In games like Magic the Gathering, you’re building your decks less around cool singular abilities, creatures and spells, and more about orchestrating a moment of critical mass where you can overwhelm and guarantee victory. Pathfinder 2e has some similarity to this kind of building, where the idea is less to make a situation where every time you X, Y happens, which triggers Z procs, and more to stack bonuses and penalties to artificially create critical successes for your team, then figuring out which ability or spell to best make use of that setup. For example, the ideal combat set-up against a boss fight on a balcony might be Heroism 9 on the fighter from the cleric, Synesthesia on the enemy from the bard, a Gust of Wind from the wizard to inflict prone, all culminating in a Brutish Shove off the ledge from the fighter.
However, the big appeal for TTRPGs for me is that not everything you can do needs to touch combat like in a traditional RPG video game. I’m particularly interested in strategies that help you traverse environments, interacting with people you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to get a word in edgewise with, and bypass dangerous encounters entirely.
In this vein, I think Protector Tree and Shape Wood are a great couple of spells for any primalist to learn and prepare on the regular. Protector Tree creates a really nice damage mitigation tool in combat, but it also sprouts a permanent (unworked) medium sized tree! That’s only kind of neat, but becomes a valuable resource when paired with the Shape Wood spell, which just so happens to require a bunch of unworked wood to be useful! Now, so long as you have both of these spells in equal measure, you can fabricate wooden items that you ordinarily wouldn’t be able to bring with you on adventures for dirt cheap. Ladders, steps, platforms, wheels, axles - you’ve basically got a low-tech Garry’s mod at your disposal! If you need a cart to move massive loot, a few casts and some basic assembly and a Form-Retention’d Wildshape will get that Mithril Door from the dungeon back to town.
Are there any spells, items, or abilities you’ve found useful when used together like this? I’d be eager to hear them!
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I play a Baba Yaga witch, and you can get pretty creative with Spirit Object (if your GM agrees). We recently fought a gibbering mouther with weakness to bludgeoning damage, so I spirit object’d a +1 mace we had picked up earlier in the dungeon in order to attack, while simultaneously delivering the weapon to our champion in the front line! You can also combine it with consumables, like a smokestick to conceal your allies, or a pint of oil to start small fires.
Using it with consumables to put them in range of your teammates is a clever idea. Hopefully they don’t break on hit, or maybe hopefully they do, depending on the type of consumable. A glass flask of yellow musk poison would be pretty ideal to crack open, though an elixir of life would be rough to lose.
not fully vanilla, But Witches+ Conjure Gadget + Blood Duplicate has gotten me some mileage, gadgets aren’t magical nor (usually) made of precious stuff, and being able to get an extra consumable like a smoke fan out of my hourly cast is pretty handy. Vanilla, it probably works similarly with other restricted item conjuration spells like Creation as a mean to quickly get an extra copy
Oh wow, that’s pretty handy in vanilla games if you’ve got an inventor in the party w/ the Gadget Specialist feat and a bundle of scrolls. Suddenly you can purchase a bunch of expensive gadgets for only 12gp.
A few others I remember seeing/using at some point:
Retrieval Prism + Sturdy Shield | When you’re a fighter, champion, warpriest, or druid that gets Shield Block for free, it can feel wasteful to not include a shield into your kit. But how are you going to use that shield if you like rolling with a big sword, or a staff and scroll combo? The easy answer is by summoning the shield exactly as needed! You can take two swings of your sword, summon the shield, and raise it, all in one turn. Or you can expend that scroll, summon your shield, and raise it. Bonus combo: Greater Retrieval Prism + any scroll on your person. Completely negate the action cost of pulling out the 1st scroll in an encounter, letting you combo together 1-action spells and whatever spell would be perfect for the situation.
Shrink Item + Stupid big pot of water + Control Water | Okay, admittedly it is hard to find a big pot that can store 80 bulk worth of water, but the upside of the crafting rules being a flat 4 days to craft anything mean you can make one yourself. Shrink the 80bulk pot of water, store it in a smaller jar to preserve the spell indefinitely, and you can now summon an enormous amount of water for use with Control Water in any environment. If you play your cards right, you can bottle up another 80 bulk of water from the raised water level and use it again in another situation.
Fear + Amped Message + Dread Striker | Our rogue has the Dread Striker feat, which makes any frightened enemies flat-footed to them. Fear inflicts Frightened, and Amped Message gives the rogue a reaction to swing. If they weren’t sneak attacking before, they are now. All for 3 actions, a first level spell, and a focus point on the spellcasters turn. Simple and effective.
A cleric with the luxury of starting their turn in touch range of a big threat can go Harm - Cast Down - Grapple. The combination of prone and grabbed is such an overwhelmingly potent way to waste a creature’s actions.
I love Cast Down so much, it’s legit the only reason I’ve touched the cleric after the oracle came out.
