Seerow's page

I am ultra late here and probably any decisions regarding what to include have already been made... but I'm going to add my two cents anyway.

1) As others have said, the prologue was a godsend. I don't actually care for the exact scenario used in the prologue, but it works. But any sort of prologue getting your heroes started in brevoy and given a chance to meet and interact with the major players before being sent off to start clearing the Greenbelt would be well received.

2) While I don't mind the idea of filling in the blank map space and giving some more short descriptions of each hex... as far as actual content I prefer the CRPG's method where random encounter areas with just one encounter are the exception (and usually bypassable). Any important encounter area has at least 3-4 encounters to go through. For example the updated Temple of the Elk, so instead of just facing the bear, you've also got a pack of wolves, a boar, and one other encounter I can't recall offhand. I'd like to see more of this sort of thing, because the 1 thing that really drags in this AP is the one encounter workdays that really are the norm. This goes double past part 2.

By part 3/4 your PCs really shouldn't be bothering to clear hex by hex and deal with local wildlife, they have scouts for that. Their scouts should be calling the PCs in for an assist when encountering something more meaningful (whether that be a tribe of lizardfolk, an island with spooky lightning balls, or a roving tribe of centaurs). Basically direct the PCs to areas that can offer a challenge, don't waste time with exploring hex by hex and dealing with speed bump encounters that are more annoying than threatening.

3) The region based kingdom management. Especially if you're making this as a PF2 product and have a chance to redesign from the ground up, claiming and upgrading hex by hex turns kingdom management into a spreadsheet simulator. Instead of claiming 50 hexes 1 at a time for 1 bp each I'd rather see claiming a region for 50bp. The CRPG's kingdom management system isn't perfect, but at least this aspect of it is on the right track.

4) The motivations of Nyrissa and the possibility of teaming up with her to take on the Eldest if meeting certain goals. Nyrissa appearing earlier and her story being brought in much earlier is also good. I have no way to be sure but from discussions on this forum I feel like Nyrissa coming into play earlier is probably one of the most frequent changes made to the AP.

So I posted... wow was that 4 years ago? About my reshuffling of Kingmaker (here https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2s7yc?Reshuffling-Kingmaker). Between delays and my group swapping campaigns/DMs fairly regularly, as well as my modifications fluffing out what we've played... we're currently done with Book 2.

Which means we're hitting the point where I plan to make more serious changes.

Short version of what I am planning here is:

-Rushlight tournament invites go out.This usually comes in part 5, but I am wanting to use this as a way to introduce the players to local politics, and show them getting recognition as a real kingdom following the defeat of Hargulka.

-Since we are at start of book 3 technically, the Rushlight tournament will not be tied to the attack of Pitax (this time at least). After returning home there'll be a time skip, and a few months later players get a call for help from Varn (who has not vanished!)

-Varnhold Vanishing is going to be pushed all the way to 5, right before or possibly simultaneously with Nyrissa's Blooms. However, I do want the players to take over Varnhold. So at this point, Varn is being raided by Centaurs in response to his settlers heading south and coming too close to Vordrakai's tomb. At this point the PCs being called in to help can choose to ignore Varn (then go take up the ruins of the town afterwards), or go to help (in which case after successfully helping Varn swears fealty to the PCs and they can annex his kingdom). In either case the PCs will need to deal with the Centaurs either to gain Varn's fealty or to successfully claim the remains of his kingdom.

-Once the Centaurs have been dealt with (or possibly simultaneously with it, depending on how evil I feel), the battle of Tatzlford kicks off, starting the events of Book 4. It will then go to Book 5, then eventually loop back to someone crossing a line, waking up Big V, and Varnhold vanishing and all of the fun associated with that starting.

So my major points of concern right now are:
1) Is the Rushlight Tournament enough to hold a whole session by itself? I am planning on doing it as a one shot in the relatively near future even though it's not my turn to DM again yet. Since it's kind of disconnected from the Minotaurs and Book 4 issues, it seems like a good way to set up that political landscape before diving in. I am just not sure it will be enough to fill a 6-8 hour session on its own.

2) In the event that it is not, I am interested in hearing about things to help pad it out. I have so far decided to add at least one new minigame event (Extreme Juggling. I can provide my current write up for it if anyone is interested), though there was a Thief Tower event someone had posted here some time ago and it may get added as well. Looking for any other events that people have created that fit in well (especially interested in anything Mage themed, though I have also considered something tied to Ride/Handle Animal with the menagerie at the tournament), or any encounters (social or otherwise) that would make sense to include before/during/after the tournament.

3) How much am I potentially shooting myself in the foot with the reshuffling of big V? I really feel like he is a bigger more menacing threat than anything we see in stages 3/4, and feels like a more appropriate high level challenge. I am more concerned about storyline setup. Particularly ramifications of the players allying with the Nomen centaurs potentially years before Big V starts doing his thing.

10 BP is 40,000 gold. Just how major ARE these items and what is your tax rate?

It costs 40,000 gold to buy 10BP, but the BP is an abstraction which is why we have BP instead of just gold costs. I mean if you want to get really technical, where does all of your nations' BP come from when you collect taxes with your tax edict set to "none". It's only a small penalty to economy that most kingdoms won't even notice, where is all of your money coming from?

The point is to give a point to those magic item slots, and make them worth something to the kingdom. Less broken than the original rules but more useful than what UK gives.

Seerow wrote:

...when the players convert a tooth fairy from Chaotic Evil to Neutral, and convince it to set up shop as a dentist rather than stealing teeth from random people around town

This story I gotta hear.

Well if you insist. Spoilered for length.

Gaberlunzie wrote:

Uhm... Kobolds live in huge colonies, are great miners andcommunaly-minded. They are mechanically skilledand of average intelligence. As generally lawful creatures with well-organized communities theres really no reason for them to have worse weapon imdustry than say, goblins or lizardfolk. Now, theres been good arguments here for why their resources are limited and equipment mediocre, some i a gree with and some not, but "humans dont allow them in their shops" is a really crappy one.

It works for ogres or bugbears, not for kobolds.

I will say that might limit some of the weapon options.

I mostly mean the lucerne hammer, the Bardiche, the Glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive- that long list of martial reach weapons that came about due to large scale production for weapons of war and advancements in metallurgy in the medieval period. Those were born from centuries of experimentation with a rather large amount of resources. So unless you spend time getting up close look at human weapons (and for kobolds, that is a euphemism for 'death'), then it might be hard to justify the breadth of unique and sometimes specialized reach weapons.

But that certainly doesn't exclude long spears or glaives, which are fairly simple and and carry obvious advantages.

Reach weapons are actually something I can understand not being big for kobolds. Particularly for defense of their homes, which tend to have a lot of twisting and turning passageways, reach weapons are going to run into problems that you just can't use them very effectively. (And of course that's probably why the lairs are designed that way, to nulify enemy reach as often as possible). They might have a few reach weapons to defend any communal spaces that are more open, or if they are caught above ground... but that's not really particularly standard.

That said, kobolds absolutely should have access to crossbows instead of slings for ranged weapons, and almost any close weapon should be within their capabilities of designing. The real problem is that the spear is a simple 2-handed weapon that is just awful all around.

A Light Pick, Light Hammer, or Shortsword would all be acceptable substitutes, letting them maintain similar damage but letting them use weapon finesse to take advantage of their decent dex (and mitigate that strength penalty), and opening up the offhand for a buckler or light shield for an extra 1 AC. These aren't changes that are really going to push kobolds up a CR, but will make them less pathetic seeming.

Update: Finished my prep-work, and am running the first group through tomorrow. I'm really bad at knowing how long a given session will run or how long PCs will take to get through content, so I deliberately left room to pad things out if things are going by too fast, and lots of places where I can cut if it's going too slow. The idea is to hit each major beat during an 8-10 hour session, giving the PCs a taste of the stolen lands, a bit of the politics that are spawning the adventure, and introducing them to the setting and the major players.

Start: PCs are helping defend a village along the south Brevoy border until Restov can send relieve. Bandit activity in the area is reaching an all time high.

PCs end up repelling an attack led by Kressle that is an attempt to destroy the village as a message to others who would resist them. The PCs heroics in repelling the attack attracts the notice of Lord Lodovka who arrives a day or two later with a squad of soldiers to find the bandit problem already resolved.

Restov, impressed by the PC's resourcefulness invites them to travel with him back to Restov. Here the PCs will get introduced to Varn and Kesten Garess (this takes place before his public shaming and disinheritance), and get to discuss a lot of the politics of what's going on and generally get to know these three characters better.

Next Ledovka asks the PCs to go take care of reports of banditry at another nearby small town. Some investigation later indicates no bandits at all, but a group of fey who decided impersonating bandits was a fun prank. PCs need to deal with it one way or another.

After PCs deal with the fey issue in town, they head back to Restov and after some praise for their decisive action in handling the fey are told about the colony Drelev will be establishing in the Slough. This is the first colony to be established in the Stolen lands, and Lodovka asks the PCs to go along as 'general problem solvers'.

This section is primarily to let the PCs get to know Drelev, his personality and motivations, and pad out the adventure depending on how time is looking. If everything thus far is going quickly, Drelev will ask them to do some hex crawling around his capitol site, working in a number of random encounters. otherwise things go relatively uneventfully, with no combat really necessary, though at least one encounter is probably desired unless the session is already running really slow.

Upon arriving back at Restov, they hear that Varn has hired a bunch of mercenaries and is striking out to form his own colony. Lodovka seems skeptical, and wants the PCs to check in on how things are developing there. To have an excuse to go, he sends them with a small supply caravan. Traveling to the fledgeling Varnhold is another place where extra encounters can be added for padding, or ignored entirely.

At Varnhold, they find Maegar Varn is paralyzed with a combination of rage and fear as one of his mercenary companies (made up of about 10 soldiers) betrayed him and kidnapped his daughter, demanding to be paid the incoming shipment of supplies the PCs were bringing in exchange for her safe return. Varn is vehemently against giving them anything, but is also terrified his remaining mercenaries are similarly compromised. He will beg the PCs for their aid in the matter.

Regardless of how the PCs handle this (even just saying "Nope" and leaving) they end up getting their charter, and are told a few other similar groups are being sent, one other should meet them near Oleg's when they arrive (the remaining groups form the party that attempts to start the 4th colony). End of session.

Behind the scenes I am going with Varn has an intent to befriend the centaurs, something that Lodovka is adamantly against for reasons little better than Xenophobia. Lodovka actually paid off this group of mercenaries, with the goal of destabilizing Varn's colonization attempt, in hopes of demoralizing him and convincing him to come back home.

If the PCs fail to intervene in the matter successfully, Lodovka will act distraught but is pleased (sense motive checks can reveal this), and offer the PCs their charter giving the reason of "as a backup" in case Varn fails.

If the PCs successfully intercede, Varn will provide a glowing letter of recommendation, which Lodovka will acknowledge, acting pleased at their success, while privately being upset at the setback (again sense motive will reveal this).

Just wanted to let folks know that, in light of comments left, edits have been made. Hopefully the editor's note at the beginning of the piece now provides the proper information everyone has wanted included, and clarifies the point the article was shooting for.

To those who were helpful and polite, thank you. To those who were abrasive but helpful, I suppose I'll say thanks to you as well.

Your editors note basically just makes your entire article worthless.

"I hate discussion of power tiers, and I'm going to tell you why tiers are useless by arguing against a definition that nobody else who talks about tiers actually uses"

Like someone else said, you did a great job of knocking down the straw man you set up. Unfortunately for you, nobody cares.

2. There are a small subset of weapons that are actually good. Look over fifty PFS character sheets who have proficiency with "all martial weapons". I'd bet you'll find greatswords, nodachis, rapiers, scimitars, kukris, longbows, bardiches, and the occasional high-power exotic weapon... and very little else as primary weapons. Maybe a longsword or two from people who haven't run numbers, some spiked gauntlets/armor spikes/cesti as secondary pieces, but that's still not broadening the pool much.

This seems like a weird form of circular design.

I've always heard the existence of crappy weapons being excused by claiming you need to have crappy weapons for the NPCs to wear, and smart players will only pick the PC-appropriate weapons to use.

Yet here we have the other side of the coin indicating that NPCs have to use the crappy equipment, or else everyone in the world would be using the same half dozen weapon types and ignoring all of the other weapons the game has.

Personally I think I'd be a lot happier if weapons were just balanced within a reasonable degree, so that each weapon has a purpose.

Seerow wrote:

I dislike GMPCs. If there's a legitimate need for an extra party member, I prefer to give the players the ability to run a second character to fill out the gaps.

For my upcoming campaign, since we have 3 players, what I'm doing is starting out with just those 3, but working in a stable of PC-caliber allies, that the party can call in to help out as needed/desired (I have about 7 prepared so far that they will meet on their way to level 4). These allies all fade to the background when the PCs don't want their help, and play minimal to no part in the story after their introduction. The players will control all of their actions within certain bounds while they are within the party (those bounds will basically be "Don't make them act wildly out of character").

I also plan to let the players introduce any potential backup characters they want in case of PC death to add to this roster, so it feels a little less out of nowhere when a PC dies and his replacement automatically shows up. And of course if a PC who dies wants to take over one of the NPCs, they're welcome to adopt it as their new PC, at which point any restrictions I did have on them are gone.

"I dislike DMPCs but I created a slew of them for the party, but wait it's different, THEY control the DMPC...."

Yeah, glad to hear that your flavor is the right one but almost the same flavor is bad/wrong.

So you genuinely don't see the difference between making a personal PC that the DM takes control of and has personal vested interest in vs giving your players the ability to call upon allies made in game to work with them on their own terms?

Because the former only works if the DM is really, really, good at avoiding personal bias. In my experience a lot of them aren't. I'm conscious of it being a problem, and still would rather avoid it by putting most of the power there into player hands rather than maintaining direct control. Games where the DM insists on running their DMPC isn't an immediate "Yeah I'm going to walk" issue, but it is a big warning sign, and it is exceedingly rare that it is handled well.

You make a valid point,

But is it not true that in D&D 4e the damage was much lower, so in turn they had more hit points on a 1:1 ratio compared to other systems like 3.75. And correct me if I am mistaken the reason was to get rid of 1 round kills in the game, and to provide a more teamwork driven and tactical experience.

Not sure on exact damage comparisons, I played 4e for a while (enough to know some of the major differences and get a feel for some of the mechanics I liked and have since adapted to my home games), but never did any complex analysis on damage per round.

While HP is an easy number to compare, average damage is much harder, especially when you factor in stuff like 4e shifting towards only a single attack per round, but having a higher emphasis on limited use powers, so your average damage is going to heavily depend on how long the enemy lives (and thus how many rounds you are stuck spamming at-wills).

If I had to guess, I'd say that 4e had higher damage per hit, especially at high levels, and lower damage per round. It seemed the intent was that characters (including non-minion NPCs) don't get one shotted, and you have more give and take in combat (including mid-combat healing that is worth the actions it takes), but my experience was that if all players were blowing their dailies (including Action Points) right off the bat, it would end even a higher level encounter in the first round or two, not so far off from how it works in 3.PF when characters nova their resources.

Edit: It's also worth noting that Monsters simply followed different rules from players. While players had much lower HP across the board, monsters, especially solos, regularly were much higher. I think that's where a lot of the hp bloat misconception comes from. Someone flipping through the monster manual finding a dragon with over 1000hp and going "what the heck?", not realizing that 1000hp dragon is fighting a bunch of 150hp characters. Monster HP bloat in 4e was a thing, and one that caused the game to drag a fair bit, especially at later levels since the math seemed to be off and cause HP to go up faster than average damage. Possibly due to the HP values being based off the aforementioned nova damage, and then once the nova is over the monster still has a ~30% HP left and the players are down to nothing but their lame at-wills causing the fight to drag while they take as long to finish the last 20-30% as they did to deal the first 70-80%.

Because in D&D (4e) hit points is vastly increased compared to other systems, and in that system, actions for parrying and defence are harder to come by. You can't raise your AC like you can in Pathfinder and don't have access to the type of defensive feats that define what is an adequate defence. Defence is covered by additional hit points.

This is a common misconception, but not really true. 4e hp is actually lower by mid levels than 3.5/PF HP, because instead of adding con mod to every hit die, you only add con score to HP once.

Just for quick comparison, a level 20 PF Fighter with 22 con is running ~235hp. 255 with favored class bonus. A level 20 Barbarian will be raging with an extra +8 con and higher hit die, jumping their hp all the way up to 355. By comparison, a level 20 4e Fighter has 129+constitution score HP. The Barbarian has the same. Even if you assume Con is your secondary ability score (so start with a 16, boost at every opportunity), that's going to end with 24 con, for a total of 153hp. We're talking close to half that of a PF Fighter. Heck even a PF Wizard who starts with only 12 con and grabs a +6 item with no favored class bonus is going to have 152 hp, almost identical to the same level Fighter focused much more heavily on con in 4e. The level 20 4e Wizard using the same constraints is sitting at ~98 hp.

I get that 4e characters have more HP at low level, but the implication of your post is that 4e reduced the availability of AC boosts and made up for that with higher HP values. That's really not the case. The goal with the HP shift was to make low level characters less swingy, and make the overall hp curve much smoother and more predictable. It had nothing to do with reimagining how the defenses worked or shifting the defense from AC to HP the way you are saying.

Wakefield we already had the discussion a few pages ago about how what you are describing is not in fact bounded accuracy. Your continued insistence on using terminology that describes a system radically different than what you want to see implemented is a large part of what is causing this ongoing argument. Come up with some other term for your capped RNG, and watch as people miraculously begin just ignoring you instead of talking about how awful 5e is.

3. After a very rocky start, they've had very little incentive to EXPAND their kingdom and instead are turtling to save up BP to build more buildings in their capital. How do I force them to expand quickly? (Though I've thought that varnhold will tell them that they'll join their kingdom only once it's big enough)

One hotfix I'm applying to Kingdom building making larger cities get much more expensive build to maintain. Rough numbers I'm using:

Large Town: +1 Consumption, +10% building cost, +5% economy
Small City: +3 Consumption, +20% building cost, +10% economy
Large City: +6 Consumption, +30% building cost, +15% economy
Metropolis: +10 Consumption, +50% building cost, +25% economy

The consumption numbers are per district. So a metropolis with >72 buildings could easily have a 33 consumption overall, and is really expensive to build.

This helps explain in-world why these megacities are so rare, and encourages players to spread out and establish more numerous small towns.

The economy bonus applies only to economy generated by buildings in that city. The consumption increase is high enough that you would need a ridiculous economy to really make the bigger city worthwhile on its own... but if you have a well spread Kingdom utilizing farms/lumber mills to reduce the consumption, it turns into a net profit. So goes further towards encouraging the players to spread out and grab up/develop lots of land as they build up their capitol.

I also provide incentives for starting new settlements, like giving discounts on the first 6-10 buildings you make in a new small town (not counting the first when establishing a Kingdom from scratch a la Kingmaker). This represents the saved costs from converting an already established village into a small town (We just don't track any settlements below the size of small town, assuming that all falls under the base population of the hex).

It basically makes whatever they roll for the attack roll, the same as what they would've rolled for the next two rolls. Damage is not necessarily lowered.

It does however make things a lot more swingy. Where with the normal rules rolling 3-4 times results in a more bell curved damage output where you trend towards average, with the no iteratives rule you end up with a bad roll meaning you don't hit at all (where normally missing your first attack still gives you a good chance of hitting on other attacks. Especially if you have bonus full BAB attacks like from haste, rapid shot, two weapon fighting), which is going to be super noticable to a player, even if the overall damage averages out to the same.

Since we're on the wish list of think we want in a new edition:

I want masterwork to really mean something. I don't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry that is 3rd level and above to have a masterwork weapon. I want, "Six-fingered man commissioned a special sword. My father slaved a year on it." I want masterwork to be something that no one short of 10th level gets. Sure you have your flaming sword at 4th level, but it is not "masterwork." A masterwork sword can have twice as many magical properties as a regular old sword. The same magical properties are more powerful on a masterwork sword. And there should be a table of quirks and/or backstories stories for masterwork weapons. I want them RARE!

This is something I've been doing for years. I have a homebrew system I originally designed for 3.5, but have used every time I've DMed since. An early version can be found here, to get a general idea, but I really do need to get around to formatting/posting the version I am using today.

If you don't want to read through that whole thing, the basic premise is that instead of just "normal" and "masterwork" you have four qualities (normal, exceptional, superior, masterwork). For each category above normal, you gain an upgrade point that can be used to add extra properties to your weapon. While this can be boring things like "+1 to hit", it can also add properties like "increase threat range", "treat this weapon as a monk weapon", "treat this weapon as a throwing weapon", "make this weapon finessible" and so on.

So masterwork weapons are not just much more rare and expensive (a masterwork weapon is +4300gp instead of +300, not coming online until around 6th-7th level, or later if you are using a magical weapon), but each masterwork weapon is unique, crafted to their intended wielder's specifications and needs. I've had players make their masterwork weapons into some really unique/interesting things that I never would have dreamed of when writing the system, and really love it.

And of course it's super easy to make extensible if you want higher level mundane weapons/armor. I liked it topping off at 6-7,since that lines up well with the implicit E6 = where mundanes level off deal, but it can of course go higher. Every 3 slots is worth slightly less than a +2, so you could scale it upwards to 6 quality categories with the top quality costing somewhere around 25,000-30,000gp.

Also possible to make it scale the other way if you want poor quality weapons/broken equipment, just take away one slot worth of properties or apply the equivalent penalties, and bam, instant poor quality gear. (This would actually probably be good for a quick handling of improvised weapons now that I think about it).

Note: If you do go check out that old thread, ignore the armor system entirely. I wound up scrapping and reworking the whole thing because it was clunky, annoying, and generated convergent results. Most recent version pretty much just gives the choice between +1 AC or +1 Max Dex and reduce ACP by 1 with each quality upgrade. It's not as intricate as what is posted, but has the same net effect but without all of the fiddliness.

I wouldn't suggest going down in point buy if your players believe they need high stats to have fun. Most of the perceptions about dump stats and so forth are based on playstyle.

You can finish an AP just fine with no one in the party having any initial stat bonus greater than +2. A 15 at character creation is just fine for your best stat, and once you demonstrate that to yourself, no low amount of point buy is really much of an issue. Try it out for a short mini-campaign and see if it works for you. I did and now 15 point buy feels like an extravagant feast of points.

Obviously YMMV but in my experience playing standard(15) point buy does not have to lead to dumping of stats. heck I've been thinking about seeing if my group is up for a game using the default heroic NPC array of 15 14 13 12 10 8.

Last few campaigns I've been in have used that array with either +1 or +2 to all stats, depending on how high power the DM wanted it to be. It ends up being a ridiculous number of points if you were to make it a point buy, but since the stats are forced to be spread out rather than just taking 2 18s and dumping the rest, it ends up pretty well balanced and gives MAD heavy characters like Monks a leg up that they tend to need anyway. I've also noticed it resulting in an uptick in Gishes and Theurge builds, which I consider a plus personally.

Seerow wrote:

Mutagen lasts for 10 minutes, and takes an hour to brew up a new one. Rage use is also limited number of rounds (at this level with multiclassing you've got around 10 rounds. So about 2 encounters), as is the bardic music. Your 5th level bard has 2-3 2nd level spells, so that's about how many bull's strengths you are getting as well.

Mutagen only lasts for 10 minutes at level 1. As a level 6 alchemist it lasts for an entire hour. You can clear an incredible number of encounters in a single hour. And since the Alchemist is unlikely to pop the mutagen until just before they investigate "potential combat site A134", they'll have a large amount of time to work through that site, then they can prep another mutagen before they head to "potential combat site A135"". Furthermore, if you try and force the alchemist to go from one location to another, they are just going to select the Infuse Mutagen Discovery so they can have 1-2 emergency mutagens.

Except the example was pretty clearly a multiclassed Alchemist/Barbarian, with it being heavily implied it's a 1 level dip into alchemist for a Barbarian. So you don't have a discovery, or extended duration.

I guess it's possible that you are doing Alchemist 4/Barb 1 instead, so you can have multiple 40 minute mutagens plus rage, but now you only have about 6 rounds of rage, which is a much harsher limitation, in exchange.

Either way the main point was it is taking a lot of resources and you are going to run out of one resource or another well before the one hour of time specified to clear out a dungeon. Keeping all of those bonuses running for the entire dungeon is not really feasible, it is a nova/burst tactic. (Though clever use of alternating between different bonuses as some fall off will probably be enough to keep your to-hit bonus in the high teens through the entire duration).

edit: Also, Infuse Mutagen requires 1000gp per extra mutagen you make. That's a pretty significant chunk of change to be blowing on a consumable, though if you're playing one-shot dungeons it probably is the best bang for your buck, in actual campaigns I generally don't see players investing 10-20% of their total wealth on combat consumables.

Seerow wrote:

First I just want to point out that Heroism is a Morale bonus and overlaps with Bardic Music, not stacks. That cuts 2 points off your to-hit bonus.

Not arguing with your overall point necessarily, but to tape the hair back together that you split: the bard's Inspire Courage is a competence bonus to to attack/damage, so it stacks just fine.

You know, I even specifically went to the Bard in the pfsrd to double check and make sure that wasn't something that got changed on me when I wasn't looking, but stopped reading when I saw the morale bonus. Never would have guessed the bonus to saves and bonus to attacks/damage were different types. I stand corrected on that point.

Around 5th level, they are rocking:

Spoiler:

+4 : BAB +4
+5 : 20 Str
+2 : Raging
+2 : Bull's Strength
+2 : Alchemist mutagen
+2 : Heroism
+2 : Bard inspire courage (5th level bard)
+1 : Weapon is +1
+1 : Weapon Focus
-0 : Power Attack (w/Furious Focus)
----
+22 to hit

There are more egregious 5th level characters than this as well.

Now if we pop open the Bestiary and look at CR6 monsters, which if you pit one of them against the above character, you'd hope it would be a challenge...

Spoiler:

ankylosaurus AC22
babau AC19
bralani AC20
ettin AC18
girallon AC18
half-fiend minotaur
kyton AC17
lamia AC20
salamander AC18
shambling mound AC19

However, our 5th level character wading through a dungeon of CR6 monsters only needs to avoid rolling a natural 1 in order to connect with every swing.

Added spoilers to the quote just to not super-stretch the page.

First I just want to point out that Heroism is a Morale bonus and overlaps with Bardic Music, not stacks. That cuts 2 points off your to-hit bonus.

Mutagen lasts for 10 minutes, and takes an hour to brew up a new one. Rage use is also limited number of rounds (at this level with multiclassing you've got around 10 rounds. So about 2 encounters), as is the bardic music. Your 5th level bard has 2-3 2nd level spells, so that's about how many bull's strengths you are getting as well.

So yeah you can walk into a dungeon and for ~two encounters basically hit anything you want, once those resources are gone, your hit bonus tanks all the way down from a +19 to a +11. That is a fairly reasonable number, with a moderate miss chance against all of the CR appropriate foes you provided. And since you specified that the dungeon will take about an hour of in game time to complete, the character in question is spending about 2/3rds of the time in said dungeon without those buffs, which his whole character has been built around obtaining.

But that's really besides the point because:

Pathfinder 2e can set up bounded target numbers. Hypothetically for a level 5 PC, your to hit bonus should lie somewhere between +0 and +15. You can still employ a system where a martial character gains a full +1 BAB per level and employ bounded accuracy.

Judging by this, it seems like we are in agreement. But the point that has been made many times in this thread is that if you have that +1 BAB per level and constrain everything else, it is not bounded accuracy. Because 5e's definition of bounded accuracy isn't constraining the RNG on a level by level basis (a goal I very much support), but constraining the RNG across the entirety of the game, so regardless of level everyone is on that same +0 to +15 RNG (a goal I detest and resent).

If you are okay with the idea that a 1st level character is going to be somewhere between +0 and +12, a 5th level character is somewhere between +3 and +15, while a 20th level character is between a +20 and +35, or something along those lines, then we are in complete agreement. The only real disagreement is over whether or not that is bounded accuracy as 5e defines it, or just intelligent application of constraining the RNG.

Healing Surges were practically unlimited in recovery ability for characters in D&D 4e.

Healing Surges were actually designed to be worn down, they just overestimated how much damage characters would actually take and let every character recover 300%+ of their max hp every day. Number of Healing Surges available is something that should probably be tuned by the DM based on their DMing style. I definitely did play in 4e games where the entire party ran out of healing surges in a single day, but that was definitely not the norm; and having characters who had taken the sort of beating required to get there wake up the next day with full HP and full healing surges was admittedly really weird.

Drop healing surges down to X + con mod max [where X is set by the DM and generally ranges from 1 to 10, with 1-3 probably being the most fitting for typical games]. I've personally been running 3.PF with 3+con mod for a while and it works great for me, and recover only 1 per day, and you'll see a lot of characters getting worn down and deciding they need to break to recover after a hard day's adventuring, but still have enough healing to make it through most adventuring days.

And your house rule to give the Heal skill spell-like capabilities works fine in a game without Clerics but at the same time makes them redundant to some degree. Paladins and Monks (wholeness of body) are likewise affected.

The healing from heal skill houserule I actually like. It is out of combat exclusive healing, and generally not enough to completely heal a character but enough to give everyone a bit of healing to press on between fights. There's still a place for actual spell based healing (topping off when you feel it's necessary, or extra healing after a bad cure roll).

Lay on Hands and similar features tend to work best as in combat burst healing, they aren't usually something used to help characters make it through the day. Wholeness of Body is just a bad ability and I've never seen a PF monk use it (2 ki for 1hp/level? Awful), and in 3.5 it only got used because "Why not? It's a little daily free healing, may as well use it"

One thing that I think needs to be fixed. Or come up with a better system. Is the CR system. I recently had to reboot the AP I was running. I'm running Carrion Crown and I added in a encounter with a Wight. One of my own not in the first module of the AP. I group with minimal optimizers. Even with increased AC and Hp as well as small increase in to hit and damage. A group of six first level players took down a CR 3 monster. Too easily imo.

Um... I'm not sure I see the problem. With 6 characters you should be treating them as APL+1... so a CR3 monster is 1 level above. Which isn't generally going to be slightly more than a speedbump for most parties. Encounters don't tend to get actually threatening until you're at APL+2-3. Especially when the encounter design is a lone monster with no bonus action economy. Seriously those are awful encounters; but you can totally design CR appropriate encounters that are challenging.

That said I will agree a redesign such that using 4 monsters is the expected baseline, with fewer monsters being the rare exception would be something I would be interested in. Either way, a DM can work within the CR system and get worthwhile results.

IMO recovery and healing should work quite differently.

And powerful recovery influences the types of games that will be played. If martial characters can fully recover indefinitely between battles it makes no difference if you have 5 encounters or that you have 1 encounter.

So what we're saying here is that 3.PF's "buy a few wands early in your career and stop worrying about healing from that point on" is bad? Or are we talking about resources for martial abilities?

Morzadian wrote:

Is there a significant difference between the older APs and the newer APs?

Have they got significantly harder (obviously not hard enough, from what you say) or have they remained unchanged?

They vary pretty wildly in difficulty, even within the same ap. MOstly because there is no testing done to see whether things should be adjusted or not.

For example, wrath of the righteous could be done with 4 commoners, it is so easy

That is a campaign log I would love to read.

edit:

Sure, makes enough sense in campaigns that use that abstraction. I'm not a fan of it, but I'm totally fine with Fighters healing meat too. [I'm assuming second wind requires a short rest period right? 5 minutes or some such.]

Second Wind is an in-combat action. Pretty sure a standard action in 4e and 5e both. Which is why I compared it to troll healing if you look at HP as 100% flesh wounds.

Healing Surges can be spent during a short rest, and is probably what you are thinking of. Second Wind is a specific action taken in combat that spends a healing surge.

Even though I loved TOB: The Book of Nine Swords, I wasn't impressed with the refresh (disassociated) mechanic.

I've actually seen arguments from fencers and such that the mechanic has a strong real world correlation. You have a trick, and you can use that trick, but after that the opponent is going to be on their guard. The action used to refresh (by Swordsage/Warblade) is them taking the time to set up the trick to be used again. I'll grant that it's disassociated because it's not actually explained that way in the book, but it is something you can hotfix without changing any mechanics to make it make sense in the world, so is acceptable. Of course the Crusader's recovery mechanic is entirely associated, since the fluff fits (you gain your maneuvers via divine inspiration. No you can't use that ability again because that's not what your deity is giving you. Maybe next round).

And yes I agree you can have per day resources and it can still be an associated mechanic, healing surge is definitely a disassociated mechanic (martial characters can't heal without magic) and action surge is disassociated but is pretending to be associated.

Healing Surges can be disassociated or associated, depending on hit point definition. This is basically an argument that has no one true answer since the rules are always super vague on it. Which is why in my big post I made reference to wanting to see healing surges used alongside vitality/wounds, to make them associated and easier to work with. Because mechanically healing surges are great. 4e had some implementation problems in terms of giving too many of them and too generous of a recovery mechanic, but the core concept of having characters base recovery be based on max HP, and having a way to keep characters going without needing a dedicated healer (or unlimited consumables) in the party is a great one. I've adapted them backwards into my 3.PF games and it's gone over great even with the players who hated 4e.

Pathfinder Unchained's stamina system does a better job of explaining the 'action surge' than D&D 5e . What can martial characters do when they are desperate, when it's do or die time, what are their limitations? It's certainly more than just a few extra attacks every day.

Yeah, we're in agreement here. Unchained Stamina is better, but still not good enough IMO. A ton of the options are really weak/useless. There's enough good stuff burried in there to make the system worth looking at or using, but still tons of room for improvement.

Action surge and second wind apart from being non-associated mechanics (the 3.75 system is based on associated mechanics) is lazy game design.

Okay I am curious, what is your actual definition for a disassociated mechanic? I ask because disassociated mechanics are one of those weird buzz words that popped up during the edition wars that gets thrown around a lot, but is all too often used incorrectly to the point where the term itself is all but meaningless.

My understanding is that a disassociated mechanic is a mechanic that has no correlation with the in-game world. For example, PF Spellcasting is associated because the caster in game can sit down and have a meaningful discussion about how he learns spells, how he prepares them, what they do, and why they work the way they do. We have the vancian casting mechanic, but that mechanic is associated because in world there is a valid reason that it works that way.

Meanwhile 4e power progressions were pretty much disassociated, because there is no in-world explanation for why powers operate on the schedules they do. Why does my Fighter have an ability he can use only once per encounter? I don't know, and neither does he. Why does he have an ability he can use only once per day? Well it might be because he gets too tired to do it again, but if he's really that tired why can he use a different daily power that is higher level and more stressful? With vancian spellcasting we know the reason (the wizard memorized certain spells a certain number of times, he can't spontaneously convert one to another), but with 4e there is no attempt at that kind of explanation, and the most common justification boils down to some narrative mumbo jumbo about "Well I could try to do it again, but the set of circumstances that lets me use it only happens once a day". So totally disassociated.

Okay, so what was the point of that diatribe on disassociated mechanics? Because I want to talk about Second Wind and Action Surge, and argue for the capability for these actions to exist as associated mechanics. Because all you need for a mechanic to become associated is to have an explanation in world for why it works the way it does.

Second Wind (and healing surges in general) are only really disassociated if you see hit points as 100% meat, and the Fighter using second wind literally closing his wounds as he takes his action like a troll or something. Which is totally silly, I'll agree. But in D&D hit points are typically not 100% meat, that is certainly a component of it, but to a certain degree it represents stamina, skill, luck, and your ability to turn an otherwise lethal blow into a glancing one. When your HP runs out, your capability to avoid those lethal blows has run out and you take an attack that can knock you out of the fight. In that case, Second Wind actually makes a ton of sense, as a character taking a minute to get their bearings and steady themselves, making themselves instantly ready to react to the next attack.

Action Surge similarly can be explained as a surge of power being used by the character to push himself beyond normal limits, moving with lightning speed. It's daily limited because that kind of energy expenditure isn't something you can do constantly, and it actually cheapens it if it is a passive effect. But this is 100% something that can fit into a Fighter as an associated mechanic, and be explained by stamina as long as any other limited use abilities get tied to the same resource.

tl;dr: Not everything with a daily limitation is automatically disassociated, and as long as you can find a way to explain an ability that makes internally consistent sense with the rest of your class abilities and does not rely on narrative contrivance, you can make most abilities associated. The problem with disassociated abilities is most frequently poorly designed resource schedules, bad/non-existent fluff, or both.

Problems with the disparity between casters and martial characters is not fixed by giving Fighters healing and more actions. Terrible idea.

I actually agree with this. Extra Actions and Healing alone will not bring a Fighter up to par. Martial characters should have just as many special abilities to pick and choose from as a spell caster, and being given two of them, set in stone, with no choice or other meaningful options to use with them... is disappointing.

But they are a good step forward. Making the Fighter self sufficient (not needing a healbot or stack of wands to keep going) and improving his action economy relative to other characters does make him much more effective. There's a reason that spells like Haste, or from 3.5 Celerity and Arcane Fusion, and Quickened Spells are considered some of the strongest out there. Because they give casters a massive edge in action economy, and mundane characters like a Fighter having an answer to that is great.

Snorb wrote:

Yes, fighters get four attacks per round in 5e. At level 20. (Or at level 5, but only once per combat thanks to Action Surge. =p)

Barbarians, monks, paladins, and rangers are stuck with one extra attack (gained at level 5.) If you multiclass into two classes with Extra Attack, you only get one extra attack unless you have enough fighter levels to grant two extra attacks.

(And before you say "What, the monk only gets two attacks per round?! HAX" the monk flurry is "Swift action: Two unarmed strikes. This costs one ki point.")

I just point it out as people have repeated and repeated, Oh even a wizard is as good as fighter in melee now. T be honest, I have no clue why the very idea of a bound accuracy concept is so off putting to folks. Almost every non-D&D game I have played has this concept built in some way.

The concept of bounded accuracy is NOT the same as keeping people of the same level on a similar RNG for combat things.

This causes a lot of disconnect, where people say "Well in my games we all have attack bonuses and saves on a close enough range by working together to make sure that happens. That's basically bounded accuracy!", but it's not. Unless you are playing a game where you remove 90% of all numerical buffs and drop BAB and Skill ranks down to a 1-6 range, and remove the majority of magic items, and cap ability scores at 20... you are not playing with bounded accuracy.

Because Bounded Accuracy very specifically is the design that if a character at level 20 can do it, a character at level 1 has a chance to do it. There are very few exceptions within the system (basically DC30 skill checks are it).

Bounded Accuracy means that your first level person with a high stat roll can pass most of the hardest checks your 20th level expert can. It means that your 20th level Fighter will never auto hit the low level enemy. It means that you're practically guaranteed to have at least one +0 save that will never improve. It means that your high level monsters will never have enough AC to push low level peons off the RNG; that they will always be threatened by a couple dozen dudes with bows.

These are things that some people actually enjoy. But you're not going to convince me that most people playing Pathfinder/D&D3.5/D&D4e are actually playing with rules that resemble bounded accuracy.

I really liked the early concept of expertise dice for Fighters, and felt like the concept had a lot of potential... but rather than expanding on it they pulled back on it, made it less effective, and then shoved it into an optional subclass that will never see further support. That was a major disappointment there. But bounded accuracy really was my breaking point. I've dealt with games giving me bad/boring fighters for decades.

Seerow wrote:

What should be obvious without any serious analysis is that PF leaves a lot more room for improvement in skills than 5e does. The 5e rogue you described is practically as good as it gets at climbing. He matches a 20th level Fighter, the only way you'll get better is by playing a strength based rogue or bard (never going to happen). Meanwhile the PF character presented is baseline minimum for climbing, and realistically will more than double his effectiveness if he cares about it, and if he doesn't will buy some slippers of spider climbing or whatever and put his ranks somewhere else.

And this is the basic problem with any of the high level skill comparisons. They don't matter. Because magic.

Climb speed trumps skill in climbing, however many points you put in it.
And fly trumps that.

Yeah no arguments there. This is why I actually like the skill unlocks in Unchained, because they are a step towards letting skill users match magic by giving level appropriate abilities. I'd argue a lot of the skill unlocks didn't go far enough, or came online too late, but it is a system that I would like to see expanded to make investing ranks in a bunch of skills potentially compete with or even beat magic at certain tasks.

But that's totally independent of arguing that 5e's skill system is awful.

Seerow wrote:

.. if he doesn't will buy some slippers of spider climbing or whatever and put his ranks somewhere else.

True for a character in any edition of any RPG. Magic obviates skills in a majority of cases at high-level play. You need to look at the comparable characters before they pick up an "I-Win" item for a specific skill if you want to talk about skill systems.

Except in 5e the "I-Win" item isn't readily available, and alternative options for skills aren't much better.

Seerow wrote:

(say a str based skill for a Fighter) at level 20 you have a +11 vs a +35. The Fighter is going to auto pass anything up to a DC36, which using your curve (I don't necessarily agree with, but we'll use it for this purpose) translates roughly to a DC20, which the 5e Fighter is going to fail at almost half the time...

Level 20 is one thing, I tend to like benchmarking somewhere around level 6-8 and somewhere around level 12-15 to get an idea of two different ideally sweet spots. Looking at level 20, you ignore 95% of levels (and probably 99.9% of actual games played).

I used level 20 because it was simple math. 20 ranks + 3 class skill + 12 strength, easy as pie. No skill focus or magic items involved.

Drop the strength down to +10, ranks down to 15, and you've still got a +28, while the 5e Fighter has a +10 instead of +11. most of the other comparisons still stay the same.

At level 10 you're probably down to a +6 or +7 strength, 10 ranks, and 3 class skill, so you've got a +20 vs the 5e Fighter's +8 or +9 (not sure exactly what levels skill proficiency improves).

Bounce them up against an example adventure. Collect all the skill checks and their listed DCs. I'd place money that a level 10 5e figher succeeds at more than the level 10 3.x/PF fighter.

I really just picked Fighter because primary stat was strength (since we were talking about climb) and moving away from rogue (who in PF has the advantage of a wider variety of skills, compared to 5e rogue's advantage in higher numbers compared to other classes, two very different points). You can look at basically any class using a skill related to their primary stat and get similar results. (or heck, even a non-rogue using non-primary stats. 5e character topping out at +6 to +7 and PF character topping out at +24 to +25 is still an argument I'd give a big advantage to the PF character in).

But in 3.X and 4e there was no improvement because the rogue wouldn't face a wall of the same DC at level 1 and level 20. The wall would gain DC at the same rate the rogue gained skill ranks so the chance of success would be a constant 50%.

That's insane. Hell 3.X/PF even explicitly has rules for climb DCs based on types of walls, so unless once you hit level 11 every wall in the world is suddenly a wall of force or a slick ice wall or something, and every normal wall mysteriously vanishes or is replaced with a different higher level wall, that doesn't happen. The higher level character is better at climbing, and will climb lower level things without needing to roll. Because when you are really skilled at things, it is good to be able to just say "I can do that" and not have to worry about the 50% failure chance.

I have no idea how many people actually played with a literal treadmill in their games where their bonus never actually mattered and all that mattered was rolling a 10 or better on a d20, but holy shit if I played a game like that I would definitely walk out and would be very tempted to punch the DM on the way out because that is batshit crazy. For my own sanity I am going to assume that any references to this sort of playstyle is forum rhetoric and not actual experience.

Bounded accuracy really comes down to doing with 95% of other RPGs do and not having characters increase their numbers by 1-3 every level so the DCs being used against characters remain constant. Other than D&D and D&D clones, most new games of the last, well, 30 years have gone for a form of BA.

Most manage it by using resolution mechanics other than d20.

For example, I play Shadowrun. I really enjoy shadowrun. A typical character will be rolling 0-4 dice in a skill they aren't trained in, 4-7 dice in a skill they've got minimal investment in, and 8-15 dice in a skill they are specialized in. DCs tend to range between 1 and 5. Literally everyone has a chance at easy DCs. Everybody with any investment has a chance even at hard DCs. Somebody specialized is much more likely to succeed at all DCs, but still has a chance (though very small) of failing even at easy DCs.

This accomplishes everything bounded accuracy wants to. Keeping players on the same RNG, narrowing the band of power, and keeping the RNG important. But despite the general scale of progressing being going up about 10 points separating an amateur from a specialist, the core mechanic makes sure that 10 points is super meaningful and the specialist still feels awesome at his job.

Other games like L5R, White Wolf, etc, all tend to use alternate dice mechanics as well, generally involving rolling a larger number of smaller dice, relying on the normal distribution curve to make small improvements feel more meaningful.

In D&D or a D&D based game, you are never going to have that. 5e tries to do it with advantage/disadvantage, but rolling 2d20 isn't getting enough of a curve in the RNG to really get the same feeling. And going much beyond that really changes the feel of the game, to the point where I don't see that change happening.

You could theoretically still get away with bounded accuracy with yet more systemic changes. Things like making HP/DR/Damage scale faster with level than they have in other editions, and heavy utilization of mechanics like skill unlocks to make it so a level 20 character can do things with a skill that a level 1 character can't dream of, despite having a similar bonus. But that requires a lot of crunch and serious changes in design, which 5e never bothered with. So instead you end up with a half-baked 3e clone that tries to stretch E6 out to 20 levels but decides to go ahead and give casters 9th level spells anyway because why not.

Despite all your comments, you didn't really put together any data to support a counterpoint.

I did however give plenty of examples of things you completely ignored in your data. In truth there are too many moving parts to make a quick comparison that is totally fair.

What should be obvious without any serious analysis is that PF leaves a lot more room for improvement in skills than 5e does. The 5e rogue you described is practically as good as it gets at climbing. He matches a 20th level Fighter, the only way you'll get better is by playing a strength based rogue or bard (never going to happen). Meanwhile the PF character presented is baseline minimum for climbing, and realistically will more than double his effectiveness if he cares about it, and if he doesn't will buy some slippers of spider climbing or whatever and put his ranks somewhere else.

What should also be easy to see without detailed analysis is the lack of relative progress being made against lower to mid range DCs. If you take a trained skill the character is good at (say a str based skill for a Fighter) at level 20 you have a +11 vs a +35. The Fighter is going to auto pass anything up to a DC36, which using your curve (I don't necessarily agree with, but we'll use it for this purpose) translates roughly to a DC20, which the 5e Fighter is going to fail at almost half the time. If you push the DC up to where the PF fighter is failing half the time, the 5e Fighter is succeeding closer to 10% of the time. And this is still ignoring all of the other stuff I mentioned (equipment, feats, traits, skill unlocks, etc).

Or even ignoring the PF comparisons, the typical 5e character starts at level 1 with a +5 vs DC15 (50% chance of success), and ends the game with +11 vs DC15 (80% chance of success). That's a pretty miniscule improvement overall. Add in that you're also getting fewer trained skills, and almost no options beyond training the skill to improve it further and it really makes it feel like nobody can actually master a skill in 5e, which is a major problem.

Basically, you cherry picked a single scenario that presents 5e in the best possible light, but when examining the majority of scenarios outside of that, it really shows how paper thin the defense of its skill system is.

There's also stats going up. That matters quite a bit for low numbers since those are usually assumed to be wearing light armor.

Yes I'm sure those Wizards and Barbarians are lining up to boost their dex to get that extra point of AC, and it's totally not just the rogues who are ever going to see a boost to AC from that.

They don't assume magic items won't be available either.

The only one of my low numbers to include magic is maybe the one at 20th level (and you can get that high with a shield without any magic at all). The high numbers are where magic comes in, and are based on the DMG's definitions of what level it's reasonable to have certain items at.

So, I'm assuming magic items exist and that some individual PC might have them for the high range only of ACs expected per level...that's not a radical assumption.

You are claiming that a character that started with a 14 AC is going to get up to 18 without any investment in magic items by level 15. I am not seeing that. There actually isn't enough bonuses floating around in the game for that to be the norm. There will be occasional characters that improve, but just taking a typical character they're going to get their expensive armor upgrade for +1, and maybe some dex for another +1 (and this one is going to be rare, pretty much rogues and maybe rangers only). If they weren't wearing a shield at level 1, they aren't going to suddenly pick one up at level 18 just because to hit your standard. In fact, if they did, that would run completely counter to the entire point of bounded accuracy, making the system even more ridiculous.

@seerow:

Yeah, but that last point isn't actually true of 5E, it's more like:

AC Expected Values
1st level: 14-18
5th level: 15-21
10th level: 17-22
15th level: 18-23
20th level: 19-25

Now, that may be less of a difference than you'd like, but it's not quite as flat a curve as you're implying. Now, anything above 20 requires magic items, but that's hardly unusual as compared to Pathfinder.

5e actually explicitly does not have any assumptions about magic items. So while it is theoretically possible for characters to improve in AC while leveling, the default math assumes that the PCs are not, and a 20th level PC has no more AC than the 1st.

Okay, maybe an extra point or two, because I do remember there being some expensive armors that you aren't intended to have at first level that you will get eventually. Still far narrower than your numbers would claim. And even that range is about half the range available in AD&D.

I'm not really arguing against a bit more bounded accuracy (what I'd really like are bounded Ability Scores and a lower number of buffs that stack with each other), I'm just noting that you're painting with a bit too broad a brush here.

Exactly this.

Bounded Accuracy isn't just about fixing the RNG. I mean yes, it sets out to do that, but it ALSO sets out to make sure low level and high level enemies are always on the same RNG (as opposed to wakedown's described problem of on level enemies being off the RNG compared to optimized PCs), and also forcing all PCs to be on the same RNG for all tasks regardless of specialization levels (so the best high level rogue in the world has a chance of failure and the untrained fighter or wizard has a chance of succeed on the vast majority of tasks). These are the aspects of bounded accuracy that offend me, and likely most others who have problems with it.

I am all for a revamp that nails down various stacking bonus types to a smaller handful of bonuses that you can get, particularly to Hit/AC/Saves/Save DCs, to try to keep people of the same level on roughly the same RNG.

Not to say everyone needs to be there (because let's face it, we don't care if the Wizard's to-hit bonus with his staff is only +5 and monsters at this level have 25 AC, he's not going to be attacking with that staff anyway), but it is totally doable and even desirable to have a system where any given 10th level character will have AC, to-hit, and save values that fall within a certain range that is predictable enough to work with.

The problem with 5e is that instead of fixing the RNG at a specific level, they fixed it across all levels, so you never really progress. Then they also applied it to skill checks, which makes the feeling of lack of progression even more profound.

The problem with 4e was that they did balance the RNG on a per level basis, but they kept the math -too- tight, to the point where being short +1 or +2 to hit felt like a catastrophic failure, rather than a tradeoff being made to be better elsewhere.

I figure at any given level you can have a 6-10 point swing in acceptable values and come out with a roughly balanced system where nobody is totally obviated. So something like:

Something like:

Something like:

Create demiplan and Simulacrum are DM spell needed for world building. It's the same reason why dominate person is in the CRB, it's needed for the DM to set up some of the classical plots. You are not actually going to permit a 9th level caster to go around with 40 dominated people.

[Citation Needed]

ryric wrote:

Yeah the discussion yesterday about +X bonuses, bounded accuracy, and monster creation was actually very civil and productive. People had different ideas but there was no belittling the opposition or vitriol. I really enjoyed the discussion even if I didn't agree with everything that was being said.

If minions were ported over I'd want to see them vastly revised from their 4e version. 4e minions seemed like these weird "slightly out of phase with reality" monsters from the Far Realm to me - they are either perfectly healthy, or dead. AoE spells, which normally are your best bet against a bunch of mooks, don't work very well on them because they all have effective Evasion. They don't roll damage so every hit from them is exactly the same - I dunno, they just gave me a weird vibe of not quite using the same physics as a normal person.

Not a fan of the concept of statistically abstract monsters, there must be a better way of doing it.

Honestly I am not entirely sure what the pushback against abstract monsters is. I mean the only real difference is you don't get designers fudging back end statistics to make it hit their target anyway. Seriously it doesn't take long flipping through the MM to find examples of monsters with outrageously high strength or way more hit dice than average in an attempt to hit a certain threshold of hit/damage/hp/whatever.

You will almost never see a monster past low levels without an arbitrary number of natural armor. There is not any logic or reason behind the natural armor bonuses granted, it is all about taking the stats that are already there and pushing the overall AC up to where they think it will be.

You'll never see creatures with abnormally low skills, even if the stat block indicates they should. If the stats say a monster should be bad at hiding, but they want it to hide, they add arbitrary racial bonuses to the hide check.

I can go on, but basically the point is with every monster they have certain things they are attempting to accomplish, and fudge everything else in the stat block to make that happen. Yes it ends up being slightly more organic as that fudging can sometimes result in numbers higher or lower in a different area that you don't care enough about to fudge upwards... but if you don't care about it chances are it's not going to be relevant in the end, and players aren't going to notice.

Now I did look at the Unchained Simple Monster creation system yesterday... and it is not perfect. It is actually surprisingly better than I would have expected, but there is a lack of flexibility there. Specifically I am disappointed by having a max of 3-4 special options (most mid level creatures seem to have more special options than what is provided by this system), and that every option is valued the same (so I can choose to have Scent, or to have Regeneration. And this is supposed to provide a balanced monster). I also really don't understand some of the damage values they picked (sorry but I just cannot imagine a level 20 caster dealing 40-60 damage per hit unbuffed with a melee attack).

So yeah, not happy with specifics of implementation, but still optimistic about the potential of a system that lets you generate a monster by picking and choosing appropriate options from a relatively short list rather than building it from scratch by hit dice and calculations. This is an area where I'd like to see some homebrew takes on it.

Even 4E had a good idea or two, as blasphemous as that probably sounds to some of you.

I'd actually argue 4e had many good ideas, just an overall implementation that caused the good ideas to fall flat and fail to engage the players.

5e on the other hand manages to engage players by sticking to things that are tried and proven, with their "innovations" being few enough to count on one hand, and mostly just turning the game into a new way to play E6 over 20 levels.

I definitely have a lot more respect for the 4e designers for forging ahead with a game trying new ideas, even if ultimately I preferred 3e to it. It had interesting new designs, and many things that could have been adapted and merged back into the previous design to create an overall better product. I cannot honestly say the same thing about anything I have seen out of 5e, because either other systems have done it first and better (most everything), or the change is one that goes against the core gameplay dynamic that I associate with D&D/Pathfinder (basically bounded accuracy).

Edit: On second consideration, bounded accuracy isn't even an innovative mechanic. It's new to d20, but mostly because bounding accuracy that tightly on a d20 is inherently dumb. But the core idea of keeping everyone on the same RNG and giving everyone some chance of success regardless of skill level isn't new at all. Pretty much every dice pool game in existence falls under that category (seriously most of those games will range between 5 and 15 dice, with high end DCs being 5 successes, so for most tasks even the low end guy has a chance of success... but the high end guy has a much better chance, without auto succeeding), and does it much better than D&D 5e.

4. Yes and no - unlike some people, I like basic +X items. How else do you represent a sword that is magically enchanted to hit more often? I do wish the assumption that PCs just get them as they level and the whole WBL system would go away.

Okay, sure, but do we need 5 different stages of "magically enhanced to hit more often"? And do we need to make it mandatory that you have your weapon magically enhanced to be more accurate before you can add any other properties?

Imagine if you had an "Accurate" weapon property you could add to a weapon that gives a flat +3 to hit. So you could have your generic magic sword that allows the wielder to hit more often. Or you could have a Flaming Sword, which hits as often as a regular sword, but adds a chunk of fire damage.

One thing I would like to see is a small number of base enchants, with an increasing number of associated enchants. Something like the Synergy enchants that showed up in late 3.5. So you could do things like you have your base Flaming Enchant, then a Synergy that lets you summon a vortex of fire around you, a synergy that lets the sword shoot beams of fire, a synergy that grants the wielder resistance to Fire and Cold... and so on. So you get weapons with abilities that have a strong thematic link and tend to become more interesting than just adding more d6's to the damage.

11. I'd like to see skill DCs expanded to do more stuff like the 3.0 ELH. Acrobatics checks to run on water or Sense Motive checks to read surface thoughts at super high DCs give skill characters fun stuff at high levels, and give them some spell-style narrative power without magic.

I think that Unchained's skill unlocks are a better way to handle this. At a certain number of ranks open up new higher level uses of the skill. I'd make an unlock come every 3 ranks instead of every 5, and make the higher level ones more effective than what is in unchained... but the core system of how it works is simply better than making absurdly high DCs you have to meet to do it.

I do agree. Throwing monsters that once challenged the PC back at them can be fun. But that' works just as well with bounded as unbounded accuracy. While the PCs aren't really threatened either way, difference is in one the monster is ineffectual and can't hit or make a save. It's pretty much a cut scene.

There's a pretty wide range between "Can't effectively hit or make a save" and "Exactly the same numbers as a level appropriate monster". Like as wide as a 10 point swing between those. Further if you expand that to include the other extreme (monster higher enough level than the party that they can't meaningfully affect it).

Add to that the part where different numbers scale at different rates for different characters (so yes the fighter might auto hit, but the rogue does not. The wizard's AC is still on the RNG even if the melee characters' are not. Saving throws in general scale slower than hit/AC) and the range of what can be threatening broadens even more.

Just skipping straight to "cut scene" and deciding that the combat isn't worth playing out is something that can happen, but the threshold for which it should happen is much higher than what you imply.

As for the scenario of going back working just as well in bounded accuracy, TheJeff already admitted it would take longer (wait until higher level) before such a scenario would be feasible; because the overall power scaling of characters is greatly decreased. Where in the scenario I described we were able to go back at level 8 and use tactics/planning to wipe out a tribe of level 4 enemies; in 5e what level would you need to be to accomplish similar? I guess if you could manage to get the enemies in small groups of 2-4 you could do it by level 10. But if you were taking out groups of 8-12 or more, with higher level leaders or giant slaves mixed into the bunch? You're probably looking at a 20th level capstone adventure. To take out a village full of low level creatures. Seems underwhelming for characters who are in theory capable of taking on gods at that level.

Can't we all just agree that bounded accuracy would be... just awful for pathfinder and move on to another topic? :P

Really, people that love it should have fun playing with it in 5E. Those that don't have our pathfinder. Sounds like a win/win until someone talked about mixing the two.

Agree, but the OP of the thread started out talking about how much he loves bounded accuracy and thinks PF2.0 should adopt it... so arguing about the merits or lack thereof is about as on topic as you can get.

Try Pathfinder Society then. Or the Adventure Paths. You will never fight an encounter that's more than APL-2 or more than APL+3. It's always level appropriate encounters, if not a little high. The exceptions are noteworthy.

Are those encounters always with a single creature with CR equal to APL-2 to APL+3? No, not really. I will admit they show up more frequently than I would prefer, because lone monsters tend to get outclassed by PCs through sheer action economy, but that's besides the point. The point being that encounter level and challenge rating are two different things. Even if you never see an encounter lower than APL-2; it is MUCH more common to see an encounter made up of creatures that are APL-4 or more, with more of them being used to make it an appropriately leveled encounter.

Besides that I haven't run a ton of APs, but the one I have been working with (Kingmaker) includes random encounters that go as high as APL+5 and at least a couple of different areas that have tons of creatures much lower level than the party, that the developers stated (when asked about it on the forums) are there explicitly to let the players feel powerful and note the difference that comes from being higher level.

Which as you may remember, is the entire point. You continue to go on about how lower level creatures aren't dangerous and therefore should be avoided. One does not lead to the other. Lower level creatures aren't as dangerous, and as a result should be used from time to time because that contrast is what makes gaining levels worthwhile.

Just as a quick example of this sort of thing, here's an anecdote from a game my group had a month or two ago.

My party ran into a lone yakfolk (3.X monster, a CR4 evil bodysnatcher/slaver) around level 4. It was a pretty tough fight, and sent us packing because we had heard there was a village full of them nearby and we did not want to get involved stirring up that hornet's nest. Around level 8 we happened to have an adventure that involved crossing through that same area again, and along the way we decided to deal with that yak folk village along the way, taking out the whole tribe of about 80 of them (plus their assorted slaves).

Being able to go in and actually take care of the problem we had been forced to walk away from at lower level was totally awesome. And something we never would have been able to do in 5e. And by your logic is something that would never actually happen in a real game because you are on a constant treadmill and should not be bothering with lower level creatures after 2 levels.

Here's the thing about increasing numbers: it's artificial progress. It's a Red Queen's Race. You get a +1 bonus to your attack and a stat boost that you all but have to put into your primary attack stat and 4000gp that you have to spend on an item that also boosts your attack stat. All so you can get an extra +3 to attack and +2 to damage. But the AC of the monsters you're fighting goes up by 2-3 so you're not really any more accurate. It's rare in Pathfinder to fight monsters with unusually low AC and you seldom fight monsters more than 2 or 3 CR lower than you. There's an illusion of progress when you're really not hitting any more often.

This is the other frequent lie 5e supporters love. The implication being that you will only ever fight things that are level appropriate for you, so your higher level doesn't matter. I find it particularly ironic in this particular post, since it comes right after acknowledging that the numerical scaling is a contributing factor to allowing high level characters to take on armies and win. Because while you may not frequently spend a lot of time fighting something 10 levels below you, knowing that you could take on a whole bunch of them at once because you are strictly better than them is an important aspect of setting and character power levels.

Even ignoring that you will frequently fight things as much as 4-6 levels below you and 4 levels above you. And there is no way you can argue with a straight face that the scaling doesn't matter when you are fighting a half dozen guys 4 levels lower, or a single enemy 4 levels above. The treadmill argument only applies if the game is designed in such a way that you can never exit the treadmill and never fight anything but level appropriate encounters. I have never encountered a game that is actually designed that way, and 3e and PF both explicitly expect you to fight a wide range of enemies both weaker and more powerful than you.

Maybe as a DM you feel you need to run your game like an MMO and level every creature you throw out up or down to match the ECL of the party exactly; but running your own home game like a robot doesn't change how the game is intended to be played.

Seerow wrote:

Disagree. This is actually one of the big lies that people have perpetuated to try to sell Bounded Accuracy. Trying to retcon it to say that old school AD&D was a bounded system and numbers didn't scale as much. All of the core numbers scaled just as much as in 3e/PF, what didn't scale as much was attributes, various "other" bonuses from class features/spells, and to a lesser degree magic items (magic Items were a much bigger deal in AD&D than they are in 5e though)

In AD&D the base AC is 10, and the Fighter would hit AC0 relatively early, as soon as he had enough loot to buy himself some full plate. A level 15+ Fighter is rocking AC-5 to -10. Similarly, his saves have at this point gone from 10-20% across the board to closer to 80-90% across the board; his THAC0 has gone from 19 down to 0. Oh and Fighters had the ability to make one attack per class level against low level enemies (such as orcs)

The AD&D Fighter had fewer hitpoints than 3e, and most of the more commonly used high level defenses were less common or non-existent at that point in time, but a high level AD&D fighter had nothing to fear from a squad of orcs. He had an AC that they needed a natural 20 to hit, a THAC0 low enough to hit them except on a 1, and could kill more than 10 of them every round. AD&D Fighters would wade through 100+ orcs before dying. And that's just the fighter, not even the rest of the party! Throw in a Cleric and a Wizard and you're taking down large armies.

Lies? Because someone disagrees with your analysis? That's pretty... strongly put, even obnoxious.

Yes, any attempt to claim that AD&D works on a scaling system that is even half as restricted as 5e is unabashedly lying.

There are elements of the offense that scaled in AD&D just like 3e and PF, true. But the defense was fairly closely bounded. AC0 was attainable, but it was much harder to get better than -2 to -5 (equivalent to AC 22 to 25) because you couldn't count on getting the magical items that you can in 3e that send the AC scaling quite a bit higher.

A fighter could generally expect magical weapons and armor. While he might not expect a +5 Weapon, +5 Armor, +5 Ring +5 Amulet and 2-3 more items to increase his primary stats; a set of magical full plate is pretty standard, and by the time you're looking at level 10-15 the Fighter is totally going to be rocking that. A Fighter without AC in the negatives by level 15 is a fighter playing in a group with a DM that translates "rare" as "nonexistent"

And of course you completely ignored all points about saves or to-hit bonuses, both of which scale far more than 5e allows without ever having to care about magic items.

Moreover, that AC tended to drop when surrounded (as multiple orcs tend to do).

So basically just like flanking in more recent games?

And those multple attacks? They got them against creatures with fewer than 1 HD - kobolds and goblins, but not orcs. High level fighters just their 3/2 or 2/1 attacks. Not quite the army-rending force you might remember.

You're right, I was misremembering thinking the rule was something like 1/5th your hd. That is more limited than I remember, but since you're pretty much guaranteed to hit every orc, you're still better off than a 5e fighter even while down 1 attack per round. And when those 1/2 hd mooks show up you actually can mow down armies of them.

The catch is... bounded accuracy doesn't *really* change your odds from 3e/4e/PF. You generally have the same chance of success. But instead of the treadmill of your bonuses going up at the same rate as the DCs everything stays flatter. In Pathfinder, fighter's don't *really* get more accurate since monsters get harder to hit at a similar rate; everyone else just becomes more and more inaccurate. Yes, his accuracy is going up and up but he's never going to fight a creature where this matters as they provide no challenge.

This is the other frequent lie 5e supporters love. The implication being that you will only ever fight things that are level appropriate for you, so your higher level doesn't matter. I find it particularly ironic in this particular post, since it comes right after acknowledging that the numerical scaling is a contributing factor to allowing high level characters to take on armies and win. Because while you may not frequently spend a lot of time fighting something 10 levels below you, knowing that you could take on a whole bunch of them at once because you are strictly better than them is an important aspect of setting and character power levels.

Even ignoring that you will frequently fight things as much as 4-6 levels below you and 4 levels above you. And there is no way you can argue with a straight face that the scaling doesn't matter when you are fighting a half dozen guys 4 levels lower, or a single enemy 4 levels above. The treadmill argument only applies if the game is designed in such a way that you can never exit the treadmill and never fight anything but level appropriate encounters. I have never encountered a game that is actually designed that way, and 3e and PF both explicitly expect you to fight a wide range of enemies both weaker and more powerful than you.

Maybe as a DM you feel you need to run your game like an MMO and level every creature you throw out up or down to match the ECL of the party exactly; but running your own home game like a robot doesn't change how the game is intended to be played.

Morzadian wrote:

I have played D&D for over 30 years and your statement is a complete fabrication.

Absolutely false.

How so? Its very much in line with my 23 years of D&D tells me and with the many issues older edition players have with 3.x. The power level went well past 11.

Note: The argument is not over whether or not 3e increased the power level (it did); it is over whether numbers scaled quickly enough to invalidate orcs numerically by mid to high levels (they did).

Seerow wrote:

Basically compared to what players are used to in 3e or PF, high level player characters are made out of tissue paper. And while it's still relatively balanced when fighting a level appropriate encounter, when you run into a small squad of orc mooks at level 10 and somebody nearly dies, that is a huge tonal shift. While there are in fact players who like the idea that a handful of orcs can challenge characters regardless of level (my experience is this is mostly DMs who never quite got how to handle high level play), for just as many the idea that high level characters who are out slaying dragons and challenging gods are having trouble with a handful of ordinary orcs is ridiculous. That disconnect is antithetical to the premise high level play has operated on for decades.

A tonal shift? Maybe. But then I could see some older school players say, "Yeah, a shift back to playing D&D instead of what 3e turned D&D into." Because those D&D and AD&D PCs frequently had ACs lowly orcs could hit and had a lot fewer hit points than they had in 3e. Commoners could kill giants and dragons in those days as well.

There may be a tonal shift, but don't forget that 3e ushered in a tonal shift of its own.

Disagree. This is actually one of the big lies that people have perpetuated to try to sell Bounded Accuracy. Trying to retcon it to say that old school AD&D was a bounded system and numbers didn't scale as much. All of the core numbers scaled just as much as in 3e/PF, what didn't scale as much was attributes, various "other" bonuses from class features/spells, and to a lesser degree magic items (magic Items were a much bigger deal in AD&D than they are in 5e though)

In AD&D the base AC is 10, and the Fighter would hit AC0 relatively early, as soon as he had enough loot to buy himself some full plate. A level 15+ Fighter is rocking AC-5 to -10. Similarly, his saves have at this point gone from 10-20% across the board to closer to 80-90% across the board; his THAC0 has gone from 19 down to 0. Oh and Fighters had the ability to make one attack per class level against low level enemies (such as orcs)

The AD&D Fighter had fewer hitpoints than 3e, and most of the more commonly used high level defenses were less common or non-existent at that point in time, but a high level AD&D fighter had nothing to fear from a squad of orcs. He had an AC that they needed a natural 20 to hit, a THAC0 low enough to hit them except on a 1, and could kill more than 10 of them every round. AD&D Fighters would wade through 100+ orcs before dying. And that's just the fighter, not even the rest of the party! Throw in a Cleric and a Wizard and you're taking down large armies.

A 10th-level Fighter is no better at fighting than a 1st-level Fighter with the exception of the things that make him better at fighting.

This is such a silly argument.

AC isn't really that simulation or associated, since it combines a whole bunch of things, some of which are also bound up in hps for some characters.

I think the biggest disconnect is that while the Fighter is better at Fighting than a 1st level Fighter, he is better to a lesser degree than he was in either 3e or PF, and that is a direct result of bounded accuracy.

When WotC first started talking up bounded accuracy, they talked about how the difference from numbers would be made up for by providing more powerful class features and new interesting options, so instead of just having a higher to-hit bonus, they'd be able to do awesome new things.

This was never delivered on. Look at a 5th edition Fighter and compare it to what you can do with a Fighter in 3e or PF. It's pretty pathetic. Seriously, the 'complex' fighter specialization in 5e gets some bonus dice that recharge with an hour of rest that let you do such amazing things as push an opponent back 5ft or disarm an enemy. 5e Fighters get to choose between getting a level-up stat boost (capped at 20) or getting a feat (of which painfully few are worthwhile).

At no point is there anything really introduced to help out defensively via class features, as the designers rely on hit point scaling to keep you secure... but the cap on con, reduced feats, general reduced availability of magic items, etc, means that hit points are lower overall by mid levels, lower by as much as 25-50% by level 20. Meanwhile AC hasn't gone up, you have only 1-2 good saves (meanwhile there are now 6! saves that can be used to screw you over, 3-4 of them are guaranteed to be bad), there's no damage reduction, no immunities, resistance is really rare, miss chance is unheard of (closest thing you'll find is causing disadvantage on attacks against you).

Basically compared to what players are used to in 3e or PF, high level player characters are made out of tissue paper. And while it's still relatively balanced when fighting a level appropriate encounter, when you run into a small squad of orc mooks at level 10 and somebody nearly dies, that is a huge tonal shift. While there are in fact players who like the idea that a handful of orcs can challenge characters regardless of level (my experience is this is mostly DMs who never quite got how to handle high level play), for just as many the idea that high level characters who are out slaying dragons and challenging gods are having trouble with a handful of ordinary orcs is ridiculous. That disconnect is antithetical to the premise high level play has operated on for decades.

And this is ignoring the problems that come up when you apply bounded accuracy to skills, as 5e did. Bounded skill systems are possible, but not with a system as simplistic as D20+X vs Y. There is just not enough granularity there to have meaningful progression of skills; so it becomes either everybody is an expert, everybody is awful, or the GM arbitrarily decides some people are more awesome than others and lets them do things with a roll that somebody else can't do with the exact same roll. I can actually imagine bounded accuracy working for combat with inclusion of more features to supplement it, but skills under the bounded accuracy system are completely unworkable as is. It would need a shift to a new system (ie pool of d20s, or d20 + bunch of d6s based on training bonus, or something along those lines).

Also in case anyone cares, I decided instead of doing rolls for random encounters every day, I'd preroll out all of the random encounters for the map, and then group together encounters in such a way that they can make some sort of story sense. So instead of having 15 or so random 1 encounter work days spread around (probably more, looking through it, I rolled around 23 encounters total compared to the expected average of 15ish), I've got 4 new adventure hubs where there's something interesting to do that progresses or at least contributes to the plot in some minor way.

So my group's other campaign has about 1 session left before I take over for Kingmaker, so I am ironing out my changes to the AP before going live. I've read through a lot of the larger threads on this forum mining for ideas, this is what I am planning to go with:

Character Changes:
The two major villains of the adventure path are Nyrissa and Irovetti. I've seen suggestions around for both of them that I liked, and am using/adapting them to my purpose.

Timeline: Timeline stretched, provide roughly 5 years between each part. After the first break, kingdom turns progress by season instead of by month. Possibly make other changes to slow down time passing if needed. Events get shuffled around, most prominently moving Varnhold Vanishes until the second to the end, but also notably moving the Rushlight tournament close to the beginning. The timeline will be mixed up as shown below.

So I guess what I'm looking for is another set of eyes to let me know if I missed anything obvious, or if there are major plotholes caused by any of these changes.

Houserule Notes (in case they affect anything):
-I will be doing level up via fiat to keep players in the level range intended.
-Experience rewards will still be issued and may be spent on upgrades that supplement/replace magic items. In exchange fewer magic items will be dropped and magic items available for purchase will be severely limited. Expect the players to invest more personal wealth into the kingdom, or personal businesses/buildings.
-I will be making tweaks to kingdom building rules to make populations numbers make a bit more sense, and encourage players to have a standing army early on.

Seerow, I believe it's called "those waskawwy fey" or something similar

Thanks, I found it.

In case anyone else ends up coming here and looking for it, at the end of the thread there is a link to this PDF that has pretty much all of the suggested pranks in one convenient place: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-cUeHm0w4XQQ3ZvNkVKTkhLajg/edit