Last time I went over the first six chapters of the Pathfinder Second Edition core rulebook. Since I’m off on Thanksgiving, I am releasing the second half of the review, since this book, like the Thanksgiving feast, is a bit overstuffed.
Chapter 7 is Spells. There are several changes in how spells work. Some of these are just clarifications to terminology. In addition to the nine schools, spells are classified on “the four essences” of Matter, Spirit, Mind and Life. For example, Enchantment and Illusion spells almost entirely deal with Mind. Then you have four magical traditions: Arcane (Wizard, basically), Divine (Cleric, but also anything dealing with the Outer Planes, which actually makes demons and devils divine casters), Primal (Druid) and then Occult. So far, Bards are the only example of Occult casters (‘The practitioners of occult traditions seek to understand the unexplainable, categorize the bizarre, and otherwise access the ephemeral in a systematic way.’) but if they ever bring psionics back into the system, it will most likely be under Occult. As mentioned before, a Sorcerer could follow any of these traditions depending on their bloodline.
They also changed the spell slots so that most spell levels, even 1st, only get a max of 3 spell slots a day, although some classes get around this. Specifically, most casters have a focus pool that starts with 1 point that can only be used to cast a specific spell or group of spells (for instance a Champion uses the focus pool to cast lay on hands, and specialist Wizards gain a focus pool that can only be used to cast their specialist school spell.) This focus pool can be added to but can never go above 3 points. In addition, casters still have cantrips, basic abilities that don’t use up spell slots. Characters are also able to cast heightened spells, which means casting a spell with a slot higher than its base level. For instance, casting 1st-level heal as a 2nd-level spell increases the damage it heals by 1 die. The book also states that cantrips are automatically heightened to half the caster’s level rounded up, so that the cantrips of a 5th level caster count as 3rd-level spells.
In terms of actually casting, this is defined in game terms as the Cast a Spell activity, which takes a special number of actions based on the spell’s description. Usually material (or focus), verbal and somatic components are each separate actions, so a spell that requires three components takes three actions (of the three allowed in the round).
The spells themselves are either buffed or nerfed compared to previous editions, depending on how you want to look at it. For instance magic missile is a 1st-level spell, that still does 1d4+1 base damage, but this goes up by one missile for each action taken to Cast the Spell, so a full-round cast can throw 3 magic missiles. Each 2 levels of heightening means you shoot one additional missile for each action used. On the other hand, wish is now an example of a 10th-level spell that can only be cast at the highest experience levels, and generically speaking it allows a Wizard to duplicate any other spell of 9th level or lower.
Pathfinder 2 also has ritual spells, which require some material/gold piece outlay and more than one caster, taking at least an hour. However, they also have long-lasting effects. Creating undead, controlling the weather and consecrating a holy site are examples of rituals.
Chapter 8 is The Age of Lost Omens. This is a mini-gazeteer reviewing the realms on one continental area on the planet Golarion. Prior to the events of the previous edition, the two most important parts of world history started with “Earthfall”, ten thousand years prior, in which a meteor swarm destroyed civilization, and the rise and fall of Aroden, a mortal-turned-god who had lived in the time before Earthfall. Aroden became known as the patron god of the Human race as well as the god of prophecy. However, Aroden was killed, and this event also killed the reliability of prophecy- thus, the time since is called The Age of Lost Omens.
This chapter deals with the regions of the “Inner Sea” surrounding Aroden’s former home on the island city of Absolom. The regions are broadly defined, where for instance “Old Cheliax” refers to the territories around the kingdom of Cheliax including the countries that declared independence from it. It’s mentioned that as time advances in the real world, so it also advances in the game history, such that the official calendar as of 2019 AD is 4719 AR (Absolom Reckoning). Chapter 8 discusses the events that have changed the world since the publication of original Pathfinder (some of which are described in the previous Adventure Path modules), such as the old empire of Taldor, after a period of long decline, entering a reformist era with the rise of its first female monarch. However the main world-shaking event for adventuring purposes was the recent return of Tar-Baphon, “the Whispering Tyrant”, an arch-lich who destroyed the frontier nation that was set up to guard against his return. Though he was prevented from immediately conquering the rest of the area, Takofanes – uh, Tar-Baphon – is now the “Big Bad” of the Pathfinder setting.
Chapter 9 is Playing the Game. This goes into greater detail on all the basic concepts that were briefly described in the Introduction. Again, there are three modes of play. “The most intricate of the modes is encounter mode.” In addition to the previous rules for dice tests, and degrees of success or failure, there are also certain combat modifiers. There is a multiple attack penalty, which normally is -5 for a second attack per turn and -10 for “the third time you attack, and on any subsequent attacks”. Given that characters only get three actions in a turn, this would seem to indicate that you can use a basic Strike action with multiple attacks if you’re willing to take the penalty. It’s mentioned that you can do this with spell attack rolls, but given that most spells require at least two actions to Cast a Spell, it’s doubtful you can use a multi-attack with more than one spell a round.
Most of the rules for “encounter mode” (combat) are in fact discussed before describing the various modes, because they’re rather brief compared with the rules for what you are able to do in combat and what happens if you get damaged. In addition to various damage types from weapons (slashing, bludgeoning, etc.) you have damage types based on magic or the environment (such as fire or electrical). In some cases a target of damage may modify it based on immunities, resistances or weaknesses: Immunity is flat-out immunity to a damage type, resistance is a category (fire resistance 4 means you reduce any fire damage by 4 points) and weakness is like the opposite of resistance (if you have weakness 5 to fire, any fire attack does +5 damage).
There are also conditions that describe other effects of damage or failing to resist a spell. How many conditions are there? Let’s see, on page 454, there are… … …43. Yes. This page is simply a summary of a more detailed glossary of conditions in the back that goes from pages 618 to 623, for example, Wounded: “You have been seriously injured. If you lose the dying condition and do not already have the wounded condition, you become wounded 1. If you already have the wounded condition when you lose the dying condition, your wounded condition value increases by 1.
If you gain the dying condition while wounded, increase your dying condition value by your wounded value.”
Of course some of these conditions are actually terms used to describe an NPC’s base opinion of your character (‘Unfriendly: An NPC with this condition doesn’t like you.’) but that kind of gets to a big problem I have with Pathfinder 2 compared to the previous version or other games: It is heavily dependent on gamespeak. And depending on gamespeak to the degree that it does, in my opinion, causes PF2 to lose its “immersive” quality in the way that Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition did, where your character felt less like a character and more like a game piece. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has its own large glossary of conditions at the back of the Player’s Handbook, but the text is about half as long, partially because D&D 5 is more prone to use simple and concise English. More on that comparison later.
After some length, Chapter 9 actually gets to the modes of play. Encounter mode (combat) starts with the roll for initiative, which in PF2 is normally a Perception check, although the Game Master may have players roll another skill (for instance a social encounter could use Deception or Diplomacy checks). Notably if a player’s roll ties with an NPC, the adversary goes first. In addition to Stride (move up to your Speed score) and Strike (attack) this section goes over various other actions, which include Crawl, Drop Prone and Stand (‘You stand up from prone’) which are all helpfully marked with trait markers like “Move.” After this there’s a relatively concise explanation of using movement points (Pathfinder characters are assumed to be moving on a square grid where each square is 5 feet, so a Small character with a Speed of 20 moves up to 4 squares per Stride). There are also brief but effective rules for combat in unusual environments, like underwater, which leads to rules for drowning or suffocating.
Exploration mode is self-explanatory; it “lacks the immediate danger of encounter mode, but it offers its own challenges.” Instead of measuring movement in tactical 5-foot squares, it is measured in feet or miles. The characters’ Speed (which is 20 feet for Small races, 25 for most races and 30 for Elves) is converted on a table to the number of miles one can travel per hour or day (a Speed of 25 is 2 1/2 miles per hour). Difficult terrain reduces the rate. There are certain activities that are only done in exploration mode (and of course are labeled with the Exploration trait) and there are also skills that can be used in this mode, such as using Survival to track creatures. Notably, encounter mode includes “preparing” after the nightly rest, preparing including memorized spell slots, and equipping armor and weapons, including “investing” any magic items.
Finally, there is downtime mode. This is just the game time between combat or travel scenes. Normally characters who rest each night recover Hit Point damage at a rate of 1 (or Constitution modifier) times level; long-term rest in downtime mode doubles that natural healing rate but assumes the character is resting the entire day. An experienced character can also “retrain” and swap out certain abilities like feats or skill increases. There is a brief list of skills that can be used in downtime mode, namely to earn income or survive off the land, or perform long-term medical care.
Chapter 10: Game Mastering is the point at which the corebook becomes the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” (which is why the Pathfinder game book is so thick, cause it’s both the ‘player’s handbook’ and GM manual). It includes a few gaming tips like “drawing a line” or allowing a player to tap an “X-Card” to limit or edit descriptions of disturbing or objectionable material. It also describes the concept of “social splash damage” if the game is being hosted in a public place; basically have respect for your hosts or the people nearby. There is also a sidebar for using disabled characters – even though basic rules don’t describe how battle injuries could create permanent disabilities. Some of this advice is politically correct, but still generally useful.
In more concrete terms, this chapter includes the tools for creating an “XP budget” for encounters. The figures used for XP are relatively small numbers because the XP system is not based on linear numbers (a creature is worth X number of experience points and higher level creatures are worth more XP) bur rather in scale with the party’s average character level. If for instance the party is a party of four 4th level characters, a “moderate” encounter would be a budget of 80 XP with a 4th level creature (or ‘Creature 4’ in the language of the game) being 40 of that 80 and “lackey” creatures being 20 each. Parties of greater or larger size have an adjustment to the XP budget; in the case of the 80 XP budget, each player more than four adds 20 to the budget and each player fewer than four subtracts 20. Note that because of the divisor the XP award to the individual characters doesn’t change- in this case each PC would get 20 XP for the encounter. All this goes back to the first chapter of the book: On page 31, “Leveling Up”, each experience level is exactly 1000 experience points. When characters reach or exceed 1000 XP, they level up and then subtract 1000 from their total and carry over any remaining. Thus this system greatly compresses the “unit economy” for totalling XP and makes the numbers a lot simpler for the GM.
In this regard, the chapter also goes over how to award XP if that whole pre-planned encounter was avoided by player choices. The GM may have to move the encounter to a different location if it is truly necessary for things to proceed, otherwise they may award the full XP for the encounter if the party avoided it because of ingenuity, diplomacy or other deliberate means. There is also guidance for social encounters that involve role-playing and skill, such as trying to persuade a mob or a judge of a person’s innocence. This usually relies on the Society skill for initiative and requires skill rolls to persuade the opposition.
It’s also mentioned that in exploration mode, the GM will be making judgment calls on almost everything that happens. Part of what’s involved is typical D&D type stuff like marching order and setting watch overnight, and since “rest” for game purposes means 8 hours, they have a little chart as to how long a watch period would be depending on how many people are in the party. The chapter also goes over downtime, and it is possible for player characters to use downtime mode for several long-term events.
Chapter 10 also has a GM guide for setting the Difficulty Class (DC) for certain rolls. For instance, some tasks require a minimum skill level (like Expert) to even succeed. This is not necessarily known to the player, so they can still attempt it (‘after all, she needs to have a chance to critically fail’). Chapter 10 mentions character rewards. Hero Points (described more thoroughly in Chapter 9) can be used to re-roll a d20 or save a 0 Hit Point character from dying. The book recommends handing out 1 Hero Point per each real hour of play after the first (for instance, 3 for a four-hour session). There are also guidelines for XP awards for miscellaneous accomplishments other than victory in combat. The chapter closes with the rules for environmental conditions, and hazards (including dungeon traps) since after all, characters can take damage from sources other than themselves.
Chapter 11, Crafting and Treasure says: “Characters acquire treasure from the glittering hoards of their foes, as rewards for defending the innocent, and as favors from the grand personalities they treat with.” The actual treasure tables are on page 508 in Chapter 10 (which is another problem I have with this book: It really isn’t well laid-out) but this chapter includes not only magic and alchemical items but the rules for using them. It’s mentioned that some items have to be “invested” in order to be fully active (similar to attunement in D&D 5th Edition) and most characters can only invest 10 magic items at a time, which the book says should not be an issue until characters are high level. A character can change out which items are invested on a given day during daily preparations.
The tables that follow list special items by level, and in addition to alchemical items include other “consumables” such as magical talismans. Thus the tables are separated by “Consumables” and “Permanent Items.” While most of the miscellaneous items are similar to those in Pathfinder 1 and Dungeons & Dragons, the rules for weapon and armor enchantment are different. The enchantments on these items are done through runes; runes for adding straight to a weapon’s hit bonus or damage are called fundamental runes, and more exotic runes (like to create a flaming weapon) are called property runes. Engraving runes uses the Craft skill. Furthermore with fundamental runes there is a distinction between potency runes (which increase the base bonus), resiliency runes (which add to a suit of armor’s bonus to saving throws) and striking runes, which actually add to the weapon’s damage dice. Potency runes only go up to +3 and also determine the number of property runes that can be added (resiliency and striking don’t count against the limit). Thus a +3 weapon could also have a “major striking rune” causing it to do four (instead of one) die of the weapon’s normal damage type. This is interesting for two reasons: One, the use of striking runes means that a Fighter’s weapons can “scale” with level similar to how a spellcaster’s combat magic does, and the use of runes as an element is an interesting setting element that distinguishes Pathfinder 2 from other D&D-based games where these enchantments are generic and unexplained.
However while most of these items only matter once characters are high-level enough to get them (assuming the GM is properly generous), some of them are tools actually created by characters on a regular basis. Specifically, the crafting of consumable items is the whole schtick of the Alchemist class, and Rangers also have the ability to create snares (which of course are their own category of item with the ‘snare’ trait). So while spellcasters have to flip from Chapter 3 to Chapter 7 to look up spells, Alchemists have to flip from Chapter 3 all the way to Chapter 11. Which is another issue with layout: if you got this book as a PDF off the back of a virtual turnip truck, you could just use Ctrl+F to flip to the right page, but I assume that Paizo, like most publishers, wants to make its sales off hardcopy books. And not only is this book expensive as I’d said before, it’s friggin’ BIG.
CONCLUSIONS
If all this makes it seem like I am ambivalent about Pathfinder Second Edition, well, I am. Every thing they do to radically simplify the system (combat action economy, encumbrance, the experience system) is outweighed by something that over-complicates things compared to previous Pathfinder (almost everything else).
At this point, since we’re dealing with a comparison of Pathfinder 2 to the first edition, and this in turn leads to a comparison of the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (which inspired Pathfinder) and the D&D that came after it, I need to bring up a concept from the latest edition of D&D: bounded accuracy. https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Understanding_Bounded_Accuracy_(5e_Guideline)
See, in D&D 3rd Edition (and therefore, Pathfinder 1st Edition), most abilities progressed equal to level. Level cap in most products is 20. A 20th level Fighter in D&D3/PF1 has a Base Attack Bonus of +20 before counting any other modifiers at all, which means that any opponent has to have an equally ridiculous Armor Class difficulty to not get hit routinely. D&D 4th Edition curbed this somewhat with the concept of the “level modifier” – where all characters got a modifier of half their level, rounded down. Thus, a 10th level Fighter only has a +5 to hit. The newest version, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, refines the concept even further. The term “bounded accuracy” isn’t in the rule books, but it is in the various online discussions, including some from Wizards of the Coast designers. In player character terms, it comes down to most abilities being based on a proficiency bonus that starts at +2 at 1st level and peaks at +6. This mechanic applies to even class abilities; a Fighter and a Wizard of the same level have the same proficiency bonus, but a Fighter has that bonus with most weapons, and a Wizard only gets it with the limited number of weapons he is proficient with. However the Wizard (and other spellcasters) apply the bonus to attacks made with spells as well as the difficulty numbers to save against (resist) those spells.
There’s also a separate mechanic in D&D 5 that further compresses the number crunching. It’s called advantage vs. disadvantage. Simply, if you have advantage on a d20 roll (for instance, flanking an opponent) you get to roll the d20 twice and apply the better of two rolls. However if you have disadvantage (for example, a Dark Elf forced to fight in sunlight), you have to roll the d20 twice and take the worse of the two rolls. Most of the little situational modifiers that were used in previous editions of D&D (and some other non-d20 games) are replaced with this mechanic.
There are various reasons why the Wizards developers went with these methods (discussed in the link) but from the player perspective it is simply a matter of not having as many numbers and modifiers to deal with. This makes D&D 5th a relatively simple game to learn and teach to others.
Pathfinder 2, by contrast, goes in the opposite direction, taking the level-scale approach of prior Pathfinder and turning the amp up to 11. It’s specified that if you have Trained proficiency with weapons or non-combat skills, the proficiency modifier includes your level in addition to the bonuses you get for Trained, Expert, Master or Legendary level of skill. This would mean that a 20th level Fighter who has Legendary skill with weapons is now at +28 to hit. Before other modifiers.
Generally, I think Pathfinder 2 takes the same wrong turn that Wizards of the Coast took with D&D 4th Edition and that Hero Games took with HERO System 6th Edition – throwing in a whole bunch of new elements that veterans of the previous edition do not need and that will not make the game easier for new players. Even if the actual core of the game is quite simple, there’s so much “cruft” that it’s hard to see.
I could be wrong, because again, this game does a lot to clean up the basics of play, and there seems to be positive buzz so far. This just isn’t the direction I would go, and if I did want to do a root-to-stem rewrite of Pathfinder, it would probably look more like Starfinder than this game does.