Holy crap - Just learned there is an Appendix 1: Special Abilities with additional rules from Appendix 2: Conditions......

[Average Joe 23]

This is a combination of confession, mini-rant, and search for empathy/validation that I'm not a complete idiot / terrible DM. :D TL/DR, why are important rules about the same thing often spread across multiple sections of the rules?!

Lately the Frightened and Panicked conditions have been kicking my players' asses, although they've persevered through the fights to win the day. Today I was doing more research on them (far from the first time I've read about them online from official rules to other GM opinions / interpretations/ homerules).

And I came across a post that directed to the Legacy PRD as hosted by Archives of Nethys. I like Archives of Nethys, but typically use d20pfsrd for quick online rule references. Anyways, it referred to Fear rules text I'd never seen before (despite looking up the Frightened/Panicked conditions dozens of times over the years) about being able to stop fleeing once out of sight and hearing from the source of fear. I went on to find these pages:

https://www.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Fear&Category=Special%20Abilitie s

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/Gamemastering/special-abilities/

And then opened up my core rulebook PDF to discover Appendix 1: Special Abilities, which is the info from above links and which has a lot of important supplemental text that adds to what is included in Appendix 2: Conditions. All these years I'd only been seeing the information from Appendix 2 and thus applying an incomplete ruling. [face palm]

The differences as described for the Frightened and Panicked conditions between these two appendices (above links vs this and this) would've greatly impacted the sessions. It just makes me shake my head that important information like this can often be spread out in different rules sections.

Does anyone else out there often feel like this?

[Belafon]

Average Joe 23 wrote:

Does anyone else out there often feel like this?

Sure. Let us say you cast glitterdust on an incorporeal monster. Does it have a miss chance? I'll check my Core Rulebook here. . . incorporeal condition is on page 567, doesn't seem like it does. Don't see anything else that describes incorporeality in more detail. Oh, I should look in the Bestiary? Well, whaddaya know! "Corporeal spells and effects that do not cause damage only have a 50% chance of affecting an incorporeal creature."

But. . .

Fear levels is not a particularly egregious rules split. Appendix 2 is just a summary of conditions. The actual rules on how conditions interact are elsewhere in the book (like Appendix 1 for fear). The effects of the Grappled condition are in Appendix 2, but the rules for how to grapple are back in Chapter 8 (combat).