| Qazyr |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Note: This is not "argh, Clerics are terrible"; judging particular classes is for other people. "Failure Cleric" refers to what is possible from the following.
1) There is no rule in PF2 stating a minimum attribute for spellcasting. In contrast, PF1 required your casting attribute be at least 10+slvl to cast a spell.
2) Unheightened Heal gives 1d8 + casting modifier healing, or just the modifier in the "mass" casting.
3) Heal does not have a rule specifying a minimum amount of healing.
Modifiers can be negative. You could potentially have a Cleric (or other divine caster) with Wisdom less than 10 who hurts people when they cast Heal. Also, because Harm is an exact mirror of Heal, the same Cleric would heal people with Harm.
If there is in fact a rule somewhere that contradicts the above, please point it out; if not, could they be added? (And no, the "starting at 10 and only having one possible -2 that is negated by the class ability boost" doesn't count. There's a sidebar about optional flaws and an entire page about roll "4d6 drop lowest" generation (which explicitly removes the class ability boost).)
| CommanderCoyler |
If there is in fact a rule somewhere that contradicts the above, please point it out; if not, could they be added? (And no, the "starting at 10 and only having one possible -2 that is negated by the class ability boost" doesn't count. There's a sidebar about optional flaws and an entire page about roll "4d6 drop lowest" generation (which explicitly removes the class ability boost).)
Casting a healing spell and getting a -1 heal would not hurt the target and vice-versa, at least not in my book (would properly look it up, but need to be elsewhere).
If you're playing by those optional rules, and playing a cleric that's useless at clericing, then yes weirdness can happen. If a player goes to play a character with a low score in their primary stat, the GM should sit them down and have a chat then, if they're both still happy after said chat, the player should accept the consequences of their choice. Especially as this brings up rp questions like "How would your character have become a cleric when he can barely commune with their god?"| Qazyr |
"Hard to do" is not "impossible". Also, as I said, "4d6 drop lowest" explicitly removes the +2 wis that Clerics get.
I'm aware that no one is going to seriously make such a character. I'm saying the rules don't prevent it from happening, as opposed to PF1 where
1) spells have a minimum attribute to cast them.
2) most healing spells or abilities add the class/caster level, which can never be negative, rather than attribute modifiers.
3) the few healing effects I could find that use attribute modifiers set a minimum of 0 or +1.
| Qazyr |
no, if it were simply a matter of a completely terrible character, that's doable in any rule set. In PF1, you could make a character in a full-caster class who's incapable of casting spells. My point is that PF2 has nothing in the rules that prevents someone from somehow harming people with a spell that's meant to heal them. PF1 has numerous examples of spells or abilities that set a minimum for a modifier so that negative values can't cause absurd results.
(Non-standard stat generation, yes, but this isn't some third party supplement or a house rule. This is doable with rules they felt worthy enough of an entire page in the book. And it takes at most a sentence to resolve.)
EDIT: The point of this thread is not to lambast PF2 as terrible; my current opinion of PF2 is neither "it's terrible" nor relevant. The point of this thread is to highlight certain "anti-absurdity" rules that PF1 had but seem to be missing in PF2, so that the designers see them. (Another of the anti-absurdity rules I can't find in the playtest: minimum damage from Str/Dex penalties. In PF1, if penalties to your damage were sufficient to reduce it to 0 or less, the attack instead did one non-lethal.)