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Okay, so, to preface this : this is not a 'oh no, this breaks the game' post, or even 'this could be an interesting strategy'. This is a fringe rule interaction that I found funny, and discovered it by accident while rebuilding a character into a necromancer with a friend.
The simple basis of this is : bombs and other various abilities deal splash damage. Splash damage is dealt :
-Upon nearby creatures if the attack succeeds or critical succeeds
-Upon the main target if the attack fails
If the attack critically fails, nothing happens.
So here is the fringe interaction :
Checks against thralls always succeed. Period.
Which means, that through attacking thralls, you can inflict splash damage onto any adjacent target, without having to overcome their defenses. Or any defenses for that matter.
Is it useful ? Probably not. Might have some very niche applications for some foes with high weaknesses and equally high defenses. But I doubt it. It only gives you a better result if you would have gotten a critical failure after all.
Though it should be noted that failure-free damage is rare in pathfinder, and alchemical bombs cover effectively every damage type and weakness in the game (bar holy/unholy, depending on if you would allow a remastered version of the alignment ampoule or not). So perhaps someone who has angered the mighty dice gods may use it to cheat their divine judgment. Like an Oracle ducking their Curse.
Anyway, I just thought it was funny and wanted to share it. So there you go !
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I think this is actually sometimes useful if you have a party with a bomber alchemist and a necromancer. You can put a thrall you're willing to lose between two or three enemies with a relevant elemental weakness or a swarm/troop and the bomber can hit them with a MAP -10 bomb. The bomber won't even care if it's at max range increment with this technique.
Yeah, the teamwork and synergy between characters makes this a lot more useful of a strategy. Which is pretty typical for PF2 game design.
Alchemist is losing out on the primary target damage, but that can be compensated by being able to hit multiple enemies even if they aren't adjacent to each other - they just have to be close enough together that the Necromancer can place the thrall such that the thrall is adjacent to multiple enemies.
Add in Calculated Splash and Versatile Vial bombs could be worth the action cost to use.
Yeah, the teamwork and synergy between characters makes this a lot more useful of a strategy. Which is pretty typical for PF2 game design.
Alchemist is losing out on the primary target damage, but that can be compensated by being able to hit multiple enemies even if they aren't adjacent to each other - they just have to be close enough together that the Necromancer can place the thrall such that the thrall is adjacent to multiple enemies.
Add in Calculated Splash and Versatile Vial bombs could be worth the action cost to use.
Also a reasonable third attack in a round for an alchemist if the necro does not care about losing a thrall. At that point extra damage is extra damage.
That's a neat interaction!
Reminds me of a strategy I thought of, where a dragon has a hostage chained to a wall. Every round, the dragon Strikes the hostage nonlethally, with a 95% chance to crit due to the level difference. This allows the dragon to recover their breath weapon every round.
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The PF2 version of a bag of rats.
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Reminds me of a strategy I thought of, where a dragon has a hostage chained to a wall. Every round, the dragon Strikes the hostage nonlethally, with a 95% chance to crit due to the level difference. This allows the dragon to recover their breath weapon every round.
I think that falls into the "bag of rats" ruling.
The PF2 version of a bag of rats.
Indeed. At the end of the day, even for PF2e you can't foresee every edge case. Common sense will always have to be applied.
Reminds me of a strategy I thought of, where a dragon has a hostage chained to a wall. Every round, the dragon Strikes the hostage nonlethally, with a 95% chance to crit due to the level difference. This allows the dragon to recover their breath weapon every round.I think that falls into the "bag of rats" ruling.
That is a great call out! I had never heard of it before. But is it really a bag of rats? In that hypothetical situation, the players have control of all the elements and the GM has to make a ruling against them.
With the dragon setup, the bad guy does have control. However, after the first use of the creature literally gaming the system, the PCs should see the situation and react to it, thereby stopping the bad guy from continuing to leverage the terrain in its favor. It forces the characters to adapt to the situation and maybe buys the dragon an extra round. Isn’t that good encounter design?
after the first use of the creature literally gaming the system, the PCs should see the situation and react to it, thereby stopping the bad guy from continuing to leverage the terrain in its favor. It forces the characters to adapt to the situation and maybe buys the dragon an extra round. Isn’t that good encounter design?
React to the situation by doing what, exactly? Killing the dragon's captive mook themselves?
That doesn't sound like good encounter design.
after the first use of the creature literally gaming the system, the PCs should see the situation and react to it, thereby stopping the bad guy from continuing to leverage the terrain in its favor. It forces the characters to adapt to the situation and maybe buys the dragon an extra round. Isn’t that good encounter design?React to the situation by doing what, exactly? Killing the dragon's captive mook themselves?
That doesn't sound like good encounter design.
What if the dragon uses a hostage the players actually care about?
The problem isn't the encounter design. It's that you're blatantly breaking the system and breaking immersion. If you want your dragon to have a lot of breath attacks, you can homebrew it. You want it to be tied to something they have to destroy or make a hard choice about ? Say they're draining the essence of someone in a cage. Or have some kind of arcane crystal feeding their power. Having it be gaming the rules is both ridiculous and immersion breaking, when the point of having a GM at ALL is to do things outside what the rules envision and make a world the players can immerse themselves in.
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You could always do this by throwing a bomb at the floor.
Though with a thrall it's more explicitly defined. And an automatic hit instead of just probably very low AC.
This is sometimes useful for alchemists when they’re at high MAP for whatever reason. I believe the DC for throwing objects to a specific square is 10, and that’s also standard for comparable objects such as a wall spell.
Thralls do have a niche use though, if the enemy is off the ground such that splash damage from hitting the floor wouldn’t hit them, but low enough that a thrall’s height is enough to - well, there you go.
The problem isn't the encounter design. It's that you're blatantly breaking the system and breaking immersion. If you want your dragon to have a lot of breath attacks, you can homebrew it. You want it to be tied to something they have to destroy or make a hard choice about ? Say they're draining the essence of someone in a cage. Or have some kind of arcane crystal feeding their power. Having it be gaming the rules is both ridiculous and immersion breaking, when the point of having a GM at ALL is to do things outside what the rules envision and make a world the players can immerse themselves in.
A dragon getting breath weapons back on crit is (besides just being kind of weird) probably some sort of momentum based psychological thing. I mean I don’t think the actual biting someone is what’s doing it here. So it makes more sense if it only works when actually meaningfully fighting an enemy.
There are other cases where this isn’t true, if some undead consumes souls for buffs it 100% should work on an incapacitated peasant, very much on theme.
