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They are items in the rules sense as everything in that chapter is referred to as an item, even materials. The rune has an item stat block, with an item level and the magical trait. I don’t think we can say the feat is describing magical “things” flavored as “items”. It is clearly referring to the game rules in chapter 11 and any item found there that is common, has the magical, arcane, divine, occult, or primal trait and has an item level of 2 or less.

I was surprised to find people using layperson meaning on a game rule term of art

Is the formula for a rune considered a magical item for picking as one of your four free formulas when gaining the magical crafting feat?

Thanks for the response.

7. So once you have the feat, the most amount of time you'll need to spend learning a single spell will be 1 hour and 40 minutes. (100 minutes), by 7th level you'd spend half that so 50 minutes, and by 15th it could be 10 minutes or less. The downtime rider becomes less and less relevant as you level.

This also leads to another question. If you fail the Learn A Spell check, can you continue to reduce the cost with additional downtime days? or do you need to wait the 1 week or level gain before trying again?

Second hand information on a random podcast by some guy who says he knows other people who asked one developer a question about this doesn't convince me that you need a healing kit for this.

Would love to get even partial answers for this.

I do worry about math fatigue. It was already apparent during the playtest, and I expect that high level play will continue to exhibit this going forward. I also do not like how meaningless your bonuses are. All throughout the playtest, I would attempt to maximize some bonus, without checking the bestiary, and I would always be amazed at how easily the monsters evaded what I thought was my best. I feel like if I've made optimized picks and roll above a 15 on the d20 I should expect to connect, and sadly the level bonus to everything means that most of the time that isn't true and that I was way off in my expectations.

I do appreciate how this opened up more room for designing challenging monsters, but as a player, I don't know what level the minions and big bad were, so I don't know that I should feel lucky I survived or even realize that I can "dance through combat with style" because the monsters are below me level. All I know is that I rolled a 17, and that I have to ask the GM if that hit, because I honestly don't know if it should or not.

At that point I might as well not do the math and just announce raw d20 results. If the encounter is "on level" the bonuses and DCs cancel each other out for the most part. level +2, yeah, anything below 15 won't ever hit, moving on to the next player's roll, rinse and repeat.

I don't think that the PF1 or 5e system is any better, but I do think that this system has made it rather impossible to know when your bonus is actually good or your check is likely to succeed.

I also feel like the way that it makes lower level challenges irrelevant means I'm never going to face that horde, or run into a level 2 hazard after I've reached level 5. Instead all the challenges published will just continue to grow along with your level and from one session to the next I'll be asking did a 24 succeed?, did a 26 succeed?, did a 29 succeed? on the same die roll! I'm unlikely to be stopped by a locked passage that I could easily crit succeed on picking, because the module author won't put it in my way.

I understand the part about reducing the time to learn, what I don't get is the part about using downtime to learn a spell.

1. What task level do I use for learning the spell via downtime? Spell level?
2. Do I still have to make the "Learn a Spell" check?
3. If I do, can I still get it for half price if I critically succeed?
4. Do I still need a teacher or a copy of the spell on scroll or in a book?
5. If not, can I use this to get any spell from my tradition's list?
6. Also, if not, can I get access to uncommon, rare and unique spells this way?
7. How is this any more economic than just working a day job and spending money the traditional way?
8. Is it really going to take a month to learn a 3rd level spell for free?
9. If I do understand how the "Earning an Income" table and this feat work, is there really no difference between expert rank downtime checks and legendary rank downtime checks? (except for 10th with you earn an extra gold per day on success.)

Thanks.

The thing is in Pathfinder/D&D there are levels of play. Most typical fantasy tropes, such as LOTR, Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones are in the 1 through 7 range. There are only a few things in those works of fiction that cannot be created by lvl 7 or so. So after that you have to start getting into beyond that fantasy. Like Eragon (toward the end anyway), Beowulf, or most superhero characters. After Lvl 13+ the characters are essentially demigods. The stories of Hercules, Achilles or Superman are those types of stories. One just simply can't expect someone who is level 15 to behave the same as someone who is lvl 4.

Just played chapter six and my level 14 character felt nothing like a demigod. Didn’t even feel like year seven Harry Potter.

In PF1, there are so many core, base, and hybrid classes to start with, and each of them have interesting archetypes that are compelling from 1st to 20th that I never really felt the need to multiclass or dip. I would rather see that approach continue in PF2 than the current system. I feel like it only seems great because the core classes are so rigid and underwhelming, not because the dedication feats are good. I also think career change characters need to be supported. One of the most fun campaigns I played had all of us start as fighters and after 5 levels we found our path. Usually it was finding treasure that we wanted to use or a mentor willing to train us. Combat tactics that we favored in those early levels became the springboard for a more advanced class. It wasn’t a low magic campaign or anything, but it was super fun and memorable and impossible to do in PF2.

Can you pay the difference without the craft skill?

Also curious about this question.

That seems wildly ineffective. RAI questions truly need Developer input and speculation and disagreement isn’t very productive.

I had hoped maybe something like a keyword/phrase to add to your subject line to help Developers zero in on threads that can be quickly answered. I’d even suggest the OP, finish things off by putting “answered” in the subject line too

There are many rules that seem unclear as written, or that are missing altogether. Much of that is by design, and some are just typos or omissions that could easily be cleared up in one sentence. I see a lot of threads that could be resolved with a simple "yes" or "no" answer.

Where is the best place for the FAQ-like closed ended questions to be raised where they have a high likelihood of getting a Developer answer?

Bolstered seems like a reasonable way to rein in the abuse

I totally agree that from an action economy standpoint, a spell that succeeds can often greatly out perform a pair of melee/ranged strikes.

The problem is it makes mages extremely boring when they don't succeed or you want to concentrate the next round and cast a new spell.

More spells should have flexibility, like a single action minor base result with the option to add one action for improved effect/target/focus. Without this, the spell caster is practically immobilized in combat where battlefield control is mostly gone and all the interesting parts come from combining actions and movement in new ways. Lots of single action spells could be circumstantially useful, but only after a meta magic effect was applied, which would bring the number of actions back up to 2, but also allow for moving out of harms way as well.

With so many 2-3 action spells, you can't do neat things like combining action and movement into an activity the way the martial classes can. And really that is about the only saving grace of the the 3 action economy.

Interesting abilities like

"Flashy spell": activity (2 actions), cast a single action spell and then make a sneak check. Your magical casting emanations are bright enough to temporarily blind any creature looking at them, you have cover and may roll to sneak away at half your movement.

"Drive by Slapping": activity (3 actions), cast a single action spell of range touch, you gain a +1 circumstance bonus on your melee touch attack roll and stride up to your movement speed. Regardless of whether the attack succeeds, you can them make another stride immediately after.

just don't can't participate in the action economy because spell casting is always an activity that sucks up most of your round.

Why not both? Potency runes add dice up to their bonus or your proficiency, whichever is smaller.

What actions for negative damage from disrupt ki?

Restriction breeds creativity

someone mentioned how bad it will be to balance every new archetype against all the existing classes down the road. I totally agree it will be almost impossible to test because of the combinatorial expansion rate of each new class and archetype.

The base and hybrid classes had a story and theme as someone else mentioned and I for one really appreciate the design that goes into making the strengths of each half compliment and synergize with each other. The playtest is way more bolted on and really doesn’t provide the same satisfaction.

Another way to describe this is meaningless choices. There's a lot of rules out there that come to the same answer and the effect that gives the player is that everyone is a clone

There are 671 feats in the book, of those only 92 grant your character an entirely new ability not covered by skill uses and basic actions. Most of these new abilities are in the form of powers that cost points and resemble spells. 52 feats merely grant a proficiency increase, most of which don’t t stack. 8 provide a companion, and 13 are a static increase in things like hit points or bonus damage to dice.

The remaining feats modify core difficulty checks of things everyone gets. They grant a bonus, remove a penalty, modify action or time cost, increase duration, altar the targets, or remove prohibitions on the base activity.

I would say that only 30 feats listed actually qualify as a true feat, the rest could just as easily be a handful of tables for ability score, class level, proficiency rank, and penalties, because they are just numbers applied to dice rolls with little description and no role-playing flavor at all.

The powers could be a collection of spell lists since only the fighter, ranger, and rogue are non-spell casters. Even the barbarian has special totem rage powers, although they are the least spell-like and closest thing to a true feat in the entire rulebook.

I’ll probably bring up a new thread since a detailed discussion is somewhat off topic here.

I also suspect PFS had something to do with the popularity of 6th level hybrid casters. Not only did you get to bring something to the table that could fill two or more party roles, but everyone finished playing at 12th level anyway so 7th-9th level first edition spells need not apply.

I don't really like the playtest archetypes at all. They are too rigid, and can never come close to a 50/50 blend, and even the 70/30 blend is pretty mediocre since you can't even get 100% single classed with the core classes. The best you can get within your own class is about 40-50% since there are about two or three paths through you primary class and you never get enough feats to be good at more than one of them.

I’m leaning towards considering most feats harmful to the game at this point.

Let’s go with those that require a certain constitution score and medicine proficiency. Basically this is all dealing with health like avoiding a disease, suffering through it, and healing back up to full. There are a series of checks that are always made outside of magical cures. The feats and skill proficiency don’t really change how this works at a fundamental level, instead they modify the numbers in the checks and results, period. Why have these non-choices at all, when level advancement increases the underlying ability bonus and skill increases do the same for proficiency bonus and both unlock your ability to buy the feat at specific gating levels, all to make the same level one check with higher numbers. It would be a much simpler, approachable, and fun game if these
In game currencies, i.e. ability and skill increases, just unlocked the numbers automatically. Less moving parts, same end results.

Or take Stealth. Three untrained uses are what the playtest gives us. All depend on ability, level, armor class penalty, and proficiency rank. The general feat, and skill feats reduce penalties or increase bonuses only. None of them really change the fundamental action or skill check results in a non-numerical fashion. So these choices aren’t really interesting at all and the skill check is complicated by tons of corner cases and feat and rule cross referencing and overruling statements spread across hundreds of pages of rules.

All of this would benefit by just using unlocks that turn on once your ability score or proficiency rank is high enough. All the penalties should just be listed as penalties that raising bonuses all you to naturally overcome, and can be ignored in situations where they don’t apply. All of this should be in one place too, instead of spread across 4-5 chapters and disconnected from each other.

Shooting a Longbow is another skill with a bunch of feats that gradually remove shackles from your ability to snipe and barrage targets. Which is all that shooting arrows boils down to in a span of 1 minute. Again, ability and proficiency increases and predefined penalties would provide a satisfying progression without the illusion of choice and unsatisfying feat taxation feel it has now.

This would go a long way towards reducing the complexity for new players, while providing plenty of reward for specialists, plenty of utility for generalists, opportunities for interesting new spells that compliment your proficiency, and more design space to focus on class feats with real substance.

I don’t think it’s been mentioned here, but after playing part of the lvl 12 playtest I think the numbers have finally gotten so big that doing the math at the table is no longer very fun. Instead it requires scratch paper and a calculator. I have no idea from level to level if my hit bonus is any good or my AC or spell DC either.

I feel like this edition wasn’t designed for pen and paper, but for a digital tactical RPG where everything outside of combat is basically a cut scene showing a far more mundane magic less world. I feel like the balancing has focused too much on encounter mode at the expense of every other part of the game.

I understand that people want to make skill and proficiency have a place at the table instead of everything handled by scrolls, wands, and godlike casters. But I do have to agree that forcing a low magic campaign on everyone has not been pleasant.

Our party's cleric got pined by the spikes, but the druid cast obscuring mist which concealed us and caused the manticore to have to hover closer. The 5 flat DC miss chance saved us a lot of damage and we eventually used the gnolls short bows and a spiritual weapon to knock it out of the sky.

Thanks for bringing up these issues Colette.

The final playtest should really go into detail under each skill what the Exploration mode uses look like and what their benefits and limits are. Just like encounter and downtime uses are detailed.

Some responses to the points your brought up.

+1 to fixing the way armor proficiency is acquired. Nobody wants to invest in proficiency for a category of armor they don't intend to wear.

I don't know that granting each of these categories a Reaction is the correct path, but I could see them gaining either an Action, Free Action, or Reaction as applicable.

I think of it as more along the lines of how Motorcycle GP riders have hardcore knee pads, and so they can practically lean over until their knee pad touches and be safe. Some more fantasy related ideas could be:

I’d rather they just stick with PF1 style archetypes and treat weapon and armor like skills are treated, with free increases and a separate pool of skill feats that vary based on class. The PF1 archetype system is just easier to approach and can be developed as whole without all the exponential combinations that the new archetype system has. Yes I know that some combinations might not be thought of but Paizo has surveys now to seek out missing ones and get them designed, developed from 1 to 20 and published pretty regularly.

Yeah my elf archer is boggled that a lightweight weapon like a longbow is the same bulk as hide armor. The playtest ideas of encumbrance seem way out of wack from reality. And they certainly don’t enable any of the cool armored characters from fantasy stories I’ve ever read or watched.

I would be happier if the natural critically went away and it was just +/- 10. It seems less punishing to specialists, and makes the critical a results seem more realistic.
The action/free action/reaction system is okay, but man does it need a lot of player planning. And it does slow down combat a bit because now everyone needs to do their max of 3 things in order to get value out of there turn.

I actually like the idea of class providing a sequence of proficiency increase and feat choices as each class levels up, but the current progressions are not ideal.

I would like to see classes gain proficiency increases much differently. It would be nice if they could get a certain number of proficiency increases to apply to certain groups and for those groups to get matching feat choices.

e.g. These are related groups that have proficiency ranks and could benefit from having corresponding feats.

One thing I notice is that the 4 degrees of success has LOTs of room for tweaking how a certain skill check feels and resolves.

All for #3 lite, each proficiency unlocks more skill uses. I think that solves the PFS problem of not having anyone capable of making the check.

I think getting a free feat with each skill increase is very flavorful as demonstrating increased mastery in that skill by training towards a feat matches up with a lot of good stories.

I still would provide some general skill feats to allow for choosing those below your proficiency. Perhaps you can only spend those on feats that require proficiency level below the current skill level.

I don’t think the multi-class option presented in pf2 is really on par with 6-level casters. I don’t think using 4 class feats to cast 2 cantrips and 2/2/2/2/1/1 and spells per day is anywhere close to 3/4 casting. At best it is 2/5 casting and severely limited in resources by comparison. And trading 4 class feats and having to wait until level 4 to get spells is a steep price to pay.

It seems that those classes in PF1 had lots of flexibility too, which IMO points to good design. Something all classes should strive for.

Seems like some tactics are just “walking and chewing gum” combos, so why not allow you to do just that and use the higher skill bonus to make the one roll. E.g Carousing and Looking Out would make one check using whichever is higher, diplomacy or perception, and the failure result in fumbling the off skill, like oops you knockever a drink as something caught you eye, but you see nothing out of place, maybe try again after you deal with the mess in front of you.

I think kits would be a nice improvement. They don’t need to take up much space or even be mandatory, just list the traits that make sense for that subrace

I agree with the OP and have said as much in other threads.

I almost like the whole skill proficiency and skill feat pool aspect of characters enough to say why not do this in a more generalized fashion?

I'm considering the Paladin class for chapter 5 and I was kinda floored that "Sense Evil" is an 8th level feat. I mean, WTF? how is a paladin ever expected to make it that far without some ability to tell evil creatures and people from good ones? It just feels wrong. It should be a 1st level class feature and follow the Detect Magic model for Illusions vs your level.

Retributive Strike is melee only. As an Elf demon hunter worshiping Erastil and using a Longbow, this class feature is completely unusable. For such a key pillar of the class, this just seems wrong. I say go back to the drawing board and make this feature into an optional feat.

Blade Ally: Again melee only unless you invest in the 6th or 10th level feats, the 16th and 20th level feats again are melee only.

I don't think the current paladin fits the roll of 'Destroyer of Evil', and instead feels more like a 'Holy Speed Bump'

If the game needs a Guardian class, then just make it and leave the Paladin be..

It might help if you could cash in general feats for archetypes

I’m for option 3, although I did like the option 2/3 alternative.

I think the attack rolls versus skill checks have already wildly diverged. Mostly because attack rolls get to factor legendary twice, once for proficiency and once for weapon bonus.

I would like to see a different implementation of the assurance feat, especially if it can become an aspect of proficiency rank. But if not, then it was might be nice to throw a bone to the triple step checks in the form of adding your proficiency rank to any subsequent checks if you succeeded on the first one.

E.g. if you pass the first pick lock attempt as a master, you would add +2 to any further checks on that lock, because in theory you nailed step one and if you need to start all over you should have the knack of it and can focus on the 2nd and 3rd steps.

I feel like that at every level up on the rogue, cleric, and druid that I’ve played so far. I am feeling like that as I make a bard for the 5th chapter.

Biggest causes:

I don’t think we can all agree that the new class agnostic archetypes are strictly an improvement.

It is an inherently punitive system, so from a player point of view it feels bad. I think they understand how that ruins the game for many people since they ackowledged it about resonance.

I would rather see a systems more like this.

Proficiency provides:

The section on flanking seems a little abiguous. Note the bolded word is actually bold in the printed book, so I expected to find it's definition in the glossary.

Both you and the ally have to be threatening that enemy: this means you both must be wielding weapons or ready to make unarmed attacks and not under any effects that prevent you from making attacks. If you have reach, you determine whether you are flanking creatures out to the distance of your reach because you threaten all of those squares.

Do ranged attackers threaten?

Actually does proficiency in short bow or long bow include the composite versions?

I dislike the archetypes as feat chain design after looking at the possibilities. I think they are way too restrictive and I really prefer the fully fleshed out archetypes in PF1e. As these are written, you basically limit everyone to a dip since most of your class features can't keep up with level unless you spend class feats, and classes don't get an equal amount of class feats, certain ratios of multi-classes are impossible due to primary class lacking enough feats.

I agree, and in some respects the dinosaur forms seemed very single note in play. I think the incentive for taking more of them is building up to 4+ feats to get the extra shifts per day.

Overall the wild order druid progression left a bad taste in my mouth. I disliked nearly everything about it, except the auto-heightened spells.

Each of the archetypes have a level 4 basic feat that gives you access to the level 1 or 2 class feats of that class. e.g basic discovery, fury, muse's whisper, dogma, wilding, maneuver, kata, benediction, hunter's trick, trickery, blood potency, or arcana.

Can these feats be taken more than once?

So the proficiency is gated to the following:

Level 1: Trained - Cantrips and 1st level spells
Level 2: Expert - 2nd and 3rd level spells
Level 7: Master - 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th level spells
Level 15: Legendary - 8th level spells and above.

Or like the archetype feats:
Level 1: Trained - Cantrips
Level 2: Expert - 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level spells
Level 7: Master - 4th, 5th, and 6th level spells
Level 15: Legendary - 7th level spells and above.

I also like the idea of proficiency granting meta magic feats instead of having feat taxes.

But then lots of spells that used to naturally increase in intensity, targets, range, and area as you leveled are now just fixed in everything but intensity and you are required to trade up to higher level slots for that increase. It wouldn't be a bad idea to apply some of those modifications based on proficiency for each spell. I could imagine a legendary spell caster can cast a burning hands that is a 25' cone by add an extra somatic action, while having the Widen spell feat could let you do it without the extra action, or with a 3 action spell.

When crafting ammunition is there a batch or do you always just craft 1?
Can you supply a casting of other spells to vary the spell arrow effect?

I'm pretty sure the answer is 1 and no for the playtest, but will this sort of thing be fleshed out in the final edition?