benwilsher18's page

I'm concerned that as written Caroming Charge is going to cause players to optimize all of the fun out of the Daredevil class, by just building around only using this feat every turn forever. Let me explain:

Let's assume our Daredevil has +4 Strength, and 25 movement speed. At level 2 once he has picked up Caroming Charge, he has the ability to do this every single turn:

Daring Stunt - Stride next to an enemy and perform an Athletics maneuver (probably Shove to deal Stunt damage if possible, but Trip if not).

OR just Strike if they are already next to an enemy, for probably 1d8+4 damage with a longsword, warhammer, etc.

Then once they have MAP, they use Caroming Charge - Stride 25 feet twice (or even 35 feet if they start both Strides next to a Prop), dealing a guaranteed unreduceable 1d6+4 damage (average 7.5) to an unlimited number of targets as long as they are within 2 Strides distance.

The damage ceiling for this damage is massive if there are multiple targets. Compare it to the best cantrip in the game Electric Arc, which does 2d4 damage (average 5) to 2 targets within 30 feet with a basic Reflex save for example, and and you can see how strong Caroming Charge is. Press is not a downside at all as this doesn't have any kind of roll involved. I'm also not including that RAW Caroming Charge doesn't seem to prevent you from affecting the same target multiple times properly.

By level 6, the Daredevil now deals 2d6+4 damage with Caroming Charge. Electric Arc is now dealing 4d4, which is still lower damage, and the Daredevil now can have Fleet and potentially Tailwind online to expand how many creatures they can target. On top of that, they now have Rushing Strike - which they can use with a D12 weapon like a greatsword if they want. So now every turn they can Stride, Strike with a weapon and deal 2d12+4 damage, and then run around everywhere dealing a guaranteed 2d6+4 damage to multiple foes.

This definitely needs to be reworked. Personally I think there should be two changes:

1. It can only effect each target once. This is probably intended anyway and just not written into the feat for some reason.
2. Creatures get a basic Reflex save against the higher of your Athletics or Acrobatics DC (or maybe just Class DC?) against the damage, and if a creature critically succeeds then you stop moving.

After playing through several Adventure Paths and GMing some too, I think I (and the players I play with) have enough experience now to be able to say this with a degree of certainty; Paizo's Adventure Path writers are not consistently able to make encounters involving hazards actually engaging.

Without going into spoiler territory, my experience ranges from older APs released before the remaster right up to several adventures released in the last 15 months. Universally, in every AP I have played there have been multiple encounters with hazards that were at best underwhelming, and at worst just a tedious slog that everyone just agreed to handwave and move past.

To be clear, this isn't every single encounter with hazards in every AP - just the ones where the hazard is the only threat, and there are no enemies to fight alongside it. In encounters where a hazard is just one of several threats, no matter how badly designed the hazard itself is you can usually still have fun with the encounter overall - because combat is fun, and everyone gets to take part.

It is definitely when hazards are the only reason initiative is being rolled at all that the ensuing encounters often elicit groans of frustration or just outright boredom at the table. These encounters generally have multiple problems from the list below, and unfortunately sometimes ALL of them:

*1. The hazard (or multiple identical hazards) were the only challenge in the encounter and they were usually immobile, meaning that often they would be triggered, and everyone would run out of range/out of the room/behind full cover immediately as soon as they got their actions and any threat to the party would just immediately be over.

*2. The hazard(s) did not pose any kind of meaningful threat to the party or their goals even when players were getting unlucky, and there was no time pressure or roleplay to resolve them quickly. Resolving the turns of hazards just feels like a waste of time when a critical hit or critically failed save essentially meant nothing and the group could just shrug it off, and slogging away for 7 rounds because of bad luck did not reach a meaningfully different result than getting lucky or co-ordinating well and resolving it in 3 rounds.

*3. The encounters are usually not dynamic at all. Everyone moves, stands next to the hazard or outside of the threat area, and repeats the same actions every round until enough skill checks are eventually passed, and the hazard repeats the same activity (or does nothing sometimes) for the entire encounter after the initial opening reaction.

*4. Spotting some hazards before blundering into them is often a 20% chance or less for the best Searcher in the party, so even having the whole group on Search makes it unlikely to avoid being surprised by them. This is just frustrating, and makes players in this role feel like their characters are incompetent.

*5. The skills required to meet the easiest DCs to disable the hazards often don't sync up with the recommended skills in the Adventure Path Guide, catching the party out when they have no Experts or better at the required skills. Sometimes this makes a hazard as written actually impossible to deal with, requiring the GM to step in and make changes or improvise solutions.

*6. In mid-level and high-level APs, sometimes the hazards have absurdly high disable DCs and require multiple successes to clear the encounter, making them just take forever to finish even when the players are making optimal decisions. There's nothing quite as tedious as 2 players doing nothing while the other 2 roll Aid checks and Disable checks repeatedly for 45 minutes, because the best player in the party has a skill bonus 14 lower than the DC and they need to succeed 8-12 times to solve the encounter.

Now to give credit to the writers, it's not like they get it wrong every time. But that just makes it stand out even more when they get it wrong later in the same book - sometimes several times.

I'm interested to hear if anybody else has similar feedback and experiences with these sorts of encounters. I really hope that going forward into the Adventure Paths of 2026 and beyond, these boring encounters can be spruced up a bit and made more exciting and less frustrating, as they are definitely a consistent black mark against what have otherwise been some very fun adventures.

Hi all. As a player of a high-level swashbuckler and a GM for a group that has a scoundrel rogue as one of its highest damage dealers, precision damage immunity has of course come up a few times.

I understand the logic behind this. Why should a ghost or a creature made of liquid, stone or paper have a specific exploitable weak point?

However in practice, because the characters that deal precision damage often use finesse weapons that have a lower damage die and they often have a lower bonus to that damage as well as they have less Strength, this immunity tends to stack with the physical damage resistance or Hardness that these monsters commonly have and end up causing these characters to deal almost zero damage with weapon attacks. This can feel very jarring for players. It's especially jarring when those characters land a critical hit, and they see their damage reduced to almost nothing anyway (or actually nothing sometimes).

My personal opinion is that this immunity is probably too punishing overall. It would be fine if there was some sort of consistent workaround or alternative option that these characters can take to still feel useful in combat against these creatures, but there isn't. Athletics maneuvers can't be used against incorporeal creatures, Charisma skill actions can't be used against mindless creatures like constructs, Aid (should) have diminishing returns when used repeatedly against the same target, etc.

I think what I might do from a GM perspective is to introduce a way to bypass precision immunity - much the same as spell-immune creatures always have a workaround, and creatures with regeneration always have a way to shut it off. It might be tough to think up something that fits the theme for each creature, but I think it's probably worth it to improve the game feel a bit.

What does everyone else think about precision immunity?

I've been running a homebrew Pathfinder 2e campaign for about a year, once every 2-3 weeks or so. On the whole my players say that they are enjoying the story and vibes of the campaign, but feelings on the system itself are a bit mixed - and most of the reason for this are issues they have all had at times with the boss fights.

For reference, my group has 5 player characters; three casters (warpriest, occult witch, wizard) a single full martial (scoundrel rogue) and a frontlines kineticist. They started at level 1, and they are just about to reach level 8 next session.

I've had several nitpicks and complaints from them, but the ones that get repeated boil down to variations of these:

1. The warpriest and scoundrel often get knocked unconscious in hard fights, and the action tax of getting back into the fight (standing and picking up their weapons) is not very fun for them.

2. Status conditions that come up a lot in boss fights (Concealed/Dazzled, Frightened, Sickened, Slowed) are frustrating and lead to a lot of wasted actions and bad turns.

3. Strong enemies that don't stay close to the party can be a chore to fight, as their mobility is far higher than the melee players and everyone else does pretty low damage to single targets. They don't find plinking away with ranged weapons, cantrips and elemental blasts very compelling.

4. A lot of passive effects, hazards, auras, area-effect damage abilities, etc. happen in difficult fights, and it can make for a lot to keep track of and it can feel a bit overwhelming.

5. They all get hung up on how many times (not actually that much) that bosses have critically succeeded on saves against their spells and abilities and how useless it makes them feel when they have sometimes multiple turns in a fight that amount to pretty much nothing.

6. Resistances and immunities are annoying (mostly mental immunity, precision immunity, "resistance to all damage except XYZ", and Construct Hardness as a concept are the ones they get annoyed about.)

To explain how I balance my encounters; I tend to only use creatures and hazards in the range of PL+2 to PL-2 when possible. The party have only ever faced Extreme encounters twice, both of which they went into with an in-game day of preparation and knowledge gathering in advance, and both of which they were allowed to prebuff as much as they wanted before the fight commenced. Every other combat encounter I have ever run has been Severe at worst, and never more difficult than Moderate if the fight was against things with a lot of resistances and/or immunities.

Do any more experienced GMs than I have tips that could help me make boss fights more fun? As it is I don't think it will be long before a few of the players give up on the system altogether, and as we have been playing TTRPGs together for years and I LOVE this game and don't want to run anything else right now, I don't want it to come to that if I can avoid it.

Thanks for reading.

https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/pathfinder2e/actions/create-a-diversion-rm

Does the action have unlimited range, as long as the target can see you (or hear and understand you if you use words)?

The reason I'm asking is because of the Distracting Performance feat, which allows a character to Create a Diversion and have one of their allies become Hidden instead of them. A character standing very far away from the battlefield and using this feat to grant the Hidden condition to their allies seems quite powerful (combined with the Confabulator skill feat also to allow this trick to be attempted repeatedly).

A player in one of my games wants to play a magical tattoo artist orc barbarian, which sounds like a cool idea - but there were a couple of rules I wanted to check before OKing it.

1. Can you have and simultaneously use multiple magical tattoos of different types at the same time? Or are you limited to "wearing" one at a time like you are with a cape or a pair of boots?

2. If the answer to question 1. is "yes" then can you have multiple of the SAME type of tattoo? For example, investing multiple tattoos which have a a once-per-day trigger in order to use the triggered power multiple times?

3. It is mentioned that tattoos can be altered or removed with dispelling magic - but does this just remove the magic or does it completely remove the tattoo?

Thanks in advance