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Over on Reddit, user u/eCyanic asked a question that generated all of the usual noise: If a Small enemy is grappling you and you use Oni Form, does grabbed end now that you’re Large, and outside of grapple size range? As is r/Pathfinder2e’s wont, this simple question was flooded with responses from people racing to be the first, fourth, or fifteenth person to proudly announce that they knew the rules! “No!,” they said in a wave, overwhelming any interesting discussion, “The Grabbed condition doesn’t say anything about size differences!” While strictly correct by the letter of the RAW, this unyielding collective reflex completely misses the point, and is emblematic of a broader issue in the online PF2e community: a dogmatic dedication to rules regurgitation as a form of gatekeeping, at the expense of fictional context, narrative sense, or even a basic curiosity about why the rules are as they are. It’s Lawful Neutral Paladins all the way down. The community has a Judge Dredd problem: No judgement, just enforcement without understanding. Game Engine vs. Story Engine Let’s acknowledge that, yes, purely Rules-As-Written, there is no rule stating a creature loses the Grabbed condition simply because it grows larger. Under a strict board-game interpretation, the enlarged creature merely gains a better modifier to the Escape action on its turn, improving its odds of getting away, should they attempt to do so. If you treat Pathfinder 2e purely as a tactical engine – as Fantasy XCOM – that procedure works. “Grapple” and “Grabbed” exist purely as functions and statuses. If you use the system as a story engine, however, where rules mediate actions to determine outcomes that make sense in the fiction of the world, that interpretation becomes completely untenable. By definition, a grapple is a hand-to-hand struggle for physical superiority. If a creature becomes so massive and powerful that it can simply ignore your hold, the contest is already over. You haven’t grappled them; at best, you have voluntarily anchored yourself to a moving giant. User u/i_tyrant highlighted this design blind spot in the original thread: It will never stop being weird to me that both 5e and PF2e went this route of “invalid targets due to size”, instead of just changing how it works. All it would’ve taken is one extra sentence; “if the target is more than one size larger, they do not have the grappled (or whatever) status, instead when they move you move with them.” Boom, done, now grappling even has a use vs really big enemies, you can climb dragons in flight n shit with it, very thematic for the genre and you don’t have to deal with these questions at all. What Does a “Grapple” Actually Represent? Something else that caught my eye in the comments of the Reddit post: The seeming total lack of understanding of what the Grapple action and Grabbed condition actually mean, in universe. For all of the flexing that goes on in the subreddit, these demonstrations of system expertise often seem to ignore any text that doesn’t tell you how many points you gain or lose on a roll. The consensus seems to treat a Grapple as something akin to a bear hug, or a collar-and-elbow tie-up, but the actual game text is highly suggestive of it being so much less than that: Grapple [one-action] [Attack] Source Player Core pg. 235 Skill Athletics (Untrained) Requirements You have at least one free hand and your target is no more than one size larger than you. Notice the details: It requires only one free hand. It can be attempted while Untrained in Athletics. You’re not bear-hugging anyone with one hand, and you’re not doing tie-ups or martial arts holds without training. In-universe, a basic Grapple, at best, is little more than gripping someone’s wrist or forearm, or at worst snatching their belt, or grabbing a fistful of their cloak. This is why the Grabbed condition still allows the target to Strike, Trip, Shove, or even Cast a Spell – it simply means they can’t move away freely without breaking that single-handed grip. A firmer hold is represented by the Restrained condition. If a player is going to insist they are putting an enemy in a full bear hug, that choice carries fiction-first consequences: I’m not going to let them use weapons to Strike if they don’t make sense (no, you can’t attack with your Longsword, unless you’re just weakly beating the target on the back with your hilt), and they’ve sacrificed the use of their hands for other actions – bear hugs are commitments! And if the player is trying to do things like strike at the target’s back, that also means they’ve loosened their grip, and the Escape DC is going down – possibly way down! Using the Whole Toolbox Pathfinder 2e provides all the tools necessary to run a game that is both mechanically sound and internally consistent with its physical world. The mechanics are meant to support a fictional reality, not override it! The Rules-as-Written provide a baseline, but applying them blindly without considering narrative leads to absurdity. And absurdity is a choice.

One of my favourite things about Pathfinder 2e is its Alternative Initiative Skills rule. It’s a simple and intuitive guideline for making character skills more valuable and pulling in “exploration”/non-combat mode activities and behaviours into combat initialization. For those who haven’t played the game before, while there’s a default initiative roll that everyone can use at the start of combat based off of your Perception modifier, you can also use whatever skill modifier maps onto the task you were doing at the time of initiative if you, or your GM, chooses. So, if you’re a Barbarian busting down a door, you can roll Athlethics for initiative, or if you’re a Cleric pre-casting Shield, you can roll Religion. This is all pretty simple, straight-forward, and elegant until you get to someone who is sneaking at initiative, because Avoid Notice – PF2’s formal name for the ‘sneaking around’ Action in exploration mode – interacts with everyone else’s Perception DC (PF2’s proxy for Passive Perception). Checks, attacks, and skill rolls in PF2 are always done against a DC; the system never does contested rolls for these. This means trying to avoid being detected by someone is always done by rolling a Stealth check against the Perception DCs of anyone around who might be able to reasonably notice them. So, if you roll Stealth for initiative, and you beat all of the enemies’ Perception DCs, none of them should notice you. None of them should know you exist. But initiative is a contested roll. It’s the only contested roll in the game, RAW. And, as mentioned, the default ability for rolling initiative in PF2 is Perception. Why? Because it’s supposed to represent you noticing that the other creatures in the room are about to throw hands. And now we have a Perception roll contesting a Stealth roll. This is where things fall apart. This opens the door to the hiding character beating their opponent’s Perception DC – and so, being unnoticed – while the opponent rolls higher on initiative. What are you supposed to do in this case, where the hider has successfully hidden, but the perceiver succeeds in noticing? Much to my perpetual bemusement and frustration, GM Core suggests that the opponent just… knows someone is out there. GM Core pg. 25: To determine whether someone is undetected by other participants in the encounter, you still compare their Stealth check for initiative to the Perception DC of their enemies. They’re undetected by anyone whose DC they meet or exceed. So what do you do if someone rolls better than everyone else on initiative, but all their foes beat their Perception DC? Well, all the enemies are undetected, but not unnoticed. That means the participant who rolled high still knows someone is around and can start moving about, Seeking, and otherwise preparing to fight. So, why does it do this? Well, biggest reason is probably that PF2 doesn’t have surprise rounds. Instead, it uses its regular stealth system to handle this. The in-text reason is subtle, and likely won’t be picked up by someone who isn’t familiar with the game’s stealth rules. Pathfinder 2e has five different awareness/perception states for creatures: Noticed, Concealed, Hidden, Undetected, and Unnoticed. These states are relative to the viewer+viewed pair. The first three are fairly straight forward and intuitive: Noticed creatures are in plain sight, unobscured, and viewed by the viewer; Concealed creatures are seen, and their location is known, but there is something obscuring the viewer’s view, making their position seem a little “fuzzy”; and Hidden creatures are not seen by the viewer, but their location is known. The Undetected and Unnoticed states, though, are often a bit of a stumbling block, because, by name, they appear to be synonymous. They’re actually significantly different, though. An Undetected creature is one that the viewer knows to exist, but that they do not know the location of, while an Unnoticed creature is one that they don’t know exists at all. If you review the quoted block of text above, you’ll probably pick up on the fact that the authors are very careful to say that the character that succeeds on their Stealth roll is undetected, is careful about the use of unnoticed, and goes out of their way to avoid other synonyms. Beating the enemy’s Perception DC on initiative rolls makes you Undetected, and not Unnoticed. But that’s not how people use it anywhere else in the game. Outside of initiative, if you roll Stealth and beat the other creature’s Perception DC, you’re usually going to be Unnoticed. If you beat the guard’s Perception DC, you’re going to be allowed to sneak on by without them paying you any attention. So, why does it work this way with initiative? The books don’t say definitively, but I’m pretty sure it’s because if you tell your players to roll initiative when you haven’t told them that there’s anything around, they will assume there’s something hiding in the shadows. Most GMs don’t just randomly throw players into initiative, and most players don’t want to be thrown into initiative with no payoff. Hidden enemies are Undetected by default, because players can’t ignore the metacontext of the encounter (nor should they). But GM Core presents this as a symmetrical situation, and it shouldn’t be. The stealth initiative rules are set up this way for good meta reasons, but the GM should be working to a higher standard vis-a-vis metagaming. There are no in-fiction reasons why these Stealth rolls should have different outcomes from any others. So, how should this play out? First of all, in the majority of cases, at least one player is going to either fail their Stealth roll and be perceived, or they’re going to opt to roll with some other skill or ability, so it’ll be a moot case. The NPCs will have a reason to investigate the shadows. But if the whole party rolls Stealth for initiative, and the whole party beats the first NPC’s Perception DC, but fails to beat their initiative roll, I think that NPC should pass on its turn. I will generally roleplay whatever it is that they were doing for 3 Actions, and then pass the baton off to the next character. Eventually, we’ll either get to an NPC whose Perception DC was high enough to actually notice that something’s afoot, or we’ll reach a PC, who will probably make sure all of the NPCs are in the know. This provides opportunities for the players to passively observe their targets for a moment without being in the reactive state of “Oh Shit, It’s My Turn”, and also rewards players with a little extra reward for having tried something as a unit and unanimously succeeding. Plus, it side-steps the invalidating and disappointing feeling of having a ‘win’ stolen away, which is what succeeding on your Stealth roll but having your enemy know you’re there anyway does.

Writing rants on the Fediverse is how I’m trying to wean myself off of that space. The book release schedule keeps reeling me back in!

@rhaxapopouetl@ttrpg.network Rules light systems are kind of weird in this framework, aren’t they? Especially micro systems, like one-pagers. Being rules light and short on page space, they trust their audience to not rules lawyering munchkins, and many just go straight to describing the mechanics (well, that and the premise/ of course). But they’re obviously fiction-first games. It’s the crunchy games where things seem to get… frustrating, with many people reading them through a mechanics-first lens, and then asking over and over again “why does X work like this”? Or “why does Y even exist when it’s not as good as Z? Who would ever pick that?” Entire player cohorts ignore the idea that designers create the rules and options to support a fiction. I haven’t played many rules-light games, but I’ve never personally seen this behavioir from those players. I’ld love to hear some horror stories to gain some perspective, though.