Pathfinder 2's Critical Hits & Failures! Plus Save-or-Suck and Damage On A Miss!

Today's Pathfinder 2nd Edition news roundup is mainly about Critical Hits! And Failures. There's also a brief diversion into "save or suck" effects, and that old favourite, "damage on a miss" (tl;dr -- it's a failed attack roll, but not a miss). As always, this information gets added to the mighty Pathfinder 2nd Edition Compiled Info Page!

Some weapons by Wayne Reynolds​

• Last night, Paizo held the first of a series of live Twitch streams with Jason Bulmahn. It's just over an hour long; I haven't had chance to watch it yet, but if I find a transcript or summary I'll post a link here.
• Critical Hits! A new Paizo blog went up last night, detailing Critical Hits and Critical Failures!
  • We know from previous scoops that a critical success or failure means beating or failing the target number by 10.
  • Saves have critical successes, and critical failure. The example fireball does the normal half damage on a success, but on a critical success it does no damage, and on a critical failure it does double damage.
  • If you have improved evasion, and legendary proficiency in Reflex saves, your Reflex save critical failures are just normal failures.
  • If you have evasion, your Reflex save successes are critical successes.
  • Not all things have critical successes and failures; if they do, then it is listed.
  • A normal critical hit on an attack does double damage. There's normally no critical miss, but there are some exceptions:
    • Certain Strike -- the fighter has an ability where you do minimum damage on a failure, and miss only on a critical failure.
    • Twin Riposte - a fighter can parry with a weapon and attack with another when an enemy critically fails an attack roll.
• Save or Suck (or, as Paizo calls it, "save or lose) -- effects which remove you from the game with a failed save can have lesser effects on a failed save, and only take you out of the game on a critical fail. The example given is a save vs. dominate: on a fail you can try to break free each round, but on a critical fail you're dominated for the duration; on a success you lose an action each turn as you fight it off.
• Critical Effects -- Mark Seifter shares some examples of critical successes and failures:
  • The creature is banished and can't return to your home plane by any means for 1 week.
  • The creature takes the full collapse damage and falls into a fissure.
  • The target believes the fact for an unlimited duration.
  • The target's intellect is permanently reduced below that of an animal, and it treats its Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom modifiers as –5. It loses all class abilities that require mental faculties, including all spellcasting. If the target is a PC, she becomes an NPC under the GM's control.
  • The creature is pushed 30 feet in the direction of the wind, is knocked prone, and takes 2d6 bludgeoning damage.
  • You grant a +4 circumstance bonus.
  • Per a failure, except the target believes that everyone it sees is a mortal enemy. It uses its reactions and free actions against these enemies regardless of whether they were previously its allies, as determined by the GM. It otherwise acts as rationally as normal and will likely prefer to attack enemies that are actively attacking or hindering it.
  • The target must succeed at a Fortitude save or die. Even on a successful save, the target is frightened 2 and must flee for 1 round.
  • Your target regains Hit Points equal to 2d10 + your Wisdom modifier.
  • Per a success, but even afterward, the target is too scared of you to retaliate against you.
• 20s and 1s are still auto successes/failures -- "If your nat 20 isn't a critical success, it is still a success, and if your nat 1 isn't a critical failure, it is still a failure. (Seifter)
• On how the new save effects compare to PF1 and D&D 4E -- "If you're coming from PF1, I don't think you have much to worry about in terms of the non-damage critical failure effects causing TPKs more than you're used to, in that even regular failures in PF1 are often just as TPKtastic. If you're coming from a game more like 4e, which solved the problem of save or out of the fight by removing many of those effects and allowing a probable recovery from negative effects every round (4e's saving throws), it might indeed be more dangerous." (Seifter)
• It's not "damage on a miss!" -- "It's not a miss. It's a failure on the attack roll, but it's still a glancing blow, and you only miss on a critical failure for a Certain Strike." (Seifter)
• On the severity of losing an action -- "Losing one of your actions might not sound like much, but it's often a big problem for monsters and PCs alike. Admittedly, dominate is on the lower end of success effects in part because the fail and critical fail effects are so dire, but even then, slow 1 is preeetty good... I didn't fully grasp it until I played enough games of it, but in addition to the situations mentioned in the blog (and that spellcaster situation is really quite terrifying; it's even worse if you needed to cast a three action spell), it really screws over monsters who have an action routine that either uses all three actions or uses two actions but needs to move first. Grappling monsters that do <bad thing> after grappling you come to mind." (Seifter)
• Mooks are affected by crits more often now it's "hit/miss by 10" -- "This is one of a lengthy list of benefits from the initial design proposal for this system. Incidentally, it also means you can do some really nasty things against mooky enemies!" (Seifter)

[FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT]​

 

[Markn]

That's not really comforting. By saying that bonuses of the same type don't stack, they're actually saying that there are a lot of bonuses of different types which need to be tracked because they stack with each other, which is the exact same type of fiddly math that PF1 already has.

Noting that the crit rules will cause the system to fail catastrophically if modifiers get out of hand is also not comforting, since PF1 also failed catastrophically when spell save DCs got out of hand. (GURPS suffers a similar problem, with called shots; it's hard to avoid whenever there are rewards for optimization, and enough decision points to optimize significantly.) Simply being aware of a problem is not the same thing as taking sufficient precaution to keep that problem in check, and every indication is currently that optimized characters will be scoring critical successes more often than not.

I see you have preconceived notions on this. I disagree, so let’s agree to disagree and move on.

 

[mellored]

I like the +/- 10 for criticals. Makes it less binary. And 10 is an easy number to calculate.

But i still don't like the instant kill, or double damage. It's too swingy.

Instead, I go with something closer to say... dominate 0/1/2/3 actions (could be fun watching someone fight against themselves), and 0/min/normal/max damage.

 

[Ancalagon]

Yeah, I had been assuming because of this very fact that natural 20 would always be a crit even if it wouldn’t be a hit, and natural 1 always a fumble even if it wouldn’t be a miss. But learning now that both results won’t always be a possibility, and that in fact they are mutually exclusive possibilities, has some subtle but important implications. For example, that save-or-become-a-vegetable effect people are worried about (which I presume is an Intellect Devourer) can only be fumbled by characters with a save bonus less than [save DC -10]. So if you wamt to use Intellect Devourers (or whatever enemy has that ability) against the PCs but don’t want to risk the players losing their character to one fumbled save, all you have to do is hold off on using it until the PC with the lowest Will save has a high enough bonus. Similarly, PCs who are at risk of fumbling a save or die effect by a small enough margin can potentially chase enough situational bonuses to their save to get themselves away from that danger zone. I kind of like that.

Also, we know that “Reflex DC” is a thing and it’s calculated by simply adding 10 to your Reflex Save Mod. So, assuming Will DC and Fortitude DC will also exist, as a player you’ll always know that you can’t fumble saves with a DC lower than your own DC for that save (short of situational penalties).

An intriguing observation - you are right that it could have big effects on the game, beyond Bob being unable to crit, or Jane always doing damage if she has that feat (vs that 14 AC orc).

Do we know if save DC is based on caster level (like 5e) or spell level (like 3.X/PF1) - that could have a huge impact on the use of low level spells. A level 13 cleric using hold person in 5e is quite valid. In 3.X... not so much.... now imagine with the +10/-10 rule.

 

[Charlaquin]

Do we know if save DC is based on caster level (like 5e) or spell level (like 3.X/PF1) - that could have a huge impact on the use of low level spells. A level 13 cleric using hold person in 5e is quite valid. In 3.X... not so much.... now imagine with the +10/-10 rule.

We don’t, but I think I recall mention of them saying they were doing something to keep low-level spells more relevant at higher levels.

 

[Arakasius]

They said in one of the threads a couple weeks ago that all spells DC scale to the caster level.

 

[snickersnax]

Of course, PF2 could address that by vastly reining in the modifiers, but there's been no indication that they intend to do so; and there's no way that they could pass off an Advantage/Disadvantage system in this climate.

That's not really comforting. By saying that bonuses of the same type don't stack, they're actually saying that there are a lot of bonuses of different types which need to be tracked because they stack with each other, which is the exact same type of fiddly math that PF1 already has.

The actual teaser quote about the rules is:

"Less types of bonuses and things that stack. No types that stack and others that don't. The types don't stack. (Bonner)"


I think your presumption about how these rules will work may not be justified based on what they have said so far...

 

[snickersnax]

I just realized something.

The +/- 10 thing means that a character can critically succeed, or critically fail, but never ever both.

I think you should qualify that and say never both with a single roll. Because of the 3 action rule with successive attacks taking greater penalties, the first attack that a character makes might only be able to miss, hit, or critically succeed. But the third attack that the same character makes in the same round may only be able to critically fail, miss, or hit.

 

[Charlaquin]

Wait a minute. I don’t think it’s true that crit and fumble are never both possible on the same roll. One of the devs confirmed that a natural 20 is a critical success even if the result is not 10 greater than the target number as long as the result would still be a hit, and likewise a natural 1 is a fumble as long as the result would have been a miss.

So keeping that in mind, let’s use an easy example. DC 10, no modifiers. 10+10=20, so 20 is the target number for a crit. 10-10=0, so it’s impossible to roll a fumble by missing the DC by 10+. However, a natural 1 is always a fumble if the result would have been a miss, and a natural 1 would be a miss on the roll in question. So this clearly demonstrates that it is possible for both crit and fumble to be valid results on the same roll. The only time crit or fumble stops being a possibility is when you would still hit on a natural 1 or still miss on a natural 20. In which case, the natural 1 is treated as a regular miss, or the natural 20 is treated as a regular hit.

 

[Wrathamon]

3.5 and pathfinder are about lots of math and complexity ... so makes sense that pf2 would also go this route

 

[Grimkrieg]

We have been doing critical hits similar to this way for years. I know my group is not the only one who does so, even in my limited circle. I like the way Paizo has thought it out, so far, and look forward to seeing more.