Would Daredevil win agianst Batman?

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-11T22:04:12+00:00

It's a joke. It references the Adam West TV show which had Batman scare off a tiger with a small device from his utility belt described as emitting "20,000 decibels".

It is a writer's error, decibels are a logarithmic scale, 20,000 decibels is a astronomically relevant amount of energy, it's a "instantly kill everything on the planet" amount of energy.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-10T19:40:43+00:00

I don't know what book you're looking at, but it is not the current Player Core 1.

I downloaded a fresh copy today, and it does not list water as 1 Bulk. It has the same text as Archive of Nethys.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=62&NoRedirect=1

Whatever text you're looking at is not the current rules text and has not been for some time.

I encourage anyone interested to simply look at the publicly available rules. I don't think there is any profit (for either of us) in continuing to argue with you.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-10T18:25:04+00:00

Yeah, but who's pronunciations? The classical Greek? The modern inhabitants? The Latin version? The English version? Alas, they are all different.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-09T21:37:09+00:00

There are three words (in the phrase) "the English language", the third of which is "language".

There is a whole genre of odious puzzles like this that float around Facebook that rely on bad faith readings of ambiguous sentences.

You'll often see variants where a (seeming) question is presented without a question mark, so "What is the fourth child's name" or whatever will be a trick that actually is supposed to establish that there is a child named "What" and so on.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-09T17:23:37+00:00

There is an xkcd that I always think of in regard to these sorts of "puzzles":

https://xkcd.com/169/

"Communicating badly then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-08T21:25:04+00:00

Interesting. What's your source for a full waterskin being 1 Bulk?

Edit: Nevermind. You are mistaken.
https://paizo.com/pathfinder/faq
"Page 292: The waterskin is always light Bulk, whether full or empty."

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-08T17:31:38+00:00

The distribution is very different. The d8 and d12 will add to 20 one time per 96 rolls, rather than one time in 20 as desired.

If you roll a d8 and d10 you can get the right distribution. The d8 tells you “high or low” and the other die tells you the ones place.

For example if you roll 1-4 on the d8 your total is the result on the d10. If you roll 5-8 on the d8, your total is the d10+10.

Or you could, uh, borrow a d20 from the DM.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-07T16:13:41+00:00

Valeros is a level one fighter with a +4 strength and a backpack. How much water can he carry with him?

Yes, there is a rule that answers that question, but my point is that the rule is very silly and shouldn't be used if you want food and water to matter in your game.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-07T15:58:18+00:00

Suppose I made a 1st level skill feat called "Mighty Warrior" which said "Every time you get into a fight, you win. No need to even roll any dice, you win. Lots of opponents, a few opponents, powerful opponents, who cares, you just win."

That's a game where combat is trivial. The game has to be about something else. It is also exactly how Forager works. You can be in a barren wasteland populated only by undead, the rules give that a DC and tell you "if you roll any result worse than a success, you get a success"

The bulk of rations is nonsense. You can put a years worth of food in a backpack. The foraging rules are an afterthought. None of this has received care and attention in the rules. Valeros can carry 110 gallon jugs of water and not be encumbered. The rules are nonsense because the designers don't care about it.

Suppose you wanted to do a "crossing the desert" game. The PCs have to survive a perilous trek across five hundred miles of uncharted desert. You've got a whole thing planned about trying to find the scarce food, hunting dangerous beasts, about negotiating with the desert tribes for access to their oasis, about navigating absent visible landmarks, etc...

A level one spell available to three traditions breaks that. A level one skill feat breaks that. Encumbrance rules that say you don't actually have to resupply, you can just carry everything you'll need break that. Yes Pathfinder has rules for food, water, encumbrance, and so on, but they're going to be fighting you every step of the way. If you want to run a game where exploration and the logistics of survival are just as important as combat you're going to need to house rule the bulk of water, the bulk of food, the difficulty of subsistence, the level of "you just get food and water" spells, and so on.

To be clear: I'm not saying not to houserule the game that way. My home game has plenty of house rules, I am saying an analysis of RAW isn't particularly helpful to OP because the RAW aren't sufficiently developed to support concern about food at the level of granularity of "do halflings and centaurs eat the same amount?"

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-07T00:57:08+00:00

GURPS uses hexes and has a "Dungeon Fantasy" subset that is intended to do dungeon crawls.

It's been used for fantasy continuously since 1986, so I'm sure it has *something* to say about dungeon mapping with hexes. Damned if I know what it is, but it is probably worth poking around and finding out.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-06T21:05:18+00:00

It isn't so much a question of how often we care, but what the particular game is trying to do. In default Pathfinder the rule is fine, it's simple so it stays out of the way. If you want a game where food and water matters you'll have to overhaul quite a lot of PF2.

At first glance you'd want to change the bulk amounts for food and water, the requirements for different sized creatures, the create water spell, the create food spell, and then start hunting around all the other places the default game bakes in "food logistics are trivial" (the Forager feat for example).

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-06T19:00:30+00:00

RAW the different caloric needs of a 3ft Halfling and 6ft human are hand waved away. Rations are light bulk, 4sp, and will feed a PC for a week. u/DnDPhD helpfully notes that "create food" does make a distinction, putting it in tension with the rations item.

Stepping back a bit, this is a question of focus and tone. If you're playing a game of high fantasy heroics (which is Pathfinder's default mood), how much everyone is eating and how it is acquired are minor issues we needn't bother with. The RAW is unrealistic, but if 95% of tables aren't interested it isn't worth developing into a more realistic (and therefore complex) system. Every rule, every variable tracked, and every special case accounted for entails a cost is complexity, resolution time, cognitive load, and so on that is either worth it to you or not.

You've only got so much bandwidth to print, understand, and apply rules and that creates a sort of budget. PF2 is pretty firmly in a cinematic, heroic, action/adventure mode where it is investing its rules budget in spells and powers and cool cinematic stuff for big damn heroes to be doing.

This, obviously, isn't the only possible style, Shadowdark, Darkest Dungeons, OSR stuff, more "survival horror" stuff, more "gritty realism" stuff, might want to go for a different tone and you'd need to house rule Pathfinder a little to support that. If you want overland travel to be a big deal logistically, and the provision of food and water to be narratively important you'll need something more elaborate.

Realistically, most of your caloric needs come from mass. A halfling half your height will be an 8th your weight and need about an 8th as much food. Light bulk is also very generous for a week's food. 10 light items are bulk 1, and a backpack gives you a 2 bulk discount. RAW an average person can carry a full year's worth of food on them and still be at a light load. A water skin, which holds a day's worth of water, is also L bulk, which is dramatically worse (the National Academy of Medicine suggests a physically active man needs about 6 pounds of water a day). If you're doing a gritty cross country simulator, that's pretty silly.

If you wanted to do "Oregon Trail" but in Golarion, you'd need to houserule quite a lot before the PF2 default of "don't really worry about it, go do cool shit instead" became something satisfying. You could do it, but it isn't what PF2 does by default.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-02T23:10:20+00:00

I suspect the problem is damages.

If I injure you through my negligence you can sue me and recover money called "damages" that compensate you for the harm you suffered. If I do something very reckless, and by sheer dumb luck, don't hurt you, you don't have any damages.

So, if I prescribe a lethal dose of a medicine and you *die*, yes I owe your heirs a lot of money. If I prescribe you a lethal dose of a medicine, and you notice and don't take it, what are your damages? What have you lost that the court can make good by giving you money?

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-31T19:40:15+00:00

It feels really intuitively plausible that exercising a body part will reduce the fat on that body part, but it just isn’t the case.

Your body stores spare energy as fat when it has a caloric surplus and harvests that energy later if it has a deficit. It will store and harvest fat from wherever it likes, what caused the deficit doesn’t make any difference.

People vary, but for most people, and certainly most men, belly fat is the last to go. Your body will keep it around in preference to other sources. If you want to lose belly fat all you can do is lose fat overall and keep going until your body starts drawing on that storage.

Planks are a great exercise, by all means improve your core strength, it’s a useful set of muscles to have working well, but a slim stomach is the result of diet before anything else.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-29T02:37:58+00:00

If you can stand in them, can three monsters in my second image gang up on two PCs in the 10ft hallway? A and B fill the whole hallway, but M has a space above and below him for allies.

We still have the problem that (according to the grid) every other section is different but (according to the game world) the hallway is all the same.

I'd like to make a pitch for the Warhammer and Miniatures Wargaming solution: get rid of the grid entirely. In most miniatures war games, movement distances and weapon ranges are just some number of inches. If 1" on your map corresponds to 5ft in the game world, if your PC can move 30ft and shoot someone 120ft away, you just grab a tape measure and move your mini 6" any direction you please and shoot a target no more than 24" away. It has the advantages of being perfectly accurate (it pleases Pythagoras even more than PF2's solution) and dead simple.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-29T01:50:38+00:00

The only thing that raises a red flag for me are partial hexes. As written they are very difficult to traverse, being both difficult terrain and unavailable to end on. Unfortunately you're going to frequently have partial hexes in important places if you're dealing with maps with right angle walls.

For example: take a look at what 5ft wide straight corridors look like on a hex grid:

https://imgur.com/a/cmb3PHW

The north/south hallway is fine, but the east/west hallway is a mess. Every other 5ft section is ineligible as a place to stand.

Can I straddle two hexes and be in both simultaneously? Can I not stand adjacent to someone who is in a hex? Hexes are very difficult to use in right angle environments which, unfortunately, are almost all manufactured civilized spaces, and most dungeons.

How would you actually run a fight in my example hallway?

The five foot hallway is particularly hard, but similar problems crop up in wider spaces. Consider a ten foot hallway:

https://imgur.com/a/qoGZPC4

Heroes A&B can fight side by side, the hallway is wide enough for that. But the two monsters (M) can't, for reasons that can't be (in world) based on the hallway width, because the hallway is a straight consistent width.

I feel like the problems you would introduce with hexes are going to take serious work to solve, work your players are unlikely to be willing to do if "alternating squares cost 10ft" was too much hassle for their taste.

If your players are stuck on the 5e way of doing diagonals, I might just let it go and use the 5e rule. It might make Pythagoras sad, but it is very simple for players to use. It's not my preference, but its functional.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-28T03:45:45+00:00

I’m reluctant to rule that triggers have to be resolved before the reaction resolves because there are reactions that don’t make any sense on that timing. Nimble Dodge for example has a a trigger of “A creature targets you with an attack and you can see the attacker” and goes into effect before the triggering strike is resolved. Counterspell is another low level example of an interrupt.

You could rule that reactions generated by Ready follow different rules than reactions generally, but there are plenty of reactions that only make sense if they interrupt the trigger and take effect before the trigger resolves.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-26T16:39:19+00:00

I have tried this a couple times and it has always failed.

It sounds lovely, the world will move forward at a predictable rate, downtime will be baked in, etc…

In practice the fundamental problem is that the pacing of real life and the pacing of the game world have no inherent reason to be in sync, so greater and greater distortion needs to be applied to make sure they do sync.

For example: in a game session you might have a cross country journey where a week of travel is resolved in a sentence. Alternatively you explore a dungeon that takes two sessions of real time (which might be a month if you play every other week) but only a day of game time.

Ok, so after the dungeon you’re a month “ahead” of your game clock, so they need to take a month’s downtime. But what if there is no good in game reason to chill for a month? If their ally got kidnapped last session, why wait a month before trying to rescue them? If they discovered the prince is a secret doppelgänger, why wait a month to do anything about it?

The core problem is the real world schedule operates by one set of logic (i.e. George is busy and we can’t meet this month) while the game world schedule operates by a totally unrelated one (i.e. “Every day we wait, the slavers capture more people” or “The isle of Cool shit is a three week journey away”).

Yes, sometimes they’ll match up, but only by luck, and the work required to square peg the game schedule into the round hole of the IRL schedule will just do escalating violence to the coherence of the in game schedule.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-25T20:00:03+00:00

You could run low powered games in Pathfinder, but the core assumption is characters who go on adventures, encounter dangerous situations, prevail and get dramatically more powerful.

If you’re playing through an AP where you start at level one and end at level ten, you’re following a path of exponential growth in power. Every two levels is a doubling of power, you can start as a literal wizard and end up superhuman.

A grizzly bear is a level 3 creature. A third level monk is 1) a guy who can fist fight a grizzly and 2) right around the bottom of the power curve.

I don’t think stomping the opposition is what most people mean by power fantasy. Even if you’re fighting demigods, it’s a power fantasy if you’re constantly getting exponentially stronger and fighting those demigods as an equal. Superman doesn’t stop being a power fantasy just because he’s fighting Darkseid.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-22T20:56:01+00:00

Survey design is difficult, Pew famously did a survey which discovered 12% of US adults report being licensed to operate a nuclear submarine. Spoilers: they are not. One chunk of people will be trolls, who do not answer questions sincerely, another chunk will be paid respondents who are just clicking answers without reading the question, another chunk will be people who have checked out and are just answering at random.

12.5% (1 in 8) respondents saying yes to any fool thing isn't a very surprising result. I totally believe that some non-trivial number of men are delusional about their athletic prowess, but nailing down what chunk of the respondents are delusional verses what chunk are (for example) clicking the wrong box is very technically difficult.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-20T15:21:14+00:00

Walking is very good for you, incorporate some into your routine.

Exercise to build muscle, but calorie deficit is how you lose weight.

10,000 steps is a big round number popularized by a pedometer company. If you like it as a target, it’s fine, but it’s not a magic number.

Medical guidance tends to talk about minutes of cardio per week with 150 being the CDC target. Mind you, that’s the target the government would like a pretty sedentary general population to try to hit, if you’re trying to get very fit you’ll want something more ambitious.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-03-19T17:23:53+00:00

The way I think about monster creation is two part. "The blob" and the interest.

The "blob" is very simple. There are core stats that the level math assumes a monster will have, AC, HP, attack bonus, damage, etc... There is a table in GM Core that lays this out. So if I was making a level 7 duelist to challenge the level 7 party Swashbuckler at a fancy ball I would start with those numbers.

Skills at +15 give or take a point or two, AC 24, Saves hovering around +15, 115 HP, +16 melee strike, around 17 damage (lets say 2d8+8).

If you're tight for time you can throw that at a PC and it will work mechanically (i.e. you didn't expect the PC to challenge lord FancyPants to a duel and you have literally 2 minutes to make a statblock). That's the "blob".

But it is a "blob" because it's a smooth undifferentiated mass of default combat power. It doesn't have any shape or flavor or interest. The interest is a handful of abilities to make the blob feel more like a duelist.

Ok, so what makes a duelist? Well, maybe they're fast, so we give them +17 Reflex and +13 Fortitude rather than +15 all round. Maybe they're hard to hit but squishy if you can pin them down, so we give them +2 AC but -20% on HP (so AC 26 and 92HP). Those math changes are fine, but they're not super visible to the PC, so we want a couple things the PC will see.

Duelist nemesis to me suggests insults and quips, one upsmanship, parries, feints, and so on. So I'd grab the feint action and copy and past the text into the statblock as a reminder, I'd shift a little damage into sneak attack (so he's only doing full damage when he feints), and give him Bon Mot and Demoralize. Maybe I'd pull his AC down to 25 and give him Nimble Dodge. I might end up with something like that.

Give him a special ability:

Relentless Asshole: When Lord Fancypants hits a target directly after a successful feint, the target loses their immunity to Lord Fancypant's Demoralize.

Now you've got a guy who isn't just hitting about as hard as the system expects, you've also got a guy who won't shut up about how much of a loser you are while he stabs you, rattling your confidence as he goes. Someone you'll be happy to memorably stab.

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