The.Bard's page

I might say the unpopular thing here, but maybe it's not that the casters are too powerful. The way I see the whole issue is that the "mundanes" are pretty crap overall (even if in PF2 they seem to be a bit better than the average).

Why keep going in this downward spiral of nerfing magic in a FANTASY game, a genre that is almost defined by exactly the existance and power of magic in the first place?

Wouldn't it be better to make mundanes more heroic and both powerful and useful instead?

D&D/PF keeps tossing casters from high fantasy in the same game with mundanes that are straight out of a nerfed version of history (monk, fighter and barbarians first of them).
And I think that's the source of the issue.

If the mundanes were to have the power they deserve (and often have in fantasy settings), magic would get to be both awesome and much less at risk of "stealing the scene" from the rest of the party.

Maybe I'm the weird one, but I want my monk to be like a charater from asian fantasy, like Guo Jing from the classic Legend of the Condor Heroes, or even better someone out of a xianxia. Not some close-to-real-life shaolin monk that has been the butt end of jokes since 3.0.
I want my warrior to be like a warrior from the legends, like Beowulf, Heracles or Cu Chulainn (spelling?), not some random historically accurate-ish fighter.

Funnily enough, comic and games have been solving this issue by making mundanes more powerful since ages ago, but for some reason RPGs are stuck on "if I'm a mundane I don't get good things that might look too close to magic" mindset.

After all, if you play a game to be a hero, would you really rather be an average warrior with a nerfed-to-s&*!farming caster besides you or an epic one fighting side by side with an actual caster?

(and yes, I did like the Tome of Battle if you were wondering and still had any doubt about it)

I do agree that when doing "basic skill use" the bonus gap between Untrained and Legendary feels way to small. I feel that for a Legendary X, anything an untrained person could accomplish should be a routine action he could do without any effort.

Also I love the idea of advanced uses of skills, so that when two people let's say try to recall information on a monster one might be able to remember the name and someone else also get information about his abilities and whatnot, even with the same roll.
But this is almost absent in the rules. I feel that they should lean in in the idea a lot more to make it viable. At this moment it seems to be stuck half-way from the old and the new system and suffering from the bad portions of both.

Now, how that could be solved in game terms, I'm not sure.

Some things I messed around with and playtested a bit that I feel could be considered are:
* Dive deeper in the scaling of things you can do/know based on training, having scaling effects even for the things you can do untrained. (What Ultimatecalibur said, it works quite well)

* Give scaling bonuses or automatic success based on how much what you want to do is below your training level. A Master should not even need to roll for unopposed actions that can be done untrained. Or if he does, have a considerable bonus to it.

* Move more things to be skill feats unlocks BUT give a free skill feats when you gain a training level with a skill. (Basically increasing the total skill feats, but having characters choose more too). This makes for a LOT more interesting characters and NPCS as everyone has at least some kind of knack of specialization in some aspect of what he does. Plus resonates well with the FEATS EVERYWHERE feel of PF2.

* Give a +1 to any skill you have a feat in (maybe removing the automatic bonus you get for training level increase, if you give free skill feats in that skill when you do). So if someone invests heavily in that skills even the modifier gets a bit better.

Now, I'm not saying those ideas are perfect or would work well as-is. But are some things we tried that made the skill system more interesting for my players and at the same time helped make more complex and well rounded characters/npcs story-wise.

On a side note since it's been also mentioned before, the level system for skills DCs I admit was something I... did not like very much, to say the least.
But playing around with it, it's actually not that bad once you get the hang of how to set levels, DC and use it. You can use the level to determine "how bad" something is like "swimming in a calm lake (level 1 water), normal" "swimming in a fast river, against the current (level 5 water, severe)" or again "swimming in a tempest, following the current (level 12 water, easy)"
Or you can use it also in reverse, eyeballing the DC and then doing the reverse process to determine a challenge level for that skill.
I must admit I came to like it, it just takes a bit to get used to.

One last thing noone seems to have mentioned yet, there are no more rules for opposite skill checks like two people pushing/pulling at each other with Athletics, or two people trying to convince each other of opposite points of view using Diplomacy and any such situation.