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
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)
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