painted_green's page

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the 'second class feat' option because to me, the whole point of the free archetype rule is to have characters branch out a bit in directions that may not be completely optimal. I feel that more often than not, a second class feat would compel players to pick from their own class at certain levels with very strong options. For players that really want to home in on their base class, I feel that most (if not all) classes have archetypes that are close enough in flavor to still allow this.

I also recognize the problem in combining free archetypes with the lockout conditions and the issue of archetypes not having a feat at every even level, but also being a bit wary about just taking dips into a large number of archetypes, I am using the following house rule for my home games: At any point, a character may have two dedication feats that are still 'locked' (rather than just one).

I wouldn't think it does. It's not spelled out explicitly and, to me at least, it doesn't sound that far-fetched for the collapsed pile of bones to still contain your intact hands holding whatever they were holding.

I started with 5e and played it for a while, but once I started playing Pathfinder I felt less and less inclined to continue playing 5e. Sone aspects of the rules simply don't vibe with me (plus I was never interested in DnD lore). Mainly:

- Concentration feels far too stifling. So many natural spell combinations are impossible due to both having concentration. Spell choices feel very restrained because so many of them are mutually exclusive.

- Advantage and disadvantage are overused. And since they cancel each other and neither stacks, this leads to extremely silly and counterintuitive situations. (Two blinded people whaling on each other just do straight rolls to hit.)

- I just don't really enjoy bounded accuracy that much. This is more of a personal thing than the two points above, but I don't like how easy even high-CR foes are to hit even at a much lower level than them.

- I despise the design of the warlock. The fact that it is purely a short-rest class doesn't fit with the other classes and inevitably leads to annoying discussions about resting; its balance is way out of whack, with eldritch blast doing tons of damage while also pushing and pulling foes all willy-nilly; and its multiclassing exploitability is through the roof. 5e would be a better game if the warlock didn't exist.

- Feat balance is all over the place. For instance, I really don't know what they were thinking making their version of power attack -5/+10 from the get-go. I guess PF1 has some issues in this regard as well, but with there being as few feats as there are in 5e, it is much more jarring. Plus having to choose between an ability score improvement and a feat sucks.

- I don't like the official adventures all that much. The ones I played leaned into sandbox so hard that they basically lost almost all sense of a coherent story. It was mostly just 'pick a direction and see what you find'. Not my style at all.

A "fleeing" creature just carefully stepping three times for a total of 15ft against an enemy with a long reach feels off to me. Since there is no reasonable in-between (drawing the line at, say, one step makes zero sense when the whole point is avoiding attacks of opportunity and the enemy's reach is obvious), I lean toward disallowing steps altogether.

Since 1+ Hand weapons express reloading it identically to Interact, this means it's not any different from the type of reloading a Crossbow does except for the amount of actions it costs.

This is where it breaks down. Using descriptive text that is similar to what you can do with an Interact action does not automatically imply that you add the traits of an Interact action.

I'd probably leave out most comic-book heroes if I were trying to give someone examples. They have many different versions. I'd make an exception for Superman, because the overall impression is iconic enough.

The idea is what you convey to the listener. Robin Hood can be debated all over the map, but you will have better success conveying CG to most people with him.

I'd argue the opposite (from the perspective of someone who doesn't follow the comics closely, at least): comic characters are good examples because their specific manifestations change a lot, because this means that most people only have some impression of the characters' constant core traits or philosophies. These are much easier to classify than a complex character could ever be.

This is like someone asking me to prove that 1 is 1, it's mind boggling to me that you could argue that all draw actions take interact and thus manipulate EXCEPT in the case of bows, because they're special little things that need to be coddled.

At the point Mathmuse ascaphalus and painted green I'm going to have to assume that you're arguing in bad faith and in going to drop this subject because nothing can change you from thick locked in view you've taken, but this kind of bad faith arguing is just disappointing.

I'm 100% that you could ask any developper about this and they'd say that obviously it has the manipulate trait because a reload does occur.

We're never even gonna have an errata on this because the answer is so obvious!

You're free to houserule this in your games of courses but it's a dumb interpretation based on programming language intepretation bug that shouldn't take place in TOTM style TTRPG.

What the actual hell. This is incredibly disrespectful. Just because you don't like our position you accuse us of arguing in bad faith? And you don't even try to engage our arguments about RAW because you keep appealing to RAI (nevermind the fact that even if you want bow reloads to still have the manipulate traits, there are at least two different ways of doing it and it is not at all clear which would be intended; Mathmuse already pointed this out). But there's literally no point in arguing with you if you just resort to ad hominem, and the fact that people are favoriting your post is disgusting. I am out.

Ascalaphus wrote:

It's not about zero action cost, it's about there being zero of that action, which is the same as none of that action. Zero apples is the same as no apples. If you go to the supermarket and buy 0 apples, they don't print any apples on your receipt. That's the plain English understanding of zero of a thing being none of a thing.

If there was a free action, it would say something like "if a weapon has reload 0, the Interact to reload is a free action". Or it would have the actual layout for a custom free action. But that isn't there in the book.

It doesn't need to be there. It is abundantly clear that the arrow is not being teleported from the quiver into the bow. A reload is happening, even if it takes zero actions. That reload is an event that is happening. That event can be reacted to.

Zero action cost is not the same as it not happening. There are plently of things which cost zero actions that happen in the game. In fact 2 of the 4 types of actions in the game have zero action cost.

Your first paragraph is irrelevant. That's just your intuition and not something that's included in the rules. I'm also obviously not saying that the arrow teleports into your hand, but this isn't the question. Noone doubts that you 'manipulate' your weapon to attack someone, but that doesn't give a strike the manipulate trait in rules terms.

And again, all that the rules are saying is that reloading a reload 0 weapon does not take an interact action. I would argue that a 'free interact action' is still an interact action (with 'zero action cost', if you want). In any case, going from 'no action' to 'free action with the manipulate trait' is a huge leap that is not justified by anything in the rules and would break many other interactions, as pointed out by Mathmuse.

painted_green wrote:

In any case, the rules say that drawing and loading are baked into the Strike in this case, so the free action interact is out the window anyway, and the text doesn't say anything about this adding traits or a subordinate interact to the strike, so it doesn't.

"Subordinate Actions Core Rulebook pg. 461

An action might allow you to use a simpler action—usually one of the Basic Actions on page 469—in a different circumstance or with different effects. This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects, but is modified in any ways listed in the larger action."

The Subordinate Action retains all it's traits, so it's moot if the greater action has them as the Subordinate Action triggers them and in this case, the Subordinate Action happens before the strike which would trigger anything that triggers off Interaction.

"Hands
Source Core Rulebook pg. 279 2.0
Some weapons require one hand to wield, and others require two. A few items, such as a longbow, list 1+ for its Hands entry. You can hold a weapon with a 1+ entry in one hand, but the process of shooting it requires using a second to retrieve, nock, and loose an arrow."

"Wielding Items
Source Core Rulebook pg. 272
Retrieve an item from a backpack , sack, or similar container, action Interact."

Yes, activities inherit traits from subordinate actions, but there is no subordinate action here. The fact that the CRB uses the same non-rule term in two places doesn't mean anything. Yes, retrieving an item from a backpack, as a standalone activity, requires an interact action, but this doesn't automatically apply to any and all courses of action that involve some kind of retrieval. Otherwise, by your logic, Dual-Handed Assault would provoke an attack of opportunity, using the same table that you cite.

Mathmuse wrote:

I hold the opposing opinion. The Reload weapon statistic counts the number of Interact actions needed to reload a ranged weapon:

PF2 Core Rulebook, Equipment chapter, Weapon Statistics, page 279 wrote:

Reload

While all weapons need some amount of time to get into position, many ranged weapons also need to be loaded and reloaded. This entry indicates how many Interact actions it takes to reload such weapons. This can be 0 if drawing ammunition and firing the weapon are part of the same action. If an item takes 2 or more actions to reload, the GM determines whether they must be performed together as an activity, or you can spend some of those actions during one turn and the rest during your next turn.

An item with an entry of “—” must be drawn to be thrown, which usually takes an Interact action just like drawing any other weapon. Reloading a ranged weapon and drawing a thrown weapon both require a free hand. Switching your grip to free a hand and then to place your hands in the grip necessary to wield the weapon are both included in the actions you spend to reload a weapon.

A weapon with Reload 0 takes 0 Interact actions to load. Therefore, it takes no Interact actions and does not gain the manipulate trait from an Interact action. Drawing an arrow and shooting it from a bow are part of the same action and that action is a Strike that does not contain an Interact action and does not have the manipulate trait.

This interpretation defies how bows are actually used. Being grappled ought to interfere with using a bow. But that is not how the rules are written. As a houserule, the GM could declare that drawing an arrow gives the Strike action the manipulate trait.

Clearly reloading a bow is a zero action cost interact.

If you are arguing that no interact has happened then you are going to get no agreement.

If you are arguing that the reload...

How is it 'clear' when you are literally responding to someone who legitimately has an opposing interpretation? So, for the record, in terms of pure RAW I agree with Mathmuse. I don't see where you get the 'zero action cost interact' in that rules text. What is that even supposed to mean? There are no 'not-an-actions' in PF2. So you must be talking about a free action, but that's a huge leap because the text just says that you need 0 interact actions. That's not the same as an interact as a free action.

In any case, the rules say that drawing and loading are baked into the Strike in this case, so the free action interact is out the window anyway, and the text doesn't say anything about this adding traits or a subordinate interact to the strike, so it doesn't.

And just to reiterate, this is my take on RAW. Whether you think it's logical or realistic is irrelevant for my and Mathmuse's arguments.

breithauptclan wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

The reason why thrown melee weapons need to be Agile or Finesse is because non-Agile or Finesse thrown melee weapons get higher dice.

Being able to Sneak Attack with a weapon that also possibly does persistent damage, splash damage, or applies conditions would be more of a consideration. And don't some of the bombs also have 1d6 as their base initial damage?

Bombs definitely benefit from Sneak Attack in the current state of the rules. Is it the developer intent, no one can know but them, but it doesn't look like they spoke about changing anything about it. Also, Bombs deal less damage than bows at high level (and because Sneak Attack comes at level 6 as you have a better feat at level 4 for bombs, I tend to look at the mid to high levels where bows are definitely better). So, it doesn't feel like there's an issue there.

This is a rare case where we do actually have clear indication of developer intent - the alchemist multiclass archetype explicitly mentions sneak attacking with bombs in its description.

In my campaign, the shield being strapped rather than held has actually been an advantage so far, since noone wanted to drop their shield so far, but people have dropped unconscious with one and I let them keep it rather than dropping it like a weapon or other item.

Doesn't it state before the spell descriptions that 'you' always refers to the caster? I think I remember something like that, but I don't have the book on hand to check right now.

That being said, 'at the start of your turns' sounds like bad English to me. It would have to be 'at the starts of your turns', which also sounds bad. And I don't even see how either of those would remove the ambiguity you are talking about.

And the torch creates a 'shed' of light - whatever that means.

There you go then. A torch creates a 'shed' of light, while a glowing rope would clearly generate a shedload of light. Completely different things.

Yes, let us talk about protests, police brutality and the American justice system. This is definitely a good idea and also a very productive thing to do in a thread about mind control that was already going nowhere.

siegfriedliner wrote:

But moving back to my original topic, do people want a less dark golarian with less horrible monsters.

Or do people just not want to see extreme examples of human evil in aps and monsters are fine because they can represent our worst nature without being us?

I think the second is where we currently are.

The people I've see talking about wanting "a less dark golarian with less horrible monsters" are overwhelming using it as a slippery slope argument about what others must want.

Like I've seen dozens of posts claiming that if you want to get rid of slavery you must also want to get rid of charm and domination because that's like slavery, but I don't remember anyone actually seriously saying they wanted those spells gone.

Feel free to count me as half a vote for wanting them gone, I guess? I've explained my thoughts to some extent earlier in this thread. I wouldn't go as far as removing them completely, but then that's not what's happening with slavery either, is it, so it would be a bit much to expect that stance. I would definitely support alignment repercussions for using such magic, and I think not wanting adventures to focus on it is a reasonable stance. (This last part is pretty vague solely because I cannot think of an adventure that I know which has enchantment magic as a focal point, rather than just a thing that some antagonists do.)

As stated before, I think this would be a very interesting discussion to have, and both The Raven Black and Temperans gave some interesting input. However, looking at the state of this thread and the general quality of discussion within it, I feel forced to agree with The Raven Black:

Then we should all put it on hiatus to come back and discuss it later. When the ripples of Paizo's decision about slavery in their products have died down.

Right now, this kind of topics are just putting unnecessary fuel on a raging inferno that makes many people's days a living hell, especially the brave moderators.

No need for that.

painted_green wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

To me it feels disengenuous to claim to not understand the difference between "squicky things go bump in the night" or "let's got beat up Dracula" and stories about cruelty and oppression.

What feels disingenuous to me is this sort of reductive misrepresentation of the original question. In fact, this thread did not have to be about slavery at all, and clearly both sides are to blame for this derailment.

Yes. I am sure the timing is pure coincidence.

As is the title BTW. I could guess the way it was going even just reading the title. I went and read it nonetheless because I honestly thought maybe it was about a real new topic. I was disappointed on this part, but not surprised in the least.

It is not a coincidence and I never claimed it was. The op specifically states that he came up with this thread because of the recent focus on such topics. But that doesn't mean that this thread is about slavery.

painted_green wrote:

...

To this whole post what I have to say is that the Mesmerist will likely never get ported over to PF2. Nor will any of the spooky, weird, and sometimes evil archetypes that were created. If Paizo does decide to port them over, it will be a miracle given the direction they are taking.

The Charm and Dominate spells are basically enough already to do everything I touched on. I also just noticed that Dominate lasts a long time, so my example argument about it being a combat spell is invalid (I must have misremembered that).

I would compare and contrast enchantment with necromancy, which has evil written all over it in all of the books, but in some respects could be fairly, if somewhat polemically, called 'enchantment with extra steps'. To me, there are some strong similarities between animating a zombie (for a limited time) and dominating a person. I don't quite see why the first should be evil and the second not, but I am open to explanations.

To me it feels disengenuous to claim to not understand the difference between "squicky things go bump in the night" or "let's got beat up Dracula" and stories about cruelty and oppression.

What feels disingenuous to me is this sort of reductive misrepresentation of the original question. In fact, this thread did not have to be about slavery at all, and clearly both sides are to blame for this derailment.

Returning to the original topic, I don't think it's bad faith or a 'dogwhistle' at all. The question of mind control is complicated and interesting on its own, even without alluding to recent events.

First off, I don't think the argument that this sort of domination is pure fantasy holds all that much water. Sure, we don't have magic, but we do have indoctrination, miseducation, false pretenses - many things that parallel enchantment magic in some respect or other. I recall some adventure specifically mentioning that the villain casts Charm Person on this one NPC every day. It's not that difficult to imagine substituting a non-magical alternative here.

Second, I am not personally familiar with trauma but I would assume that it doesn't generally need superficial operational parallels for a trigger - emotional states can suffice. And if you think about, say, a magically dominated person who still has some mental acuity left to be conscious of their situation, though unable to change it... It's definitely not the same as just 'squick' horror. There is more to it.

Finally, I think what sets magical enchantment and domination apart is that the PCs can benefit from it. There aren't even alignment repercussions. It's considered perfectly fine, in game terms, to take away other creatures' free will by magical means. There are, of course, arguments to be made for that. (One could say, for example, that Dominate is a combat spell, so other standards of morality apply by default.) But it's worth pointing out.

So what's my position? I don't know. The one thing I want people to recognize is that this is a difficult subject, and accusing people who want to talk about it of slippery-slope fallacies and bad faith arguments is unhelpful.

Mmph strides up behind Arun as he whiffs his first swipe. "Let me help." She reaches around him to touch the haft of his polearm as she casts Magic Weapon.

Mmph quickly corrects Valdris. "A warg, not a 'talking wolf'." In case the warg seems upset, she tries to placate him a bit: "My companions mean no offense. Regardless of his impertinence, I am sure you can see the value in the talking ape's offer."

Thanks! I didn't think of simply discarding the standard failures. It's a nice trick.

Honestly, I'm glad I decided to have Athletics as a wizard. I've been making most of the skills by the skin of my teeth.

I can relate. I picked it on my alchemist and it already paid off (he is a follower of Irori so it makes sense). I guess it would have made *some* sense on this character as well, but for her I had some more pressing priorites.

That series of Athletics checks was quite stressful. xD

Whenever Athletics comes up, I imagine all of our characters just staring at Arun expectantly. It's a bit of a gap skill in this group. :P

In my view, the last section cited by Aratorin also implies that you can get formulae for runes from the Magical Crafting feat. While feats are not explicitly mentioned as sources for formulae on page 293, I would consider the "can be acquired in the same way as an item formula" part to stand on its own.

for those not compulsively checking the recruitment threads

I feel called out.

Reflex save: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (1) + 8 = 9

Seeing the mug begin to teeter, Tawny tries to scoot backwards, but his boot catches on the stool, which begins to tilt over. His hands slip uselessly as he grasps for the edge of the counter and he goes down together with the stool, landing on his back with a less-than-elegant thump. Adding further insult, the mug now finally topples and spills his contents all over Tawny. Boy, I sure hope noone saw that. Casting his eyes about, it seems like everybody saw that. The thump must have caught their attention just in time to witness the grand finale of this performance.

Tawny pushes himself up into a sitting position just as the halfling approaches with a towel. Mindful to change his surprised expression to a conciliatory smile, he lets her mop him off before standing up fully. "That's quite the act." He does not bother to hide his amusement at the lady's obvious embarrassment. "Might I suggest a cleaning spell as your next lesson?" After taking a few seconds to adjust his cloak and straighten his clothing, he extends an arm toward Redd. "The name's Tawny. Pleased to meet you." Thinking for a second, he adds: "And congratulations on learning the bardic arts."

With a side gesture, he motions to the bartender to replace his spilled ale.

Thanks, should all be in order now. :) Ready to sign up to stuff!

Again, I'm fine if people want to talk about the mechanical difficulties in handling blindness or deafness specifcially. My own first post in this thread talks about just that But it's not OK to try to silence someone by arguing that they're immoral for criticizing Paizo on this, or alluding that they're the "real ableist" because someone has a blind friend that dislikes Daredevil. Disability is not a monolith, and those who would like to play disabled characters while remaining optimized are not wrong to have that desire, and any acommodations that make that possible without disrupting the game as a whole are worth discussing.

I have reread Captain Morgan's original post which you seem to keep referring to. It is respectfully written and brings up a worry that me and many others share. Your constant denigration of it as them somehow claiming something about "real ableists" is both baseless and a wholly unnecessary roughening of the discourse. You say that "disability is not a monolith", yet you insistently refuse to engage with the issue brought up by Captain Morgan in their anecdote, which, from my experience, is based on a viewpoint that many disabled people share.

Your principal thesis seems to be that adding "disabled" characters with, in effect, no mechanical drawbacks is value-neutral for all able-bodied people and either neutral or positive for all disabled people. But this is not true. Denigrating Captain Morgan's friend's opinion is not going to make it invalid. People like them would be negatively affected by any ruling of the sort you suggest. But you seem to happily ignore this.

Captain Morgan wrote:

I feel like there is a pretty clear difference between being inclusive as far as all players are concerned versus being inclusive as far as all characters are concerned. Watery Soup, you're conflating the two and it feels pretty problematic.

Well, no, actually, it's a desire to see characters like ourselves in fiction, and in TTRPG's being able to play characters who aren't "95% of players" is a pretty important part of getting to play characters who are in some way like ourselves without being asked to just be worse than others.

I'm extremely opposed to this accusation that wanting to play characters like ourselves is somehow a f*~&ing problem. It's not, it's that desire to make sure those who are different know their place to avoid making this "tedius" for those that consider themselves normal that I see as a problem.

It's fair enough if you're uninterested in playing such a character, if you think of it as entertaining as doing your taxes. But don't speak on behalf of those who would like to play such characters. We're not being "problematic" by expecting the same representation other groups get, and while there are mechanical issues that might make that more difficult the effort to make it more possible shouldn't be treated as a bad thing.

But how is it representation if the character is not actually disabled? As far as I can tell, all you want to do is play a run-of-the-mill character with all the normal mechanics, slap the label "blind" on it, and go on your merry way. If that's how you want to flavor it and your GM is fine with it, go right ahead. But do you honestly think this would be a good idea for an official implementation of such characters? Do you not see any issue with building trivialization of disabilities right into the core rules? Or am I misunderstanding your intent here?

Ultimately, I kind of agree with you - I think the easiest way to solve it is by inserting a line somewhere and explicitly saying, "for characters without vision, X, Y, and Z can count as 'sight'."

This is not a workable solution. Other senses are not equivalent to sight, and just putting them on the same level whenever sight is not available diminishes the struggles of actual blind people.

Artofregicide wrote:

you're really not helping and you aren't doing a good job of representing our community.

Depending on how you define "our", I may not disagree.

If you think this topic is too "hot," then let me use a parallel example: Paizo has made it clear they are not including people who primarily speak languages other than English. Their exclusion isn't a value judgement, it's just a practicality. Characters speak "Common," and Common is English. The rule books are not translated. It would be hard to run a game with an English-only speaker and a Spanish-only speaker.

And to my knowledge, although some ex-US players are sad, very few are mad. But it'd be different if Paizo said they were supporting Spanish speakers, and then put out an awkwardly translated CRB. Or translated part of it and just said "use your best judgement in adjusting everything else."

Furthermore, if Paizo did choose to put out a poorly translated CRB, and when Spanish-speakers complained, a bunch of English-speakers on the forums complained about how most people speak English so deal with it, Spanish-speakers would feel excluded.

You're correct that I don't speak for you - or many others in this thread. The question is whether I am part of "our" community, or whether people like my son (who has congenital hearing loss) are part of "our" community. To be clear, it's cool if we're not. I am not threatening to boycott or show up with torches and pitchforks. I am asking Paizo to either scale back their promises or make some minor wording changes.

This analogy is exactly the kind of thing Captain Morgan was talking about, so just to reiterate:

I feel like there is a pretty clear difference between being inclusive as far as all players are concerned versus being inclusive as far as all characters are concerned. Watery Soup, you're conflating the two and it feels pretty problematic.

Trying to apply advanced physics to magical effects as an assumption of common sense is going to result in a lot of problematic bickering. Assuming that it is common sense that a wall of force would stop sound or scent is far from a common consensus of opinions. Can I bang on the wall to make sound on the other side? What if the wall does not enclose the target? sound very easily travels through physical objects and around corners as can smells. The details of this do not need to be spelled out in every instance if the general idea is that a magical effect does or does not generally impact perception, only if it is intentionally meant to impact specific kinds of perception.

This is a fair response, but then my question becomes this: Do you really expect your changes to spell descriptions to have any relevant effect on the amount of "problematic bickering" that would ensue? I also still do not quite see how this is a matter of ableism in any cases that are not completely analogous to the Magic Missile thing (of which I, to be frank, do not know how many there are).

To illustrate this: The issues you bring up regarding the Wall of Force spell can be reduced, as far as I can see, to two questions:
1. Does the wall form an airtight seal at its common edges with other structures?
2. Is the wall able to transmit vibrations?

Note first that answering these questions in the spell description would solve all issues related to scent or hearing that you bring up, but only *in reference to the wall itself* - to answer them completely, you would actually need values for transmittance of vibrations through, at the very least, any common materials for walls, as well was for permeability for substances (though this one, I would assume, can safely be taken to be zero for most situations). But this is clearly infeasible, so really, even addressing all issues like this in the spell description would still leave the vast majority of situations a judgment call - and that is fine!

My second point is this: whether you answer these questions in terms of senses or in terms of the underlying physics or whatever-which-way *does not matter*. To frame the issue as one of ableism is, in my eyes, dishonest. It is solely and entirely a rules issue, and I, for one, find the formulation used in the finalized spell to be a very workable compromise between accuracy and economy of space.

As a final point: I do not think the basic mechanisms of hearing and smell are particularly advanced physics. But this issue could be solved by specifying how hearing, smell, and sight typically work in the chapter on senses - which, as it happens, is what other people have already suggested in this thread.

In all of this thread, I have seen only two examples where the description used is actually problematic in my opinion, and neither are because they are ableist, but rather because their rules are incomplete:

The Magic Missile example appears to have been ceded by pretty much everyone. Yes, another precise sense should work as well. Case closed.

The tremorsense example is an issue with the description of tremorsense - it should specify what blocks it and what does not, which it does not do.

Other than that, what I see from Univore is almost exclusively an overreliance on rules in place of basic common sense. The game never tells you that you can hear around corners, or that sight requires light reflecting off the object in question to reach your eye or other appropriate organ. It does this not out of prejudice against sighted people, but because these are basic assumptions on the physics of the world which are understood by everyone. My question is: why should other senses, whose workings are completely clear, be handled differently?

As an example, I have seen the wording of Wall of Force being touted as exclusionary. Let me cite the relevant parts of it:
"The wall blocks physical effects from passing through it, and because it's made of force, it blocks incorporeal and ethereal creatures as well. Teleportation effects can pass through the barrier, as can visual effects (since the wall is invisible)."
So you are telling me that this does not cover the other senses? Let's have a look, shall we? First off, tremorsense is not up to debate here - I ceded that it has issues. But what about other senses? Does a Wall of Force block hearing? Yes, obviously - because waves of pressure in air are quite clearly a physical effect. The spell does not need to tell you this, nor does it then need to specify that actually, hearing is only blocked if there is no way for the waves to travel *around* the wall, because all of this is already clear - the rules do not start from an empty universe, but from the assumption that basic physics work the same as in our world. Does a Wall of Force block scent? Yes, obviously - because diffusion of particles in air is quite clearly a physical effect. And so on. None of this is unclear. None of this is ableist. It's really not that complicated.

Data Lore, your insistence on needing to change grips, drop weapons and then pick them up again, or whatever-you-have is very much like advocating that Flurry of Blows should take two actions because a Strike takes one action and you are making two of them. You should have noticed that the rules do not justify each and every detail of their action economy with the exact flavor you should use, but there is exactly zero basis for simply discarding the notion that the action for Battle Medicine *includes* making a hand free to apply the healing and then change your grip back. Claiming that this is impossible just because the flavor is not explicit (while the rules *are*) and then mocking everyone who disagrees is counterproductive and, frankly, insulting.

You are flat-footed to anything that is hidden from or undetected by you, so if you are blinded and vision is your only precise sense, blinded does make you flat-footed. It is not written directly into the condition because other creatures may be able to rely on other senses, such as echolocation, to offset the blindness.

As Tiene said, the point of Avert Gaze is that you try not to look directly at harmful things while still keeping up your usefulness in combat. The bolded part is what makes it difficult, and it's reasonable for that to require a conscious effort each and every round, keeping threats just at the edge of sight, moving your gaze if they move around, and so on - hence the action each round. If you just do not want to get caught in visual effects, you can always just close your eyes (which I would rule a free action, but I doubt it is clarified anywhere in the rules), but then you have to deal with the downsides of that as well.

The thing that threw me off is that while the example in the sidebar is not entirely analogous, the requirement for Push *does* specifically mention "[t]he monster's last action". So I do not think your (or my) assessment is supported by the rules alone.

Also, regarding Wing Rebuff not being an activity: The term "activity" is not really comprehensively defined anywhere, but it is very possible for an activity to be a reaction. The last sentence of the first paragraph on activities on page 461 of the CRB states: "In some cases, usually when spellcasting, an activity can consist of only 1 action, 1 reaction, or even 1 free action."

The attack trait does not imply that you roll an attack roll. It just means that the corresponding roll is affected by the multiple attack penalty. A Trip maneuver always uses Athletics, as stated in the chapter on skills (if there were other options, it would appear somewhere else in the book, most likely in the list of basic actions in the rules chapter). All that the trip trait on the whip does is allow you to use the reach of the whip for your maneuver, as well as let you drop the weapon on a critical failure and add the item bonus of the whip to your check, if any (so if it's a +2 whip, you get +2 to your trip check). It does not change the fact that Trip uses an Athletics check.

Why all the snark? What exactly the materials are is a detail that is relevant for flavor and nothing else. You said that "it's an abstraction" is unsatisfactory for you, but what would be the alternative? Do you want the CRB - already over 600 pages long - to list the materials for every single item? Do you want it to explain the chemistry behind Alchemist's Fire and Bottled Lightning? There are limits to what can reasonably fit into such a volume, and I would think that most people would be quite disappointed if actual game mechanics were cut to fit fluff like this into the book. And if you are seriously asking if a longbow and a suit of plate are made of the same materials, I do not know what to tell you.

So, to reiterate what was already said: the materials can be whatever the GM wants them to be. If you want a detailed description, talk to them (or if you are GMing yourself, make something up); in the case of runes, this will probably tie into how magic works in your world (similar to the costs of learning spells). If you want to talk about ideas or other people's explanations, I would suggest opening a thread in the General Discussion forum, since that's not really a Rules question.

You already answered your own question. The lesser damage for the claw may be acceptable in return for a higher hit chance on the second or third hit, and the talons are relevant for the AoO feature.

There are many examples in the Bestiary of attacks which are worse at face value but either have beneficial traits or are used for some other feature of the monster in question. As another example, the giant stag beetle's foot attack is strictly worse than its mandibles, but is used for its Trample feature.

To expand on that, the only things that kick you out of a stance are changing into another one, getting knocked unconscious or leaving encounter mode. For stances that have specific requirements, you also need to keep fulfilling them or leave the stance. Other than that, you can move and use other actions all you want and stay in stance.