Winning Streak - what counts as a 'significant foe'?

[rokeca]

The SoM spell Winning Streak provides one character/creature a quickened effect for one round with this twist:

"If the target or one of their allies within 20 feet gets a critical success on an attack roll against a significant foe, whoever got the critical success becomes quickened if they weren't already, and the duration of the winning streak is extended by another round. Creatures quickened by the spell can use the extra action to Strike, Step, or Stride. If a full round passes without the target or one their allies critically succeeding on an attack roll against a significant foe, the winning streak breaks and the spell ends."

So what counts as a significant foe? A creature of the same level as the character making the attack? Above their level? No more than 1 or 2 levels below?

Thanks!

[SuperBidi]

Any creature as long as the character is not attacking a spectator or a bird passing by. It's an enemy that can affect you, roughly.
The "significant foe" is used to avoid shenanigans. As long as your players are using it during combat it should work fine.

[breithauptclan]

Significant Foe is a term used in several abilities. Basically it is left up to the GM to determine what exactly that means.

My understanding and guidelines would be: Any creature that is budgeted in as part of a designed encounter. It will most likely be in that CR-4 to CR+4 range for the encounter building table.

[Ascalaphus]

Yeah it's a fairly wide range. I think it came about for the first time in Starfinder where it was CR = APL -4 and higher creatures.

Basically it means, you can't bring a sack of lab mice and kill them to satisfy the condition. Because that's the PF1 exploit that it's supposed to stop.

[Squiggit]

I wish it was worded a bit better, tbh.

For someone not familiar with the bag of rats concept, I can easily see people putting too much emphasis on the "significant" aspect of significant foe.

In fact I've had a newer player specifically mention this spell as being a pain because they assumed it only worked on bosses and bosses are hard to crit.

[gesalt]

Squiggit wrote:

I wish it was worded a bit better, tbh.

For someone not familiar with the bag of rats concept, I can easily see people putting too much emphasis on the "significant" aspect of significant foe.

In fact I've had a newer player specifically mention this spell as being a pain because they assumed it only worked on bosses and bosses are hard to crit.

Bag of rats is the usual idea of being able to activate any on-kill or on-attack effect by killing one of your rats that you stuff into a sack or barrel and travel around with. One of the funnier bits of cheese that's been floating around forever. The whirlwind super cleave where you kill a rat, cleave the main target, repeat is probably the least complex but most obvious example I can give.

[Ascalaphus]

It took me a while to drag up from memory where this all started, but I think it was PF1 "Great Cleave" feat.

Basically, you hit one enemy and if you hit you get a free attack on an adjacent enemy. And if you get a hit then you get a free attack on an adjacent enemy. And on and on, until you miss.

So what you might do was: drop a bag of defenseless rats at your feet, hit your enemy, cleave a rat, cleave same enemy, cleave another rat, cleave same enemy, cleave rat...

For some reason this was considered an exploit. Ahum. So that's where the ideal of "significant enemy" comes from. The enemy has to at least be worth statting up and perhaps being able to hit you.

Like, if you were doing some fight where you're level 15 and wading through an army of level 1 skeletons that can't really do anything to you, that's not a significant enemy anymore. If they were modeled as a level 12 skeleton troop, that'd be a significant enemy (and might do a bit of damage to you if it gets very lucky).

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I'm having difficulty finding an actual rules definition though.