Buffman

I think it can be hard to provide a definitive guide that makes all the choices for you because the campaign you’re playing will significantly influence your choices. Does your campaign go from level 1-20 or some range in between? Will you have downtime to retrain? Are you playing with variant rules? Will you be expecting a lot of combat (and what creatures) or is it more RP heavy? What are your companion builds and how many are there?

Most guides I’ve read will provide general advice and usually a rating of skills/feats/abilities with caveats or notes on when something might be better or worse.

That said, I’ve found RPGBot usually has decent guides (not sure if they’ve been updated for the remaster). Your best resource right now (until more content is on Lenny) is probably Reddit.

Are Captain Janeway and Kristi Noem the same person? I’ve never seen them in the same room together… 🧐

If the NPC is expected to see combat, you can use the Archives of Nethys NPC database as a starting point or you can use the Monster creation rules to start from scratch.

For certain things, like recalling knowledge where a critical failure leads to false information, secret checks I feel are necessary. I usually try to make it so that the false knowledge isn’t detrimental and they can usually figure it out after the first time. Things like stealth, perception, and social skills are important for players not to know the result. Partly, it prevents meta gaming, but mostly it keeps things moving smoothly. Using a VTT makes it trivial and I usually let the players roll the check, with me rolling on rare occasions for when the players should be looking for something, but don’t explicitly say they are.

Don Snoreleone

There are now two wolves and a moose inside of you.

I think they meant for it to cover more than just feats. For instance, maybe you have an item you activate that increases your damage die size or you’re under the effects of a spell. It would be too verbose for them to enumerate everything. They could have instead stated “effect” or “anything” if they intended it to cover traits. There is also this from the definition of trait (emphasis mine):

A trait is a keyword that conveys additional information about a rules element, such as a school of magic or rarity. Often, a trait indicates how other rules interact with an ability, creature, item, or another rules element that has that trait.

Trait specifically calls out ability as something separate from a trait.

I think this largely depends on whether you consider traits abilities or not. My interpretation would be that abilities are things like class features/feats, but traits are not, and would therefore not impact the ruffian’s sneak attack specifically.

The 13^th^ month should be called Smarch!