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Yarr.
Alright, so rituals are pretty cool but they don't make good "obstacles" for PFS scenarios.
Problem 1: They boil down success to a single skill check (One that fortune effects like hero points can't influence) and most skill buffs are way too short for.
Problem 2: Secondary Casters
In PFS we want everybody to be able to participate most of the time. Okay so for rituals you could increase the availability of secondary casters...
The problem is secondary casters in rituals do not make things easier, they are a punitive requirement designed to make rituals harder.
Looking at the success chart for Secondary checks on rituals shows us:
Critical Success You gain a +2 circumstance bonus to the primary check.
Success No bonus or penalty.
Failure You take a –4 circumstance penalty to the primary check.
Critical Failure As failure, and you reduce the degree of success of the primary skill check by one step.
Lets say we have a secondary caster who succeeds on an 8. 15% of the time they add +2, 50% of the time they add nothing, 30% of the time they give -4 and 5% of the time they give -4 and reduce the primary degree of success.
Since the bonus is a circumstance bonus, no matter how many secondary casters crit, the bonus is never higher than +2 (No matter how many fail it doesn't get worse than -4) but as you add more secondary casters you increase the chance of one of them critical failing, which is disastrous. (One which no amount of other success/critical successes is going to recover from).
You want as few secondary casters as possible (0 preferably).
Especially since complex hazards are vastly customizable and encourage cooperation and working together can we please use those instead?
Thanks.
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Thank you for highlighting the math and mechanics that have been bothering me for some time now.
I think (and this is just a guess) that when they were designing PF2 they wanted to get away from "I Aid, I aid, I too aid, etc" to overcome difficult obstacles for the most skilled member in the party.
For a brief while, PFS2 tables had the potential of table variation for assist role DC, but that has since been removed.
So the Core game has a rule that directly and distinctly discourages A. Cooperating B. Player involvement in a given situation.
OrgPlay has been running on 'Mostly Core Rules'.
Is it really fun to watch tables flop and struggle around with rituals/other things requiring 'aid'?
I know as a player it isn't, and a stumbling block to GMing is the idea of having two tables like I had at GenCon.
In one case the players looked at me and said "Well, none of us have the skills high enough to handle the encounter, I guess we just fail this part, then?"
In the other case, the players kept trying to 'help' and made things *worse* (and very nearly all died).
Rolling and hoping for a 'Nat 20' is not a good way to play the game. Save for the most addicted of gamblers trying to hit that five percent is... just admitting defeat.