yellowpete's page

Errenor wrote:

Irrelevant. The topic is about game terminology and conventions. That is governed by rules, especially for this forum. [Then there are things like GM judgement and various game needs but those aren't discussed here.]

And the plain language interpretation of the rules is that both eat spaghetti and swallow food are the last thing you did.

It's also true in plain language that before the whole thing, the next thing you would do was both to eat spaghetti and to twirl the fork. But for that case, the PF2 rules tell us to treat it differently regardless of what plain language might indicate. So plain language isn't a good sole indicator here.

The rules also say that there are more such cases than are explicitly listed, by calling this an 'example' of the more general rule that 'Using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions'. So it's not at all a stretch to think that they intend to handle it the same for requirements that come afterwards, as that is the most closely analogous scenario to this explicitly listed example. But in the end it's underdetermined, could be this or that.

This game is not written in pseudo- or actual code. There are no 'vars to clear out', and nothing follows from your particular imagination of a machine implementation of the process.

The ambiguity here comes mostly from the overloading of the term 'action', which subsumes something like 3-4 different concepts in PF2. Multiple different interpretations are all perfectly intelligible.

Most convinced by the container interpretation myself, the term 'subordinate action' alone to me indicates that these actions are meant to be part of a bigger action/activity, rather than consecutive with it. And yeah, it doesn't follow from this that subordinate actions can't be modified or prevented.

Right, the writer of the spell didn't want the reader to miss the application of general rules here that are all already fully defined elsewhere (in the Dying and Unconscious conditions), and so added a superfluous phrase to make sure they wouldn't be missed. In other words, a pure rules reminder that makes no functional change to the spell, with the word "though" in it. The kind of thing you said doesn't exist.

I could mention more examples but we're like 3 layers of side tangents deep at this point so let's not

I'm not questioning that there's an editing process. I'm questioning the specific editing rule that was suggested to exist. ('When pf2 is communicating a reminder harmonious with the previous text, it does NOT use "though."')
That's just a baseless suggestion, an imagined pattern retrofit to the hypothesis about the specific case that Trip wished to support. It's also false (see e.g. Stabilize).

You are looking for patterns that don't exist and would be altogether nonsensical if they did. You think part of paizo's editing process is to search for usages of the word "though" and make sure they're not used as part of rules reminders?

"..., though you still can't do X" is perfectly sensible as a rules reminder of a pre-existing limitation. Whether or not any words of that sentence have or haven't been used in different contexts elsewhere across paizo's publications could not be less relevant to that.
The phrase however makes no sense to introduce a new limitation with, due to the word "still". It's just not correct to say that "you still can't do X" if you previously could do X already.

Sorry man, you are reaching hard on that one. The "though" is perfectly consistent with this being a rules reminder. It contrasts someone's possibly highly stacked leap distance formula (and their possible belief that it is unconstrained) against the existing speed cap.
The "still" however makes no sense for anything but a rules reminder.

As an aside, the idea that paizo might have some unified, rules-implicatory pattern of how exactly to use the word "though" (other than its plain meaning in the English language) across all their rules text is absurd. You can stop looking for other examples.

The fact that Winglets reminds you of the limit is not an indicator that the limit doesn't otherwise exist. This is true generally for rules reminders, and is even more clear here as the sentence "you *still* can't jump farther than you Speed" makes no sense if you normally could jump farther than your speed in the absence of that sentence.

If you take L.Jump's Success to be a future proofed cap, what does Cloud Jump offer? You already hit the speed cap so easily, that 3x mult on the check result is irrelevant. How does that version of Cloud Jump measure up to other Legendary skill feats?

The 3x is not irrelevant, maybe you're misunderstanding the feat? Let's say you have 50 Speed and a +15 Leap distance. Without the 3x, when spending 3 actions on your Long Jump, you'd need to roll a 135 on your check to jump the full 150 feet, obviously impossible. The 3x is making it so that the 3-action triple distance jump is as easy/hard as a normal Long Jump would be. And yes, it also trivializes the normal Long Jump if bonuses haven't yet done so.

With regards to Blast Boots, I think it's fair to say that the writer here did not consider the values they wrote to be capped, looking at the cartoonish amount of added distance for the higher levels. So, that leaves us with one writer who mistakenly thought basic Leap was capped (Malleable Movement), and another who mistakenly thought Long Jump was uncapped. By the way, Blast Boots as written are already even more powerful than one might first think, because they don't take the initial Stride away – they merely remove the need (but not the ability) to take it. It's not a particularly well polished item rules wise.

Your Energy Mutagen case is at least worth a thought, but ultimately it doesn't move me because
1. The formulation there is directly in the self-contained context of determining numbers of d6s from time, as opposed to the jump limit that is put explicitly on top of/after an already finished determination of distance, in a separate sentence.
2. 10d6 is not a value, it's a distribution. It's unclear what something like "the final damage after bonuses can't exceed 10d6" would even mean, other than at minimum it would exclude values larger than 60.
3. There isn't really a sensible designer motivation for why this 'final cap' would be meant to exist in this particular context (and nowhere else w.r.t. damage), whereas for jumping, there is (both for gameplay and fiction).

So, I still think that
RAW: Leap uncapped, successful Long Jump capped at Speed
RAI by whoever wrote Leap/Long Jump: Both capped at Speed

The Crane stance bonus made sense when Long Jump was still different, where you decided ahead of time how far you wanted to jump and set the DC to that distance. Since the remaster, it should say something like "Boost Leap distance by 5, or by 10 if used as part of a successful Long Jump" instead to have the same effect. Alas, it was overlooked.

Yes it's all Leap, either basic action Leap or subordinate action Leap. Leap modifiers apply to both.

Yes, the basic action Leap doesn't have an explicit cap and can thus exceed Speed in edge cases, unless you take "Jumping a greater distance requires using the Athletics skill for a High Jump or Long Jump." to be applying even to cases where the 'greater distance' would be caused by Leap modifiers (more likely though, it was just overlooked, given that it's not a situation that comes up easily naturally, and certainly not with only the content that existed when Leap was first written).

So, the writer of that feat probably misattributed/-remembered where exactly that Speed limit was set in the rules; however the point of me bringing this up wasn't the strict RAW consistency of this feat but rather to further substantiate that such a limit is intended even for Leap modifiers, with a very plausible reasoning behind that intention (to prevent 24/7 bunny-hopping from being optimal).

https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=8505
"As normal, this can't increase the distance of your Leap beyond your Speed."

The intention with the limit is clear – 24/7 jumping ought not be strictly superior to walking.

Early game, everything is swingier though. At level 2, the DDs likewise get put down by 3 average hits of those level 2 foes if they have High damage, or 1 crit and 1 hit (assumption: no more than +2 CON and 8 ancestry HP on the DD). One of them could very conceivably not even make it to their first turn.

My reading:

Yes, the bonuses also apply to High/Long Jump, as they both reference Leap.

No, they don't override the restriction in the Long Jump success. You first determine the maximum distance by the result of your check and any further enhancers to distance that you have. Then that result gets capped to your normal movespeed, if it was higher.

This is further supported by the way Cloud Jump works, where it asks for as many actions as walking would have taken. The intention seems clear – they don't want it to ever be optimal to just jump through the world 24/7 like some sort of video game glitch where that makes you a bit faster than you otherwise would be.

The no-save thing is good design for this ability. I roll my eyes every time the game asks me to make a save against e.g. a lightly damaging aura to determine whether it's going to take 0, 1, 2 or 4% of my HP this round. That taxes the mental load budget of running/playing encounters a lot for very little added excitement.

Charge does roughly your level in damage. That's very low – the weapon dice comparison is apples to oranges, as you almost never deal weapon dice damage only by itself. Additionally, it's a repeatable ability, which further lowers the value of assigning a save to it (the more rolls are made, the further the overall result will trend towards the mean anyways). Paizo did this right with Thermal Nimbus, I hope they stick to their guns here.

I am considering the past tense. 2d8 scaling vs 2d6 and 1d6 patch on the ground.

If you mean something else though then yeah I'm not getting it.

Fire Ray was still only 2d6 and 1d4 persistent on a crit when the 2d8 IW got released. The 1d6 patch on the ground thing is from Player Core.

Cry of Destruction's damage upgrade isn't per target, it's upgraded against all creatures if you've damaged any enemy before on that turn (even one that isn't in the cone at all).

However, the new errata change intends to make Spellstrike's damage combined at least for weaknesses and resistances, as written in the blog post (though I can actually only find that actual change spelled out for the Spellstrike-like abilities like Eldritch Shot, Spellsling, and spellstrike ammunition, not for Spellstrike itself). So arguably CoD would only ever be d8's even with a hit on the Spellstrike now.

Another high damage-potential focus spell is Winter Bolt, though it understandably comes with its own risks (eating up to 2d12/rank no-save damage if they don't remove the bolt and get in your face instead). Fire Ray surely is the best all-rounder now

Hi all,

well I think the new text for Take cover (p 418) is more unclear than before.
In the Requirements it says "You are benefiting from standard cover" and further down I read "If you would have standard cover... Otherwise, you gain standard cover..."
But if the new requirements say You need standard cover for the action Take cover, there is no "otherwise" and gaining standard cover when I already have standard cover make no sense at all.

I guess the work on Take cover is still in progress and need more updates!

The requirements are still disjunctive in the form "A, B, or C", same as before – only one of them has to be true. And then in the text it describes what happens depending on their truth values.

In the case of our most active campaign, the change in immunity to crit hits may have more impact than the Resist All change. We have no Champions, but getting those non-doubling crit effects could be big. Time will tell.

That wasn't a change, was it? I think you always got fatal/deadly etc. regardless of crit immunity

Since Spellstrike is combined damage now, you could make a convoluted example of a Magus using Moonbeam on a Spellstrike with e.g. a flaming rune. In practice however, Moonbeam's damage output is going to be higher than any fire resistance you're realistically facing in the vast majority of cases, so the exact handling of this case has no significant impact.

Somewhat more commonly, you will see cases with Shield of Reckoning used against multi-type Strike where the new resist all will still let through some amount of damage of the second type even though the primary physical damage (minus shield hardness) was significantly lower than the resistance. I.e. the total reduction of damage ends up much less than the resist all value, and still some damage comes through.

I support nerfing champion’s reaction to resist any but it should have just been champion’s reaction. And then you can have resist any as a category for new abilities.

I think introducing 'resist any' as yet another separate type of resistance (on top of damage type res, trait res, res to all; any of which with possible exceptions) would just further complicate things. I like how this change made things more unified than before.

Like, I just cannot phrase this differently; anyone claiming a status bonus would edit the bomb's number for Sticky is just lying about what a status bonus does, or repeating someone else's lie.

Don't assume malice where just genuinely having a different reading of an issue will suffice.

To use this thread as an example, 99% of actual table play will not suffer at all from the 'new issue' of Dragonscale Amulet now being much more powerful than Resist All, because Dragonscale Amulet is a rare, campaign-specific L15 item. It can only come up in a game if you're playing that AP or if the GM actively, consciously decides to have it in their game.

There are common alternatives that one could make the same argument about, like Energy Aegis, no GM permission needed there in most games.

It's just not clear at all that the perceived 'oddness' of this comparison is a function of the new mechanics in a vacuum rather than of the fact that there was a change in mechanics. Would we see this thread if the definition of resist all had always been like it is now? Highly questionable, imo

Champion reaction and Thaumaturge Amulet reaction are both drinking themselves under the table tonight because they are now both on equal footing of effectiveness with Flamekeeper Witch's Restored Spirit temp HP instead of being strictly better like they used to be.

Edit: Against one attack. Resistance is still better than temp HP if you get attacked more than once.

Restored Spirit is only 2+half level vs the 2+level from both of those resistance abilities. Also, you never waste those resistances on a target that ends up not getting damaged that round.

It's not an insignificant change to those reactions, but I have the feeling those classes will be just fine. Mainly because the change only lowers the ceiling of the abilities' effectiveness, but not their floor.

As for the original post, one reason this might feel odd is simply that it has been different for so long. Had resistance to all damage always meant what it means now, then it probably wouldn't feel odd to have this specialized multi-resistance tool be more effective in the situations it is designed to address (Energy Aegis being another example).

Yeah, you are in the right on this. It's not only the more sensible interpretation w.r.t. to sentence structure (additional comma before the 'and'), but also gameplay.

Now, will a thread of randoms agreeing with you manage to sway your group? Less clear, but I wish you the best of luck :)

I like Sudden Pounce, it's an interesting trade-off vs Sudden Charge and if feels very slayer-y. No complaints on that one.

OTH needs to somehow stack with quickened in the long run. E.g. I could see the option of taking the gained action immediately (and MAPless) rather than becoming quickened as a reasonable level 11 feature. That way, you're not constantly sad about one of your main features as being quickened from other sources becomes more and more frequent.

Also, the feats that let you OTH with different triggers need to be rewritten as to be compatible with the extra reaction you get for OTH. They need to just say "Your On The Hunt reaction gains the following triggers in addition to any other triggers it already has: ..."

Excellent point. Now to find a way to reduce my Will DC without hurting my Performance.

Juggernaut mutagen

Do we even have an actual creature with an immunity to spirit damage and a weakness to holy or unholy?

No such creature has ever been printed, at least none that's listed on AoN.

Holy trait isn't inherently tied to spirit damage any more than to any other damage type, it just happens to coincide a lot (because of how 'good' damage was translated). A champion triggers holy weakness with their Strikes while only dealing physical damage, for example.
In the retracted errata, Holy wasn't part of any of the damage instances at all, but a property of the Strike as a whole. We'll see what they make of it in the rework

It's a bit tough to parse for sure, but it says the following, parentheses mine:

"decrease the Strength score required (to ignore the check penalty and reduce the Speed penalty) by 2"

You are reducing the required Strength score by 2 (or, in remaster terms, you reduce the required Strength modifier by 1), not the Speed penalty.

I believe there is no way with items alone to get full Speed while also having a combined 6 AC from base Bonus + Dex Cap. That's the basic trade with heavy armor vs the other categories, +1 AC for -5 Speed. You need something like Unburdened Iron to get around it.

Almost:
- The Speed Penalty is unaffected so still at -10 ft (reduced by 5 as usual for reaching the Strength requirement)
- The required Strength modifier should be +2. Armored skirt is legacy content and thus talks about Strength score instead of the now relevant Strength modifier
- Arguably, it should stay at 3 Bulk instead of 4, as you are replacing parts of the armor with this skirt instead of adding it on top. You're making your armor lighter overall, that's the whole point of this modification. But this isn't explicitly stated so I guess RAW would be 4 Bulk still

Paizo directly says "If you would gain more than one persistent damage condition with the same damage type, the higher amount of damage overrides the lower amount." Paizo then gives an example of how persistent fire damage 2 is not combined with persistent fire damage 1d4. It's very clear (at least, IMO).

The question here is whether multiple sources of e.g. bleed in the same Strike create multiple persistent damage conditions in the first place such that this rule would apply, or whether they create a single persistent damage condition with an expression of their combined damage. The example sadly doesn't speak to that, as it mentions a case where one of the conditions is pre-existing the other.

But yeah we don't really need to litigate it here, I just thought the request for the upcoming clarification to touch on it was valid.

I agree with Samir that 'multiple bleed sources on a single Strike' is a case they should cover while they're at it with their upcoming clarification, as there is certainly room for confusion. I would currently combine them as the clarification speaks of combining ALL damage before processing IWR for an effect (not conditional upon whether that damage is actually affected by IWR at this moment). But who knows if that's intended.

I don't think it's a big deal for gameplay either way – you can already stack persistent damage vertically by using different types, and while that can be fun, it's not a particularly oppressive strategy.

The ability struck me as a strange reversal – normally you want more reactions as a martial rather than actions as to dodge MAP (rogue even pays an expensive feat to be able to convert them), so it seems like using it means trading down. Early on it seems fine, but I imagine as soon as you can get access to an actually good reaction via archetype, you'd rather use that instead.

Hurl at the Horizon says hi.

You shouldn't use a feat's name as having mechanical impact that overrides other rules elements. The name is for narrative guidance and being memorable.

Sure, however, if you reread my post, you'll notice I didn't do that. I used it to make an educated guess at designer intent.

Would "Hurl at the Horizon" cause me to think that the intention is for the exemplar to literally throw things that far? No, because such a judgement of intention depends on more context than the text alone.

I think it works with High Jump the way it's written. Also, the ability is literally called "Flying Tackle", it would be rather strange if the intention here was to prevent it from working while you're midair.

By the RK rules as they're written right now, the information about what skills can be used to RK about any given creature is effectively always public at no cost to the PC. Because they are always allowed to ask a question, suggest a skill for it and then get feedback from the GM about whether or not that would apply (or what the DC would be) before they ever commit an action, there's no reason not to just short-circuit the process of going through 16 or however many skill suggestions and simply let the players know which skills are relevant up front. Yes, that lets them know the likely creature type. It's not a big deal.

But if a group pisses me off by abusing grey parts of the rules and I warn them that I don't like it and they continue to ignore it, I have 0 problem killing off all those characters. And doing so repeatedly until they get the message.

That's not a great way to handle it imo. Really, it's 100% a people problem, one of mismatched expectations. It needs people solutions (i.e. conversation followed by agreement/compromise or by parting ways), not gameplay solutions.

Like fury of blows, people complaining it would be worse than attacking twice for triggering weaknesses. Yeah, it is worse, would of been worse under the clarification, and will be worse under the errata. But, it was not designed to be better at triggering weaknesses it was designed for action compression and overcoming resistance.

The problem with Flurry under the errata+discord clarification wasn't that it was worse than attacking twice, but that it could lower your overall damage output if you hit the second Flurry Strike compared to missing it, if the first had already hit. In those cases it would be strictly better to just target an empty square with the second Strike instead of attempting to hit your enemy again, very unintuitive.

Appreciated, though it's funny you managed to pick the one case that so far wasn't being handled as combined damage either by the rules or the community and made it your preliminary example for combining (Spellstrike).

And no, you cannot detonate a fireball inside the globe, as that portion being dispelled is all of it.

This is false, nothing stops you from having your fireball's burst originate within the globe. The outcome is the same as if you have it originate outside: If there are any creatures in the fireball's area that are also inside the globe, a counteract check is made to see if they are affected.

Flame Wisp triggers automatically from hitting something with a Strike; That happens twice in a (successful) Flurry regardless of any IWR procedures.

I'd argue that in order to put a spell behind it would invoke the same counteract as attempting to put a spell inside it.

Again, unless you allow spell curving for everything, the line of magic of the spell cast is otherwise to need to cross the threshold and enter the globe.

That approach has fictional resonance if one imagines that the reason for the line-of-effect requirement is that a spell effect is always a kind of object in space traveling in a straight line from the caster to the target. That's an assumption however – there is no justification given for why the line of effect rules are what they are. They could just as well exist purely for gameplay reasons and have no fictional justification at all, or none that is more detailed than 'magic is strange and that's simply how it works'. It's a game, after all.

Dispelling Globe in the meanwhile is pretty adamant that only targets specifically inside the globe get a counteract check.

It's because line of effect requires a rather straight line by default, doesn't matter what the obstruction looks like, that obstruction creates an unusable zone behind it.

While it doesn't matter what the obstruction visually looks like, it very much matters what it's made out of. The only thing that blocks line of effect is a "solid physical barrier" as per the rules. Given that one can freely move into a dispelling globe, it can hardly qualify as such. Also, one of the explicit points of the spell is to attempt to counteract spells that target things inside of it. The globe blocking line of effect would make that pointless, as it would prevent such targeting to begin with.

Idk what year he said that, but if you subscribe to the "many instances" ruling, it really is mandatory that every instance of damage carries the attributes and traits.

No, it's not. There's no necessity to have all traits be treated the same in that regard. Case in point, the Holy trait doesn't work this way, as we now know.

There's also no operational problem that I can see with treating particular trait resistances as analogous to Holy from the example – reducing the total damage taken by that number instead of of looking at instances. Like, it might not fit into your mental model of the system that you have so far imagined to underly the IWR rules. It might not be a particularly elegant and simple mechanic. But that doesn't mean it isn't operable, or that there is no possible reading of the rules with which it's compatible.

Expressing that you don't like the newly clarified approach for reasons of gameplay or complexity is perfectly reasonable. So is presenting what you think would be a good alternative approach and why. Closing your eyes to explicit examples while pretending on repeat to know that the devs were really totally intending to do things your way all along is not.

A touch-proc of weakness damage is still a part of an instance of damage, rofl.

Is it? A fire elemental enters a deep puddle, such that its weakness to water is triggered. What's the instance of damage being dealt here?

Yes, you need line of effect to the target(s) and/or area origin point of any spell unless noted otherwise. You can't e.g. cast a fireball to originate behind a wall (or even behind a pane of glass).

Dispelling Globe doesn't block line of effect, as it is not a solid physical barrier. Targeting someone on the opposite side of it with a spell doesn't cause a counteract check, even if any possible line of effect to the target crosses the globe. It only protects those on the inside.

Quote:

If more than one weakness would apply to the same instance of damage, use only the highest applicable weakness value. This usually only happens when a creature is weak to both a type of damage and a material or trait, such as a cold iron axe cutting a monster that has weakness to cold iron and slashing.

There is no sane world in which a monotype damage spell pops two weaknesseses instead of only the highest.

And again, this rule only exists for instances of damage. Literally the sentence before this, water is called out as something that usually doesn't deal damage. It's simply exposure that triggers such a weakness. My extrapolation from the new example here is that this passage likewise refers to Holy (as that is now shown also not to belong to any damage instance). But, let's say this extrapolation is unreasonable – then we are back to not knowing exactly (for the water/cold case), not a contradiction.

As a side note, I also don't find the outcome insane at all. If a creature is given both of these weaknesses explicitly, I think it's totally fictionally appropriate for it to be affected more by a spell that combines both of those aspects than by another one which is either only cold or only water. Cold does not inherently mean ice.

The rules aren't asking you to do multiple mutually exclusive things with resistance against non-damage-modifying traits either. It's left open how to handle it, with a fairly obvious solution available (reduce the total damage by 15 instead of increasing it by that much if the Terotricus is resistant to Holy instead of weak).

If it did as the errata's holy-on-the-side, then you would take 2 pops of weakness when getting hit with that cold water spell. We already know that's not how it works guys.

That is in fact how it works according to the new clarification. If you have official information also saying the opposite, now's the time to quote it in order to show the contradiction.

I would say that the conditional choice of die size is part of the effect of the spell (Reading Spells: "A horizontal line follows saving throws and duration, and the effects of the spell are described after this line."), and is thus delayed until after the Strike deals damage as per Spellstrike rules. So, d12s.