hyphz's page

Annotate Composition wrote:

You can’t regain the Focus Points you spent to create the annotated composition until it is activated or loses its magic.

When you activate it, it uses up the focus point(s) used to make it. It is not intended to be used more than once.

The text seems to imply that the focus point is used up when the item is created, and is available for return via Refocus only after its activation. I can see this giving a reasonable implication that if the spell on the composition costs a focus point, then it is lost after one activation, but what if it is a composition cantrip and the focus point was spent purely to create the item?

The text for Annotate Composition reads:

Any creature that can read the language you used when annotating your composition can Activate the Item by spending a single action, which has the concentrate trait. This produces the effects of the composition as though the activating creature had Cast the Spell.

A composition you create this way loses its power the next time you make your daily preparations.

But it does not state that the item is destroyed when the spell is cast.

The only text that suggests this is above where it states it is transcribed "on a special scroll", and a Magic Scroll would typically destroyed by casting the spell from it. But this is far from clear, since a scroll that you write 'on' is a mundane item, and neither the created item nor the action are stated to have the Consumable or Scroll traits - and the action used on the text is not to Cast A Spell.

Is it intended that Annotated Compositions last until the next daily preparations or until rendered inert, regardless of being cast? (I also note that some scrolls actually have "once per day" listed as their activation frequency, even though they can still only be cast once?)

Per RAW there is no risk of bumping into the opponent but that's probably a bit pedantic. Also, you couldn't take cover from someone behind themselves because the text does state that the cover must be "between" you and the opponent - the opponent is not between you and the opponent.

And yes, the burst works, but most people will choose the cone when Seeking in combat without any prior knowledge because of its longer range. Forcing the opponent to waste an action on choosing a Burst that covers their square (and therefore only covers 10' in front of them) could be beneficial if other stealth characters are ranged.

Regarding the seeking sized areas, this does have the issue of whether or not a player has the right to insist that the GM follow the cone/burst rule when an enemy is seeking their PC. If it's one way but not the other then stealth abilities may be significantly more powerful for NPCs than they are for PCs.

It seems that it's possible for a Tiny creature with Invisibility to Sneak and Hide in a creature's actual square. Is that correct?

It also seems that by RAW this is actually very powerful. The Seek action says that if you're looking for creatures, you choose a cone or a burst. If you choose a cone, it starts at the edge of your square and moves outwards, which means it doesn't include your square itself.

This seems quite powerful because it means that all attempts to seek in the cone, which is the most common option, will fail. Only if the character thinks to seek in a burst that includes themselves will they detect the creature. This potentially means that in an encounter where such a creature may be present, their opponents (PC or NPC) are likely to waste a lot of actions checking their feet. Is that correct?

It seems that in Treasure Vault, the Pacifying rune was copy-pasted out of Agents of Edgewatch while forgetting that in that AP, the PCs are expected to be dealing nonlethal damage all the time.

So with the Treasure Vault version you can stab someone to death with a weapon that makes them feel horribly guilty about stabbing you back.

Also, the -2 it gives is untyped and lasts an effective 10 rounds, so could multiple party members with Pacifying weapons stack up a huge penalty on an opponent's lethal attacks?

While you hold your lantern, its burning light leaves secrets no place to hide.

That's presumably flavor text?

So does that imply that you can wear a lantern implement, and it continues to produce light? There is no danger of fire because there is no oil?

The text on the Lantern implement says that you can ".. use a common glass lantern" as your implement, so presumably they're the same.

The section on carrying and using items reads:

Worn items are tucked into pockets, belt pouches, bandoliers, weapon sheaths, and so forth, and they can be retrieved and returned relatively quickly.

It seems a common assumption that this allows any item to be worn, but I could not actually find that statement anywhere, and "worn items" is still a unique category of magic item.

The confusion we encountered comes from the Thaumaturge implement rules:

If you had your lantern implement in one hand, a weapon in the other, and a chalice implement you were wearing, you could swap your lantern for the chalice to use its reaction.

"Swapping" the lantern for a worn chalice implies that the lantern can be worn. But if that's true, it's beneficial for any character to wear a lantern to provide light without taking up a hand. Is that the intent?

If I were to be pedantic about it, I would then argue that the level 1 Wizard would get level 2 and 3 spell slots from the Type III ring then.

They would, but they can’t have any of those spells in their book, so it’s largely moot.

It was actually that Hero Lab technical support claimed that the - meant that level 1 slots could never be gained.

Hi,

If you are a bounded spellcaster such as a Magus who no longer has level 1 slots but has higher slots, can you use a Ring of Wizardry to regain level 1 slots?

It seems ambiguous. The number of level 1 slots is listed as "-", not 0, implying that the slots are unavailable. At the same time, the Ring of Wizardry states only that you must have "a spellcasting class feature with the arcane tradition", not that you must already have slots at the level indicated.

Is there clarification on this?

Hi folks,

Two questions came up today:

1) Confusion says “use all your actions to strike or cast offensive cantrips…”. Since “stride” isn’t an option, does this imply that someone who’s confused is unable to move and can just be kept away from?

2) We disturbed a Drider armed with a glaive with 10ft reach. The Drider opened the door that was between us. However, the GM then had trouble as the Drider entry does not list the reach of the Drider’s hands and it was a bit difficult to believe that the Drider hooked the door handle with their glaive and then pulled it open. Is there any standard assumption about the interaction reach of creatures with weapons that would clearly increase reach beyond their hands, but that don’t have listed unarmed attack reach?

Spellstrike reads:

You Cast a Spell that takes 1 or 2 actions to cast and requires a spell attack roll. Make a melee Strike with a weapon or unarmed attack. Your spell is coupled with your attack, using your attack roll result to determine the effects of both the Strike and the spell.

[...]

One Target: The spell targets only the target of your Strike, even if it normally allows more targets.

[...]

Multiple Defenses: Any additional rolls after the initial spell attack still happen normally, such as the Fortitude save attempted by the target of a disintegrate spell. Similarly, a spell that allows you to attack with it again on subsequent rounds would only combine a Strike with its initial attack roll, not with any later ones.

The Imaginary Weapon cantrip, which a Magus can access via Psychic Dedication, reads:

Amp: You form multiple force weapons to lash out at multiple foes. You make two imaginary weapon Strikes, each against a different target. Your multiple attack penalty doesn't increase until you've made both Strikes.

Does this mean that by Spellstriking with Imaginary Weapon, you can make two Imaginary Weapon Strikes against the same target?

"One Target" says that the spell targets only the target of the Spellstrike. The argument is whether effects that would otherwise have targeted others are lost, or retargeted to the Spellstrike target. The wording seems to favor retargeting. Thus, the One Target rule rewrites the description of Imaginary Weapon's Amp effect to omit "each against a different target". By the rule in Multiple Defenses, the second attack would not be resolved based on the weapon Strike, but it's still two attacks with extra heightening damage.

Oops. Ok, thanks. But you can still wrest control from an unwilling pilot with no more difficulty than a regular one?

The Take Control action states that you only have to be adjacent to the controls and suceed at a Piloting check in order to "become the vehicle's pilot". It does not seem to require or mention that there must not be an existing pilot, so fighting over a vehicle's controls is remarkably easy, and you can drive a vehicle at double speed by constantly swapping the controls. Is this intended?

In addition, if you fail the piloting check, does the vehicle still become uncontrolled even though you were not successful at becoming the pilot?

These are OK, _if_ it's actually intended by the author that what are in some cases fairly large chunks of the AP can be bypassed. The example in Strength of Thousands 2 bypasses an entire encounter series, for example, and since there's no consideration either way in the text it's not clear if it's what is planned for.

I've either played in or ran several APs where it seems that the author designed an encounter assuming that the edges of a natural clearing could be used as hard bounds. But they can't be. They can be flown over, and some characters might even be happier or at an advantage in the jungle.

Examples:

While I appreciate this, it is not actually legal to spend a Hero Point before rolling. The text reads: "Spend 1 Hero Point to reroll a check. You must use the second result. This is a fortune effect." You cannot reroll what has not been rolled (and it would make no sense to spend a hero point before a roll to do a useless first roll and then roll the second result)

By the wording of "second result" then the implication would be that the hero point roll is a new roll, so if they were affected by Misfortune on "their next roll" then they are no longer affected by it, but if they are continuously affected by Misfortune then they cannot spend the hero point?

A PC rolls an ability while affected by a Misfortune effect that makes them take the worst of two dice. The result turns out bad and they want to spend a Hero point. How is this dealt with?

1. The PC cannot spend the Hero Point because it is too late to affect the Misfortune effect on the roll.

2. The PC retroactively cancels the Misfortune effect on the roll, meaning that they should have rolled only one dice, so their roll is now the “first” roll which has to be tracked as well as which is the highest and lowest roll.

3. The PC spends the hero point and gets an additional roll in the normal way because the Fortune effect of the hero point is happening after the roll and does not cancel with a Misfortune effect that happened before the roll.

Recieved a note that the PDF had been updated but no errata saying what the changes were - are they layout only?

"Only once for the stage's duration"?

My assumption was that if you are on Stage 1, you suffer the stage 1 damage, then after the stage's duration (1 round), you have to roll a save. If you make the save, then because the affliction is virulent you do not decrease it by a level yet, so you are still on stage 1 and take the damage again. This is still "only once for the stage's duration" because the stage's duration was 1 round and you are now on the 2nd round.

Is it instead correct that making the first successful virulent save causes you to stay on the current stage without taking its effects again? Essentially extending its duration?

Is this legal? Nothing seems to prevent it, but it seems to have some strangely powerful effects.

For example, sustaining a spell has no line of effect/sight requirements. So a mage can hit an enemy with a sustained damage or effect spell, then Maze themselves, so the enemy has no possible way to reach them and they can sustain their spells over and over from absolute safety. When they want out, they just stop sustaining the Maze.

There's even other possible uses, like setting up an ambush where stealthier party members agree a time, and the mage Mazes themselves, waits for the agreed time (5 minutes etc.) then returns. While he's in the Maze, he can't possibly be detected. Or, they can scout by using Share Senses on their familiar, which has no range limit, from the Maze...

The CRB states that to improve the stage of a virulent affliction requires two successful saves in a row. It seems to be commonly assumed that if you fail the second save having previously made one, then you fail to make the two consecutive saves but the affliction doesn't get worse as it normally would when you fail a save. But I could not find an actual reference for this. Is that correct?

If so there seems to be a very strange interaction with Tears of Death. Tears of Death has stage 1, 18d6 poison and paralyzed, 1 round. Stage 2, 25d6 poison and paralyzed, 1 minute.

Since the maximum duration is 10 minutes, this has the weird effect that if someone fails all their saves then they take 283d6 in total before the poison wears off, from remaining at stage 3 for 8 minutes (and the poison wears off 6 seconds before the 9th stage 3 check).

On the other hand, if they make every other save, and the rule about not getting worse is applied, then they take 1800d6 in the 10 minutes it takes the poison to wear off (10 minutes * 10 6-second rounds per minute * 18)!

Obviously either of these amounts of damage will kill a PC without help but with magical healing or regeneration available the first one might just about be possible. It seems bizarre then that the PC is potentially penalized for trying to recover from the poison. Is that the correct reading of this?

For running the gauntlet I treated it like I'd treated the chase and just put the effects in sequences.

I also found it wrong for the last encounters to not have maps. It is rather ironic that the book says that the area of the spiral "can't be measured" then tells you that the worldsphere moves 30ft per round!

I did find two seriously unexpected major hazards in the last section of the adventure, though. First of all, Blue Viper's Plum Rain Deluge using Tears of Death is absolutely lethal and can cripple party members or even wipe the whole party in a single move.

Second, the first phase Syndara's ability to use Disjunction can be very nasty, even if it is only once per d4 rounds (and it is rather awkward that the adventure does not give Syndara's counteract check modifier - I have noticed this is a recurring error in APs, they will give an enemy's spell DC but not the modifier for attack roll spells). In the first round he used it on one of the PCs magic weapons and seriously limited his damage dealing ability for the entire rest of the fight.

In case this is useful to anyone, here's a DOC file of the handout I made for the players with the player-safe version of the map and the rules of the tournament.

My group's team were The Bright Crusders, you'll probably want to edit it to change that name in the team roster on the second page.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ii4XZ3F9H82TxcAsOH5dshgxDUDlGLQJ/edit?u sp=sharing&ouid=104408107019192077021&rtpof=true&sd=true

How have people handled the dimensional mirror "guarding" the pile of statues at G5? I can't really see how it's positioned. The artwork shows a standard full-length mirror on a stand but I presume it isn't like that because I'm pretty sure Syndara isn't silly enough to just use a mirror that a PC can approach from behind and just push over. How have people dealt with the positioning here?

Another thing came up on this - does having Air Walk mean you don’t fall if you’re knocked Prone in the air? Air Walk doesn’t give a fly speed, but lets you “walk on air as if it were solid ground” which may imply that it also lets you land prone on it as if it were solid ground, meaning that having both Fly and Air Walk saves you from falling when knocked prone.

Sorry for the necro, but is it really intended that you can’t Fly while doing a Running Reload, but you can loophole it by declaring that you’re Sneaking using your Fly speed, and it doesn’t matter if you succeeded at sneaking or not because you just wanted to fly? That seems like a blatant system mastery trap.

I probably won't ask them to use survival, but it's still a bit tacky that the author clearly wrote this as a fixed series of fights, then put it onto an island to mirror the first section but apparently didn't consider the consequences.

Then again, I'm trying to prep chapter 2 and just read G1. The aolazes roll across the bridge and through winding tunnels in the mines, firing at the PCs through "the lookout windows around the perimeter of the mines". The PCs will naturally, enter the tunnels to pursue the Aolazes once they realize what is going on. The map shows no tunnels nor lookout windows. It doesn't even specify elevation.

If I wanted to play OSR I would be playing OSR.

Yes, it is using the chase mechanics. If those mechanics create a situation where I cannot explain what is happening in terms of something that the character is experiencing, then those mechanics are bad. "You can't shoot the creature you're chasing, even though you can clearly see it, because it's a chase" is definitely in that category. What, the character has a little HUD in the corner of their eye that's flashing "CHASE MODE"? Come on.

That said - your point about "if you stop to aim and shoot then it will slow you down and you risk Razu getting away" is absolutely what I would have done, if the chase was on foot (or, I suppose, if they were using their own Fly speeds). But it isn't, it's on a flying chariot which will continue to move no matter what the Gunslinger does.

Ok, but how do I explain to the players that they can see where he is going clearly enough to follow him the right way, but at the same time cannot see him clearly enough to shoot him?

If it is going to be cinematic, it should not be producing a sequence that would end up on CinemaSins :)

What made me think "this is a problem" was the statement that "makes calculating distance.. largely unnecessary".

Unless the adventure suspends all the standard rules for survival and overland travel, it cannot be unnecessary to know how far the PCs have to go.

If the story would break if the distance between encounters were a million miles, then guess what, calculating distance is now necessary because that's what tells you it's not a million miles.

A fundamental part of writing fiction is making the heroes able to win without it appearing that the villain is letting them. In the case of the AP, it is a case of making the adventure and game fair without feeling that Syndara is being fair, because he wouldn’t be. An AP author should be doing this because I am paying them for the AP because they have those skills professionally and I don’t.

It doesn’t matter if the adventure doesn’t say he doesn’t have total control, the PCs need to know that.

Are there any rules for aborting a fall in the middle?

This has come up with some of the APs which include aerial encounters. The PCs are high in the sky above the city on a flying vehicle.

They encounter a dragon. A PC crits the dragon with a flail.

Per RAW, the dragon now plunges all the way down to the ground. While it can use the Arrest a Fall action to avoid taking any damage, it can't use it to stop the fall. Assuming it fell 500' as per the rules on one round of falling, and even if it has an 80 foot fly speed, it will now take 4 rounds to get back up again (half speed to fly upwards, 500 / (40 * 3)) by which time the PCs may be long gone. It seems ridiculous that in this case it can be practically defeated by a single blow.

If it had, say, 1000' foot to fall, then it spends two rounds falling. The RAW is silent on what you can do when it's your turn in a round while falling, and whether or not taking a Fly action in that round will end the fall. It's not readily obvious, especially given that ruling that it does gives flying creatures the ability to make stall descents, which may not be the intent.

The map purposefully does not include a scale; the mutable and unpredictable nature of time and space on Syndara’s Island makes calculating distance both impossible and largely unnecessary.

Seriously? I mean, surely someone could point out that this makes no sense?

Of course it's necessary. If it's in Syndara's control, he waits for the players to take a step away from the Solar Jian, then makes it a million miles away and so is everything else. The PCs starve. Done. If he wants them dead, there's no reason he wouldn't do that.

The South statues require no check to "uncover the inscription", but:

A successful DC 40 Society check is necessary to decode the script—if the reader understands Tien, they gain a +2 circumstance bonus to this check, but the highly allegorical style of the writing, couched in historical references and metaphor, means that magic such as tongues does not automatically reveal the meaning.

So it looks like if they fail that check, they're kind of stuck unless they just sit there and roll over and over again (or I guess get back on the chariot and go and try and find someone else to decode it).

My apologies - you are correct that the yak is Speed 20. But even a level 1 human is Speed 25 and can just kind of walk up to it in a round, and a level 18 character probably isn't going to have a problem climbing cliffs; heck, they can probably fly faster than that.

The PCs would know that just bringing Hao Jin back is not a permanent solution. The forces that captured her could strike again and there is no guarantee the Celestial Dragon would grant a second wish to rescue her. The only viable solution is to breach the demiplane and defeat the forces within.

The PCs also do not know that the "forces" that took Hao Jin are on the island, only that they took her there. They may have gone elsewhere after dropping her off in which case this wouldn't do much good. And, of course, she wasn't actually captured and since she has a decent chunk of a continent who want rid of her it's probably better if they assume she can look after herself.

Anyway, they can just wish for Hao Jin to be returned and not taken again.

Also: one of the temple chores asks the PC to catch a yak. The yak is described as moving at “40 foot a *round*”. Because there are three move actions in a round, this is actually extremely slow - Speed 13.3 - and can be trivially caught by most PCs. Was this meant to be that it is Speed 40?

The first sentence of Legendary Sneak reads: "You’re always sneaking unless you choose to be seen, even when there’s nowhere to hide. "

The text of hide says that "you cease being hidden if you do anything except Hide, Sneak, or Step".

I've had players argue that this means they always remain Hidden no matter what they do, because they case being hidden in the moment they do something else, and then "you're always sneaking.." means that their Stealth kicks back in as soon as they do not choose to be seen.

Is that the intent?

This isn't a straight street where they either go down the alley or not, and if you don't see them, they went down the alley. It's the open air. If you don't see someone there's an infinite number of options for where they went.

As we're starting, two concerns:

a) what happens if the PCs fail the checks to read the writing on the statues near where the land, so they never know about the Celestial Dragon?

b) what happens if the PCs decide their wish should be "bring Hao Jin back?"

Edit: also, is it correct that the Abbot does not have Nine Seals Spellcasting? This could make sense, but makes Falling Sal Stance much worse.

After the first shot, Razu should be taking a path that breaks line of sight to avoid the gunfire.

If he could just decide to do that, he could trivially lose the PCs pursuit. I figured the PCs would have to have lost or be seriously behind on CPs.

Either way, the players could only close with him by overcoming obstacles.

But, I would not have Razu start falling in the first place.

The text is awkward with this. I mean, looking through the chase rules, they seem to make the following assumptions:

a) the pursuer and the pursued are moving under their own steam.
b) the pursuer and the pursued are both subject to all obstacles.
c) the obstacles are not time sensitive.

The single example given is a crowd, which fits these. A locked door is also mentioned, which doesn't quite fit, but can be wangled to. But the adventure gives us these:

Rubble flies through the air as Mogaru levels a series of towers, threatening to knock you to the ground.

This is the first obstacles that Razu faces too. So apparently, Mogaru knocks down a series of towers, waits as long as it takes for the PCs, then knocks down another series of towers in the same place, that he carefully did not knock down the first time.

Regarding Razu not falling - if I'd just applied HP damage, he would have been killed before the end of the chase and the scene would have broken. It would obviously be idiotic for Razu to continue flying away when he realized that the gunslinger PC could repeatedly shoot him in the ass with him having no fallback.

This should be handled by the chase rules. If the players want to get to where Razu is, they have to overcome the obstacles.

This assumes that Razu is continuing to flee through the obstacles. He is not, he is falling out of the sky. The falling rules are very vague on what you can or can't do while falling, but presumably because of the Arrest A Fall action you pointed out, he can't just take a Fly action to move upwards and not be falling any more.

hyphz wrote:

Razu doesn't need to obtain chase points. NPCs advance automatically.

GMG wrote:

Typically, to reduce variance, the PCs roll checks to progress while their opponents proceed at a steady pace.

He doesn't make skill checks. But the PCs catch him by getting the same number of Chase Points he has, so he does need to gain them. And if he rolls 1d4 for the first round and rolls a 1, the first successful skill check by the PCs catches him. That might make sense if he was right next to the PCs and fled, but he saw them from several hundred feet away.

Phewwwwp. Have just finished playing through the Razu chase sequences and really it shows how very inadequate the chase rules are.

The PCs on their chariot identified Razu, and he immediately jumped from the top of the Pathfinder Lodge and dodged to create acoustics. I gave him an initial lead of 4 chase points, since as written if the PCs roll well in the first round they can catch him instantly. And they did roll well and got hot onto his trail as he started to fly toward Mogaru’s path.

The PC bard casts a mass Haste including the drakes on the chariot. Per the chase RAW, this makes no difference. This seems daft. I decide to give them a bonus to their chase rolls.

“I shoot him,” says our Gunslinger. Oh. For whatever silly reason, the chase rules have no integration with actual distance! When there’s spells with 500’ range and attacks with 150’ range increment, that’s a pretty big omission. The Gunslinger hits Razu’s AC so I decide to hold off on the HP damage and instead announce that Razu’s wing has been damaged, and figure he’ll roll lower dice for the chase. He also releases the Melodic Squalls (of which there were 3 because there are 6 PCs in the party)

Immediate problem again. Releasing the Melodic Squalls make this a combat encounter, so initiative is rolled. Because initiative has been rolled, the Gunslinger can shoot again with Hair Trigger. There is no rule about who he must shoot at, so instead of shooting the Squalls, he decides to shoot Razu again and crits, so I figure that Razu is now spiralling out of the air. Immediately there are a ton of questions about how many feet up we are in order to determine how much falling damage Razu might take when he lands, which isn’t specified anywhere.

So we now need to know how far Razu is away, how fast the chariot moves, and how high up the chase is happening, none of which are specified by the chase rules or the adventure. This is complicated by one of the players announcing that they want to steer the chariot to intercept Razu’s fall. Razu will fall 500’ this round, but we don’t know how high up he is, so I just allow a PC to spend the round steering the chariot to make an Acrobatics check to catch Razu. This is also predicated by the Gunslinger player’s sylph PC jumping off the chariot to fly up to Razu themselves (with the extra movement from Haste) in an attempt to catch him in the air, which he successfully does with a Grapple check. I could not find any reference to whether or not the Melodic Squalls can block the movement of the chariot or how much damage they might take/inflict if the PCs just decided to ram them.

So, next round. The chariots move closer, pass below the Gunslinger and Razu where they fly, and Razu squirms free of the Gunslinger’s grip and lands on the lower chariot, being immediately surrounded by PCs with flickmaces and beaten to death in a round.

Now, on the one hand this worked pretty well at the table, on the other hand PF2e is meant to be a rules crunchy game. If I wanted to have to make that many guesses about how things work I’d play an OSR game. The chase rules really need a revamp and assertions in the adventure like “we don’t consider attacking vehicles” are just not acceptable, especially when the existence of the crunch in other contexts leads to a lot of table slowdown such as a lengthy discussion as to whether or not there are railings around the deck of the chariot and what might happen when a Melodic Squall landed off-centre on the deck and hit the railing.

Edit: also - there’s no point giving out XP bonuses in a milestone based adventure.

The section on chasing down Razu does not state how many points Razu needs to obtain to reach the Opera House.

Normally this would be worked out from the obstacles, but several of the obstacles aren't neutral parts of the terrain. For example, Razu would not need to gain chase points to overcome Razu creating confusing echoes around a building.

It just seems a rather odd mismatch. I mean, consider the following effects:

a) PC 1 is in a zone that deals 2d6 fire damage on turn start.
b) PC 1 is in a zone that deals 2d6 fire damage to anyone attacking while in it.

If PC 2 is capable of putting out the flames on their turn, then if they go after PC 1 on initiative, then they can put out B but not A. That doesn't seem representative given that in world, PC 1 is standing in a fire in both situations.

BTW I have no issue with the idea that killing the grappler would end the grapple in normal circumstance. Rather, it's the interaction with the rule that says that you cannot Delay to wait out a negative situation.

So as written, if an enemy has an emanation with the text "any PC that starts its turn in the aura.." then a PC who starts their turn in the aura and delays is still subject to it even if the enemy moves away in their turn, because their turn start effects were processed when they delayed and they were in the aura at that time. Waiting out Silence _does_ work, because it says "while [the target] is in the area.." rather than "if they start their turn in the area.."

For potions on enemy teams, remember they have sponsors too and they have items as well as cash to burn. So you can justify having potions and items on them that they are not granted by APL, since the tournament is special.

I was under the impression that the teams listed in the books are the ones that are mathematically balanced for the PCs to fight against, not that they need to be modified for that.

Watch out for pre-initiative actions. If the PCs start close to enemies, they can Battle Cry immediately.