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]​

 

[Charlaquin]

The more I read the more I know its not for me.

I'd get rid of crits all together. They just make things stupidly swingy IME. I know everyone loves rolling a 20..then doing another calculation, but too often I found fights ended up being about who got the luckiest rolls for crits than anything else.

Under normal circumstances, I hate crits. They favor the monsters (who make more attack rolls than the PCs and therefore have a statistically higher chance to roll them more often) and add almost nothing to the game. Critical failures attempt to balance this out, since monsters also have a statistically higher chance of suffering them more, but they feel bad for the players to roll, and often they don’t actually balance out the advantage critical hits give, because the effects GMs put on them are often worse for PCs than they are for NPCs (such as if you attach lingering injuries to criticals.)

But I like what Paizo is doing with degrees of success, because despite their name, they fill a different design space than critical hits and fumbles innother d20 games. First of all, they’re achieved by beating or failing to beat a target number instead of by randomly getting the best or worst number on the die, which means they’re controllable. Instead of a 5% chance of an extra special or extra bad thing happening on every d20 roll in an otherwise binary task resolution system, it’s adjusting the task resolution system to make it not binary. And that means they can design around a four-degrees-of-success system, such as by tying damage multipliers to AoE spells depending on the result of the save. Or including Reactions that trigger on certain degrees of success being achieved. There’s a lot of design space opened up by having multiple degrees of success, and by tying those degrees to target numbers, making the odds of achieving them a thing that players can influence with their modifiers, it avoids the pitfalls of crits and fumbles being so swingy.

I hate crits and fumbles, but that’s really not what PF2’s degrees of success are. They’re a way to fix the issues of crits and fumbles, while keeping the names for tradition’s sake.

 

[Lylandra]

Mh, thinking about the new critical miss mechanic, I do see lower level ranged or melee attackers not using a "full attack" because they fear a crit failure on their last (-10) attack roll. Now this isn't a problem when these types get attack actions that are more powerful but use multiple actions, but it would be one if "I attack" is all they do at lower levels.

 

[Charlaquin]

Mh, thinking about the new critical miss mechanic, I do see lower level ranged or melee attackers not using a "full attack" because they fear a crit failure on their last (-10) attack roll. Now this isn't a problem when these types get attack actions that are more powerful but use multiple actions, but it would be one if "I attack" is all they do at lower levels.

Well remember, critical fails on attack rolls don’t do anything per se. There are some monster Reactions that trigger on an opponent critically missing, but they’re probably not super common.

 

[Lost Soul]

Damage on a miss for martials...the TRUE Participation trophy award. Is Rich Baker secretly imbedded in the Pathfinder 2 design team?

 

[Charlaquin]

Damage on a miss for martials...the TRUE Participation trophy award. Is Rich Baker secretly imbedded in the Pathfinder 2 design team?

If you prefer, think of it as a reverse Power Attack. You get +10 to hit, but if you do hit you only deal minimum damage, and if you crit you deal normal damage; in order to do double damage, you need to beat the target’s AC by 20. That’s functionally identical to how this Sure Strike maneuver works.

 

[CleverNickName]

Eh... I'm less jazzed about this news. I don't care much for multiple layers of success or failures...critical hits alone were swingy enough, adding more layers of it and expanding it to save throws seems like it would add even more swing (to say nothing of being a pain to track).

And I have always loathed the idea of damage on a miss; renaming it to "damage on an almost miss" doesn't improve my disposition.

I'm still curious about the new edition and I'm looking forward to seeing what makes it into the final product, but this is the first time I've frowned at a PF2 update.

 

[Charlaquin]

Eh... I'm less jazzed about this news. I don't care much for multiple layers of success or failures...critical hits alone were swingy enough, adding more layers of it and expanding it to save throws seems like it would add even more swing (to say nothing of being a pain to track).

I understand preferring binary success/failure, but if swingyness is your objection, tying critical successes and failures to target numbers instead of the number on the die will make it less swingy. In PF1, your odds of a critical hit are always somewhere between 5% and 15% depending on your weapon choice (higher with Feats), no matter your attack bonus or your opponent’s AC. Nice PF2, they will be 25% lower than your odds of a hit, which means your odds get better the higher your attack mod or the lower your target’s AC. That’s the opposite of swingy, it’s far more controllable and predictable.

And I have always loathed the idea of damage on a miss; renaming it to "damage on an almost miss" doesn't improve my disposition.

It’s neither. It’s a special maneuver that makes it easier to hit at the cost of dealing less damage. It’s very much the reverse of PF1 Power Attack. It just accomplishes that by piggybacking on the existing degrees of success system instead of kludging it in with a +10 to hit Mod and adjusting the results of your success thresholds.And as far as we know it’s only one Fighter Feat, so worst case scenario you can just ban that one Feat if it bothers you that much.

 

[CleverNickName]

I understand preferring binary success/failure, but...

I'm sure there are plenty of ways to work the math, modify the rules, and omit certain things to get the game to feel the way I like. And I probably will -- I've been houseruling Pathfinder for years. This is just the first thing we've heard that I didn't like, that's all. I'll probably ignore as much of it as I can during the playtest if possible.

 

[Aldarc]

I'll probably ignore as much of it as I can during the playtest if possible.

You should probably play with it so that you can provide constructive feedback on what you find displeasurable about it.

 

[Nightfalcon]

The first thing to turn me off for D&D 4e was fighters doing damage on a miss. I'll see (and playtest by the book) but I see this "it's a failure, not a miss" quizling not making the grade for my table