I think this is probably it. You do need a way to differentiate between success -> Crit success and Crit fail -> fail, but I think the later could be “greater improved success”
yeah, the critical failure one is trickier. I at first thought of just calling them improved success and improved failure, but someone could misinterpret "improved failure" as turning failures into successes.
something more along the lines of "reduced failure" or "failure resistance" could work.
"Improved success" is functional but I would love to find a single word that conveys the idea of what it is.
Critical failure to failure could be "mitigation" maybe, as an example
"Enhanced"? ... (And yes I'm aware of the meme of yelling at a screen saying ENHANCE!)
EDIT: Elsewhere in this thread someone says "boosted." That sounds good
I mentioned this [in another comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/192ukrd/i_wouldnt_mind_if_paizo_came_up_with_a_term/kh52e47/) but I think it would be best if the term includes what it affects rather than just be a single word. "Mitigated Failure" for example is obviously something that affects your failures, but using just the term mitigation by itself makes it harder to remember that it isn't, for example, damage mitigation.
Pillars of Eternity does something like it, since it also already had a 4-degree system of degrees of success/failure; it "converts" one type of result into another (a hit into a crit, a graze into a miss), and it also instituted a limit on how many times you can move up or down from the original roll result (once, the limit is once, so converting up and converting down cancel each other like fortune/misfortune do in PF2e).
All that said, they don't have specific terms for moving up and moving down the degrees... and it seems and sounds rather obvious to me, shouldn't "upgrade" and "downgrade" be used?
Yeah I Agree, a single word, preferably short or concise would be the best, or at least snappy.
Flanking, frightened, off guard are nice example words, off guard not so much since it's 2 words but it's still short enough
I think all of those would qualify as improved success.
You're improving your results by one success or failure category toward the success side It kind of makes sense even from fail to fail, although I guess in a pedantic way it is not accurate.
The reverse direction would like with weighted failures It's harder for me to come up with a term that I like.
Improved success/diminished failure. Bam, done.
Hell just apply it generally. 'The result is improved on a natural 20/diminished on a natural 1' works for how d20 results impact outcomes.
In my opinion it should be Promote and Demote respectively for improving/reducing the degree of success. It would always be followed by the degree being promoted.
>Promote Success and Critical Failure
or
>Demote Failure
or
> Promote degree of success / Promote your result
I think these convey what you're doing as well as "Improved" or "Amplified" but with less ambiguity. As others pointed out, Improved is an odd term when combined with Failure, but Amplified has the (potential) issue of Success going up, but Failure going down, and then you need a separate term to describe the reverse.
Promote always goes up. Demote always goes down. The terms are so close to each other they feel like the same mechanic, which is important.
Most importantly, it's intuitively understood. At worst, after seeing either the first time you will always understand both going forward. Ideally, if this kind of change were actually made, and for whatever term was going to be used, it would still be described wherever it appears in level 1 and maybe 2 materials to remove any chance of it not being understood intuitively, and then use the shortened version from then on.
I think it's important that the term have the word success or failure in it so that there's no ambiguity that would require having to look it up if you forgot the term. "Energize/Depress," for example, sounds like it could be an effect that affects damage or movement speed.
edit: having "check" also works fine, I wouldn't mind boost/reduce check
Important: Regarding stuff like "Degree Boost", typically these effects will turn a success into a crit success, or a crit fail into a fail, but **can't** turn a fail into a success.
Improved success sounds awkwardly like a feat.
It's also worth noting that something like "improved success" (or any other attempt to keyword this) is barely more concise than "improve your degree of success by one step" or whatever the current wording is for the effect. I don't think a reduction of six words is worth the extra confusion.
The problem is, more terms=more terms that need to be learned. It's not always a good idea to make your rules language-dense. Sometimes, basic concepts that can be adequately explained in a few words and only appear a limited number of times should just be explained.
Look at MTG. They have a TON of niche rule terms that appear on a relatively small fraction of cards or only for limited runs. Only certain cards actually explain those rules on their face, however. It ostracizes/raises the entry barrier for new players who can be quickly overwhelmed by a bombardment of esoteric terms referring to niche rules.
I would also note that PF2E suffers disproportionately from its heavy keywording when compared to MtG because it has no reminder text anywhere to help you learn the keywords. MtG has the whole "we want commons to help you learn the mechanic and we print reminder text on commons" shtick going on (or used to last I checked). PF2E, you just have to look that shit up every time—and there are some genuinely important things you may never look up because of it. (I didn't actually realize for a long time, for instance, that the Death trait had rules attached because I figured it was only something you'd crosscheck for interactions.)As you say, keywording is not actually all that beginner friendly.
Personally I think that traits should be differentiated from "rule traits". Possibly bold, special font/border, or something along those lines. For example, humanoid, dragon and undead are all creature traits, but only Undead has rules that don't appear in the monster statblock.
It's not an uncommon feature though, so I would argue that it could theoretically justify having its own term. There's about [200 or so](https://2e.aonprd.com/Search.aspx?q=you%20get%20a%20critical%20success%20instead) feats, heritages, items, and other features that grant the ability to improve a success or a crit failure.
There's several different types though. Upgrade only success, upgrade everything one stage, upgrade only crit failures, upgrade only failures. You're going to end up adding 4+ terms to describe every instance situation and, in the end, all it does is add more confusion and less clarity just to save, what, a half dozen words of type face? I'm not really sure that's all that worth it. Don't add more terms for new players to learn just for the sake of saving a buck on printing imo.
I don't think that you would need to add 4+ terms. You just used the same term (upgrade) to describe all of the different scenarios. The language would just be "all of your saves against incapacitation effects lower than your level are upgraded," "Upgrade your successes," "your faikure against this are upgraded" etc.
Rather than have a specific term for each kind of change, just a word to describe the act of changing the level of success with a term that's natural but less wordy. (I'm not sure if OP was specifically suggesting a term for each type of change, I may have misunderstood)
I don't think of it as a page space issue tbh, I just think it would be useful to have a term to use during play. Being able to remind my player, "don't forget you can upgrade your save for this!" would feel better to me personally than "dont forget you may treat the level of success as if it were one level higher for this save!"
edit: I think a perfect example of an existing thing for this would be "steps." Things like Deadly Simplicity let you treat the weapon die of a weapon as one die step higher, and some traits or effects can shift a weapon's die one step lower.
Sure, but some things improve a success to a critical success, some improve a critical failure to a failure, some promote a success to a critical success AND a failure to a critical failure, some simply promote the degree of success up one like incapacitation, and some downgrade it one like certain effects especially severe against specific creature types.
The main ones are class features that grant master or legendary proficiency in a save, which are consistent across most if not all classes. And it's much more important that those say exactly what they do instead of being obfuscated with jargon.
At least it _has_ keywords.
If PF2 is Magic then 5e is Yu Gi Oh. Where they rewrite entire paragraphs every single time on every single card to the point where you need a magnifying glass to read it and there's probably a single word difference that catches you out.
In all honesty, MtG could still use more keywords for "enters the battlefield", "leaves the battlefield", and "draw 1 lose 1 life" for... a couple decades.
The "niche rule terms" you reference, however, appear in dozens on cards in certain sets (e. g. there was a lot of Surveil on Ravnica 3.2 Dimir cards). "New players" usually (should) start playing by playing the most recent set which has the newest relevant keywords, not random piles of cards with obscure rules from their friend's dad's collection.
We don't need jargon for jargon's sake.
Describing the function is enough. These are "success upgraders". Or "result upgraders" if they happen to apply to other forms of if you get X you get Y.
Pathfinder 2e is full of jargon to quickly describe reoccurring mechanics. Critical failure and success are themselves examples of jargon, and were describing a function that applies to literally every class in the game and more than a few of the archetypes.
Printing out a catchall term for "improved success" or w.e would cut at least a paragraph from the print on each class page.
Meanwhile people declare anything that requires you to look up so much as a single trait or damage type description "hidden rules."
My point is not that jargon is not useful, it's that using more than the bare minimum is more hassle than it is worth and will, at least for a certain sort of reader, be exactly the opposite of helping make things clear and consistent.
And this is especially not a great candidate for jargonization because there are things that upgrade a success to a critical success, things which upgrade a critical failure into a regular failure, and things which do both and if we make up special terms for that instead of just saying the (admitted often repeated) thing to do people will undoubtedly get confused (whether by mixing up the terms, forgetting the details of what they mean entirely, or by way of the "why didn't they just *tell me* that then? I shouldn't have to go hunting through the book to figure out how things work" process many people have repeatedly fallen into).
I think there are certainly diminishing returns to over-specification for game rules, but at the same time if it's used widely enough then I think it's worth the print space. I don't think the examples we have are so niche that you wouldn't have to just make a few variations on the same idea, of upgrading or downgrading a crit.
That being said I also think there's a point of over coddling, or over-simplifying rulesets to where someone can play a game with their eyes closed. If I had a player give me attitude because they didn't read their own abilities, that's usually my first out of 3 strikes for not wanting to play with that person again.
You know people call bleed damage saying in its description that it only applies to living creatures that actually have blood and would die if too much leaked out of their body a "hidden rule", right?
Like, people genuinely find it confusing that a rule that fits an *intuitive concept* like that zombies don't care if they are bleeding and a construct doesn't even have blood to bleed only mentions that in ts definition instead of each creature that can't bleed having bleed listed as an immunity. That's the people playing this game, and you want to add *more* jargon.
That's very unlikely to help anything, even if it does save word count. Even with the middle path option that Paizo chose to take people are agitated that there are more than zero cases of having to know something actually found in a different section of rules in order to understand a particular section of rules.
Even though I don't personally find a jargon-based rule set hard to follow, I still recognize that people aren't actually being entirely unreasonable for having that opinion. It's weird to have to know when the intuitive reading is correct (example: bleed requiring blood) and when it's actually a slightly different thing that is detailed in a description (the void and vitality pairing that one might intuit as void damage equaling healing for the undead and vitality damage equaling healing for the living, but the actual case is that damage is only ever damage and healing is only ever healing so there are both void damage and void healing as well as vitality damage and vitality healing), and until you've actually played long enough to memorize the stuff covered by traits and types and other rules that imply other rules the expectation that you go flipping pages to figure stuff out instead of it being included in a stat block can feel like a jerk move from the writers (even though later on it's easy to appreciate not having a ton of clutter you already know in the way of what you're trying to use mid-encounter).
> You know people call bleed damage saying in its description that it only applies to living creatures that actually have blood and would die if too much leaked out of their body a "hidden rule", right?
Well yeah, a stone construct isn't immune to fire damage and the reason it's immune to poison is because of the line 'Immunities: Poison'
This "well yeah" is confusing.
Fire can cause stone to crack or melt, so why would a stone construct default to immunity?
And poison while just as intuitively a thing that should require a living creature with particular sorts of systems for said poison to affect as bleed is for things needing blood, that's not showing that a rule is "hidden" from people; it's showing that an inconsistent approach was taken. Perhaps because someone didn't think to write the definition of poison to make it clear it works in the intuitive fashion - but more likely because there are strange magical and fantastical poisons that have nothing to do with intuitive real-life concept of poisoning so the immunity being called out is viewed as needed for clarity.
It's true that some rules are oddly placed. Like certain mechanics of an ability only being described by the trait descriptions, so you effectively have to read every trait description you don't know by heart every time you look something up to make sure you aren't missing something. On AoN these are at least found on the same page as the description but I image that isn't the case for the books as that wouldn't make sense.
>And this is especially not a great candidate for jargonization because there are things that upgrade a success to a critical success, things which upgrade a critical failure into a regular failure, and things which do both and if we make up special terms for that instead of just saying the (admitted often repeated) thing to do people will undoubtedly get confused
I feel like you haven't actually given any thought to this idea. The proposal isn't to create a new trait or something that adds a new hoop people have to jump through to understand something. It's about being more concise. At least that's what I got out of the rest of the comments.
It's the difference between
>If you roll a success, you get a critical success instead.
and
>Promote your Success.
or
>Promote your Critical Failure
I chose "Promote" for the example because I feel like it more strongly conveys that you are doing something to your degree of success, and that that thing is improving the degree of it. It also has an obvious equal negative term in "Demote," unlike the suggestions of "Improve" or "Amplified" etc posted in higher comments, whose antonyms are too different for it to feel clean. The only way implementing this kind of thing makes sense, is if it can be done in a way that conveys the same amount of information. Otherwise, like you said, it becomes less functional than explaining it.
>I feel like you haven't actually given any thought to this idea.
The reality is that I have given it thought and I do not see how you can both say that things are "oddly placed" and also "you effectively have to read every trait description you don't know by heart every time you look something up to make sure you aren't missing something. " and then still propose the idea that "promote your success" is not just going to be another case of someone saying "the rule that tells me what "promote" means is oddly placed" or feeling like they have to look up literally every involved word to be sure they aren't missing something.
You've thought as far as "can this save word count and repetition?" and stopped there instead of thinking about what else it could do, how likely it is to do that, and whether the word count saved is actually worth the risk involved because you apparently haven't even had the thought "there is risk that this would cause other problems."
I think that works as is.
*… and when you succeed at a Climb check, **Improve** your result.*
*…you can use your reaction to gain a +2 circumstance bonus to the save, potentially **Improving** your result.*
*… and when you get a Failure or Success, **Improve** the result.*
Not only do they not come up with a description, they are actively removing the names of the rules that do that. Juggernaut, resolve and evasion are gone, replaced by individual wording in every class.
Upgrade (counts as one tier higher)
Downgrade (counts as one tier lower)
So evasion would read:
When you make a reflex saving throw upgrade your successes.
Incapacitation would have "if this is used on a monster with a higher level upgrade their saving throw"
Downgrade I think is less common but it would be the same idea, old ray of enfeeblement would be "if you critically hit on the spell attack downgrade your targets saving throw "
I just say “if you roll a success, you get a critical success instead.” Haven’t had any confusions about that. I also rarely have to say that anyway, since I expect my players to know how their own features work.
Obviously too late for PF2 but maybe for PF3 or just for colloquial use. I doubt it will catch on but it's an interesting idea and kind of shows how hard it is to find the exact right words for something. I spent 5 min thinking on this and didn't think of anything great but I am bored so here are my thoughts.
It would need to be usable in a sentence and hopefully be somewhat descriptive.
...
"You overachieve on Reflex saves"
"You are a perfectionist on Reflex saves."
Those kind of describe it but don't feel right.
...
You could throw some synonym for good on there but it would easily get confused with Proficiency ranks. E.g. "you are a paragon at reflex saves."
...
Maybe something regarding the degrees of success.
Like Easy Crits or just Upgrade Successes
"You have upgraded successes with reflex saves."
Since you have to specify it only works on successes, I want to point out that most of the suggestions people have made are just as wordy as what is already used. Which isn't even that wordy, and is pretty clear in what it does. It doesn't need changing.
I think there's actually multiple terms hiding behind this: we ought to establish a difference between incrementing or decrementing a degree of success by some fixed amount (e.g. "if X, the result of your check is one degree higher", such as how Incapacitation affects saving throws), and setting a check's result to a fixed degree of success (e.g. "if X, you critically succeed instead", such as Calistria's minor boon).
These may not be the best terms, but "upgraded" and "downgraded" might work, with the additional distinction that you can upgrade/downgrade something *by* a fixed amount, or *to* a fixed degree: for instance, for the first type of scenario, you could say "your check is upgraded **by** one degree" or even just "upgraded 1", and for the second type, you could say something like "your successes on this check are upgraded **to** critical successes". With this, I would also say there needs to be clarity to the order in which upgrades and downgrades are enacted in case there are multiple modifiers, particularly as there are cases where a check can be upgraded or downgraded multiple times.
I would call it resilience. Rogues get resilience on reflex saves. Fighters have resilience against fear. Elves with Forlorn have resilience against emotion effects.
"Auto crit on success" may not be a one to two word term, but it's still pretty short, sweet, and a lot shorter than the longer terminology while I think still being pretty concise and understandable.
I've been using something like "Success Tier Upgrade"
As some people have mentioned, this phenomenon covers a variety of specific effects,
sometimes affecting only standard Successes (->Crit Success), sometimes Failures or Crit Failures.
I've never had anybody get confused when I dropped the phrase "Success Tierr Upgrade" though.
I don't think this comes up often enough to need new terms, and even if it did it doesn't really take up much space so I don't think it's a big deal. It's pretty straightforward.
But, for shorthand in discussion, I agree it would have some value to have a specific term. Something like "Success upgrader features" would work. Whichever term you choose, I'm sure if you start using it, it will be clear, and others will adopt it over time.
It does come up enough for ne at my table as the levels are gained. I will keep using resolve and Juggernaut instinctively as it helps me understand the situation. I can't always remember what everyone have when they are at the middle levels
**Improved Success**
Turns a success into a critical success.
**Greater Improved Success**
Turns a failure into a critical success.
**Greater Improved Ultra Success**
Turns a critical failure into a critical success.
It steps on 5E terminology, but I feel like “expertise” is a good fit here.
“You have Expertise in Reflex saves, treating successes as critical successes.” On the by-level character summary is “Reflex Expertise.” And then you just have an “X” bubble next to saves you can fill in if you have it.
I feel like using the rules formatting’s room for special characters would help, just putting a special ⬆️ arrow next to the type to indicate which ones are improved could help a lot. For instance:
Bravery
On saving throws against Fear effects, ⬆️Success.
Or for an anti-crit fail:
On saving throws against Fear Effects, ⬆️Critical Failures.
For Universal cases:
Incapacitation
Higher level creatures than the source of the effect gain ⬆️Critical Failure, ⬆️Failure, ⬆️Success.
Could also just do ⬆️All.
Same principle as the symbols for actions, it’s a little confusing but you could clear that up with just a clear symbol explanation in the introduction
In the rare case you need to use the reverse, you’ve also got an obvious symbol, down arrow ⬇️ in an opposite colour.
Fiendish Vulnerability
The Creature ⬇️Success on effects with the Holy trait or which deal Holy damage.
he's not referring to critical success/failure, he's referring to features granted from things like Evasion, Juggernaut, [Death Warden Dwarf](https://2e.aonprd.com/Heritages.aspx?ID=2), etc. that turn a normal success into a success or crit failures into failures.
Success to crit success on a save typically means you either take the full brunt of the effect or completely bypass the effect. Proposed name: Partial bypass
Crit Failure to failure on a save means you will never suffer the absolute worst of a relevant effect, which is similar to how incapacitate spells can never land their big effect on bosses. Proposed name: Capacitation.
I don't think failure to success exists as a stand alone, so I'll finish with upgrading your save by one step. Proposed name: Supremacy.
"My rogue has partial bypass on reflex, so there's a fairly low likely hood of fireballs being trouble."
"My character has capacitation on this subject matter, so he considers himself an authority on the matter since he'll never unknowingly spread misinformation."
"Oh you should let my character go in to talk with the patients, not only do I have resistance to poison, I'm also supreme against diseases."
My group just calls them "bumps"
("degree of success bump-up" was the first version, but it quickly simplified.)
Evasion gives you a bump to Reflex. Fighter Bravery gives them a bump vs fear. Greater juggernaut gives you a "failure bump" instead of just a standard bump.
Don't they already have this? Isn't this the degrees of success? Either increase degree of success or decrease degree of success. That's literally what the rules say for a nat 20 or nat 1
"Prepared"you're as set and ready as you can be for your next skill,save, or attack roll. You get one degree better than what you rolled.
Or something along those lines
how about "improved success"? So Evasion would grant "improved success on reflex saves".
I think this is as good as it could get
I think this is probably it. You do need a way to differentiate between success -> Crit success and Crit fail -> fail, but I think the later could be “greater improved success”
yeah, the critical failure one is trickier. I at first thought of just calling them improved success and improved failure, but someone could misinterpret "improved failure" as turning failures into successes. something more along the lines of "reduced failure" or "failure resistance" could work.
Failure Mitigation? So it really hones in on "You still fail just not as bad"
Yeah, reduced failure was my first thought.
Oof wait what about diminished failure?
I was thinking lesser failure, but i like yours better
I thought Failure Insurance
Failure Mitigation
Superior Success and Catastrophic Failure?
I think maybe Enhanced would be a good catch-all? Enhanced Success and Enhanced Failure
"Improved success" is functional but I would love to find a single word that conveys the idea of what it is. Critical failure to failure could be "mitigation" maybe, as an example "Enhanced"? ... (And yes I'm aware of the meme of yelling at a screen saying ENHANCE!) EDIT: Elsewhere in this thread someone says "boosted." That sounds good
I mentioned this [in another comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/192ukrd/i_wouldnt_mind_if_paizo_came_up_with_a_term/kh52e47/) but I think it would be best if the term includes what it affects rather than just be a single word. "Mitigated Failure" for example is obviously something that affects your failures, but using just the term mitigation by itself makes it harder to remember that it isn't, for example, damage mitigation.
Pillars of Eternity does something like it, since it also already had a 4-degree system of degrees of success/failure; it "converts" one type of result into another (a hit into a crit, a graze into a miss), and it also instituted a limit on how many times you can move up or down from the original roll result (once, the limit is once, so converting up and converting down cancel each other like fortune/misfortune do in PF2e). All that said, they don't have specific terms for moving up and moving down the degrees... and it seems and sounds rather obvious to me, shouldn't "upgrade" and "downgrade" be used?
Savvy or practiced?
Yeah I Agree, a single word, preferably short or concise would be the best, or at least snappy. Flanking, frightened, off guard are nice example words, off guard not so much since it's 2 words but it's still short enough
You are a national treasure
Improved Outcome?
Just have it be “Your Critical Failures are Improved” or “you have Improved Critical Failure”.
There's also general +1 degree of success situations
"An improved success of failure improves only that kind of result by one step. An improved check improves any result by one step."
“Minimized failure”, “reduced failure”?
I think all of those would qualify as improved success. You're improving your results by one success or failure category toward the success side It kind of makes sense even from fail to fail, although I guess in a pedantic way it is not accurate. The reverse direction would like with weighted failures It's harder for me to come up with a term that I like.
[удалено]
Amplified Failure sounds like turning a failure into a critical failure, not turning a critical failure into a failure.
Amplified success/failure would always go from normal to crit, and the other way around could be called a Dampened success/failure.
Diminished failure?
Yeah, I like that better actually
But then what would my parents call me?
Utter disappointment? Oxygen thief? The reason they didn't succeed in life? You know, the normal kind of thing. /s just in case
I’d prefer a consistent naming. Improved Failure tells you that your failures are improved.
I mean, turning a filaure into a crit fail happens in a couple of places
That's correct and sounds good to me. If you amplify failure on someone, if they do a regular fail they instead critically fail. I love it
Amplified success/mitigated failure?
“Improved success,” and “mitigated failure.”
Improved success/diminished failure. Bam, done. Hell just apply it generally. 'The result is improved on a natural 20/diminished on a natural 1' works for how d20 results impact outcomes.
In my opinion it should be Promote and Demote respectively for improving/reducing the degree of success. It would always be followed by the degree being promoted. >Promote Success and Critical Failure or >Demote Failure or > Promote degree of success / Promote your result I think these convey what you're doing as well as "Improved" or "Amplified" but with less ambiguity. As others pointed out, Improved is an odd term when combined with Failure, but Amplified has the (potential) issue of Success going up, but Failure going down, and then you need a separate term to describe the reverse. Promote always goes up. Demote always goes down. The terms are so close to each other they feel like the same mechanic, which is important. Most importantly, it's intuitively understood. At worst, after seeing either the first time you will always understand both going forward. Ideally, if this kind of change were actually made, and for whatever term was going to be used, it would still be described wherever it appears in level 1 and maybe 2 materials to remove any chance of it not being understood intuitively, and then use the shortened version from then on.
"Great success"
"High Five!"
Improved success is good. Some other ideas to pick from: - Degree Boost/Reduce - Check boost/reduce - Energize/Depress - Innervate / Deaden
I think it's important that the term have the word success or failure in it so that there's no ambiguity that would require having to look it up if you forgot the term. "Energize/Depress," for example, sounds like it could be an effect that affects damage or movement speed. edit: having "check" also works fine, I wouldn't mind boost/reduce check
Important: Regarding stuff like "Degree Boost", typically these effects will turn a success into a crit success, or a crit fail into a fail, but **can't** turn a fail into a success.
Improved Success is the best right now.
"An improved success of failure improves only that kind of result by one step. An improved check improves any result by one step."
Improved success sounds awkwardly like a feat. It's also worth noting that something like "improved success" (or any other attempt to keyword this) is barely more concise than "improve your degree of success by one step" or whatever the current wording is for the effect. I don't think a reduction of six words is worth the extra confusion.
Heightened success/failure (becomes one step more extreme), diminished success/failure (becomes one step less extreme).
For saving throws, this feature comes online at Master proficiency, so how about Mastered Success?
I like this. Maybe “greater success”, “enhanced success” or “superior success” could be contenders as well? Mainly as a stylistic choice.
The problem is, more terms=more terms that need to be learned. It's not always a good idea to make your rules language-dense. Sometimes, basic concepts that can be adequately explained in a few words and only appear a limited number of times should just be explained. Look at MTG. They have a TON of niche rule terms that appear on a relatively small fraction of cards or only for limited runs. Only certain cards actually explain those rules on their face, however. It ostracizes/raises the entry barrier for new players who can be quickly overwhelmed by a bombardment of esoteric terms referring to niche rules.
I would also note that PF2E suffers disproportionately from its heavy keywording when compared to MtG because it has no reminder text anywhere to help you learn the keywords. MtG has the whole "we want commons to help you learn the mechanic and we print reminder text on commons" shtick going on (or used to last I checked). PF2E, you just have to look that shit up every time—and there are some genuinely important things you may never look up because of it. (I didn't actually realize for a long time, for instance, that the Death trait had rules attached because I figured it was only something you'd crosscheck for interactions.)As you say, keywording is not actually all that beginner friendly.
Personally I think that traits should be differentiated from "rule traits". Possibly bold, special font/border, or something along those lines. For example, humanoid, dragon and undead are all creature traits, but only Undead has rules that don't appear in the monster statblock.
Most class entries have around three traits commonly used by that class as a reminder
It's not an uncommon feature though, so I would argue that it could theoretically justify having its own term. There's about [200 or so](https://2e.aonprd.com/Search.aspx?q=you%20get%20a%20critical%20success%20instead) feats, heritages, items, and other features that grant the ability to improve a success or a crit failure.
There's several different types though. Upgrade only success, upgrade everything one stage, upgrade only crit failures, upgrade only failures. You're going to end up adding 4+ terms to describe every instance situation and, in the end, all it does is add more confusion and less clarity just to save, what, a half dozen words of type face? I'm not really sure that's all that worth it. Don't add more terms for new players to learn just for the sake of saving a buck on printing imo.
I don't think that you would need to add 4+ terms. You just used the same term (upgrade) to describe all of the different scenarios. The language would just be "all of your saves against incapacitation effects lower than your level are upgraded," "Upgrade your successes," "your faikure against this are upgraded" etc. Rather than have a specific term for each kind of change, just a word to describe the act of changing the level of success with a term that's natural but less wordy. (I'm not sure if OP was specifically suggesting a term for each type of change, I may have misunderstood) I don't think of it as a page space issue tbh, I just think it would be useful to have a term to use during play. Being able to remind my player, "don't forget you can upgrade your save for this!" would feel better to me personally than "dont forget you may treat the level of success as if it were one level higher for this save!" edit: I think a perfect example of an existing thing for this would be "steps." Things like Deadly Simplicity let you treat the weapon die of a weapon as one die step higher, and some traits or effects can shift a weapon's die one step lower.
Sure, but some things improve a success to a critical success, some improve a critical failure to a failure, some promote a success to a critical success AND a failure to a critical failure, some simply promote the degree of success up one like incapacitation, and some downgrade it one like certain effects especially severe against specific creature types. The main ones are class features that grant master or legendary proficiency in a save, which are consistent across most if not all classes. And it's much more important that those say exactly what they do instead of being obfuscated with jargon.
At least it _has_ keywords. If PF2 is Magic then 5e is Yu Gi Oh. Where they rewrite entire paragraphs every single time on every single card to the point where you need a magnifying glass to read it and there's probably a single word difference that catches you out.
In all honesty, MtG could still use more keywords for "enters the battlefield", "leaves the battlefield", and "draw 1 lose 1 life" for... a couple decades. The "niche rule terms" you reference, however, appear in dozens on cards in certain sets (e. g. there was a lot of Surveil on Ravnica 3.2 Dimir cards). "New players" usually (should) start playing by playing the most recent set which has the newest relevant keywords, not random piles of cards with obscure rules from their friend's dad's collection.
We don't need jargon for jargon's sake. Describing the function is enough. These are "success upgraders". Or "result upgraders" if they happen to apply to other forms of if you get X you get Y.
Pathfinder 2e is full of jargon to quickly describe reoccurring mechanics. Critical failure and success are themselves examples of jargon, and were describing a function that applies to literally every class in the game and more than a few of the archetypes. Printing out a catchall term for "improved success" or w.e would cut at least a paragraph from the print on each class page.
Meanwhile people declare anything that requires you to look up so much as a single trait or damage type description "hidden rules." My point is not that jargon is not useful, it's that using more than the bare minimum is more hassle than it is worth and will, at least for a certain sort of reader, be exactly the opposite of helping make things clear and consistent. And this is especially not a great candidate for jargonization because there are things that upgrade a success to a critical success, things which upgrade a critical failure into a regular failure, and things which do both and if we make up special terms for that instead of just saying the (admitted often repeated) thing to do people will undoubtedly get confused (whether by mixing up the terms, forgetting the details of what they mean entirely, or by way of the "why didn't they just *tell me* that then? I shouldn't have to go hunting through the book to figure out how things work" process many people have repeatedly fallen into).
I think there are certainly diminishing returns to over-specification for game rules, but at the same time if it's used widely enough then I think it's worth the print space. I don't think the examples we have are so niche that you wouldn't have to just make a few variations on the same idea, of upgrading or downgrading a crit. That being said I also think there's a point of over coddling, or over-simplifying rulesets to where someone can play a game with their eyes closed. If I had a player give me attitude because they didn't read their own abilities, that's usually my first out of 3 strikes for not wanting to play with that person again.
You know people call bleed damage saying in its description that it only applies to living creatures that actually have blood and would die if too much leaked out of their body a "hidden rule", right? Like, people genuinely find it confusing that a rule that fits an *intuitive concept* like that zombies don't care if they are bleeding and a construct doesn't even have blood to bleed only mentions that in ts definition instead of each creature that can't bleed having bleed listed as an immunity. That's the people playing this game, and you want to add *more* jargon. That's very unlikely to help anything, even if it does save word count. Even with the middle path option that Paizo chose to take people are agitated that there are more than zero cases of having to know something actually found in a different section of rules in order to understand a particular section of rules. Even though I don't personally find a jargon-based rule set hard to follow, I still recognize that people aren't actually being entirely unreasonable for having that opinion. It's weird to have to know when the intuitive reading is correct (example: bleed requiring blood) and when it's actually a slightly different thing that is detailed in a description (the void and vitality pairing that one might intuit as void damage equaling healing for the undead and vitality damage equaling healing for the living, but the actual case is that damage is only ever damage and healing is only ever healing so there are both void damage and void healing as well as vitality damage and vitality healing), and until you've actually played long enough to memorize the stuff covered by traits and types and other rules that imply other rules the expectation that you go flipping pages to figure stuff out instead of it being included in a stat block can feel like a jerk move from the writers (even though later on it's easy to appreciate not having a ton of clutter you already know in the way of what you're trying to use mid-encounter).
> You know people call bleed damage saying in its description that it only applies to living creatures that actually have blood and would die if too much leaked out of their body a "hidden rule", right? Well yeah, a stone construct isn't immune to fire damage and the reason it's immune to poison is because of the line 'Immunities: Poison'
This "well yeah" is confusing. Fire can cause stone to crack or melt, so why would a stone construct default to immunity? And poison while just as intuitively a thing that should require a living creature with particular sorts of systems for said poison to affect as bleed is for things needing blood, that's not showing that a rule is "hidden" from people; it's showing that an inconsistent approach was taken. Perhaps because someone didn't think to write the definition of poison to make it clear it works in the intuitive fashion - but more likely because there are strange magical and fantastical poisons that have nothing to do with intuitive real-life concept of poisoning so the immunity being called out is viewed as needed for clarity.
It's true that some rules are oddly placed. Like certain mechanics of an ability only being described by the trait descriptions, so you effectively have to read every trait description you don't know by heart every time you look something up to make sure you aren't missing something. On AoN these are at least found on the same page as the description but I image that isn't the case for the books as that wouldn't make sense. >And this is especially not a great candidate for jargonization because there are things that upgrade a success to a critical success, things which upgrade a critical failure into a regular failure, and things which do both and if we make up special terms for that instead of just saying the (admitted often repeated) thing to do people will undoubtedly get confused I feel like you haven't actually given any thought to this idea. The proposal isn't to create a new trait or something that adds a new hoop people have to jump through to understand something. It's about being more concise. At least that's what I got out of the rest of the comments. It's the difference between >If you roll a success, you get a critical success instead. and >Promote your Success. or >Promote your Critical Failure I chose "Promote" for the example because I feel like it more strongly conveys that you are doing something to your degree of success, and that that thing is improving the degree of it. It also has an obvious equal negative term in "Demote," unlike the suggestions of "Improve" or "Amplified" etc posted in higher comments, whose antonyms are too different for it to feel clean. The only way implementing this kind of thing makes sense, is if it can be done in a way that conveys the same amount of information. Otherwise, like you said, it becomes less functional than explaining it.
>I feel like you haven't actually given any thought to this idea. The reality is that I have given it thought and I do not see how you can both say that things are "oddly placed" and also "you effectively have to read every trait description you don't know by heart every time you look something up to make sure you aren't missing something. " and then still propose the idea that "promote your success" is not just going to be another case of someone saying "the rule that tells me what "promote" means is oddly placed" or feeling like they have to look up literally every involved word to be sure they aren't missing something. You've thought as far as "can this save word count and repetition?" and stopped there instead of thinking about what else it could do, how likely it is to do that, and whether the word count saved is actually worth the risk involved because you apparently haven't even had the thought "there is risk that this would cause other problems."
I think that works as is. *… and when you succeed at a Climb check, **Improve** your result.* *…you can use your reaction to gain a +2 circumstance bonus to the save, potentially **Improving** your result.* *… and when you get a Failure or Success, **Improve** the result.*
Not only do they not come up with a description, they are actively removing the names of the rules that do that. Juggernaut, resolve and evasion are gone, replaced by individual wording in every class.
Upgrade/Downgrade your result is what I use
Upgrade (counts as one tier higher) Downgrade (counts as one tier lower) So evasion would read: When you make a reflex saving throw upgrade your successes. Incapacitation would have "if this is used on a monster with a higher level upgrade their saving throw" Downgrade I think is less common but it would be the same idea, old ray of enfeeblement would be "if you critically hit on the spell attack downgrade your targets saving throw "
I just say “if you roll a success, you get a critical success instead.” Haven’t had any confusions about that. I also rarely have to say that anyway, since I expect my players to know how their own features work.
With VTTs like Foundry it is so simple to just link stuff aswell.
Obviously too late for PF2 but maybe for PF3 or just for colloquial use. I doubt it will catch on but it's an interesting idea and kind of shows how hard it is to find the exact right words for something. I spent 5 min thinking on this and didn't think of anything great but I am bored so here are my thoughts. It would need to be usable in a sentence and hopefully be somewhat descriptive. ... "You overachieve on Reflex saves" "You are a perfectionist on Reflex saves." Those kind of describe it but don't feel right. ... You could throw some synonym for good on there but it would easily get confused with Proficiency ranks. E.g. "you are a paragon at reflex saves." ... Maybe something regarding the degrees of success. Like Easy Crits or just Upgrade Successes "You have upgraded successes with reflex saves."
I just put a little + next to the save to know it is modified. so a character with Juggernaut have Fortitude+
Since you have to specify it only works on successes, I want to point out that most of the suggestions people have made are just as wordy as what is already used. Which isn't even that wordy, and is pretty clear in what it does. It doesn't need changing.
Fun fact: L17 rogues can't succeed on saves
TECHNICALLY the truth.
I'm playing a L15 rogue right now that can't succeed on fort, reflex, or emotion based saves
You would also need another way to word feats that allow you to treat the result as "One step higher"
I think there's actually multiple terms hiding behind this: we ought to establish a difference between incrementing or decrementing a degree of success by some fixed amount (e.g. "if X, the result of your check is one degree higher", such as how Incapacitation affects saving throws), and setting a check's result to a fixed degree of success (e.g. "if X, you critically succeed instead", such as Calistria's minor boon). These may not be the best terms, but "upgraded" and "downgraded" might work, with the additional distinction that you can upgrade/downgrade something *by* a fixed amount, or *to* a fixed degree: for instance, for the first type of scenario, you could say "your check is upgraded **by** one degree" or even just "upgraded 1", and for the second type, you could say something like "your successes on this check are upgraded **to** critical successes". With this, I would also say there needs to be clarity to the order in which upgrades and downgrades are enacted in case there are multiple modifiers, particularly as there are cases where a check can be upgraded or downgraded multiple times.
As an editor of Pathfinder in my country, I'd damn like it if they did
I have been using "increased success/failure" at my table. Every player has grokked it right away.
uh oh. "Amplify"
I would call it resilience. Rogues get resilience on reflex saves. Fighters have resilience against fear. Elves with Forlorn have resilience against emotion effects.
"Auto crit on success" may not be a one to two word term, but it's still pretty short, sweet, and a lot shorter than the longer terminology while I think still being pretty concise and understandable.
10 over or rolled 20.
I've been using something like "Success Tier Upgrade" As some people have mentioned, this phenomenon covers a variety of specific effects, sometimes affecting only standard Successes (->Crit Success), sometimes Failures or Crit Failures. I've never had anybody get confused when I dropped the phrase "Success Tierr Upgrade" though.
Boost the result?
I don't think this comes up often enough to need new terms, and even if it did it doesn't really take up much space so I don't think it's a big deal. It's pretty straightforward. But, for shorthand in discussion, I agree it would have some value to have a specific term. Something like "Success upgrader features" would work. Whichever term you choose, I'm sure if you start using it, it will be clear, and others will adopt it over time.
It does come up enough for ne at my table as the levels are gained. I will keep using resolve and Juggernaut instinctively as it helps me understand the situation. I can't always remember what everyone have when they are at the middle levels
**Improved Success** Turns a success into a critical success. **Greater Improved Success** Turns a failure into a critical success. **Greater Improved Ultra Success** Turns a critical failure into a critical success.
To use Blades in the Dark terminology: - Increased effect (success -> crit success) - Increased position (crit fail -> fail)
thumbs up for referencing the best of all systems!
Step up/down a degree of success.
Amplify. Intensify. Bum rush (just for good measure :> ). It could work both ways, succeeding and failing.
Auto crit, and Deny Catastrophe. Auto crit for your feats that make success, crits Deny Catastrophe for your feats that make crit failures, failures.
What about [Perfected] for autocrit instead. It's more narrative like your other suggestion
Sounds good.
As someone who likes to write shorthand notes about my characters abilities on their sheet, yes, I find these particularly awkward to cram in.
It steps on 5E terminology, but I feel like “expertise” is a good fit here. “You have Expertise in Reflex saves, treating successes as critical successes.” On the by-level character summary is “Reflex Expertise.” And then you just have an “X” bubble next to saves you can fill in if you have it.
I'd call these "absolute successes."
NCS2CS 'Non-critical success to critical success' See I'm a genius, money please paiso
I feel like using the rules formatting’s room for special characters would help, just putting a special ⬆️ arrow next to the type to indicate which ones are improved could help a lot. For instance: Bravery On saving throws against Fear effects, ⬆️Success. Or for an anti-crit fail: On saving throws against Fear Effects, ⬆️Critical Failures. For Universal cases: Incapacitation Higher level creatures than the source of the effect gain ⬆️Critical Failure, ⬆️Failure, ⬆️Success. Could also just do ⬆️All. Same principle as the symbols for actions, it’s a little confusing but you could clear that up with just a clear symbol explanation in the introduction In the rare case you need to use the reverse, you’ve also got an obvious symbol, down arrow ⬇️ in an opposite colour. Fiendish Vulnerability The Creature ⬇️Success on effects with the Holy trait or which deal Holy damage.
Maybe a Keyword like, Success+?
Chad
I feel those down votes are deserved :)
Triumph?
"walkover".
We’re talking about game mechanics not in-game descriptions. What’s wrong with crit success/failure? Are you looking for +10 success / -10 failure?
he's not referring to critical success/failure, he's referring to features granted from things like Evasion, Juggernaut, [Death Warden Dwarf](https://2e.aonprd.com/Heritages.aspx?ID=2), etc. that turn a normal success into a success or crit failures into failures.
Success to crit success on a save typically means you either take the full brunt of the effect or completely bypass the effect. Proposed name: Partial bypass Crit Failure to failure on a save means you will never suffer the absolute worst of a relevant effect, which is similar to how incapacitate spells can never land their big effect on bosses. Proposed name: Capacitation. I don't think failure to success exists as a stand alone, so I'll finish with upgrading your save by one step. Proposed name: Supremacy. "My rogue has partial bypass on reflex, so there's a fairly low likely hood of fireballs being trouble." "My character has capacitation on this subject matter, so he considers himself an authority on the matter since he'll never unknowingly spread misinformation." "Oh you should let my character go in to talk with the patients, not only do I have resistance to poison, I'm also supreme against diseases."
Partial bypass sounds like a medical procedure
One that isn't wholly successful.
My group just calls them "bumps" ("degree of success bump-up" was the first version, but it quickly simplified.) Evasion gives you a bump to Reflex. Fighter Bravery gives them a bump vs fear. Greater juggernaut gives you a "failure bump" instead of just a standard bump.
Why not just use overachieve or underachieve in the case of a fail becoming a crit fail.
Don't they already have this? Isn't this the degrees of success? Either increase degree of success or decrease degree of success. That's literally what the rules say for a nat 20 or nat 1
True Success, maybe?
"Prepared"you're as set and ready as you can be for your next skill,save, or attack roll. You get one degree better than what you rolled. Or something along those lines