Incapacitation trait rules: a solution in search of a problem?

[Shisumo]

Ubertron_X wrote:

Hm...

Not feeling any benefits yet, but that might be due to overall party level still being low, i.e. every spell and ability hits you for full effect in addition to there not being any low level enemies everybody is always talking about...

In Age of Ashes,

Spoiler:

the Dragon Totems in book 2 are split about 50/50 between damage and debuff effects, and all the debuffs are Incap effects. This was huge for letting the PCs survive those encounters. They were able to handle the damage ones well enough, but the debuff ones (blinded for a minute! yikes) were horrible, forcing multiple retreats - until they leveled up past the totems' level. The difference was night and day.

[Unicore]

Ubertron_X wrote:

Hm...

Not feeling any benefits yet, but that might be due to overall party level still being low, i.e. every spell and ability hits you for full effect in addition to there not being any low level enemies everybody is always talking about...

Until you are level 5 or 6, it can be difficult for GMs and adventure writers to have a big enough pool of monsters to draw on to throw many lower level enemies at you, but it definitely happens. Ghouls are a real killer in particular without incapacitation. 8 of them can be a party killer even at level -4 or 5 in PF1.

But even from the player side, spells that take out higher level enemies with one failed save were incredibly overpowered and down right boring in PF1. They were a huge part of why single monster fights were terrible, and why so many powerful monsters had to basically have resistance to every offensive spell you could possibly cast.

Incapacitation also keeps debuff/damage spell casters more balanced with each other because your top level slots are your heavy hitters. Without the trait, spells like color spray would not have been first level spells or they would have been nerfed so badly that people would never take them.

[Ubertron_X]

Shisumo wrote:

Ubertron_X wrote:

Hm...

Not feeling any benefits yet, but that might be due to overall party level still being low, i.e. every spell and ability hits you for full effect in addition to there not being any low level enemies everybody is always talking about...

In Age of Ashes, ** spoiler omitted **

I guess level 7 is where the incap party protection starts to kick in, as you will be protected from nasty low level effects. However we are not there yet (currently level 6.75).

Age of Ashes:

We already encountered a couple of those totems, however only damaging ones, which where a pain in the arm but manageable.

[galator]

My last 5e session we are level 7 and we were up against 30 hobogoblins and a cr 11 devil. Surprise round I took out the hoboglins with an aoe. I'm a caster so I have blast spells: ok, good. Next round I thought I can shoot this guy or throw out a hynotic pattern. I threw out the pattern and it stuck. We tied the devil to something and proceeded to take turns murdering him. The fight ended up being very silly and anti climactic. something just fundentally not fun about that.

5e's solution is legendary resitances, pathfinder has the incapacitate trait. Both have issues their issues, but I feel like it makes sense to address this problem in some way.

[kayman]

galator wrote:

My last 5e session we are level 7 and we were up against 30 hobogoblins and a cr 11 devil. Surprise round I took out the hoboglins with an aoe. I'm a caster so I have blast spells: ok, good. Next round I thought I can shoot this guy or throw out a hynotic pattern. I threw out the pattern and it stuck. We tied the devil to something and proceeded to take turns murdering him. The fight ended up being very silly and anti climactic. something just fundentally not fun about that.

5e's solution is legendary resitances, pathfinder has the incapacitate trait. Both have issues their issues, but I feel like it makes sense to address this problem in some way.

What do you think about this small modification in the incapacitation trait rule?

"An ability with this trait can take a character completely out of the fight or even kill them, and it’s harder to use on a more powerful character. If a spell has the incapacitation trait, any creature of more than twice the spell’s level treats a CRITICAL FAILURE check to prevent being incapacitated as a FAILURE. If any other effect has the incapacitation trait, a creature of higher level than the item, creature, or hazard generating the effect gains the same benefits."

Spells with this characteristic would have a more powerful effect but without the possibility of eliminating a monster or PC permanently. This would somewhat mitigate the problem of damage spells by facilitating memorization at higher levels (although it is still distressing due to the small number of slots).

Do you think this interpretation is incorrect and the low level spells with the incapacitation trait would become to powerful?

[Temperans]

Treating just the critical failure roll as one step better instead of treating all failures one step better would be helpful.

My preferred version is still just giving a +5 bonus. which does mean they can be critically effected, but its very rare. But I think I might be a minority in wanting that to happen.

[Deadmanwalking]

The incapacitation trait is designed primarily to insulate against failures, not critical failures. Critical failures are vanishingly unlikely to start with, while failure alone is often a fight ender.

So...no, I don't think that rule would work to actually preserve what Incapacitate is supposed to do.

[Unicore]

The most obvious reason to me why both changes listed above (just prevents critical hit, and +5 save) are not rules that I would want to play with, is that they massively boost the part of PF2 spell casting that is already in the strongest shape: debuffing.

Without incapacitation, as is, a debuff caster has amazing offensive spells to choose from, from level 1 to level 10 without ever having to change them up. Sure some monsters will be immune to specific effects (death effects, emotion, etc), but color spray will be sitting in your level one slot from 1st level play to 20th level play.

Meanwhile, blasters will be out with pitch forks because only their top 2 levels of spells do enough damage to really matter as boss fight worthy offensive spells. Removing incapacitation is making all debuff spells auto heighten. Why give this boost only to this narrow range of spells, which already have the best effects in the game?

Personally, I think a lot of the ill will towards incapacitation is misplaced frustration with the rebalancing of general encounter building in PF2. We are seeing that there is a very vocal subset of players that hate how the 3 action economy and 4 tiers of failure have stratified powerful success to things that generally require rolling the equivalent of a 19 or 20 (or 1 or 2 for enemy saves). Against higher level enemies, that definition of Great success, shifts down, because it should not really be possible to cause a solo boss monster to lose all actions for even a single round, on anything less than a critical result.

For players that are frustrated by the general tone of play, there is a really great fix for this problem that can be implemented on the GM side, without touching how incapacitation works: Stop designing encounters with solo monsters that are much higher level than the party. You can even keep the general difficulty of the game high, by throwing 8 or more on level or level -1 creatures at the party, or having the very occasional level +1 boss creature accompanied by armies of level -2 creatures or having the boss fight in rooms with level +1 hazards that will still keep the challenge up. This not only will make your anti-incapacitation players happy, it will also make the players that feel like they are always failing happier as well, because general levels of success go up, but singular instances of great success are less significant over all. This will fix both issues without having to drastically change base rules of the game and seriously over complicate game balance.

Personally, I love the lethal and challenging feel of solo monster fights in PF2, and am thankful for the shifts in PF2 that have made that possible. I think that the adventure writing team at Piazo might want to consider making sure to release some content that is more focused on lower level opposition, because they currently cater much more to players with my play style than players that want a challenge, but not a high risk of individual action failure. But as a GM, it is not too difficult to rebalance encounters with the weak template and an extra mook or hazard.

[thenobledrake]

kayman wrote:

What do you think about this small modification in the incapacitation trait rule?

I think it makes the difference between

A) the entire party gets a round of actions against a solo monster that is supposed to be a serious threat while it is flat-footed and unable to do anything except Recall Knowledge

and

B) the solo monster that is supposed to be a serious threat loses 1 action

If you use the paralyze spell as an example. Suggesting that it's not just critical fails that the "boss" type encounter needs a protection against, but also regular failures.

Or your extra-planar threat is banished (maybe it can come back, but maybe it can't), or it's blind for a minute, or you've prevented it from taking hostile actions for up to a minute (unless someone is hostile to it before then) - and this is just me picking out 1 spell I remembered and then starting in alphabetically and stopping in the early Cs.

[SuperBidi]

Unicore wrote:

For players that are frustrated by the general tone of play, there is a really great fix for this problem that can be implemented on the GM side, without touching how incapacitation works: Stop designing encounters with solo monsters that are much higher level than the party. You can even keep the general difficulty of the game high, by throwing 8 or more on level or level -1 creatures at the party, or having the very occasional level +1 boss creature accompanied by armies of level -2 creatures or having the boss fight in rooms with level +1 hazards that will still keep the challenge up. This not only will make your anti-incapacitation players happy, it will also make the players that feel like they are always failing happier as well, because general levels of success go up, but singular instances of great success are less significant over all. This will fix both issues without having to drastically change base rules of the game and seriously over complicate game balance.

I love accompanying bosses with spellcasters mook. The low level Cleric casting Reach 2-action Heal every turn on the boss and the low level Bard using Inspire Courage + Magic Missile on the fallen PCs are the kind of enemies you want Incapacitation spells for.

[Zapp]

kayman wrote:

Thanks for all the advices , i brought this issue on the APG discussion and receive a reply from Mark Seifter Design Manager. He said this:

"Everything Ssalarn and others have said is accurate. But maybe this will help kayman:

Incapacitate does prevent disappointing fight-enders against bosses, yes, but it was even more so created to protect the players and their characters from weird situations with multiple low level incapacitation enemies. If you get attacked by 8 harpies in PF1, or 8 mummies, even if every character in your party of 4 only needs a 5 on the d20 to save, the chances each character will fail and get incapacitated is about 5 in 6, meaning the chances everyone is incapacitated (and eats a coup de grace, TPKing) is about 50/50. And we saw that happening in those types of encounters a lot unless the GM pulled punches or used other methods to help save the PCs (you can likely see the pattern yourself if you check online reviews for any adventures you remember that have such an encounter).

Over the course of a long game, PCs are the ones most likely to benefit from effects like this that make things a little more likely for survival (since monsters don't need to survive an encounter but PCs need to keep surviving each encounter in the campaign). So you could also try to remind your players that this benefits them."

I think this argument is very reasonable and when i showed to my players they felt the same.

Interesting.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that the chosen solution is frikkin boring for PCs, when you can't do what you want your spells to do, which is to take down the big boss.

I'm thinking instead that any higher-levelled creature gets a "halfway" effect upon failing an "incapacitation save". This effect would most simply a suitably severe condition of the GMs choosing, such as encumbered, fascinated, immobilized or (perma-)prone.

If that creature still is affected by the first spell when it fails a second "incapacitation save", and this second failure would lead to the same condition, only then does it suffer the full effects of the incapacitation.

Most simply put: you need to get in two Baleful Polymorphs, not just one, to turn the BBEG into a sheep.

[Zapp]

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

For instance, Color Spray will remain an effective 1st level spell for your entire casting career (assuming your opponents are immune for some other reason, of course) while 1st level direct damage spell slots are quickly outstipped by cantrips...

You make this out to be something bad.

I don't mind Color Spray being useful at high level. If you cast it in a high-level slot, that is.

[Taja the Barbarian]

Zapp wrote:

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

For instance, Color Spray will remain an effective 1st level spell for your entire casting career (assuming your opponents are immune for some other reason, of course) while 1st level direct damage spell slots are quickly outstipped by cantrips...

You make this out to be something bad.

I don't mind Color Spray being useful at high level. If you cast it in a high-level slot, that is.

Well, that's kinda the whole point: without the Incapacitation mechanic, a 1st Level Color Spray is 100% as effective as a 10th level version.

Color Spray (Spell 1) wrote:

Illusion, Incapacitation, Visual

Source Core Rulebook pg. 324
Traditions arcane, occult
Cast Two Actions somatic, verbal
Area 15-foot cone
Saving Throw Will;
Duration 1 or more rounds (see below)

Swirling colors affect viewers based on their Will saves.

Critical Success The creature is unaffected.
Success The creature is dazzled for 1 round.
Failure The creature is stunned 1, blinded for 1 round, and dazzled for 1 minute.
Critical Failure The creature is stunned for 1 round and blinded for 1 minute.

[Zapp]

Taja the Barbarian wrote:

Well, that's kinda the whole point: without the Incapacitation mechanic, a 1st Level Color Spray is 100% as effective as a 10th level version.

Sure, but fixing that this way seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Maybe incapacitation spells need to use the old not-auto-heightening mechanism?

I mean, if you're onboard with your highest levelled slot being able to take out a BBEG, then apply, dunno a -2 penalty for each lower level of the slot used.

The level rule of incapacitation spells could then simply be "creatures don't lower the result one category one a 1".

[Deriven Firelion]

kayman wrote:

galator wrote:

My last 5e session we are level 7 and we were up against 30 hobogoblins and a cr 11 devil. Surprise round I took out the hoboglins with an aoe. I'm a caster so I have blast spells: ok, good. Next round I thought I can shoot this guy or throw out a hynotic pattern. I threw out the pattern and it stuck. We tied the devil to something and proceeded to take turns murdering him. The fight ended up being very silly and anti climactic. something just fundentally not fun about that.

5e's solution is legendary resitances, pathfinder has the incapacitate trait. Both have issues their issues, but I feel like it makes sense to address this problem in some way.

What do you think about this small modification in the incapacitation trait rule?

"An ability with this trait can take a character completely out of the fight or even kill them, and it’s harder to use on a more powerful character. If a spell has the incapacitation trait, any creature of more than twice the spell’s level treats a CRITICAL FAILURE check to prevent being incapacitated as a FAILURE. If any other effect has the incapacitation trait, a creature of higher level than the item, creature, or hazard generating the effect gains the same benefits."

Spells with this characteristic would have a more powerful effect but without the possibility of eliminating a monster or PC permanently. This would somewhat mitigate the problem of damage spells by facilitating memorization at higher levels (although it is still distressing due to the small number of slots).

Do you think this interpretation is incorrect and the low level spells with the incapacitation trait would become to powerful?

Interesting. And true. Even now some of my PCs critically fail saves just by random chance and it can get nasty.

Good to know. Maybe I'll come up with a PC against environment solution that suits my sensibilities.

[Gortle]

kayman wrote:

What do you think about this small modification in the incapacitation trait rule?

"An ability with this trait can take a character completely out of the fight or even kill them, and it’s harder to use on a more powerful character. If a spell has the incapacitation trait, any creature of more than twice the spell’s level treats a CRITICAL FAILURE check to prevent being incapacitated as a FAILURE. If any other effect has the incapacitation trait, a creature of higher level than the item, creature, or hazard generating the effect gains the same benefits."

Spells with this characteristic would have a more powerful effect but without the possibility of eliminating a monster or PC permanently. This would somewhat mitigate the problem of damage spells by facilitating memorization at higher levels (although it is still distressing due to the small number of slots).

Do you think this interpretation is incorrect and the low level spells with the incapacitation trait would become to powerful?

I think this is one of many compromises to get around the incapacitation trait, and a reasonable house rule. It means that players spells are not totally hosed (which is what is making them upset) but has some reasonable effect still.

[SuperBidi]

I've found the Incapacitation trait very handy recently when I've cast Calm Emotions 2 with our level 5 Barbarian in the middle of it. Being able to affect enemies but not allies is one of the good thing about this rule.

[Fumarole]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Interesting. And true. Even now some of my PCs critically fail saves just by random chance and it can get nasty.

Mine too. It happens about 5% of the time.

[Nelroy]

Sorry if I missed this elsewhere on the thread...

Is it possible the 1 degree of success better is only applied upon a successful role? Meaning that if over double the incapacitating effects level you would then treat a success as a critical success and not adjust a failure, critical or otherwise.

I don't think this is what the incapacitation trait is saying, but perhaps an interpretation worth considering?