Credits

• Icons courtesy of Truly Malicious, Ddant1100, and Game-Icons.net

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.

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#Environment #Solar #Ecology

"Artificial intelligence (AI)" and the law thread 🧵

(Really large language models (LLM), not AI, but I'll never find the thread if I don't put "AI" in it)

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Let's do this.

Know your Star Trek phenomena:

Plasma storm: Something colourful is shaking the ship

Gravimetric distortion: Something heavy is shaking the ship

Subspace anomaly: Something invisible is shaking the ship

It’s been a loooong time since I’ve played FInal Fantasy 7. Like, probably 25 years now. Maybe 20. But definitely before I permanently moved away from home. It’s one of my favourite games of all time, but also, one of the hardest for me to revisit.

I’m at the City of the Ancients now, and I’m finding myself woefully unprepared to handle it.

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.

Over on Reddit the other day, u/MeanMeanFun asked the PF2 subreddit what they can do about a player at their table who isn’t as engaged with the game as the rest of the players. This player is newer to the game than the rest of the table, but has been playing for a year now and still struggles to remember things like what all of their items do, and isn’t engaging in optimal tactical play.

Some form of this discussion comes up somewhat frequently, and the responses people get are often jarring to me. Consider these replies:

If they cannot grasp the basics after 12+ months it is possible that pf2e isn’t their game.

Some people’s brains aren’t wired for this game. At this point I think you have to come to terms with the fact that they’re not gonna get any better, and then start thinking and discussing with your other players how to go forward.

There’s almost a kind of literacy that ttrpgs require in general and PF demands a lot of in particular. Even if someone is really committed to memorizing stuff, there’s a bringing-it-all-togetherness that’s a unique skill that’s still required to actually apply that knowledge.

All of which is to say that it’s possible this isn’t really their fault while this game still not really being for them. If someone just doesn’t get basketball and is constantly double dribbling, carrying, making fouls, and shooting in the wrong basket despite a lot of practice, they’re probably not going to be very welcome in the local pickup game, even if they practice a lot and try really hard.

Responses like this are common on any post where someone is either struggling to internalize all of the rules of the game, or doesn’t want to engaged deeply and directly with the game’s engine. There’s a chauvinism on display here which often goes unacknowledged and unchallenged, and not only is it deeply unhelpful to people who are specifically looking for help, but it also creates a sense that the game itself, and the community that surrounds it, is actually openly hostile to them and their play.

And my experience with the largest online spaces focused on the game is that they are hostile to players who aren’t looking to engage with the game in a narrow range of ways. There is constant background chatter around what “the game expects” or “the game demands”, and that chatter ultimately always paints a picture of a very rigid game with a very narrow focus on tactical combat with a narrow range of parameters.

Meanwhile, the game includes rules that supports almost everything under the sun, including a significant list of feats, spells, and other player options that people regularly complain are too niche to even look at, many of which are explicitly focused on exploration, survival, or social engagement – you know, all of the things you’d want to include in your game if you were trying to release a general purpose fantasy roleplaying game.

So, it all raises the question: Just who is this game actually for?

While there doesn’t seem to be a consensus among the game’s audience – or, at least the part of it that is active on Reddit and the Paizo forums – about who Pathfinder 2e is for, there does seem to be relatively strong agreement about who it is not for: Everyone.

And I’m not really sure I get it.

I mean, ok, sure, nothing is truly for everybody all of the time. Even water isn’t going to do much for someone who’s not thirsty. PF2’s not going to be a great fit if you’re looking for early 20th century psychological horror, say, or if you’re in the mood to play a cozy game about contemporary hobby farming. But the line is not “this game isn’t necessarily the best fit for the type of thing the player wants to do right now”, it’s “this game isn’t for them”. And I know someone’s going to tell me I’m reading too much into that wording, but I don’t believe that I am.

I think there’s a vocal group of people who like very particular things that PF2 enables, and who simultaneously do not care about other things that PF2 also enables, and who want to totally discount the latter while enshrining the former as the default – if not only – legitimate way to play the game.

And that’s unfortunate, because Pathfinder 2e is an incredibly flexible and robust fantasy RPG with so many bits and pieces that you can lean into or remove as your table sees fit. Is it a one pager? No, of course not – there are a lot of rules to skim over and decide what you like and want to keep, and what you maybe can trim away – but you can pare it down very far and have something that supports your play (just look at Pathwarden, and its genre-neutral follow-up Warden, both of which are based off of the PF2 engine). Or consider Hellfinder, another pared down ‘hack’ of PF2 focused on modern horror, developed by Jason Bulmahn, lead designer of both Pathfinder 1e and 2e.

The game is designed to be modular. It can be extended or stripped down almost as much as you want. This was the designers intent for the system.

And I say with much confidence, the game feels really good played loosely. It’s a great engine for wacky nonsense, and light play. It’s great for a roleplay focused table, just as it is for a hardcore tactical combat focused group. It supports fiction-foreward play so much better than it’s given credit for.

A response to the original post by u/SleepylaReef really hit something home for me. I don’t know that it’s fair to the OP, but it definitely holds a bit of a mirror up to this toxic vein:

Lots of players never learn the game, period. So you decide if this person is a friend you like to spend time with and you accept their foillibles, or if they’re just tools you use to game with and you kick them out for not being good enough for you.

For some people, the others sitting around the table are just tools to enable their own particular type of fun. For some people, there being others in the player pool who aren’t good tools for them is a waste of their time. This has become abundantly clear over time.

Something lost a bit in the amazing images released earlier: Vera Rubin Observatory is a steely-eyed asteroid hunter! It's already found thousands of new ones in just a few nights, and is predicted to find *3.7 MILLION* more.

THREE POINT SEVEN MILLION

https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/vera-rubin-observatory-will-find-millions-of-asteroids-millions-513f

I give you a momentary reprieve from the madness:

The Vera Rubin Observatory has taken its first images of the sky, and they are *extraordinary*. Mind blowing detail, jaw dropping beauty.

https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/rubin-opens-its-eye-and-what-it-sees-is-the-universe-8203

lemmy.ca