don't wake baby's page

Let's take a Rogue with the Acrobat archetype. As the rogue gains levels he/she/they wind up with both the Tumbling Strike and Mobility feats.

If this Rogue fails a Tumbling Strike, does Mobility prevent an attack of opportunity?

The Tumbling Strike feat has the MOVE trait and the failure states "You remain in your original space but can still Strike". The Tumble Through feat states on a failure that "Your movement ends, and you trigger reactions as if you had moved out of the square you started in." and the Mobility feat states "You move in a way that denies your enemies the opportunity to retaliate. When you take a Stride action to move half your Speed or less, that movement does not trigger reactions."

Or a different way of asking is does Mobility only apply to the Stride action or does it apply to other move actions?

Hi,

There is something I want to make sure that I'm reading right. The Swashbuckler feat, Antagonize, appears to be always on. There is no mention of any switch that allows a character to selectively choose whether they antagonize a foe. I realize that it probably sounds like I'm looking for hairs to split but our group tends to split hairs and it helps to be prepared. The language, which I think could be slightly clearer, reads

"When you successfully Demoralize a creature, its frightened condition can't decrease to less than 1 at the end of its turn until it either uses a hostile action against you or can no longer observe or sense you for at least 1 round."

I personally would replace the "When" with "Whenever" which would make it unambiguous but that's just me.

From a flavor standpoint, I view it as instead of your character just being an annoying braggart swashbuckler this feat changes your character to be a really annoying braggart swashbuckler.

Thanks. Missed the pre-requisites and didn’t realize the weapons cap. The idea was fun while it lasted.

If you are a war priest of Gorum, does taking deadly simplicity means that a greatsword now does 1d14 of damage (or equivalent — 1d14 is possible in online tools)?

I’d like to get community input before going to the DM. It seems to me that this should work, but I haven’t seen any postings on this topic.

Hi,

I want to make sure I'm reading RAW/RAI as intended.

It looks like Brutish Shove does not stack with Titan Wrestler but Knockdown does. This not quite right. Sure, the shove on brutish shove is automatic but the flat footed is only until the end of your turn. Knockdown by comparison put the target prone so that your friends can play whack-a-mole. Assurance on athletics can make Knockdown automatic on the non-big boss assuming you invest in athletics.

Am I missing something?

I like a lot of the things about 2E - it seems more balanced (especially compared to 1E).

Conceptually, the idea the proficiency skill bonus for each step after trained is just a +1 just bugs me. It doesn’t feel right. It isn’t clear to me on how you can fix this easily. Maybe changing from -4/0/1/2/3 to -4/-1/1/3/4 could work? You couldn’t do this with attacks/perceptions/saves - it would unbalance too quickly.

Other than that, it comes down to a lot of preference quicks.

D@rK-SePHiRoTH- wrote:

In PF2 instead you have no real choice. You either roll lots of dice, or you'll be underperforming.

To me, this is not very good design.

Some things were already rolling tons of dice. Sneak attack, ...

You're rolling significantly fewer attacks, so any time lost with more damage dice is gained by not rolling a fourth attack in the turn.

It seems fine to me.

The extra damage dice just shorten the combat. The monsters roll more dice too. They often have the better weapons.

I don’t think that following a specific feat tree or specific classes/spells (rogue, fireball, spells, etc.) is a much of a choice. You had to work along specific paths to optimize your character. If you didn’t optimize your character, it wasn’t as interesting compared to people who are optimized.

Could there be tweaks to make it better? Absolutely! This is a playtest.

But +5 weapons? That’s on the DM - not on the game mechanics.

I like some of your rules.

We’ve been going through the Darkwood Moon series (Hallows Last Hope, Crown of the Kobold King so far) and something to pay attention to are Skill and Monster DC. These progress at 1.5/level whereas Character proficiency goes at 1/level. It is recognized as a problem that will be addressed in the future.

Since you are running a homebrew, check the forums for suggestions. I don’t know if one is better than another as we haven’t tried them yet.

To help balance this should classes come with built in archetypes? E.G. specialist wizard is a "build in" archetype with a correspondingly more powerful dedication feat? Barbarian totems are "built in" barbarian archetypes and so on?

Thoughts? Am I worried about nothing? Is this too much like 5e's sub-classes? Would that be a bad thing?

It seems to be that class “feats” (I like to call them options) achieve the differentiation you get out of P1E Archetypes. You can be a TWF, Power Attacker, Sword +Board, some combination of the prior, and so on. There could probably be more choices/tracking but overall it seems to me that you wind up with more flavors in 2e because it is individualized.

Lightning Raven wrote:

I honestly thought this would be a thread ripping a new one on people that come here to nag and complain without actually giving a proper read on the rules.

Same, and I was loving it.

Same here. Shame that it is about the game.

As far as the game goes if the player isn't literate, their character should not be.

The claim that most people in Glorion were literate does not track with world history. Estimates of the percentage of people involved in subsistence farming (i.e. peasants) during this period are 85-95%. Most of them were not literate.

In game play, certain classes have to be literate - spell casters - and other classes such as fighters might be able read the tavern menu.

Golarion and reality are two words that don't mix very well so the DM should just makeup whatever literacy rules they want.

I really appreciate Zman0’s link to his table above. Good stuff - a little hard core but I am going to try to sell it to my DM.

If this is true, then what was the point of getting rid of the "Big Six"? I thought this new system was supposed to work without demanding characters to buy certain items so that the math can work as expected. Seriously. If we're really expected to have boosting items than Paizo
If you're investing in an item that's boosting something, it must put will above the curve for that particular stat, not being a baseline requirement for the character to be able to be on the expected power-level.

I agree. Requiring magic items just to stay level is painful.

My real hope here is that someone from Paizo might drop very big hints about what they are planning so that it can be playtested. {fingers crossed}

The thing that I like about this idea is that a player isn’t stuck with being a heal bot. It would be nice to have a cleric free party for a change.

For our party there is a problem with the game. The average character kill rate is one character for every 3 sessions. In both cases, the characters died because they didn't make their fortitude saves against a Monster's DC, and not because of a tactical error.

This problem is only going to get worse as we level.

The reason is DC table 10-2, which many DM's are using for Monster DC's.

If we look at the rate of change per level, we get the following

type | player | trivial | low | high | extreme | severe
change/level | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.5

The consequence is that chance of failure increases by %5 ever two levels. A save that has 50% chance of failure at level one will fail 75% of the time at level 11.

There are some mitigations such as the 5% boost from stats every five levels and magic items. Unfortunately there have to be lots of powerful magic items (+2 at 5th, +4 at 9th) as the above DCs apply to all skills & saves.

Lastly my experience is that the starting values are set high. At 2nd level, my character had an 80% chance of failure per save and needed two saves. After that experience, I seriously considered quitting Pathfinder altogether and not returning. Instead I decided that this was an opportunity to play every single class.

I am very interested to hear what fixes people have for the above Math that doesn't involve lots of magic items.

Matthew Downie wrote:

Doktor Weasel wrote:

The dragon hoard issue is probably always going to be a problem, mostly because artwork tends to show absolutely absurd piles of gold. It's a running joke in my group that an adventure will have a picture showing the dragon sitting on a 20 ft tall mountain of gold and then the treasure list is like: 2,000 gp, 4,000 sp, 9,000 cp. Smaug was possibly sitting on more gold than has ever been mined on Earth.

I had a dragon hoard in a recent D&D game that was something like 300,000cp, with a thin layer of gold on top, for show. That feels about right to me.

No such luck: With 25% efficient packing that's still only a cubic meter at 50 coins per pound. The old 10 coins per pound of early (A)D&D could give those "dragon bed" hordes, but only barely.

As for Smaug: The two hordes portrayed in the movies would have more gold than mined on Earth¹, the one in the book would not, (it isn't the 'sea' of treasure the movies used).

1: About 60 semi-trailers worth of volume, although you would need far more to carry it.

Based on the drachma, you get about 100 coins per pound but I think that misses the point. If the Dragon isn't house trained, there is 300 bulk of coins to wash.

My high level fighter should be like movie Thor, except better looking.

Martials and Casters seem pretty well balanced, assuming that the Martials have the correct magic items.

And that is the problem. You can’t always the right magic item and you don’t want the campaign littered with items. How about making the Martial character be the magic item?

At 5th level, a Martial character can spend a resonance point to add a damage die to all non-magic weapons for a minute. At 10th, two die and so on. For athletic/acrobatic skills, perhaps a resonance point to add a die to the check.

This helps get magic weapons that are magical just for the sake of balancing the game, which allows you to make magic items interesting and part of story.

The last thing to make things special is to have expert, master, and legendary skills to actually mean something. It seems to me that legendary should be more than 15% better than trained for both sides of the divide. What if legendary athletics meant you could scale a 30’ slick wall? Or legendary occult means that you can summon a specific obscure demon that is the only one who is able to help you overcome your current dilemma?

That is what I want. A Martial character who can be the magic. Legendary skills that are ... well ... legendary. And all classes should relevant, interesting, and able to advance the story.

It might be better to consider class feats to be class options. TWF was a fighting style in 1E available only to fighters/rangers and in 2E there is double slice available only to fighters/rangers. This might help to scale back the emotion. Grouping the class “feats”/options could be a help as leveling is not quick. Also, it seems like some “feats” could be pooled into general groupings (martial/spell casting) - why shouldn’t power attack be available to all martial classes? Or eschew materials to all spell casters (actually this might already be the case - I haven’t researched spell casters in 2e).

Then we are left with the general feats and skill feats which have flaws. There are few general feats and the skill feats don’t always add up. For example bonded animal is a second level skill feat that requires expert in nature which can’t happen until level 3 making bonded animal effectively a level 4 skill feat. Which is OK except that I think the designers want you to have bonded animals at lower levels where they are more effective/fun. My thoughts are that the weaknesses in these feats is the root cause of the unhappiness. The focus was getting the class feats/options just right which made the general/skill feats suffer in comparison.

My experience is that there are things to like and to dislike. If the dislikes outweigh the likes, wait and play something else. Starfinder has a nice stamina/hit point system and home brews can be fun. In one home brew that we played, our party accidentally unleashed a zombie apocalypse and destroyed the entire world. It was fun.

Likes:

* Action System

* Class Balance - I don't feel like spell casters are overpowering the other characters and that other classes exist just to keep them alive. Maybe it was overcorrected but I don't want to go back to the days when everything revolved around spell casters.

* Weapon Potencies - I like the extra damage die. Monsters often scale up in damage significant with CR, this levels the playing field a little. I'm not trying to kill a 400 HP monster with 1d8

Dislikes:

* Skill System - I liked when members of the party had to specialize in different skill sets and work together. Also, someone who is legendary in a skill is only +3 over someone who is trained?

* Monster DCs/Perception - If your DM lives by table 10-2 then Stealth becomes useless, Climbing becomes falling, Tumbling becomes laying prone, etc. Really reduces playing options and non combat activities - which I don't think was the intent

* Resonance - I agree with what they were trying to do, but the system needs tweaking. My main complaint is that you can't play ugly characters anymore. We can't all be pretty.

Warning: This is a long and in depth thread digging into the foundational math of skill DCs, their Scaling, Monster Skills, Monster Perception, and consequently Skill Items. .

Thank you, this is an exceptionally well written post.

Based on experience,

With #1, I had a second level character attempting a DC 17 dying save. Death was pretty much automatic with this.

#2 made stealth a useless skill - unless I was trying to hide from party members

Lastly #3 means that tumble through doesn't work and that Cat Fall becomes a required pick because you are going to fall when climbing (up or down).

Whatever the intended outcome, the result is that the game is less enjoyable than it could be. The character that could sneak into the Dragon's lair to tell the party what was inside, no longer exists. The acrobat who would tumble through combats in order to gain advantage on the enemy, no longer exists. The hero who would climb castle towers to rescue the princess, fell to his death a long time ago.

It does need to be fixed and we should focus on what the outcome should be - characters that can do more than smash, cast spells, and die.

If I feint before using double slice and only get a normal success then how does this play out? Do my attacks count as one for taking advantage of the fate similarly to how they count as one for utilizing my multiple attack penalty and applying resistances and weaknesses or is the enemy only flat footed against one attack? If the latter than do I choose which weapon or is at always the main hand one?

Great Question (and now I really wish we could use our own images for avatars)

Under Double Slice it reads

"For purposes of resistances and weaknesses, this is considered to be
a single Strike."

Which to me sounds like it should apply to both strikes. Double slice is effectively being treated as if the strikes land simultaneously.

If it becomes unbalancing, I could see it getting house ruled in a different way. I don't think that it is unbalancing though. Feint is by no means automatic and you are giving up your 3rd action, which could be used for something like twin parry.

Draco18s wrote:

virtualjack wrote:

a 20% hit chance

Well there's your problem.

A 20% hit rate is super low against anything that would be on-level with you. Against a monster the same level as you, you should have a 50% hit rate.

As you showed:

Quote:

If you change the assumption to a +1 d12 weapon and a 45% hit chance, the results favor 2 individual attacks over a power attack by 1.0 damage per round.

20% is too low but 30% is about right for a 4 vs 1 boss type encounter according to the bestiary (party lvl +4 should work out to about 30%).

Thank you.

My point is two fold. The first is that power attack is almost always better than two attacks until you add magic weapons. The second is that we are talking about less than 1.5 DPR in most cases.

At 30%, power attack does 1.225 more DPR with no magic weapons, 0.575 DPR with +1 weapon, and 0.075 worse with a +2 magic weapon.

At 50%, power attack is 0.425 DPR better with no magic and 1.5 worse with a +1 weapon. And a 50% success rate against a big boss has never happened in our group (5+ years).

Your question might be, why take this feat? After all, 1.2 additional DPR is not a big deal.

Well our 2nd level party just fought a creature with legendary chain wrapped around it (hardness ~13). We had to destroy the chain to kill the creature (it took 4 dents). Power Attack was key - ranged attacks were useless and ordinary attacks were laughed at.

And that, my friends, is why my character has Power Attack. It isn't to do massive amounts of average damage. It is to break things.

My analysis did not confirm the original poster's premise. In fact it tended to show the opposite but the results are highly dependent on assumptions.

As an example, lets assume a d12 2H weapon, +4 STR, a 20% hit chance, and no magic bonus. For the first attack, we have an average hit damage of 10.5 which, including the critical, gives the average damage per round of 2.65. For the second attack, the average damage per round falls to 0.525 yielding a total average damage of 3.15 per round. With the power attack, the average weapon damage is 17 which yields an average damage per round of 4.25. So a power attack net 1.1 damage per round additional.

If you change the assumption to a +1 d12 weapon and a 45% hit chance, the results favor 2 individual attacks over a power attack by 1.0 damage per round.

These results make sense. When a target is hard to hit, you are better off with the extra damage on the first strike as the second is unlikely to land. Also, the magic damage decreases the importance of an extra damage die.

The average damage per round doesn't tell the whole story. If you are going up against a DR or trying to overcome hardness, the power attack has value. If you are trying to kill a bunch of easy to hit cannon fodder, then two strikes is better.

Personally, I wouldn't get too worried either way. We are talking about 1HP/round or less in most cases.

Right now I’m wondering why should I continue with Pathfinder 2e (Playtest). What are people finding interesting about Pathfinder 2e?

The one thing I like is actions. The Pathfinder team did a nice job of cleaning this up.

After that, I am at a loss. Classes/Feats/Spells are largely watered down versions of Pathfinder (version 1). I am struggling to find something that sets 2e apart from the other RPG games that are out there (5e, Starfinder, Pathfinder)

I’m in a game where the DM decided that Monster Perception DC should be based on table 10-4 instead of the rules starting on the bottom of 291. Apparently there is enough ambiguity in the language for either interpretation. I would be grateful if this could be clarified. Thanks in advance.

The issue I have with the death mechanics is that is it close to impossible to survive in most cases. Last night I was in a situation where I went to dying 2 (after attacks) with a monster that was one level above mine. My fortitude save had been weakened a little so my odds of a successful save was 20% (DC was set using table 10-4). Sine I had to make two saves, my odds of survival were roughly 5%.

Not surprisingly my character died. I have to wonder, what was the point of me rolling to begin with. My character was highly likely to die. Rolling just prolonged the agony.

If you are going to have a death system where people die most of the time, don’t bother. Just kill them outright.

I’m not sure what the goals of the Paizo’s developers were.

What are Perception DC, Will DC, and Reflex DC in pathfinder playtest? It is not defined in the core rulebook.

In our group, one of us thinks it should from table 10-2, Skill DCs. My belief is that it should be 10 + the appropriate modifier ( I.e. Perception DC is 10 + Perception bonus) and that the Skill DC table is for situations (I.e. what is the DC to swim the English Channel).

Any thoughts as to what it should be?