Must circus tricks have trick traits?

[Ravingdork]

Got a player of a spirit barbarian who wants to channel the spirits of the audience's dearly departed as his trick. I think the audience trait would be fitting, but since this is their first performance, none of the available traits really match what he's trying to do.

Is it possible for him to have a trick with no trick traits?

[Zapp]

The only reason you'd want a trick trait is because they are associated with bonuses.

These bonuses are of two kinds: first the obvious ones - the bonuses listed in the list of traits.

The second type of bonus is story-related. At various points in the AP the text will say you can use a circus trick with a given trait, often granting you a lower DC or perhaps giving a better outcome on success.

Nothing would break if you allow the player to have a traitless trick.

In fact, nothing would break if you allow the player to use a trait like "audience" even though the circus has not yet recruited a NPC performer with that trait. A big reason for the traits is to provide a motivation for players to recruit new circus NPCs, to gain new traits ("collect them all") that they can then use for their own tricks.

The in-game benefits are never large, which is why I'm confident nothing will break if you loosen the rules. For instance, if you know your players will love recruiting NPCs no matter what, you don't really need the "gotta get them for their traits" thing.

Don't forget that the circus rules are MUCH more fast and loose than the other rules of the game. As soon as you have left the very lowest levels, you should find that succeeding at performances quickly become entirely trivial.

(My campaign is now high level, and the devs have severely underestimated the levels of anticipation and expectation the circus rules actually generate. If the adventure asks you to reach 100, say, the heroes can easily reach 250 without breaking a sweat, so it's not like the writers were off by 20% or even 50%... Saying this mostly to tell you you can do whatever you want w.r.t the circus rules because they're mostly there to give interested players a little administrative minigame - but there's none of the balance and tension Pathfinder 2 is otherwise known for. So you can't really break anything)

Good luck with your game!

[Staffan Johansson]

If none of the other traits work for you, there's always Agile.

As for what Zapp is saying about the difficulty levels... yeah, that's a bit odd. I think they wanted to make sure that the circus didn't eat up character resources that would otherwise go into dungeoning, so they set the bar fairly low. But it's strange that you start the campaign off with a show that's legit difficult, but by the next show at level 4-5 you essentially crush it without any worry whatsoever. I guess that's because the AP is somewhat mis-marketed: it's not the Circus Adventure Path where you also stop the evil Xulgath plot, it's the Xulgath Adventure Path where you also come from the circus.

And that's a bit of a shame, because if you give the players a home base (which the circus is), and means to improve that home base, they're going to care about that a lot more than about some plot to destroy or take over the world (or at least a corner of it).

[Zapp]

Paizo has staked its claim on very rigorous rules. That is rules you can hand out to a minmaxer confident he or she can't break them.

It makes no sense to first invite players to engage with the rules seriously (and they are seriously intricate), only for the players to quickly find out there is no actual game balance in them.

Either just include a couple of paragraphs that explain things narratively (without any of the game elements, the +1 bonuses and what not) or include rules of the same rock-solid quality the rest of Pathfinder 2 is known for.

In this context, letting the circus rules slip through as-is was a mistake. The rules are actually quite complicated, but with none of the rigour of the rules of, say, the Core Rulebook. Just to take a trivial example to prove this beyond the shaodow of a doubt. Imagine one of the class feats for your class said "Treat results of attack rolls as one category better" meaning that when you miss you hit, and when you hit, you score a critical. This would be obviously and massively better than every other option, and entirely broken.

Yet Merchandise has this effect on circus performances. The challenge of reaching a success becomes entirely trivialized for every other show. So there is no doubt Paizo did not or could not spend even a fraction of the care it is known for on these rules.

If the writers realized there was no time for rules stringent enough to be allowed to interact with the rest of the game (my players were disappointed there was nothing for the characters to gain by interacting with the circus rules), Paizo should have concluded very simple rules (what regular running text can suggest) would have been far preferable.

[Zapp]

Staffan Johansson wrote:

I guess that's because the AP is somewhat mis-marketed: it's not the Circus Adventure Path where you also stop the evil Xulgath plot, it's the Xulgath Adventure Path where you also come from the circus.

This is what you get when you try to please everybody.

In their effort to make the campaign useful even if you aren't interested in the circus at all, they made the story much less compelling for everybody.

It would have been a much wiser choice to go all-in on the circus theme, and simply assume that everybody who purchased the product actually wanted the circus front and center.

Complete with a story that revolves around the circus, and rules elements that allow players to convert show successes into tangible benefits for their characters (such as new archetypes, bonus feats, or more money to purchase magic items for).

---

I can easily envision management getting anxious "shouldn't we hold off an AP this strongly themed until later in the shelf life of PF2?", and the writers, sensing their idea is about to get nixed, agreeing to a "compromise", namely to give the AP the go ahead if the writers promise to make the circus entirely optional.

That was a clear and unequivocal mistake. An easy mistake that's very understandable to make, but still, a mistake.

[thewastedwalrus]

Eh, it seems like later-level circus performances are more about trying to hit the critical success option and do so with the maximum amount of anticipation for payout. After running up to book 3 it seems very easy to always succeed at the circus performance, but the party has really tried to hit the critical success in every case after the first show.

Aiming for a critical success also gives meaning to multiple trick checks, where a trick check with a lesser bonus could be used to try and get a critical failure on the check and reduce excitement below or to the anticipation value.

Otherwise to the original topic, trick traits are entirely minor buffs to the performance. You could describe what the party has access to and give the player some direction about what checks they'd like to roll or different ways they'd like to enhance the trick (maybe use some spooky green/black flames -fire- representing the spirits for a bonus on intimidating the crowd and help from pyrotechnics, agile because it's very general if they don't want to change anything about their trick, animal with maybe some crows cawing to represent the dead or The Boneyard, water as a reference to the River Syyx). Tricks are able to be more complicated and have more trick traits as the party gains levels, so it could be a good idea to encourage experimentation early on.