Forget Fighting Monsters; the True Challenge is Climbing


Skills, Feats, Equipment & Spells

Grand Lodge

Upon reviewing the rule for climbing under Athletics, I realized that climbing is by far the biggest challenge low level characters will face.

Athletics, Climbing wrote:

Success: You move 5 feet up, across, or safely down the incline. If your Speed is 40 feet or greater, you move 10 feet instead.

Critical Success: You move half your Speed up, across, or safely down the incline.

Critical Failure: You fall (see page 310). If you began the climb on stable ground, you fall and land prone.

PF2 "Running the Game" Blog wrote:
For instance, climbing a rope that's hanging in mid-air is a level 1 task, so it's normally a high DC (14), but it might have a low DC (12) if you can brace yourself against a wall while climbing through a narrow area, and maybe even a trivial DC (10) if you can brace against two walls.

Let's say we're a human adventurer. We need to climb up a 60 foot wall, so we throw up a grappling hook tied to a rope and brace ourselves against the wall to start our climb. It's DC 12 and we move only 5 feet on a success or 17.5 feet on a crit success.

Now, there's pretty decent odds that we're going to roll a 1 at some point and fall. You would think this would be where the Assurance feat comes in, but it only lets you get a total of 10 until you become an Expert in a skill, which you can't do for Athletics until level 3 at the earliest. At that point, you could then use assurance to receive a 15 and be able to climb up.

Basically the issue is this: From levels 1-2 climbing any significant distance is near impossible and continues to be so for many levels onward for any character that does not spend a feat on assurance and skill increases to get Athletics to Expert.


It's a problem because they didn't port over take 10 and take 20 rules.

Edit: I realized that humans can take assurance at level 1 with general training ancestry feat.

Liberty's Edge

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I like Assurance well enough, but it should be a basic rules concept, not something you have to take with a feat. The idea that you need to sink all of your skill feats into Assurance just to not fall on your face while doing trivial tasks is wrong-headed. A feat to take Assurance in combat sounds like it'd be worthwhile, though.

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