pi4t's page

Easl wrote:

This works fine when it's one or just a few encounters per day. When it gets to about 3 or more, then the model of "build the class assuming they can use highest slot + lower rank slots in every encounter" breaks down. I think the remastering of focus spells is intended to help with this - essentially making them available for every encounter. Am I guessing correctly? Or is there some other remastery update that helps the Wizard class be robust against 3+ combat encounters between morning preparations?

Three encounters is basically the assumed baseline, which is why 3 is the default number of spells per level that core casters cap out at. You're generally assumed to be having about 3 encounters per day and using 1 top-rank slot per encounter, supplemented by some combination of cantrips, focus spells, consumables, limited-use non-consumables, lower level slots, etc.

Can I politely suggest putting that information in the revised rulebooks somewhere? It's about half the number of encounters per day recommended in 5e or PF1, and I think groups coming from those systems try to run the number of encounters per day they're used to and end up finding spellcasters aren't able to contribute properly.

It allows you to choose exactly how much to heal people, so you don't "overheal" them and waste the extra hit points. Increasing your efficiency in terms of spell points.

For example if someone is only down 3 hit points then normally you wouldn't want to waste a spell point healing them for 1d8+CL hit points. But with fount of life, you could cast a heal, use 3hp of that healing on your friend, and save the rest for the next time someone gets injured.

Casters can always use their cantrips. They are surprisingly effective. And they have many other options, using skills, roleplaying, etc, because they game shouldn't be reduced to mere combat.

Casters in D&D variants have always been weak at low levels. In PF2 they are less weak than in many other game systems. Don't turn up your nose at cantrips, and don't just judge them on their ability to deal damage.

AFAIK there are no suggested guidelines for encounters per day. It all boils down to the story the DM has decided to lay out, and what he wants to see the players accomplish. With non-magical healing available to every character, regardless of his class, most parties will have options for healing between encounters, unless the DM really puts a timer under their nose.

And for those who think spellcasters don't have enough slots, don't foget scrolls & wands. There are ways to boost spells per day, maybe not at first level, where everything is far too expensive, but soon-ish.

So what's the point of having slots per day at all? If, as you claim, the game is perfectly well balanced however many encounters you have per day, why not just say casters can't regain spells at all until they gain a level? That's effectively what a GM would be doing if "the story he decided to lay out" involved a lot of encounters in a day. Would you be happy playing a caster in a game with that rule?

Or flipping it around, what about just saying that casters regain all their slots with a ten minute rest? That's effectively what happens if the GM is running a "1 encounter per day" sort of game, which you claim is fine. Would you be happy playing a mundane character with a sword when the casters are dropping fireball after fireball in every combat and killing all the enemies far more efficiently than you?

Or are you saying that spells aren't really much more powerful than cantrips, so it doesn't really matter whether casters have spells available or not? Because if so, Paizo's own game design comments contradict you. I can't find the quote right now as I'm on my phone, but they explicitly designed cantrips to be backup options that were significantly worse than a martial character's attack or using a proper spell, but were at least able to achieve something.

Martialmasters wrote:

If you don't like religion at all on some level cleric isn't for your, neither is champion.

I can play either but I don't play preachy characters.

I enjoy playing religious characters while not personally liking religion.

I'm pretty much the opposite. In real life I'm strongly Christian, and that makes playing religious characters feel rather awkward. Interestingly, it's not exactly the "pretending to worship another god feels like idolatory" problem, though. The thing is, the "gods" of Pathfinder (and D&D) seem...well, kind of rubbish and not worthy of worship. They're simply another type of creature within creation, not the One who created it all and is behind all things. In many cases they're simply humans who happened to gain a lot of power, in one case by accident! The whole "gods need prayer badly" trope is also problematic for me, and the idea that the cleric's power comes from "faith" rather than from the god feels like an awkward sort of distortion of ideas from Christianity. In short, my worldview would make me a textbook "atheist" in Golarion's terms, precisely because I'm a Christian. And that means that I view any character worshipping them as...at best woefully misguided and rather tragic. Which can be interesting to roleplay, but isn't something I'd want to play as with every character.

Also, ArchSage20, biblical afterlives include memory loss as petitioners? That's horrible.

You know tho really it doesn't make sense that christian's view death negatively unless you know your being sinful and are afraid of judgement... hmm actually maybe it does make sense...

While I'm here perhaps I can quickly clear up a couple of misunderstandings about Christianity.

"What, everyone brought chalk?"

I've got a bit tired of seeing entire groups of adventurers all carrying exactly the same equipment, just because that's what was in the adventurer's pack. An average size party will have:

200ft of rope but no grapple
20 torches for lighting up the dungeon but no ten foot poles or crowbars
40 pieces of chalk but no paper for mapping

Clearly, this is a bit silly, so I set up some alternative options. These packs are a little more expensive than the standard one, as they include more gear, but they're still significantly cheaper than buying the stuff individually. For that reason, you can only buy these during character creation.

If anyone wants to contribute more specialisation options, please do. To match up with the ones above, they should add up to about 16-17sp in value, and should ideally contain a torch or a couple of candles in case no one went for the light specialisation.

To get back to the actual question, there are some house rules I saw in another thread which try to remove incapacitation, while keeping things balanced by giving every spell a minor buff to compensate.

I'm not intending to use them right now - I'm currently testing the system by running a group of GM-played characters through Age of Ashes and want to give incapacitation a fair chance in actual gameplay - but I could see myself using them if I find incapacitation is as irritating as it looks.

Possibly one could add some sort of extra cost to supercharging a spell, so you have the choice of using the base version or the upgrade. A gold cost like esoteric material components from 1e, or perhaps a cost in hp or a condition, or a wild magic chance of some kind. Or something else, if you have any other ideas.

Also, regardless of anything else, it might be worth adding something like the following spell:

That would at least allow you to make an informed decision, knowing when a creature is too high level for an incapacitate spell so you don't waste the spell against an enemy that turned out to be slightly too high level for it. The reason for limiting the number of uses per turn is so that you can't just scan an entire crowd of people in one round and find the high level assassin among them.

Can I ask people that are for wands of CLW a question. Is the reason you want the wands because of difficulty? So far I'm at chapter 3 and a cleric wasn't "obligatory." We haven't had any TPKs. If you use good tactics and teamwork you can get through combats that are quite difficult and still come out with health to spare.

Speaking for myself (and I believe most people who are in favour of the mechanic feel the same way), it's not exactly because of difficulty. I'm quite in favour of difficult games and gritty settings myself. But having access to reliable healing (either through wands, or a dedicated healbot) makes the game far, far easier.

If every group has access to reliable healing, that's fine, and challenges can be balanced with that in mind. If no one has access to reliable healing, that's also fine (if a bit unusual for d&d systems). Any given GM, or writer of a module, will tone down the power of the encounters they send against the group.

However, if both modes of play are possible, and if which mode you go for depends not on the GM's choices about his setting, or the players' telling the GM how hard they want the game to be, but on whether anyone has a character concept that involves being a cleric and/or wants to play a "healbot", that's a problem. Particularly if the game is being balanced assuming you're playing one mode or the other, and incorporates that assumption into its guidance on how dangerous an enemy will be for the group. And particularly if that game is known for its modules and adventure paths, with prewritten encounters designed to save the GM having to design the encounters himself.

I congratulate you on getting through to chapter 3 without a cleric. As, unfortunately, I've not yet been able to play the playtest modules I can't comment on how much of an achievement that is. But it seems like however easy the modules may or may not be without a cleric, they'll be a good deal easier with one. Indeed, your group (who appreciate a harder challenge, and perhaps put more thought than most groups into your tactics) might have found it too easy.

If it was possible to play through the game without a cleric BUT you had to spend money and resonance on healing potions would you still not like it because you want to have inexpensive unlimited healing and start combat full hp every time to make the game easier?

If it was properly balanced, sure. That is to say, if the amount the group was losing out on in terms of extra money for gear, and extra magic item "slots" from resonance, was equal to the power gained from a character changing from a cleric who focussed their abilities on healing to a more offensive class and build. However, I don't think that's possible, at least without coming up with some radically different limiting mechanic - the amount of healing a group will need is just too variable depending on player skill, the nature of the encounters the GM likes to throw at them, etc.

And if Paizo doesn't get the balance right for your group, it becomes either inexpensive unlimited healing - but worse, inexpensive unlimited healing that the premade modules aren't balanced for - or either a TPK (if resonance stops the group healing and their hp runs out in an adventure) or a long, drawn out death spiral (if money is the limit and the group starts falling more and more behind the wealth the modules expect). This can be partly dealt with by a skilled GM who isn't running a premade module (or is willing to do substantial tweaks), of course. But "Pathfinder 2: Ignore our GMing advice and make sure you're an experienced GM before you start playing! Oh, and don't buy the modules as they won't be properly balanced for your group!" is not a very good tagline :)

And anyway, it's certainly not possible to play without a caster who can heal you at present. Unless you play a human, you can't even use mundane methods to heal hp at all until level 2, and even then medicine is almost as likely to harm you as heal you.

Maybe I'm just a different type of gamer. I like difficulty. I don't play games on easy mode because it's too boring. Or maybe it's not a difficulty thing idk. I just can't really understand the complaints because from my games a cleric hasn't been required, and our party got through fine.

I also like difficulty. That's why, in the game I'm playing in at the moment, my level 3 halfling earned the emnity of a level 20 lich wizard-king in backstory. In a game where the PCs we're using spheres of power, which is considerably less powerful at high levels. It's also why I'm running an old school megadungeon, and have added a number of house rules (to 5e, as it happens) to make things more difficult.

If Paizo would offer optional variants to the rules to make things harder for the players, I'd be rather interested. 5e has done a little bit of that - the DMG contains options for tweaking the resting mechanics, and so on.

But I don't want the difficulty to be determined by whether someone's playing a cleric or not.

Well, the traditional four-character party is a Damage Dealer/Tank, a Damage Dealer/Skill Monkey, a Healer/Buffer, and a Battlefield Controller/Debuffer. Truth is, if you don't have any of these roles, you're probably going to notice the difference (if you're an experienced player that knows what could be done, anyway). Most adventures are written with the assumption that you have some way of accessing the abilities of the traditional party, even if that means hiring an NPC back in town.

Well, I question why that should have to be the case, just because "it's always been done this way before". If we're not willing to change anything about the game, we might as well just go back to PF1 and forget the new edition entirely.

But even assuming we want to keep enforcing those roles...the four-character party from PF doesn't have a healer/buffer, it has a buffer. And a wand of CLW. And a trap option of trying to use the buffer as a healer.

Conversely, PF2 has a healer, who can also do a bit of buffing. But not a great deal of it, since buffs have been severely nerfed in this edition. And based on the frequency of threads like these, it seems like while there are plenty of people willing to play a battlefield controller/debuffer, and plenty who enjoy playing a damager dealer/skill monkey, and plenty of enjoy the damage dealer/tank role, significantly less than a quarter of the player base wants to play a primary healer. Which would mean that if the game required every group to have a primary healer, then obviously people are going to be forced to fill that role when they want to do something else, which can't be healthy for the game.

But I still think out of combat healing should be a premium and not something every party can have unlimited access to.

Trouble is that in a system where out of combat healing is at a premium, a group with a healer (whether that means someone who heals in combat, or just someone who heals out of combat, in this hypothetical system) will enter every combat on full hp, while a group without a healer will have their hp whittled away and have a far lower hp for the later battles (in the same day, or before downtime lets them heal naturally, depending on whether you use resonance or gold cost to limit the healing).

This is a major difference in power, particularly since Pathfinder expects you to have several encounters per day and end with the hardest ones. Theoretically there should be a sweet spot where you can make non-healer healing just rare enough that parties without a healer enter their last battles down [whatever fraction of their hp you think is balanced]. But in practice, I think there are far too many variables that differ between groups, and between adventures, to be able to pull it off that effectively - how many encounters do we have, how well did the PCs play them, were the dice favourable towards them, etc - which will mean that the amount of healing a group needs will vary quite a lot from game to game and from day to day, even among characters who are the same level. So one day one group, may find that the healing you've allotted them is more than sufficient to let them encounter the boss on full hp (the wand of CLW scenario) while the next day another group may find they run out of healing and TPK before reaching the boss.

neaven wrote:

Should you have some form of healing in your party? Yes. Should a player have to spend some of the relatively limited choices they get each level up on healing? Very much no in my opinion - it's not healthy for a game to mandate a particular role in that way. It makes people less likely to enjoy playing, because either they have to stick someone else with the role or they get stuck with it themselves. It should be a "nice to have if someone wants to bring it, but not mandatory to proceed" type situation.

If only there was some sort of... reliable out of combat healing. Perhaps some sort of cheap reusable item? One that could be carried easily, but wouldn't be so efficient as to make it powerful in combat. Perhaps it replicates a low level healing spell?

Nah, that can't be right. Resonance knocks that one on it's head. Oh well.

;)

What you suggest removes the healer class and healing skill from the game entirely. Additionally its literally the games job to set roles for party member heck its a role playing game.

Sorry that this is going to sound blunt, but no, it doesn't remove the possibility of a healer role. In 1e, even the optimisation community considers Dreamscarred Press's vitalist a solid tier 3 class, and that's all about healing. But unlike the 1e cleric, it's capable of doing competitive amounts of healing in combat. And someone capable of doing that is a very useful addition to the party, even in a setting that has wands of CLW for cheap out of combat healing.

If you mean that a wand of CLW means you can't have a "healer" whose healing is too slow to work in combat, then yes. But is "guy who contributes nothing much in combat, but then tells the party to restore their hit points to full after the battle" really a party role we want? Frankly, it sounds really boring to play.

Also, I've always interpreted the "role-playing" in "RPG" to refer to pretending to be your character, not to the somewhat nebulous party roles of healer, arcane caster, etc. So I'm not playing the role of a healer, I'm playing the role of a halfling who was freed from slavery by a dragon and has a curse preventing her from attacking people, but has access to certain magic powers she uses to heal the party. My character fits into the healer role within the party as it currently stands, but could theoretically switch to some other role if the party's composition changes, or she breaks her curse.

I think healers shouldn't be "mandatory" but I feel like the party should be punished for not having one. A few hundred gold (or silver in this edition) wand shouldn't completely replace the role of a character. Imagine if a wand of burning hands was the most "efficient" way to deal damage. People would hate it instantly because then all we would have is character with a ton of AC and health running around with explody wands. That's how clerics and healers feel in 1e. You HAVE to build for damage if you want to be efficient because otherwise you're not pulling your weight.

Strictly speaking, a wand of burning hands is the most efficient way to deal damage, calculated on a hp-for-gp ratio. Or it's some other level 1 spell, depending on whether you need the AoE. The "punishment" for relying on wands is that you can't do damage quickly, making the strategy useless in combat. If you had to, say, melt your way through a wall of ice, though, then a wand of burning hands would probably be your best option.

And the situation is similar here. The "punishment" for not having a healer is that you can't heal in combat. Bring along a healer, and you should be able to heal much more quickly, in a way that's actually worth doing in combat. Unfortunately, the "healing" Paizo classes in PF1e (and, to be fair, their counterparts in 3.5 and 3e) aren't able to do that, which has led to this idea that strong healing in combat is OP and that having a healer who just heals outside combat is somehow the default.

Yeah, I actually agree. Getting heavy armor proficiency is as easy as starting down the Fighter multiclass path, or you invest three general feats into it. But at the start, Mage Armor will get you through the lower levels.

I think you've misunderstood my point. Yes, getting full armour proficiencies with a single feat is also probably not great design, but even if Paizo removed that option, your best choice would still be to use heavy armour without proficiency, rather than using mage armour. Because there's no penalty for using armour you're not proficient in, other than it being slightly less effective.

There are a few worthwhile things left to put on yourself, like Mage Armor, False Life and Mirror Image.

Actually, no, Mage Armour is abysmal because of the way armour proficiencies work in PF2. All you lose for wearing armour you're not proficient in is 2 points of AC; until the very high levels a wizard gets a better AC by just wearing the heaviest armour he can afford and not casting mage armour. Even if he didn't bother to get proficiency. And that way he can also dump dexterity to no higher than 12, rather than raising it at every possible opportunity to maybe be competitive with the armour-wizard's AC. And he doesn't have to spend one of his highest level spell slots.

TL;DR: Currently, mundane healing is unable to stand in for a magic healer, even suboptimally. And if you have a magic healer, it's so weak in comparison that it's not worth investing in. To solve this, allow medicine to heal hp without Battle Medic as a 10 minute activity, let each creature benefit from mundane healing once per hd per day rather than the current limit; and reduce the DC and/or remove the critical failure effect.

For various reasons, it looked like the playtest game I'm participating in was going to be without a class that could use healing magic. Initially we thought this would be fine. Perhaps suboptimal, but we could always rely on the medicine skill, and perhaps later someone could multiclass into cleric.

But we then realised that the equivalent of Treat Deadly Wounds from PF1 is locked behind a skill feat. Without that feat (battle medic) there is no way to use medicine to heal hit point damage (other than bringing people from 0hp to 1hp). This is a serious problem, since nonhumans can't get their first skill feat at level 2. Thus, at level 1 a party without a caster with healing will have no way to recover hp other than bed rest, or items/NPCs the GM plants in the adventure. Obviously, this is a problem, as it means that every game starting at first level will need a divine/primal caster.

The obvious solution to this is to shift the action that Battle Medic offers into an activity under the medicine skill, that takes a long time to do - perhaps an hour, like Treat Deadly Wounds in PF1, or perhaps ten minutes like Natural Medicine's option. Battle Medic would then turn that into a single action, allowing it to be used in combat.

In a separate but related complaint, the amount healed by Battle Medic doesn't scale properly with level. Since at each level everyone gains an extra hit die, your healing should also increase by about a hit die's worth of hp to remain effective. The Heal spell does this; it starts with (a little more than) 1d8hp, and each level it's heightened increases it by 2d8. On the other hand, Battle Medic just remains fixed. Unless you make the skill master/legendary and get a high enough bonus to meet the greater DCs, but even then it can only do a maximum of 4 dice of healing which is worse than a third level Heal spell.

This could be solved by simply allowing each creature to benefit from mundane healing once per day per hit die of the creature. Battle Medic would still be of limited value mid-battle, but at least it would be possible to play the game without someone being stuck playing a healbot caster.

This also solves another exploit/problem: since Bolstered only prevents you getting healing again from the same person, you can get more healing if you go round asking lots of different people to heal you one after the other.

A cleric would still be the best healer, since they a) have magic to augment their medicine, and b) they'll have a high wisdom naturally.

Oh, and either lower the DC for Battle Medic, or ditch the critical failure effect. Preferably both, at least for the ten minute option I suggested above. Currently Nature is better than Medicine for healing people outside combat!

I think one major problem with Resonance is that it costs the same to activate a magic item once, for a single instantaneous effect, and to invest in an item that will continue giving you bonuses for the whole day. But the latter type of item is almost invariably better: Would you like a +1 weapon you can use all day, or a single casting of a 1st level heal spell? I foresee a situation where people just load up with as many invested magic items as they can afford, and just use consumables for anything left over. Perhaps it might be worth reserving one or two points so you can pull out a scroll if a spell you didn't prepare is suddenly needed, but essentially I think people will just ignore consumables except when they can't afford enough permanent magic items to fill all their resonance "slots".

This could be solved by making it a lot cheaper to use resonance for activating magic items. Maybe Paizo could borrow an idea used by 5e and by the OSR, and base it on a dice roll. The proficiency system would extend very nicely to this, as well, if we let the roll be variable. Something like the following:

-----

Every character has a level of proficiency in magic items, which gives them a specific size of resonance die (see below). Whenever you activate a magic item you must roll your resonance die; if you roll a 1 then you lose a point of resonance. If you have no resonance remaining, you can no longer activate magic items (the rule about making a d20 flat check is replaced by this system). If you invest resonance in a magic item, don't roll the resonance die - you always spend a point of resonance when investing.

If you are Untrained in magic items (which should be reserved for specific character options that deliberately eschew magic, like that barbarian totem) then you don't get a resonance die at all. Every time you activate a magic item you lose 1 resonance.
If you're Trained (most characters), your resonance die is a d4.
If you're an Expert (alchemists, perhaps high level characters of certain other classes), your resonance die is a d6.
If you're a Master (higher level alchemists) it's a d8.
If you're Legendary (extremely high level alchemists) it's a d12.

-----

This system makes it hard to predict exactly how much more you can activate items (which I think was something Paizo was aiming for with their flat-checks-to-activate-after-you-run-out-of-resonance rules). It makes activated items worth using instead of invested ones, particularly if you're a class which "should" be using consumables more, like an alchemist. It even gives a way to do the "refusing magic" trope which isn't horribly crippling if the character is in a group with magic users, and/or horribly overpowered if the character is solo/in a group without magic users. It can also replace the rather ugly fake-resonance-only-usable-for-consumables ability that the alchemist gets at level 9.

Obviously, the formula to calculate your resonance might need to be adjusted in this system, since a point of resonance does now stretch a lot further when using it for consumables.

It does not say -2, +0, +1, +2, or +3, it simply gives us a pip. At first glance this reminded me of WoD, but under analysis it's D&D2e's Weapon Mastery system applied to every skill as well as weapons and armor.

Now, be fair. I've spent some time looking at D&D2e's weapon mastery system in the past, and the situation there was completely different. That system had several different bonuses from each level of mastery, some of which varied depending on the weapon, so it was totally reasonable to have names for the different levels of skill. Of course, that doesn't mean that having those complicated sets of bonuses was necessarily a good idea, but if you're going to do that then it's very sensible to use named levels of mastery.

On the other hand, if you're just giving a +1 bonus per level...not so much.

Humans are blatantly underpowered compared to literally every other Ancestry. Not only are they at -2 to one ability score, they don't even get their traditional bonus feat.

Well, they don't have a -2 penalty to one of their other ability scores, for what that's worth. Also, they can turn their ancestry feats into class/general feats, albeit only 1st level ones. Since a lot of ancestry feat choices are, shall we say, particularly disappointing even for PF2e, this may be quite a good option. The only trouble is that there aren't that many good general or class feats either.

Other than that, I agree with most of your assessments.

Rethink the guidance. Instead of having clear goals for where you want players to go, refocus on creating ways to help people navigate a more complex path.

New people in 1e were overwhelmed by choices and options because there was nothing there to shield them from the excess. Having a million choices is not a bad thing, if there is a way to filter them down to a dozen or two that would be right for what you were wanting to make.

Do I have an easy answer on how to do that? No, I don't. But I do fully believe that you need both an easy entry for new people, AND the full complexity for the older people, or you will fail. New people are fickle and will come and go, who will buy one or two books in large numbers and then vanish. Old players will buy damned near everything, but are fewer in numbers.

The goal should be "How do we make it easier to transition newbs into vets", not "How do we sell as many books as possible to the newbs before they wander off?".

Possibly Paizo could draw inspiration from how Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might handle things. They have a very large number of feats (or "talents" that can be bought for a feat, if you want to be technical) but they're divided into the eponymous spheres. Each sphere is grouped around a specific theme; and whenever you get a talent, you can either spend it to unlock a new sphere along with getting its base ability, or choose a talent from one of the spheres you've unlocked.

This means that you're not overwhelmed with options that aren't going to be relevant to you. Want to play a sneaky sort of character who likes to sneak up on people and stab them where it hurts? Take the fencing and scoundrel spheres, and then just choose from talents in those two spheres. Hoping to remake Drizzt? Take most of your talents from the dual wielding sphere, dabbling in the beastmastery sphere just enough to get an animal companion.

Since there aren't too many spheres to choose from, and they all have very clear themes, it's generally fairly easy to decide which spheres you want. And there are then only about as many talents in each sphere as there are class feats for a PF2 class, which is far more manageable. Yet because you can mix and match different spheres, it's possible - and, in fact, surprisingly easy - to make almost any combat style you like.

PF2, on the other hand, forces you to pick just one class, and (other than the limited options for multiclassing) you're then stuck with just the feats associated with that class, limiting your options. Worse, though, since the classes don't represent just one specific combat style, each class has to provide the feats to allow for several different styles. So the fighter has a bunch of its feats dedicated to dual wielding, and another bunch dedicated to fighting with a single 1h weapon, and so on. Since each class only has limited feats available, this means that once you've chosen your combat style you have very few actual choices about which feats to take - since most of them are obviously irrelevant to you. With better organisation, dividing up feats by combat style rather than class, there could be a lot more interesting options for builds, without making things any more complicated.

They nerfed everything except +1 per level power creep.

And they added it to AC. hahaha!!

Actually, adding it to AC, and making everything +1 per level rather than varying with class and ability is a good thing. Makes it far easier to strip that rule out entirely as a house rule.

Bill Dunn wrote:

Chess Pwn wrote:

Looked shady, told us just to go away when we talked to them, then attacked our scout when we tried to investigate

this stops them from being "innocent".
If they are innocent then a group of nice people should be easily able to talk with them and get the info they need.

That looks shady, Hey person here guarding this, may we lodge here? No you may not. What is the reason for this inhospitality? We are refugees and don't have supplies and don't feel safe letting strangers in.

Not buying it. Refugees fleeing an oppressive regime or other enemy may have very good reasons for keeping a low profile. They should trust a random group that shows up at their door just because they seem nice? i wonder how many other refugees fell for that ruse and got slaughtered by the people they were trying to flee...

Understandable motives does not an innocent make. If they attack random groups that seem nice, they are monsters and putting them down gets you an A+ on your Paladin exam.

And if a handful of civilians tells a group of dangerous warriors they're not welcome and asks them to leave, and said warriors respond by sending one of their number to spy on the civilians and scout out the area in preparation for an attack? Do these warriors still seem nice to the civilians? Aren't they more likely to be a group of bandits or looters? In which case, won't putting them down earn the civilians an A+ on their own Paladin exams?