No, it’s also better if you want an internally consistent system built on top of sensible principles. Or a system with reliable baseline for power scaling. Or if you want to invite an optimizer or a newbie to your table.

It’s not a “tactical combat RPG”. That’s a wild misconception propagated by both tactical combat fans and people who have looked over the hedge and been scared away by somethings being different. It is, instead, a well crafted systemic RPG, designed with reliability at its centre.

Reliability enables tactical combat, which is why TC fans flocked to the system, but it enables a hell of a lot more, too.

It’s also better if you want a steady stream of new content without paying Hasbro or relying on randos.

See, I don’t think that 20 does make up for that 1, any more than your 20 on an attack roll lets me roll damage on my 1.

The party isn’t some cohesive, singular unit that catches or avoids attention based on some average of the total behaviour. It’s instead a cloud of actors that are only as strong as its weakest member.

Like, if they were 4 kids sneaking cookies from the cookie jar, and the youngest knocked the jar off the counter, it really doesn’t matter how quiet the other 3 were, the shattering of the jar is going to get them all caught.

So very often, these types of questions remain fully mired in the realm of naked mechanics, but I find it helpful to imagine what’s actually happening in the fiction. The mechanics are there to aid the fiction at the table, after all.

So, what’s taking place during Stay Down!? How is the creature keeping the target down?

To me, this has real “stomp” energy, where the user is putting their foot on the target’s back, or dropping a knee on them, or something, while yelling at them to stay down. The target tries to get up, but is forced back down to the ground before they can really move – after all, if the prone creature can get up into a plank position, or up onto their hands and knees, it becomes significantly harder to force them back into a prone position.

That is to say, it happens very early.

Reactive Strike, on the other hand, is about looking for openings to strike, where the target has let their guard slip (or abandoned it altogether). This is why it applies when the target is trying to stand – it’s very hard to defend yourself from a determined attacker when you’re transitioning from lying prone to getting into almost any other position.

But when the first creature uses Stay Down, they are functionally putting themselves between the target and anyone else who might want to strike. An ally might not want to take the chance in this situation, particularly since the fiction is not “attacking someone who’s being held down”, but “attacking at the same time that your ally is getting in the way”.

Topple Foe, on the other hand, is entirely about taking advantage of a distracted or staggered target and trying to sweep or tackle them to the ground. And unlike Stay Down! and Reactive Strike in the first example, it doesn’t even have the same mechanical trigger as the reaction you’re trying to pair it with. This is just a pure tag team shine spot.

Pathfinder fixes th… Wait, which forum was this again?

No, you’re not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It’s just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.

Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It’s a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don’t like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.

So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They’ll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.

It’s only a TTRPG if you can win it in character creation. Everything else is just sparkling video game.

Yeah. At least for my sessions, the biggest sources of stealth play tend to be things like bushes (which I scribble on my play mat like I’m 4 years old), or things like furniture, so I hear you. It’s easy to say “here are all the ways stealth could happen”, but the reality is that most spaces that people will actually spend time in will not have an abundance of hiding places, and trying to create them can feel very contrived. Feint gets used so much more often than Hide/Sneak.

taaz@biglemmowski.win said in How to handle stealth & detection without bogging it down?: > I should try the offloading though that is good tip, my players are bit meta/gamey

Be judicious in what you off-load to them, then. Maybe don’t let them track which NPCs can see which PCs, but let them track which NPCs the PCs can see. Make sure they’re all tracking their own HP, and not leaving that to you. Let one of them handle calling out initiative, telling everyone who’s up and who’s “on deck”. These all work towards treating you more as the player of the NPCs and less as the person who’s organizing/running the game.

One thing you can do with stealth and initiative, when the NPCs are the ones hiding, is just be transparent about how many enemies there are. Say something like “You think you can hear three distinct sets of sounds.” This makes it so that NPCs are never Unnoticed (which is how the designers seemingly wants you to treat it, anyway). This lets you roll initiative for all of the hidden NPCs openly, and incentivises the players to start looking for them. This keeps it so the players can keep track of the initiative order, even when there are hidden enemies.

Sure, but the Champion gives resistances, and even the ability to just move for free. Plus, it has a significantly higher offensive output, which means it can both protect their ally and punish the attacker.

The Guardian inserts itself between the ally and the attacker and says “you’re wasting your time attacking them”. The Champion sees the attacker targeting the ally and says “I’m going to make you wish you didn’t do that”.

One of the things that people new to the system kind of trip over – in multiple areas of the game, but Stealth is one of the most common ones – is that the rules make sense from the perspective of someone actually doing the thing. They’re not simulating the process by any means, but they’re much, much closer to trying to (or at least look like they’re trying to) than people seem prepared for. Or that people pick up on on first reading.

So many of the rules are written in a deeply systematized way, and if you’re not used to discussing or building systems, it can all seem really wordy and complex.

It all really just boils down to a few questions, though (hence the flow charts):

• Is there anything obstructing the view between Creature A and Creature B that would make it a little bit difficult to discern where the other character’s edges are? If so, the other creature is Concealed.
• Is there anything making it so that one creature cannot see the other? e.g. did Creature B duck behind a fully opaque wall and are they standing away from the edge? Then they’re Hidden.
  • If Creature B is standing right at the edge of the wall, you should assume they are still visible, in part. This just gives them cover. The ‘Hide’ action represents making an effort to be fully occulted by cover.
• If Creature A loses sight of Creature B (e.g. they ducked deep behind a wall, or they took cover and hid) and then Creature B moves stealthily, then Creature A no longer knows where Creature B is. Creature A now no longer able to detect Creature B.

Picture yourself in a little wooded glade. Unbeknownst to you, I’m approaching in an attempt to ambush you. You hear something in the woods, but you can’t see what it is, and you can’t tell exactly where it was. That means I’m Undetected. If you were to enter the woods and catch a glimpse of me as I duck behind a tree, that would mean you know where I am. If you can see parts of me poking out from behind hte tree, I’ve lost all stealth, but if you can’t see me, I am Hidden. From there, if I successfully sneak away from the tree without you noticing, you no longer know where I am, and I’m Undetected once more. On the other hand, if I slip from the tree to behind a bush, where you can see me through the leaves, I’m now Concealed.

I have so much to say about stealth in the game, but I won’t bore you with most of it. Stealth, though, is the system that highlights to me most directly just what Pathfinder 2e is as a system, and how it’s not what many of the game’s most vocal online fans seem to think. In short, the Stealth system highlights that PF2e is much more simulationist and fiction-focused than most people are willing to admit (which is not to say that it is a simulationist game, just that it is making some pretty direct but oft-overlooked efforts to be as flexible and multi-purpose as possible).

Party stealth is a multi-comparison system in no small part because hiding and perceiving things in real life is a multi-comparison system. In real life, it’s just not systematized. But also in real life, you only need one person on your team to be detected by one person on the other team for the other team to mobilize. This hints at multiple ways to track the interactions, or multiple ways to modify Stealth to help create a smoother experience.

Unfortunately, I don’t think any method really works well, like, in Pathbuilder. But Pathbuilder’s GM mode should make it easier to see what the actual Stealth rolls are.

The first thing that I do when preparing a pre-made encounter, or crafting an encounter in advance, is create a table and pre-roll initiative for the NPCs. I’ll usually do this on my laptop, in Excel or in my note-taking program. Rolling initiative first isn’t actually important here, especially if you’re using something like Excel which will let you easily re-order the table, but it helps create just one table if you’re doing it on paper. The table includes the initiative roll, some signifier of the skill used for initiative, and the NPCs key stats: Perception, Ref, Fort, Will, AC, and max HP, (plus columns for current HP and status). This helps make stealth roll comparisons much easier.

You then compare the max Perception DC to the lowest Stealth roll. If Stealth wins, everyone is Undetected (or Unnoticed, if you’re at my table, because screw that discrepancy). If not, I’ll jot down which PCs the NPC notices. After this, I’ll switch to initiative order for comparisons. I’ll make note of the first NPC’s Perception DC and then compare it to all of the Stealth rolls to see who’s noticed, and make note. If it’s everybody, I stop there. The first NPC will spend their turn pointing out the hidden PCs to everybody else. If there’s anybody left after that, I move down to the next NPC and only check the remaining PCs.

This can be streamlined, but doing so involves allowing for contested skill checks. Instead of comparing the Perception DCs to the Stealth rolls, you can instead choose to compare the NPCs’ Perception-based initiative rolls to the PCs’ Stealth-based initiative rolls. Following the procedure above, this actually cuts out one of the steps.

Multiple comparisons can also be reduced if you just let the lowest roll stand for the whole party. Then you’re just comparing the lowest stealth roll to the initiative rolls.

To overcome the writing space issue, pick up a clip board. It’s back-to-school season in the northern hemisphere, you should be able to find something on sale right now without any problems.

For actually tracking the changing stealth statuses during play, how you play is important information here. You say the table is small – does this mean you’re not using maps/minis? If you are, you should actually be able to tell at a glance for most creatures whether someone his hidden or not at the time the player rolls Stealth to hide. The actual range of Perception DCs should be small, and with them written on a clipboard or spreadsheet, you can hopefully just make a mental note and remember. If you have a lot of NPCs, that might be harder to do, but with 2 - 6, it should hopefully be OK with a little bit of practice.

Concealed/Undetected is slightly more complicated, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of the fiction of the game, and I’ve found that that makes it a lot easier to track. Standing behind something that crates partial blockages to line-of-sight (such as a bush?) The enemy can’t quite tell where the edges of your body are! Concealed! Hide and successfully snuck away without anyone noticing? Undetected! Wearing camouflage but standing in the open? You have fuzzy visual boundaries! Concealed! Standing in a thick fog cloud? Fuzzy boundaries again! Concealed! Ducked around a corner, out of line-of-site and then moved in a way that no one could reasonably hear you (i.e. used ‘Sneak’)? Undetected! Ducked around a corner, out of line-of-site, but didn’t sneak away? Hidden! Ducked around the corner, but ran away so that the NPC could hear your movements? Hidden!

If you want, you can assume the state applies to every NPC on the board until you look down and see where that doesn’t make any sense. Or, you can make it apply to every NPC on the board, but extend Seek to allow NPCs ot make an unlimited range, 360 degree Perception check for stealted creatures that they have line-of-site on (this super-charges Seek, and kind of nerfs stealth, but making it cost an action turns it into an active choice with an opportunity cost). You could reduce it to 180 degrees for the sake of better empowering stealth (and also introducing better sense of directionality to sight).

I don’t know if Guardian is a better tank than a Paladin, but it’s definitely a better brute-force damage-sponge than one (or ‘classic tank’, as [ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]](https://wanderingadventure.party/user/professorowl_phd%40hexbear.net) said). Since tanking is really about managing party damage, not just taking it, there are a fairly wide variety of potential tank builds in the game.

Guardian is just the WoW Warrior version of that, right down to the taunt function.

Aye. And there are things the player can do that lets them take 2 attacks for one action, but you get a normal Multiple-Attack-Penalty progression between each attack, and there are things that let them take 2 attacks for 2 actions – as would be normal – but which do not progress the MAP until after the second attack is done. And there are a lot of each. Or rather, there’s functionally 1 of each, but it’s often named different things for different classes.

The single-action variety can be seen, in-world, as being very fast, taking multiple individual attacks in very quick succession, like with Flurry of Blows. The two-action variety can be seen as hitting someone with two different weapons at the same time, as with Double Slice.

It does bother me that both let/make you pool your damage for dealing with resistances/weaknesses. Given the choice, I’d probably have the two-action varieties pool damage, and the single-action ones count as multiple instances. But nobody asked me.

I usually play ranged martials. In 5e, is was basically exclusively rangers, and in AD&D2 it was a ranged fighter. I’ve always kind of played fairly timidly, trying to stay back, kite enemies, and avoid actually taking hits.

I’ve only gotten to play PF2 as a GM. My table only has 2 players, so I have a GMPC tagging along with the party. I wanted someone explicitly defensive in nature, so I originally spec’d them as a Champion. It wasn’t the best fit for who the character was supposed to be – they weren’t devote, and they weren’t in any way magical – but I made it work. When the Guardian playtest launched, I respeced him immediately.

Guardian has been a real breath of fresh air for me. Since the GMPC is there to be a meat shield, and because I’m not especially attached to him, using the Guardian as a mobile interceptor has been a lot of fun, even as I do everything to make sure he exists solely to shine the other players. Also, GMing has really helped me deal with my hesitation to get into the fray – the NPC monsters exist to be killed, and I’m happy to put them in positions to be killed.

If I ever get to a PF2 table where I’m just a player, I’m absolutely rolling another Guardian. Especially with the buffs that came with it’s official release. A utility defender is scratching an itch I didn’t know I had.

There’s a Pathbuilder 1e, but I think it might only be for Android. I haven’t seen a web-based version.

Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they’re on the ground (prone), when they can’t see where they’re being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).

Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.

It’s not available yet on iOS (though an iOS port is in development). You can find it on the web at pathbuilder2e.com. Mobile and web apps don’t sync, though. The paid versions allow you to save characters to Google Drive, which you can use to sync them.

Which version of Pathfinder? 1e and 2e are pretty different. In 2e, Fireball is on the Arcane and Primal spell lists, so it’s accessible to Elemental, Fey, Genie, Imperial, Nymph, and various Draconic sorcerers (Adamantine, Fortune, Horned, and Mirage). See the sorcerer bloodlines here.

I can’t speak to 1e.

No, archetypes are not subclasses. They’re a whole system of character modifications, most of which can be taken by any character as long as they meet the prerequisites. They usually modify some base element of your class (eg the Flexible Spellcaster archetype changes how casters select their spells, use their spell slots, and how many spells they get). There are a subset of archetypes (Class Archetypes) which are locked to specific classes, and which more deeply alter the class’s base abilities. The changes can be quite significant. This is where the presteige classes are rearing their heads.

No one complains more about a product than long-time fans of the product. They’re the ones who have had the time to feel betrayed by something, be it minor design choices, or things the owners have done, and who also feel a deep sense of ownership over the product.

Haters are just fans that feel alienated somehow, and can’t move past it.