

I am trying to work it into my Shattered Star Conversion in pretty intrinsic and involved ways, and a couple of questions have started to arise:

How do you deal with topics who's "research level" are going to change over the course of a long running campaign?

Like do you just set a really high level for the research task as a whole? And then maybe have some early libraries that just have much lower research DCs than the task would otherwise require?

I am guessing the "correct" way to run it is to divide the research topic up into multiple smaller research topics that will run a gambit of levels, but something about that structure feels like it is just making more work for itself than necessary. Is it a big deal for libraries to have levels instead of (or as well as) the Research Topic? What would be the issue with doing so?

Secondly (and probably relatedly), I am thinking about trying to tie secondary value to the research beyond the direct information learned at each threshold. My primary idea for this is to have a list of things players can spend their research points after they have been earned (not losing their total research done, but just to turn the points themselves into a spendable resource). So for example, if the party spends time researching the Runelord Krune in the process of their adventuring, then in addition to reaching certain research thresholds for knowledge that will help advance the plot of the adventure, they can spend their research points on things like: learning uncommon and rare spells that would fit in that Runelord's school; get formula for items they might want to make; unlocking archetypes; forging connections with NPCs in the local settlement and gaining boons from helping those NPCs level up their locations.

Is there any obvious issues with this that I am just not thinking about that I can catch before falling too far down this rabbit hole?

Also, have your tables had fun with research? why or why not?

Imps in the monster core have charm once a day and invisibility at will.
As a GM, would you rule that casting charm breaks invisibility? Charm is a spell almost defined as “not a spell to use with hostility, and all it does is make the target more friendly.

Also, Charm is a subtle spell, but on a failure the target is supposed to think another spell was cast on them? And it can be identified while casting? It sort of feels like the subtle trait was added to charm after its text was already written and nobody considered how the remastered subtle changes would affect it.

Charm is already a useless spell to cast on PCs so I doubt too many players are worried about invisible imps casting charm every day with no one noticing, but there are cuties in Golarion where this feels like it will lead to trouble.

Is there any spells or rituals or even magical items that already exist in the game that would enable a PC to put magic on an object that would protect it from decay indefinitely?

I am asking as a GM that is wanting a dungeon (and many of the objects in it) to feel like something a powerful PC wizard would one day eventually be able to do or make for themselves.

Is there something like the old permanence spell hidden somewhere I haven't seen it?

Wish seems like one potential option, but that seems a little over the top for preserving one book.

I am struggling to think of anything else except animating objects maybe to clean and care for themselves? We have spells that preserve corpses that probably should be about the same rank as preserving an inanimate object so maybe a rank 5 spell or ritual version of something like peaceful rest?

I am converting an adventure where evil/unholy folks used a circle of protection against law to keep devils from being able to pass beyond a certain place in the dungeon. Is there anything in the remaster that works anywhere close to that?

Or do I just make something up that specifically targets creatures with the devil trait? That loses a little bit of its fun for interacting with PCs, but should at least narratively explain why no devils are on the other side of the circle. If I do just make something up, does it seem like it could be a ritual that players could reverse engineer and learn? Or would that be a headache in a way I haven't thought of and I am best off just making it a special one off situation built into the dungeon itself?

The commander is so close to complete as a class that this issue is much less of a big deal than the big deals of many other playtests, but there is one issue that I think is going to cause the greatest variance between tables on how effective a commander is, and how much tactics have to be limited:

The order of operations for issuing commands that grant multiple free actions and reactions at the same time needs to be more clearly spelled out than it currently is in the game.

Does the Commander decide the order of operations for the actions? Does it resolve in turn order? And especially with advanced tactics like Ready, Aim, Fire, does everyone have to go through with each action? and what is the order of it?

I think Ready, Aim, Fire! is one of the clearest examples of how confusing this can get and how much Order of Operations can affect its utility.

One reading of it, which fits the narrative very well, might be that everyone participating draws their weapon at the same time, reloads at the same time, and then fires at the same time.

If this is true, then all of the characters participating should end up holding a ranged weapon that has already been fired by the end of the tactic, regardless of whether the first shot or the last shot killed the enemy.

Another reading, which makes less sense narratively, but will probably be common because it keeps things organized, is for the characters to cycle through drawing the weapon, reloading it, and firing it one by one, in some order decided either by the commander or the GM.

When it happens this way, you could have the heaviest ranged-hitters cycle through first and only have the melee teammates draw their ranged weapons if the enemy is both still alive, but feels close enough to death that the potential loss of actions having the melee teammates switch to ranged is outweighed by the potential of ending the combat early.

Part of this is that there is no clear delineation about when allies have to be committed to responding to the tactic. I think it probably makes the most sense that all allies that might potentially commit have to make that decision as soon as the tactic is issued, but before actions start getting resolved, so that players can't wait to decide whether their characters are participating until they are sure there is an action they want to take...as that gives substantially more power to the multiple ally tactics.

Right now, one of the biggest ways the commander blows up the action economy of encounters is that their multi ally tactics kind of throw initiative order out of the window, and while there are many ways that is a lot of fun, there are a lot of pitfalls and complications that can arise when a player gets to completely rearrange the turn order for just the sliver of time that is their own action, especially when that could happen twice in a turn.

I am in the middle of a pretty massive conversion project, converting Magnimar: City of Monuments, City of Strangers, the Shattered Star Adventure Path, and a couple of PFS1 Scenarios over into a level 1-20 campaign that adds in more Role Playing opportunities and downtime development in the cities of Magnimar and Kaer Maga. Depending upon how ambitious I get and how much extra material I need to make the campaign fill in 20 levels, I may add a Shadow Lodge element where the PCs get to decide halfway through the campaign whether to stick it out with the Pathfinders or to take the Shards of the Sihedron to the Shadow Lodge for more nefarious purposes.

I am trying to document all the little modifications I am making to the narrative as well as the mechanical conversions so that I can share them with others that might be interested in a Varisian AP that goes from 1-20 and really explores Magnimar and Kaer Maga in depth.

It is all going pretty well, but I am waffling a little bit on what to do with the shards as artifacts, but especially the Ioun Stones that enable them to be used without their curses. I have a rough draft stat block for all of the shards that feels well balanced to the intention of the original, including providing saves against types of spells that each shard represent, but I am aiming to make my conversion fully remastered, and not depend on schools of magic or elements that are just not part of the remastered world.

At first I was inclined to just make 7 new Aeon Stones that are totally not Ioun Stones to use in the Shards...but the difference between PF2 Aeon Stones and PF1 Ioun Stones is already too much for it to feel quite right, and there is something about sticking too close to Ioun Stones that just feels antithetical to what the remaster is about.

So now I am considering designing a ritual instead that will have to be performed on each shard, that requires understanding a bit of the history and purpose of each shard and each Rune Lord school (which I am also writing up for this campaign as options to retrain into once more about them get uncovered). So the ritual would change each time and require the party to do some research and participate in the ritual, even if they wont be leading it.

What do people think? Aeon Stones do appear in the GM core, and seem like they will still be a pretty essential part of the Pathfinder Society going forward, so maybe making them all level 12 items that the party gets special access to from the Pathfinder Society once they realize which ones need to pair with each shard is one option, and the closest to what Ioun stones were in the original adventure. Or option 2, go the ritual route and diverge more from PF1 and more traditional Thassilon Lore.

Carrying over from a different thread about a different topic:

Are tactics (specifically the actions you can take with the tactic trait) too complex to be allowed to be combined with a readied action?

I think so for the following reasons:

1. Most tactics are already actions that spark a chain of reactions and free actions from other players, sometimes all of your allies. Allowing a one action tactic like pincer attack or form up to trigger off of a conditional situation that might already have other steps stacked up on top of each other can create a lot of confusion. Technically, things like Form Up already have this issue because there is no set order for who has to move in what order and strides can trigger reactions, but having 5 or 6 characters waiting to move until the trigger resolves starts to create its own head ache.

2. Characters can only benefit from one tactic a turn. This gets messy, and a hassle to remember if enemies go first, then a commander uses a tactic, then readies a second tactic to set off after an enemies action, then multiple other characters go, then you enter the next turn, then the enemy goes and sets off the trigger. It will be a book keeping headache in play.

3. How much of the specific effect of the tactic has to be factored in to the triggering condition? I feel like one of the important limits on readied actions is that the thing you are trying to do in response to a specific trigger is clear cut and simple. but using a tactic is something that basically just lets another character take a set of free actions/reaction, which adds at least 1, potentially everyone into the decision making process of resolving a readied reaction.

I don't think it is necessary to preserve the cool factor of having some tactics only taking one action, by allowing them to be used as readied actions when they have the potential to bog down the flow of an encounter and will be easily and often exploited by trying to track who has already utilized a tactic before the next one is issued.

I think the Commander is already going to be moving around a lot in the initiative order with delaying to maximize the efficacy of their tactic, drawing that out over multiple creature's turns has too much potential to sour people on the class to feel worth it to me, even as I see some fun and interesting possible situations, the headache factor just feels too high. Like readying an action to reload! for "as soon as x of my squadmates are holding unloaded firearms doesn't sound too complicated, but then the players have to remember if they already benefited from a tactic on the commander's turn, potentially many other creatures turns later when the condition of the trigger has been met.

I want to like deceptive tactics, but I am struggling to imagine how to use it. It feels like pincer attack is the much, much more reliable way to get offguard for melee fighting than a feint, so the feat really boils down to lengthy diversion and the ability to hide without cover for at least one round…ok, interesting, but what is the commander doing with this? One attack a combat with offguard? Are people picking it?

Between Form Up! and Coordinating Maneuvers a commander can set up a caster for AOE blasting and control better than any class in the game thus far. I can understand why most parties won't touch Coordinating Maneuvers because they have a 2 hander martial that they want to give an extra attack to every round, if your party doesn't have that, and instead has 2 casters (or AoE Kineticists) and a more defensive martial in the mix, the casters can absolutely feast on cones, lines and blasts in ways that other parties really struggle to exploit.

The key is that you will want your casters going pretty much right after the Commander and before the enemies, so it takes coordination that some parties struggle to accomplish, but the extent this class can reorganize the battlefield by the end of their turn is down right remarkable.

I think some folks want more active debuffing of saves and ability, but we already have that in the minimal expert and master tactics available to us. I am failing to see how much better the commander can be at helping casters without getting too bonkers. It feels like trying to make a version of Strike Hard! that does what Ready, Aim, Fire! does would actually be a set back from rearranging the battle field because it forces the use of cantrips which are rarely going to be more effective than repositioning the battlefield and just using a bomb to exploit whatever weakness you thought you were going to hit with your cantrip...then letting your casters AoE more effectively.

It sort of seems like some of the confusion/crossed expectations folks are having with this class has to do with what they imagine a “commander” looks like, as opposed to what the class offers. Like people wanting other attributes than Int as a KAS, and people wanting better defenses, are looking for pretty different feat options than the class we are playtesting is going to offer, because this class is a smarty pants class that ends up not really being able to do any of its cool stuff if you don’t have at least a 16 in your INT and isn’t recalling knowledge or doing more with tactics than just having 1 ally attack. You need to be able to affect your whole party with your tactics and have more than 2 of them you ever want to use.

I think calling the class a tactician (since using tactics is the class shtick, not issuing commands, could help bridge player expectations with class offerings. I also think adaptive stratagem might need to be baked into the class from level 1 to help sell the brilliant, prepared martial strategist, which is what the class we have does best.

I just wanted to say that I am a huge fan of the more focused classes we have been seeing in these playtests! I love that, instead of trying to go too broad and accommodate a bunch of subclasses in each class, that we are getting single attribute classes with feats and abilities built around what that class does, rather than sub folders that don’t work with the core narrative. I think, one day (in a future edition), things like scoundrel and ruffian might be better as their own class or class archetypes than as rackets and that many of the sub class options for other classes (like the swashbuckler) might be the same. It really feels bad when half or more of the feats at a level feel like they are designed for a totally different class than your character.

I am glad to see new classes being given the space to be their own thing, and leave space for other classes in the future to do the other thing better.

I am working on a set of variant rules for getting rid of secret checks without removing the tension they add to a game, and rather than wait until I had them fully developed and tested on my own, I thought I would share them here in progress for feed back as I am working on them, in case this is an area of the game that other folks/tables are finding to be a detriment to their game.

PF2 without Secret Checks

Caveat, I actually love secret checks as a player, but they can get annoying for GMs, and I play with some other players who absolutely hate them, so I started working on how to get rid of them. This thread is not about discussing the merits of secret checks, but trying to think of more fun ways for players to roll their own dice and still keep the suspense that secret checks can add to the game.

Right now I have mostly just thought through recalling knowledge and put a little bit of thought into the search exploration activity.

It is my intention for these ideas to be shared freely and developed further by anyone who wants to spend the time on it. I'd love to hear your thoughts or about how you would use them/modify them.

I am particularly looking at stealth here. If my character has cover and hides, they get a +2 circumstance bonus to stealth checks…so it applies to the check.

But if an enemy seeks on their turn, does the bonus not apply because it is their perception check vs my stealth DC?

Personally that feels off to me, but I can’t find anything in the rules about checks or DCs that clarify it. What am I missing? Or is the action cost of seeking just mean it deserves the offset?

In a world with alignment “evil” was a pretty codified concept. Now, Golarion has shifted to a place where evil is a much more subjective concept as there are not really purity tests for separating evil actions, intentions or innate states of being from good or just neutral ones.
Should her anathema change to focus on unholy?
Does her church have doctrines to try to define evil specifically for what must be struck down vs what can be redeemed?

It feels like the removal of alignment has a good chance of leaving the church of the Dawnflower in a place where subjective interpretations of morality are going to lead to a lot of violence. I know we are not supposed to see a major change in how the world works from PF2 to PF2 remastered, but this is an area where it feels like an in-world measuring stick has been removed and now every disciple of Sarenrae is now on their own.

So I got my copy of pactbreaker today, and overall, it is exciting to see the first ORC adventure path rollout with the remastered rules. I am still close reading through 7 dooms of Sandpoint so I haven’t looked closely at the whole adventure yet, but something that jumped out at me with alignment being gone is that you really have to read all the text around an NPC to get a sense of their purpose in an encounter and what their initial disposition to the party is going to be.

I know it might work against word count, but it could be helpful for GMs if initial attitude for NPCs was either a trait tag, or if a line could be added in the stat block. With NPCs that have highly variable attitudes towards the party, something like “varies, see text above” would at least serve to help flag the NPC as one with complex motivations or roles in the encounter.

The other reason I think this would be helpful to GMs is because I don’t think many GMs are as familiar with the rules for making an impression and how all of that interacts with the built in game mechanics, and thus many just default to hostile or friendly without really knowing how the party could otherwise approach them. Calling out other attitudes in stat blocks could help GMs think about broader ways for PCs and NPCs to interact in a way that I think alignment did pre-remaster.

If I cast Gravity weapon and then throw an acid flask, what happens? Does the status bonus to damage apply to persistent damage? I am thinking not, but am struggling to find the rules explaining what a bonus to damage applies to. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So the fascinated condition seems to cause a lot of confusion and frustration for players, or at least, it has at tables I have run/played with. A lot of players seem to struggle with “when is this useful?”

My understanding of the condition and its value rests on making sure you have a list of the actions that have the concentrate tag, and then making sure that you, the person causing the fascinated condition, are positioned so that anyone else wanting to exploit that condition is not in a position where their actions and your actions can be detected or viewed together. However, the order of operations on some of the common use actions related to this are a little confusing.

Let’s say a caster approaches some guards at the gate to a wall and casts a subtle enthrall spell, talking to the guards about how important their duty standing guard right there is. If the rest of the party is sneaking over the wall a ways away from the gate, can the guards ever turn away from the caster?
The party would have to have feats or special abilities to be able to climb and stealth at the same time, and the sneak action requires making an active check, but even if the guards heard a sound like people climbing over the wall, they can’t use a seek action in anyone or any area that doesn’t include you, the caster in the area. Move doesn’t have the concentrate tag though, so can the guards just move away from you because they heard a noise? Even if they can’t do any kind of investigative actions about that noise?

I totally get that this boils down to a GM call, but it can be tricky as a GM to arbitrate this in the moment without creating an adversarial GM moment if you are not fairly permissive with the player’s intended purpose of fascinating the targets. So as a GM, I’d tend towards permissive, as long as the party is not being overtly hostile or standing where the fascinator is clearly within sight/sensory area. Have other GMs found good rules of thumb for arbitrating the fascinated condition?

I am curious what people think about veil of privacy as a spell, and especially why a spell like this would last 8 hours instead of until the next time you prepare spells?

Anti-scrying measures can be powerful, and powerfully annoying in certain campaigns, or as a player, but it feels a little weird to have an 8 hour duration spell. Like, if it important to the plot that an NPC is memorizing 3 copies of this spell a day, at ranks high enough to make overcoming it a challenge, a GM can arbitrarily decide that easily enough, but it becomes a massive drain on an adventuring party to do this.

Lasting only 8 hours does have the consequence of opening up a weird cat and mouse game of catching the caster sleeping, but it would require a lot of time management for GMs to decide when various NPCs using this are going to be casting it in advance to avoid situations where players will not just end up feeling like it is being used against them by the GM when it is a plot based convenience.

Meanwhile, if the PCs are playing in a campaign where they are trying to avoid detection from a powerful caster, it becomes pretty useless as a spell, because the caster could just keep on switching up when they are being scried on.

Overall, the 8 hour duration feels like a weird legacy hold over to me, that I would probably change to “until the next time you reprepare spells,” but am I missing something? Is there a good reason this is supposed to be a work shift protection that can’t be relied upon as your all day protection?

So last night, Sitsi, the Shoanti Wizard was hit with 2 shards of a Force Barrage spell while at 3 HP. The total damage on the spell was 8 damage, 5 from the first shard and 3 from the second. Was Sitsi at dying 1 or dying 2? I thought she would be at dying 1 because the last sentence on the spell description talks about combining damage into one instance of damage, but there was not consensus at the table about that call. In my mind that falls under the “so forth,” but I acknowledge “so forth” isn’t tight rules jargon. It ended up mattering greatly because I rolled a 2 on my dying flat check that round, so if she was at dying 2 instead, she’d be dead. It seems a little harsh to me that one higher level casting of force barrage (where you might be hit by 4+ shards with one casting) is instant death for a character with low HP. Is there somewhere in the rules that clarifies that more, or is it pretty much a table to table ruling? Sitsi is level 4 and ate two Rank 3 vampiric feast spells, the 2nd of which dropped her to 6 hp, so that encounter was really out to kill her.

It is probably too late to have this reflect in the official cannon, but tying fey as strongly to occult traditions as primal traditions feels much more in line with the stories being told about them in Golarion than having both the first world and the elemental planes rest qsquarely in the realm of primal magic. The occult tradition really needs some lore beyond the old ones and Lovecraftian unknown terrors in pathfinder.

I figure it would be good to have one super thread for talking about changes or non-changes to spells in the remastered player core book (I finally got mine!!) feel free to post your own spell observations here as well. I will keep adding stuff here as I read the spells more closely.

Acid arrow and polar ray join shocking grasp as spells that are no more, replaced by saving throw targeting spells that are a little different. Acid grab’s speed reduction while taking persistent damage is interesting. It is starting to look like item bonuses to spell attack roll spells might be possible in the future of the game as single target high-damage spell slot spells that target AC don’t exist in the arcane or primal traditions anymore? This is just an initial thought, I haven’t deep dived it.

No love for control water. The exact same verbiage as pre-remastered leaves this spell entirely up to GM arbitration with vague guidance void of clear rules language for things like “raise the water level in an area.” It is left kinda feeling like an NPC only spell to me, which is unfortunate.

This is a thread topic that I have been thinking about for longer than the announcement of the remaster, and is very connected to many of the ideas that are posted in these 2 threads:

The Arcane Tradition - what do you think?

Arcane vs Occult

but these are some new things affecting my thinking about the Arcane tradition since the announcement of the remastered ruleset and the dropping of schools of magic as an innate property spells themselves and a classification determined by in world schools.

1stly: The metaphysical reality of Golarion has strongly moved away from "hello player! Here is exactly how everything works in universe, with immutable laws of reality." and towards, "Hello player, here is an example of an in world voice explaining how some people in at least one particular region make sense of the games mechanical rule set, but we are not promising that it always works this way and won't significantly change in the future."

In other words, (and this was something that we did start to see with the Secrets of Magic book), when we get rules text that is connected to lore, it is from an in world perspective that is one of many possibilities, rather than the exact way that it is for everyone. Even our (player) knowledge of the planes is largely just the common innersea interpretation of the planes, with many other possible arrangements of planes out there beyond what the scholars currently know. This was a necessary change because it vastly opens up how different cultures can have different gods and different metaphysical realities than those of the Core 20 and the boneyard etc. Long story short, Golarion is much more of a subjective reality campaign setting than it was in PF1 or even at the start of PF2.

2ndly: In world, I don't think we are going to get much interaction between the loss of schools of magic as objective classifications of types of magic, and what that has meant in world. It is hard to stop talking about something that becomes a huge "this used to be here in the past, but isn't." We got it with the Drow, but it came in the back matter of a transitional AP, and is not something that is going to be brought back up in Core Rule Books published under the ORC license. I suspect the old schools of magic will similarly not be something that can be talked about if the biggest reason for their removal was for legal considerations of wanting the ORC world of Golarion to be different from proprietary metaphysic systems.

So the new schools of magic, as actual physical schools and theories of magic that are held up as philosophies of magic are going to be a little bumpy for many players because they are just going to have always existed in Golarion despite having never existed previously and terms like "Necromancer" and "Conjuerer" aren't fundamentally connected to any inherent properties of magic, but to how certain in world groups look at magic and how it can be manipulated.

Ok, so given all that, I want to revisit the conversation of "what is Arcane Magic?"

There have been 2 ways of approaching this question. One is to stick to the essences. Arcane magic is the meeting place of the essences of Matter and Mind. This will have to be the future of the Arcane Tradition, but I think we as players are going to need a lot of help figuring out what this means, especially, where does this magical power come from?

This is because the more practical attempts to explain the Arcane Tradition tend to do so by describing it as the "science of magic" with a focus on mathematics or linguistics. It had some kind of strange legacy connections to the power of dragons, but anytime someone started talking about arcane magic as a way of understanding the mysteries of the universe, you started running into real problems in world, because what mysteries of the universe are we really talking about? Almost every AP or adventure that really delves into mysteries finds that the root cause of the magic behind those mysteries to be connected to divine machinations, planar influence (which is almost all divine or primal in PF2), or weird, mind-shattering stuff that gets labeled as Occult now.

With no schools of magic, what are wizards and other arcane casters studying, and how are they studying it? There is no more system for trying to classify magic that isn't just directly tied to its power source, some of which falls outside arcane casters ability to manipulate. We can try to compare wizards to real world scientists, but magic is not real, so are our characters breaking the 4th wall to be essentially studying the underlying game mechanics themselves? Any why then would they be tied and limited to just examining 2 essences of magic? "I want to understand the mysteries of how magic works...but I don't want to consider that it could be connected to the spirit or the innate life force of living beings" is a really weird take for scientists, especially when the effects of other traditions of magic are observable and just as measurable as anything in the arcane tradition.

We got some fun lore writing examining this stuff in the secrets of magic book, but the vast majority of it falls apart now stepping away from schools of magic. There were some really cool metaphors and "arcane" ways of talking about how spell casting in PF2 works, but on reading again after considering all the changes, they just feel like ways of explaining how every slot based caster, and especially prepared caster, is limited in what spells they can learn and how.

What does all of this mean?

Well, maybe it is a request for a new, arcane focused rule book to give the arcane tradition its own place in Golarion, because it feels like the arcane tradition has mostly just been the "fill in your own idea about what wizards are from other games/fantasy lore, and it goes here" with nothing really connecting it to something distinctly of Pathfinder Lore. I mean we have the Rune Lords, and we have Tar Baphon, and we have the Magaambya academy and Old Man Jatembe and the magic warriors as really cool examples of Arcane casters that exist in the world, that need to be arcane, but their connection to the new lore and magic schools is going to take some bigger work to situate back into the ORC version of Golarion.

The Wizard is my favorite fantasy class and if you know anything about this Unicorn on these boards, you probably know that I am one of the staunchest defenders of the PF2 wizard's overall class design as the "spell slot prepared caster" as I think that prepared spell slots do the best job of simulating the careful, studied approach to magic that defines a wizard. So I say this as someone who loves the mechanical design of the wizard class, but what is a wizard of the the civics school studying that they wouldn't be concerned with many of the exact same things as a cleric of Abadar? Or would lead them either to scoff or jealously resent the ways an elementalist shapes earth and stone to form permanent structures? Why wouldn't they be trying to study, and potentially exploit these other ways of accomplishing the same things? What is fundamentally making their magic different enough from these others that it exists as a separate magic tradition?

For me, this has to boil down to where the magic comes from and what price you pay for using it. Arcane magic as a studied form of magic is about only harnessing magic that has a knowable price, that doesn't indenture you permanently to another entity (oops bye arcane witch), and that requires incredible intelligence to use safely, repeatedly, and under your own control. I said for me because this also seems to rule out arcane sorcerers as well as witches. It is just really hard to say what arcane magic is or where it comes from in Golarion without intruding into other traditions pretty intensely. Like it almost exists exclusively as a mechanical designation and not well as a lore one...even though some of my favorite Golarion Lore is tied to practical users of this tradition.

Is any of this making sense to anyone else? Is my wizard brain flailing at trying to understand why I partially share a magic tradition with people who make bargains for the power I have worked so meticulously to understand and control? Or with idiots who just happened to smart, magically inclined parents? If it is about magic being some force out there in the universe that can be manipulated in different ways, where is the power that us wizards are using coming from and why can't we studiously understand the connection of magic that involves spirits and life?

I would love to see other player's perspectives on these topics, and I would really love to see a Lost Omens book tackle bringing the Arcane Tradition squarely into its ORC Golarion Lore. How about you?

It would be kinda cool for animists to be able to get a hyper specialized lore by calling on a specific spirit for the day, like not just mountain lore, but this mountain lore. Mechanically, I think it’s be easiest to do by just giving a +2 circumstance bonus to relevant checks

I really appreciate how there is some intended synergy between wandering feats with lore requirements and the apparitions that give those lores. I would love to hear about how people have used some of these.

The one I really want to like but it doesn't work is Roaring Heart with River carving Mountains. Neither one of these abilities on their own is anywhere near the top power levels of what Animists can do, so it is a real shame that you can't benefit from using these two abilities together or even in the same round. Which is too bad because Roaring Heart does kinda work for Earth's Bile: You can move and push a 2 foes into places to take advantage of your area of effect spells. Right now I don't think most players are looking at that as an option because players are racing to just want to throw down 2 or 3 Biles as fast as they can and then they are stuck spending too many actions a turn to do any 2 action activities. With Earth's Bile, I strongly suspect that the fix is going to be that you can't over lap areas to affect the same target more than once in a round, which will also de-incentivize trying to spam cast the spell and just sit around sustaining as many versions of the spell as you can every single encounter. I don't think this because I think it is too powerful an option (if it is, it is only so by a small degree), but because doing exactly the same thing with every action for an entire encounter is boring class design.

But it would be cool enough to actually see happen in play if the benefits of River Carving Mountains could apply to the movement of Roaring Heart. Yes the +5ft status bonus to speed stacks, but status bonuses to speed are a dime a dozen and +5 from level 1 to 20 is not great. Roaring heart takes 2 actions so any round you want to use it while sustaining your River Carving Mountains, you basically get nothing. People generally don't love battlefield control options that only move people around or create difficult terrain, so I don't think we'd be exceeding any power options by letting a character gain the difficult terrain benefit from River Carving Mountains while completing the move and push options form Roaring Heart.

Any way, what are some of the combos you've tried or want to try or wish you could try?

I know Embodiment of battle and Grudge strike has been getting a lot of talk. And Spirit Walk and discomfiting whispers would be good together against haunts if you ever were going to trigger haunts with Spirit walk, if only because making haunts/traps roll twice and take the lesser roll is about the most effective way to keep them from critting everything to death.

I know that PF2 has picked up a lot more fans and players over the last year, which is totally awesome, and I am betting that means that we have a lot of new folks learning about the playtest of the new classes and wondering how to best participate.

There is no wrong way to download the documents, read them, have feelings about them or express those feelings, and don't let anyone tell you that your impressions of the class are wrong, or that your ideas about what you want the class to do shouldn't be expressed as feedback.

The absolute best place for your feedback is the official surveys so whether you get to build a character and play it, or not, if you fill out those surveys you are doing your part to help the developers learn more about the classes they are testing. That is all information covered in the introduction to the playtest classes and is hopefully just a reminder that we are all doing this for fun, and to help develop a better game for all.

Some things I have learned from doing quite a few of these play tests that I want to share, not as "do this or despair" but as "be kind to yourself and to others:"

It is totally cool and valid to read the classes and have ideas about what the classes can do, can't do, or could do. It is totally cool to share those ideas on the message boards. But remember that the developers are testing out ideas here, and some times that includes ideas that are pretty rough, that might already have alternatives that might be used instead. The developers are not really dependent on us play testers to come up with the new mechanics or mechanical tweaks they might add to the class. What they really need is feed back about how these ideas that are being tested feel and work, especially in play if you can test it. You don't have to know how to fix anything in order to voice concerns or pain points that you experience when you try to play a class, and while it might be fun to offer suggestions, remember that the people responding to "ideas to fix the class" on these boards are just other players with their own experiences and ideas. The developers may step in to answer FAQ type questions about how things actually work, but they also might not, because they want to see how the wording is interpreted by a broad audience, and they very, very rarely will step into conversations about player suggested "fixes" because that is like stepping into a homebrew conversation about material that might not even end up in the game in the first place.

Even if you have an idea on the boards that word for word ends up in the final class release, that is as likely to have been an alternative idea that they didn't really feel needed to be play tested that they were already possibly thinking about, and just wanted to see the reaction to a different, more experimental idea. You aren't going to get writer's credits for anything you post on the message boards as ideas, so there is no need for anyone to get too invested in one idea or another, nor will convincing a stubborn detractor from the idea that you like mean anything about how the final class turns out.

The developers want to know if you have fun with the classes. Especially when you use one in play. That is the feedback that they are really looking for and will help them figure out what feats are succeeding, which ones aren't even being picked, and which ones people want to use but are getting confused about, or aren't accomplishing the fantasy that they evoke with their narrative descriptions.

So if you want to help the most, try to build characters that feel like they would be fun, play with those characters if you can, keep track of what works and what doesn't and fill out those surveys about your experiences afterwards. Anything else you want to do can be fun and insightful in its own way too, but if arguing about mechanics with other forum posters starts to get frustrating or just not fun, remember that nobody's suggestions on the message boards override the data that the developers collect from the surveys and which elements of the class are pretty well locked in and which ones are experiments being tested is not something that gets revealed until after the playtest is over.

People will get really worked up over very small mechanical differences. It happens with every single play test. Getting into the weeds talking mechanics can be a source of fun for many regular forum posters (myself often included), but nobody wins or loses the play test based upon how frequently or vehemently they post on the message boards. In fact the only way anyone wins the play test is by making sure that as many voices and experiences as possible get considered and recorded in the surveys.

Have fun out there because fun is all the payment anyone gets from participating in these playtests. Overall, I am pretty pleased with the classes thus far, but I really look forward to hearing about folk's experiences playing these classes in games. Don't hesitate to share your stories with us!

I think one of the most interesting aspects of the 2 new class playtests is that we are getting a glimpse of what the spell casting rules for spell casters will look like remastered. In the animist playtest we are told:

"Regardless of which source you’re drawing on, you are a spellcaster and can cast spells of the divine tradition using the Cast a Spell activity. As an animist, your incantations might be reciting relevant snippets of legends—stories passed down orally—or they might see you calling nearby spirits to honor ancient vows; your gestures could take the form of elegant dances or full-body convulsions as generations of memories and otherworldly energies surge through you."

This seems either to be referencing that the cast a spell activity is going to make it clear that there are "incantations" and "gestures" that will be associated with spell casting and will be like verbal and somatic components, and that individual classes will give advice to players about what they look like/sound like for each class.

In a number of discussions, an issue that keeps popping up is the role of adventure design and the expectations placed on GMs for setting up and pacing encounters in dungeons.

Is PF2 as a system inherently biased towards Martial characters? Are GMs supposed to give PCs enough time between Encounters for all characters to be at full health and full focus points? How many encounters is a caster’s spell slot load out supposed to last them? Should encounter difficulty generally default to a level where a party should be able to readily win as long as their hit points are full and their focus points are restored, regardless of whether the PCs are prepared to fight the specific enemies faced? Or should there be an expectation that encounters probably require some level of preparation, either to learn about their enemies before engaging them, bring resources (like consumables) that will help the party win, and have potential “silver bullet” spells that would greatly decrease the difficulty of the encounter?

I am going to start off by saying that my personal, strongest wish for any RPG I play or run, is for there not be any one set of “rules” to use to answer all these questions. Variety in encounter design and adventure writing is a good thing that makes the game dynamic and fun to play. I don’t think I want to play a RPG where the players would think “well, we’ve fought exactly 4 encounters, that means this room where we finished our 4th encounter must then be a safe place for us to rest the night and it would be unconscionable that either the adventure or the GM would potentially hit us with another encounter, or expect us to fall back and return later to a potentially changed dungeon if we do want to rest now.” But I think there are some hard coded expectations that are leading to certain meta-analyses of classes and power tiers that are only really true within the confines of those expectations and lead to hurt feelings when GMs or adventure writers deviate from them, or if a player joins a table where that is what everyone else is already expecting...but they are not.

I think it is very common for players to expect combat encounters to be isolated events, contained to the terrain features present at the onset of an encounter, against a number of enemies known from the beginning of the encounter, or minimally revealed in the very first round of combat. Within this mindset, the difficulty of the encounter against these set enemies in this defined space should generally stay in the low to severe threat range and the party should have at least 10 minutes between encounters.

When these expectations hold true for 90+% of the way a GM runs encounters, I think all of the meta analysis about Martials being able to adventure all day and casters having to be able to rely heavily on focus spells, cantrips and reusuable resources becomes 100% true. Especially if the enemies faced don’t tend to have resistances, abilities or tactics that allow them to prepared to fight against a blitz of fast moving PCs focus firing on one enemy and either dropping that enemy in the first round, or (if it is a solo creature) debuffing it by minimally knocking it down and probably frightening it as well. When all of the above expectations are true, I think there is a “one true strategy” that emerges in PF2 that is better than any other and that is the one shaping the “fighters are the new god class” of PF2 and casters can only really keep up in parties if they have un-ending resources (whether that is relying mostly on focus spells or having a mass pile of scrolls to make sure they are casting spell slot spells at least 2 or 3 times every encounter).

As a GM, I find these kind of encounters incredibly boring to run over and over again though, and they tend to be over in 3 rounds tops. PF2 is an incredibly well designed system, especially from the GM perspective, so it doesn’t take much work to throw 10 or more of these encounters together in a hurry so I do get how and why we get so many of them. In fact, I think a game without any of these short encounters would probably skew towards making players feel like the GM is out to get them and they can never have an easy victory, but if they become the only encounters that players think they ever need to prepare for, I think it can really stagnate the game and discourage creative strategizing and lead players to “automating” their characters to the point where they get themselves into a lot of trouble the 10% of the time where the encounter expectations change drastically.

As a GM, whether I am home brewing or running pre-written material, I very frequently aim to have no more than 30% of encounters run this way, or if I have a bunch of encounters strung together that do feel like they want to be run this way, I throw out the scripts of monsters and NPC fighting to the death in their isolated dungeon rooms turned tombs, and will have enemies try to run and escape, alert allies, and collapse these encounters on top of each other, so that the party either needs to start throwing down heavier resources, fall back, or face Extreme+ encounters. These are the effects I have seen by doing so (in no particular order):

1. Durational spells have a lot more value when encounters run 7+ rounds than when they run 3-. If one of the enemies moves to the back of the room, opens the door to a hallway behind them and shouts out “we’re under attack,” it has bought the party a few extra actions in the first or second round of combat that can be spent buffing, healing, positioning, or otherwise preparing for the next encounter that is going to start pouring into the room over the next round or 2. It greatly diversifies the type of resources that are useful to the party and gives 1 minute duration items, spells, and abilities a chance to be utilized to their fullest.

2. It tends to make the battlefield a lot more dynamic. The battle lines move, lines of sight change and have to be reconsidered, Area of effect abilities and battle field control options intrinsically get more valuable because there become predictable points on the battlefield where multiple enemies are likely to be moving and having to congregate before they can engage with the party.

3. It gives the party the opportunity to make total victory, where they stop any enemy from escaping, a potential goal that gives an immediate reward, but is not required if the fight proves difficult/the dice don’t cooperate. It can also incentivize taking prisoners/granting mercy if the GM wants that to be a feature of their game, where enemies trade information for their lives. This spills over into point 4.

4. In addition to the battlefield being more dynamic, it lets npc and creatures be more dynamic too, as they can have changing motives. Unless the enemy has telepathy, it also requires that they communicate (potentially in a language the party can understand) about what they are trying to do, which gives them a chance to have some personality, but it also can serve as a way for GMs to feed more information to the players about the kinds of enemies or threats ahead in a dungeon. Fleeing creatures will run one way but not another, they will shout out “get the boss” and then hint where that boss is. There are just lots of opportunities for there to be more going on that a race to kill the opposition as quickly as possible if the world of the encounter is bigger than a single room.

It does take work to learn how to do this without completely overwhelming your PCs. But look at movies and books, Stories where everyone is always trying to kill everything else immediately, without ever offering deals to stop fights or trade information is boring and almost unheard of in the fiction that informs this game. Players learn to be ruthless and expect always the worst out of their enemies when their enemies are always ruthless and out to kill them. There is nothing inherently wrong with that for the way people choose to play their games, unless it is leading to repetition that is getting dull and flattens the world into a combat simulator for players that are wanting to role play. And the thing is, this really is on the GM to arbitrate and not the adventure writer, because it has to be something that dynamically responds to the way the players interact with the encounter. Trying to script 10 different scenarios is too much to put on pre-written adventure writers. They can drop short hints about the relationships of the creatures in a dungeon and the ecology of the dungeon, but they overwhelmingly already do that. Maybe the one big step moving forward could be to just stop adding the line “so and so fights to the death” and instead it can be understood that you can use that as a default assumption if you want, unless something else is specified, or you should feel free to give goblin warrior #7 whatever secret dream you wish when you see the opportunity for her to fulfill that dream.

I think community spaces like this are much better places to develop GM skills and ideas for our individual tables than we can reasonably expect to be fit into rules books or setting books, or even adventures. Getting dynamic feedback on what you have tried, how it went, and what you would have liked to have happened differently is all much easier in a community of folks who are also playing the game, than in expecting the developers to have answers for you at your table.

So what do you think? What approaches have you tried to make make encounters feel dynamic and fun at your table? What encounters have gotten the best feedback from your players and how have you modified encounters to make sure that everyone at the table feels like a valuable and contributing member of the team?

I have been busy running some older APs for a while, so I hadn't looked at too many newer APs, especially with so many 3 book ones coming out so recently, but when did we lose the chapter by chapter treasure list?

I am curious why this decision was made, because it seems like there is still plenty of room for it in the chapter summary side bar at the start of every chapter? I have found those lists really useful when preparing a new chapter for my party and seeing what kind of treasure they might find to make adjustments up front to better fit the party make up. Were they causing problems?

After having an enlightening conversation about the perceived problems with low level spell casters, it became clear that some tables are having trouble with the wealth distribution expectations of PF2 for treasure and rewards.

Table 10-10 of the CRB "Character wealth" (on page 510 of the CRB) is for players making characters that are coming in new to a campaign. It is a useful chart for GMs to keep in mind when players level up, to make sure no one player is falling behind the minimum expectations, but it is important to understand that it is a minimum expectation for how much useful inventory each character should have left at the start of each level, not a chart of how much wealth a character should earn over the course of a level. In game, GMs should follow table 10-9 (on page 509 of the CRB), for understanding how much treasure to give out to players in the course of actual play over a level. These numbers are much, much higher than the minimum amount on table 10-10, because it is an assumption of the game that players will spend their wealth on things other than permanent item bonus items.

Be sure to keep an eye on whether your players are taking the rune items that you are giving out and keeping 90% of the wealth by transferring those runes to martial weapons, but selling just about everything else and then dividing that remaining wealth up to everyone else. This will vastly unbalance the wealth by level in the party towards your martial players and leaving casters feeling like their characters are second tier characters.

PFS has very strong rules for keeping this from happening, and a GM that is homebrewing can keep a closer eye on the kinds of treasure they are putting in the party inventory (and looking at how it is getting used), but for GMs running pre-written adventures, I think there can be a tendency not to pay attention to items and character wealth except by keeping tabs every level on that minimum wealth by level chart. Be sure to look at the list of items at the start of every chapter in an AP and think about how those items will work for your party in play. Is it going to get distributed equally between all players? Are there items every player will find useful? Are the consumables listed likely to be used (and by everyone)? or are they going to get sold at half value all the time, reducing the amount of treasure for the party as a whole, while the runed items are going to be heavily used by martials and not accounted for in the sharing of treasure?

SO there are a lot of conversations going on about the mechanics and math of casting, and with the remastery I think that these questions will be going on for the next several months. And I imagine some folks may want to start their own thread collecting stories of frustrations with spell casting, but as someone who has a lot of fun playing casters, I want to hear your stories about spells that have broken encounters and been great fun at the table. Mostly this is just for fun, but maybe it can also inspire players to try out spells they haven't used before. I'll go first:

The classics

6th level slow is an encounter breaker against fey (or really any low fort creatures) At 16th level, it is not even really using a serious resource, but fighting 4 fey monsters with their human master looked like it could have been a daunting encounter...until 2 of the fey crit failed, 1 failed, and the master and 1 of the fey succeeded. In the first round that was 7 actions eaten and the two that crit failed could pretty much be ignored until the fight was over.

Wall of stone against 3 mounted fighters in an arena (I was GM here). Having the cavelry have to charge the wall and then move back so they could get their damage bonus again in order to be able to break the hardness wasted a lot of actions. A fight against 3 became a fight against 1 and then a fight against 2, easily managed.

Calm Emotions. AoE incapacitation spells get way too much hate. They absolutely shut encounters down because if you have 3 enemies, then there is a very strong likelihood that even your second highest spell slot is going to be good enough to land the effect. For assaulting a well fortified position, I have seen Calm Emotions break an entire wave of reinforcements and keep a fight very manageable.

Focus spells

Tempest surge against low reflex enemies is a power house. Not only does it do good damage, it has a good chance of debuffing the snot out of the target for a big spell slot spell the next round. The creature already had a bad reflex, now they are really in trouble. This is the best spell in the game for hunting black dragons.

Amped Shield. Holy Handgrenades can this spell soak damage! I have seen a Wizard MC Psychic use it very effectively as their third action on an ally, and I have had success with a tanky Tangible Dream Psychic because it pretty much doubles your HP through the early game. Combine it with long duration defensive spells like false life and you can feint being a very appetizing target for the enemy, especially if you also have a champion in your party. For the Psychic, if they start ignoring you because they are tired of your shield, you are often in a good position for round 2 to unleash psyche and then amp imaginary weapon. It has to be one of the toughest 6HP caster options out there.

Lingering composition on Dirge of doom. In a party built to exploit the frightened condition, this opens up an absolute flood gate of critical hits and damage. It has been pretty ridiculous in my experience.

Darken eyes. It takes a while to build this up, but taking away enemies darkvision is brutally effective. I once got a higher level Demon to crit fail on their save, and blinded, the creature just gave up and left the fight. It worked as well as banishment without using a spell slot.

others

2nd level Ventriloquism. It is an auditory illusion that lasts an hour and lets you change what your voice sounds like. Casting it before doing any kind of infiltration scouting and you can be creating distractions over and over again, often accomplishing everything you had hoped to do with an illusory image, but without having wasted the whole slot after one use. It also does not break invisibility and can be used to make it very difficult to pinpoint your exact location since it requires no actions to make your voice sound like it is coming from somewhere else. It is a fun way to waste enemy actions when you are running low on combat spell slots too.

Hydraulic Push. I was a little goblin cleric, unconscious and dying 2 in the grasp of a starving bear. I was dead for sure, because the thing had all its hit points and our martial had a weapon and shield, so to even try to grab me would have involved dropping the weapon and getting mauled himself. The party sorcerer critically hit the bear with a jet of water, heavily damaging it and pushing it away from my character, saving their life. Before this I had been down on spell attack roll spells, but realizing how effective they can be against solo creatures when you really need them turned me right around on my wrong assumptions about them. Once I realized how much easier it is as a team to debuff AC than any other defense, I realized that you don't even need to have true strikes ready to go to get good use out of the occasional spell attack roll spell slot, especially if your still have any hero points.

Lightning Bolt. The damage on this spell is swingy, but when it swings your way, it blows any other similar level spell out of the water. A crit fail can one shot a creature your level or lower, especially if they don't have great reflex saves. As a GM it is the only time I have killed a PC with massive damage.

It might be too late for this idea if it hasn't already been considered, but I think one issue with the spell casting traditions, especially non-arcane traditions, is that too many spells are common and there are not enough suggested or mechanical ways for characters to gain access to uncommon spells.

Instead of just trying to make non-arcane lists more limited than the arcane list (which only really seems to work with the divine list) it would make more sense for the primal and occult list to have a much smaller list of spells that are common/ freely available for any caster with access to the tradition to pick up, but for there to be more GM guidance in giving access to spells for casters to learn/ keep in a spell book. I think this works well with divine domain focus spells, where there are lots of options, but you can't gain access to all of them at once.

Even in the arcane list, it would be fine for more spells to be uncommon as long as wizards (through school and feat) have ways of picking them up.

I am thinking that maybe this is a part of the redesign of wizard schools, where the given spells each level are just spells that are uncommon spells, whether they are from the arcane tradition or not, and that access to them requires finding a spell book from that school, or being a part of the school itself.

The Remastered panel at Paizo Con today was really enlightening about SO many things that trying to jam them all in one thread feels impossible. One of the most interesting and exciting changes that the remastery is introducing (by necessity) is the elimination of what I will call the old-schools of magic, replacing them with actual "schools of magic," meaning that your school of magic as a wizard is the actual school you attended to learn your wizardry and it will determine your starting spells in your spell book and possibly some additional elements of the class, probably along the lines of focus spells, if focus spells are still a part of the class at all anymore.

This means that Golarion Wizards really are going to look a lot different than other game's wizards as there are nearly a limitless number of potential schools of magic across Golarion. The one's mentioned in the panel today (that I remember) include a school of battle wizardry that is going to include a lot of evocation options, but also martial battlefield control options like Earthbind, which would be "must learn spells" for any wizard that is going to be casting spells alongside an army. I think this means that you are likely to have some higher level spells in your starting spellbook right from the start, as they are resources your school gives you as you graduate. The other two that I remember being talked about is a school of universal something (which is like the generic wizardy wizard school) and a school with a really cool name that I don't remember that is about bodily transformation and nature magic that i think will respond well to the "this game doesn't support a good transmuter" line of criticism.

I can't imagine we won't get an illusionist school of mirages and misdirection as well as a cheliaxian school of devil summoning. But eventually we could get lots of different options which could include feats as well as spells.

One hypothetical example of how this will let them really break the old molds in the future is something like a Ustalav school of wizardry that combines spirit magic (necromancy type spells) and Electricity for a Frankenstein vibe. We also might see one or more Magaambya schools of wizardry in the future that also break the mold of past "schools of magic."

Personally, I am a huge fan of this decision and can't wait to see how it gets incorporated into the player core. Even as a fan of PF2 wizards, I am excited to see the wizard break away from what feels like a bland and restrictive arcane magic tradition defined by legacy elements that don't fit in Golarion, and see what kinds of stuff we get that will feel centered in the game world around them. I think this will also really help PF2 be a better system for homebrewers because it lets you have schools of wizardry that actually make sense to your game world, whatever that might look like.

The next several months are going to be challenging, just because so much more flavorful options are coming through the pipe line. I have a Magic Warrior Wizard in PFS that I basically want to completely rework once I see what new options are going to be available. I can't wait!

If refocusing is being made to be easier, then it is likely that means refocusing is not going to be limited to 1 point regained per 10 minute rest. I think this make sense because focus points really are a unique 2e mechanic and moving them away from "requiring a short rest" is probably necessary to get further away from D&D.

This also makes the oracle in particular need a little more work because they were already in a position where it was too easy to burn yourself out too quickly with the curses from an early level.

My hypothesis is that curse mechanics are getting a little simplified and that is why they are getting moved up to core 1, along-side the witch. I think it is going to be easier for characters to use 2 focus spells in an encounter, more than once a day from an earlier level, at least for the witch and the oracle if not everyone. What do you think?

How is this going to work leveling up past what is 18 now? Will there just be max levels that attribute modifiers can reach at different levels? Will it take 2 points worth of investment to boost past +4? It feels like this could change the way characters work a fair bit. Will all the ancestry changes port over cleanly?

Hello all! Before I go into great depth with details I want to say that overall, the Outlaws of Alkenstar campaign was a lot of fun and played well overall into its thematic space of guns, mana wastrels and stick ups.

The first book was amazing! 5 out of 4 stars for creating a fun premise, giving us the heists and outlaw scenarios to make a gun slinging adventure work well. Many of the encounters feature monsters that are happy to duel it out at range and there are encounter spaces big enough to make that work well and let this AP be the right AP for Guns and Gears to really shine.

Book 2. 3.5 out of 4 stars. Overall, very fun book with great and memorable encounters. Airships, mana waste monsters, enemy mercenaries with guns that are absolutely brutal, a lot of fun. The Cradle of Quartz was a meat grinder. It killed 2 of our PCs and nearly derailed the whole campaign, but we were having enough fun to keep it going, and start trying to bring the story back around. I was surprised to find out that Mugland was the villain of book 2 and not a book 3 villain so the replacement character I built who was entirely focused on revenge against Mugland didn't really fit at all with switch in direction that happens with book three...

Which leads to book 3. 2 out of 4 stars. I wanted to like book 3. I love the overall plot. I love the maw of rovagug as an encounter location. I love bomb threat scenarios. I absolutely should have loved everything about book 3. But the encounter spaces!!! Book 3 encounters are brutal for ranged characters and for parties low on magic, which both are directions the AP kind of leads players towards. From encounter locations that are tiny rooms with narrow hallways, monsters that guns are nearly useless against, and with weaknesses that only really magic can easily activate, it almost feels like the whole third book mechanically makes the characters you built and want to play in this campaign useless. Did other folks have this experience? Our party gave up after getting TPKed by an unexpected creature that could grab all of us at once, was 3 levels higher with an extremely AC and our Investigator, fighter, Cleric and Gunslinger were completely useless against. Alchemical shot and persistent damage almost saved the day, and bad rolls did us in, but by that point it felt like it was too late in the final book to magically have a new set of PCs come in to save the day, because the final clock was definitely already ticking and anyone who could have saved the day at this point, and wasn’t already involved felt like far too great of a narrative stretch.

Did other folks get all the way through it? What did you make of the encounters and maps of the third book? Did it feel like it ran counter to everything thematically the rest of the AP was trying to accomplish? Or did we just have the wrong characters/didn’t take the tech-necromancy foreshadowing seriously enough to try completely switch the focus of our party away from accurate gun toting partials and towards more of a traditional dungeon crawling party?

There is a lot of talk and thought going around right now on attributes in PF2 and especially the relationship between ancestry, class and attributes and what kind of attribute soereads are necessary for X character idea to be feasible.

For many of us, character building is a game in and of itself that provides its own endless hours of enjoyment. Many people have their own sets of “rules” for what makes a character concept viable or not, and all of those “rules” are incredibly subjective, and table and campaign dependent. There is a whole other discussion to be had about wether whether attribute flaws as a trade off for attribute boosts is a fair way to keep the game balanced mechanically and what are the narrative consequences of encouraging the idea of “dump stats” that I care about, but am seeing take place in other threads. What I would rather talk about here are some common situations about attributes I see playing out in actual play, that I don’t see often represented in online discussions about character builds.

“You need an 18 starting Key attribute”

There are builds where starting with a -1 to your key thing will really matter. The more times you roll the dice for a certain kind of check, or use a DC to make others roll against it, the more the +1 matters. This is nothing new. However, starting with a 16 instead of an 18 can mean having the exact same bonuses from your attribute as the character starting with the 18 for 10 levels of the game, while giving you 2 extra ability boosts to go to other attributes over the course of the game. Additionally, in APs, I find levels 1 through 4 move very very quickly, some times happening in game in the matter of a week or less. Levels 5 to 9 almost always include the first largest break of down time and tend to draw out into a very long period of time. Levels 10 through 14 usually include at least 1 big down time break as well, and be a long time in play, but so again dies 15 to 19. Level 20 on the other hand tends to be one big dungeon or encounter and then narrative wrap up.

Some players are building always ti the end game, and starting with an 18 is the only way to max out that primary number at level 20.that is not meaningless. But over the grand scheme of the campaign, if you hit patches of adventures where you might level up once or twice largely from social or exploration encounters with fewer combat encounters, you might really feel having all of your attributes and skills tied up in combat stats. One party “face” is often a problem in the way social encounters are designed to include everyone, and having 3 characters who are terrible at any social checks can set a party back more than even having a party fighter who has a 16 key stat.

Starting attribute spreads are only one part of the character building story because of the massive boosts that you get every 5 levels. However, if 2 or 3 of those boosts are going into raising attributes over 18, that can end up with 4 to 6 attribute boosts ending up as “dead boosts” for a significant period of time for your character in play. Be careful thinking about the end goal and not the process of getting there. Campaigns tend to change foci over the course of 20 levels. Having large parts of the game where your character is just trying to survive/get through as quickly as possible to be fully realized can be devastating if your character doesn’t make it. Retraining and down time are not super consistent, but talking to your GM about what you are doing with your character can help you figure out if that niche thing you want to do in X levels is worth investing the time in building that character to get there.

I like having big dynamic encounters where lots of things can be happening all at once, and have a bit of a reputation for it as a GM. I find this relatively easy to do with VTT maps, often just trying to use a pretty basic base map, and adding components on top of it, instead of having massive high resolution images. Even so, I generally top my maps out at about 100 5ft squares.

The problem is that 500ft is too small of an area to run adult dragon fights in. In one set of movements, the dragon can be almost entirely across the whole map, and if you want to have the dragons flying between buildings in a city, unleashing breath attacks, and then drawing heroes way out of position when they try to attack. I have tried doing this all theater of the mind, but I find PF2 players' characters have so many abilities that interact with very precise positioning, that the players get uncomfortable relying on the GM to describe the active combat zone well enough for the character to have a strong sense of their options.

I tried using a very large scale map, with a combat zone to break out into when the characters were in close, and it worked ok, but I worry it discourages some of the taking advantage of the environment when things like walls, rubble, and other features of the terrain are not big enough and laid out in clear enough detail.

I don't know that there is a great solution out there for this, but I was just curious how other GMs handle open air dragon fights and having the encounter space feel wide open and dynamic?