Reading through the spell descriptions in the recent blog post got me wondering about the best way to display success/failure of spell effects for ease of use. How set in stone is the format:
Success
Critical Success
Failure
Critical Failure
Just thinking of looking up spell effects, the most common circumstances will be success/failure, and having failure after critical success makes it take longer to identify the relevant information. Would either of the following be an improvement?
Success
Failure
Critical Success
Critical Failure
Critical Success
Success
Failure
Critical Failure
What do people think?
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I expect that while it might be set in type for the playtest already this is surely something the developers would welcome feedback on.
I like:
Critical Success
Success
Failure
Critical Failure
It just feels logical to me.
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I like:Critical Success
Success
Failure
Critical Failure
I agree with this. It's what I'm used to seeing in World of Darkness and the like.
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Success
Critical Success
Failure
Critical Failure
I believe there's a very good reason for this format!
If there is nothing listed for Critical Success, you use the entry above. If there's nothing listed for Critical Failure, you use the entry above.
The best-to-worst method isn't as intuitive for the missing entries. So, while aesthetically less pleasing, I think it's more practical.
I think it would be easier to just not include an entry if there is no critical success/failure mechanic
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Yeah, make it Best to Worst (Critical S, S, F, Crit F), and just ommit whichever doesn't apply.
Much better.
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Success
Critical Success
Failure
Critical FailureI believe there's a very good reason for this format!
If there is nothing listed for Critical Success, you use the entry above. If there's nothing listed for Critical Failure, you use the entry above.
The best-to-worst method isn't as intuitive for the missing entries. So, while aesthetically less pleasing, I think it's more practical.
There are 24 different ways you can order these entries (though some of those 24 are patently absurd, like Critical Success, Failure, Critical Failure, Success in that order). We've actually tried 5 or 6 different orders over the years of alpha testing, weirdly enough. This current one stuck from a combination of the reason you state (that you will often omit a critical entry), the fact that critical results are less likely to happen than non-critical results in most cases, and the fact that critical results often liked to refer to the non-critical version, a la :
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
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Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
I hope this is one of the newly added spells!
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I was hoping Mage's Magnificent Birthday would make its way into this edition!
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Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Thanks for the response, Mark. That's a compelling argument for the current format.
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I dunno about everyone else, but I'd be a lot happier with the critical results indented as a sub-entry. for example (but omitting the line before the critical effect):
.
.
.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
___Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Failure No party for you
___Critical Failure EVIL CLOWNS!!!
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Im coming around after Mark's reasoning.
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Success
Critical Success
Failure
Critical FailureI believe there's a very good reason for this format!
If there is nothing listed for Critical Success, you use the entry above. If there's nothing listed for Critical Failure, you use the entry above.
The best-to-worst method isn't as intuitive for the missing entries. So, while aesthetically less pleasing, I think it's more practical.
There are 24 different ways you can order these entries (though some of those 24 are patently absurd, like Critical Success, Failure, Critical Failure, Success in that order). We've actually tried 5 or 6 different orders over the years of alpha testing, weirdly enough. This current one stuck from a combination of the reason you state (that you will often omit a critical entry), the fact that critical results are less likely to happen than non-critical results in most cases, and the fact that critical results often liked to refer to the non-critical version, a la :
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
I'd go for
Critical Success
Success
Failure
Critical Failure
OR
Critical Failure
Failure
Success
Critical Success
I know that maybe the way you did is more intuitional since you'll have more Successes than Critical Successes, but the Failure line will lost the intuitional need the same way...
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I'd rather have the failures before the successes. That's what the person casting the spell is most interested in, after all!
I dunno about everyone else, but I'd be a lot happier with the critical results indented as a sub-entry. for example (but omitting the line before the critical effect):
.
.
.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
___Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Failure No party for you
___Critical Failure EVIL CLOWNS!!!
This type of formatting is a good idea as well.
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I'd rather have the failures before the successes. That's what the person casting the spell is most interested in, after all!
This type of formatting is a good idea as well.I dunno about everyone else, but I'd be a lot happier with the critical results indented as a sub-entry. for example (but omitting the line before the critical effect):
.
.
.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
___Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Failure No party for you
___Critical Failure EVIL CLOWNS!!!
You have actually determined the way that we did things second-to-most-recent of our 5-6 ways: based on the person likely to be looking up a rules element, we picked the non-critical version of the thing they wanted to see, then the critical. So spells started with failure but attacks and skills (which you want to succeed!) started with success. The editors rightly pointed out that it can be very confusing to someone just skimming it if sometimes the first thing is failure and sometimes success, so we changed to this way.
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You have actually determined the way that we did things second-to-most-recent of our 5-6 ways: based on the person likely to be looking up a rules element, we picked the non-critical version of the thing they wanted to see, then the critical. So spells started with failure but attacks and skills (which you want to succeed!) started with success. The editors rightly pointed out that it can be very confusing to someone just skimming it if sometimes the first thing is failure and sometimes success, so we changed to this way.I'd rather have the failures before the successes. That's what the person casting the spell is most interested in, after all!
This type of formatting is a good idea as well.I dunno about everyone else, but I'd be a lot happier with the critical results indented as a sub-entry. for example (but omitting the line before the critical effect):
.
.
.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
___Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Failure No party for you
___Critical Failure EVIL CLOWNS!!!
Fair enough! Editors generally know what they're doing.
What about Deadmanwalking's subheadings, assuming they're applied everywhere?
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Success
Critical Success
Failure
Critical FailureI believe there's a very good reason for this format!
If there is nothing listed for Critical Success, you use the entry above. If there's nothing listed for Critical Failure, you use the entry above.
The best-to-worst method isn't as intuitive for the missing entries. So, while aesthetically less pleasing, I think it's more practical.
There are 24 different ways you can order these entries (though some of those 24 are patently absurd, like Critical Success, Failure, Critical Failure, Success in that order). We've actually tried 5 or 6 different orders over the years of alpha testing, weirdly enough. This current one stuck from a combination of the reason you state (that you will often omit a critical entry), the fact that critical results are less likely to happen than non-critical results in most cases, and the fact that critical results often liked to refer to the non-critical version, a la :
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Cool beans. That's enough to convince me.
I've changed my mind about the format and I would like to have a variation party spell with pie.
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I think the use of the horizontal dimension is good to "structure" the information.
This can be indenting the Critical entries like somebody did above.
...
..
.
That could be like this:
Success abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
_______ abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
______Critical Success abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
___________________ abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
__Failure abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
_______ abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
_______Critical Failure abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
___________________ abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
Or it could be like this:
Success
abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
___Critical Success
___abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
___abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
Failure
abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
___Critical Failure
___abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
___abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#abcxyz123!@#
Or it could be splitting the text into 2 columns, one for Success and one for Failure.
That way there is no problem with clunky linear sequencing of S/CS/F/CF, instead there is array:
Example...
... SUCCESS ....... FAILURE
. abcxyz123!@# ... abcxyz123!@#
. abcxyz123!@# ... abcxyz123!@#
. CRIT SUCCESS .... CRIT FAILURE
. abcxyz123!@# .... abcxyz123!@#
. abcxyz123!@# .... abcxyz123!@#
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I will admit that Mark's explanation for this formatting makes a lot of sense to me, and will probably make a lot of sense to people that come to expect it, I think the
Success
Critical Success
Failure
Critical Failure
formatting is going to feel off to a lot of people just picking up the book. I am worried about the effect this will have on new players and new potential players who are looking at the book in the store, comparing it to another system, and deciding that the information is not presented in an intuitive enough manner and pass the book over.
Like Quandary, I wonder if there is not an alternative visual format utilizing vertical and horizontal space that will illicit less immediate "this doesn't look right" vibes from people that don't get the benefit of Mark's immediate, and clearly well reasoned explanation.
Nobody is going to examine the books in a store, online however...
I honestly think that the party spell example should be in a sidebar in the very front of the magic chapter, but perhaps in a Cayden Cailean format instead of cupcakes and ice cream.
Enough people have had the same thought, but have been turned around by Mark's example.
Or maybe Hero's Feast is already like that, at least in ritual form?
Success- you create sufficient quality food to bring up health and morale providing [ INSERT SPELL EFFECT HERE ]
Critical Success- On this result, the quality of the meal also provides [ INSERT BONUS HERE ].
Failure- The disappointing fare nourishes, but does not bolster or heal.
Critical Failure- participants in the feast must make a Fortitude save or else be sickened for the duration of the spell.
...
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Why not:
Critical Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes and ice cream.Success As above, but the party has no ice cream.
By the sounds of it if critical successes are rarer, we won't want to be parsing the more complex like-critical-but-statements all the time.
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...
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.Why not:
Critical Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes and ice cream.
Success As above, but the party has no ice cream.By the sounds of it if critical successes are rarer, we won't want to be parsing the more complex like-critical-but-statements all the time.
Either the quote chain got messed up, or you answered your own question. Success and failure should be spelled out, and crit success and crit failure should reference them.
Either the quote chain got messed up, or you answered your own question. Success and failure should be spelled out, and crit success and crit failure should reference them....
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.Why not:
Critical Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes and ice cream.
Success As above, but the party has no ice cream.By the sounds of it if critical successes are rarer, we won't want to be parsing the more complex like-critical-but-statements all the time.
I answered my own question (after typing that up on my phone I wasn't going to just delete it)... I see that it is frustrating to read right now when we are getting one or two spells at a time and get read them in detail. I'm waiting for the playtest to see how it handles skimming in bulk where I just want a quick answer to what this enemies spell does.
I honestly think that Critical Success and Critical Failure are sort of cumbersome on their own. I wish there was a better single word to be used for each term. Not necessarily backing these terms (tense is all wrong, and taking 'Critical' away from the success part is likely to cause riots), but as an example, formatting is much cleaner if they are each single word game terms.
Save Results:
Remarkable
Success
Failure
Catastrophe
I my untested intuition is that I want:
-Crit success
-Success
-Failure
-Crit failure
But really whatever order it goes in I hope it gets laid out using dot-points or something similar. Having the entries in the same line makes it harder to figure out which is which.
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I think that the order should be best-to-worst or worst-to-best. Either one is ok with me, just don't mix them up.
Their justification for doing it the way they are is "but we sometimes refer to the success condition to describe the crit success". Well, don't do that. I don't want to have to read multiple lines to determine the result of the save, I want to go directly to the line that tells me how to interpret what was just rolled.
Yeah, but sadly clear game rules is sometimes trumped by word count limits of the print medium (or at least history has proven).
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You have actually determined the way that we did things second-to-most-recent of our 5-6 ways: based on the person likely to be looking up a rules element, we picked the non-critical version of the thing they wanted to see, then the critical. So spells started with failure but attacks and skills (which you want to succeed!) started with success. The editors rightly pointed out that it can be very confusing to someone just skimming it if sometimes the first thing is failure and sometimes success, so we changed to this way.I'd rather have the failures before the successes. That's what the person casting the spell is most interested in, after all!
This type of formatting is a good idea as well.I dunno about everyone else, but I'd be a lot happier with the critical results indented as a sub-entry. for example (but omitting the line before the critical effect):
.
.
.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
___Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Failure No party for you
___Critical Failure EVIL CLOWNS!!!
TBH saves have always been confusing in that they are reversed from everything else in the game, it's an attack rolled by the defender and you want it to be low. Letting the caster, firebreather etc roll to hit against the target's Fortitude, Reflex and Will like 4E is better, even if if that is a sacred cow.
But if saves are still the order of the day, failures should come first. Just clarify them with an extra word, and it becomes much clearer: put the name of what is being rolled in front of the word Success or Failure. So using Deadman's formatting, it is:
(Fort/Ref/Will) Failure Woo!
___Critical Failure WOOHOO!
(Fort/Ref/Will) Success Darn.
___Critical Failure Bleh.
And then likewise with everything else.
(Skill/Attack) Success Woo!
___Critical Success WOOHOO!
(Skill/Attack) Failure Darn.
___Critical Failure Bleh.
And in addition to indenting the critical results, you can put a very thin horizontal line in between the success and failure sections to make them even more readable.
I really don't think people will be that confused if saves are listed reversed to everything else, because the result the person provoking the save wants - that which is effectively a success for them - is still listed at the top. And now it's clarified right there in the heading.
“The order you want” doesn’t work well because martials will only be rolling saves, not looking it up for other people. The GM’s position is even more confusing.
Whatever the ordering, it needs to be consistent in where success and failure are located.
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Saves as Defenses even officially exists in PF2 (grapples and disarms target Reflex Defense, which is Reflex Save Bonus +10).
They just aren't used for resisting spells, which is probably a good call because getting to roll to avoid things like being mind controlled is much more fun than the GM rolling and saying "Well, you're mind controlled now."
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Saves have advantages when dealing with conditions because they let the player feel in control of their own character's fate. They also have advantages vs. area attacks in that it's easier logistically to have everyone in the area roll a save than to have the attacker roll attacks on everyone separately (and rolling one attack and applying it to everyone gets a bit overly swingy).
Single target attacks that just do damage usually are just an attack roll, regardless of whether they're a spell or not.
Saves as Defenses even officially exists in PF2 (grapples and disarms target Reflex Defense, which is Reflex Save Bonus +10).
They just aren't used for resisting spells, which is probably a good call because getting to roll to avoid things like being mind controlled is much more fun than the GM rolling and saying "Well, you're mind controlled now."
If Reflex defense actually exists in PF2, that makes it even weirder that there is still a separate "Touch AC" and that various armor and monsters will have independently determined Touch AC values. They should just rename that to Supernatural AC or the like as I proposed elsewhere, that would be much easier to justify than keeping "touch" separate from Reflex defense.
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Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Were critical results to be listed first, would it really be so terrible to reference the very next line in the spell description? It's not like you're having a person reference a different part of the book or something.
Critical Success: As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Success: You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
That works fine for me, and listing them by degree of success (or failure) is much more aesthetically pleasing.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Were critical results to be listed first, would it really be so terrible to reference the very next line in the spell description? It's not like you're having a person reference a different part of the book or something.
Critical Success: As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Success: You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.That works fine for me, and listing them by degree of success (or failure) is much more aesthetically pleasing.
I think this will get frustrating when you are GM or player pouring over 20 spells looking for a quick answer on what it does. Actual play will tell.
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Yes, I am unhappy with the keeping of TAC, for many reasons.If Reflex defense actually exists in PF2, that makes it even weirder that there is still a separate "Touch AC" and that various armor and monsters will have independently determined Touch AC values. They should just rename that to Supernatural AC or the like as I proposed elsewhere, that would be much easier to justify than keeping "touch" separate from Reflex defense.Saves as Defenses even officially exists in PF2 (grapples and disarms target Reflex Defense, which is Reflex Save Bonus +10).
They just aren't used for resisting spells, which is probably a good call because getting to roll to avoid things like being mind controlled is much more fun than the GM rolling and saying "Well, you're mind controlled now."
I apologize for dredging this up from the muck, but Friday's post bugged me enough that I wanted to post something about it. (Which is something I rarely do.)
Either which way, you're going to be looking at two lines.
The way that it is, if it's a crit success, you're going to skip over success to look at crit success, then realize you're going to need the success line, and then look back up a line to read it.
If crit success line is listed first, then the first thing you see lets you know that you're also going to need to read the next line.
Also:
Crit Success
Success
Fail
Crit Fail
Is more aesthetically pleasing (to me, at least), and in a more intuitive order.
In a recent blog post, it was really glaring to read disrupting as:
Success: Enfeeble 2
Crit Success: Enfeeble 1
Failure: Enfeeble 3
Crit Fail: Target Destroyed
I was seriously confused for a minute or so, until I reread the entire thing a couple of times, and then translated in my head to:
Crit Success: Enfeeble 1
Success: Enfeeble 2
Failure: Enfeeble 3
Crit Fail: Target Destroyed
I think this will get frustrating when you are GM or player pouring over 20 spells looking for a quick answer on what it does. Actual play will tell.Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
Critical Success As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Were critical results to be listed first, would it really be so terrible to reference the very next line in the spell description? It's not like you're having a person reference a different part of the book or something.
Critical Success: As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Success: You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.That works fine for me, and listing them by degree of success (or failure) is much more aesthetically pleasing.
Guess I'll have to see it in practice; as-is, it feels like it's going to slow me down trying to figure out where in the spectrum a result is. Then again, it's not going to slow me down nearly as much as trying my best to remember to check BY HOW MUCH something failed, when I've been used to just "success or failure" for almost 20 years now.
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I'm strongly in favor of printing things in an order that reading them in order makes the most sense. So if something is going to be true for the following case (e.g. "the party has cupcakes") this should appear on the page above the special case ("the party has cupcakes and ice cream.")
It drove me nuts in Pathfinder 1 when, say a feat chain was printed in alphabetical order so the basic feat in the chain appeared last and the ultimate feat in the chain appeared first.
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I dunno about everyone else, but I'd be a lot happier with the critical results indented as a sub-entry. for example (but omitting the line before the critical effect):
.
.
.
Success You throw a big party for everyone with cupcakes.
___Critical Successes As success, and the party also has ice cream.
Failure No party for you
___Critical Failure EVIL CLOWNS!!!
Whew! I knew I couldn't have been the only one to see this as a solution. Developers, please give this as much further consideration as possible. Indenting (whether success then crit success is first or failure then crit failure is first, it doesn't matter) allows the two usual outcomes (success and failure) to be visually listed together without being interrupted by crit success or crit failure (in either case, going unintuitively out of order), and still allows for crit success/failure to say, " As success/failure, but additional yay/boo".
I'm strongly in favor of printing things in an order that reading them in order makes the most sense. So if something is going to be true for the following case (e.g. "the party has cupcakes") this should appear on the page above the special case ("the party has cupcakes and ice cream.")
It drove me nuts in Pathfinder 1 when, say a feat chain was printed in alphabetical order so the basic feat in the chain appeared last and the ultimate feat in the chain appeared first.
This happened a lot in Planar Adventures... Dumb Combat style feats!