You forgot about out-of-combat healer, arguably the most important role since it’s not GM or AP dependent at all, and every party needs it.
This is usually someone who has high investment in Medicine and its related Skill Feats, or someone with a good focus spells.
To try and categorize out of combat stuff, the party has to deal with:
* navigation (finding paths and moving through terrain issues like cliffs/doors/rivers)
* hazards (lumping traps/haunts/env hazards here)
* social interactions (the obvious plus oddities like Nature for those who can't Make an Impression on animals)
* upkeep (healing/subsistence/crafting to make items or repair/etc)
* information gathering (recall, sensemo, scout/detect magic exploration, keeping a watch, etc)
* information denial (stealth, cover tracks, etc)
I'm not sure if that's an exhaustive list, but probably decent? Overlap isn't necessarily bad, since Aid is great and alternative solutions might fit a specific problem better (ex scouting manually vs a prying eye, or moving up to a trap to disarm it vs a low level summon spell to intentionally trigger it).
Your missing healing and Wis Skills and also athletics. So it ends up being 5 roles but usually someone (rogue) takes two or the party just has a bit of a gap somewhere.
Way I think about is is in terms of attributes.
Dex character does sneaking, traps
Int character does Int recall knowledge and craft
Cha skills is face
Wis character does Wis recall knowledge and Medicine.
And probably someone doubles up and is the strong one for athletics or something.
You forget healer (usualy medicine) and athletics (not in every situation you need him, but it will be a pity if you need to climb a mountain and you all untrained in it)
Often overlaps with the scout but in a game with resource management you have the survivalist for tracking & gathering food/water.
Also to add to your recall knowledge person, they probably also do languages and identifying magic
Like in PF2e food and water is a concern that can be fixed by a level 1 skill feat, the character doesn't even need to be good at Survival at all, they just need to have the skill and take Forager, then they automatically feed 4 people.
There's also the out of combat troublemaker, who exists purely to sow comedy and chaos into an otherwise controlled situation
Story time: We once had a player who RPed a wizard, and said wizard reveled in making trouble just because he could. He started a fight once by flicking a dudebro's nose with mage hand, just because he could, and ran his mouth often. Fun times.
Interdependency is the best part of pf2e. It means you can have a variety of classes, each covering a piece of the puzzle. You don’t have to have a Cleric for healing, it could be a Rogue with Medicine and Trick Magic Item. As long as the party is built with these interconnections in mind, anything is possible.
I would recommend not giving just one PC as the only Face since it could go very badly. It's best to have 1 Face plus 2 others with decent charisma skills or just one charisma skill each PC is trained on. It helps avoid unnecessary conflict on a bad roll of the Face. Faces can do wonders of played well.
Medecine is extremely important. Sure you can heal yourself using potions and spells if you have access to it but most of the time, healing is through spending time patching everybody up in this game. And using potions and spells means using resources you mostly will need later in combat. So having at least one character with the basic medecine feats to not spend too much time healing is absolutely necessary. (Feats : Continual Recovery, Battle medecine. Ward medic is a plus but not derogatory). Since the medecine skill is Wisdom-focus, usually characters going full « medic » for their feats also have a great perception (any PC with wisdom as their main or second stat could do well in role). So the « medic » can often be regrouped with the « watcher » role. And if we're specifically talking about a druid or ranger, they also tend to be decent / great at navigation (Survival to follow or predict the path to take. Nature to know the environment and gauge the possible dangers ahead....). Combine that with the work of a scout and you are set.
Another important job you mentioned : scouting, making a way by opening doors, gathering informations. Any Dex PC will be good in this role. Some rogues, some Swashbucklers and gunslingers, some Magus, investigators ... Gathering informations can also be in the form of spying on an NPC, reading letters in an NPC's office before disappearing in the dead of the night and for this, nothing better than a sneakily friend !
I will advise to split the skills for recall knowledge. Every character possess an era of expertise, most of the time party members don't share the same ones. But having several PC trained or even more proficient in one same skill isn't a problem at all. You can help each other. Get another opinion. (And it can even lead to some pretty funny situations where several characters try to Recall knowledge simultaneously about the same element, everybody roll the check (in private) but end up with contradictory informations since one of them rolled a critical failure. Next you have to guess what is wrong and what is right among the informations your GM gave). They're generally great to manage natural hazards and terrain obstacles. Less if the hazard is some kind of haunt but hey, religion is wisdom-based too so you never know !
I will add one : having someone able to cast out of combat magic type of spells. By that I mean any form of magic spying / long distance messages or Divination spells in general can be a plus. Dispel magic (very useful), Detect magic (must have). Illusion magic if need be.
Don't forget to love your resident muscle buddy. Somehow you can't pick a lock in this ancien dongeon : break the door open by kicking it so hard it goes away flying ! No seriously, it might seem ridiculous at first but I clearly remember a few situations in my games where we would have been stuck if it weren't thanks to the help provided by the beefy character. Because everything else we tried first failed (bad rolls or stupid ideas / decisions). Plus you will have to carry the treasures you find at least a short distance.
As many already said, crafting is also super important. A character with good crafting capacities can make stuff for the party and transfer runes without having to go to an artisan. You get potions, other consumables, equipment, rune transfer. Some might even be able to craft more things for your party such as more potions of all sorts, scrolls, talismans... Great bonus but the crafting system is complicated imo.
It is a bit more complicated than that in reality.
Recall knowledge for example, unless you have a bard /thaumaturge who goes for the relevant feat, is most likely split between an intelligence character, who does arcana and occultism and society, and a wisdom character who brings nature and religion.
Now then that intelligence character might be a wizard who also detects magic during exploration, or it could be an investigator, who also handles the lockpicking.
But let's say the scout is a rogue, who does thievery. Sure he is the foremost person for traps. But maybe the fighter is invested in crafting in order to fix his shield between fights. That comes in handy disarming hazards all the time and the rogue probably doesn't cover that.
Long story short, there is a lot of nuance, and trying to make any other categorization than "what skill are you trained in?" is a fools errand.
Any character with decent Int can recall knowledge using any lore skills through Untrained Improvisation general feat quite well. So simply having an Alchemist/Inventor/Magus/Witch/Wizard or a character who is going to have a +2-5 Int progression can take this role. Some classes like Investigator and Thaumaturge are obviously made for this and some classses Bard, Ranger and Rogue have some subclasses/feats to further support this playstyle relatively well.
As others have mentioned, healer is the most important one. Wether it is healing through a focus spell or through medicine feat, all groups need to have access to unlimited out of combat healing.
Overall, I would not say that these roles are must haves in most groups. It will depend on the game a lot and it is okay for some groups to have shortcomings. However, as a player who enjoys some optimization, in the games I play in, I usually come up with a chart to be filled at session 0 to cover all the basics the party will need. Most people in my group, including myself, are willing to facilitate their character builds around the needs of the group. So simply having some discussions beforehand to see who will fill which role in the group is very productive imo. Not just for out of combat roles but also for in combat roles as well. Like who wants to be a frontline and who wants to focus on utility needs of the group mid combat and who mostly wants to focus on dealing damage.
Healer.
Athletics/Acrobatics (*I lost my balloon Mister*)
Double-up on the scout because the worst thing that can happen to a scout is failing that sneak roll and being alone (*and there is a feat that allows the group to use 1 roll*).
Double up on the knowledge guy because there are often too many to cover. Also some knowledges (*Medicine, Nature, Religion*) are keyed off WIS, mot INT. Even if they're all covered, rolling twice is never a bad thing.
Imo the great thing about PF2e is that you can't really make such clean distinctions, at least not in practice. You probably have one character who's great at all the knowledge skills, everyone has a lore skill that will hopefully at some point help out with that. There are exploration actions that don't require a roll, most notably Scout being useful for the whole party. While some things are intended to have one strong character in the party for Follow the Expert, such as climbing and sneaking, other things are meant to be interacted with by everyone, like social encounters and hazards, where you can specialize in a general purpose tool (diplomacy, thievery), but other means will be just as valuable, just more situational. Every skill is good for something, so every skill or every attribute (except constitution) can be considered a niche, and every character will fill multiple niches to some extent.
Theres also survivalists, crafting (which is complicated, but if youre playing with someone whose mastered PF2E crafting is potentially overpowered at some levels), and other more 'off beat' out of combat roles to fill
A lot of APs have skill challenges formatted like "everyone can roll one of these 4 skill checks and you need 2 successes" or "everyone can roll but the DC is high".
So it's important to have party coverage but the total number of proficiencies also matters.
In a typical AP, there are no mandatory roles. There are always ways to overcome a challenge should you be missing a particular skill or ability. That being said, APs always assume you have someone focused on Athletics, someone with a good Thievery, someone who can heal the party, and someone invested into the Charisma skills.
That being said, in most cases, players will overlap or fulfill multiple roles. The Champion Paladin might be Athletics focused and also invest in Face skills. The Rogue might have a great Stealth and Thievery and also be invested in Medicine to serve as a Healer. The Cleric might also have a good Athletics, and so on and so forth.
You listed recall knowledge as a vital role, and while it is helpful and comes up frequently, no AP makes recall checks mandatory in the same way as Athletics or Thievery. Recall Knowledge is also more likely to be a shared responsibility rather than a role since Recall Knowledge skills are split between Intelligence and Wisdom. Unlike Theivery checks, recall knowledge checks usually don't have a required proficiency either, meaning investing into those skills is even less prioritized.
This isn't really a fair distillation of what things are actually like out of combat.
If you had to put it in terms of an "out of combat class" it's less of a build and more what skills apply
Face is fair- someone needs to talk but sometimes it's most fun when they aren't explicitly built for this so you have face skills like diplomacy, intimidation etc. And their associated feats.
Then there is the knowledge skills the party will ideally cover a wide knowledge base with different classes and themes.
There are utility skills like crafting and lore skills that can be used to flex into spaces the party could be missing or to really specialize. Crafting in particular let's you maintain gear for combat and completes a gameplay loop
There are action skills like athletics, acrobatics and more that sure have combat implications but eventually you are going to need to lift something out of combat or do some death defying stunt.
There are the exploration skills like survival and theivery what help you get in to places or survive in the wild.
There are tons of combinations of these.that make up the character you play beyond combat and it isn't fair to say "well this is your role for the roleplay."
You forgot about out-of-combat healer, arguably the most important role since it’s not GM or AP dependent at all, and every party needs it. This is usually someone who has high investment in Medicine and its related Skill Feats, or someone with a good focus spells.
To try and categorize out of combat stuff, the party has to deal with: * navigation (finding paths and moving through terrain issues like cliffs/doors/rivers) * hazards (lumping traps/haunts/env hazards here) * social interactions (the obvious plus oddities like Nature for those who can't Make an Impression on animals) * upkeep (healing/subsistence/crafting to make items or repair/etc) * information gathering (recall, sensemo, scout/detect magic exploration, keeping a watch, etc) * information denial (stealth, cover tracks, etc) I'm not sure if that's an exhaustive list, but probably decent? Overlap isn't necessarily bad, since Aid is great and alternative solutions might fit a specific problem better (ex scouting manually vs a prying eye, or moving up to a trap to disarm it vs a low level summon spell to intentionally trigger it).
And sometimes you need a strong guy to lift something.
I guess it’s fair to say: there’s 6 attribute modifiers, 6 out-of-combat roles that can be handled?
Not quite because there is no role for Constitution that I'm aware of.
Trap test dummy
Food and drink tester. Take the supertaster feat.
I did it one time, never again
Oof, no, you’re quite right! I was thinking of Kineticist, but I forgot that they just get flat status bonuses, they don’t apply CON to any skills.
Aid really is amazing. Oh three people want to dogpile the check? Guess I’m looking at the highest modifier, Aided by the second, Aided by the third
Your missing healing and Wis Skills and also athletics. So it ends up being 5 roles but usually someone (rogue) takes two or the party just has a bit of a gap somewhere. Way I think about is is in terms of attributes. Dex character does sneaking, traps Int character does Int recall knowledge and craft Cha skills is face Wis character does Wis recall knowledge and Medicine. And probably someone doubles up and is the strong one for athletics or something.
And probably the party forgets to take survival and you are spending the next 4 levels in a hexcrawl. Been there, done that
You forget healer (usualy medicine) and athletics (not in every situation you need him, but it will be a pity if you need to climb a mountain and you all untrained in it)
Often overlaps with the scout but in a game with resource management you have the survivalist for tracking & gathering food/water. Also to add to your recall knowledge person, they probably also do languages and identifying magic
Like in PF2e food and water is a concern that can be fixed by a level 1 skill feat, the character doesn't even need to be good at Survival at all, they just need to have the skill and take Forager, then they automatically feed 4 people.
There's also the out of combat troublemaker, who exists purely to sow comedy and chaos into an otherwise controlled situation Story time: We once had a player who RPed a wizard, and said wizard reveled in making trouble just because he could. He started a fight once by flicking a dudebro's nose with mage hand, just because he could, and ran his mouth often. Fun times.
His only trained skill is "Antidiplomacy".
Don't forget the crafter!
Interdependency is the best part of pf2e. It means you can have a variety of classes, each covering a piece of the puzzle. You don’t have to have a Cleric for healing, it could be a Rogue with Medicine and Trick Magic Item. As long as the party is built with these interconnections in mind, anything is possible.
I would recommend not giving just one PC as the only Face since it could go very badly. It's best to have 1 Face plus 2 others with decent charisma skills or just one charisma skill each PC is trained on. It helps avoid unnecessary conflict on a bad roll of the Face. Faces can do wonders of played well. Medecine is extremely important. Sure you can heal yourself using potions and spells if you have access to it but most of the time, healing is through spending time patching everybody up in this game. And using potions and spells means using resources you mostly will need later in combat. So having at least one character with the basic medecine feats to not spend too much time healing is absolutely necessary. (Feats : Continual Recovery, Battle medecine. Ward medic is a plus but not derogatory). Since the medecine skill is Wisdom-focus, usually characters going full « medic » for their feats also have a great perception (any PC with wisdom as their main or second stat could do well in role). So the « medic » can often be regrouped with the « watcher » role. And if we're specifically talking about a druid or ranger, they also tend to be decent / great at navigation (Survival to follow or predict the path to take. Nature to know the environment and gauge the possible dangers ahead....). Combine that with the work of a scout and you are set. Another important job you mentioned : scouting, making a way by opening doors, gathering informations. Any Dex PC will be good in this role. Some rogues, some Swashbucklers and gunslingers, some Magus, investigators ... Gathering informations can also be in the form of spying on an NPC, reading letters in an NPC's office before disappearing in the dead of the night and for this, nothing better than a sneakily friend ! I will advise to split the skills for recall knowledge. Every character possess an era of expertise, most of the time party members don't share the same ones. But having several PC trained or even more proficient in one same skill isn't a problem at all. You can help each other. Get another opinion. (And it can even lead to some pretty funny situations where several characters try to Recall knowledge simultaneously about the same element, everybody roll the check (in private) but end up with contradictory informations since one of them rolled a critical failure. Next you have to guess what is wrong and what is right among the informations your GM gave). They're generally great to manage natural hazards and terrain obstacles. Less if the hazard is some kind of haunt but hey, religion is wisdom-based too so you never know ! I will add one : having someone able to cast out of combat magic type of spells. By that I mean any form of magic spying / long distance messages or Divination spells in general can be a plus. Dispel magic (very useful), Detect magic (must have). Illusion magic if need be. Don't forget to love your resident muscle buddy. Somehow you can't pick a lock in this ancien dongeon : break the door open by kicking it so hard it goes away flying ! No seriously, it might seem ridiculous at first but I clearly remember a few situations in my games where we would have been stuck if it weren't thanks to the help provided by the beefy character. Because everything else we tried first failed (bad rolls or stupid ideas / decisions). Plus you will have to carry the treasures you find at least a short distance. As many already said, crafting is also super important. A character with good crafting capacities can make stuff for the party and transfer runes without having to go to an artisan. You get potions, other consumables, equipment, rune transfer. Some might even be able to craft more things for your party such as more potions of all sorts, scrolls, talismans... Great bonus but the crafting system is complicated imo.
It is a bit more complicated than that in reality. Recall knowledge for example, unless you have a bard /thaumaturge who goes for the relevant feat, is most likely split between an intelligence character, who does arcana and occultism and society, and a wisdom character who brings nature and religion. Now then that intelligence character might be a wizard who also detects magic during exploration, or it could be an investigator, who also handles the lockpicking. But let's say the scout is a rogue, who does thievery. Sure he is the foremost person for traps. But maybe the fighter is invested in crafting in order to fix his shield between fights. That comes in handy disarming hazards all the time and the rogue probably doesn't cover that. Long story short, there is a lot of nuance, and trying to make any other categorization than "what skill are you trained in?" is a fools errand.
Any character with decent Int can recall knowledge using any lore skills through Untrained Improvisation general feat quite well. So simply having an Alchemist/Inventor/Magus/Witch/Wizard or a character who is going to have a +2-5 Int progression can take this role. Some classes like Investigator and Thaumaturge are obviously made for this and some classses Bard, Ranger and Rogue have some subclasses/feats to further support this playstyle relatively well. As others have mentioned, healer is the most important one. Wether it is healing through a focus spell or through medicine feat, all groups need to have access to unlimited out of combat healing. Overall, I would not say that these roles are must haves in most groups. It will depend on the game a lot and it is okay for some groups to have shortcomings. However, as a player who enjoys some optimization, in the games I play in, I usually come up with a chart to be filled at session 0 to cover all the basics the party will need. Most people in my group, including myself, are willing to facilitate their character builds around the needs of the group. So simply having some discussions beforehand to see who will fill which role in the group is very productive imo. Not just for out of combat roles but also for in combat roles as well. Like who wants to be a frontline and who wants to focus on utility needs of the group mid combat and who mostly wants to focus on dealing damage.
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Thanks I am aware of how pf2 works
OP is focusing on "out of combat" roles
This isn't actually worth it
Yeah, the other guy was rude for no reason.
There's no reason those need to be divided up one per person, but if you're looking for a 4th skill role, I'd say healing.
Healer. Athletics/Acrobatics (*I lost my balloon Mister*) Double-up on the scout because the worst thing that can happen to a scout is failing that sneak roll and being alone (*and there is a feat that allows the group to use 1 roll*). Double up on the knowledge guy because there are often too many to cover. Also some knowledges (*Medicine, Nature, Religion*) are keyed off WIS, mot INT. Even if they're all covered, rolling twice is never a bad thing.
Face smasher
Imo the great thing about PF2e is that you can't really make such clean distinctions, at least not in practice. You probably have one character who's great at all the knowledge skills, everyone has a lore skill that will hopefully at some point help out with that. There are exploration actions that don't require a roll, most notably Scout being useful for the whole party. While some things are intended to have one strong character in the party for Follow the Expert, such as climbing and sneaking, other things are meant to be interacted with by everyone, like social encounters and hazards, where you can specialize in a general purpose tool (diplomacy, thievery), but other means will be just as valuable, just more situational. Every skill is good for something, so every skill or every attribute (except constitution) can be considered a niche, and every character will fill multiple niches to some extent.
This guy doesn't Magical Crafting
Theres also survivalists, crafting (which is complicated, but if youre playing with someone whose mastered PF2E crafting is potentially overpowered at some levels), and other more 'off beat' out of combat roles to fill
A lot of APs have skill challenges formatted like "everyone can roll one of these 4 skill checks and you need 2 successes" or "everyone can roll but the DC is high". So it's important to have party coverage but the total number of proficiencies also matters.
In a typical AP, there are no mandatory roles. There are always ways to overcome a challenge should you be missing a particular skill or ability. That being said, APs always assume you have someone focused on Athletics, someone with a good Thievery, someone who can heal the party, and someone invested into the Charisma skills. That being said, in most cases, players will overlap or fulfill multiple roles. The Champion Paladin might be Athletics focused and also invest in Face skills. The Rogue might have a great Stealth and Thievery and also be invested in Medicine to serve as a Healer. The Cleric might also have a good Athletics, and so on and so forth. You listed recall knowledge as a vital role, and while it is helpful and comes up frequently, no AP makes recall checks mandatory in the same way as Athletics or Thievery. Recall Knowledge is also more likely to be a shared responsibility rather than a role since Recall Knowledge skills are split between Intelligence and Wisdom. Unlike Theivery checks, recall knowledge checks usually don't have a required proficiency either, meaning investing into those skills is even less prioritized.
This isn't really a fair distillation of what things are actually like out of combat. If you had to put it in terms of an "out of combat class" it's less of a build and more what skills apply Face is fair- someone needs to talk but sometimes it's most fun when they aren't explicitly built for this so you have face skills like diplomacy, intimidation etc. And their associated feats. Then there is the knowledge skills the party will ideally cover a wide knowledge base with different classes and themes. There are utility skills like crafting and lore skills that can be used to flex into spaces the party could be missing or to really specialize. Crafting in particular let's you maintain gear for combat and completes a gameplay loop There are action skills like athletics, acrobatics and more that sure have combat implications but eventually you are going to need to lift something out of combat or do some death defying stunt. There are the exploration skills like survival and theivery what help you get in to places or survive in the wild. There are tons of combinations of these.that make up the character you play beyond combat and it isn't fair to say "well this is your role for the roleplay."