Hi,
I'm building a recurring flavour NPC for my setting, which will be a male ratfolk witch with the Wandering Chef Dedication (guess the name). I imagine him wandering through the lands of Golarion together with his lanky human friend, taking what he can get, and then setting up a temporary restaurant and improvising cool new foods from what he has foraged.
Thus, I wanted him to have the Forager skill feat to be able to cook for many people.
Now, in the Wandering Chef dedication feat, it says:
"When using the Subsist downtime activity, you can use Crafting or Cooking Lore in place of Survival, and if you roll a failure, you get a success instead."
The Forager feat says:
"While using Survival to Subsist, if you roll any result worse than a success, you get a success. On a success, you can provide subsistence living for yourself and four additional creatures, and on a critical success, you can take care of twice as many additional creatures. You can choose to support half the number of creatures with a comfortable living. Increase the number of additional creatures you feed on a success to eight if you're an expert in Survival, 16 if you're a master, and 32 if you're legendary."
How does this interact? Since I could use Crafting or Cooking Lore instead of Survival, does that mean I would get the enhanced benefits of being expert, master or legendary by being X in Crafting / Cooking Lore? Or do I still need to push Survival to get that?
Thanks,
Tali
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The way I see it, they should interact woth each other just fine.
Forager says whenever you'd roll Survival to Subsist (as opposed to Society) you get X effect.
Wandring Chef says whenever you'd use Survival to subsist, you can instead use Crafting or Cooking Lore.
So to me you can get the effects of Forager with Crafting or Cooking Lore. Honestly the effect of this is pretty much a ribbon and unlikely to come up in 99% of all games, so might as well do it.
Though I'm curious, since this is an NPC for your setting why are you asking? Just say it works and move on.
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It doesn't work because the feat doesn't say when doing that activity, it says when using Survival to do that activity. Except as TheFinish noted, it's an NPC so such particulars don't matter. Nearly all NPCs break PC rules because their role matters more (and one might assume the GM won't create and exploit shenanigans). Plus I'd advise not to let rules rigor interfere with the narrative. Later on, if a player is interested in making a similar PC, invent a feat similar to Forager they can take. Hard to imagine there's any nefarious exploit available there.
Thanks for your opinions!
I tend to build my NPCs adhering to the rules so my PCs just have the security of "the GM doesn't cheat on us", and could build a PC just the same way. And while this specific combination might not be exploitable that much, it's an example of several other occasions feats that might interact with each other (or not) in a similar way.
I agree with TheFinish.
It doesn't work because the feat doesn't say when doing that activity, it says when using Survival to do that activity. Except as TheFinish noted, it's an NPC so such particulars don't matter. Nearly all NPCs break PC rules because their role matters more (and one might assume the GM won't create and exploit shenanigans). Plus I'd advise not to let rules rigor interfere with the narrative. Later on, if a player is interested in making a similar PC, invent a feat similar to Forager they can take. Hard to imagine there's any nefarious exploit available there.
This. Forager says specifically "when using Survival to Subsist." You are not using Survival. Therefore it doesn't apply.
In order for it to apply, it would use simpler language such as "When using the Subsist activity" in Forager, which would apply Subsist no matter how you're doing it.
Sounds like an order of operations problem. What is the more specific rule?
Which interpretation is more likely to lead to an outcome that is fun for everyone?
I think they work together just fine. Though Forager does state "While using Survival to Subsist...", I think Wandering Chef clearly changes that with the statement, "When using the Subsist downtime activity, you can use Crafting or Cooking Lore in place of Survival..."
The alternative completely ignores one feat's benefits and seems less likely to be fun for anyone, whereas the other allows everything to work per RAW, is probably going to be more fun, and isn't the slightest bit disruptive to game balance.
I'm not sure why anyone would say "no" to this when there really are no upsides to doing so, and there is at least one perfectly valid interpretation of the rules as written that allows for it.
Has anybody said "no" as a table ruling or advice? Or that's what the rules say, and that it's either worthwhile or a non-issue to set aside such a legalistic reading. Except the OP seems to desire that, which seems a shame, and goes against Paizo's own advice on rules.
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To better explain myself, this is how I see it:
Forager: "While using [Survival] to Subsist..."
Wandering Chef: ""When using the Subsist downtime activity, you can use [Crafting] or [Cooking Lore] in place of [Survival], and if you roll a failure, you get a success instead."
Wandering Chef says [Crafting] = [Cooking lore] = [Survival] when you Subsist. Therefore, we can substitue [Survival] with [Cooking Lore] or [Crafting] in Forager and it still works fine.
I can see what other people are saying, but like Ravingdork says it's an order of operations thing. It's either.
We check Forager before applying Wandering Chef -> It works.
We check Wandering Chef before applying Forager -> It doesn't work.
And since this is such a minor thing, why not go with the one that lets the NPC/player do more stuff.
Usually, I'm very flexible with rules and like to modify etc.
In this instance, it was a question for a specific combo, the answer to which could probably also be applied to other instances of feats substituting skills for each other (for example, to stay in the same general region, the City Scavanger Goblin ancestry feat allowing to subsist on Society, or Acrobatic Performer with several of the Performance skill feats). That's why I asked.
To better explain myself, this is how I see it:
Forager: "While using [Survival] to Subsist..."
Wandering Chef: ""When using the Subsist downtime activity, you can use [Crafting] or [Cooking Lore] in place of [Survival], and if you roll a failure, you get a success instead."
Wandering Chef says [Crafting] = [Cooking lore] = [Survival] when you Subsist. Therefore, we can substitue [Survival] with [Cooking Lore] or [Crafting] in Forager and it still works fine.
I can see what other people are saying, but like Ravingdork says it's an order of operations thing. It's either.
We check Forager before applying Wandering Chef -> It works.
We check Wandering Chef before applying Forager -> It doesn't work.And since this is such a minor thing, why not go with the one that lets the NPC/player do more stuff.
People are dramatically overthinking this to try and come to the conclusion they want to come to.
"When using the Subsist downtime activity, you can use [Crafting] or [Cooking Lore] in place of [Survival]"
aka: "Use X in place of Y."
That's it. You're not using X because you're using Y. There's nothing else to this. Order of operations is completely irrelevant here. You were literally never using Survival if you're using Wandering Chef to do this and you don't get to ignore the substitution just because you want to check it in a certain order like this is a poorly coded algorithm.
Even if you did try to do that, it still doesn't work because as soon as you make the substitution you're no longer using Survival and thus no longer meet the condition Forager states for its effect to take place.
You are using Subsist, but you're not using Survival by the very definition of the thing that lets you roll Cooking Lore.
By my reading, Forager requires the use of Survival. If you don't use Survival while doing the subsist, it doesn't work. There's no order of operations or anything else here that would change the outcome.
That said, this is an NPC.
I know OP said they like to build NPCs using PC rules....and that's fine I guess but that's exactly what's causing the problem.
It's an NPC. Make it do whatever you want. Especially something like this that isn't a combat ability. The NPC can just do it. How? Doesn't matter unless a PC in that game decides they would be interested in doing the same.
It's a feat you created for the NPC that expands on the wandering chef dedication.
IIRC Forager was written before Wandering Chef.
Forager precising Survival was IMO to say Society would not work. Not to prevent it from synergizing with Wandering Chef.
By that same reasoning, Wandering Chef was written after Forager and it could have easily been written to synergize with Forager. It specifically does not.
Its not like the writer of Wandering Chef had no way to know about Forager. It's a major leap to say "I don't think the writer of Forager would have known about this so it's intended to work" while dismissing that the writer of Wandering Chef knew explicitly about Forager and wrote it specifically so that it doesn't work.
So, I would allow this to fly at my table.
Of course. Folks are free to do that and it's not going to be a big deal.
This has come up in the past and it's always seemed like "Use Skill to Skill" type language has been built explicitly to block skill substitutions. There's no real point in even using that awkward phrasing otherwise.
This does lead to the less RAW question of why in the world Paizo wanted to put guardrails on the subsist action of all things, but I doubt there's a satisfying answer to that.
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This does lead to the less RAW question of why in the world Paizo wanted to put guardrails on the subsist action of all things, but I doubt there's a satisfying answer to that.
I think they had their fair share of weird combos in PF1, so they just put guardrails everywhere to avoid them.
That has been PF2 design philosophy since the beginning.And they hated skill substitution. I'm not sure they hate it so much now seeing how it's becoming more and more common.
This does lead to the less RAW question of why in the world Paizo wanted to put guardrails on the subsist action of all things, but I doubt there's a satisfying answer to that.I think they had their fair share of weird combos in PF1, so they just put guardrails everywhere to avoid them.
That has been PF2 design philosophy since the beginning.And they hated skill substitution. I'm not sure they hate it so much now seeing how it's becoming more and more common.
Well they have it far more controlled now. Being able to substitute a skill to Subsist isn't that big a deal, ditto with the Perform action or other limited cases.
It's not like in PF1 where my Bard was using one of two Performs in place of like 7 skills and I had such ridiculously high bonuses in them that I didn't even bother rolling dice to use them.
But yes, these things are pretty tightly constrained now and the logical hoops people are trying to leap through to get around that should make it painfully clear that the intent is to constrain it.
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Being able to substitute a skill to Subsist isn't that big a deal
I think Paizo doesn't want to have to think about it. What substitution would be acceptable, in what circumstances... It's better to just block and limit. Sure, sometimes you block things you could have allowed, but it's much less of an issue than not blocking something you should have blocked.
Agree with the people saying that while this specific case of substitution isn't a problem, Paizo has also seemed pretty intent in PF2 have very limited substitutions so they don't recreate problems that PF1 had, where you could end up using one skill to replace 10 completely.
Like even some of the best abilities for skill replacement in PF2 like Bardic Lore which allows you to recall knowledge on any topic with one skill, is limited in how far it grows (it only goes to Expert by getting Legendary occultism). Another good example is Esoteric Lore from Thaumaturge. It allows you to recall knowledge on haunts, curses, and any creature but not other topics. It scales up to Legendary, but is more limited than Bardic Lore.
And then for comparison, you have the Human ancestry feat (accessible to those who want to spend a general feat on Adopted) on Clever Improviser, which allows you to eventually get a proficiency bonus to every skill equal to your level, and let's you do all the trained actions of that skill. Sure you bonus isn't as good as someone who is actually trained, but the fact that you can roll on anything is nice.
Clever Improviser is something I frequently pick up on characters because you're not that much worse off compared to someone who is trained or expert in the skill. And if you're not trying to do "on level" tasks you'll likely have a high chance of success.
The value of Clever Improviser really depends on the table. In PFS, skill challenges often propose multiple skills and rather high DCs, making Clever Improviser mostly useless. APs tend to focus on one character making one skill check, so characters mostly roll their Legendary skill and ignore the rest.
But I see a clear asset in having it around a table where the GM asks for many skill checks with a difficulty set on the overall environment and not the level of characters. At mid to high level, you end up able to do tons of things thanks to it.
You're not wrong, but in games I run I like to mix in a fair number of skill challenges where you need to accumulate a number of success and not just 1 high skill check, with how you succeed depending on how long it takes to reach that point.
To your point, it depends on the campaign being run and how the GM handles things. And also whether your party ever gets split and needs to deal with challenges that aren't "at level" challenges.
It's also good for "narrative" things like "oh, I'm a 15th level fighter and I'm not trained in stealthy but I have clever improviser, but I'm going to break into this low level shop and take some stuff".
If you only ever encounter on level challenges with high DCs, then you're right it's not useful.