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 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

How is it any different than an attack with +10 to hit that deals less damage if it does hit?

 

[CleverNickName]

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

FWIW, "the game works/doesn't work without this rule" is also constructive feedback.

 

[Nightfalcon]

Because it opens up the possibility of "He winds up, swings and... it's a miss." Not that I want to go too far with the baseball analogy but I don't care how focused you are, how much power you put into it, there is always the chance the batter will miss. making it so you can't miss is cheesy. "I'm Perfect Peter and I can't miss and I have a +5 vorpal holy avenger and I killed Elric and I stole Smaugs treasure and I mastered the one ring, etc, etc." If you're gaurenteed a hit why bother rolling? It's the chance of failute that gives us the trhilled of success.

 

[Nightfalcon]

FWIW, "the game works/doesn't work without this rule" is also constructive feedback.

I said I'd playtest by the book and that "I'd see" meaning that I would give it a try. It's just that I am dubious of this.

 

[Retreater]

I don't understand when one of the major design goals of PF 2nd Edition is to streamline and unclutter the game, that all these previews seem to add further complications to the game that seems to be counter-intuitive to that goal. For example, instead of learning one spell effect, you have to learn three (standard effect, critical success effect, and critical failure effect). Instead of keeping up with action economy, it varies depending on which spell you're casting (some take 1 action, some 2, some 3).
I don't mind some complexity in the game. However, in this case it just seems so fiddly. It reminds me of looking at THAC0 charts.

 

[Charlaquin]

Because it opens up the possibility of "He winds up, swings and... it's a miss." Not that I want to go too far with the baseball analogy but I don't care how focused you are, how much power you put into it, there is always the chance the batter will miss. making it so you can't miss is cheesy. "I'm Perfect Peter and I can't miss and I have a +5 vorpal holy avenger and I killed Elric and I stole Smaugs treasure and I mastered the one ring, etc, etc." If you're gaurenteed a hit why bother rolling? It's the chance of failute that gives us the trhilled of success.

Y... You do understand that it’s still possible to miss and do no damage with Sure Strike, right? You just have to miss by 10 or more. It is literally no different than a +10 to the Attack roll at the cost of doing minimum damage on a hit (and normal damage on a hit by 10 or more over the target number).

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't understand when one of the major design goals of PF 2nd Edition is to streamline and unclutter the game, that all these previews seem to add further complications to the game that seems to be counter-intuitive to that goal. For example, instead of learning one spell effect, you have to learn three (standard effect, critical success effect, and critical failure effect). Instead of keeping up with action economy, it varies depending on which spell you're casting (some take 1 action, some 2, some 3).
I don't mind some complexity in the game. However, in this case it just seems so fiddly. It reminds me of looking at THAC0 charts.

Their goal isn’t necessarily to bring down the overall complexity of Pathfinder. It’s to adjust the dismal depth-to-complexity ratio of PF1. It will still be a complex game, it’s just that the complexity is going to be put to better use.

 

[Nightfalcon]

We'll see.

Y... You do understand that it’s still possible to miss and do no damage with Sure Strike, right? You just have to miss by 10 or more. It is literally no different than a +10 to the Attack roll at the cost of doing minimum damage on a hit (and normal damage on a hit by 10 or more over the target number).

As I said, I'll playtest as written and see how it works and how it feels. I'm open to the possibility that it will work well, my players will love it and we'll keep it but, to me, it's saying that anything but a critical failure is a hit and I have a native dislike for that. I suspect that this will diminish the dramatic moment of the critical miss and that would be a pity. For me, this is ore of a storytelling issue, not one of mechanics.

As they haven't published the rules yet and it is all out of context, I'll wait until I can play test it.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Y... You do understand that it’s still possible to miss and do no damage with Sure Strike, right? You just have to miss by 10 or more. It is literally no different than a +10 to the Attack roll at the cost of doing minimum damage on a hit (and normal damage on a hit by 10 or more over the target number).

It's not always possible to miss by 10 or more, though. You're still only rolling a d20, so if you would otherwise hit on 10 or better, the absolute worst you can fail by is a margin of nine.

And if I understood the rules of 1 and 20 correctly, a 1 isn't a critical failure if the margin of failure is less than 10; it's just an automatic failure, in case the roll of 1 would otherwise have been some sort of success.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's not always possible to miss by 10 or more, though. You're still only rolling a d20, so if you would otherwise hit on 10 or better, the absolute worst you can fail by is a margin of nine.

And if I understood the rules of 1 and 20 correctly, a 1 isn't a critical failure if the margin of failure is less than 10; it's just an automatic failure, in case the roll of 1 would otherwise have been some sort of success.

You didn’t understand the rules of 1 and 20 correctly.

your check result meets or exceeds the target DC, congratulations! You succeeded, and you might have critically succeeded. Otherwise, you failed. If you exceeded the target DC by 10 or more, or if you rolled a natural 20 and met or exceeded the target DC, then you critically succeeded. If your result was 10 or more lower than the target DC, or if you rolled a natural 1 and didn't meet the target DC, then you critically failed.

As I proved earlier in the thread using if/then rules describing what was said in the blog and in Siefter’s comment, a natural 20 is an automatic hit if the total is below the target number, and an automatic critical hit if the total does meet or exceed the target number. A natural 1 is an automatic failure if the total meets or exceeds the target number, and an automatic critical failure if the total is less than the target number.

Again, this Sure Strike Maneuver is literally functionally identical to an attack with a +10 bonus that deals less damage on a success or critical success. If you would not have a problem with a mechanic that worked that way, then your only objection is to the word “miss,” or to be more precise, the word “failure.”