Regarding Thievery, aside from the obvious +2 bonus from each higher proficiency rank, there are also traps that you can’t even try to disable unless you have a certain proficiency rank.
I completely forgot about that. It’s such a weird restriction, though. The bonded animal can’t increase your combat power in any meaningful way since it only becomes Helpful toward you rather than becoming a minion (and it won’t get stronger like an Animal Companion can). That means it will readily follow instructions that “aren’t at the expense of the helpful creature’s goals or quality of life” (quoting the Helpful condition). Combat with a chance of death or serious injury seems to run afoul of the “quality of life” bit. Even if it doesn’t, you can only use Command an Animal to direct it in combat, and that action is a 1-for-1 trade of you giving the animal your actions to use. Trading your actions for those of a weaker animal is almost always going to be a downgrade.
So I’m not really sure why they added that restriction when there’s no threat to the game balance of using both at the same time. I certainly wouldn’t object if @Rando feels like handwaving that bit of the rules. I’m not sure you can make the second Warg a familiar in any case since it needs to be a Tiny animal and Wargs usually grow to Medium (2 steps up), but that would also be up to Rando.
@Ryuken
I hope the procedure goes well and you have a quick recovery.
Well I am just trying to come up with ways that I can do the two pups. Going the Animal accomplice way, I can do that in the time-frame of the downtime after this adventure. Doing it the Bonded Animal way, would take me until I am 5th to 7th range. I already have the Animal companion slotted for level 4 so that will take care of the one pup during the downtime. And I would not be able to take Nature up to expert until 5th and then I would have to wait for the right Feat slot either at 6th or 7th to take the actual Bond Animal feat. I haven’t looked into it that far to nail it down. Which would be a long time to have one of the puppies unsupervised.
If I did the animal Accomplice way, I would never modify the pup itself with any abilities. I would just choose Master abilities. And I would just treat it as a Bonded Animal from the feat, just without me having to take Nature up to expert. Which leaves me with still taking thievery up to Legendary level.
But I’ll leave it up to @Rando if he will allow either way or neither.
Oh wow! I suppose in that case it probably doesn’t make sense for Anna to pick up thievery then. I can’t afford to take it to legendary, unfortunately.
@ocelot
It’s supposed to be the same for all skills, that some uses require a minimum proficiency rank. Thievery is just the one I’ve personally seen come up a few times. Maybe Rando can fill us in on whether there are many other instances of minimum proficiency requirements in the AP.
@Rando
Can you give us some idea of whether the citadel-related uses of Crafting and Society (separately, preferably) are set up so they consume lots of a PC’s downtime, or are they just checks that don’t interfere with other downtime activities?
Administer is fire and forget; a success lasts for a week, a crit success lasts for a month. This would be a few hours of office work and a the meetings to give people their marching orders.
Organize Labor is also fire and forget; success means labor remains for the duration of whatever Repair or Upgrade task they are helping out on; crit success reduces cost by half. Another few hours of office work and meetings to give people instruction.
Repair/Upgrade works just like normal crafting, X amount of time for the task (from 8 to 40!!!), and further time can be spent to reduce cost, but the extra time requires daily craft checks (crit success counts as two days extra work). This is like regular crafting, you’d have to be on site to do it - unless you hire an expert to do it in your stead.
This is all supposed to be fun and extra stuff you guys can do 'cause you’ll have your own castle. Supposedly it all means nothing until the sixth module anyway, and if you don’t do any of this before then I can always rework/rewrite that module so we don’t have to worry about it.
This isn’t supposed to be stressful!
With out doing spoilers, the only thing you’ll have to do is repair the stairs from the courtyard down to the vaults (4 days of crafting) and then from the vaults to whatever is below the vaults (8 days of crafting). Even this is optional, but it’s going to be a time/sanity saver.
Gah, that sucked. Spur of the moment stay in the hospital to have a procedure done and not sure it is going to do the job, might have to undergo nasal surgery at some point here and not looking forward to that at all.
Thanks for the info, Rando. My takeaway here is that multiple people investing in Society won’t make any difference, and multiple investments in social skills probably won’t, but multiple investments in Crafting could. Of course, even if Valk is the only one with Crafting as a focus, we can still evaluate whether working on items or the citadel is more cost-effective and spend gold on the other side.
Incidentally, @Rando, I saw a thread today with a lot of comments that in AoA it’s really easy to fall behind in level compared to the expectations of the AP. Which is, of course, potentially lethal in PF2e. Just thought I’d mention it in case you see that happening; lots of people talking about adding an extra encounter or side quest here and there to make sure the party stays where they should be. Apparently there are notes on the encounters listing the level the party should be for them?
Typically in my own campaigns I run with no xp and you level up at milestones. All of the Pathfinder modules have an “Advancement Track” table, usually on the same page as the table of contents that lists what level the players should be before/at certain parts of the module/story. For those DMs that don’t hand out XP, that advancement track tells you when you should have the party level up.
If in the future you go someplace that you are underleveled:
If you are “supposed” to be going to the new location/encounter and the advancement track says you are supposed to be level X there and you are level X-1, I’ll bump you up to X.
If you are going to a location/encounter outside the expected advancement path and you are more than one level under said location/encounter I’ll issue (not so) subtle warnings that you are heading into dangerous waters.
Hellknight Hill has been pretty linear in arrangement, and you guys have been pretty thorough at “finishing” one area before moving onto the next. Plus I think you’ve hit almost all the optional xp rewards.
Finishing this module at the appropriate level shouldn’t be a problem. That being said, there’s a section in the module that specifically says if the party isn’t level X before they get to it, the GM might want to throw some random encounters into the area preceding it and there’s an appropriate place to do so. I don’t like random encounters, and if you are close in level at that point I’ll just bump you. If yer like 700+ xp away… I dunno. I hope it’s not going to happen like that but I haven’t added up all the (XP) numbers.
Without spoilers… the next module is more free-form in how you tackle it. You could (potentially) go to places that are not level appropriate. I’ll issue the warnings then.
I also have another super-secret tool in my toolbox that I don’t want to go into detail on that I can also use to make sure you guys aren’t underleveled.
One should hope they put notes in there for the DM to tell what level the players should be for particular parts. The Starfinder modules have level recommendations for the different parts so I have to imagine the Pathfinder ones do too.
I’m just gonna put this out there again, Huulm could take Thievery and get it to Legendary as well. Huulm can easily take Thievery to Legendary and will be DEX based and honestly I could just not do with Stealth as I was going to take it up to Legendary for the heck of it. I don’t see us doing a whole lot of stealthing with Valk being a heavy armor wearer so if it works out the best I can take Thievery over Stealth with Huulm. Not like Huulm is going to go around picking people’s pockets or committing burglaries, but it would not be any stretch to imagine picking locks and disarming as fitting the character. And now that I have thought about it more I could still get Stealth up to expert to get the Quiet Allies feat and for Thievery I could pick up the Quick Unlock (they should have called it Quick Pick) feat and perhaps/or Wary Disarmament. I could forgo taking Acrobatics much higher unless the DC for roll through changes in some way I am unaware of besides the distance added to the check. I feel like taking Acrobatics all the way to Master just for Kip Up is not important as investing in Thievery. So the option is there for Huulm to focus on Thievery and it really wouldn’t impact my build at all.
@Rando so these high level area warnings, are they gonna be all cool and contextual like or just a giant voice that sounds like you booming out in the sky “DON’T GO THERE!”
Man, Huulm is going to be pretty useless when it comes to getting anything done for the stronghold. No crafting and I don’t have anything really in the way of Society or Diplomacy. But I am a monk and don’t have much in the way of expenses so I can just throw money at it I suppose.
Oh, @Ryuken that would be super awesome if you take thievery up to legendary!
Like I said I don’t mind picking up thievery if nobody else is willing/able to but if it’s something you think you’d enjoy doing and would fit your character, then go for it!!
As long as you don’t mind narratively, Huulm taking Thievery seems like it would work fine. You’ll have good AC, saves, and HP to absorb those traps you fail to disarm, too.
Quick Unlock is really only useful in the cases you need to open a lock in the middle of an encounter, so I’m not sure how often that will come up. Quiet Allies is an odd duck. It does provide a significant benefit (only have to pass 1 roll instead of 4), but only when trying to sneak as a group, and Valk coming along will set that modifier to +0 for quite a while (he can probably get Trained in Stealth at some point down the road).
Heh, don’t be so sure. You’ll have to invest in the two greatest gold sinks, weapon and armor runes, just like everyone else. Everyone needs to keep up with armor runes (except for a caster who is willing to lose his highest spell slot every day casting Mage Armor, but who wants to do that?), and all of us “hit things with other things” folks have to keep our weapons up to snuff, too.
The only problem with a wand of Mage Armor is it can’t be upgraded to keep pace with the heightenings of the spell. Runes can actually be upgraded for the difference in cost between the two levels. Lv1 Mage Armor would make a nice wand until around 5th or 6th level when we start getting armor potency runes, though. On the flip side, some wands (lv2 Longstrider, for instance) are great forever.
I have reworked my build as far as skill training so I can have Thievery at expert by lvl 5, Mastery at lvl 11 and I can do Legendary at lvl 15. This allows for me to take a Thievery feat if needed. I won’t be training up Stealth, but I will still be taking Athletics to Legendary at lvl 17 and Acrobatics to Mastery.
@Cortillaen You are right about the runes I have to remember that.
Thanks @Ryuken, I will happily hand off Training up Thievery to you. So that leaves me with Crafting and Medicine to train to legendary. And a Third skill.
Now I’m rethinking about the animal companions. After reading the Link @Cortillaen gave me for the tooth and fang article. I don’t want to split the pups up. So if the plan to use one as a familiar or Bonded Animal is not OK’d by @Rando. I think I’d go back to asking Rando to put together a side quest to deal with them. Given I am not a full druid, going Animal companion I really can only train the one up to Incredible Companion (Nimble or Savage). I cannot expand it with the Specialization skills. Because of the half level thing from dipping into Druid rather than being a full blown druid. The caveat here is this is as I understand the rules from doing multiple builds in Pathbuilder and working with Cort.
@Cortillaen if it comes down to having to pick one over the other then I would definitely prefer to have to have the armor potency rune but it feels to me like a squishy mage wants every + to AC they can get so if I can both I would definitely prefer to do that. Also, it looks like heightened long strider only lasts for 8 hours whereas mage armor lasts until the next daily preparation which means I’d still need to have a longstrider slot if I wanted to maintain it during a full 16 hour wake cycle.
I’m not sure you can make the second Warg a familiar in any case since it needs to be a Tiny animal and Wargs usually grow to Medium (2 steps up), but that would also be up to Rando.
Everyone needs to keep up with armor runes (except for a caster who is willing to lose his highest spell slot every day casting Mage Armor, but who wants to do that?), and all of us “hit things with other things” folks have to keep our weapons up to snuff, too.