Playtest experience with Athletics and Jump

[Snickersnax]

So the other night, I was playing a cleric/fighter and the Big Bad had retreated to flying just over the party's head because I was beating the snot out of it. It was my turn and I asked if it was possible to jump up and hit the creature. The DM decided that there was effectively a 5 foot vertical space between us, so I would have to jump 5 feet.

Not knowing if that was going to be difficult or easy, we consulted my character sheet and the rules.

During character creation I had ended up with Assurance in Athletics, Mastery in Athletics, and Quick Jump mostly because there weren't any good choices for Backgrounds or Skill Feats not because I wanted to be a good jumper. But here I was with a +9 in Athletics after armor check penalties, and I figured I might have a good shot at it. With an automatic 20 it might even be a sure thing...

Then we consulted the rules and discovered that jumping more than 3 feet is a DC30 Athletics check and if you fail by 10 you fall prone!!!???

Which meant that if I used my Athletics Mastery Assurance there is a 100% chance I would fall prone trying to jump more than 3 feet. And if I rolled for it there was no way I could jump 5 feet, and a very good chance I would fall prone. Since movement and location are chunked into five foot units, if the creature had been flying any lower I would have been able to hit it without jumping.

Basically unless I had taken the Powerful Leap feat, jumping for the smallest possible extra reach was impossible.

Please re-evaluate the mechanics of this skill.

[Draco18s]

Try reading the rules for long jump.

Player at my table could jump 20 feet, no check needed. But as soon as he wanted to jump twenty one feet it was a DC 26 check that he had a +10 towards.

[pauljathome]

I get the very strong impression that the jumping rules suffer from multiple changes having been made simultaneously without anybody looking at the end result of them all together

1) Characters base speed is now 25, not 30. And 30 is still the break point for distances jumped.
2) The distance to jump a 10 ft pit has gone from 10 feet to 15 feet. There was a huge thread awhile back and either choice makes sense but this is a clear change from PF1
3) The DC for athletics is now 5 + distance jumped. It REALLY looks to me that this was made in parallel to the change in distance above and nobody noticed that the same change (effectively) had been made twice
4) Take 10 no longer exists and assurance is all but useless.

The net result of all this is that what in PF1 was trivial (DC 10 to jump a 10 ft pit assuming a running start, able to take 10 so automatic for everybody who hadn't dumped Dex and wasn't wearing armour) to something very, very hard in PF2 (DC 20, at most +5 at level 1).

In Rose Revenge, getting across the 10 ft pit suddenly became a HUGE obstacle (that is AFTER the pit is found).

I'm pretty sure this is all unintentional and will change as long as the issue doesn't get lost in all the other feedback

[Aramar]

pauljathome wrote:

4) Take 10 no longer exists and assurance is all but useless.

I hadn't thought about this before, but Assurance for leaping really can be useless for a significant set of characters - Until it hits Legendary, it only gives the '20' result. Which is guaranteed failure for a High Jump attempt and which allows a distance of 15 feet on a Long Jump attempt...which is already the distance a character/creature with 30+ movement (or Powerful Leaper) can Leap without making a check anyway.

The Powerful Leaper feat also causes some superfluousness issues - in boosting vertical Leap to a 5-ft base, it's not clear which a successful Athletics check would achieve anymore, since that also only allows a 5-ft Leap, rather than a +3 ft Leap, for instance. It effectively overrides any usefulness of Assurance for vertical leaping as well - Legendary assurance would only guarantee the 30 check to High Jump 5 ft, but again, the lvl 2 feat already guarantees that without a check.