I have a large number of Pathfinder PDFs from Humble Bundle, however they are locked. I am unable to bookmark them or write any notes in them. Both things i like to do before running a module. And while them having my email address watermarked on them is annoying, it is not the end of the world. Are there official PDFs that you can edit? Or do I need to check with Anna?

I am currently currently through a bunch of Pathfinder setting books, and decided to share my thoughts on BookWyrm. (Are you also sharing your RPG reviews on BookWyrm?)

I took the info from the link shared in this post and put it into a spreadsheet. It is currently sorted by Adventure Path name alphabetically. I have the ranking from the original author of the list as well as the community ranking. There are some new and remastered adventure paths coming next year, I do not have all of those in here yet. I created it in Libre Office, I never use Google Docs so I have no idea how it will behave, but it seemed to be the easiest way to share it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qo7e2sddjHeW-apagvNwYA_L8Zn-TEEvEVyZUMtiQQ4/edit?usp=drivesdk

Potions of healing are magical, but elixirs and alchemical healing is distinct. Theres a few other alchemical sources of healing, like Healing Vapors. Also always worth a reminder that, while it doesn’t work in-combat, battle medicine is considered separate from Treat Wounds, so you can use battle medicine and then immediately get your wounds treated. Also the day of immunity only applies to one person’s battle medicine; if two people have it, the same target can benefit from 2 different battle medicine checks. I dunno about your particular build, but godless healing would be a good boost to any life oracle that applies, as well. As far as in-combat only, yeah, I’d just stock up on elixirs of life. Even if everyone else is relying on healing magic, that’ll be enough to at least get you back up if you’re dropped and battle medicine has been used.

Wherein the Summoner nee Druid finally gets to show his nature knowledge! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/J2-iv_pm5QM

Yeah, i’m actually traveling right now, so i’ll take care of it when i get a chance later. Edit: it is done

The first hit the rat got a critical hit on the orc fighter and rolled quite a bit of damage. I did not use the critical hit deck on that one. He did not go down but was low. After that it was good rolls on my part, bad rolls on theirs.

When my players’ party (of 3) was Level 2, I ran them through the core of the DCC module Legend of the Ripper, which culminates in a battle with a Redcap. I ran the module, and the Redcap, as written, just substituting in PF2e versions of the monsters and hazards (the conversion was buttery smooth, really), which meant I was putting the party up against an Extreme encounter. The players had circumvented a fight with a ghost earlier, and in fact had managed to befriend it, so I decided to use it as an intervention if and when the party got the Redcap down below a certain HP threshold, or if the fight turned totally sideways. Well, the Redcap managed to down the party’s only melee character – a Champion – in the first round with a critical hit, which turned the party into a little bit of a reactive mess. The Cleric had recently respec’d into an Oracle, so they were lacking a dedicated healing option, but I gave the Oracle a custom Celestial Relic with Word of Faith so that they’d have some sort of free and easy healing. So, they locked themself into the roll of keeping the Champion alive, and the Champion locked themself into the role of keeping the Oracle alive, while the Druid did what they could to pick away at the Redcap’s health and outpace its fast healing, and the Redcap skirmished with the Champion and the Druid. This went on for a few rounds, with the Druid doing most of the damage, and the Oracle and Champion doing chip damage where they could, until they were just a few HP away from the narrative trigger I’d decided on. Then the Champion managed to catch up to and trip the Redcap, while the Druid walked over and pulled out Horizon Thunder Sphere. Natural 20, with a high damage roll. More than enough to kill the Redcap. It was a great encounter, with a mobile enemy, in a setting with lots of crates and boxes that it could take cover behind, and a party that felt pretty consistently on the ropes, right up until the dice gods blessed them into a decisive victory.

The number of APs that qualify as “remastered” is fairly limited. We’re really just talking about Wardens of Wildwood and later. That means Wardens, Curtain Call, Triumph of the Tusk, Spore War, Shades of Blood, and Myth-Speaker. Of these, I don’t think any of them easily follow from Menace Under Otari or Trouble in Otari. Seven Dooms of Sandpoint, though, is a pretty good fit level-wise, but it’s not remastered, and it has enemies in it that utilize alignment damage. Some small efforts would need to be taken to adjust for the removal of alignment from the game.

And here is u/Killchrono’s reply, which I think is must-read: So there’s a line of thought that’s come to make me realize why a lot of the discussions surrounding PF2e seem so needlessly antagonistic, and a big part of it comes down to a weird quirk and hypocrisy I’ve noticed in discussions about it over the years. Back before Remaster, there was a tonne of discussion about how the online community about the game is hostile to homebrew and house rules. Obviously there still is, but after the Remaster came out (particularly PC2, where a lot of the more controversial changes were made like the orcale rework), there was a notable shift in tone towards saying things like ‘use the old rules’ and ‘just change it if you don’t like it’ was poo-poo’d. Now you’d think it would be the people who were ‘enforcing’ the so-called RAW purity who were doing this, or it was just a plain old Goomba Fallacy where the people complaining about the changes weren’t the same as the ones who were complaining about the rules purity…except they were, because even barring the fact I’m a chronically online pedant who knows too many of the regular usernames around here and I recognized a lot of the same ones popping up in those discussions, it was clear it was the people who were already dissatisfied with the game who were making complaints about the changes like the oracle rework, or cantrips or poisons being nerfed, or the mistaken changes to the death rules before they were clarified in errata. So the line of questioning becomes, why not use the old rules? Simply put, it was a combination of people who felt fatalistic about being unable to negotiate or change things about the game they perceived they had no power over, and online pedants who were just trying to score one-ups on people who were defending the changes by enforcing an arbitrary Oberoni Fallacy to discuss it in the most RAW-enforced way possible. Now the latter in this case can be summarily dismissed because that’s the kind of toxic, self-important point-scoring that leads to unproductive discussions, but it’s the former here is what I’m interested in. Changing rules at the table really is an insular decision that should be made within your group. Why does it matter what Reddit thinks? Why do you need Reddit’s permission to discuss that with your GM, let alone feel the need to change the RAW entirely to what you want to get what you want? Simply put: the GM isn’t letting you under the auspices that they’re sticking to the rules, because clearly Paizo knows better and if the rules are designed that way, that’s the way the game should be run. So the only way to change your table’s experience, is to change the official rules. Now let’s be clear about something: this train of thought is not entirely unfounded. It’s why people care so much about releases like Remaster or DnD 2024. The RPG zeitgeist has a more direct influence on people’s decision making than the online discourse would have you believe, and most of the time it gives this disproportionate deference to official releases as being the Source of Truth for what the most up to date and polished version of the game is, while completely undermining the wider sentiment that the RPG space is this self-determinate bastion of free thought where you can make the game whatever you want. And there are definitely ‘sheeple GMs’, for lack of a less crass phrase - that go by what the official sentiment is and stick to RAW as rigidly as possible, not allowing house rules, homebrew, 3pp, etc. even going so far as to assume the official designers inherently know better how to design and tune their own game, even if they’ve proven they can’t. Simultaneously and non-contradictorily, none of this changes the fact that yes, in the end it really is between you and your GM how you decide to handle rules at your own table. Just because the game ‘expects’ something as a baseline, doesn’t mean you have to abide by it. This comes down to a more important question I also think gets overlooked here: has your GM not thought about this? Or do you simply disagree with your GM? This got me thinking about why these sorts of complaints are less prevalent in the more ‘popular’ d20s over the past few decades like 3.5/1e and 5e, and it was discussing a completely different topic related to what you’re discussing here. I’d regularly point out, having overpowered options in 3.5/1e or 5e was no different to comparing the modifiers, DCs, and wider scaling abilities of lower level creatures in PF2e. What the math is more or less exactly the same, what is the breakpoint? The thing that gets regularly pointed out is that in 3.5/1e (less so 5e since feats and magic items are technically optional rules, but more so in terms of how they’re generally tuned), is that in those systems, that power scale is determined by the player’s available RAW choices, not by the GM adjusting the challenges or going out of band of the expected power band each level to grant it. In PF2e, the maths is so tight and foolproof, the baseline is more or less ‘normal difficulty’ at best. In 3.5/1e and 5e, you can game it so you are superlative to any assumed baselines. And that’s when it hit me: it’s about being the determiner of the power cap. In 3.5/1e and 5e, it’s very easy for a player running with a sheeple/Abed-type GM who runs perfectly neutrally and says ‘well it’s in the rules so I’ll allow it’ to set their own power caps, because the rules permissively allow it. You can’t do that in PF2e. In PF2e, it is entirely dependent on the GM to be permissive to those power spikes, because the ‘expected baseline’ is a more level power cap. This results in two kinds of players who are dissatisfied: those who are not being selfish or malicious just used to the mechanical permissiveness of those other systems suddenly feeling stifled, and those who’s need for enjoyment relies on (if not is entirely dependent on) feeling superior to other people at the table. That’s why a lot of the most hardcore complaints about PF2e are supremely and unnecessarily aggressive and vindictive towards people who like it. The former type are people who think they’ve done nothing wrong, assuming they’ve done nothing wrong, and legitimately don’t see why what they were doing before was a problem. The latter are the exact kinds of problem players PF2e is setting out to stop, so of course they’ll react in the exact way a toxic person reacts when someone puts reasonable boundaries on their behaviour that affects everyone else.

Including my comment on the video here: Pathfinder 2e gets hit with the “rules-heavy” label a lot, and I find that that is a term that predispositions people to see a lot of what’s written in the source books as hard-and-fast rules that are specific to the game. Now, I’m by no means going to argue that PF2e is rules light*, but rules-heavy getting thrown around as the antonym of rules-light style gaming introduces something of an unfair and *unhelpful bias. From where I sit, Pathfinder 2e is a systemic game, rather than a “rules-heavy” one. Aren’t all rules-heavy games systemic in nature? I don’t know, I haven’t played them all, but of those that I have, yes. But some of these games have a thousand bespoke systems that interact poorly; others have a significant number of highly detailed and complicated systems that don’t share DNA; and some have a small number of fairly simple systems that interact well to create complexity at the table. PF2e sits closer to the latter, without quite reaching the mark. Here’s the thing that often gets overlooked when people discuss PF2e’s rules, in no small part because so much discussion about the rules boil down to “this is what this particular rule says, the rules mean what they say, and you should follow the rules”. Everyone keeps focusing on the tree bark; they’re several steps away from seeing the forest: The overwhelming majority of “rules” in the various xCore books are just codifying how people have been running d20 games since 3e launched, if not earlier. They’re not novel, and they’re not particular to the game, they’re just written down using systemic language, while guarding against bad-faith rules-lawyering. That’s it. They gave that CHA check everyone rolls while trying to charm someone a name, and included some guidance on how to come up with a DC in a systemic way, and everyone lost their damn mind. The various Victory Point systems are no different. They’re just clocks. They’re just reputation points. They’re just ways of abstracting away named actions. They’re things GMs have been doing for 25 years now, written up with a little bit of structure and formalism, using a style guide that a lot of the audience finds intimidating or alien. And, unfortunately, the fact that a lot of the stuff that’s hung off of the game’s core pillars (level standardization, 4 degrees of success, DCs from bonuses/no opposed rolls, multi-tiered proficiency, and modular character design) are just codified community tradition means that they don’t always interact meaningfully with the core systems. It doesn’t help that a significant fraction of the game’s audience really does just seem to be here for combat, though. I mentioned on [SBG’s] Patreon how people complaining about niche skill feats grind my gears because so many of the complaints boil down to “but the designers are supporting somebody else’s play!!!”, and we can say the same thing here, too. It’s just that here, that support kind of boils down to some pocket game modes that haven’t been properly tied into the core.

Thanks for the read. Apparently I’ve got the Pawn Box already (digitally).

Your highest rank is based on your level. Technically this would give you a single rank four slot at level 9, a rank 5 slot at level 11, etc. without taking the expert or master spellcasting feats. Yes, if you had spells from your sorcerer that overlapped with the mystery’s spells, you could cast them using the extra slot without taking the basic spellcasting feat.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=5006 Your familiar can subsume its body to become pure spirit. Your familiar gains the Shed Spirit activity. This firmly puts the action as the familiars.

Sprites have to burn an ancestry feat to gain a 15 foot fly speed. It’s a significant boost to their flexibility, and gives them the ability to both reach enemies who might be in places where the party wouldn’t otherwise be able to touch, but they have to end their turn on the ground, so it’s not like they can really avoid the worst of combat. I wouldn’t stress about it too much. There’s utility there, but if it becomes a problem, it can be planned around.

To add a little more detail, the primary differences are: A bunch of things got renamed on the advice of lawyers or to make things clearer. e.gs Magic Missile ->Force Barrage, Spell Level -> Spell Rank Alignment got removed and replaced with Sanctification (holy or unholy), Anathema and Edicts Wizard Schools got reworked for lawyer reasons Witch Class got some reworking Lots of ancestries, monsters, and items got renamed, sometimes with small changes, for lawyer reasons. E.g Dragons are no longer color coded, but more based on different mythologies and archetypes. Edit: Paizo’s overview of the changes is available at https://downloads.paizo.com/RemasterCorePreview.pdf

It can’t be “takes the Stand action”, though, because Stand reads “You stand up from being prone.” If your reaction prevents the targer from standing up, then they have’t actually taken Stand, just attempted to.

The thing is, preventing someone from getting up - especially someone with any amount of combaat training - involves a lot more than just standing next to them. You have to get your weight on top of them, and then usually attack or manipulate one of the limbs. That is not an act that leaves you out of the way. It kind of means being on top of the target, at least while you’re forcing them baack down. So, the Stay Down reaction kind of needs to be imagined as something that interferes with a strike that can be done without risking an ally.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Search.aspx?q=disrupt&include-actions=Reaction&display=short Reading through some other examples, it’s definitely a mixed bag of wording, with some saying “attempts” or “begins” or otherwise implying before the action is complete, and some saying after. I’ll stand by my original claim that the correction should be “attempts to Stand” though, because reactions occur after the trigger is complete, you can’t disrupt an action after it’s happened.

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.