A friend brought it to my attention that the NPC guidelines in Lost Omens Character Guide include mention of new kinds of skill-having for non-player characters, noting that templates may list skills to add to the statblock, either as primary skills (if you have reason to believe the creature would be good at it) or secondary skills (if you don't). Dark Archive has something similar.
But what does it mean to be a primary skill or a secondary skill? Is there a canonical answer as to what they correspond to in the Designing Creatures section of the GameMastery Guide, where the terminology is low/moderate/high/extreme? It's frustrating seeing a third angle of describing how good a creature is at something, after TEML/LMHE, and to not even see what the writers mean by it.
This is dealing with creating NPC characters. The ultimate goal is to have a stat block that is of an appropriate level, and fills the role that the character was designed for. At the end of the process only the TEML ranking and final bonus is what is going to be written down on the NPC stat block. Everything else is just a path to that result. One of many paths that are available.
The Gamemastery Guide's 'building creatures' rules are for creating a character from scratch. And it works quite well. You can build any creature at any level. But the process is fairly involved. You have to make decisions about every stat and ability for the creature.
The NPC theme templates allow for using existing creatures and tweaking them to be part of a theme. So there may be less decision making involved. One of those decisions is if the template gives a skill training, then you have to decide if the base creature would be good at that skill or not.
Ultimately, you just use your best judgement and tweak the NPC character as desired.
You're dodging the question. I understand the point of them. But what does primary or secondary skill even mean? Nothing?
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Yes, thank you, that is what says you should judge to determine if something becomes a primary or secondary skill, but what do you do with that information? Make the same gut calls you were going to make before?
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I have found absolutely nothing on AoN, in the Lost Omens Character Guide or in the Rules forum explaining what primary and secondary skills mean.
My guess is that primary would be the ones you push to the top (so High) and secondary the rest (so Moderate), but it's only a guess.
Something was left unwritten and an errata would be welcome.
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The Gamemastery Guide's 'building creatures' rules are for creating a character from scratch. And it works quite well. You can build any creature at any level. But the process is fairly involved. You have to make decisions about every stat and ability for the creature.
I also use the Building Creatures section in the Gamemastery Guide for adjusting a creature by a few levels. (I had altered an adventure path designed for levels 1 to 16 to cover levels 1 to 20, so I had to level up a lot of creatures at the end.) Table 2-3: Skills has four columns for skills: Extreme, High, Moderate, and Low. The explanation says,
You have lots of flexibility in setting your creature’s skills. Pick some skills you think are appropriate, and consider how good the creature is at them. High skills are roughly on par with a specialized PC of the creature’s level, though they could be a little lower or higher. Most creatures have at least one high skill, but no more than three. The best skills should go with the best ability modifiers, and you might even want to estimate the creature’s proficiency rank for these skills. Some skills can get a high bonus for free to fit the creature’s theme, particularly Lore skills.
This is similar to the advice in the Lost Omens Character Guide but that advice uses the words "primary" and "secondary' instead. The two books were published in different years: the Lost Omens Character Guide was released in October 2019 and the Gamemastery Guide was released in February 2020. I guess in the intervening months Paizo changed their minds from two columns of skill values to four columns of skill values.
A primary skill would be a High skill in Table 2-3. A secondary skill would be a Moderate skill in Table 2-3. The Extreme and Low columns in that table are almost never used.
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Or another possibility to look at it:
A primary skill is whatever skill a monster/noch needs to serve it's primary role/function
Or another possibility to look at it:
A primary skill is whatever skill a monster/noch needs to serve it's primary role/function
Yes, thank you, that is what says you should judge to determine if something becomes a primary or secondary skill, but what do you do with that information? Make the same gut calls you were going to make before?
In all seriousness, the release date information is some useful context, thank you Mathmuse. I'll be sure to tell my friend about it. However, Dark Archive is a main-line release from July of 2022. They should have been able to work with the new verbiage by then, right?
To anyone reading the thread and thinking of commenting: Please make sure you're aware that I am not a fool. I have the Core Rulebook, GameMastery Guide, and Lost Omens Character Guide, among other books. I have read them at least once in the relevant sections. I know what the guidelines for creating creatures say about skills. That part is not the part in contention. I am not a newbie GM looking for help making baby's first monster and would not like to be treated as such, I'm just trying to understand the intent behind the design using these words as if they were capital-G capital-T Game Terms, so I can thoughtfully decide how to use it in my home game.
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In all seriousness, the release date information is some useful context, thank you Mathmuse. I'll be sure to tell my friend about it. However, Dark Archive is a main-line release from July of 2022. They should have been able to work with the new verbiage by then, right?
I never purchased Dark Archives, and searching Archives of Nethys for the quote would have taken time, so I skipped searching for that content. I think I found it in Archives of Nethys under Secret Society Member:
You can turn an existing creature into a secret society member by completing the following steps. This adjustment is best applied to NPCs and other humanoid creatures rather than beasts or other monsters. Increase the creature's level by 1 and change its statistics as follows.
• Increase AC, attack bonuses, DCs, the Perception modifier, saving throws, and skill modifiers by 1.
• Increase Deception and Society to be primary skills for the creature's new level.
• Increase either Diplomacy or Intimidation to be a primary skill for the creature's new level, and the other to be a secondary skill.
• Increase damage with Strikes and other offensive abilities by 1. If an ability can be used only a small number of times (such as a dragon's Breath Weapon), increase the damage by 2 instead.
• Increase HP by the amount listed on the table.
I am not a newbie GM looking for help making baby's first monster and would not like to be treated as such, I'm just trying to understand the intent behind the design using these words as if they were capital-G capital-T Game Terms, so I can thoughtfully decide how to use it in my home game.
Given the further use of the terms in Dark Archives, I suspect that they are not Game Terms but instead they are Game Development Terms used by the Paizo designers. My suspicion comes from a lot of my experience with earlier versions of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder 1st Edition (remember primary and secondary natural attacks?) and with the style of the Playtest Document for Pathfinder 2nd Edition. This is guesswork rather than spelled out in the rules.
As Tactical Drongo said, "A primary skill is whatever skill a monster/noch needs to serve it's primary role/function." Let's talk about how creatures function in Pathfinder roles.
PF2 is about balance, and too many skills would make an enemy too versatile. That is bad for the party, who would find their tactics countered by a skill the enemy had not demonstrated previously, and bad for the GM, who would have to decide which skill out of many the enemy would use, such as Deception to trick the party or Intimidate to scare the party. To prevent this, the designer of the enemy character would give some skills higher bonuses, a primary skill, and other skills lower bonuses, a secondary skill, and some skills not intended for use don't even get stats. The GM would see the higher bonus on the primary skill and use that first. If it failed, maybe the enemy would switch to a secondary skill, but would have diminishing returns except by a lucky dice roll.
For example, imagine that a GM writing his own adventure wants to create a Palace Guard who is secretly a member of the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye. This guard, Lieutenant Gawain, is a younger son of a minor noble family who used his family connections to gain his prestigious job. He hopes to earn a knighthood from the king by saving the kingdom from a supernatural threat, so he joined a secret order that watches for such threats.
The generic 4th-level Palace Guard has:
Skills Athletics +12, Diplomacy +10, Intimidation +8
Athletics at +12 is a primary skill, supported by the key ability Strength +4. Diplomacy and Intimidation are secondary skills.
The first bullet point for modifying a Secret Society Member is to raise the level, which raises the skills by 1.
Skills Athletics +13, Diplomacy +11, Intimidation +9
The second bullet point, "Increase Deception and Society to be primary skills for the creature's new level," adds two new skills.
Skills Athletics +13, Deception +13, Diplomacy +11, Intimidation +9, Society +13
The third bullet point, "Increase either Diplomacy or Intimidation to be a primary skill for the creature's new level, and the other to be a secondary skill," gives us a choice. Diplomacy is higher, so let's make it primary and Intimidation secondary.
Skills Athletics +13, Deception +13, Diplomacy +13, Intimidation +12, Society +13
The remaining bullet points have nothing to do with skills.
We have already given Lieutenant Gawain a lot of skill increases, but the advice in Dark Archives is not comprehensive. The Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye deals with occult threats, so Lieutenant Gawain needs to be trained in Occultism, too. Let's go for Low skill.
Skills Athletics +13, Deception +13, Diplomacy +13, Intimidation +12, Occultism +10, Society +13
To make up for all the skill increases, Lieutenant Gawain gains the minimum additional abilities as described in Secret Society Member.
Lieutenant Gawain built this way is suitable for one-shot or intermittent encounters. He could be an enemy, because his branch of the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye decided to use their confiscated occult artifacts for evil. He could be a misguided obstacle, because the true cultists planted false evidence against the party and he and his squad want to arrest the party. He could be an outside ally, because he identified an occult threat and asked the party to deal with it.
But if Lieutenant Gawain is supposed to guide the party to a trouble spot and fight beside the party against an ambush, he should be built like a PC instead, a human fighter with noble background and an Eldritch Researcher, Exorcist, Folklorist, Ghost Eater, Harrower, Mind Smith, or Soul Warden archetype. The arguments against a versatile NPC do not apply to an NPC who is in the party. I learned this from experience. In Siege of Stone the party recruited two dwarven NPCs designed to confront them and judge whether they were worthy to enter the monster-invaded dwarven reliquary. The two dwarves were odd working with the party, sometimes useless and sometimes as powerful as party members despite being lower level. In contrast, in Fangs of War I rebuilt a halfling guide Cirieo Thessaddin by PC rules for the oracle playtest. That worked out fine. People in the party work better with PC builds.