Complex Hazards - how many actions

[LarsC]

Hi! I am prepping an Adventure Path right now, and am running into a question that seems incredibly simple, but I can't find a clear answer for it.

I'm looking at the rules for a complex hazard. Its routine is listed as "1 action." That routine involves dealing damage to a PC and having them roll a basic save. Okay, fine. Got it.

The rules for complex hazards say: "The number of actions a hazard can take each round, as well as what they can be used for, depend on the hazard."

Does this mean that this hazard is only able to take one action per turn, and that action is its routine of dealing damage to a PC with a basic save?

Or does this mean that the hazard, like everything else, gets 3 actions per turn, and its routine only takes up one of those actions, so it gets to apply that damage three times within a given turn?

I realize I'm asking a sort of remedial, stupid question, but it seems slightly unclear to me, because it's not clear whether the "one action" on the hazard rules indicates how many actions it's allowed to take or how many of its three actions its routine uses up.

And somehow, I can't find anyone else asking this question, so I feel like a real dunce. But I thought maybe you could help!

Thanks for your help!

[SuperBidi]

Complex hazards are very badly written. You have to completely ignore any link to actions.
Roughly, they have:
- A trigger, that must be apply only once unless it says it's a free action and then it's as much as you want.
- A routine that you must apply every round.

That's it.
I think they should be completely rewritten by removing the notion of actions that are crazy misleading as they have nothing in common with character actions.

[LarsC]

SuperBidi wrote:

Complex hazards are very badly written. You have to completely ignore any link to actions.

Roughly, they have:
- A trigger, that must be apply only once unless it says it's a free action and then it's as much as you want.
- A routine that you must apply every round.

That's it.
I think they should be completely rewritten by removing the notion of actions that are crazy misleading as they have nothing in common with character actions.

This is very helpful. Thank you! I agree with your opinion on this.

[thenobledrake]

They don't need a complete re-write.

Just another sentence (or even just altered wording) to bridge the gap between "The number of actions a hazard can take each round, as well as what they can be used for, depend on the hazard." and the easily skipped Hazard Format section where it says "Routine This section describes what a complex hazard does on each of its turns during an encounter; the number in parentheses after the word “Routine” indicates how many actions the hazard can use each turn. Simple hazards don’t have this entry."

So that readers skip that part less, and as a result find it less confusing that a hazard says something like "Routine (4 actions)" or "Routine (1 action)" and isn't meaning that the former takes more than 1 round to complete and the latter can be repeated 3 times per round.

[SuperBidi]

thenobledrake wrote:

They don't need a complete re-write.

Just another sentence (or even just altered wording) to bridge the gap between "The number of actions a hazard can take each round, as well as what they can be used for, depend on the hazard." and the easily skipped Hazard Format section where it says "Routine This section describes what a complex hazard does on each of its turns during an encounter; the number in parentheses after the word “Routine” indicates how many actions the hazard can use each turn. Simple hazards don’t have this entry."

So that readers skip that part less, and as a result find it less confusing that a hazard says something like "Routine (4 actions)" or "Routine (1 action)" and isn't meaning that the former takes more than 1 round to complete and the latter can be repeated 3 times per round.

It's far more than that.

Hazards have reactions that are not reactions but triggers (please avoid to use a Summoning Rune every round if you don't want to overwhelm your party).
Hazards have actions, and their routine cost them all their actions. So you can write Routine (46464 actions) and it works exactly the same than Routine (1 action).

Giving actions to hazards would be fine if hazards were having different choices for these actions. When the only thing you can do is your routine and when your routine costs you all your actions, there's no point in having actions.

Hazards should be entirely rewritten to simplify everything. They are uselessly complicated and generate tons of errors because you think they are actually having actions, real actions, not hazard actions which are not actions.

[thenobledrake]

Hazards aren't as complicated as you're making them out to be, they just need better organization/sign-posting to connect the appropriate text describing their rules to the format explanation.

And while they don't usually have X number of actions that can be spent on Y different choices of things, the number of actions can matter - both in the case of being able to slowly dismantle a hazard by reducing it's number of actions, and in the case of player character abilities that theoretically would function differently (or not at all) if the game weren't using as consistent of language as it can by calling hazards doing things actions.