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Long, thoughtful post

I think you really hit the nail on the head with this whole issue when you point out that anything that did happen with this should be limited to a single instance and only really noticeable at low levels (my reading of the -1 damage for tiny, +1 for large). Personally, I think that something like that isn't really worth complicating the game with, but it is about the extent to which it makes sense to address the issue for people who feel like it is a big deal.

Past the lowest levels and single damage dice weapons (so weapons with no runes), the magic of the game world is kicking in so hard that trying to apply real world physics to weapon damage based on size is just really weird and arbitrary. That is why I too am against any house rules that would apply a change to damage dice. The whole underlying formula of damage in PF2 is just really different than in PF1 and applying changes to the damage dice are too big of a swing. Fatal is an incredibly powerful weapon trait because it is one of the only ways to affect this.

I am curious if the “sticker shock” here is not actually about different sized weapons, but a desire/expectation to see creature damage break down into a formula where every piece is tied to something directly (even if arbitrary, as was often the case with PF1 creature number formulae).

Like seeing the Fire Giant’s damage at 2d12+14 (I think, archives of Nethys is not working for me right now)with a striking weapon, you are assuming that the size bonus to damage has to sit somewhere in that +14 and that is what feels unsatisfying since it is not connected to a difference in damage dice? And it appears so similar to what a non-giant barbarian might do?

The bigger issue here is that the fire giant’s damage is determined by the level of creature they are and general type of creature (a brute expected to take one big primary attack and be less accurate with follow up attacks), not the weapon or even the runes…so if this is an issue for your table, it’d be relatively easy to just take away the striking rune (replace it with a different treasure in your campaign) and just imagine that the larger sized weapon is what is essentially giving a whole extra dice of damage, but is nearly impossible for a PC to pick up and use?

Well, I used Microsoft CoPilot to ask the following questions:

1. How do you calculate damage in PF2e?

2. What would the calculations look like using a greataxe for a Fire Giant?

In #1, it gave an example of a barbarian using a greataxe. Ignoring barbarian special abilities, the difference in damage centering around the greataxe my PF1e players thought just wasn't believable.

We're not asking for realism -- we're just asking for a level of believability.

I'll bet if a survey was taken, most PF1e players would have a lot of issues playing with PF2e damage calculations -- with the core issue being weapon size.

Having a tiny greataxe and a huge greataxe do the same damage is just unacceptable to PF1e players. Almost always discussions about this with different PF1e players yield utterances of "dumbing it down".

This is the same thing PF1e players said about 5e.

I have tried to understand where you are coming from because I love PF2 and think it is really easy to make small changes that help meet different tables needs, but I really don't think I understand this at all.

What levels are you trying to compare a Barbarian using a greataxe to a fire giant using a Greataxe? 10? What kind of barbarian? If it is a giant barbarian, then the barbarian is using the same sized axe. Even other kinds of barbarians are filled with all kinds of magical energy that is massively boosting their damage. If the barbarian is not raging their damage is going to fall waaaay behind. Barbarians do not represent regular people doing regular things with weapons. A Fire Giant Barbarian should do significantly more damage than a regular Barbarian in the same way. A fighter is going to be more accurate, and thus likely to crit, but do significantly less base damage.

Whatever you decide to house rule about this, I would really not encourage it apply to any damage die except the first mundane one. One extra damage (or one less) per die would be too much, and all the additional damage comes from magic so it doesn’t need to follow the same guidelines.

Maybe I am confused about what the OP is asking for. I wasn’t thinking they were concerned about the same character using an oversized weapon but about how a small creature’s short sword does the same damage as a large creature’s short sword.

While I agree with posters who are saying that this isn’t a problem for them and that the realism of turn based RPGs is already so far off the deep end that this isn’t just a drop in the ocean, I don’t think the suggestion to add clumsy and a damage bonus is a useful solution because that is specifically the smaller character using the oversized weapon. That was why my suggestion was to just raise the damage floor of a large weapon by 1 and the ceiling of a small weapon by one, and that it only needs to apply to the base weapon die because everything else is magical.

I think if I were to make any kind of house rule to this, it would be something along the lines of: if you roll a one on every damage dice with a large weapon, add one damage to the total.

If you really want to penalize small creatures you could do the same thing with rolling max damage on the damage dice losing 1 point, but PF2 has none of the other offsets that help balance how this worked in PF1.

For me, as a player and as GM with familiarity with both systems mythic system, but only a lot of play experience with PF1, the problem with giving players defined, statted out abilities to do things like cut a mountain in half, is that the players will turn every challenge they face into a mountain they can cut in half unless there are very clear limits on when and what mountains they can use their abilities with. At the point players can do stuff like fly into outer space or cut mountains in half, the whole adventure has to center around that, and players really shouldn’t be expecting to cut every mountain they see in half unless they are adventuring across the elemental plane of Earth in a region of endless mountains.

In other words, the powers really need to revolve so closely around the adventure the GM is running that the GM needs to be pretty hands on with setting the players up to have mythic powers that fit with the adventure enough not to completely trivialize the entire campaign or create so many artificial restrictions around when the mountain cutter can and cannot cut open the mountain that the player feels like they don’t even have the ability. Having a party choose amazing mythic powers that have nothing to do with each other can really exacerbate the whole angel summoner/BMX Hero dilemma if some powers are getting used all the time and others never do.

The OP said the players are enjoying the story. The problem is their experience with the system.

If these are all new players to the PF2 system, they chose some of the weakest starting classes in the game with an odd party composition. That's going to make the game feel bad.

It doesn't seem like the OP is looking for ways to spice up the role-play or make the story more fun. He's trying to understand why the PCs are getting hammered and going down so much and why magic feels ineffective.

It's a more nuanced post on "Why does PF2 feel so hard."

The OP asked this

Do any more experienced GMs than I have tips that could help me make boss fights more fun?

They also listed out the reasons their players don't always have fun with the harder encounters, so that experienced GMs can make suggestions for the GM around addressing those issues. Because of that, I think it is not useful to approach this advice thread as a general discussion about the difficulty of PF2 or what players should do to fight hard encounters better. As a GM, telling your players they are just not good enough and that they need to get better is a recipe for frustrated players to quit the game, and the issues the OP brings up are fairly easy to accomodate on the GM side of things in ways that don't just make the encounters feel easier. AP writers add curve balls to encounters fairly frequently, as well as bad strategies the creatures might try to employ or things they will waste actions doing in the first rounds of combat all the time. They do this not to just make things easier but to give creatures memorable character.

I have some other suggestions for making combats more fun.

* Smack Talk. Seriously, have the bad guys do combat trash-talking at the PCs.

* Use Terrain. Vary things up a bit by what's on the map. Make it multi-level, have combats over rivers or lava with skipping stones, add cover and other dynamic things. I love having bad guys on top of crates in a warehouse, ready to topple things over, or shoving the PCs into water with sharks in it. Vary it up.

* Make the combat mobile. Have the bad guys move. Let them move in, hit, and move out again.

For your specific group, I agree with the advice to bring the encounter level down a little with more people to fight. I did run one CR+2 encounter for my Season of Ghosts group, but added a few CR-1 minions to it to give the less combat-oriented something to hit.

These are all great ideas, and I have one to build on them, especially in combination with adding more lower level creatures to encounters: Don't be afraid to let the minions have some personality as well, especially if it allows you to pull punches in the party is struggling with the encounter. If a creature with a good weapon has fallen in the combat already, but the party has had some bad luck and has a character down as well, the encounter can take on some fun new dimensions if one of the goblin warriors decides now is their opportunity to make a move and run over and steal a treasure or pick up a weapon and then flee, or traitor their comrades in the hopes that the PCs will not only spare them, but let them take control of the dungeon when they leave, or try to use a summoning gem or some other treasure ineffectively and have it cause trouble for everyone. It is a lot harder to get the opportunity for those kind of occasional curve balls if there is only one or two creatures in an encounter.

The ability for the GM to handwave any encounter into a single die roll is always a tool in the GM’s tool kit that can be helpful (even for combat encounters!) but it is also something that can hit the players hard, especially when it feels arbitrary and like it is undermining choices the players made to be prepared for those kinds of encounters. It is important players learn what things a GM tends to ignore/handwave/house rule around before committing resources to it.

I already talked about how many of the out of combat feats fail because they are not designed around the kind of situations in which players would actually use them, but a huge part of that is that because no skill feats are designed to work around social encounters, chases, races, research, infiltrations or investigations. They are instead designed around specific actions/activities that have turned out not to be the way most GMs (and adventure writers) handle those skills in the kinds of tense moments we break out into encounter mode around. When the game was being developed, those skill activities were imagined to be a bigger part of the game than the adventure writers have ended up using and that is a big part of why out of combat skill feat options keep missing the mark.

I don’t really see much value in telling the players to play different characters. Especially for a homebrew campaign where the GM can really be flexible with the levers.

I do think the not wanting any characters to ever drop is a pretty unreasonable general expectation for the party to have though and is worth talking with the table about. Probably, the issue, especially with a party if 5 and only 2 characters getting near the front lines, is that it is the same characters getting dropped over and over again and the party isn’t planning around expecting that to happen and how to mitigate it with tactics. If the party is expecting enemies to spread their attacks out or draw enemies away from focus firing one PC down, they need to have strategies in place to help rotate and replace the front lines. Spells offer many different ways to do this and the players can try out different strategies for it on their own (I don’t find many players enjoy being told exactly what to do, but are more receptive to general strategy ideas when they are actively being frustrated by encounters and trying to figure out how to approach them differently).

All that said, another nice thing about bringing in lots of minions to encounters with a couple of on level or lower leaders is that the HP swinginess of encounters gets leased so it is a little easier for players to see where the threat of the encounter will be. Ending a turn next to a boss and 3 minions should look like the kind of behavior that is going to get someone knocked out, whereas getting hit by a single powerful crit can feel like it came out of the blue.

It really seems both of you would rather skill feats be separated out into combat effective ones and ones designed for other modes of play, because then you could easily direct your players away from all the out of combat feats across the board, but still have skill feats that do interesting things in combat. Like it is fine if you would completely ignore the out of combat side of things. I get that you worry that the developers would spend more time developing out of combat skill feats if they were separate categories, but they already are designing those, they are just grouped in with all the other skill feats and it is recreating the problem that prevented anyone from taking g skill affecting feats in PF1, and why skill feats exist in PF2 in the first place: to not compete with combat resources.

The difficulty settings of PF2 can take a while to dial in for your party and they tend to be more difficult than a lot of players expect. 1 equal level enemy should have a 50% chance of taking down a PC. Level +2 is approximately twice as hard, which can easily mean dropping one PC with a single lucky round of actions. Level -2 is about twice as easy, but that still actually means a level -2 creature has a 25% chance of beating the higher level creature by themselves. It doesn’t exactly work out this way precisely with every creature, but luck really matters and characters going down in encounters is pretty essential to victory. For example, a party that tries to spread their damage around equally to every monster is going to make fights much harder for themselves and take much longer. In reverse, this means that combats have to pretty much be limited to moderate or less if the party expects no player character to ever go down. It is nearly impossible for encounters to be challenging and not have at least 1 of 5 PCs drop, because the shift in action economy advantage is what flips the encounter balance and can be why parties struggle against solo monsters if they aren’t good at action denial.

I really think your party will enjoy significantly shifting down the level of enemies and increasing the number of them. With 3 casters and barely any Tanking ability they really don’t want to be stuck in close against anything that can crit regularly on a second attack. It might seem silly at first, but throw 8 level -4 enemies at them some time or 6 and 1 level -2 enemies and see if they have fun with the immediate sense of feeling overwhelmed shifts into feeling awesome when creatures fall quickly to big spells and crits.

As far as just “roleplaying instead of roll play,” what is fun to role play really changes from table to table, and some players don’t have the training in the skills that their characters would have in handling other types of encounters, just like almost no players have the combat training skills to role play combat, so they mostly rely on dice rolls and descriptions within the rule book to narrate what happens.

This very often results in one or two charismatic players handling all of the “roleplay” encounters while other players just sit quietly and watch, or get forced into interacting in ways that end up complicating g everything for the whole party. There is definitely a reason newer APs include a lot more subsystems for out of combat encounters than they used to, and they continue to do it because they get good feedback about it.

At the same time, the skill feats system was something pretty new, that didn’t get play tested in nearly the same robust way as the combat system, with the exception of skill feats that play over into combat. I don’t remember the playtest really pushing things like the influence system or the research system, and if it did include any of that, it was pretty one off compared to the number of combat encounters. It makes sense that the development of combat came first, but now, between PF2 and SF2 there is room for a lot of growth in making these non-combat encounters more dynamic and fun, and less worthy of just skipping with a single dice roll.

To add on to Teridax’s point about modularity, these systems already exist in game and many people ignore them because nothing that one would think connects to them does. If your AP has an influence encounter and you have streetwise, can you make society check in place of a diplomacy? Will the GM use the same DC? Will it be easier? Harder? There is no real guidance for how to do this except maybe give a small circumstance bonus to checks where skill feats could be applicable, but that is putting a lot on GMs to arbitrate, and a lot of “useless” skill feats (useless because they do things like make influence checks take less time…in situations where time constraints are almost never relevant), would be much better built around non-combat encounter modes of play and pacing.

Thinking more about the modes of play in relationship to all this, I think for PF3, we need to do away with “encounter” mode and just call it “Combat.” Encounters are things that need to be able to happen in all three modes of play at different paces and when encounters become synonymous with combat, it turns all abilities characters have into nails. Combat nails.

I also think that, for a new edition of the game, that skills for use in combat be split off from skill use in other modes. Not necessarily as the skills themselves, like the athletics number could be used for either, but skill feats really need to pick a lane and having something like “talents” for combat skill feats, and skill feats for exploration and down time skill use would eliminate the issue of combat skill feats being inherently better and of having exploration encounters where there is no obvious way to apply a skill feats that should be useful.

Mythic just being flat bonuses over equally leveled characters is just making the characters higher level for that task, nothing else. I am glad that they didn't take a "more numbers" approach to Mythic.

PF1 Mythic was the end of my table playing pathfinder until 2nd edition came out. We really, really wanted it to be good and played through the first 3 books of Wrath of the Righteous before it became clear that what mythic did was exacerbate all of the existing problems with 1st edition into a completely unplayable mess. Mythic can't just mean "higher level challenge." PF2 is already really good for simulating that kind of power difference. You just use higher or lower level opponents depending on who is supposed to feel awesomely powerful.

Mythic needed to not be "You are awesomely powerful," at least not with raw numbers. It needed to be "you interact differently with the world."
I actually think the mythic defenses work really well for that, as long as they applied very carefully and mythic creatures still have some form of glaring vulnerability. It seems like James Jacobs and the adventure writing team understand this, so I anticipate the official mythic APs to be well balanced around creature's mythic abilities and nature. For introducing new narrative changing systems (like Mythic) it kinda feels like the base rules have to come out, and then, like 2 years later, the GM focused book that will help guide GMs using that system should come out that can incorporate that system. I know that it would be best to just be able to play test the rules for a really long time before launching them, but casual gamers are not going to be a part of those play tests, so many usability and complexity issues would probably be hard to assess.

I still have such a bad taste of PF1 mythic in my mouth that I have been hesitant to get too far into the PF2 mythic rules in play, but my table will probably run the Revenge of the Runelords AP eventually, way too late to be of any use in thinking through how well the new mythic rules allowed the creative team to tell a different kind of story than they would have been able to tell otherwise. I think it is really cool and bold of the adventure path team to tackle the most core pathfinder story to test those rules (especially jumping in at high level) around. Like the Rune Lords are supposed to be the kind of wizards who other wizards will never live up to being, but that doesn't specifically mean cast more powerful spells or regular spells more powerfully (ie: just be higher level than possible). I am very interested to see how it turns out.

Is this how the game is already set up?

There are some areas of flexibility around what kinds of narrative abilities fit in each tier, but spells like teleportation (and long distance movement) are not really accessible to players before the level 10-20 "epic" tier that you are talking about.

I can see the appeal of wanting to make sure each class has a set number of out of combat related abilities that line up better with the various out of combat encounter subsystems that exist but there are some serious issues with trying to do that, even if I agree strongly that the game has a problem where those subsystems were clearly not developed enough at the playtesting phase for things like skill feats to interact cleanly and clearly with them.

The issues with over formalizing out of combat abilities:

1. Unlike combat, the same kind of narrative out-of-combat challenge might be played out in 2 or 3 different ways in any given adventure in PF2. A complex environmental challenge like crossing through a lava-filled cavern, might play out in a combat encounter pace, where many of the threats are treated like simple or complex hazards that uses battle maps and 3 action turns to resolve; or it might be a victory point-based skill challenge; or it might end up resolving with almost no checks at all if the party has access to resources or ideas that the GM decides are suitable enough to just bypass, like the party all can teleport or the ability to fly fast enough to just take some minor damage in the crossing.

2. The existing way that the game gives characters out of combat abilities is primarily skills, but there are lots of spells that address these modes of play as well. PF2 is much better than past games at not letting as many types of out-of-combat challenges be completely bypassed by a single spell, but it certainly still happens and that is where the narrative expectations of different levels of play really enters this conversation. It is entirely possible for 20th level characters to have no default ability to fly, for example, but would be bad adventure design to build encounters for 20th level characters that present no challenge to characters who can fly, because, minimally, a level 20th party should be capable of getting the ability for the whole party to fly with less than a percent of their character's material wealth, if not by other means.

These two issues combine together to create a pretty big problem with trying to formalize how out-of-combat power can be formalized.

Skill feats for example, really only consistently handle the game at combat encounter-mode pace. There are some exceptions, for down-time activities in particular, but the inconsistency of whether challenges will be presented in combat encounter or victory point encounter mode means either every feat/ability would have to have a formal explanation for how to handle both, and that is a pretty Herculean task/overhaul of these systems, especially as there will pretty quickly come a point in the game where the power tier of the game has moved past the skill/skill feats relevance to the types of challenges being faced. For example, high level skill feats for climbing related challenges are a waste of page space, when the items and magic to bypass those challenges are trivially available by mid levels. This is not something that many adventures have necessarily handled well, and is complicated by the reality that challenges in adventures don't always line up to the expected tiers of play at the levels they are happening...but at the same time, it is only a problem for out of combat encounters to become trivialized by characters with the right abilities/items/spells prepared if the tension and excitement of the campaign was riding of these encounters being narrative focal points of the adventure. As much as Mount Doom is built up as the pinnacle location of the Lord of the Rings, and its dangers foreshadowed through out the story, we largely bypass most of the environmental hazards it presents as background narrative by the time the scene set there happens. There was more important parts of the story to focus on by that point, which will often be the case in RPG adventures as well, although RPGs have to also contend with fitting a certain amount of XP into each step of the story so it is not uncommon to have adventures set aside front and center stage time to challenges that would be montaged over in a film or skipped in exposition in a novel.

This is kind of the difficulty, but also the artistry of adventure writing and GMing. You have to keep things interesting but you can't move things along so fast, and only focus on the main plot points of the adventure, that players get no time learning the ropes of their characters growing powers, develop a relationship to the game's setting, or the opportunity to gain enough experience with their characters to be at the right level to face the next plot essential event.

All of this is true of combat encounters as well, but there generally is more patience for extraneous combat encounters than for extraneous out-of-combat encounters. This might be a product of PF2 game mechanics, but it is definitely also a product of long running game expectations that predate PF2's existence.

All of this might just be to say that the game needs a lot of flexibility around how out of combat encounters can be handled because not every cliff face needs to be scaled at a pace of 5 to 10ft of vertical movement per check. It also could be interesting to consider having more ways to streamline down combat encounters into VP subsystems that can more quickly determine resource expenditure and rewards than having to fight out every combat encounter, but that is something that is kind of already happening and also something that might require a new edition before it could be formalized in a manner where almost any combat encounter could be resolved that way.

Heroism is actually a kind of good example to look at of a wand that is definitely not worth buying. Like if you find a wand of heroism, it makes sense to hold onto it for a while and then sell it, but wands being higher level than the spells they cast on top of having such a limited number of uses per campaign/day, the utility and usefulness are extremely limited. You can start buying scrolls of Heroism +2 at level 11 after all, so are you going to use the wand 12 times before you've reached a level where you have better compression of bonus to actions/resources? Maybe. But at best it's campaign dependent.

Tail Wind is kind of a real outlier here because it really never heightens usefully past rank 2 and there are not a whole lot of other options out there for getting long term status bonuses to speed. Even a wand of Darkvision doesn't have a long enough duration to be worth while until it is such a high rank that there are much better options for getting it. The "better as a wand than scrolls" is a very very limited pool of spells in PF2, with the exception that a high level wand of a useful spell as loot is a nice find because it is something that can be used for a while before being sold.

The reason why the "consumables are actually better than permanent items" in PF2 is not really a problem as an ivory tower game design element, is because it is a dial that GMs can very easily dial in around the preferences of their PCs, while things like feats that players may decide to choose without talking to their GM would be much more problematic. Players might start saving up money to try to buy expensive wands, and that can really harm a party when the player is like, "well I don't have the funds to buy this wand in town while we are here, so I am just going to not buy anything and set off with a bag full of gold coins as I go into a dungeon that might see us level up repeatedly before having access to a magic shop again," but a GM can pretty easily just replace an early treasure item with the wand they know the player is trying to buy, so they can have it when they might actually use it, and it will feel extra valuable (especially if it is at the top rank of spells they can cast), even if the player should have just bought a fist full of scrolls of the spell and been able to use it more often than the wand will ever allow.

Community resources win out over and over again because TTRPGs don’t have employees in place to make these resources as effectively as the community and finding the resources to pay for equal quality to what the community and 3rd party companies puts out is hard when it is not the background of anyone in the company to hire the right people to do it. Especially not when parties interested in doing so can take on the risk for themselves and just do it, since the rules are fairly free to use, explicitly for this kind of purpose. All of your monster hunter references don’t cross over to TTRPGs as well as you think they do because all of the information you talk about being hidden is transparent in PF2 and open licensed RPGs. The only thing “hidden” from players is which kind of creatures and challenges your specific characters will face in their specific campaigns and that is not actually hidden, it is just completely at the whim of the GM and which adventure they are running or designing for your character.

Players know what the feats do. They don’t know how often it will come into use. Many players chose toughness in 3.0 even though there could have been better choices because they just believed that HP was something their character was always going to need, while situationally better feats (including even some static bonus feats) required your character to be doing those situational things, which didn’t feel like it would happen as often as your character taking damage. Taking toughness didn’t break the game as a bad choice in 3.0, but it’s bonus was so limited as far as a percentage of over all HP that players that understood this and knew they were playing to higher levels could do much better. Thus Ivory Tower is about optimization of character ability, but an optimization based upon understanding when things are useful and for how long.

Thus there is an actual second Ivory Tower optimization strategy in PF2 that players get wrong all the time, and that is underestimating the value of consumables and over valuing permanent items. Players imagine their characters existing for long full lives using these items over and over again, when in actual play reality an Item that can only be used once a day, for example, might only get used 3 or 4 times in the level band where it is most useful. Meanwhile 8-10 of a consumable that does the same thing might be about the same price and be usable all on the same day if necessary and replaced with a more effective version after leveling up and starting to get the treasure from higher level encounters. This is an objectively provable fact that can pretty easily be demonstrated (and has been over and over again) but many players just don’t feel like playing that way. It’s not that the information is hidden or difficult to process it is just player tendency. But the difference with something like this is the GM can very easily change the pacing of encounters to let players who want to play with permanent items do so effectively. The only thing a GM could do with a bunch of players who wanted to take 3.0 toughness was only play first level adventures.

@Trip,

Paizo, as a company, would not be around today if they had tried to make the kind of resources you enjoy about their games be there own creations or products. AoN, Pathbuilder, Foundry, etc are great products along side the game rules because the rules are free to use in these kind of passion projects. Multiple PF1 SRDs have existed over the last 2 decades and AoN has emerged the best because people who love the game kept up with it. People have voluntarily offered financial support to these projects, but they got of the ground from people doing these things largely unpaid first, out of enjoyment for the game, and then folks supported them once they were finished. If Paizo had tried to fold any of the VTTs or online support into their game design from the beginning, and especially locked down that work with restrictive IP, those resources would be garbage.

Additionally, and this is the really, really important point, TTRPGs are not anything like video games when it comes to game mechanic elements that rely on expectations established by GMs and adventure writers. In video games, the exact number (or percent chance for more randomized games) of x creatures with y ability showing up is a known commodity about the game. If I have an ability z that is good against y ability, then the functional value of Z is causally linked to prevalence of Y in the game. Knowing exactly how many X creatures will appear in the game becomes the secret sauce meta-information that determines how good X will be.

But every single AP and homebrew adventure is going to have its own separate numbers for this so that information does not exist in the same way for a table top RPG. Even where you can count the numbers of creatures in a bestiary type rule book isn't the same because many of those creatures will never enter play in any given adventure. There is not some random distribution of creatures that players should be expected to build characters to face because it is not random, it is determined by the GM and what adventure they are running and so all of that metadata changes in every campaign, and steering players to build characters towards specific assumptions about that without any reliable information on how the future adventures they might play follow or challenge those assumptions isn't helping players, it is quite likely hindering them...and we see this play out on these boards all the time with people giving advice about things like "never pick spell attack roll spells" or "assume that fire resistance is going to be the most common form of resistance encountered."

No one person or group is controlling these assumptions on a game-wide level enough for any set of these assumptions to be considered the games overall default and that is a massively different situation than will be encountered in any video game.

I personally am very happy to see Paizo "stick to their lane" and develop game content that is centered around the things they do well: write fun adventures, develop rules that fit within the general balance of the game and are very easy to modify and develop for yourself to fit your specific play requirements or desires if they fall outside of the expectations that shape play for Paizo APs, adventures or PFS scenarios. Trying to control all the information that will shape what is optimal and what is not in any specific instance of playing a PF2 game would be a massive waste of time for Paizo and have killed the company, probably long before PF2 was developed.

Did ANYONE in this thread actually READ the linked Monte Cook essay where he described, in hindsight, some of his work on 3e as "Ivory Tower Design"? Because so far not one single usage of the term in this thread has matched what he actually said about it there, instead of what people came to "know" he said the term meant via subcultural osmosis.

It's not a long essay. You might consider giving it a look.

I have read this essay several times and it is exactly what I was referencing when I said the only Ivory Tower design elements of PF2 show up in trying to build characters that go against the expectations of the class that require one specific feat/item/spell to become possible and then the player has to have a very deep understanding of the game to figure out if that choice alone is good enough to serve as a primary build choice, or if it is really a secondary "my character can occasionally do this when doing this badly is better than doing something else my character is better at" ability. Almost any class built into the sign-posted strengths of a class is not going to have any of these problems. Other characters might be slightly more optimal in certain circumstances (some of which are common circumstances to encounter and some are not), but not in a way as to render any character unplayable.

Backgrounds really are a character's past, and I would not like it if they tied too much into progressing abilities that represent a character's future. I know many players do start with picking one that has a boost in the attribute that they want to focus on, and then think about flavor afterwards. I don't think that is inherently a bad idea. It is good to let your choices during character creation help shape your idea of who the character becomes, rather than having a vision to start with and trying to stick to it no matter how the mechanics of the game work against you.

I am also on record as preferring eventually to do away with set attributes that get boosted in very narrow ways and having the benefits you get from every aspect of character creation work more like feats, that give you a set number of bonuses to certain kinds of actions, so that there could be multiple paths towards being accurate with a sword, for example, instead of just "be the strongest."

However, since we are not getting that any time soon, I very much appreciate being able to build a very charismatic alchemist who might only have a +2 to INT, or a Barbarian who might want to throw a lot of things and maybe start with a +2 STR and a +3 Dex. I have had many characters start with a +3 KAS and be perfectly fine at what they do and capable of doing things many of that class cannot do because they have the attributes to pick up the archetype feats or be good at the skills. These are the real "Ivory Tower" builds of PF2 because many of them have to wait for very specific feats or spells or items to come out before they are possible, and sometimes, even when the right thing does finally come out to make it possible, it might be so convoluted and unusable as a primary strategy that trying to build fully into that option instead of using it as a secondary backup option becomes the new trap.

But I think that is ok, because they are character concepts that tend to really work backwards against the system and require a lot of knowledge to put together in the first place. Newer players trying to build into them are probably be directed to by more experienced players/guides and not the system itself.

That is interesting. I wonder if one of the things that had been standing in the way of a lot of higher level scenarios is whether having a gap between spell ranks made the "these are reasonable narrative challenges to face a lot more complicated to span.

Like at level 3 you don't get that much more stuff you can do with spells than level 1 (as far a narrative breaking spells) but at higher ranks the gaps stretch a lot more. It could be that tighter level bands are going to make higher level play easier and they are trying to show case that by having more higher level scenarios.

It just seems like it will be harder to get the numbers to run those except at large conventions.

Also it is not really the players responsibility to know all the items they could possibly buy. The GM and adventure writers are the ones seeding the adventure. Some players like to do that work and GMs can let them, but it is also fine with players that don’t want to do that work to just buy basic stuff, find stuff as you adventure, and then sell treasure when it is no longer useful. The GM core is overly explicit about GMs helping to guide players through the item/treasure process and working with the player to help them not have to sell everything and scour obscure books for useful loot. The GM should have a sense of how much treasure their players have, whether they are on track with the campaign, and whether anyone is getting way out of hand with it.

Running with that Ring of the Ram example, imagine this:

You, a thief rogue, and your level 5 party are on the way to your next major plot point objective. While on route, you pick up a side quest to tackle a small time gang with an interesting twist: their leader is a telekine.

The gang leader, Arde Sholve, uses his powers to push carts off the precarious mountain roads so he and his cronies can pick the spoils in the ravine at their leisure.

An interesting encounter featuring combat and possible athletics checks to maintain grips and climb up cliff faces ensues. After the bandits have been dealt with, you pull a Ring of Ram off of Arde Sholve's cold dead finger: the source of his deadly party trick!

Fast forward to lvl 16 fighting some tier 4 boss and its minions. Some brute grapples the caster and starts wailing on them. Things are looking dire but you're up next! Pushing something a couple feet might not be all that impressive at lvl 16 but in this situation it would definitely help.

Your neurons begin to fire as your eyes snap to your finger. The ring! The jewelry you got from that small time gang leader 1.5 irl years ago (what was his name again? Some sort of pun...). You've used it a couple times and though it hasn't been often those few moments were pretty clutch.

You line up your fist green lantern style and make the minion throw a save against your class DC. It rolls a 20 on the die and disregards; on the caster's next turn they magic away. What you did was pointless, but you TRIED. GODS BLESS IT, YOU TRIED AND HAD A CHANCE!!! All bc of some treasure with a story from way back in tier 1 of play.

That's much, much, MUCH more satisfying to me than a constant treadmill of soon-to-be-trash.

This is an interesting scenario and I can see the desire for something like this but I think if we look at this exact scenario closely the issues with always slightly useful magic items to horde becomes more visible as well.

The difference between the two encounters is 11 levels. The ring, at a level 5 encounter is 220 gp, or about the entire treasure expected from a severe encounter. The DC of 22 is right on level for a level 6 item and so is decent for a level 5 party but will fall off over the next several levels and really be not worth keeping by level 9. Selling it at level 9 is not much wealth, but could be like a rank 3 and a rank 4 scroll (something decently useful to a level 9 character).

The issue is that by level 16 the party should have received 54500 gold in just the adventures of their 15th level, or about 270 rings of the ram worth of treasure. even at level 5 they might have gotten 5 or 6 of them, so if they get 5 or 6 things each level they want to keep for ever, the amount of treasure the party is hauling around at level 16 is just way out of hand. The game either needs items to upgrade, so that you have to keep directing your wealth into them, or replace them so that players don't end up with giant bags of loot that may be useful some day, so we cant sell them, but getting them out of a bag of holding, equipping it, and then activating it is just way out of hand as far as action economy loss, compared to just moving up and pushing a minion, even with just a trained athletics skill.

Basically, things that just do a little damage or a minor effect don't need to be always relevant and potentially useful as characters should get newer options that can do those things better as they level up. Players may dislike a lot of the existing magic items and just sell them, but that is actually a lot better than them just holding on to everything and then never actually using any of it because the action economy trade off to get it ready is terrible and at least the party could have some better stuff if they sold off the bad stuff when it was still somewhat valuable.

Addressing the “very special treasure” question of items like the one ring and even HP’s invisibility cloak, items really intended to stick around…those are absolutely artifacts in PF2. I think a lot of players don’t think much about incorporating artifacts into their characters because you can’t. They represent something that the GM is going to have to design and fit around the campaign narrative and the characters, and thus they are not going to factor into players who have long term build plans in place the same way typical items do.

This makes artifacts a little tricky, as characters end up having to be built around them once the character sees what the growth progression of the artifact is, or else the GM has to really sculpt the artifact around the character. And I think that also leads to less artifacts in play and even some disappointment on players parts when they do find one if it doesn’t fit what the characters expected progression path would be.

Other than artifacts though, having equipment generally fit into “the very special item that you name and use your whole career” that really falls into stuff that should be class based, of which we only have the inventor and the Exemplar that kind of go that route. Really you see that best done in classless systems generally, where any growth of power is tied to leveling up and comes from the same bucket of resources. PF2 keeps items a separate bucket, which is why making items rely on class DCs doesn’t work currently. Items is too big of a bucket to tie on to a variable class feature.

Another GM/adventure writer side issue with scaling item DC, is that storywise, the random person finding a item of immense power works well with static DCs but doesn’t with the item relying of the holders internal power.

Unicore wrote:

I think the general issue is players approaching magic items as character defining game elements and that is very much against the design philosophy of PF2. Those kind of items are a part of a class kit like the exemplar. There are mandatory magic items for keeping up with numbers, but those items enable your class abilities (like weapons, shields, armor, etc). They are not character defining by themselves.

I'm wondering though. We've been doing this for half a century now. Game designers insisting the players should enjoy these items, and players saying Nope, I don't want it that way.

I feel like there's this ongoing struggle between designers insisting that a particular design is rational and balanced and exists for good reasons, and sure, I can be convinced of the sound reasoning.

Like the demon mask. It's pretty much a design rule that you can't have items that only give a +1 to a skill without doing anything else. And there are some of these items that are well-received, like the mage's hat that gives +1 arcana and prestidigitation. On the face of it, Intimidate is probably a more useful skill and prestidigitation isn't supposed to be powerful. But this feels like a nicer item than the demon mask. You can wear a wizard hat and just wave your hands at the dirty dishes.

But wearing a demon mask is a bit of a weird gimmick. Are you gonna wear that just walking around on the street? RP-wise it's kind of a big commitment, but mechanically it doesn't give you a lot back for that. A fear spell that is kind of marginal because it has a fading DC and also you probably already had Intimidate anyway because you're the one who cared about getting a bonus to the skill.

I think that treasure gets a lot harder to give out meaningfully when players have a very small handful of things that they want and everything else they plan on selling without even looking twice at. I get that some players bring this approach to PF2 already, but it is an outside game approach, not one fostered within the game itself, or many games in the genre.

When every item that the party finds is something that they very well may hold onto and want to keep for their entire career, it is hard to have giant bundles of treasure in every dungeon because it will just end up being too much stuff the players want to hold onto, and that is hard for adventure writers because gear is the way that adventures have meaningful milestones in play beyond just leveling up. That is actually why I personally really dislike using ABP in games that I play in. Tying more item numbers directly to what level your character is just makes leveling up even more of the only purpose in playing. With gear having more of a disconnect from direct character level, it is easier to have the power progression of characters have more steps in it and not be as large of jumps.

The Demon Mask is interesting because the DC for it is actually ahead of most equal level items already. It is pretty much running at class level progression, which is better than the typical level DC that most other items adhere to, and fear has a strong success effect, so it is not difficult for the mask to keep its utility for up to 4 or 5 levels, pending on when you found it. And I really do think that is part of the rub. For players looking to buy equipment, especially equipment of secondary importance (like skill boosts), players probably are not buying the demon mask at the earliest possible opportunity. Instead of maybe getting it at some point during level 3, they could easily be 5th level before thinking about buying a skill item like that. Then the DC is already behind an it is a level or 2 that the item might be useful. That is a pretty big difference. At that point you would really be looking for a different item. So I think it is also possible that "is the character finding this item or buying this item" can easily end up shaping the players perspective on how useful it will be and for how long.

Why is finding a level 4 demon mask (worth 85gp) at level 3 worse treasure than finding an art object worth 42 gold and 5 silver? If you wear it for 2 or 3 levels and use its activation a couple of times while the DC is worth it, then sell it, you got more value out of the mask than a lump sum of treasure. Maybe somebody in the party values intimidation enough that they hold on to the mask well past level 6 or 7 where the DC falls off into irrelevancy, because it is just a +1 at that point. If casting fear regularly was this awesome thing for the character, they’ve had 4 levels to find another source for that ability and it will have only gotten worse than a multi class casting archetype in the last couple of levels.

I think the general issue is players approaching magic items as character defining game elements and that is very much against the design philosophy of PF2. Those kind of items are a part of a class kit like the exemplar. There are mandatory magic items for keeping up with numbers, but those items enable your class abilities (like weapons, shields, armor, etc). They are not character defining by themselves.

All items in PF2 are limited use in practice, the question is whether you get enough uses out of it to be worth the price. If you don’t like that paradigm, then a variation of artifacts and Automatic bonus progression with vastly less wealth per level is what you are looking for. This will be easier and better than trying to houserule around static DCs.

And I don’t think the game assumes that players should have to, or even can, be the ones combing through all items old and new to figure out what is the exact equipment to buy at every level. They might need to know what general equipment their character is looking for to keep up with basic game numbers, and then a couple times an adventure they maybe get enough wealth and information about what is coming up to buy specific supplies that will be useful. Otherwise they find treasures and the GM/adventure writer is doing most of the filtering of what equipment to populate in the game world, outside of basic common stuff. As a GM, limiting items to only be at player level will always result in disappointment outside of generic number boosting items.

Static DCs let higher level items be awesome at the point of the story where they should play an oversized role in the adventure narrative.

Sometimes treasure will just be sold, and that is ok. Selling consumables that no one will use isn’t a massive mistake, but it’s not doing the party a ton of favors. Selling everything the party finds and turning it into gold will result in under geared characters eventually, which I think can feel counter intuitive to players used to the idea that it is better to save up wealth than spend it all when you are back in town / between adventures. Gold is almost never the most useful item you can have inside a dungeon, and as you level up, the stuff you find will be worth so much more than what you had before, that equipment that helps you better explore and tackle encounters right away, without creatures running away with loot or killing PCs that have to be brought back with expensive rituals, will long term see your character have better and more useful equipment.

That is a playstyle thing that gets negotiated between players and GMs and can be easily adjusted to satisfy the table with good communication.

Unicore wrote:

EDIT: Also 3 levels of functional play with an item before upgrading it or replacing it is about right in my opinion. Even with weapons you get your potency bonus, then your striking, then your property runes in about that that span, and that all feels like it works pretty well.

For my example item, you're not replacing it. You just have an activate that is useless and you're keeping the item for several more levels for the item bonus.

You're also not replacing a weapon potency rune. You get something in addition to it, then you upgrade it. But that rune remains useful for however long you have it.

It's not at all the same thing because the other parts of that paragraph are missing from the other items.

I address that in the very next sentence left out of the quote. I agree that more modularity with items generally would be a fun addition and make sense for a book with the Runesmith in it.

And again, I don't disagree that there are gaps with many items that would be nice to be filled, I just don't think all items getting scaling DCs based awkwardly off of class DC would be a better solution than some set level item runes that boost the DC of an Item to a specific number.

Like a level 10 item boosting rune that set any static DC to 27. If there were versions of this every 3 levels, then any player could play the upgrade carousel with any item of any level that they wanted to keep around without suddenly giving classes with good class DCs the ability to give cheap items better save DCs than the items would have normally at the character's current level (Item DCs are already behind average character DC progressions). The pricing on an item like this could be relatively cheap, so that a low level item plus the rune could be a bit cheaper than a traditional item at that level would be, since items at that level should have more to them than just a DC boost.

This doesn't have to be the player's responsibility though. With Consumables in particular, put ones in the adventure that are good and useful. Players don't need to try to sort through them unless they really get into that.

I think the issue with permanent items and DCs is that they are typically providing a worse version of what a class or ancestry ability of the same level would allow, which I think is the intention, because "this item is my power source" is something that needs to be class defined, not gear defined, or it is a narrative thing that is best accomplished by giving an NPC a wildly over leveled item that they stole or found for a big effect, in which case that character is their special item, but that doesn't hold up for a PC for a campaign.

As a GM, I do tend to adjust the consumables up a level over the treasure by level recommendations, as it is an easy way to make sure the party gets fun toys worth playing with, it is especially fun to give lower level enemies a couple of bombs that a higher level boss gives them so they can be pretty inaccurate with them, but a little bit scary, and then the party gets a couple to use against the boss that are a level or 2 higher than anything they brought into the dungeon.

EDIT: Also 3 levels of functional play with an item before upgrading it or replacing it is about right in my opinion. Even with weapons you get your potency bonus, then your striking, then your property runes in about that that span, and that all feels like it works pretty well.

Item runes that you add to upgrade invested items would be a cool addition to the game and something that feels like it could fit with a book that has the Runesmith in it.

Having more "all numbers are on the exact same treadmill" doesn't sound interesting to me and that is pretty much what would happen if item DCs were set by players DCs, whether that be class, or save or whatever.

I think there are some parallel issues that make it feel like the issue is static DCs, but it is perfectly fine if the DCs are a little powerful for when you first get them and underpowered by the time you can get the upgrade, as long as there is an upgrade and there are enough intermediary steps for it to be worthwhile.

Bombs pretty much already work this way and I see people use them fairly often, especially in the first 5 to 10 levels of play. When the damage type is right or the effect is really useful, players use them.

If players can never find items with DCs that are at the higher end of usefulness when they find them, then they definitely don't use them. That is an adventure writing issue, and it is a difficult one to work around when there aren't items to add in later to keep the forward momentum going. That is an issue that could either be solved by items that can attach to other items to boost a DC by +1 or +2, and/or making sure items with DCs get enough higher level versions to not just flatten out and never be worth using again.

Lower level items that are not supposed to particularly upgrade into higher levels probably should be consumables or limited use items to help make it clear "use these while they are good."

Which returns to the adenture writing component. Giving cool DC items that are not going to have good in game uses until several levels after they are found is a good way to make players hate those kinds of items and assume that they are terrible. Special Ammo, bombs, most consumables really can be powerfully encounter changing when used at the right levels, but expecting players to figure that out without some help from the GM (by finding examples that will be useful, for example) is pretty unfair and a good way to see players never use them.

Then there are the players that hate consumables and just don't use them ever and only ever want items that they can use a really long time. I get that desire, but if you look across the game, consumable versions always get the better damage and better DCs, so the DCs of permanent use items should be behind what you get for consumables, and probably should be behind what you get from your class abilities. Permanent items are not designed to be character defining items. Some classes have items that enable specific playstyles, but that is not DC items, that is items that allow worse options to be more feasible for what a character does (like doubling rings and bandoleers.

So consumables should (and generally do) have enough levels to be "upgradable" by just using them when you get them and then getting newer, higher level ones when you can. Permanent items should have slightly behind average DCs of class abilities at most levels (like it would be fine to find an item a level early that has a equal or better DC for a level or 2), but have enough upgrade options that a player that really wants to do that thing the item does can do it at around the archetype level of either a full rank behind on damage, or a DC that is usually a couple behind.

Static DCs are a much better way of maintaining this then trying to base it off a character's growing abilities, but where there are gaps will feel very bad to players that wanted to play where those gaps are

My primary issues with item DC's scaling are that

1) In such a theoretical system, you get this issue where you can't really give players meaningfully new items. They'll just stick with their existing items, and sell the new items.

2) The wealth disparity between high- and low-level characters means that high-level characters are incentivized to buy a bunch of lower-level magic items that have very useful activated abilities.

Because of both of these reasons, higher-level items need to be much stronger to compete, leading to higher-level power creep, which damages balance, which leads to PF1e problems of level 20 games being mostly unplayable.

You can say problem #1 isn't a real problem because players can just stack non-invested magic items, but that sidesteps parties who would rather have more gold to reach up to higher-level runes early, exacerbating problem #2.

You can solve problem #2 by restricting investment slots more, and making the activated items require an investment slot, but that worsens problem #1 where the opportunity cost incentivizes you not to drop your level 3 item that gives you some activated ability that's unique.

There might be an elegant solution that solves both problems. I foresee a skill feat that lets you spend an action to upgrade an item's ability's DC for 1 round such that it can't be stacked with trick magic item, and makes the action economy less attractive at higher levels so that there's some opportunity cost to not upgrading. However, I get the feeling the people who want item DC's to scale wouldn't be happy with something like that since it still basically creates the incentive structures that they're chafing against in the first place.

I get that it feels bad to have to throw away old toys when they get outscaled, but getting rid of the system has a knock-on effect that removes a lot of mechanical incentives for character choices.

This is really good analysis and my general thoughts on the topic as well. I think the thing I want more of is just more intermediary versions of items. 3 is too few. If more items had level steps at every 3 levels, then if the level you get it has a strong DC, then its never going to become useless if the character wants to invest in it. Maybe some rules for upgrading existing items that makes it go a little faster so that crafting doesn't compare so badly to just buying new, especially when downtime is limited would be in order, or just better narrative advice about downtime and how essential it is to game expectations would cover it.

I really don't think the not scaling issue would be a big deal at all if there were just consistent options to upgrade at the point the DC would really start trailing.

To be clear, I understand why players might not like these changes and why playing pregens can be disappointing.

I was just trying to understand the situation, why it is happening the way that it is, and think about whether it is likely that they would just change things.

I really think the cutting the level band is about simplifying the writing process and getting more uniform balance in play experience of scenarios. I think that is hard to do with 4 levels instead of 2 and that is why I would be surprised if the went back to 4.

I think things like changing the pregens and making them available at every 2 levels is much more likely to happen.

I do think it would be a long term benefit if the simplified scenario writing meant that they could start publishing more and more scenarios, even if it means that most of them are going to have to be level 1-2 scenarios so that those levels don't get boring to play.

I also think it is much more likely that we get a ton of level 1-2 scenarios for a while and that playing those is going to be the default for conventions for several years as players who like to play a lot of different scenarios will have to have a stable of characters at different levels to make sure they can play available tables.

I agree that the reason for the more narrow level band is too streamline the creation of scenarios and make them easier and faster to write and balance. It is much more of a dev side adjustment, not a player side adjustment, although reading and running scenarios will probably be easier for newer GMs as well, and it is definitely being done for the larger convention as lowering the bar to GMing will mean more tables can be run.

I really don’t think making the scenarios more adjustable will help with those elements so it seems like “just play lower level scenarios and make new characters if necessary” is going to be the solution to players not having characters in the same higher level bands.

Edit: or of course, just use a pregen” will still be an option and making more levels of pregens is a relatively easy thing to do.

I have the first book and I have to say, with no details yet, since the book isn’t officially out yet, that it is cool and makes sense and doesn’t contradict anything. Maybe you could say “luck?” But I am not sure if it is good or bad luck involved.

I haven't played PFS for a while now due to life constraints, but it seems like the new meta for players is that you are pretty much going to have to keep a large stable of characters and expect to play a whole lot of low level adventures for a long time, and have new low level characters ready to play anytime people show up without the higher level characters ready to go.

I can understand why a lot of players are not going to like that. It means it is going to be exceedingly rare to get to play the higher level scenarios, and it will be harder to play PFS like a campaign where you have a single character learning a lot about each season's meta-narrative.

At the same time, I don't think it is going to be detrimental to newer players wanting to get involved unless the lodge is really trying to push forward into the higher level scenarios and the tables are not ready and kind of expecting to play mostly levels 1-2 and 3-4 scenarios most of the time with the occasionally lucky break where the players who show up have the stable of characters to support it. Like as a GM, I would almost never prep something higher level unless people signed up well in advance.

I am guessing the plan is for the new style scenarios to stay in the 1-2 and 3-4 level ranges until there are tons to choose from. It is also probably easiest to get new writers to write for those levels so from a production stand point, I can see why they did it this way.

Ancestry balance is certainly more complicated than just raw numbers for statistics like HP and movement speeds/types.

For example, the elf in Pathfinder looks pretty weak numerically (terrible HP with a penalty to CON) as an ancestry, but it has some of the best ancestry feats in the game, so people continue to choose to make elven characters despite the set backs.

When I look at the Vesk and the Dragonkin for Starfinder, it seems like Vesk feats are equally some of the best in the game, while the Dragonkin feats are pretty run of the mill and in SF2 it seems like being large is a much bigger detriment than it is in PF2: Reach is less important and in environments like spaceships, you could be stuck squeezing a lot. If players can get darkvision and flying with equipment at low levels, those aren't really the same kind of boosts that they are in PF2 as a whole.

All of this is to say that I don't see anyway that allowing ancestries across games is going to be anything but a case by case basis for the GM in deciding if it is good for their game. A guide really would have to go ancestry by ancestry in each direction for conversion to relieve a GM from needing to familiarize themselves with both systems and what what the expectations are for those systems, as well as understand what kind of adventure they are trying to run. Which I still see as being a much better community guide than an official Paizo one, since the community will keep it up to date and have pretty much as good a grasp of each game's expectations as any one Paizo developer.

Elric200 wrote:

The problem I see is that people are trying to force all races to be equal. All races are not equal. That is why you have the uncommon and rare traits. Make Flyers uncommon or Rare and let flyers fly.

Give dragonborn glide at 1st level and flight at 5th level simple fix. Give them the feats from the 3rd party author that used to work for pPazio.He knows game balance.

I ported a flying race from another game they get 40' gly at first level
they are small and have a penalty to strength and hate melees they hate bright lights and have a penatly to their fort save from flash or orther light effects.

Dont't try to shoehorn all races into one cataory PFS while fun is far to restrictive and should not be used as a normal set for all races.

Rarity traits are not a power creep excuse system. It's thematic related to scenario or adventure (like this ancestry is uncommon or rare in Inner Sea but it's common in Tian Xia or in another plane. Or this teleport spell is uncommon because it can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge).

Ancestries with flight (and other movement) speeds are a little tricky because they half fit in the "teleport trivializes certain kinds of adventures" category, but with fast speeds, it can definitely overstep into combat balance as well. That is partly why it feels like such a flimsy balance dial.

It is starting to sound like the SF Dragonkin ancestry is just a slightly overpowered ancestry as a whole for either system, and it is interesting that Society choose to allow it. I guess we will see with the Draconic Codex how much of those balance issues spill over into Pathfinder.

Unicore wrote:

It means if I am a GM, and a player approaches me about wanting to use a flying SF ancestry, and explains why they want this, and how it can fit in the campaign, and I don’t think it’d be appropriate to just use the ancestry as is…then I look for a relatively similar PF2 ancestry and probably choose the ancestry flight abilities(feats, heritage) and speeds that match that other ancestry.

Could you point to the bit of the text that says you'd have to choose an ancestry with flight? Would you be applying the feats directly, or would you be creating separate feats?

It in the section of text I quoted earlier from page 246 of the GM core:

“While some Pathfinder adventures might not mind the low-level access to these speeds, you might want to adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed–related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder.”

It doesn’t really matter if you make up your own feats that are just close but maybe a little different, or use the other ancestry’s feats directly. Either way is fine if gives everyone at the table something that looks fun and fair enough for your table.

Unicore wrote:

We have guidelines though. For example, with movement speeds, we are told (on page 246 of the Starfinder GM core) "You should also be wary of special movement speeds, such as climbing and flight, that become available at a much lower level in Starfinder. While some Pathfinder adventures might not mind the low-level access to these speeds, you might want to adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed–related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder."

Would it be possible to explain, in specific and concrete terms, what this text means to you? In particular, the last sentence.

It means if I am a GM, and a player approaches me about wanting to use a flying SF ancestry, and explains why they want this, and how it can fit in the campaign, and I don’t think it’d be appropriate to just use the ancestry as is…then I look for a relatively similar PF2 ancestry and probably choose the ancestry flight abilities(feats, heritage) and speeds that match that other ancestry.

We have guidelines though. For example, with movement speeds, we are told (on page 246 of the Starfinder GM core) "You should also be wary of special movement speeds, such as climbing and flight, that become available at a much lower level in Starfinder. While some Pathfinder adventures might not mind the low-level access to these speeds, you might want to adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed–related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder."

For Society play, it seems like the folks in charge of society play just decided that the answer was "for special one-time character boons for participating in this playtest, it is fine for the characters to just have the low-level access. Otherwise, typically, the answer is that none of these ancestries are available."

That is kind of what I mean about how trying to standardize this seems against the point of having it available as content. The most basic "standardization" is probably just to not modify anything and just allow not allow content that challenges adventure expectations that are important to the game you are going to be playing and allow the stuff that doesn't challenge those adventure or narrative tone expectations. GMs that want to hybridize beyond that can just look at other ancestry examples that have similar types of movement, but having all ancestries work exactly the same way at a system level gets really boring fast. It works in a one off context because things aren't all the same if only one of them is actually in use, but if 4 players play 4 different ancestries that fly and they all fly exactly the same way, that does get a little boring.

Strix and Awakened animals (flying heritage) for example are very similar, but they do things a little differently, so while the level 1 flying abilities are very similar, Strix are still going to have a Heritage boon while the awakened animal is going to have an additional unarmed strike and the ability to talk to certain kinds of animals. Guidelines are either going to be "look at these and pick something close that feels right for your game" (what we have), or they are going to have to define it for each potential ancestry based upon what else the ancestry gets, and have to deal with the fact that both systems are going to keep getting new ancestries at a pretty quick pace.

I think it was very smart to go the first route and just point out some issues and suggest where to look for solving them based upon what your game needs.

moosher12 wrote:

Having a standard conversion is a defense for both GMs and players, because it sets the vanilla baseline. A GM does not have to worry about pressure to use someone else's home rule, when the official conversion rule already exists.

So we come full circle…

My OP was regarding PFS, but now after a lot more debate related to home games, it appears there’s no standardization. Does that mean we’re back to the request for Paizo to let us know how we should be doing this with an outline of what to do at official tables and guidelines (or at least notice of what might become problematic in encounter design) for home games?

I am still pretty confused why you would be expecting there to be standardization of handling cross-over content in people's home games.

There are nearly an infinite number of ways to combine elements from one game into the other and each of those could very easily want to bend the expectations of one game or the other...after all, why include content from a completely different genre of game and expect that all the base line assumptions of the one genre-centered game are going to hold up exactly the same?

Like if you want to include the Starfinder Dragonkin ancestry in your PF2 game, is it because you want the character to be from this far off distant planet? Or is it just because you like the aesthetics and wanted a more "dragon-like" PF2 ancestry? If it is the latter, I would really recommend waiting a couple of months, as the Draconic Codex is soon to release and going to offer these options more directly into PF2. If it is the former, and it is about the lore and bringing sci-fi elements into your pathfinder game, then the table really should get together and talk these things through. It would be just as fine to just let flying characters fly from level 1 as using ancestry feats from a different flying ancestry, depending on what your group wants.

Trying to insist that there needs to be 1 standardized way to combine material from these two systems, or maybe that there needs to be 2, one for bringing content from one game into the other, really ignores the whole point of how the material from the other system is much like a slider that will shape the games adventure design expectations based upon how much content you want to blend.

Don’t we already have this? There already is guidance in howl of the wild for having flying PCs from level 1 and it would be trivially easy to reverse that by just using the exact same feats for an awakened animal if you wanted to take that flight away from an existing ancestry. But either way, there are like 3 different ways a GM could handle a player asking for access to a SF2 flying ancestry so it really is going to boil down to what the GM and player wants more than it needing to work one specific way.

And to add, if it's balanced for a dragonkin to have a 20-foot fly speed, it's balanced for Awakened Flying Animals, Sprites, and Strix having level 1 full flight.

The case falls apart when the player with one of these ancestries starts asking why they aren't getting the full fly unlock of at least 20 feet.

You simply can't justify granting an unedited dragonkin in Pathfinder without granting the appropriate buffs to these ancestries, or for additional example full flight at level 5 for dragonbloods.

Well as a GM, you very easily can, because it only matters if you have players playing ancestries that don’t align that way, or you have players who feel such a thing would be unfair, in which case you just don’t let a player play a SF dragonkin or you modify it in a way that feels fair to the table.

Why I don't think a Paizo brand conversion guide is a good idea:

1. Someone has to make it. It would be a release for one of the two systems in a year where I would much rather see something else. Because it crosses over both, it might even require developer labor from both pools.

2. Both Starfinder and Pathfinder grow frequently with new content. The guide goes out of date before it even gets printed and then requires constant up dating. The community has proven itself better at this than Paizo at every possible opportunity.

3. Unless PathStar or StarPath becomes a product that is getting its own APs and adventures regularly enough to need more content than already exists to do the occasional one off combination of games, it is a dead end of development time. Any special considerations that need to be given to a specific AP or adventure can just focus on the content that product will use in the context it is going to be used and not have to cover every possible use case.

4.Or maybe 3.5. This "consider on a case by case basis" is the better way of introducing cross-game content, and is how GMs should do it regardless of what "official" material says. Will an ancestry that gets flying at level 1 really (or always) disrupt a PF2 campaign? No, not always. If the first 5 levels are pretty tight dungeons or spaces where the climb DCs to get anywhere a flier could get are 15 or lower, and the character is a melee character, AND no one else in the party is making PF2 choices that involve spending multiple feats to gain flight, and everyone is fine with it because it creates some narrative that the table likes, then it doesn't really matter, just as the GM could already decide to essentially give level 1 flight away to a PF2 flying ancestry already, and there is guidance in PF2 about how to do that. On a case by case basis, there is no "broken" content to worry about crossing from game to game except for stuff the GM is just not going to support.

5. The best advice about all of this stuff is going to come from tables that use the content in play this way. I doubt that is going to be happening internally at Paizo nearly as often as it will outside of Paizo, so a community built repository of advice is going quickly end up superior to anything Paizo could hope to publish (as well as 2, be kept up to date better).

6. Paizo gave us the big picture stuff/game expectation stuff to consider already, and that is enough to give GMs a very solid start on allowing cross game content. The next best place for official Paizo ideas to be introduced is in specific adventures. Like if there is an AP where a starfinder class could work out well, include that in the player's guide to the AP. Then, if it is not the best advice/doesn't work out as intended, then they can do better next time. If they try to give specific conversion advice out of no where in an official rule book, and it fails to meet player expectation, they might be in a position where there is a lot of errata to do to fix it. That might seem ideal to players who want offical, perfect conversion notes for everything in both games, but it is a lot of needless work and potentially flopping a major rule book, instead of testing some ideas out in content that is given out for free.

7. The conversion guide is something that is pretty much all mechanics with no unique story to tell with (that wouldn't be tied to a specific adventure). Is it just going to reuse all art from PF2 and SF2 sources as well? probably. There is no sellable product here as the content would all be available for free on Archives of Nethys.

Summary: A purely mechanical conversion guide between PF2 and SF2 is introducing no actual new content mechanically or narratively into either game space. Everything it would offer is already there for GMs and players to talk over and use for themselves. The community will do this better than Paizo, more quickly and keep it better up to date.

Edit: It would be better for paizo to do this piece meal in specific APs and Adventures so they can put their creative spin on to it and give folks new content to play with.

moosher12 wrote:

Different solar system, not galaxy. Vesk are from the same galaxy as golarion, so can come to Golarion via a rank 10 teleport. (On this note, every ancestry in Starfinder, except for ancestries that do not exist yet, like the Shirren (They'd need time travel, plus this), could theoretically access Golarion via a rank 10 casting of Teleport.)

I mean, as a GM hearing about this character my first response is "tell me more why someone used a 10th level spell on a 1st level nobody?" I'm not saying there can't be a good answer to that, but I hope the answer is more interesting than "this is what I need in order to justify playing this character."

Yeah, as a GM, I want my players choosing ancestries and backgrounds that will help their characters fit into the campaign world and have local connections that we can build up together over the course of a campaign. I especially don’t want players making choices that so completely overshadow the starting campaign scenario that it makes the adventures of the campaign feel underwhelming and meaningless. “I am the only one like me you will ever encounter can get very “protagonist energy” very quickly.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I think the things for which a conversion guide will be useful, moreso than ancestries, is classes. A GM can make a quick call based on any ancestry on nothing more than "this isn't really a story featuring people from other planets." But people are going to want to play something like a Mystic in a Pathfinder game and there's no reason this shouldn't work, so some guidance a la "recharge weapon is nonfunctional in Pathfinder so replace the cantrip granted by the Elemental Connection with something else, and you might want to alter Data Bond so you don't give access to Summon Robot in a pathfinder game" would genuinely help people.

Im surprised such a guide is not in the GM Core. Might be a cool book idea to explore in the future. A big old crossover AP with its own player guide and rules on how to convert content for either game.

Good News!

Edit: The one trick is that, for like the Mystic, some of the information would be in different sections, like the spells and feats sections...but the class guide tells you that.

I know things that I've flagged for conversion are of course, speeds in general. Fly speeds are the biggest factor, but there is also the matter of Climb Speeds being much higher in Starfinder than Pathfinder grants. Then there is the Ysoki's ability to have a 3rd arm for a tail, which raises the question of whether that feat should be reduced to work like a tiefling's tail in a Pathfinder game, and whether a tiefling's tail should function as a 3rd arm in a Pathfinder game, as well as for other dexterous-tailed ancestries.

It seems like it would be a really strange case to bring a SF2 Ysoki into PF2 when it is an ancestry that already exists in PF2. I think that highlights why my default for players asking “can I bring X ancestry into PF2?” Is “sell me on why this is necessary for your character concept in a way that fits with the campaign narrative expectations, and isn’t an attempt to just exploit mechanical differences between the systems?”

I think players will make the kinds of guides that are being asked for here faster than Paizo would be able to and keep them more up to date.