Don't Let Feats Stop You from Improvising

you'll see it fairly often online Pathfinder second edition is hard for new players or GMS who like to improvise because there's so many little Feats that block off improvisation you have to learn them all discussions and debates pop up around this topic all the time and I've seen several in the past few months we're here today to help with that the key takeaway is not to let the Feats get in the way of your improvising and today we're going to show you how Pathfinder has two sections in the rules specifically on improvising the quick rules

for improvising an activity are probably the most relevant in encounters basically you can make something take one action or two actions if it feels like something that shouldn't happen three times per round if it seems like it would always succeed great go for it and if it seems like if it's something that wouldn't always succeed you can find an appropriate check to make to determine whether it succeeds or fails another thing to consider is whether this improvised idea is powerful enough that the players are going to just try to use that every single time instead

of the other options they have available to them in which case the improvising rules suggest that you can say this will work this time it it's really cool we'll make it work or that you're going to allow it now and think about what to do later if it turns out that they want to keep doing that again and again this framework for improvising is all well and good but what about the times that something I might want to improvise already exists in a feat or some folks say there's a feat for that I'm here to

tell you having written many of the Feats we're talking about here as well as worked on the improvisation rules in Pathfinder 2 the Feats are not meant to prevent you from trying things without the Feats they're meant to be a more efficient reliable and repeatable way of doing things often when this is discussed online people will reference an answer I gave on a Reddit AMA and a corroborating statement Mike Zer made on social media where we both say that you can and should definitely allow players to try things without the Feats perhaps with the penalty

or harder DC a worse action economy that's all in well and good that I said that but I didn't give you the tools to decide how to adjudicate this let's take a look at group coercion which is a skill feed that is one of the most commonly cited as potentially brocking off improvisation it allows you to coers increasingly large groups of preachers at the same time without a penalty and with a single skill check that doesn't mean that if you need to co five people without the feat you're completely out of love there's a few

ways to handle this the first is time if you spend more time on the coercion attempt you can coers the group by essentially spending enough time to roll Separate Checks on each individual the other way you might be able to handle it is via the DC if you need to co a larger group quickly at the same time and you don't have special training that should be harder psychologically a large group of like-minded people feels safe in numbers and it would be harder to threaten them to act in a certain way in front of all

their peers you're just one person trying to coer them without the feet you might consider applying the hard DC modifier of plus two for a few creatures the very hard modifier of plus five for a larger group and the extremely hard DC modifier of plus 10 for an especially large or for a cohesively disciplined group that math also strangely lines up with some of the math for troops if you were trying to coorse a single hell night arer with a will save a plus six modifier uh the DC would be 16 but a hellnight Cavalry

troop is a single creature that represents a cohesive organized Squadron of hel nightes and they have a plus 16 will save modifier for a coer DC of 26 which that's 10 higher it's exactly in line with the extremely hard DC modifier Our advice is nice when you're aware of the feat in advance when you're trying to improvise but for some folks they're most afraid the Feats will get in the way of improvisation for a new group because of the Spectre of a feat that no one was aware of when when you made the ruling and

you only learn about it later after the game is over what if you improvised a ruling and your ruling was basically the same as what the feet allowed in the first place or Worse your ruling was actually more lenient than what the feet normally allows now what I'm about to say might be more controversial than the previous advice which mainly relies on the official rules of P finder to for improvising but I'm going to tell you a secret you don't need to worry about that either if you find out later that's a there's a feat

that covers the same situation and uh you've just seen and the feed is similar or stricter to how you ruled without the feat you have a few options you can gauge uh first of all either yourself or together with your group how the improvised ruling worked for your game did it seem like it was about right already might it be better to make it a little hard next time and ask the players to take the feat to get the full benefit you can decide which way works best that means that if your group wants to

make something that normally works via feet Universal for every character that's okay and you could even make it so that taking the feet makes it even more powerful than that if you change your mind later that's okay too tailoring content for your group is part of what makes tabletop RPGs great and handing out some small skill feet benefits to everyone for free is really unlikely to be the kind of house rule that's going to throw things off in your game in the same way that you would want to be much more careful about tinkering with

action economy or the math of bonuses even giving out a strong skill feet like continual recovery for medicine isn't going to break your game in fact the original version of treat wounds during the play test didn't have the 1 hour timer at all and its inclusion with a skill feet to remove the timer was a compromise due to some place testers who aesthetically didn't didn't like how quickly you could heal up with a universal 10minute tree wounds that suggests that if your group doesn't have the same concerns you might be fine giving that benefit to

everyone the same sort of logic applies with many other skill feeds as well that being said if you're considering giving out pee benefits for free or easing up on improvised actions it makes sense to let your players know that you've chosen this to give additional benefits and ease things up and that you're going to watch how the house rule impacts the game and possibly change it up if there's a problem chances are you won't have to but if you tell them in advance hey I'm trying out a house rule it avoids a situation where someone

really leans into that idea and then if you later walk it back they have the rug pulled out from them under under them unexpectedly also if you do make a change later you should strongly consider allowing some free retraining without spending downtime to go pick up the feet that you added back in if they want to still be able to use it absolutely we hope this helps you feel more confident in improvising rules around situations that might also have fats to handle them please like And subscribe and let us know if you'd like to see

more of this kind of content on our Channel and if you hear from someone who's worried about trying out Pathfinder second edition for fear that all the Feats might make it too difficult to improvise rulings to run the game without encyclopedic knowledge you can link them to this video to help explain or if you wants some more examples in actual play you can see a video of Mark here in action improvising rulings on the live for three brand new players who don't know the didn't know the Pathfinder second edition roles in advance by clicking on

the link in the description below thanks and goodbye