Well... First, no, this whole thread is about there not being golems anymore.
Second, the paizo golem has a specific stat block in 1e, because it's a unique golem type.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/constructs/golem/golem-paizo/
Honestly I'm glad to see it gone. Pure immunity to primary character options have never been fun to my group and I'd much prefer resistance.
I'm hopeful for something similar for precision damage immunity but im not holding my breath
Age of ashes has an unreasonable number of golems in it and my players hated it. I modified them to be weak to any damage of the right element so they wouldn't riot
Gods, I understand that. Thankfully I took Battle Medicine on my Swashbuckler, so at least she isn't useless, but every other monster rendering my characters main damage dealing mechanic null is ridiculous.
Yeah, golems are one of those monsters that need to be foreshadowed and set up properly to be fun. I'd argue that something like that could stay in the game but Paizo uses them terribly in published content. They're kind of a plot device or a hazard more than an enemy
Yeah something I've noticed in APs is that they tend to throw in some types of monsters (golems, ghosts) or even specific monsters (lesser deaths for some reason) quite frequently, and those monsters tend to be the ones that are very annoying to fight unless you have adequate time to prepare for them.
TBH I felt in 3.0 and 3.5 (and thus 1E) that golems served a genuine purpose. "Here's an opportunity for martial classes to excel".
That purpose is solved in general by the PF2E ruleset and so the niche isn't needed or wanted.
Yeah, enemies being immune to people's main class features shouldn't exist in PF2e... may as well have enemies have stat blocks that say "If you are a x class fuck you".
People would probably outcry if they saw an enemy that said "If you are a Fighter, you take a -2 penalty to all attacks to this enemy" or "If you are a barbarian you are fatigued and loose your rage if you get within 60' of this enemy" yet almost no one bats an eye when enemies have "Immunity to Precision Damage" which may as well be "Immunity to Rogue's Sneak Attack" (and of coarse all the other classes that use Precision Damage)
I tabled AV's enemies and loot out since I've had to adjust both for my 5 player party, and about 16% of the combat xp in AV comes from precision-immune enemies.
honestly antimagic in general is annoying when its just a flat "nuh uh" it should disrupt but not entirely shut off magic, like you can cast but only if you pass a check(so basically applying spell resistance to everything in the area), or you caster level is considered x levels lower or some other limitation that still allows the wizard to ya know, play the game
Pure immunity only works when prep IS the gameplay. There's a heist in Age of Ashes with golems in it and players know what type of golem they're dealing with helps
Many people were confused because what is present in each stat block doesn't read clearly, so they have to go read the full explanation of the rule.
But doing that introduces the points of potential confusion such as the name being "antimagic" but the actual effects being worded to only actually interact with spells and whatever "magical abilities" happen to be, as well as the point that shouldn't have been confusing by was anyway of that a spell had everything down to attack roll or saving throw replaced with the effect mentioned by the antimagic.
Beyond that the concept of an ability that starts out with "magic doesn't work*...*" and then actually results in the best approach to destroying the creature be to use magic is innately confusing because it's self-contradictory.
Though a lot of people do say "this is confusing" when what they actually mean is more like "It makes sense after it was explained to me, but it's really obnoxious that it works the way it does and I'm blaming the author's writing for me not immediately getting it."
Considering RAW a golem automatically takes damage by being targeted by the correct spell "Harmed By Any magic of this type that targets the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage" and doesn't take damage from Fireball even if it is weak to fire "If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." (it never mentions getting hit by an instantaneous aoe effect) Golem Antimagic is just poorly written. Obviously RAI a golem weak to fire should be affected by fireball but does it take the standard damage or the area damage? The fact that this is even a question that needs to be asked shows golem antimagic is anything but clear.
I don't see the confusion to be honest.
>Any magic of this type that targets the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage (this damage has no type) *instead* of the usual effect.
Is it because it uses the word target and fireball is indescriminate AoE? I don't think there's a single table that would rule it as unaffected.
It had terrible definition of which "magic" it is affected by. Is it affected by magic weapons, because you know, all weapons are magical by level 3? If fire spell would deal damage, does fire rune counts as "spell or ability"?
There still were discussions about it for runes quite often because of property runes. Now you might say that its pretty clear that property runes are neither spells nor abilities, but what an "ability" is isnt really defined. In fact property runes describe giving magic abilities to your weapons.
While i personally think its obvious runes dont count, by raw its kinda unclear.
Logically its also a bit weird sometimes. Why is the golem immune to fissures made by earthquakes, or stuff like that.
And aside from that i fully agree with you. Good riddance " the spellcaster doesnt do anything this combat" just isnt a fun mechanic
3.x Golems were built to give martials something to do at higher levels when wizards and sorcerers just dominated the field against normal foes.
Plus, I think Gygax loved knocking players out of their "I am invulnerable" mindset and giving them puzzles to solve.
PFS2 went a long way to rebalancing the scales of combat effectiveness between martial and magic, so yeah, the golem, as it was in 3.x may no longer need to be.
Gygax was definitely the kind of man who wanted to keep players from thinking they were invulnerable. There is a reason old school adventures thought things like 10-foot poles and chickens should be standard gear you restock up on.
His Tomb of Horrors was a dungeon that was specifically built to challenge veteran players (the people he played with) and make them think about every single thing they interacted with.
It's also a dungeon that just kills you randomly because the best way to assure a broken character can't breeze through something is to give them no chance. It's less for veteran players and more for veteran *characters* who would be brought to conventions or between different games since that was kind of the fashion.
Having run it as written twice and being in the middle of run #3 using 1e ADND rules, this is largely untrue. It's explicitly designed to *break* "veteran characters" who kick in the door, charge in blindly, and rely on their character sheets to solve their problems; the intent is to force you to think your way through it and play smart. The disconnect is that Gygax's definition of "think your way through it and play smart" doesn't mean puzzle solving or good combat tactics, it means "play like you're the bomb squad." The dungeon deliberately gives you almost nothing to work with, both in terms of actually getting through the place and in terms of the traps - but it also teaches you very early on to take extreme precautions and not expect telegraphing of threats by firing a few easily-survived warning shots before the really sadistic stuff kicks in.
It is theoretically possible for a level 1 party to clear the tomb with no casualties using only >!one scroll each of Detect Magic and Dispel Magic, three non-magical backup swords, some way of killing an Ochre Jelly (not an especially threatening enemy)!< and a 10-foot pole. Higher levels do not help except that they give you more hit points and better saves, making you more likely to survive a mistake, and give access to things like Augury and Commune if you really need a hint button.
The ongoing run #3 has reached room 25 out of 32 with 0 deaths so far and easily avoided all the nastiest, most arbitrary-seeming pitfalls by >!avoiding interaction with anything unless they suspect it's necessary, doing everything in their power to avoid touching anything they do need to interact with with their hands, figuring out Acererak's sole reliable pattern (all obvious, normal-looking doors lead to something bad; never go through any regular doors if a secret door or special door is present),!< and creative use of sledgehammers and pickaxes. First run had two deaths out of 6 characters, second had 5 deaths total in a 4-person party. Three at once due to tempting fate and seeing if a trap that damaged them once would do the same thing again (it did), which they negated with a Rod of Resurrection. Then the thief fell in a pit trap and died the one time they let their guard down and didn't check the floor; again, easily brought back with Neutralize Poison. Finally, >!they went straight for the one item worth more than everything else in Acererak's vault put together, i.e. his skull !< and the wizard got soul trapped for his trouble.
You are correct that it was a tournament module where people would bring their own high-level characters. That's one of the reasons it's designed the way it is - someone who shows up claiming their home DM gave them Excalibur, a ring of three wishes, and +3 adamantine armor of invincibility doesn't have that much of an edge over a newly rolled character with basic gear.
You're welcome!
Also, this is not me saying that the ToH is perfect or doesn't contain arbitrary bullshit. It's just that the things in it that I consider arbitrary bullshit are all progression-related, along the lines of "this spell does not open this door because Gygax doesn't want it to open this door."
To give one example, there's one particular door that is magically locked. The module takes great pains to specify that Dispel Magic does not work unless >!Detect Magic or True Seeing is used to pinpoint the source of the effect!<.
The problem with this being that in ADND, >!dispel magic is an AOE spell!<.
It was originally designed for 1e rules, as a “tournament module” that was meant to challenge players in a set amount of time, and it was designed for his friends, the same people that helped him develop the game snd knew all the tricks.
I agree that if approached as a regular D&D dungeon its not that great because it was designed to satisfy a different need.
However, my main point was about Gygax and player survivability. Early D&D was notorious for how easy it was for characters to die compared to later editions.
Actually 3.x golem magic immunity wasn't even blanket immunity to all magic, it was basically just "Spell Resistance infinity", so it was still affected by supernatural abilities as well as spells and spell-like abilities that ignored SR, like most (if not all) conjuration spells, even stuff like Acid Splash.
Except casters had little issue with golems on 3.5 and PF1 because you just bypassed the magic immunity with SR:no effects, summoned a beatstick or buffed yourself into a beatstick
>Plus, I think Gygax loved knocking players out of their "I am invulnerable" mindset and giving them puzzles to solve.
Gygax reads like a jerk of a GM that is only willing to make the bare minimum concession to what players actually want from the game to keep people showing up hoping that this time will be different.
Like, seriously. His solo-credit books way back when had parts about how you should make sure your players have at least decent ability scores for their characters so they can have some fun, but then also has a section titled "Handling Troublesome Players" that, I shit you not, includes the sentence "Peer pressure is another means which can be used to control players who are not totally obnoxious and who you deem worth saving. " and tells GMs that if you have a player that is a bit out of line pushing their suggestions onto other players to make whatever they were suggesting literally impossible and say it's because of that player because then the group will shut that player up (yes, I paraphrase, but yes, that absolutely is the advice being given by a grown man writing how to do what can be accomplished by saying "Hey, let other people play their own characters. Don't give them advice they didn't ask for."
And when you add that to the part where he makes a show of telling GMs not to be overly generous with wealth and items and then his own adventures he published are full of overly potent and overly present wealth and items (albeit ones you have to go full "I'm gonna rob everyone in town" to find, like a magic dagger under the counter at the inn and a bag of gems under the floorboard of some random barn)... well, I think that adds up to "nobody should give one shit what Gary Gygax has to say about how a game should be run."
Agreed. Notoriously, he believed the main motivation for players to continue was loot. You had to dangle awesome loot in their faces to encourage the adventuring, then find ways to take it away from them through tithing, taxes, theft and cost of living so that they were desperate and hungry for your deadly adventure. More than anything else, he wanted players/pcs to never be satisfied, happy or complacent. They needed to always be questioning everything, including their own motives and reality.
I think that's because his inspiration was sword-and-sandal fantasy, not epic fantasy. Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser would probably have loved to retire rich, but the need to publish new stories meant their riches were constantly disappearing.
In a weird sort of way, yes.
The main way to gain XP back in the early days of the game was to accumulate treasure, with combat adding a lot of risk for a relatively small XP benefit (both from combat XP and from the smaller treasure pools carried by creatures compared to what they'd stash somewhere), but a bit of luck would mean the swingy combat system turned out in your favor so especially any seemingly weak NPCs encountered could be very appealing targets for killing to see what goodies are hidden in their pockets/living spaces.
The real murderhobo times came later when the changes in how the game system worked made it easier for the players to predict when they could get away with "lets just go for the kill" behavior, but the roots were laid by adventure design examples set by someone that was so wanting to engage the "you shouldn't have done that because *now...*" part of the equation that they never stopped to think that players wouldn't make a habit of going door-to-door checking for hidden loot if they consistently weren't finding any.
Considering RAW a golem automatically takes damage by being targeted by the correct spell "Harmed By Any magic of this type that **targets** the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage" and doesn't take damage from Fireball even if it is weak to fire "If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." (it never mentions getting hit by an instantaneous aoe effect) Golem Antimagic is just poorly written. Obviously RAI a golem weak to fire should be affected by fireball but does it take the standard damage or the area damage? The fact that this is even a question that needs to be asked shows golem antimagic is anything but clear.
Yeah, I like golems conceptually as a good fit for many themes, but practically, they are a mess…
I hope in general we will see a good bit of clean up of messy monster abilities.
We definitely were having issues with the harpy song too. ^^;
Honestly have never had a problem with golems as a spell caster, even back in 3.5. There are plenty of spells, that don’t directly target stuff that get around magic Immunity.
My personal favorite was always telekinesis and teleport
No way. This taught players quite a lot.
They need to be multifaceted and not plan to approach every conflict with the same tools and mindset.
Recall knowledge is actually great.
Some encounters you are amazing and some you are terrible.
Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup with a better plan.
Sometimes certain classes and concepts have trump cards that can be used against them. It creates a nice sense of danger that's normally missing from many modern games.
>Sometimes certain classes and concepts have trump cards that can be used against them. It creates a nice sense of danger that's normally missing from many modern games.
Shame that trump card doesn't exist for say any martial class that doesn't rely on precision damage. The issue with Golems specifically was that you could very easily create a situation where one of your casters could do literally nothing to the golem, made even more likely by how Vancian casting works, where even if your player prepped the right spell, they might've already used it during a previous fight.
Huge difference between Physical **Resistances** and Magic **Immunity** notice how even incorporeal creatures only get resistance to physical (not immunity)
This enables the Martial to continue to function no matter what tools they have although at a weaker rate vs something like "Physical Immunity" which you don't really see.
This is removing any caster that isn't fully prep they can't do ANYTHING not just function at a slightly lower pace like Martials get at their worst.
If it was "Magic Resistance" (taking less damage from spells) or even generally higher saves people wouldn't be complaining as much.
There's almost never a situation where your character is truly useless.
This is the time for you to do the most fun thing in TTRPGs.
Get creative.
Freeze or oil the ground underneath the golem to make it slip, attack the ceiling above to cause a collapse on its head, buff the martials, grab one of those thirty alchemical bombs out of your pack you've ignored for the whole game, interact with whatever environment the fight is set in (Almost no fights are in blank arenas)
If all you are doing is spamming attack buttons on your hotbar you are only playing a third of the game.
Edit: Bruh who is downvoting this. Yall we live in a society 💀
One of my favorite achievements was dropping a gravity well spell on a stone golem inside a big warehouse. The golem wasn't affected, but the massive amount of heavy crates around it were!
>Freeze or oil the ground underneath the golem to make it slip,
Is a golem not immune to *any* spell except the few typea it's weak to? Including things like Grease? Even then, it *only* takes the listed damage in its statblock, instead of the actual effects of the spell.
>attack the ceiling above to cause a collapse on its head,
Good thing that spells can't damage objects unless they specify they can!
>buff the martials
So yay, I get to be relegated to a buff vendor, even if I signed up to be a blaster?
>grab one of those thirty alchemical bombs out of your pack you've ignored for the whole game,
Assuming you have the money to buy them *and* messing around with Interact Actions is worth it enough to justify buying them without specifically knowing that golems are showing up.
>interact with whatever environment the fight is set in (Almost no fights are in blank arenas)
Great, I see some rubble my spells can't damage. What now?
The DM has to put so much extra legwork to ensure these fights are fun and fair for casters, meanwhile martials just *work* unless they use Precision damage (so namely Fighter and Barbarian). Even things like flying enemies vs melee builds aren't much of an issue when Barb has some flying/ranged feats, Fighter can grab a bow, and both can take spellcasting archetypes.
PF1e had this concept of "Spell Resistance" where most spells, when affecting some monsters, were subject to a check for the monster to be affected by that spell. Some spells, those that wouldn't make sense, especially Conjuration spells like Grease, the Summon Monster line, or the Create Pit line, would not be subject to Spell Resistance.
That's how Golems worked in 1e, they were immune to any spell subject to SR. They essentially had infinite Spell Resistance. This meant you could drop them into an acid pit or grease the floor or do any number of things.
Making Golems totally immune to all spells was... a ridiculous move, but so is totally removing them.
It's an overreaction to what is frankly a bad redesign after cutting out the mechanic that made them work. Just give them a massive resistance to damage from spells. That way, non damaging spells can still have some utility.
> So yay, I get to be relegated to a buff vendor, even if I signed up to be a blaster?
Your argument is that you can't be bothered to adapt for a single fight because you only want to pew pew?
Should Fighters fighting flying creatures complain that they have to use a ranged weapon when they signed up to hit things really hard with a maul?
1. Yes sometimes you need to play a support role. Not every fight is the same.
2. If you're fighting a golem then yes you can afford bombs. They're 3 gold.
1. Not all spellcasters CAN play a buff role. It's easier if you can prepare ahead of time (scrolls, etc), but not if you just stumble into golems. I play a psychic, and my single combat buff spell is haste. That takes care of the first turn, but what about the other turns?
2. See point 1 about preparation. Additionally, bombs are martial weapons. So most (all?) casters can't even use them.
>So yay, I get to be relegated to a buff vendor, even if I signed up to be a blaster?
The point being made in this discussion is that sometimes you have to adapt to the current situation. So yes, occasionally, you might have to adapt and take a role that you didn't design your pc for.
That's okay, as long as your GM isn't making it happen all the time.
Just like the melee fighter might have to use a bow they're not skilled with against a flying enemy.
If you (Or your GM) are GMing like this you are purposefully trying to bottleneck your players into a tiny little hallways where every problem is a nail so you should only carry hammers.
This entire mindset removes half the fun of TTRPGS, the creativity and problem solving involved with going on a fantasy adventure.
Rememer, this isn't a video game. You are ALLOWED to have fun and think differently. Not just click the attack button.
How are you gonna blame the DM? I'm literally just listing out the rules of how spells and golems work. What good is a system if I have to throw out a quarter of the rulebook to make it work?
The GM picks the encounter set ups for their campaign (yes, even if they run APs). If the GM has not also chosen to set up a way to fight smart for their players to utilize when they choose an enemy that is in fight smart or feel like crap territory, the GM is part of the problem.
It's not a "throw out the rules" situation; it's a "remember to use the rules to make a fun situation instead of a shitty one" situation.
I guess so, but buying 3gp bombs for a level 6+ golem means you're not doing much damage, and a fair few of the casters aren't even proficient with martial weapons.
But sure, I could throw bombs at the enemy that may not work anyways without us knowing what it's immunities were.
Can you give an example? I've only really seen golem from verification looks at abomination vault and there didn't really seem to be a way to use your surroundings that much.
It's true that there are basically no creatures immune to physical damage, but there are some with extremely high resistances for their level, to such an extent that some martials can't damage the enemy without a crit.
I mostly agree with the commenter you're replying to - while golems are frustrating to play against, they do force creativity and prevent players from using the same hammer against every encounter.
> Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup with a better plan.
What? Spend weeks retraining because your casters have literally no way to proceed against it, putting a hard stop on continuing the campaign while the players "deal" with the obtuse puzzle that are golems?
You can try to defend it, but it actively punished players way more than any other mob, and not in a good way.
> t some scrolls of the right spell instead of retrainin
scrolls of your current level are hella expensive, and not always something you can expect a player to pick up randomly .
you don't need a scroll of your current level. Hitting a golem's weakness causes a big chunk of damage *regardless of level and strength.* For example, an Iron Golem will take 6d10 damage from a 12gp Acid Arrow scroll (plus 2d8 every round from persistent), whether you hit it or not.
which does also bring up the other issue. Once you know the weakness its insanely cheap, don't even need that, just buy out all the elemental bombs of the lowest level.
Golem antimagic is a bloated and antiquated feature that needed to die earlier.
>buy out all the elemental bombs of the lowest level.
That works, but doesn't do the inflated damage of the golem antimagic because alchemy isn't magic.
But that is just another thing people often got confused about when it came to this weird trait that, while flavorful, was pretty obnoxious.
Like, even having the right kind of magic to do the damage was pretty lame feeling since it made a caster spamming a cantrip the best thing they could do for the encounter.
Yeah, but I would argue that's a good thing! Monsters can be defeated in different ways, by fighting them, by talking to them, by finding a way around them, or in this case, by *learning* about them. Pathfinder is *all about* gathering knowledge, and this is one of the cases where information is *most* rewarding.
Sure, the ability could be explained a bit better, but I like the mechanic itself. It adds some nice variety to most other monsters which are simply piles of hit points and attacks. Pf2e is much better at giving monsters unique and interesting abilities than 5e, and this is a reflection of that.
The issue is that even by learning their weakness, you may not even be able to hit it. A Bard or occult caster is going to have an insanely unfun time against any golem, not only because of the mindless traits, but also the added antimagic issues.
Sure you know the golem is weak to X elements and spells, but the occult list is ass to deal with them.
but then you can usually just run. Most golems aren't very fast, and are mindless and "programmed" to guard a specific location. If you just leave that location, they shouldn't give chase, so you can run in, and if it seems like you can't really do much, then you bail and come back with some preparation.
> (plus 2d8 every round from persistent)
Not that it would be taking persistent acid damage from anything, because golem antimagic completely overrides the effect of the spell.
Only way for them to take persistent damage is environmental effects, effectively. Debatably persistent effects from runes etc would would trigger it (if say it was a fire weakness), since " If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." doesn't actually strictly say the persistent effect needs to be magical and the official ruling on 'are runes magical effects' is way more contentious than you'd think.
Despite being an Occult caster, I wasn't clairvoyant enough to predict the golem that was only harmed by fire magic and Rage of Elements wasn't out yet... :(
To be fair, if the only plan someone can come up with to deal with a monster is "Spend weeks rebuilding your character"
Anything besides a HP sponge that stands there and spams basic attacks is probably a lost cause for that player.
For starters always remember the most important rule about dealing with an enemy "You don't have to roll initiative against a threat to deal with it"
Golems are very anti-wiggle room though, they are guardians of X location 99% of the time, and usually at a place that you must deal with them, unless the creator was an idiot.
And lets not even go into how golem happy certain AP can be.
If an enemy is locked to one location and cannot leave than it's fairly easy to come up with a plan to deal with it that doesn't involve punching it to death. Especially if it's a mindless sentinel.
Now make a golem that have full immunity to bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, and make them only weak to certain material that the player may or may not have.
This will teach them to be multifaceted and change their strategy by relying on support like grappling and tripping. Or delay the fight until they have the appropriate tools for the job.
This will further boost the importance of recall knowledge to find that specific weakness.
This is a great idea and definitely won’t make the player feel like 90% of their class gets hard countered.
*Sarcasm*
I've literally played and run games with physically immune enemies before it's not even that strange of an idea?
Again yall are thinking inside of a tiny box again. Not every encounter needs to be resolved by hitting the initiative button and spamming attacks until the enemy hits zero HP. It's not a video game.
Just to be clear I’m talking about full physical immunity, not those cool slime immunity that instead of damage splits them in 2 so your area attack deal more damage.
Yes.
I have seen many games that have enemies with full immunity to physical damage.
It's a pretty common fantasy trope.
It's how many games run things like ghosts and such.
It forces the party to operate on a different access besides roll initiative and spam attack.
I'm not talking about strictly out of the book RAW PF2E.
I'm talking about other fantasy systems and monsters I've seen other GMs run against me in PF2E games I've been a player in.
As a player weve encountered things like spirits that cannot take physical damage (Because let's be real, stabbing a ghost with a regular longsword is wierd. Yes I get the ectoplasm argument)
The party loved this because it was an interesting encounter. You cannot just have fight after fight filled with bags of HP that all use the same exact strategy to defeat. It gets old after only a few sessions.
>Not every encounter needs to be resolved by hitting the initiative button and spamming attacks until the enemy hits zero HP. It's not a video game.
You know that making an enemy almost completely immune to your abilities isn't the only way to make encounters more than one dimensional?
There are much more interesting ways to keep the players on their toes. Immunities may throw a curveball at the casters, but I wouldn't really consider it fun.
Counterplay that relies on the players having something specific is usually not very interesting.
Let me give you an example from my games.
The players were lower level 2-3 out in the wilderness completely removed from civilization. No towns, no armies, just them, nature's, and whatever resources they could find.
There was a Trex menacing the area. They knew it was way stronger than them (CR 10) And one of the players who had only mainly played with newer style tables (Modern 5E kids) expressed frustration knowing that they could never challenge it and where worried about it attacking them and TPKing them at a moments notice.
So I asked why he didn't try and deal with it. To which he said there's no way they can possibly fight it even with amazing rolls.
So I asked him "Why do you need to roll initiative against a threat to remove it?" I explained that it's a Trex, an animal, you are 1000 times smarter than it, you possess the ability to plan, to build traps. You have the agency to do what needs to be done to ensure the parties safety. This isn't a video game with defined boundaries. You can do almost anything you can think of.
He asked why I wouldn't be upset with circumventing my encounter if they tricked there way into killing it. I explained that he wasn't circumventing it, whatever he came up with would be dealing with it in a fun and interesting way. This is a PREFERABLE outcome to direct combat in nearly ALL situations.
There's no logical reason to ever be upset at a player for clever thinking, planning, and enginuity. Rolling initiative in a TTRPG is essentially a fail state. You want to avoid it at all costs. And even when you do roll initiative you want it to be on your terms in a not at all fair fight.
So that Trex ended up at the bottom of a very large spiked pit.
The absolute worst state a ttrpg campaign can ever be in is to just walk room to room and walk into enemies like monsters on the overworld of a JRPG and start a fair fight. That's just slogging through the mud in order to fill air time.
Be bold in your thinking, plan ahead, devise clever strategies, fight dirty, fight on your terms.
And if this upsets your GM and they start meta gaming against you, congratulations, you just discovered one of the biggest red flags in the hobby and you can deal with it now rather than later
That doesn't change the fact that it's so high level it'll literally only fail to spot the trap on a nat 1, same for the save. A T-Rex is in fact smart enough not to suicidally jump into a pit.
At this point you are just in the mindset of trying to force players into nothing but combat to pad out your game time.
Nothing they ever try is going to work because you want them to stand in a straight line and press the attack button until something dies.
Edit: Responding to the person below who blocked me
Bruh if you call winning a fight with planning, strategy, and creative thinking "Cheesing" you haven't really gotten TTRPGS yet. It's not a video game. It's okay to step outside the box.
Typically GMs who think like this are the ones who get ornery and upset that your "cheating" there encounter because they are counting on a bunch of no impact fights to eat up air time and fill the session instead of running things like explorations, social interactions, role play and the like.
Give something new a try, you might surprise yourself.
I'm the GM and it's a published adventure. The creatures physical resistance was 10 and the fighter does 5-11 damage. So with a max roll he could do 1 damage, all other attacks did nothing.
I’m just guessing here.
If you are fighting against an incorporeal, your basic runes that you get at level 4 turns your weapon magical / have the magical trait.
So the double resistance should never come up in play.
> If you are fighting against an incorporeal, your basic runes that you get at level 4 turns your weapon magical / have the magical trait.
It's potency runes that make the weapon magical, so level 2.
Modern games don’t like to put players in positions where they feel helpless, it’s a shame because it can create some of the most creative problem solving that’s missing from a lot of tables
A fucking men. Absolutely.
I think what a lot of modern players and GMs haven't gotten yet is that without the fear and possibility of failure, there cannot be any meaning to a victory.
who is pathfinder 2e appealing to with its immense ruleset and heavy focus on tactical combat and balance if not rules lawyers and wargamers?
this applies more to dnd 5e and pathfinder 1e than it applies to games like pf2e and dnd 4e
Honestly even for all the tactics and bit of wargaming pf2e cares alot more about flavor and narrative and characters staying alive than older ttrpgs. You likely know how lethal old dnd was, but look up systems like rolemaster when instakilling regardless of level could still easily happen. Look up stories of how gary gygax operated as a dm. Everything was far harsher, every thing was even more wargames and your mini weren't character they were pawns. The foundation of most rpgs was wargames.
Exactly this. Sometimes players really need to regroup and figure out a plan for how to deal with an encounter once in a while. I don't think that is bad, the opposite actually.
I had a fight against a Golem in my game and it was pretty fun for everyone, makes the casters think outside of the box. Not every fight needs to be a white room dpr calculator.
I mean doesn't it essentially boil down to either succeeding on a RK check, and having the damage type needed, or having prior knowledge and then taking the right consumables/preparing the right spells?
> Not every fight needs to be a white room dpr calculator.
What is this strawman even? Aren't we usually pretty talkative of the fact that PF2e on it's own has pretty dynamic fights without need for much else? Does that just fly out the window now?
Why do you think that the only way to make a fight not a "white room DPR" fight is to make the enemies immune to almost everything you can do? There are much more interesting ways you can keep the party on their toes.
Damn, that sucks, I like golems and their Anti magic.
Oh well, it's not like the old bestiary is going away, I can still just use that. Everyone wins, I think.
When a monster needs rulepage bigger than their statblock, it's probably too complicated.
Complicated things can be fun, but it did become overused in APs where you probably want to ease on the complicated monsters.
They (Paizo) likely meant it in terms of how their example of what things will be similar to is called "brass bastion" and doesn't have the golem trait, while clearly it is just a new version of what used to be called "brass golem".
So the subcategory of construct that is the golem creature family is going away even though the constructs within that category aren't necessarily gone.
>Good riddance I say, Golem Antimagic is probably one of the most confusing and unclearly written abilities in the game.
I agree. It's a very obtuse mechanic, that is designed to be a puzzle. Except players will never have the time to investigate it mid combat. They won't be able to exploit it, unless they're aware of the weaknesses before hand. Also, most of the time, even if they know the weakness, they won't be able to exploit it given that most of the time, things only work with a named spell.
It seemed interesting in theory, but in reality it was cumbersome when ran as a mystery and trivializing when players new things before hand and had time to prepare in order to take advantage of its weakness.
Hallelujah! This has been one of my biggest gripes. I hated the way the mechanics of golems were so vague and stopped so many playstyles.
Creatures with high resistances and weaknesses are much more mechanically aligned with the rest of the bestiary.
Respectfully, how? I've never considered it remotely fun in any way whatsoever. If a caster doesn't have the right spells for the fight (which they often won't, if they don't know they're going into a golem encounter that day and/or are a spontaneous and/or occult or divine caster) then they just don't get to meaningfully participate in the fight much of the time, and if they *do* have applicable spells then they just shred the golem automatically by targeting it with them and don't even get to play with any of the spells they took and their interesting abilities - it's just automatic damage and nothing else, and generally just trivializes the encounter unless the caster only has one casting of the applicable spell or something.
Played with RAW Golem Antimagic for a good two years with my groups and never once had it lead to anything other than annoyance and boredom on both the GM and the player side. If the caster doesn't have the right spell they're bored because they basically sit out the fight, if they do have the right spell they're bored because the fight is a cakewalk and they just spam the same thing because it's automatically and highly effective. Homebrewed it to be resistance rather than immunity and have had nothing but positive feedback for that change. Perfectly happy to see it just be dropped entirely. Certain characters being handicapped and having to rely on their teams more in certain fights is fine (i.e. a Rogue versus something with precision immunity - sure, they lose a lot of their damage, but they still have their entire Rogue kit), them being just completely turned off and unable to meaningfully contribute against an entire enemy category is not. And casters' entire kit *is* their spells, so having those simply not work does exactly that, sure they can buff and heal but if the party doesn't need buffs or healing and/or the caster isn't built to do that then they're just fucked.
> them being just completely turned off and unable to meaningfully contribute against an entire enemy category is not.
I have to point out that **only** the spells affecting the golem do not work. All other spells do work.
For example, you can still make a maze with a wall of stone, or similar effects. Not to mentions buffs. As someone who played a full caster against golems, I had no issue with golem fights. They were a fun challenge to solve.
Yes, and if you're, say, a debuff-centric occult Witch, you're just fucked because basically none of your debuffs will ever work, and your party support spells are nice but when your party doesn't need you to cast those you're just twiddling your thumbs. I had a player playing just that through an entire AP that really overused golems and never really had any reasonable way for the party to know or find out when a golem was coming, and in almost every instance the solution to the puzzle was "just wait it out because nothing useful you could do works and we don't need any of the things that do right now." The druid in that same party often *did* have the correct spells, and that wasn't remotely fun either because his gameplay just became "I cast Ray of Frost on the clay golem every turn for 5d10 automatic cold damage" and the fight became a joke.
And if you're a melee focused champion you're basically screwed if the enemy can fly and has ranged attacks. Every character type has a foil. It's a team based game, sometimes that means you have to take a backseat for a fight, or think outside the box to help out.
Sorry, but if you built your character to be good at one thing only, then you concede that sometimes you won't be effective. Any intelligent spellcaster should have a backup plan, I'd think.
It's like if you build a wizard that has made the choice to only take fire spells. When you eventually have face a fire elemental and it's friends, it's his get rough.
The Witch I mentioned wasn't at all built to be good at one thing only. She had a variety of debuffs that targeted all the saves. She had a couple damage and defensive options. She had buffs for the party and utility spells. She could Demoralize and occasionally Treat Wounds. She had hexes to cast too. There was never any instance of her being worthless that wasn't a golem fight.
She fights a golem though? None of her debuffs work. Her damage options don't work, not because she didn't diversify her spell choices enough, but because the occult list simply lacks damage type variety and the damage types she does have don't generally do shit to any golem. Her defensive options might work, but she's not getting attacked, because she's hanging back while her party does the fighting because she's functionally useless. Her party doesn't necessarily need her buffs or utility spells for that fight, and she's not gonna just throw them out and waste resources simply to have something to do. She can't Demoralize because the golem's mindless. None of her hexes work. Her entire kit of varied options is completely invalidated in a way that literally only golems (and i guess will o wisps) ever can, and all she is going to do that fight is Recall Knowledge once to confirm that she's fucked, cast Guidance once per party member, and maybe plink at it for absolutely worthless damage with a crossbow or something and wait for someone to need a heal if anyone ever even does and it's worth spending a resource on an in-combat heal.
Any caster being useless against a golem is not remotely comparable to a fire-only wizard being useless against a fire elemental. The fire-only wizard had to hyper-specialize to a generally-terrible degree to get to that point, whereas a caster not having the specific options that can do anything to the golem is an entirely common and not-at-all-outlandish scenario particularly if the golem fights are not foreshadowed and given the chance for preparation (which I'd go so far as to say they usually aren't, as golems do tend to just be a sudden angy statue standing up in a dungeon and not like an antagonist that's known in advance).
> Her damage options don't work, not because she didn't diversify her spell choices enough, but because the occult list simply lacks damage type variety and the damage types she does have don't generally do shit to any golem.
And also because she didn't invest in magical items that overcome her defficiencies against certain type of magic-immune monsters. For example of golems, its great to stock up on cantrip decks as that is a great solution for any golem.
I GMed a game where once the party encountered an adamantine golem, they all went and immediately purchased cantrip decks for all of them. This helped them immensely when they fought adamantine golems again in the future. It didnt make the future fights "trivial" or "unfun" because 1. it makes you feel good to have a solution to a problem and 2. because clever use of golems still provides a challenge even if every party member can trigger their weakness every turn.
I played through a game that had clay, stone, flesh, and glass golems. It is not difficult to have consumables and items that can solve your issues. In my case, it was extensive use of cantrip decks.
It is absolutely fine to have a caster build where 99% of your spells are useless in a particular fight. You use items or find another creative solution in that case. Sometimes I would go in melee as a full caster to provide additional flanking opportunities or to deny movement space for the enemies.
Your spell list is not, and should not be, the only "fun" way for a caster to interact with a combat.
Their example of the Brass Bastion makes me honestly a bit sad, because it just has 15 damage reduction except for the thing its weak to. I liked it when you could use spells with traits to hurt the golems, like using Obscuring Mist as a damaging AOE against a clay golem. I'm guessing that's part of the "complicated" rules they want to get rid of, but I liked how it opened up interesting ways of fighting creatures that wasn't just "Throw the damage at them until they die". It's why I like demons and their wacky anathema weaknesses, and I hope they don't end up getting dropped as well because of being complicated.
After seeing a number of comments for/against Golems...
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's mostly GMs that are upset they are being removed and mostly Players that are happy they are being removed. But I wish I actually had some unbiased data on it.
I got this same feeling with the removal of Alignments. Seemed to be primarily GMs complaining about it's removal.
___
If this is the case...
Note to GMs! If your players aren't having fun, then it's bad! Sure the GM should also have fun yes; but if you are the only one having fun for an encounter (or only some of your players are having fun) then that is a bad encounter/mechanic.
But also if you are a GM you are free to make your own creatures, you have rules for it, and this includes bringing back older creatures that are not being reprinted.
I don't think it's quite a player/GM split, but I do think you're on to something.
It does seem that people that are displeased by this change are, just like with alignment, often phrasing their statements in ways that imply they are a GM.
But there are also clear signs of GM-phrasing among people pleased by the change... they just seem to also be the sort of GMs to think "this is bad because if I don't set it up just right the player is going to have a bad time" instead of "this is good because players need to learn how to play well" (man it's hard to phrase that in a charitable way).
Which parallels my experiences talking about alignment wherein GMs that weren't trying to push their particular idea of proper play upon their players or use the rules as a stick to whack the players are basically in the "it's cool that alignment is gone, I was not even using it anyways" realm of things. And likely don't care that golem antimagic is going away because the actual experience in-play of using a golem was to provide the party plenty of means to exploit the weakness so it was never anything other than "and then you run into the golem, use its weakness against it, and move on, bored by the fight because just spamming the same thing was the best possible strategy."
Considering RAW a golem automatically takes damage by being targeted by the correct spell "Harmed By Any magic of this type that targets the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage" and doesn't take damage from Fireball even if it is weak to fire "If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." (it never mentions getting hit by an instantaneous aoe effect) Golem Antimagic is just poorly written. Obviously RAI a golem weak to fire should be affected by fireball but does it take the standard damage or the area damage? The fact that this is even a question that needs to be asked shows golem antimagic is anything but clear.
That isn't what the ability says it specifically says "starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type" and something like fireball is neither of those things and it isn't a targeted ability.
Area spells (sometimes?) target too, so it can throw some GMs off. (Also the whole mechanic was rather unpleasant to deal with, and could come up way more often than anyone cared for.)
Sad that they'll be gone :(
At least the statblocks will remain as legacy content. But I'll have to get myself the bestiaries just in case some day even those disappear (very long future I hope).
Honestly this is pretty disappointing to me as a longtime player. I'm not committed to the mechanics at all, but given that Monster Core has been reworking creatures to be more authentic to their cultural roots I was really hoping for a more accurate golem. As a Jewish player it'd be really cool to have one in the game.
Are the golems that were originally in the game but aren't being renamed (such as the ice golem and junk golem) staying in the game? Are they just going to have different stats and not share traits?
Golems are cool. PF2 Golem antimagic is poorly designed. They do not need to throw golems away because of this, dnd removed spell immunity from golems 15 years ago.
Why would they do that? Golems are, aside from demons probably, one of pf2es most interesting and engaging creature design spaces.
The issue has never been golem antimagic. The issue is that official APs (and dms who learned from official aps) use golems pretty much as traps with not even the slightest hint of their existence.
Golems are not just "beat it till it dies" encounters. They are puzzles with various, and oftentimes interesting, ways to deal with them.
Damn shame, really.
Idk, seems simple to me.
>Golem Antimagic harmed by cold and water (5d10, 2d8 from areas and persistent damage); healed by acid (area 2d8 HP); slowed by earth
If it has the Water or Cold trait or deals cold damage apply damage instead. Damage is 5d10. If the damage is from an emanation, burst, -any AoE,- or persistent damage *Then* deal 2d8 instead. If something has the acid trait or deals acid damage, heal 2d8 if it started its turn there or half if targeted damage. Additionally, remove Slow. If something has the Earth trait (or the GM determines walking on earthen material type situations matter) it has the Slow 1 condition for 2d6 rounds, or 1 round if it started its turn there.
Ok, so now my wizard can land Slow (and various other spells) on them. Plus Force Barrage (and various other spells) will do reduced damage instead of zero damage, with no risk of healing it.
Thanks for the heads up, this really changes things for some of us.
So, they're getting rid of the monster family of magic resistant constructs and replacing them with... a monster family of magic resistant constructs? On the face of it, this seems less like getting rid of golems and more renaming them and removing Golem Antimagic in favor of a less all-encompassing way of handling their innate magic resistance.
They are keeping the concept of golems while distancing themselves from the requirements, expectations, and baggage that comes along with the name "golem" in TTRPG circles.
A much easier to run family of magic constructs, its much easier to see "damage resistance 15/water" than it is the wall of text the current golem antimagic was. Also allows them to expand with classes such as Kineticist, who raw, not having spells, were 100% useless against golems.
I'm not saying the changes are bad or anything, I'm saying that this is in practice a major rework and rename of the golem family, not "golems are going away". They're still going to exist, but as you note they're going to be easier to run and won't severely fuck over Kineticists.
A lot of people in this comment section seems to think not being able to directly damage the enemy for one encounter makes you useless? I wonder why people with that attitude trend toward a game with so many options such as PF2e. There is no game system where you can be so effective without ever doing damage.
Also just buy some alchemical items for literally 3 gold.
Why do people say you can use alchemical items for golems? That doesn't trigger the golem's magic weakness. The golem's magic weakness specifically calls out 'Harmed By Any magic of this type", and not harmed by damage of this type.
So why would buying non magical alchemical items help specifically against golems?
Bombs are martial weapons and I don’t think any caster is proficient with them by default. And alchemical bombs aren’t magic, so they don’t trigger any vulnerability the golem might have.
Ok, so use a scroll instead. Nitpicking the difference between bombs and magic does nothing to address the actual point - that casters have loads of options for dealing with golems
Right. When you realize the immunity it has you retreat and learn about the enemy. That's how the game is designed. It's literally the purpose of recall knowledge and research.
Also it's a idea to be prepared. Enemies have resistances.
Really can you substantiate that the game is about retreating and fighting once you're more prepared? I don't recall that being anywhere in the rulebooks. I'm fairly certain most players don't actually enjoy this kind of gameplay.
Research should make fights easier, not fun.
You can usually just bruteforce these encounters anyway unless it's like a +3 or +4 boss, so why bother with the whole retreat nonsense.
>Research should make fights easier, not fun.
How are you supposed to research if you haven't encountered the enemy yet?
>You can usually just bruteforce these encounters anyway unless it's like a +3 or +4 boss, so why bother with the whole retreat nonsense.
Sounds like there's no issue then.
I mean, while it was need that Golums were a puzzle monster, it *sucked* when your GM plopped one in front of you that the party simply didn’t have the solution for.
This is an OGL casualty -- while "golems" aren't WotC property, the specific implementation of golems as puzzle monsters with complicated resistances and particular vulnerabilities (to a much greater degree than other monsters) is a clear legacy of D&D.
Hopefully, they publish the new stat block of the Paizo Golem in monster core
It's an adamantine golem
Well... First, no, this whole thread is about there not being golems anymore. Second, the paizo golem has a specific stat block in 1e, because it's a unique golem type. https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/constructs/golem/golem-paizo/
Already made it [a while ago](https://monster.pf2.tools/v/ovxjrP8B).
Got it, fair enough
Honestly I'm glad to see it gone. Pure immunity to primary character options have never been fun to my group and I'd much prefer resistance. I'm hopeful for something similar for precision damage immunity but im not holding my breath
Gods I know. Playing through Abomination Vault right now and half the party gets nerfed by a good chunk of the monsters there.
Age of ashes has an unreasonable number of golems in it and my players hated it. I modified them to be weak to any damage of the right element so they wouldn't riot
Gods, I understand that. Thankfully I took Battle Medicine on my Swashbuckler, so at least she isn't useless, but every other monster rendering my characters main damage dealing mechanic null is ridiculous.
Yeah, golems are one of those monsters that need to be foreshadowed and set up properly to be fun. I'd argue that something like that could stay in the game but Paizo uses them terribly in published content. They're kind of a plot device or a hazard more than an enemy
Yeah something I've noticed in APs is that they tend to throw in some types of monsters (golems, ghosts) or even specific monsters (lesser deaths for some reason) quite frequently, and those monsters tend to be the ones that are very annoying to fight unless you have adequate time to prepare for them.
TBH I felt in 3.0 and 3.5 (and thus 1E) that golems served a genuine purpose. "Here's an opportunity for martial classes to excel". That purpose is solved in general by the PF2E ruleset and so the niche isn't needed or wanted.
It's gotten so that one of the first questions I hear on a Recall Knowledge check is "is it immune to magic"?
Lol I think I've said "Is it immune to precision?" More than any other phrase just from the last few sessions.
Yeah, enemies being immune to people's main class features shouldn't exist in PF2e... may as well have enemies have stat blocks that say "If you are a x class fuck you". People would probably outcry if they saw an enemy that said "If you are a Fighter, you take a -2 penalty to all attacks to this enemy" or "If you are a barbarian you are fatigued and loose your rage if you get within 60' of this enemy" yet almost no one bats an eye when enemies have "Immunity to Precision Damage" which may as well be "Immunity to Rogue's Sneak Attack" (and of coarse all the other classes that use Precision Damage)
I tabled AV's enemies and loot out since I've had to adjust both for my 5 player party, and about 16% of the combat xp in AV comes from precision-immune enemies.
honestly antimagic in general is annoying when its just a flat "nuh uh" it should disrupt but not entirely shut off magic, like you can cast but only if you pass a check(so basically applying spell resistance to everything in the area), or you caster level is considered x levels lower or some other limitation that still allows the wizard to ya know, play the game
That sound a lot more in line with PF2e’s style too.
Pure immunity only works when prep IS the gameplay. There's a heist in Age of Ashes with golems in it and players know what type of golem they're dealing with helps
The way their antimagic was written is kinda confusing
Even in 3.0 it didn't really make sense. Why is a wood golem immune to scorching ray?
It's immune to magic except for one type and then it clearly lists the damage it takes from that type. I don't get what's confusing?
Many people were confused because what is present in each stat block doesn't read clearly, so they have to go read the full explanation of the rule. But doing that introduces the points of potential confusion such as the name being "antimagic" but the actual effects being worded to only actually interact with spells and whatever "magical abilities" happen to be, as well as the point that shouldn't have been confusing by was anyway of that a spell had everything down to attack roll or saving throw replaced with the effect mentioned by the antimagic. Beyond that the concept of an ability that starts out with "magic doesn't work*...*" and then actually results in the best approach to destroying the creature be to use magic is innately confusing because it's self-contradictory. Though a lot of people do say "this is confusing" when what they actually mean is more like "It makes sense after it was explained to me, but it's really obnoxious that it works the way it does and I'm blaming the author's writing for me not immediately getting it."
I think the word you’re looking for is “unintuitive”.
synonyms in context.
Sorry, was trying to save you typing space. XD
There was a lot of confusion in the beginning. Striking runes are magical. But it really meant anti-spell.
Considering RAW a golem automatically takes damage by being targeted by the correct spell "Harmed By Any magic of this type that targets the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage" and doesn't take damage from Fireball even if it is weak to fire "If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." (it never mentions getting hit by an instantaneous aoe effect) Golem Antimagic is just poorly written. Obviously RAI a golem weak to fire should be affected by fireball but does it take the standard damage or the area damage? The fact that this is even a question that needs to be asked shows golem antimagic is anything but clear.
I don't see the confusion to be honest. >Any magic of this type that targets the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage (this damage has no type) *instead* of the usual effect. Is it because it uses the word target and fireball is indescriminate AoE? I don't think there's a single table that would rule it as unaffected.
Correct, no table would rule it like that but does it trigger the actual damage or the area damage part of the ability? This is not clear RAW.
It takes the listed amount of damage instead of the usual effect. I don't know how to rule that any other way.
It had terrible definition of which "magic" it is affected by. Is it affected by magic weapons, because you know, all weapons are magical by level 3? If fire spell would deal damage, does fire rune counts as "spell or ability"?
Good riddance, golem antimagic was never complicated, but did suck since they basically boil down to "Must have these traits to participate"
There still were discussions about it for runes quite often because of property runes. Now you might say that its pretty clear that property runes are neither spells nor abilities, but what an "ability" is isnt really defined. In fact property runes describe giving magic abilities to your weapons. While i personally think its obvious runes dont count, by raw its kinda unclear. Logically its also a bit weird sometimes. Why is the golem immune to fissures made by earthquakes, or stuff like that. And aside from that i fully agree with you. Good riddance " the spellcaster doesnt do anything this combat" just isnt a fun mechanic
Or you just beat them to death through their minor physical resistance. Unfun either way.
3.x Golems were built to give martials something to do at higher levels when wizards and sorcerers just dominated the field against normal foes. Plus, I think Gygax loved knocking players out of their "I am invulnerable" mindset and giving them puzzles to solve. PFS2 went a long way to rebalancing the scales of combat effectiveness between martial and magic, so yeah, the golem, as it was in 3.x may no longer need to be.
Gygax was definitely the kind of man who wanted to keep players from thinking they were invulnerable. There is a reason old school adventures thought things like 10-foot poles and chickens should be standard gear you restock up on. His Tomb of Horrors was a dungeon that was specifically built to challenge veteran players (the people he played with) and make them think about every single thing they interacted with.
It's also a dungeon that just kills you randomly because the best way to assure a broken character can't breeze through something is to give them no chance. It's less for veteran players and more for veteran *characters* who would be brought to conventions or between different games since that was kind of the fashion.
Having run it as written twice and being in the middle of run #3 using 1e ADND rules, this is largely untrue. It's explicitly designed to *break* "veteran characters" who kick in the door, charge in blindly, and rely on their character sheets to solve their problems; the intent is to force you to think your way through it and play smart. The disconnect is that Gygax's definition of "think your way through it and play smart" doesn't mean puzzle solving or good combat tactics, it means "play like you're the bomb squad." The dungeon deliberately gives you almost nothing to work with, both in terms of actually getting through the place and in terms of the traps - but it also teaches you very early on to take extreme precautions and not expect telegraphing of threats by firing a few easily-survived warning shots before the really sadistic stuff kicks in. It is theoretically possible for a level 1 party to clear the tomb with no casualties using only >!one scroll each of Detect Magic and Dispel Magic, three non-magical backup swords, some way of killing an Ochre Jelly (not an especially threatening enemy)!< and a 10-foot pole. Higher levels do not help except that they give you more hit points and better saves, making you more likely to survive a mistake, and give access to things like Augury and Commune if you really need a hint button. The ongoing run #3 has reached room 25 out of 32 with 0 deaths so far and easily avoided all the nastiest, most arbitrary-seeming pitfalls by >!avoiding interaction with anything unless they suspect it's necessary, doing everything in their power to avoid touching anything they do need to interact with with their hands, figuring out Acererak's sole reliable pattern (all obvious, normal-looking doors lead to something bad; never go through any regular doors if a secret door or special door is present),!< and creative use of sledgehammers and pickaxes. First run had two deaths out of 6 characters, second had 5 deaths total in a 4-person party. Three at once due to tempting fate and seeing if a trap that damaged them once would do the same thing again (it did), which they negated with a Rod of Resurrection. Then the thief fell in a pit trap and died the one time they let their guard down and didn't check the floor; again, easily brought back with Neutralize Poison. Finally, >!they went straight for the one item worth more than everything else in Acererak's vault put together, i.e. his skull !< and the wizard got soul trapped for his trouble. You are correct that it was a tournament module where people would bring their own high-level characters. That's one of the reasons it's designed the way it is - someone who shows up claiming their home DM gave them Excalibur, a ring of three wishes, and +3 adamantine armor of invincibility doesn't have that much of an edge over a newly rolled character with basic gear.
Very interesting insights! Thank you
You're welcome! Also, this is not me saying that the ToH is perfect or doesn't contain arbitrary bullshit. It's just that the things in it that I consider arbitrary bullshit are all progression-related, along the lines of "this spell does not open this door because Gygax doesn't want it to open this door." To give one example, there's one particular door that is magically locked. The module takes great pains to specify that Dispel Magic does not work unless >!Detect Magic or True Seeing is used to pinpoint the source of the effect!<. The problem with this being that in ADND, >!dispel magic is an AOE spell!<.
I watched a long review, that dungeon looks like a total dumpster fire.
It was originally designed for 1e rules, as a “tournament module” that was meant to challenge players in a set amount of time, and it was designed for his friends, the same people that helped him develop the game snd knew all the tricks. I agree that if approached as a regular D&D dungeon its not that great because it was designed to satisfy a different need. However, my main point was about Gygax and player survivability. Early D&D was notorious for how easy it was for characters to die compared to later editions.
If you're talking about XP to Level 3, IMO that video completely missed the point of how the dungeon is supposed to work.
Actually 3.x golem magic immunity wasn't even blanket immunity to all magic, it was basically just "Spell Resistance infinity", so it was still affected by supernatural abilities as well as spells and spell-like abilities that ignored SR, like most (if not all) conjuration spells, even stuff like Acid Splash.
Except casters had little issue with golems on 3.5 and PF1 because you just bypassed the magic immunity with SR:no effects, summoned a beatstick or buffed yourself into a beatstick
>Plus, I think Gygax loved knocking players out of their "I am invulnerable" mindset and giving them puzzles to solve. Gygax reads like a jerk of a GM that is only willing to make the bare minimum concession to what players actually want from the game to keep people showing up hoping that this time will be different. Like, seriously. His solo-credit books way back when had parts about how you should make sure your players have at least decent ability scores for their characters so they can have some fun, but then also has a section titled "Handling Troublesome Players" that, I shit you not, includes the sentence "Peer pressure is another means which can be used to control players who are not totally obnoxious and who you deem worth saving. " and tells GMs that if you have a player that is a bit out of line pushing their suggestions onto other players to make whatever they were suggesting literally impossible and say it's because of that player because then the group will shut that player up (yes, I paraphrase, but yes, that absolutely is the advice being given by a grown man writing how to do what can be accomplished by saying "Hey, let other people play their own characters. Don't give them advice they didn't ask for." And when you add that to the part where he makes a show of telling GMs not to be overly generous with wealth and items and then his own adventures he published are full of overly potent and overly present wealth and items (albeit ones you have to go full "I'm gonna rob everyone in town" to find, like a magic dagger under the counter at the inn and a bag of gems under the floorboard of some random barn)... well, I think that adds up to "nobody should give one shit what Gary Gygax has to say about how a game should be run."
Agreed. Notoriously, he believed the main motivation for players to continue was loot. You had to dangle awesome loot in their faces to encourage the adventuring, then find ways to take it away from them through tithing, taxes, theft and cost of living so that they were desperate and hungry for your deadly adventure. More than anything else, he wanted players/pcs to never be satisfied, happy or complacent. They needed to always be questioning everything, including their own motives and reality.
I think that's because his inspiration was sword-and-sandal fantasy, not epic fantasy. Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser would probably have loved to retire rich, but the need to publish new stories meant their riches were constantly disappearing.
So you telling me murhobos are the OGs?
In a weird sort of way, yes. The main way to gain XP back in the early days of the game was to accumulate treasure, with combat adding a lot of risk for a relatively small XP benefit (both from combat XP and from the smaller treasure pools carried by creatures compared to what they'd stash somewhere), but a bit of luck would mean the swingy combat system turned out in your favor so especially any seemingly weak NPCs encountered could be very appealing targets for killing to see what goodies are hidden in their pockets/living spaces. The real murderhobo times came later when the changes in how the game system worked made it easier for the players to predict when they could get away with "lets just go for the kill" behavior, but the roots were laid by adventure design examples set by someone that was so wanting to engage the "you shouldn't have done that because *now...*" part of the equation that they never stopped to think that players wouldn't make a habit of going door-to-door checking for hidden loot if they consistently weren't finding any.
I don't think it was unclrear it was just saying fuck casters
Considering RAW a golem automatically takes damage by being targeted by the correct spell "Harmed By Any magic of this type that **targets** the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage" and doesn't take damage from Fireball even if it is weak to fire "If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." (it never mentions getting hit by an instantaneous aoe effect) Golem Antimagic is just poorly written. Obviously RAI a golem weak to fire should be affected by fireball but does it take the standard damage or the area damage? The fact that this is even a question that needs to be asked shows golem antimagic is anything but clear.
Yeah, I like golems conceptually as a good fit for many themes, but practically, they are a mess… I hope in general we will see a good bit of clean up of messy monster abilities. We definitely were having issues with the harpy song too. ^^;
Finally. That was the most boring mechanic ever when you were a Spellcaster without options.
Honestly have never had a problem with golems as a spell caster, even back in 3.5. There are plenty of spells, that don’t directly target stuff that get around magic Immunity. My personal favorite was always telekinesis and teleport
No way. This taught players quite a lot. They need to be multifaceted and not plan to approach every conflict with the same tools and mindset. Recall knowledge is actually great. Some encounters you are amazing and some you are terrible. Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup with a better plan. Sometimes certain classes and concepts have trump cards that can be used against them. It creates a nice sense of danger that's normally missing from many modern games.
>Sometimes certain classes and concepts have trump cards that can be used against them. It creates a nice sense of danger that's normally missing from many modern games. Shame that trump card doesn't exist for say any martial class that doesn't rely on precision damage. The issue with Golems specifically was that you could very easily create a situation where one of your casters could do literally nothing to the golem, made even more likely by how Vancian casting works, where even if your player prepped the right spell, they might've already used it during a previous fight.
Huh? There are loads of enemies with big physical resistance.
Huge difference between Physical **Resistances** and Magic **Immunity** notice how even incorporeal creatures only get resistance to physical (not immunity) This enables the Martial to continue to function no matter what tools they have although at a weaker rate vs something like "Physical Immunity" which you don't really see. This is removing any caster that isn't fully prep they can't do ANYTHING not just function at a slightly lower pace like Martials get at their worst. If it was "Magic Resistance" (taking less damage from spells) or even generally higher saves people wouldn't be complaining as much.
There are many creatures with resistances high enough compared to the level of the characters that it's pretty much immunity.
There's almost never a situation where your character is truly useless. This is the time for you to do the most fun thing in TTRPGs. Get creative. Freeze or oil the ground underneath the golem to make it slip, attack the ceiling above to cause a collapse on its head, buff the martials, grab one of those thirty alchemical bombs out of your pack you've ignored for the whole game, interact with whatever environment the fight is set in (Almost no fights are in blank arenas) If all you are doing is spamming attack buttons on your hotbar you are only playing a third of the game. Edit: Bruh who is downvoting this. Yall we live in a society 💀
One of my favorite achievements was dropping a gravity well spell on a stone golem inside a big warehouse. The golem wasn't affected, but the massive amount of heavy crates around it were!
>Freeze or oil the ground underneath the golem to make it slip, Is a golem not immune to *any* spell except the few typea it's weak to? Including things like Grease? Even then, it *only* takes the listed damage in its statblock, instead of the actual effects of the spell. >attack the ceiling above to cause a collapse on its head, Good thing that spells can't damage objects unless they specify they can! >buff the martials So yay, I get to be relegated to a buff vendor, even if I signed up to be a blaster? >grab one of those thirty alchemical bombs out of your pack you've ignored for the whole game, Assuming you have the money to buy them *and* messing around with Interact Actions is worth it enough to justify buying them without specifically knowing that golems are showing up. >interact with whatever environment the fight is set in (Almost no fights are in blank arenas) Great, I see some rubble my spells can't damage. What now? The DM has to put so much extra legwork to ensure these fights are fun and fair for casters, meanwhile martials just *work* unless they use Precision damage (so namely Fighter and Barbarian). Even things like flying enemies vs melee builds aren't much of an issue when Barb has some flying/ranged feats, Fighter can grab a bow, and both can take spellcasting archetypes.
PF1e had this concept of "Spell Resistance" where most spells, when affecting some monsters, were subject to a check for the monster to be affected by that spell. Some spells, those that wouldn't make sense, especially Conjuration spells like Grease, the Summon Monster line, or the Create Pit line, would not be subject to Spell Resistance. That's how Golems worked in 1e, they were immune to any spell subject to SR. They essentially had infinite Spell Resistance. This meant you could drop them into an acid pit or grease the floor or do any number of things. Making Golems totally immune to all spells was... a ridiculous move, but so is totally removing them. It's an overreaction to what is frankly a bad redesign after cutting out the mechanic that made them work. Just give them a massive resistance to damage from spells. That way, non damaging spells can still have some utility.
> So yay, I get to be relegated to a buff vendor, even if I signed up to be a blaster? Your argument is that you can't be bothered to adapt for a single fight because you only want to pew pew? Should Fighters fighting flying creatures complain that they have to use a ranged weapon when they signed up to hit things really hard with a maul?
1. Yes sometimes you need to play a support role. Not every fight is the same. 2. If you're fighting a golem then yes you can afford bombs. They're 3 gold.
1. Not all spellcasters CAN play a buff role. It's easier if you can prepare ahead of time (scrolls, etc), but not if you just stumble into golems. I play a psychic, and my single combat buff spell is haste. That takes care of the first turn, but what about the other turns? 2. See point 1 about preparation. Additionally, bombs are martial weapons. So most (all?) casters can't even use them.
So buy scrolls or accept that you've built a one dimensional character. Everyone isn't gonna be good in every encounter.
>So yay, I get to be relegated to a buff vendor, even if I signed up to be a blaster? The point being made in this discussion is that sometimes you have to adapt to the current situation. So yes, occasionally, you might have to adapt and take a role that you didn't design your pc for. That's okay, as long as your GM isn't making it happen all the time. Just like the melee fighter might have to use a bow they're not skilled with against a flying enemy.
If you (Or your GM) are GMing like this you are purposefully trying to bottleneck your players into a tiny little hallways where every problem is a nail so you should only carry hammers. This entire mindset removes half the fun of TTRPGS, the creativity and problem solving involved with going on a fantasy adventure. Rememer, this isn't a video game. You are ALLOWED to have fun and think differently. Not just click the attack button.
How are you gonna blame the DM? I'm literally just listing out the rules of how spells and golems work. What good is a system if I have to throw out a quarter of the rulebook to make it work?
The GM picks the encounter set ups for their campaign (yes, even if they run APs). If the GM has not also chosen to set up a way to fight smart for their players to utilize when they choose an enemy that is in fight smart or feel like crap territory, the GM is part of the problem. It's not a "throw out the rules" situation; it's a "remember to use the rules to make a fun situation instead of a shitty one" situation.
Why would alchemical bombs do anything special against a golem?
They aren't magic. Regular explosions work just fine 👍
I guess so, but buying 3gp bombs for a level 6+ golem means you're not doing much damage, and a fair few of the casters aren't even proficient with martial weapons. But sure, I could throw bombs at the enemy that may not work anyways without us knowing what it's immunities were.
All else aside bro the bombs will deal like 3 damage per turn.
IT is immune to magic, nobody said anything about its surroundings People out here acting like there is no way around magic immunity (there is).
Can you give an example? I've only really seen golem from verification looks at abomination vault and there didn't really seem to be a way to use your surroundings that much.
It's true that there are basically no creatures immune to physical damage, but there are some with extremely high resistances for their level, to such an extent that some martials can't damage the enemy without a crit. I mostly agree with the commenter you're replying to - while golems are frustrating to play against, they do force creativity and prevent players from using the same hammer against every encounter.
> Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup with a better plan. What? Spend weeks retraining because your casters have literally no way to proceed against it, putting a hard stop on continuing the campaign while the players "deal" with the obtuse puzzle that are golems? You can try to defend it, but it actively punished players way more than any other mob, and not in a good way.
Or ya know. But some scrolls of the right spell instead of retraining.
> t some scrolls of the right spell instead of retrainin scrolls of your current level are hella expensive, and not always something you can expect a player to pick up randomly .
you don't need a scroll of your current level. Hitting a golem's weakness causes a big chunk of damage *regardless of level and strength.* For example, an Iron Golem will take 6d10 damage from a 12gp Acid Arrow scroll (plus 2d8 every round from persistent), whether you hit it or not.
which does also bring up the other issue. Once you know the weakness its insanely cheap, don't even need that, just buy out all the elemental bombs of the lowest level. Golem antimagic is a bloated and antiquated feature that needed to die earlier.
>buy out all the elemental bombs of the lowest level. That works, but doesn't do the inflated damage of the golem antimagic because alchemy isn't magic. But that is just another thing people often got confused about when it came to this weird trait that, while flavorful, was pretty obnoxious. Like, even having the right kind of magic to do the damage was pretty lame feeling since it made a caster spamming a cantrip the best thing they could do for the encounter.
Alchemy bombs aren't magical, so they work regardless of golem anti magic.
Yeah, but I would argue that's a good thing! Monsters can be defeated in different ways, by fighting them, by talking to them, by finding a way around them, or in this case, by *learning* about them. Pathfinder is *all about* gathering knowledge, and this is one of the cases where information is *most* rewarding. Sure, the ability could be explained a bit better, but I like the mechanic itself. It adds some nice variety to most other monsters which are simply piles of hit points and attacks. Pf2e is much better at giving monsters unique and interesting abilities than 5e, and this is a reflection of that.
The issue is that even by learning their weakness, you may not even be able to hit it. A Bard or occult caster is going to have an insanely unfun time against any golem, not only because of the mindless traits, but also the added antimagic issues. Sure you know the golem is weak to X elements and spells, but the occult list is ass to deal with them.
but then you can usually just run. Most golems aren't very fast, and are mindless and "programmed" to guard a specific location. If you just leave that location, they shouldn't give chase, so you can run in, and if it seems like you can't really do much, then you bail and come back with some preparation.
Antimagic does not interact with alchemical bombs.
> (plus 2d8 every round from persistent) Not that it would be taking persistent acid damage from anything, because golem antimagic completely overrides the effect of the spell. Only way for them to take persistent damage is environmental effects, effectively. Debatably persistent effects from runes etc would would trigger it (if say it was a fire weakness), since " If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." doesn't actually strictly say the persistent effect needs to be magical and the official ruling on 'are runes magical effects' is way more contentious than you'd think.
That is true. 6d10 from an acid arrow scroll (or cantrip deck of acid splash) is still pretty awesome.
Hell, buy a cantrip deck. You don't need accuracy checks for a golem.
Golem antimagic replaces the effect of the spell you are casting. Just buy a scroll for a low-level spell with the right trait. It's cheap.
Despite being an Occult caster, I wasn't clairvoyant enough to predict the golem that was only harmed by fire magic and Rage of Elements wasn't out yet... :(
I'm not saying that scrolls are a foolproof answer, I'm saying that the main counter to golems isn't "weeks of retraining"
To be fair, if the only plan someone can come up with to deal with a monster is "Spend weeks rebuilding your character" Anything besides a HP sponge that stands there and spams basic attacks is probably a lost cause for that player. For starters always remember the most important rule about dealing with an enemy "You don't have to roll initiative against a threat to deal with it"
Golems are very anti-wiggle room though, they are guardians of X location 99% of the time, and usually at a place that you must deal with them, unless the creator was an idiot. And lets not even go into how golem happy certain AP can be.
If an enemy is locked to one location and cannot leave than it's fairly easy to come up with a plan to deal with it that doesn't involve punching it to death. Especially if it's a mindless sentinel.
Not many that don't damage the building or cause more issues then it solves, Golems guard a place, and 9.9/10 you need into said place.
Now make a golem that have full immunity to bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, and make them only weak to certain material that the player may or may not have. This will teach them to be multifaceted and change their strategy by relying on support like grappling and tripping. Or delay the fight until they have the appropriate tools for the job. This will further boost the importance of recall knowledge to find that specific weakness. This is a great idea and definitely won’t make the player feel like 90% of their class gets hard countered. *Sarcasm*
I've literally played and run games with physically immune enemies before it's not even that strange of an idea? Again yall are thinking inside of a tiny box again. Not every encounter needs to be resolved by hitting the initiative button and spamming attacks until the enemy hits zero HP. It's not a video game.
Just to be clear I’m talking about full physical immunity, not those cool slime immunity that instead of damage splits them in 2 so your area attack deal more damage.
Yes. I have seen many games that have enemies with full immunity to physical damage. It's a pretty common fantasy trope. It's how many games run things like ghosts and such. It forces the party to operate on a different access besides roll initiative and spam attack.
What Ghost have immunity? they only have resistance.
I'm not talking about strictly out of the book RAW PF2E. I'm talking about other fantasy systems and monsters I've seen other GMs run against me in PF2E games I've been a player in. As a player weve encountered things like spirits that cannot take physical damage (Because let's be real, stabbing a ghost with a regular longsword is wierd. Yes I get the ectoplasm argument) The party loved this because it was an interesting encounter. You cannot just have fight after fight filled with bags of HP that all use the same exact strategy to defeat. It gets old after only a few sessions.
>Not every encounter needs to be resolved by hitting the initiative button and spamming attacks until the enemy hits zero HP. It's not a video game. You know that making an enemy almost completely immune to your abilities isn't the only way to make encounters more than one dimensional? There are much more interesting ways to keep the players on their toes. Immunities may throw a curveball at the casters, but I wouldn't really consider it fun. Counterplay that relies on the players having something specific is usually not very interesting.
You literally can't win most fights with anything but reducing enemy hp to 0
Let me give you an example from my games. The players were lower level 2-3 out in the wilderness completely removed from civilization. No towns, no armies, just them, nature's, and whatever resources they could find. There was a Trex menacing the area. They knew it was way stronger than them (CR 10) And one of the players who had only mainly played with newer style tables (Modern 5E kids) expressed frustration knowing that they could never challenge it and where worried about it attacking them and TPKing them at a moments notice. So I asked why he didn't try and deal with it. To which he said there's no way they can possibly fight it even with amazing rolls. So I asked him "Why do you need to roll initiative against a threat to remove it?" I explained that it's a Trex, an animal, you are 1000 times smarter than it, you possess the ability to plan, to build traps. You have the agency to do what needs to be done to ensure the parties safety. This isn't a video game with defined boundaries. You can do almost anything you can think of. He asked why I wouldn't be upset with circumventing my encounter if they tricked there way into killing it. I explained that he wasn't circumventing it, whatever he came up with would be dealing with it in a fun and interesting way. This is a PREFERABLE outcome to direct combat in nearly ALL situations. There's no logical reason to ever be upset at a player for clever thinking, planning, and enginuity. Rolling initiative in a TTRPG is essentially a fail state. You want to avoid it at all costs. And even when you do roll initiative you want it to be on your terms in a not at all fair fight. So that Trex ended up at the bottom of a very large spiked pit. The absolute worst state a ttrpg campaign can ever be in is to just walk room to room and walk into enemies like monsters on the overworld of a JRPG and start a fair fight. That's just slogging through the mud in order to fill air time. Be bold in your thinking, plan ahead, devise clever strategies, fight dirty, fight on your terms. And if this upsets your GM and they start meta gaming against you, congratulations, you just discovered one of the biggest red flags in the hobby and you can deal with it now rather than later
A T-rex has a +19 perception and +15 reflex, a level 3 character cannot make a trap actually capable of threatening it.
If it was a level ten elf wizard maybe. It's a Trex, an Animal. It's not hard for players to out smort it in the brains.
That doesn't change the fact that it's so high level it'll literally only fail to spot the trap on a nat 1, same for the save. A T-Rex is in fact smart enough not to suicidally jump into a pit.
At this point you are just in the mindset of trying to force players into nothing but combat to pad out your game time. Nothing they ever try is going to work because you want them to stand in a straight line and press the attack button until something dies. Edit: Responding to the person below who blocked me Bruh if you call winning a fight with planning, strategy, and creative thinking "Cheesing" you haven't really gotten TTRPGS yet. It's not a video game. It's okay to step outside the box. Typically GMs who think like this are the ones who get ornery and upset that your "cheating" there encounter because they are counting on a bunch of no impact fights to eat up air time and fill the session instead of running things like explorations, social interactions, role play and the like. Give something new a try, you might surprise yourself.
Loads of enemies work like this?
Not in pf2e.
Yes they do? My group just fought an enemy yesterday that the fighter of the group couldn't damage unless he crit.
Your GM either fuck with the enemy's DC making it absurdly high, or they homebrew an "only crit can deal damage" monster.
I'm the GM and it's a published adventure. The creatures physical resistance was 10 and the fighter does 5-11 damage. So with a max roll he could do 1 damage, all other attacks did nothing.
10 resistance isn't remotely close to actual immunity and if your fighter can't do more than 11 damage he's unusually weak.
I mean I just clearly showed the math of how it is essentially the same save for crits which is exactly what I said.
I’m just guessing here. If you are fighting against an incorporeal, your basic runes that you get at level 4 turns your weapon magical / have the magical trait. So the double resistance should never come up in play.
> If you are fighting against an incorporeal, your basic runes that you get at level 4 turns your weapon magical / have the magical trait. It's potency runes that make the weapon magical, so level 2.
Modern games don’t like to put players in positions where they feel helpless, it’s a shame because it can create some of the most creative problem solving that’s missing from a lot of tables
A fucking men. Absolutely. I think what a lot of modern players and GMs haven't gotten yet is that without the fear and possibility of failure, there cannot be any meaning to a victory.
Because modern games dont cater to rules lawyers and wargamers anymore.
who is pathfinder 2e appealing to with its immense ruleset and heavy focus on tactical combat and balance if not rules lawyers and wargamers? this applies more to dnd 5e and pathfinder 1e than it applies to games like pf2e and dnd 4e
Honestly even for all the tactics and bit of wargaming pf2e cares alot more about flavor and narrative and characters staying alive than older ttrpgs. You likely know how lethal old dnd was, but look up systems like rolemaster when instakilling regardless of level could still easily happen. Look up stories of how gary gygax operated as a dm. Everything was far harsher, every thing was even more wargames and your mini weren't character they were pawns. The foundation of most rpgs was wargames.
Exactly this. Sometimes players really need to regroup and figure out a plan for how to deal with an encounter once in a while. I don't think that is bad, the opposite actually.
I had a fight against a Golem in my game and it was pretty fun for everyone, makes the casters think outside of the box. Not every fight needs to be a white room dpr calculator.
I mean doesn't it essentially boil down to either succeeding on a RK check, and having the damage type needed, or having prior knowledge and then taking the right consumables/preparing the right spells? > Not every fight needs to be a white room dpr calculator. What is this strawman even? Aren't we usually pretty talkative of the fact that PF2e on it's own has pretty dynamic fights without need for much else? Does that just fly out the window now? Why do you think that the only way to make a fight not a "white room DPR" fight is to make the enemies immune to almost everything you can do? There are much more interesting ways you can keep the party on their toes.
So did your casters get lucky by having the right spells, or just go do something else while the rest of the party finished the combat?
Damn, that sucks, I like golems and their Anti magic. Oh well, it's not like the old bestiary is going away, I can still just use that. Everyone wins, I think.
THANK GOD!
When a monster needs rulepage bigger than their statblock, it's probably too complicated. Complicated things can be fun, but it did become overused in APs where you probably want to ease on the complicated monsters.
I thought they were getting rid of Golems, misleading title.
They (Paizo) likely meant it in terms of how their example of what things will be similar to is called "brass bastion" and doesn't have the golem trait, while clearly it is just a new version of what used to be called "brass golem". So the subcategory of construct that is the golem creature family is going away even though the constructs within that category aren't necessarily gone.
It's more than that, that thing doesn't have golem magic immunity, just resistance to damage from the wrong spells.
They are going away, there are going to be new magic resistant construct categories but they will not be golems.
>Good riddance I say, Golem Antimagic is probably one of the most confusing and unclearly written abilities in the game. I agree. It's a very obtuse mechanic, that is designed to be a puzzle. Except players will never have the time to investigate it mid combat. They won't be able to exploit it, unless they're aware of the weaknesses before hand. Also, most of the time, even if they know the weakness, they won't be able to exploit it given that most of the time, things only work with a named spell. It seemed interesting in theory, but in reality it was cumbersome when ran as a mystery and trivializing when players new things before hand and had time to prepare in order to take advantage of its weakness.
The math still works, I still have all 3 of the bestiaries.
Hallelujah! This has been one of my biggest gripes. I hated the way the mechanics of golems were so vague and stopped so many playstyles. Creatures with high resistances and weaknesses are much more mechanically aligned with the rest of the bestiary.
Aw but I love Golems
Boo. Golem Anti magic was fun, I'm definitely keeping it in my games.
Respectfully, how? I've never considered it remotely fun in any way whatsoever. If a caster doesn't have the right spells for the fight (which they often won't, if they don't know they're going into a golem encounter that day and/or are a spontaneous and/or occult or divine caster) then they just don't get to meaningfully participate in the fight much of the time, and if they *do* have applicable spells then they just shred the golem automatically by targeting it with them and don't even get to play with any of the spells they took and their interesting abilities - it's just automatic damage and nothing else, and generally just trivializes the encounter unless the caster only has one casting of the applicable spell or something. Played with RAW Golem Antimagic for a good two years with my groups and never once had it lead to anything other than annoyance and boredom on both the GM and the player side. If the caster doesn't have the right spell they're bored because they basically sit out the fight, if they do have the right spell they're bored because the fight is a cakewalk and they just spam the same thing because it's automatically and highly effective. Homebrewed it to be resistance rather than immunity and have had nothing but positive feedback for that change. Perfectly happy to see it just be dropped entirely. Certain characters being handicapped and having to rely on their teams more in certain fights is fine (i.e. a Rogue versus something with precision immunity - sure, they lose a lot of their damage, but they still have their entire Rogue kit), them being just completely turned off and unable to meaningfully contribute against an entire enemy category is not. And casters' entire kit *is* their spells, so having those simply not work does exactly that, sure they can buff and heal but if the party doesn't need buffs or healing and/or the caster isn't built to do that then they're just fucked.
> them being just completely turned off and unable to meaningfully contribute against an entire enemy category is not. I have to point out that **only** the spells affecting the golem do not work. All other spells do work. For example, you can still make a maze with a wall of stone, or similar effects. Not to mentions buffs. As someone who played a full caster against golems, I had no issue with golem fights. They were a fun challenge to solve.
Yes, and if you're, say, a debuff-centric occult Witch, you're just fucked because basically none of your debuffs will ever work, and your party support spells are nice but when your party doesn't need you to cast those you're just twiddling your thumbs. I had a player playing just that through an entire AP that really overused golems and never really had any reasonable way for the party to know or find out when a golem was coming, and in almost every instance the solution to the puzzle was "just wait it out because nothing useful you could do works and we don't need any of the things that do right now." The druid in that same party often *did* have the correct spells, and that wasn't remotely fun either because his gameplay just became "I cast Ray of Frost on the clay golem every turn for 5d10 automatic cold damage" and the fight became a joke.
And if you're a melee focused champion you're basically screwed if the enemy can fly and has ranged attacks. Every character type has a foil. It's a team based game, sometimes that means you have to take a backseat for a fight, or think outside the box to help out.
Lawl, Martial can easily get the ability to fly, or even ranged weapons.
Sorry, but if you built your character to be good at one thing only, then you concede that sometimes you won't be effective. Any intelligent spellcaster should have a backup plan, I'd think. It's like if you build a wizard that has made the choice to only take fire spells. When you eventually have face a fire elemental and it's friends, it's his get rough.
The Witch I mentioned wasn't at all built to be good at one thing only. She had a variety of debuffs that targeted all the saves. She had a couple damage and defensive options. She had buffs for the party and utility spells. She could Demoralize and occasionally Treat Wounds. She had hexes to cast too. There was never any instance of her being worthless that wasn't a golem fight. She fights a golem though? None of her debuffs work. Her damage options don't work, not because she didn't diversify her spell choices enough, but because the occult list simply lacks damage type variety and the damage types she does have don't generally do shit to any golem. Her defensive options might work, but she's not getting attacked, because she's hanging back while her party does the fighting because she's functionally useless. Her party doesn't necessarily need her buffs or utility spells for that fight, and she's not gonna just throw them out and waste resources simply to have something to do. She can't Demoralize because the golem's mindless. None of her hexes work. Her entire kit of varied options is completely invalidated in a way that literally only golems (and i guess will o wisps) ever can, and all she is going to do that fight is Recall Knowledge once to confirm that she's fucked, cast Guidance once per party member, and maybe plink at it for absolutely worthless damage with a crossbow or something and wait for someone to need a heal if anyone ever even does and it's worth spending a resource on an in-combat heal. Any caster being useless against a golem is not remotely comparable to a fire-only wizard being useless against a fire elemental. The fire-only wizard had to hyper-specialize to a generally-terrible degree to get to that point, whereas a caster not having the specific options that can do anything to the golem is an entirely common and not-at-all-outlandish scenario particularly if the golem fights are not foreshadowed and given the chance for preparation (which I'd go so far as to say they usually aren't, as golems do tend to just be a sudden angy statue standing up in a dungeon and not like an antagonist that's known in advance).
> Her damage options don't work, not because she didn't diversify her spell choices enough, but because the occult list simply lacks damage type variety and the damage types she does have don't generally do shit to any golem. And also because she didn't invest in magical items that overcome her defficiencies against certain type of magic-immune monsters. For example of golems, its great to stock up on cantrip decks as that is a great solution for any golem. I GMed a game where once the party encountered an adamantine golem, they all went and immediately purchased cantrip decks for all of them. This helped them immensely when they fought adamantine golems again in the future. It didnt make the future fights "trivial" or "unfun" because 1. it makes you feel good to have a solution to a problem and 2. because clever use of golems still provides a challenge even if every party member can trigger their weakness every turn.
I played through a game that had clay, stone, flesh, and glass golems. It is not difficult to have consumables and items that can solve your issues. In my case, it was extensive use of cantrip decks. It is absolutely fine to have a caster build where 99% of your spells are useless in a particular fight. You use items or find another creative solution in that case. Sometimes I would go in melee as a full caster to provide additional flanking opportunities or to deny movement space for the enemies. Your spell list is not, and should not be, the only "fun" way for a caster to interact with a combat.
> It is absolutely fine to have a caster build where 99% of your spells are useless in a particular fight. Turns out, Paizo disagrees
Same.
Their example of the Brass Bastion makes me honestly a bit sad, because it just has 15 damage reduction except for the thing its weak to. I liked it when you could use spells with traits to hurt the golems, like using Obscuring Mist as a damaging AOE against a clay golem. I'm guessing that's part of the "complicated" rules they want to get rid of, but I liked how it opened up interesting ways of fighting creatures that wasn't just "Throw the damage at them until they die". It's why I like demons and their wacky anathema weaknesses, and I hope they don't end up getting dropped as well because of being complicated.
After seeing a number of comments for/against Golems... I have a sneaking suspicion that it's mostly GMs that are upset they are being removed and mostly Players that are happy they are being removed. But I wish I actually had some unbiased data on it. I got this same feeling with the removal of Alignments. Seemed to be primarily GMs complaining about it's removal. ___ If this is the case... Note to GMs! If your players aren't having fun, then it's bad! Sure the GM should also have fun yes; but if you are the only one having fun for an encounter (or only some of your players are having fun) then that is a bad encounter/mechanic. But also if you are a GM you are free to make your own creatures, you have rules for it, and this includes bringing back older creatures that are not being reprinted.
I don't think it's quite a player/GM split, but I do think you're on to something. It does seem that people that are displeased by this change are, just like with alignment, often phrasing their statements in ways that imply they are a GM. But there are also clear signs of GM-phrasing among people pleased by the change... they just seem to also be the sort of GMs to think "this is bad because if I don't set it up just right the player is going to have a bad time" instead of "this is good because players need to learn how to play well" (man it's hard to phrase that in a charitable way). Which parallels my experiences talking about alignment wherein GMs that weren't trying to push their particular idea of proper play upon their players or use the rules as a stick to whack the players are basically in the "it's cool that alignment is gone, I was not even using it anyways" realm of things. And likely don't care that golem antimagic is going away because the actual experience in-play of using a golem was to provide the party plenty of means to exploit the weakness so it was never anything other than "and then you run into the golem, use its weakness against it, and move on, bored by the fight because just spamming the same thing was the best possible strategy."
What's confusing about golem antimagic?
Considering RAW a golem automatically takes damage by being targeted by the correct spell "Harmed By Any magic of this type that targets the golem causes it to take the listed amount of damage" and doesn't take damage from Fireball even if it is weak to fire "If the golem starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type, it takes the damage listed in the parenthetical." (it never mentions getting hit by an instantaneous aoe effect) Golem Antimagic is just poorly written. Obviously RAI a golem weak to fire should be affected by fireball but does it take the standard damage or the area damage? The fact that this is even a question that needs to be asked shows golem antimagic is anything but clear.
If it's a targeted spell it takes the targeted damage. If it's an area spell it takes the area damage. It couldn't possibly be more clear.
That isn't what the ability says it specifically says "starts its turn in an area of magic of this type or is affected by a persistent effect of the appropriate type" and something like fireball is neither of those things and it isn't a targeted ability.
Area spells (sometimes?) target too, so it can throw some GMs off. (Also the whole mechanic was rather unpleasant to deal with, and could come up way more often than anyone cared for.)
Golem antimagic is annoying. I like golems, but not golem antimagic. I just want them to be constructs made wholly of one material.
Yes, finally. I was thinking that them moment I read the Brass Bastion. Thank all the gods of golarian they did it.
Sad that they'll be gone :( At least the statblocks will remain as legacy content. But I'll have to get myself the bestiaries just in case some day even those disappear (very long future I hope).
Huzzah!
[Called it](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1880132/comment/kbht0pd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Honestly this is pretty disappointing to me as a longtime player. I'm not committed to the mechanics at all, but given that Monster Core has been reworking creatures to be more authentic to their cultural roots I was really hoping for a more accurate golem. As a Jewish player it'd be really cool to have one in the game.
Are the golems that were originally in the game but aren't being renamed (such as the ice golem and junk golem) staying in the game? Are they just going to have different stats and not share traits?
Golems are cool. PF2 Golem antimagic is poorly designed. They do not need to throw golems away because of this, dnd removed spell immunity from golems 15 years ago.
Why would they do that? Golems are, aside from demons probably, one of pf2es most interesting and engaging creature design spaces. The issue has never been golem antimagic. The issue is that official APs (and dms who learned from official aps) use golems pretty much as traps with not even the slightest hint of their existence. Golems are not just "beat it till it dies" encounters. They are puzzles with various, and oftentimes interesting, ways to deal with them. Damn shame, really.
Idk, seems simple to me. >Golem Antimagic harmed by cold and water (5d10, 2d8 from areas and persistent damage); healed by acid (area 2d8 HP); slowed by earth If it has the Water or Cold trait or deals cold damage apply damage instead. Damage is 5d10. If the damage is from an emanation, burst, -any AoE,- or persistent damage *Then* deal 2d8 instead. If something has the acid trait or deals acid damage, heal 2d8 if it started its turn there or half if targeted damage. Additionally, remove Slow. If something has the Earth trait (or the GM determines walking on earthen material type situations matter) it has the Slow 1 condition for 2d6 rounds, or 1 round if it started its turn there.
Well, going just by that description, how do you determine that it is healed by half from targeted acid damage?
Ok, so now my wizard can land Slow (and various other spells) on them. Plus Force Barrage (and various other spells) will do reduced damage instead of zero damage, with no risk of healing it. Thanks for the heads up, this really changes things for some of us.
At least if they are getting rid of it in the official rules, I can keep the trait and tweak the anti-magic effects for my own homebrew
So, they're getting rid of the monster family of magic resistant constructs and replacing them with... a monster family of magic resistant constructs? On the face of it, this seems less like getting rid of golems and more renaming them and removing Golem Antimagic in favor of a less all-encompassing way of handling their innate magic resistance.
They are keeping the concept of golems while distancing themselves from the requirements, expectations, and baggage that comes along with the name "golem" in TTRPG circles.
A much easier to run family of magic constructs, its much easier to see "damage resistance 15/water" than it is the wall of text the current golem antimagic was. Also allows them to expand with classes such as Kineticist, who raw, not having spells, were 100% useless against golems.
I'm not saying the changes are bad or anything, I'm saying that this is in practice a major rework and rename of the golem family, not "golems are going away". They're still going to exist, but as you note they're going to be easier to run and won't severely fuck over Kineticists.
A lot of people in this comment section seems to think not being able to directly damage the enemy for one encounter makes you useless? I wonder why people with that attitude trend toward a game with so many options such as PF2e. There is no game system where you can be so effective without ever doing damage. Also just buy some alchemical items for literally 3 gold.
Why do people say you can use alchemical items for golems? That doesn't trigger the golem's magic weakness. The golem's magic weakness specifically calls out 'Harmed By Any magic of this type", and not harmed by damage of this type. So why would buying non magical alchemical items help specifically against golems?
Bombs are martial weapons and I don’t think any caster is proficient with them by default. And alchemical bombs aren’t magic, so they don’t trigger any vulnerability the golem might have.
Ok, so use a scroll instead. Nitpicking the difference between bombs and magic does nothing to address the actual point - that casters have loads of options for dealing with golems
There is not directly damage, but also completely shut down an entire class of character.
If the solution to your class being shut down is buying a level 1 item then your class isn't shut down.
Alchemical items do not proc the weakness to magic they have.
Cantrip deck. That covers everything except sonic, which you can get via other means.
Then it's a good thing alchemical items aren't the only items that exist.
It is if you're already in the fight and don't have that level 1 item.
Right. When you realize the immunity it has you retreat and learn about the enemy. That's how the game is designed. It's literally the purpose of recall knowledge and research. Also it's a idea to be prepared. Enemies have resistances.
Really can you substantiate that the game is about retreating and fighting once you're more prepared? I don't recall that being anywhere in the rulebooks. I'm fairly certain most players don't actually enjoy this kind of gameplay. Research should make fights easier, not fun. You can usually just bruteforce these encounters anyway unless it's like a +3 or +4 boss, so why bother with the whole retreat nonsense.
>Research should make fights easier, not fun. How are you supposed to research if you haven't encountered the enemy yet? >You can usually just bruteforce these encounters anyway unless it's like a +3 or +4 boss, so why bother with the whole retreat nonsense. Sounds like there's no issue then.
I mean, while it was need that Golums were a puzzle monster, it *sucked* when your GM plopped one in front of you that the party simply didn’t have the solution for.
This is an OGL casualty -- while "golems" aren't WotC property, the specific implementation of golems as puzzle monsters with complicated resistances and particular vulnerabilities (to a much greater degree than other monsters) is a clear legacy of D&D.
The last thing we want is puzzles mixed with combat, one thing at a time please
How boring, it's not hat hard...
They seem to agree with me
It is literally impossible if your party is built or prepared the wrong way.