Witch of Miracles's page

Honestly, I always felt like Hunt Prey was just learning from 1E Slayer. Studied Target was just so utterly practical and smooth compared to the favored enemy system ranger was saddled with. Sure, it took actions at lower levels... but most people would take that over their class mechanics turning off entirely when they fought the wrong enemy. It just made sense to slap 1E slayer's core thing onto the new ranger, since it accomplished something similar with less grief to the player.

Persistent damage stacking would blow out certain abilities. The runesmith playtest rune that adds bleed to weapons, for example, would've been even stronger than it already was (and it was pretty ridiculous just because you could prep them to pop later).

I personally find that really unintuitive, but that's just me.

I also think it would be bad formatting to have to check trait tags instead of just... reading the damage type next to the damage, which is the place it's most relevant.

This has all been a bit messy, but I am glad to see them taking feedback and responding quickly.

Seen more than my share of dev teams that stick to their guns, either in a misguided attempt to save face or out of sheer stubbornness. It's refreshing to see something else for a change.

I'm genuinely unsure why the game bothers to have the player suggest skills for monster ID. By RAW, the skills you can use are largely fixed anyways. Why negotiate?

At every table I've run or played at, it's been:

Player: "Hey, I want to ID this thing. What's the relevant skill?"
GM: "Arcana or Crafting."

The most negotiation we might get is a followup, "Any chance Lore (whatever) might be relevant?"

The GM is always free to allow alternate skills at higher DCs, of course. But I think that's houserule territory?

Way too dramatic of an opinion. We're gonna see clarifications on instance of damage quite soon, pretty sure. In the end, they needed to clarify it so even a bad interpretation is better than none.

The thing is, most people with a stake in the answer to the question had basically already settled on how to do it. We wanted an answer more as a formality.

Then they gave us an answer that we pretty much universally liked less than what we were already doing, even though what we were already doing was available as a way to answer.

Then they started backtracking and saying, no, we mean this other thing that's better but still confusing and still not what we were already doing and thought was fine.

The crux of it is, there was already a received interpretation. It's not errata vs. nothing. It's errata vs. what we were doing already.

I do think it's also worth noting that skill feat quality heavily influences skill selection, and Kip Up almost makes it worth investing in acrobatics by itself. A lot of other skill choices just have extremely weak feat options.

Since several people have mentioned it, I'd like to say I agree that rarity impacting RK DC was a huge miss. It'd be one thing if the bonuses in the game could really get overinflated like 1E. But the end result in 2E is that you normally do the worst at learning about the creatures you would most like to know about, both mechanically and narratively. It's really frustrating.

It's a bit of simulationism the game doesn't really handle well.

It kind of really is, which frustrate me as a GM because sometimes I like being able to let characters who want to be smart feel smart and give them info but the baseline framework for RK is so wretched. Highly action intensive, highly volatile even with training, low payoff (you essentially get one piece of information). Even purists tend to rarely run RK strictly by RAW because it's so bad, sometimes even without realizing it.

... Reminded of another tabletop I play where its RK mechanic has no failure feature (you spend the action and just get the info) and gives you the monster's entire statblock instead of just answering one question and even then it's kind of a pain to get players interested in using it.

The PF2 version is so so so so so bad and so limited it always kind of baffles me when people worry about the power level of RK options.

Yeah. I've drastically buffed RK at my table. It is a free action, lets you select what kind of info you want from several categories, rewards an additional single piece of info for every 5 over the DC you hit (though I don't refund you if you hit a category with nothing), requires you to be at least trained for topics DC 15 or higher, and cannot be tried again. The only change I ever made to this rule since I adopted it was changing it from 2 pieces of info per to 1 piece per because I hadn't really accounted for multiple players being invested in RK.

This is a massive change.

The effect is that RK simply now functions instead of never getting used.

Bardic lore, Loremaster lore, esoteric lore, and warfare lore are the textbook examples of unspecific lores. A specific lore can only hit a narrow category (e.g. Fey Lore, Undead Lore).

EDIT: As a counterpoint to the idea that esoteric and warfare lores are specific lores, consider how odd it would be if taking diverse lore made your recall knowledge DCs for the same creatures higher because it lets you use RK for anything (unspecific, on your view) instead of just creatures and haunts and curses (specific, on your view).

It just seems like a pretty raw deal. Free action is significantly better than normal, but "will fail against on-level enemies and locks you out of further checks" seems significantly worse than normal.

-8 HPs on Rysky Surgery and Nat 1 on Medicine check followed by -8 HPs is the pinnacle of fun.

16 damage at level 1 from, say, a Wizard is nothing to scoff at.

Now you just need to convince your enemies to let you heal them to death.

"Guy with a negative medicine check that moves to you and uses risky surgery+treat wounds on you for 3A" would make for a pretty funny low level enemy.

An additional clarification on how stunned interacts with slowed would be nice, given the errata. Actions lost to stunned values aren't supposed to stack with actions lost to slowed. However, that applies to actions lost at the beginning of the turn when actions are given. So it seems like the action loss now does stack if you're stunned during your turn, but does not stack if you're stunned during someone else's. Is this intentional?

...are people really complaining that Stunned now only takes away the number of actions listed on their condition value in all circumstances instead of potentially getting 4 actions for the price of 1?

I am complaining, yeah, because the cases in which this could be a problem almost universally cost you 2A+1R and required an enemy save. The two exceptions I know of are Power Word Stun (which is still 2A+1R, but always works and has longer range, so it's broken and should've been hit on its own) and crit reaction attacks from firearm users with critical specialization (which require the attack to crit and a save against class DC, require you to not use fake out if you're a gunslinger, and probably are more likely to occur on builds for the bad gunslinger subclasses than the good ones anyways).

It's among the most edge case interactions in the rules outside of readied power word stun. Outside of PWS, it mostly nerfs things that don't need additional nerfs.

It's not like stun is some plentifully available status effect. The ways to stun enemies on their own turns are already limited, high risk, and expensive (readied stunning fist), or heavily gated by rng and feats (crit spec firearm crit on target of opportunity). The only exception was readied power word stun, which is only online at high levels to begin with.

I think what bothers me most is that I feel like none of the implications here are good. To me, it says the devs must think one of the following:
-that readied stunning fist or firearm strikes going off as a reaction and critting with crit spec are too strong, which is just false
-that PWS is too strong and that they should just nerf stunned to account for it instead of nerfing power word stun itself, which is a bad balance approach, and that it's further a good idea to create a bespoke exception to gaining and losing actions just for stunned in the course of doing so, which I also consider a bad design approach
-that they didn't realize that stunned already kept you from taking actions if you were stunned on your turn and thought how the interaction worked was unclear, which means they didn't understand the rules as they currently exist

No matter what, I don't like it.

Resentment witch was not a stray, 1000% deserved. Now they can only extend slow success once, still really good.

PWS needed to be fixed (it deleted boss turns completely, no save) but agree on the other cases not mattering much and it being aesthetically annoying.

Disappearance was an outright broken OP spell that let you quickened stride and become undetected, with very little counterplay from the enemy. Now it's less awful.

Resentment Witch largely makes the rest of the table better at doing their jobs and still has all the downsides of being a prepared spellbook caster in a game that strongly favors spontaneous casters. Things that are strong in a way that tends to make the rest of the table feel strong are much less concerning than things that eat other people's lunch, so Resentment Witch wouldn't have been at the top of my priority list to smack down.

PWS should've just been hit by itself. Tacking "this can't be readied" onto it would've been ugly, but would've had less collateral damage. As it stands, this clarification is actually an indirect nerf to gunslinger of all classes, since their crit spec inflicts stunned.

Disappearance was absolutely broken (or worse, depending on the table), but now it can't even perform the function it's intended to perform. I just can't get behind that. It's not like this game gets errata every two weeks; the spell may well be nonfunctional until the end of the game's lifespan.

Oh geez. That's. Uh. Well, that's comedy.

That really rubs extra salt on the wound on kindle inner flames being """upgraded""" to give a rune instead of just giving flat fire damage forever. I should really houserule that (and the other similar kin auras), honestly.

I think I actively dislike this errata round.
-One of the only good prepared spellbook casters caught a massive stray.
-Stunned is now less intuitive (and arguably nerfed) to cover an edge case, the only abusive version of which is probably readied power word stun. (Gun crits with crit spec and stuff like readied stunning fist are not terribly abusive.) Previously, getting stunned on your turn would've had "you can't act" lock you out of actions until your next turn, and then you'd lose the actions at that time and it'd wear off. Now it just wears off immediately if you run out the stunned value? And it also creates its own special edge case, via errata, that violates the general principle that you only gain or lose actions at start of turn. If stunned is going to work this way, why can't I get actions on the turn I haste myself? I hate this sort of arbitrary inconsistency.
-Disappearance appears to be absolutely gutted. It no longer says it works on imprecise senses, so against any enemy without a special precise sense, it's no better than rank 4 invis. A lot of special senses are imprecise, too. It now doesn't work against a lot of enemies that foil senses works against. I'm not sure this is even remotely worth an eighth rank slot.

I need to look over more, but this is not a winner for me. Clarifications confirming how the community already handled things (i.e. instances of damage) are nice but ultimately not useful; meanwhile, a lot of the other stuff has been actively annoying.

I'm hesitant to really place blame on any individual event or party. I understand thinking the new options did start to feel less coherent with previous system design close-ish to when some of the system's major original designers left... but there was also just a lot going on in the company around that time, and I'm not really one to try to ascribe the quality of a whole company's product to a few people to begin with.

It's more likely that a hectic schedule, employee turnover in general, and a combination of other problems (the distributor issues, the economic climate, etc.) have made it an especially difficult time for the company and its workers. It'd be stranger for that not to show in the product.

I feel like my expectations changed from new content being more tightly designed and fitting into the game's very controlled vision to new content being a much more scattershot experience.

It's hard to say where in the process things have changed, from the outside, but there's a lot of design decisions now that just don't match the initial balance of the game, and abilities, spells, and class features with basic errors (be those templating, formatting, or proofing errors). Two examples from battlecry that immediately stick out to me are Helpful Reload and Shock and Awe.

Helpful Reload is, bluntly put, a wild cheater spell and I have no idea how it got printed. It fundamentally upsets Gunslinger balance and action economy. "Spend a reaction and a rank 2 spellslot to reload an ally's weapon" should never have been printed.

Shock and Awe, just... there's a lot going on here.
-The save block refers to a "target" even though it's a 50 foot burst.

-The duration is 1 round even though the effect is instantaneous, and it makes no mention of what happens to enemies that enter after the initial effect.

-This is more subjective, but the spell itself just feels wrongly tuned. It's 3A for a 50ft burst that only targets enemies, inflicts frightened 1 on success, frightened 2 and stunned 1 on failure, and frightened 3 and stunned 2 on a crit failure. It also has keyword soup (auditory, emotion, fear, illusion, mental, visual). This is... weird.

--> The nearest comparison to this, imo, is synaptic pulse. 30ft emanation, 2A, stunned 1 on success, 2 on failure, stunned for 1r on crit failure, mental and incap traits. So compared to synaptic pulse, +1A buys you... a decrease in how good it is at stunning enemies (it's like it has incap even against lower level enemies), but better targeting, and you staple third rank fear onto it.

----> Those improvements come at the cost of a whole lot of keywords that enemies can resist the spell with, though, and the increase in AoE size is honestly not that helpful. And frightened and stunned have a degree of anti-synergy, because you're debuffing fewer actions and thus making the frightened less valuable. This doesn't really matter in practice (as yeah, I'd rather inflict stunned than not), but it kind of muddles the usecase of the spell compared to Synaptic Pulse.

--> A second comparison is freezing rain. Freezing Rain is a good mark for what a 3A spell might provide at Rank 5, and it's also about action denial. It creates difficult terrain in a movable 20ft burst, and deals damage against all creatures inside and makes them save against slowed (slowed 1 for 1r on fail, slowed 2 for 1r on crit fail) on sustain.

----> Shock and Awe provides an alarmingly large amount of instant value compared to freezing rain, mostly mitigated by the keyword soup and the fact the AoE on Shock and Awe is pointlessly large. In comparison, Freezing Rain can provide more value over the course of an encounter, has damage as a rider, and works via mechanisms that are more difficult to circumvent.

The spell just feels off. It's like it's being actively nerfed with keyword soup in exchange for this massive AoE it has and just doesn't need. And the usecase for the mechanical effect is less clear than most comparison spells even if the effect is quite strong. I just feel like it's tuned wrong along multiple dimensions just looking at it. I don't feel like I saw much of this sort of "it's just off in weird ways" design in larger books, before.

I would like to just add to this conversation that one of my first GMing experiences for the system was Malevolence, and I actually had a Tangible Dream psychic in that game that /did/ play as a glass cannon melee.

It was, frankly, a pretty exciting play experience for the player. Their highrolls were memorable, and they were indeed constantly in danger because they were so squishy. And they were quite high impact for a caster at those levels (particularly at level 3 and 4) in exchange for the risk. Those are probably some of the best levels for the build, honestly, because they're smashing things with 4d8+4 imaginary weapon when psyche is unleashed and the accuracy penalty on casters hitting AC hasn't gotten too out of hand yet. They really carried their weight as a damage dealer for the party.

It's not like Tangible Dream psychic is some theoretical build that no one does because they know melee spell attacks are bad. It's a genuinely attractive playstyle for some people, and the nerf is pretty painful.

Shocking grasp was a rank 1 spell attack roll spell that targeted one enemy in melee. It had slightly better base damage but didn’t heighten as well and was outpaced by imaginary weapon by rank 3.

Thunderstrike replaced shocking grasp in the remaster. The lowered base damage and increased heightening as well as making it a saving throw targeting spell and gave it range. It didn’t lose damage to gain those things. 2d8 heightening is too high for a focus spell, period. It was especially too much for a spell that can have two targets.

Making the base cantrip target 2 enemies, even at 1d6 and melee, would be plenty to make it stand out. It doesn’t need to do more than 2d6 heightening as a focus spell.

These are focus spells designed for a class with limited spell slots, though. They need to carry more weight. They are the compensation package for getting bad casting.

If they were going to bonk it, I'm shocked they didn't do something like chop off a d8 off the amp at rank 1. That would've put it in line damagewise with that one necromancer focus spell from the playtest, with the downside of needing to be in melee (compared to the necromancer's downside of needing to sac a thrall).

I've had issues with hazards and haunts since I started running the system (and my first foray into that was Malevolence, so I've had more than a few of said issues). The OP has the right of it.

The biggest issue in my experience is that most solo hazard encounters don't seem to consider that the party can just... avoid them. There's usually no reason to interact with them unless you're forced to, and you're rarely forced to, so you don't. The party is informed it's there (or isn't and someone triggers it), and then they just walk around it or something. It's silly.

And like the OP says, even if you don't avoid them they often have no long-term cost. (Malevolence at least does do something about this, to its credit.) They feel like bug bites in too many cases instead of an actual scare, for all the reasons the OP describes.

Hazards as part of another encounter are a different story, obviously. But hazards just in an otherwise empty hallway or room, or along your travel route, just are not the stuff unless they're really really really scary.

Honestly, the prevalence of multiclass archetypes, in particular, is a symptom of the game both failing to scale in certain ways (early class abilities poached via archetyping scale worryingly well) and the game failing to provide in-class solutions to obvious problems (granting strong 1A abilities and reactions).

Too much of the game's mechanical payload is frontloaded. The result is that archetyping grants you features on par with in-class feats of a much higher level in terms of real, in-play value. It's admirable to want to make the stuff you do at level 1-6 remain relevant to a degree throughout the game, but this is a consequence that wasn't really designed around.

And we've talked at length already about how desirable it is to get good third actions and reactions on classes that might natively lack them.

I would also like to say that even in FA games, no players at my tables or the tables I play at have known to take psychic on magus without being informed by a GM. Even then, one of those magi never bothered with it and is still very happy with their build, being a more RP-first player.

I feel like the proliferation of alchemical items that solve common problems is far more of a nail in the coffin than trick magic item, which eats a skill feat and doesn't work with a lot of useful spells.

Like, if you haven't looked at the alchemical item list in a while, you really, really should. Some of the stuff on there is more than a little good.

The issue that a remastered magus has to deal with is that the focus spell space of the class was given over to conflux spells that recharge the spell strike. When you MC to get spell attack roll spells, you do lose out on the recharge focus spell option. That doesn’t really matter much with the starlight magus but the rest of them do have action economy issues with having to spend an action just to recharge. Just adding in conflux spells that use an attack roll ihas more complications that it might seem like.

You don't lose the option at all. You're still free to spend your focus points as you see fit. And psychic even gives you focus points more quickly than just going plain Magus, considering you get good focus spells at 2 and 6 instead of just at 2 (Force Fang) and then possibly never afterwards (depending on your opinion of Hasted Assault). If you really are in a situation where using a conflux spell multiple times is beneficial, you can use it more often for having taken psychic archetype—not less.

Yeah I've been to this rodeo before. ;) Of course, it's not really about Protector Tree at all: back when it was just a spell, people didn't really think that hard about how it worked because it has to be heightened to keep up so it feels fine (or even rather weak considering what that spell slot could be doing). A max rank spell slot designed to protect people that doesn't protect the caster is... not good.

But then Timber Sentinel happened, and that's when these discussions all picked up steam. People largely actually want to nerf Timber Sentinel but don't see a way to do it without house rules, so instead Protector Tree gets targeted on what amounts to a technicality which makes an already meh spell pretty terrible.

I just never saw it as particularly strong past the early levels to begin with. A kineticist spending 2A on timber sentinel at level 11 to prevent 60 damage is not good; that's usually worse than using a higher level impulse for utility or AoE damage. A kineticist spending 2A at level 1 or 3 to prevent 10 or 20 damage, though? That could stop someone from hitting the floor the next time they get hit, so that's pretty good. Archetyping for Timber Sentinel also usually means that you're either using Timber Sentinel instead of casting a higher rank spell (which is usually bad) or instead of just doing your job as a martial (which is also usually bad because you're important to winning the damage race). My read has been that most people play at low levels, so people have an inflated opinion of Timber Sentinel.

EDIT: Protector Tree also falls off really fast because its AC is 10 and doesn't scale, and you just start being able to obliterate it with easy crits.

This whole thing only bothers me because "it means the tree's ally, not you!" is such a strange reading. If someone thought that Protector Tree was itself just written wrong, or was poorly balanced and wanted to change it, that'd be something else entirely. But I just don't see how to get to "the spell protects the caster" by RAW. And Trip seems to be arguing that the RAW is that it's talking about the tree's ally. So I'm left scratching my head. That's the part that especially bothers me.

I guess I'm also kind of baffled by the assertion that Protector Tree creates a animated tree creature. That's just... not necessary for the spell to work, and not said by the spell.

This stuff is more "I'm really nitpicky about semantics (both as part of who I am and because my degree trained me to be)" than it is that I think it's essential to keep Timber Sentinel from protecting the caster. I do think it's too strong at early levels if it protects the caster, but it falls off pretty fast. If it turned out I was wrong and Timber Sentinel protected the caster, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Which is a waaay worse pain than that of just reading some text, getting the wrong conclusion, and taking the ego hit of being corrected later.

...Haven't I already conceded I was probably wrong once already in this topic, in addition to elsewhere in other conversations? For example, I already said that I probably value single feat dip amped guidance less than is warranted because of both choices from other players in games I've played in (like aggressively pursuing status bonuses) and some house rules at tables I've played in and ran at (like giving out hero points more often, and usually running with FA) leading me to misjudge its utility. And the topic about subordinate strikes also had me change my rules interpretation via the discussion in the topic.

I do take people's arguments seriously. There wouldn't be a point in participating in these conversations otherwise. I care a lot more about having a well-supported opinion than I care about being the one who "wins" an argument. I'm just pressing really hard on this reading of Protector Tree because it doesn't click for me at all.

If the spell was intended to exclude the caster, it would not say "protect you from" and instead would say "protect your allies from"

A Medium tree suddenly grows in an unoccupied square within range. The tree has AC 10 and 10 Hit Points. Whenever an ally adjacent to the tree is hit by a Strike, the tree interposes its branches and takes the damage first. Any additional damage beyond what it takes to reduce the tree to 0 Hit Points is dealt to the original target. The tree isn't large enough to impede movement through its square.

There is nothing in the text of protector tree that implies it protects the caster. There is nothing that implies "ally" means "ally" of a magically animated object here. There's no reason to think the reading deviates from the normal reading of ally, and a whole lot of reason to think it doesn't because of how strong the spell is if it also protects the caster.

The Ghoran ancestry feat is more evidence than the person who wrote the Ghoran feat runs Protector Tree wrong and it slipped past QA than anything else. It wouldn't be weird for it to; I've seen more people who assume you count as your own ally in pf2e than people who know you don't.

EDIT: To be extra clear, I think it would need some wording like this for me to think it protected the caster on the grounds of it checking the tree's ally:

"...You and your allies count as the tree's allies. Whenever an ally of the tree is adjacent to the tree and hit by a strike..."

There is nothing even remotely close to that, so it makes more sense to assume it uses the default syntax and reference for a spell, where "ally" means the caster's ally.

I do not like ramp up abilities. Too much movement, too many other PCs doing their stuff, and targets often don't last long with the crit rules whether a spell crit or melee crit from multiple party members launching attacks.

Yeah, same. Ramp-up works if fights are long enough that the thing you're ramping up to still has a significant impact; however, the early turns of an encounter are the ones that matter most here because fights don't go on long enough for it to be otherwise. It's not great to spend a few turns getting ready for your big attack, only to realize that the fight is mostly decided by the time it goes off—and that's exactly what'd happen with backloaded abilities in this game.

Dragged out fights can exist in this game, but they're so far outside the normal course of play that designing backloaded abilities for them is a rough sell. And sustained spells kind of fill that backload niche better anyways; you do get progressively more value from them the longer a fight drags out.

I think the major problems with psychic dedication are more general game design issues over issues with the archetype. I see three big issues:

1) Too many classes just get poor reaction options, and psychic is a bandaid fix that can be shoehorned onto any class that uses INT or CHA for anything.

2) Too many class feats fail to be competitive with archetype dedications and archetype feats in general. Basically any caster dedication is better than cantrip expansion, for example. The 3-feat lockout on other archetypes doesn't counterbalance the power of most dedication feats at all.

I also don't think psychic dedication is significantly stronger than a lot of other INT/CHA archetype dedications—it's just one that gives a benefit that a wide array of characters can make use of. I'd also argue that while amped guidance is good, it's honestly not as strong as a lot of people make it out to be, since it never lets you crit and also applies a status bonus. Getting a party-wide +1 status bonus to hit is already one of the the most common party-level optimization goals, and a lot of the best buff and prebuff spells (e.g., heroism) give status bonuses as well.

3) Psychic itself is weak, so poaching the things that are good about it is just better than playing it. Psychic promotes a playstyle that is bad in the context of PF2E's design, and doesn't offer enough to compensate; psychic has poor class feats that often ask you to make your teammate's lives harder and class features that make your own life harder, so taking the good parts of the class via archetyping is quite attractive; amps don't compensate well enough for a lack of spellslots, but sure are great backup options for casters that already have a lot of spellslots; and so on.

I consider the other issues below—the ones the thread zeroes in on—to be more minor, personally.

1) It lets you accumulate focus points unusually quickly on a lot of classes. I think this is fair. It tends be very beneficial early, but significantly reduces the value of focus spell feats later.

2) Magus benefits disproportionately from psychic archetype. I consider this minor because it's frankly more of a problem with magus's design than a problem with psychic archetype in and of itself. As per why:

2a) IIRC, unamped imaginary weapon is only slightly better than gouging claw. The amp specifically is the problem, because it makes focus spells extremely competitive with slotted spellstrikes.

2b) I believe Force Fang is still a competitive use of focus points and gets more competitive the higher enemy AC is. The problem is moreso that the other conflux spells aren't great—and being able to spellstrike with amped IW then force fang to recharge (provided you contort your feat selection to do so, which isn't trivial) allows for an extremely potent one-round burst without spending permanent resources.

2c) There are still other good focus spells for magus to use, even if you disallow amped IW. The largest benefit of psychic is that it's an INT class and a lot of people like to have INT on their Magi to increase their spell saves anyways. The other favored option (champion to pick up fire ray or winter bolt, along with better armor proficiency to mitigate dumping DEX) requires CHA instead.

2d) Magus is itself a bit of a problem child, design-wise. It's a great class from a pure damage perspective, but its action economy is stilted and it has a hard time taking advantage of its own class features because spellstriking is so attractive. I suspect that amped IW would be a less attractive pickup for Magus if the class were designed better.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

...So Double Strike should proc off-guard, because I get all the effects of a named action strike, including effects that ask for Strike by name, even though using an activity isn't the same as using its subordinate actions and you don't think you ever actually use a strike and just drop in the rules text of strike?

Yes. That is what that sidebar says.

While resolving the subordinate actions treat them as if you used the referenced base action, potentially modified by the activity. While not resolving the subordinate actions only the activity exists.

That's why a subordinate strike gets everything a regular strike gets, but when not resolving it the only thing that you can refer to is the activity, so next/previous action and the like won't see the subordinate actions.

No. This contradicts the text.

Subordinate Actions
Using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions. For example, the quickened condition you get from the haste spell lets you spend an extra action each turn to Stride or Strike, but you couldn't use the extra action for an activity that includes a Stride or Strike. As another example, if you used an action that specified, “If the next action you use is a Strike,” an activity that includes a Strike wouldn't count, because the next thing you are doing is starting an activity, not using the Strike basic action."

Hide
"You cease being hidden if you do anything except Hide, Sneak, or Step. If you attempt to Strike a creature, the creature remains off-guard against that attack, and you then become observed. If you do anything else, you become observed just before you act unless the GM determines otherwise."

The Hide text specifies Strikes. You are starting the activity Double Slice; Double Slice is in the "anything else" bucket, because Double Slice is not the same as using strike twice; therefore it requires GM fiat for the enemy to be off-guard to the first hit of double slice. I think every GM should rule that the enemy is off-guard to the first hit of double slice, mind, but it is GM fiat by the rules.

If you attempt to Strike a creature, the creature remains off-guard against that attack, and you then become observed.

This part of the Hide text is functionally equivalent to saying, "when hidden, if your next action is a Strike, the enemy is off-guard to that attack and then you are observed." It is effectively identical to the example given in the sidebar. This is, in fact, the problem this whole thread is about.

===

I should also note that what I said there is internally inconsistent, to point out that shroudb's position there is internally inconsistent. It requires Double Slice to both be treated as equivalent to strike and not be treated as equivalent to strike.

My best guess is they mixed up "effect" and "affect." What they said makes some sense if you had read "This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects" as "This subordinate action still has its normal traits and whatever affects the subordinate action normally still does." That's not what the rules say, though.

How about you answering my question for a change though:

If you can only do an action after an activity completely finishes, if a subordinate action is the same as the base action, how do you start it?

This only makes sense if you think the game isn't telling you to do other actions as part of activities to begin with. But it is! It even says you don't need to spend more actions or reactions to do so (which effectively makes them free actions, one might note).

An action might allow you to use a simpler action—usually one of the Basic Actions—in a different circumstance or with different effects. This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects, but it's modified in any ways listed in the larger action. For example, an activity that tells you to Stride up to half your Speed alters the normal distance you can move in a Stride. The Stride would still have the move trait, would still trigger reactions that occur based on movement, and so on. The subordinate action doesn't gain any of the traits of the larger action unless specified. The action that allows you to use a subordinate action doesn't require you to spend more actions or reactions to do so; that cost is already factored in.

Note the wording is literally saying you use the basic action.

And since you get ALL the effects of stuff that affect "the named Action Strike" with a subordinate action Strike, you get it.

...So Double Strike should proc off-guard, because I get all the effects of a named action strike, including effects that ask for Strike by name, even though using an activity isn't the same as using its subordinate actions and you don't think you ever actually use a strike and just drop in the rules text of strike?

Witch of Miracles wrote:

shroudb wrote:

Less than a shorthand, and more like building blocks, yes.

That's why activities often change how the base actions behave (adding dices, speed, removing stuff, adding and removing traits from them, and etc).

The game has a handful of said base actions, and uses them to build the more complex actions (activities). All the rules are easily referenced this way without having to repeat them all the time, and stuff that are suppossed to influece the base parts of the game (like weapon specialization adding damage to your attacks as an example) can be easily accounted for in current and future content with extreme ease.

The thing is, either the game is telling you to use a strike when it says to strike, or it isn't. You are saying that the game is not telling you to use a Strike when it says to use a strike inside of an activity; it is saying this in lieu of copypasting the rules for Strike into every activity.

So you would say Rogue does not get Sneak Attack on any attack but a Basic Action Strike. This is a necessary consequence of your position. Do you agree with that statement?

No, I don't, because thankfully the game tells us to

Quote:

This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects

And sneak attack is an effect of a Strike.

This is not logically available to you. Strike is a named action. Sneak Attack specifically refers to a Strike by name. It does not refer to any trait or effect of Strike; it specifically says Strike.

When your enemy can't properly defend itself, you take advantage to deal extra damage. If you Strike a creature that has the off-guard condition with an agile or finesse melee weapon, an agile or finesse unarmed attack, a ranged weapon attack, or a ranged unarmed attack, you deal an extra 1d6 precision damage. For a ranged attack with a thrown melee weapon, that weapon must also be agile or finesse.

Less than a shorthand, and more like building blocks, yes.

That's why activities often change how the base actions behave (adding dices, speed, removing stuff, adding and removing traits from them, and etc).

The game has a handful of said base actions, and uses them to build the more complex actions (activities). All the rules are easily referenced this way without having to repeat them all the time, and stuff that are suppossed to influece the base parts of the game (like weapon specialization adding damage to your attacks as an example) can be easily accounted for in current and future content with extreme ease.

The thing is, either the game is telling you to use a strike when it says to strike, or it isn't. You are saying that the game is not telling you to use a Strike when it says to use a strike inside of an activity; it is saying this in lieu of copypasting the rules for Strike into every relevant activity.

So you would say Rogue does not get Sneak Attack on any attack but a Basic Action Strike. This is a necessary consequence of your position. Do you agree with that statement?

You do not have to invent anything though?

That's the whole reasons that paizo gave us the building blocks called base actions. To make more complex maneuver without hving to have a page describing each one of them.

In short:

My position is that when I use "Act together" is use the action called "Act together". That action may tell me to attack...

So, on what you are saying, Skirmish Strike says to Step and Strike. ("Your feet and weapon move in tandem. Either Step and then Strike, or Strike and then Step.") But what you should read is not what is written, but something like this: "Your feet and weapon move in tandem. Either [perform the rules text of Step] and then [perform the rules text of Strike], or [perform the rules text of Strike] then [perform the rules text of Step]."

This is literally what I mean when I say that you have to be saying the game uses Strike "as a shorthand."

At the end of the Sudden Charge, did you finish a Strike, or did you finish a Sudden charge? Because you need to finish the Sudden Charge to do your next action.

Performing Sudden Charge is paying the 2A to invoke sudden charge and then performing the subordinate actions of stepping twice and then attacking. Once you've attacked, you've done everything sudden charge told you to do, so you've completed it. There's no need to add a "sudden charge finished" step. Doing the last thing the activity tells you to is finishing the activity in my book.

That is the rule. That is the containerization. An activity contains its subordinate actions and using the activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions: not its first one; and not its last one.

That alone doesn't imply any containerization. It just says that activities are not identical to the actions they ask you to perform, that using Flurry of Blows is not identical to striking two times in a row. Containerization is an entirely separate assertion from the identity assertion made here.

snip

So here's the thing. To understand your position at all, I need you to answer one question. Do you believe you actually perform a Strike when the game tells you to in an activity like Skirmish Strike? Or do you think the game just tells you to perform a strike "as a shorthand" and you never perform any action that is named "Strike"?

I am taking the game at face value. The abilities tell you to perform a Strike; I say you perform a Strike. Do you think you are not performing a Strike when activities include a Strike? Do you think that a Summoner using a Strike as part of Act Together is not actually performing a Strike? Do you think Rogue gets sneak attack on Skirmish Strike if they have flanking?

The way Trip parses this, for better or worse, gives an extremely clean answer to these questions: yes, you do perform a strike, and it is a strike just like every other strike. This just doesn't. It requires you to invent the existence of Strike* and divine when the rules mean to include strikes-in-activities when they say Strike, and when they don't.

The rules clearly separate the effects of a subordinate action from the subordinate action actually counting as said actions.

This is, unfortunately, a misunderstanding—one I shared. The exact wording is "using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions." All it ultimately means is that using Skirmish Strike, for example, is different from doing Step and then Strike without using it. It is natural to further read into this that "using Skirmish Strike means you don't actually do a step or a strike," but that would contradict the plain rules text of Skirmish Strike that says you step and strike.

Using an activity can modify its subordinate actions, as per the rules text. The correct way to see this is that you use Skirmish Strike for 1A, and it instructs you to step and then strike or strike and then step, modifying their costs so you're doing both as a free action, and not allowing you to do anything else until you've used a step and a strike. This is implicit rules text in basically every activity; you pay the cost of the activity, perform the "activity," and then do any further subordinate actions it instructs you to do as a free action without doing anything else until you've finished. (The "without doing anything else until you've finished" part is supported by the statement on combined activities in spellstrike, and also just by common sense—you would look at someone funny if they tried to feint inbetween stepping and striking during skirmish strike.)

On this reading, the reason the free action strike doesn't count as a strike for haste is fairly simple: the Skirmish Strike modified the cost of your strike to be a free action already.

If you don't use this reading, you're stuck with the weird thing I proposed earlier, where there is Strike and Strike*; Strike is the standalone action; Strike* is the one used in activities; and you have to guess if the rules text wants things to apply to Strike and Strike* or only Strike every time it says "Strike." Or your other alternative is a kind of containerization that prevents the game from looking forwards into the contents of activities, but may or may not allow it to look backwards into them depending on your view of the RAW, while executing the game normally inside the container. Both can be made to work with enough ad hoc adjustments, but they just don't play nice with other rules text and require more band-aid fixes.

-The reading where there's Strike and Strike* requires an unacceptable amount of houseruling and makes it impossible to tell what's meant when the rules say Strike. (Sneak Attack is an easy problem case for this reading, as are abilities like Debilitating Strike. Summoner's Act Together would also be a nightmare for this, because it would make it so Stride used with Act Together is not the same as Stride used outside of it.) It also contradicts the plain text of every combined activity: you are literally striking.

-The reading where you containerize doesn't square with the plain text in the subordinate actions bar that says "...the next thing you are doing is starting an activity, not using the Strike basic action." This makes it clear that the activity itself is invoked (that you're "starting an activity"). It is also worth noting what it doesn't say: it doesn't say that an ability that says "your next Strike gains X benefit," like the Nagaji poison ancestry feat, won't work with the strike inside of Skirmish Strike; and it is not stated that backwards referents (like debilitating strike) don't work, though you'd be forgiven for thinking they wouldn't based on context. (One should note, though, that they assiduously avoided the "your next strike" wording in favor of almost exclusively saying "your next attack," probably to ensure no one would ask if "your next strike gains X" and "if your next action is to strike" worked differently. The Nagaji poison feat is the only time I saw "your next Strike" used.)

The "Activities are a flat chain of actions" ruling that actually exists in the text results in the expected behavior. No need to invent mechanical scope voodoo.

That's not clear, because the flat chain of actions reading makes several wordings a nightmare to parse.

-anything that says "your target is off-guard against your next Strike" probably works with activities including a subordinate strike, though I won't guarantee it
-anything that says "if your next action is a strike" does not work with a subordinate strike
-anything that says "if you attempt to Strike a target before the end of your next turn"... might work with a subordinate strike? Unclear if this is asking for the strike basic action or not!
-anything that says "the target is off-guard to your next melee attack" (e.g., feint) definitely works with subordinate strikes

I also really hate this because it makes activities parse differently than basic actions. On your reading, Strike just causes you to perform strike; there is no "starting to strike" and then performing Strike. It's extremely unintuitive to have basic actions work normally, but then have activities like spellstrike produce some phantom action called "spellstrike" with no effect before executing cast a spell and a melee attack.

It also is a real nightmare when abilities like debilitating strike (that refer backwards) interact with subordinate strikes, on your reading. It's not at all clear if the precondition is asking for the Strike action specifically or if subordinate strikes qualify. It's especially bad if there's a way to have that kind of ability proc in the middle of something like double slice; it's not clear that's even allowed, because the rules for spellstrike imply you "typically" can't interrupt the flow of subordinate actions in a "combined activity." (But maybe that's because most, though not all, spellshapes are 1A, even though there are a few that are a free action that a magus might be able to use.) And "combined activity" seems to be mentioned... in spellstrike and nowhere else. Good luck divining the intent here!

Furthermore, I also have no clue why they're called "subordinate actions" if they're not a part of the activity. What you're saying is that flurry of blows is three things, not two things: it is flurry of blows, then two strikes, and the strikes themselves are not in fact flurry of blows, just something you do after flurry as a free action. Or perhaps it is four; flurry, strike, strike, flurry ends? This is just a ridiculous reading to me on every level. It makes much more sense to say Flurry of Blows is just the name for doing two strikes in one action, and that Flurry of Blows is not named Strike, so things that ask for Strike don't work with flurry of blows. And it's completely asymmetrical with any activity that doesn't invoke a subordinate action! It's awful.

===

...Okay, I typed all that, and the more I read how the system is literally written, the more I'm inclined to agree it's actually written the way I hate. What a miserably awful way to design your semantics. Every activity with subordinate actions has a phantom action with the action cost of the activity up front to block forward referents that care about your next action, but only the activities with subordinate actions? ...But it doesn't block backwards reference? ...And Flurry of Blows actually isn't the strikes, which are their own action, just the phantom action before said strikes? Really? Really? REALLY? This is so awful. It feels absurd to read it. And it looks correct as a description of the system as written, especially considering the lengths they go to in order to avoid phrases like "your next strike" from occurring in the rules. Why would anyone ever design something this ugly? I'm gonna scream into a jar and bottle it for my players to open on Halloween.

If someone disagrees with that, please provide a practical use case for buying and using Spellstrike Ammunition on a regular basis. Or even for buying it for niche use cases.

Magus only has melee spellstrike by default; starlit span is the only subclass that has ranged spellstrike. The ammunition can be used by other magi with their backup ranged weapon.

A champion (or warpriest, or maybe even a monk) could use it with their focus spells, as well. Champion can pick up Fire Ray, right? It's expensive, but it doesn't seem awful aside from the cost. It's not a terrible trick against a flying enemy, in a pinch.

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

As much as I miss free access to some utility spells, I am very, very glad that no PF2e GM is ever going to just find out their player took Blood Money because they saw it on Nethys... and then find out oopsies, the wizard ruined the economy at level 3 with blood money and masterwork transformation haha isn't that crazy guys what a fun game c:

Witch of Miracles wrote:

These kinds of commenters aren't unique to PF2E. What's unique to PF2E, though, is the quantity and concentration of them.

It's... really not. Like even remotely. 5e forums are this way. Lancer communities are this way. PF1 and 3.5 were this way when they were more popular. Even more expressively narrative systems like World of Darkness get this kind of talk. "TTRPG company released something that's really good/really bad and people are talking about it" is just like, a standard component of discourse in these kinds of games. The variance you see is mostly a matter of how crunchy the system is, you see it more in PF2 and less in PBTA, because the system rules are more/less weighty. But like... people talking more about the crunch of a crunch heavy system than a system that isn't meant to be crunchy also is kind of a self evident revelation.

Like IDK you're just describing one of the most normal aspects of online discussion for crunchy TTRPGs and then framing it as something special about PF2. The reality is this is just how people talk about games like this. Like people complaining about how bad the 5e ranger is is basically its own meme.

Maybe you've simply had different experiences than me, but the proportion of those players to other kinds of players has been unusually high in PF2E. At no point did I say those posters don't exist elsewhere. I simply feel like they make up an unusually large percentage of participants (emphasis on unusually). My experience is that most of the people who grow really attached to PF2E and talk about it online are attached to the mechanical aspect of the game, and they're attached to it as a game. Not as many Vorthoses in online discussion, to drag out that term from discussing types of MtG players, but a whole lot of spikes.

Another way of putting it is that lot of other crunchy RPGs have commenters who're invested in the mechanics, but like the crunch as a form of simulation or representation or metaphor. Those players are disproportionately absent in 2E discussions.

This is such an oddly antagonistic way to describe the GM-player relationship.

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

I want to jump into this just to say that I, personally, feel you're really underestimating the difference between the whitelist-based system in PF2E (where anything uncommon, rare, or unique is off-limits by default, and the GM whitelists options for you) and the blacklist-based system in 1E (where everything is open unless the GM says otherwise, and it's on them to tell you what's off-limits and play whack-a-mole). If you've got a girl who's been running 1E games for ten years, yeah, she'll tell you that Speak with Dead is off-limits in the murder mystery campaign, or you'll only get half-answers when you use the spell because the victim themselves doesn't know what happened. A new 1E GM won't even know what to blacklist, and the easiest blanket blacklist (allowing only PFS legal options) leaves most narratively powerful spells on the table and doesn't even ban stuff like emergency force sphere.

The "system default" is very different between the two, and that matters.

A new GM confronted with speak with dead for the first time in the middle of play in 1E is in the position of having to tell a player they can't use a spell they had no reason to think was off limits, or they're scrambling to improvise solutions to a problem they didn't know existed 30 seconds ago. A new GM in 2E can tell the player it's uncommon and they forgot to ask permission. It's been remarked on many times, but 2E's rarity system allows GMs to sort of make the system the lame hall monitor spoiling their fun instead of having the GM expend the social capital themselves.

I think there's honestly some truth to the cynical take Sigh is expressing—but in my opinion, paizo is as much an Adventure Path company as a game system company, and APs run much better when the players aren't one spell (possibly a spell published in some splatbook long after this campaign was made!) away from derailing the whole thing. To me, it's not malicious; it's a sensical way for a company that makes a lot of money off AP subscriptions to design its system. Why wouldn't you want the system those APs run within to make the APs easier to GM, with less possibility of the players doing something the AP book won't have space to cover? It makes them a better product for the person using them.

I feel like the only meaningful benefit of PF3E being a more polished version of the current product would be possible backwards compatibility.

I'd prefer a more drastic shift. We have PF2E; if I want to play it, I already can. It's more than a complete product, at this point, and has several fairly iconic APs attached to it (such as abomination vaults and season of ghosts, the latter of which polls as one of the best APs the company has ever released). There's enough PF2E content for me to run games for a few years as it stands.

I also think that since a lot of the driving forces behind 2E's system design have left the company, it may well make sense to take a different tack with them gone. It's an extremely opinionated design. I'm unsure whoever paizo assigns or brings on to develop 3E will want to carry the system ethos and design forward.

Personally, I also feel like PF2E is a fairly rigid framework where coloring outside the lines, even a tiny bit, can stick out like a sore thumb. And we've seen how detrimental that can be time and time again in the reaction to new material. The balance-heavy ethos draws in a crowd that's fairly picky about how different classes and options stack up against each other; a single option out of whack really starts to dominate the discussion. (Think about how exemplar dedication was such a topic on its book's release.) If I were paizo, I don't know if I'd want to make another system where I'd have to keep such a tight eye on the content of every single splatbook to keep those more vocal parts of the playerbase from being annoyed—especially not with paizo's release schedule. The game just demands a high level of system mastery from its content designers to avoid breaking things, and a high level of QA on its products (from people with good system mastery!) to catch slipups. And I don't know if that's a good place to be, marketwise. It's more attention to detail, and more system fluency, than I think people expect from any market competitor. It's a good differentiator if you can keep it up—but it inherently draws a fickle audience. You're punished if your quality goes down, even if it's still better than your competitors. There's an incentive to move away from the PF2E formula.

I understand wanting "the perfect version" of something you already like, but after seeing god knows how many tabletop and video games get iterated on for this many years, I've just accepted the perfect version of a thing doesn't exist and you're better off being grateful for what you've got. Something novel and interesting is usually more enjoyable than a really polished version of an experience you've already had, anyways, once you've had said experience enough.

The thing is what ive found in this forum is that people here do not treat anything as a consequential statement if its not hyper specific.

So laughing to them isn't speaking and wont cause any air loss.
I had similar discussions with enthrall claiming you cant choose to take actions inconsistent with your giving your undivided attention to the caster. But they consider it all flavor text and not instructions.

To me, this read of uncontrollable laughter and pointed question is in the same category as physics-lawyering the temperature of a fireball to try to cheat in extra effects not listed in the spell. It is something I, as a DM, am going to shut down immediately without further argument.

Even if you think laughing fit should force a creature to open its mouth —which I again find questionable, because it works on creatures that don't have mouths at all, and the game's only restriction on what creatures it will and won't work on come from its trait tags—or you're happier playing a game where mechanics entail flavor that entails further mechanics in this way, which is your prerogative... I think any DM with half an eye for balance will still push back on you here. At the least, if I counterfactually had a table of players that -all- wanted to play this way, I'd be flavor-lawyering them back and telling them it's functioning as an incapacitation effect and will grant save upgrades. And that's assuming I didn't just ban the strategy outright, in the way I'd be playing whack-a-mole with silly strategies like this in 1E.

Yeah. Assurance has uses, but it feels like it's supposed to a replacement for take 10—and it's just not. This is mainly a problem because the game has a lot of places where it feels like take 10 and take 20 should probably exist, still. Parties do sometimes just have no time pressure. Failure at some repeatable tasks (like picking locks when there's no one you're hiding from) just can't be made interesting. Assurance doesn't solve these, and it looks like it should.

Instead, the problem is just tossed to the GM to solve. I compress or outright skip checks if it's detrimental to game pacing out of combat at this point, sometimes just substituting things like "PCs with x proficiency rank automatically succeed."

I will say that—as others have mentioned—climbing is, by RAW, the single most egregious offender for this in the game. It really needs fixing.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Claxon wrote:

Let imagine a world in which the wizard can "cast spontaneously" any spell in his spell book.

Does that really fix the wizard? I don't really think so.

Because he's still going to have to know that perfect spell for the situation.

I made everyone spontaneous casters with all signature spells to balance the playing field and it did not fix the wizards.

In this game, class features are everything because casting is balanced across every caster with the same proficiency and the same number of actions to cast per round and roughly the same number of spell slots.

Being able to cast slightly more often is one of those things rarely needed and needed even less as you gain more slots.

Base class features that integrate well with your class are everything.

That's my suspicion. Although in your case, while you made all casters equal in terms of spells, it just makes the wizards failure points more obvious how they stack up to other classes.

My question is more, if you left other casters as they are, and let wizards spontaneously cast any spell in their spell book would that fix them.

I think the answer is still no, because they don't have good class features to really make their usage of spells stand out.

I asked myself a while ago if even unlimited 1A spellsub would make wizard competitive with sorc. There was a discussion about it, but my instinct at the time remained no, because sorc has enough spells to function well in the context of the system, and more aren't really -needed-, even if they can be nice. Others (particularly Teridax, I think? it's been forever, might be wrong) disagreed, and felt it would be too strong.

I think considering the cost of spells vs. the default wealth allocation, I'd say now that it would remain weaker than Sorc in-combat. 2A to cast a good spell with sorc's benefits, like sorcerous potency and blood magic, is probably still better than 3A to cast the best spell for the situation. But the wizard would obviously be better out of combat, and would excel in some play sequences (particularly things like chase scenes run using the chase system).

Really, a lot of how good the wizard and spellbook prepared casting are depends on how useful it is to have access to a larger selection of lower level but heightenable spells from the arcane list. (I say lower level because on-level spells are prohibitively expensive, and very low level spells become exceedingly cheap as players level.) We've discussed that ad nauseam at this point, and there's not a real consensus across posters here as to the value of spell variety.

I think you misread what I wrote. Outside of mookbusting, only "success" matters. For mookbusting, I even said much further upthread that AoE incap is my preferred method.

...So I did misread. That's my bad.

I still wouldn't agree that only success matters for single target, though. I can understand sort of calibrating your expectations to single targets succeeding their saves. But there -are- single target spells where the failure condition is a huge part of why the spell is valuable, like confusion.

2x APL+0 isn't even a fight outside of the very earliest levels. It's a mild inconvenience unless the party collectively can't roll above a 2. If you can't resourcelessly clear fodder moderates like that, the party has deeper issues.

Same idea also applies to some severe budget encounters: e.g., 3x APL+0, or 2x APL+1 on odd levels.

Moderates can still go south at any level; depends on how annoying the enemies are for the party's strategy, even before the possibility of bad luck. As a DM, I hesitate to call anything I'd actually put on the table "fodder."

That being said, I know where you're coming from.

It's less that spells only as useful as their success entry and more that a lot of spells are balanced with the expectation that they hit multiple enemies and see maybe 1 fail and 2 successes.

I'd also say a lot of mookbusting incap spells are more effective than you're giving them credit for; I've seen Calm end a surprising amount of combats. Incap spells are situational, but very strong when they're applicable.

A lot of single target incap-style spells -are- bad, but a few are strong enough to pick despite the downsides (like Uncontrollable Dance). It's also true that a spell like Paralyze can have a huge impact in a fight that's something like 2x APL+0 enemies. I dislike single target incap because it's inherently more situational than AoE incap, but it is still very useful when it's relevant.

I'd also note that buff spells also don't have guaranteed effects, because a buff didn't actually do anything if it didn't change any outcomes. Heroism isn't more "guaranteed" to be useful than a blast, and can often have significantly less impact than a fireball would.

WRT stunned: I often forget the "senseless" part because it's omitted on the premaster GM screen, which I still use. (I never bothered to get a new one.) That's my bad.

To be clear on what I meant, I meant the distinction as a negative. I get differentiating them, since they are different, but I do not think that differentiating them needs to come hand in hand with narrative text being belittled as compared to rules text since I still think they're two parts of an important whole. My issue with the term "flavor text" is the negative connotation, not the differentiation. What I find silly is saying one part of the whole is less needed than any other.

Since I've been pretty clear about how I don't think the flavor text is important to parsing what things do, I should also be clear: I think the flavor text is a really important part of TTRPG game design, and helps keep the game from feeling like a soulless number pusher. I also think a good fit between mechanics and flavor text is an integral part of the game design. I just don't think flavor text is a good port of call to understand how to run the game mechanically in most cases.

The stunned one is an interesting example.

Because if we ignore the "you can't act" part it's basically no different from slowed. But if having the stunned condition during your turn at all means you can't act that's probably harsher than intended.

It does raise the question why do we have both stunned and slowed.

The description of stunned also has some interesting implication with how something like haste works with it....although rereading the description haste causes quickened with restriction on what kind of actions you take so it would interact with Stunned and Slowed in the same way.

So anyways...what's actually supposed to be the difference? It doesn't seem like there is any.

The duration of stunned is determined by how it ticks down. If the system had an incap spell that inflicted stunned 4, it'd eat 3A on the first turn and 1A on the second. Slowed always eats the same amount of actions every turn. I can't think of any effect inflicts stunned at high enough values for this to matter, though.

The most important difference between slowed and stunned as the game is currently designed, though, is that being stunned keeps you from using reactions until it wears off.

The boomerang argument was patently ridiculous at the time, and remains ridiculous now. From a mechanics perspective, people were arguing the weapon got the returning rune for free; nothing about the way we know the game balances weapons indicates a returning rune fits in the boomerang's power budget, and it certainly doesn't have any of the powerlevel cuts you would expect if a weapon were to get a returning rune for free. That argument doesn't withstand scrutiny, either mechanical (free returning rune is silly) or narrative (boomerangs don't come back when they hit something in real life).

Counterpoint: the first sentence of the Stunned condition is flavor text that should be totally ignored when interpreting it.

Flavor text is nearly universal and nearly universally nonmechanical, and exists 20% for stylistic and 80% for copy fit reasons.

I'll admit that this one slapped me until I doublechecked that "you can't act" is indeed treated as keyword text by the game every time it appears. The break in formatting convention on stunned is genuinely confusing (and I wish it were more obvious that "you can't act" is basically a keyword).