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So one of my players has brought up complaints after literally every single session of how awful it feels to play as a caster, particularly when it comes to using spells that have a spell attack roll, given his current awkward staggered slower proficiency from the other martials and the lack of a potency rune. Given we're now about a year into this, it's clearly not something he's grown into the concept of. In fact, it's only gotten worse as levels have gone up and the ugly slow scaling rears its ugly head.
I'm already planning on dropping in a free shadow signet into his loot to try to ease that but I always felt like Shadow Signet was a bandaid myself. I'm wondering if I should alternatively or also drop in a house rule to just, make his spell attacks be just as accurate as martials attack rolls. Like as if they had the same scaling and potency runes [possibly give him a customiseable staff that he can etch potency runes into or something].
Has anyone done this? Has it particularly affected things to become too good for casters? Did it make things feel better for the casters, make the martials unhappy, or not that much of a difference?
I'm not interested in the usual caster weak bad etc arguments. I've read those back and forth hundred page long threads before. I'm in the camp casters are fine. I only just want to know what people think or have experience of how this might affect stuff, I want to make sure he has fun but not muck up any particular balance I didn't take note of. His caster gripes is something I've discussed with him a lot, but he still brings this up as a massive pain point that's hindering his enjoyment. (and honestly, I agree that the spell attack specifically is an annoyance and a grievance I also had to the point I felt very stupid having to advise him not to use a whole subset of spells available in the game).
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I think making spell attacks scale like weapon attacks is a perfectly valid change to make, so long as you're basing the scaling off of regular martials and not legendary attack martials like the Fighter or Gunslinger. Mark Seifter, one of 2e's co-creators, proposed the following as I recall, specifically:
This would let spell attacks become as accurate as 0 MAP martial Strikes. I'd recommend making caster items a little cheaper if you do this, as you'd be introducing a dependency on weapon potency runes and thus an additional cost. If you do this, I'd also recommend avoiding Shadow Signet and similar Strike boosters so that casters don't overshadow martials in attacks.
Thanks for that. Yup, my plan is to base it off the scaling of regular martials. We don't have a Fighter or Gunslinger in the group anyhow.
You're right, Shadow Signet is probably unecessary if I give them this.
At risk of sounding a bit of a noob, what items are caster items? Staves, wands and scrolls yeah? So far they've shown little interest in those in the first place. Maybe I need to sprinkle more of those items into this module [hence my idea that the potency runes could be etched on a staff instead of a weapon, give the bard the same option but with the instrument version of the staves].
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You're entirely right, scrolls, staves, and wands are caster items, and I'd definitely recommend sprinkling a few of those just so that your party casters start warming up to them. The game doesn't do the best job of presenting them as such, but I think they're an essential part of caster progression and a major contributor to their versatility, especially with scrolls making it easier to cast more niche spells. The idea of etching weapon potency runes onto staves would be an excellent way of incentivizing casters to go for staves too with these changes.
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Thanks for all the input folks!
I'll definitely consider a built in progression too. I actually would have probably liked to have run ABP in the first place but I decided to run things by the book. It might confuse them though idk.
More ideally I have to see how easy/hard it is to add to Foundry. I am a coder though so hopefully not too hard.
The team just finished off a boss, they didn't pick up the clues to go to the next areas for the next set of enemies, which means they're going back to their employer who will then send them off again. But getting a reward in shiny new custom +1 staff items will definitely make them happy to work for her again. Just need to think of what spells to put on it that is both thematic for the employer, and the players would hopefully like. Maybe I'll let them customise it after the fact. And of course an equally exciting item for the martials.
And I totally forgot about Spellhearts. I'm gonna have to read ahead of the AP some more and see where I can fit in some of those. I've put in a few scrolls before in their loot of some fun niche spells but they might've proved to have been too niche because the players wanted to sell them instead and then promptly forgot about it lol.
I'm not sure you do need to make them cheaper. Casters will still only be purchasing half the number of weapon runes martials will. They haven't got to worry about Striking runes at all.
Casters under this model would want to purchase weapon potency runes when they normally wouldn't need to, on top of caster items that they already want to purchase. This is why I am recommending making caster items cheaper in compensation.
Spell Attack rolls are objectively the worst attack rolls in the game. That's just the math. They lag behind martial attack rolls as early as level 2 and there's some level ranges where they lag by HUGE amounts (-4 vs a martial at level 13, and a staggering -6 vs a Fighter/Gunslinger). It eventually ALMOST catches up at level 19 (-1 vs a normal martial, -3 Fighter/Gunslinger), but never actually does.
They feel awful to use as a result, but new players don't tend to realize that because the system doesn't really warn you how bad they are. So yeah, changing this won't break anything. It's just going to help smooth out the bad levels where it lags even farther behind and will help players that haven't realized why these things feel so bad.
Hell, the PF2 playtest had a dueling wand that gave item bonuses to spell attacks, so they could actually keep up. So at some point someone clearly recognized there was an issue. I don't know why that was removed but it's always felt like a mistake.
Shadow Signet is a bandaid for this problem as well, since it lets you target a lower number, assuming the enemy has a lower number (not all of them do) and you can get that knowledge (or guess correctly, but I've seen players guess wrong and make it worse as a result). You don't really need that if you have runes... but runes come online at MUCH lower level so they're a better factor. Shadow Signet isn't really an option in a 1-10 campaign unless you're just handing them out.
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Here's what I ended up putting together. The bolded text is to really emphasise the new staff houserule and it will be on every staff/coda if the players wants to use a different staff (the bard will get a similar coda though I'm further considering houseruling to be 1 handed/just make it another staff idk). I think this would be a nice way to introduce the houserule than awkwardly bringing up at the start of the next session "by the way you're buffed yaaaaay~", instead I have the employer hand them this as a reward and it all slots in together. Hopefully.
Looking at it now I suppose a potential issue may be that the casters get Legendary proficiency at level 19. Which if they have that + the potency runes it pushes them ahead of the other martials? I am running an AP that goes up to level 20 so I have to think about that. Having the lower proficiency + potency runes would still be better than legendary proficiency without runes so I just say that this also overwrites the Legendary Prof for spell attacks in the future? I can see that being awkward to explain to the players but that's a future me problem.
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I would definitely recommend having this house rule override normal proficiency progression for spell attacks, so that you don't end up with Fighter-level accuracy. Up to master progression + item bonuses ought to be fine, but not legendary + item bonuses in my opinion.