| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think I am making a distinction between:
I'm a GM and either running an AP or creating a homebrew campaign. I have a challenge scenario here that would best be solved with Performance. Hopefully someone in the party has Performance trained.
and:
I'm a player and took Performance. I'm hoping that the GM will let me use it for something useful.
As a GM, I really struggle with the first one. I can't think of many situations that would require Performance exclusively. And even for the second one, it takes the player of the character actively trying to use the skill and proposing ideas in order for me to figure out something to make it work.
I don't have that problem with Crafting. Sure, it isn't used in all campaigns or all situations. But I don't struggle to find a use for it. From either side of the GM screen.
A recommendation from GM to GM: when presenting a challenge scenario to a party, make sure the scenario has at least three solutions that use different skills or abilities.
Forest of Spirits in the Jade Regent adventure path had a skill challenge requiring multiple skills. Prince Batsaikhar of the city Ordu-Aganhei wanted to be entertained by the travelers who had crossed the world to his city. He invited the party on five days. Each day he would provide his usual entertainment and then challenge the party to provide similar entertainment.
The Feast of the Honored Visitors
On the fourth night, the Feast of the Honored Visitors is held. For this feast, the guests must advise the royal chefs what to cook, and must provide the entertainment for the feast. The prince’s advisor Chua wakes the PCs at dawn and asks for instructions for the feast—the royal household is ready to act under their direction.
Feast: The PCs have to feed the prince’s 300 guests, but all dishes must be made from what is locally available—camel, horse, mutton, and pork being the most obvious options.
Challenge: The prince’s chefs are totally unfamiliar with Avistani cuisine, and unless the PCs personally intervene, the cooks produce something that looks disgusting and tastes vile, which displeases the prince. The PCs can supervise the cooks and create a pleasing meal with a DC 25 Profession (butcher), Profession (cook), or similar skill check, or by using magic.
In the preceding module, The Hungry Storm, the party had led a caravan over the northern ice cap. I stocked the caravan with colorful passengers, including a gnome chef eager to visit Tian Xia and learn its recipes. And whenever the party killed a monster that threatened the caravan, the chef would cook it up as a new recipe to try out and feed the caravan.
Instead of attempting the feast challenge themselves, the party brought in their friend the gnome chef. He decided to cook a monster for the prince. Some queries to the local militia found a nearby village threatened by an aurumvorax. They killed the aurumvorax and the chef cooked it for the prince. Thus, they won the feast challenge with their social skills and their combat skills rather than their cooking skills.
Oh, and one of those other days was a Performance challenge. The party had a bard who sang, but the glassblowing oracle also made a performance of blowing glass.
As for the player wanted to use Performance, the GM has to be open to suggestions of an unexpected way to solve the problem or a little roleplaying just for the fun of it. Maybe the party is spending the night at an inn and the bard wants to take the stage in the common room and entertain the crowd. Maybe the GM had nothing planned for the night, but a little roleplaying won't hurt. Or maybe the GM thought the inn would be a good place for Gather Information about their upcoming quest, and rather than having the players roll Diplomacy to Gather Information, the GM could improvise a singing contest in which guests at the inn sing ballads, one of which contains useful information.
A GM finds opportunities by being alert to when the players and their characters take a step in the right direction on their own. Build upon that natural plot hook rather than planting the plot hook by GM intervention. My players love driving the plot themselves. The skald Kirii did not know that her concert would break the logjam on my plot. The player did it because Kirii loved to sing. I simply recognized that the concert could shape events as I needed so that I did not need to break the logjam myself.
Thus also highlights that the players don't have to choose the most commonly useful skills. The story can make good use of niche skills instead.
|
I think I am making a distinction between:
I'm a GM and either running an AP or creating a homebrew campaign. I have a challenge scenario here that would best be solved with Performance. Hopefully someone in the party has Performance trained.
and:
I'm a player and took Performance. I'm hoping that the GM will let me use it for something useful.
As a GM, I really struggle with the first one. I can't think of many situations that would require Performance exclusively. And even for the second one, it takes the player of the character actively trying to use the skill and proposing ideas in order for me to figure out something to make it work.
I don't have that problem with Crafting. Sure, it isn't used in all campaigns or all situations. But I don't struggle to find a use for it. From either side of the GM screen.
PFS is its own animal. It has a *lot* of skill challenges. And part of their remit is to make every skill useful.
But something I see a lot is that both Performance and Diplomacy will do the job, but Performance has a lower DC. Or you're dealing with Gnomes or Goblins or Fey (soooo many Fey the last few years) where it doesn't matter if they like you, what matters is that they aren't bored, so Performance is the best way to go. Or you can use Performance to soften up an NPC that you can't *approach* to use Diplomacy, but once you've gotten their attention with Performance then you can talk to them.
In a weird way, Performance is like a social Lore skill -- narrower in scope and useful less often, but when it is the right tool it is more likely to succeed than other social skills.
I'm with you on Crafting, by the way -- I see it come up *all the time*. But then I play at tables where people are trying to change up the battlefield a lot. It also often works as a poor man's Thievery.
What are considered the least useful skills?
Sort of a tricky question because it's very campaign dependent and a GM can make any skill much better or much worse just with a few choice decisions. Skills like Acrobatics, Thievery, and Stealth can be extremely useful or very niche just based on adventure and gm style.
Performance is pretty rough. You can Earn Income or Perform, and Perform explicitly doesn't do anything on its own but your GM might allow it to provide some secondary benefits.
Craft if you aren't using shields can be hard to find space to do much with. It can enable certain things but on its own it's not the most useful skill.
Survival has some really useful benefits in theory, but tracking, navigating, and managing food are three of the things most often handwaved by campaigns and GMs, which means sometimes its use cases are just wiped out from the get go.
I'll admit I meant it as a trap question.
The answer people give kind of shows what was useful in their experience in the kinds of games they played with the GMs that ran them.
Even after playing many games none of us alone could exhaust the permutations of campaign design combined with GM execution such that we could actually find a definitive answer. At least thats my opinion.
Performance seems to have lots of RP use, albeit not mechanically stipulated. Yes, it's just entertaining people, but that's kind cool and builds goodwill. Bar's sad? Let's sing a culturally appropriate song to salute/mourn/enliven/etc. And PF2's Performance includes joking, dancing, and other periphery activities too, all unexceptional in a game designed for violence, but nevertheless useful in an RP heavy environment. PFS taps into this with some obstacles where Performance can be a secondary skill (at a higher DC) for some social & societal obstacles, like addressing a crowd with oratory or using music to soothe a beast. (And yes, the writers have to go out of their way, partly to address the breadth of skills, much like Crafting gets used to repair items/set pieces a disproportionate amount of the time.)
Did have one PC who performed so poorly at a bar's weekly public stage (open-mike) night that he had to finagle just to be allowed back in, and only if he never sang again. And that campaign was city-based with that the local bar for the PCs' base so it resonated with the player throughout. Meanwhile a glowing result would have mirrored that, making for a good source of wharf scuttlebutt...something another PC did achieve (and kinda teased the first PC about).
So yeah, as a GM, I find it flavorful, reward it, and allow it some flexibility, though that said, as a player I seldom take it and perhaps never will advance it! :-)
My skills depend on the character, either stealth/thievery/acrobatics, intimidate/athletics/something else, Diplomacy/intimidate/casting skill, or similar bundles.
Whatever the characters theme and two highest stats lean into.
I don't value Int based or lore skills much as they just prevent you from failing forward.
I often try to get more then three skills at or above expert though as three legendary skills feels restrictive.
So while my heal/recovery characters, my stealth characters, my front line characters and my casters tend to look the same as all others with those roles, they don't share much in common with other roles.
Performance isn't necessarily a bad skill. It is just the worst skill.
Which is a very interesting statement to make. Isn't English fun.
Sure, Performance can be justified to be useful. But those same justifications can be used on other skills. Often to better effect. And those other skills have more inherent uses without needing extra justification.
So if someone asks 'what is the least useful skill?' I'm calling out Performance.
But like a lot of things in PF2, even the worst of the choices still aren't bad.
You can also just spend 1 skill feat (Acrobatic Performance) to Perform with a much more useful skill (Acrobatics) without having to invest anything into Performance itself. At which point the value of the skill plummets even further down.
It's still great for flavor at least.
|
You can also just spend 1 skill feat (Acrobatic Performance) to Perform with a much more useful skill (Acrobatics) without having to invest anything into Performance itself.
To some extent, sure, But Performance lets you sing, play the flute, act, tell jokes, etc. And sometimes the situation calls for singing, fluting, acting, joking, etc and not for athletics, no matter how entertaining the athletics are.
I know, anybody investing seriously in Performance is probably going to specialize somewhat so some of their performances are going to be notably better than other ones. But they can still DO the other ones, and if they've seriously invested in performance likely still do them quite well.
In my experience, the most difficult skill issue to resolve as a GM is dealing with the overlap/difference between arcana and occultism. It kinda seems like the remaster has taken a step back away from defining differences between them, and it really has been left as GM fiat.
Which is mostly fine as long as the GM lets them be used mostly interchangeably for magical mysteries, but it can lead to awkwardness if both are supposed to be functionally necessary in a campaign for major skill challenges. Like, mostly in PF2 APs, occultism is the more useful skill than arcana, not just for identifying creatures but for learning about major plot points. Arcana’s only marginal area of specialty is if the campaign heavily revolves around wizards and arcane spell casting, which the closest thing we have is strength of thousands, and even that is probably more nature dependent than arcana dependent.
I personally think it was a mistake for any recall knowledge activity to use an attribute other than INT. Like maybe ritual casting/haunt dispelling etc could use wis, but it doesn’t make sense that knowing information about elementals and undead is wisdom based.
Performance is a skill that needs to be built for. There are various PC options driven by Performance, including ways to substitute for multiple other social skills. And GMs can build in unusual challenges that use it. But in a vacuum it is mostly for RP.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I've seen a lot of characters when running organised play games and with one exception they all have very varied list of skills they are trained in.
The one exception is Medicine and associated feats which has been present on most characters. The feedback I get is they have Medicine so they don't need to worry about whether they are going to be on a table with a dedicated healer.
In terms of higher levels of skill than trained the nature of organised play (Specifically the rarity of scenarios past level 9) means that most have concentrated on the skills required by their class as they haven't really reached the point yet where you can start increasing more than one or two skills.
The one exception is Medicine and associated feats which has been present on most characters. The feedback I get is they have Medicine so they don't need to worry about whether they are going to be on a table with a dedicated healer.
Which really means that organised play should come up with a rule to cope. Offer groups an item which does slow healing with a ten minute activation, or a pacifist NPC healer, or some other item as compensation, on a rental basis.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Which really means that organised play should come up with a rule to cope. Offer groups an item which does slow healing with a ten minute activation, or a pacifist NPC healer, or some other item as compensation, on a rental basis.
I hear the pearly white spindle aeon stones are popular for exactly this reason.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The one exception is Medicine and associated feats which has been present on most characters. The feedback I get is they have Medicine so they don't need to worry about whether they are going to be on a table with a dedicated healer.Which really means that organized play should come up with a rule to cope. Offer groups an item which does slow healing with a ten minute activation, or a pacifist NPC healer, or some other item as compensation, on a rental basis.
In Organized play (PFS) every character gets a Healing Potion or two from the Pathfinder Society at the beginning of the scenario.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I strongly believe all martial characters should invest at least a Trained advance into Deception for decent Feint checks. It's the only skill action that repeatably does something useful in combat, and even fighters don't really need that 3rd attack in a round. Demoralize by contrast only works once per encounter on each target, and while the frightened status is REALLY mean, it also doesn't last very long. Even if your Charisma sucks, as long as you're trained or expert in Deception, Feint will still work often enough to be worth the effort.
I mean, when flanking exists the value of feinting goes down IMO. Thief and ruffian rackets are the most popular rogue rackets for a reason. Not to mention that martials already have their third action dedicated to something else most likely.
Some skills like Intimidation and Athletics are strong and useful.
Yes they have limitations. But the limitations of other skills are worse.
Feint doesn't stack with Flanking and Flanking doesn't require a die roll. I don't Find Feint worthwhile unless you also take on Goading Feint - which is hard to get. Why they didn't make it a skill feat is beyond me. It does nothing regards ranged attacks.
Intimidation is once per opponent but once is often enough especially low levels or if you have a couple of strikers in your group. It impacts melee ranged and spells. Plus it has a lot of strong feat support.
The skill system is not balanced or fair and it is not meant to be. I'm Ok with that up to a point but there should be more support and more options for certain skills. Deception, Acrobatics, Stealth...
I like what they did by adding something in with Thievery eg Dirty Trick. But it is not strong.
I like that they fixed Recall Knowledge. It is now good. But a Wizard really has to work to make it effective, whereas it is easy for other classes.
Dirty Trick having the attack trait makes sense but the fact that it has the attack trait it what IMO makes it kinda useless. Athletics does everything Dirty Trick does and I don't need to take a feat for it, and while I agree its a nice "alternative" for Dex-based characters, all the Dex-based classes in the system or the classes that would want to be Dex-based already have better 3rd actions.
I'm also quite surprised on why ranged flanking (or rather ranged off-guard) is so limited in the system. I feel like it wouldn't be that overpowered if you make people invest into something through skill increases and feats to get it, but currently the only way to do it is through Pistol Twirl which requires you either be a gunslinger or take a very specific archetype.
Only on the builds I make for fun. Because they're largely concept-dependent. But when I pick one of them to play, I always adapt. Both skill upgrades and skill feats are largely campaign and party dependent stuff so I don't fret over.
My current Champion, for example, has had very different feats from what I planned out from before. The white room auto-pick "Toughness" has been exchanged for Canny Acumen (Reflex) at 3rd level and for Fleet at 7th level. Two things that are shoring up weakness that the extra HP didn't feel like a priority like when I was conceptualizing the character.
So has been my focus on Intimidation rather than Diplomacy. My champion became much more angry and relentless than the original motherly figure I envisioned for my 50 year old Aasimar.