pedroph's page

Oh, let me join this thread ressurrection.

My party has:

Korvak of the Blackened Blades (conjurer wizard), a half-orc son of Halgra, who works as bureaucrat in the militia.

Helga (fighter), a dwarf who is a tavern owner.

Gar'Ysha Bloodfang (ranger), a half-orc stablemaster who is all about mounted combat.

Gor'Yshun (oracle), Gar'Yshas' crippled brother who helps her at the stables.

The Bloodfang siblings fled their orc tribe with their mother, who died on the way.

Just did the assassins attack yesterday. One assassin for each PC, infiltrating their houses during their sleep. Thankfully everybody rolled high on their perception. The Bloodfang siblings almost died but were saved by a goblin who appeared from nowhere, stabbed the assassin, took a bread from the table and left by the window without a single word - not the hero they want, but the one they need.

The mysterious goblin is the fifth player, who is yet to show up, but I used his character as a NPC when the situation was dire.

To sum it up: it is easier to scale/adapt monsters and challenges.

I've put a weakened hydra against a 2nd level party. Just subtracted 4 from all its numbers, halved its HP and took one dice away from its damage. The battle was smooth (5 or 6 turns, I think). The barbarian almost died, but that was because he fell from a bridge into the 3m deep water where the hydra was, having trouble to land hits and avoid bites because of that.

I've GM'ed 2 games in the last 10 days. My players told me something similar to what Corwin Icewolf said: high level play is about super-human, magic-like powers. The power to defy reality should not be unique to spellcasters. That is why there is a feat (for rogues, I think) to ignore damage from falling, no matter the height.

It all boils down to mentality. The purpose of the skill scaling is that the challenges should become more epic each level. That's why I disliked it at first. I prefer low-fantasy games, while pathfinder is presented as high-fantasy.

When a challenge is presented, those trained in the appropriate skill can overcome it, those untrained should find other means to overcome it, like casting a spell, using a magic item, etc. That makes an interesting game, forcing the players to use their creativity and to spend their resources.

I think that the present system makes it very easy to scale monsters and challenges. One must just become used to it (and have a quick table for reference - one that is easier to read than the one in the Rulebook).

In high levels the +3 of legendary seems to make little difference, compared to an untrained character, it is +5 points higher, which is significant. What truly bothers me is the excessive number addition and subtraction a player must do, but that can be ignored if one uses a digital character sheet.

I made a thread dedicated to skill mechanics. I've taken some of the post from here.

I made a thread dedicated to skill mechanics. I've taken some of the post from here.

I am making this thread to be dedicated to discussing Skills and its mechanics.

The only other relevant thread that discusses it I could find is:
DD-475e-or-Old-is-Old-my-reaction-on-my-first.

some of the things regarding skills' DC that are there:

The skill system seems to be more complicated and hard to remember in many ways. I think this is why Numbers that go up is actually been popular in the past, because a number is always easy to remember.

With PF2e you get the skill, but very limited upgrades. After that you seem to get better with skill feats. This makes a division that is hard to keep track of in my mind (as I said, it could be old is getting old).

I would prefer something a little simpler and easier to keep track of.

Escalating DCs. (for those who can't find this, the table is on pg 337 of the Playtest rulebook) This is what 4e did and it appears to be what PF2e is doing. So you want to climb that wall over there...great, that's a DC 14. Oh wait, your a level 12 character, sorry, that's a DC 30.

Sure, it's the same wall and all, but the DC just got that much tougher because you are a higher level...

Say WHAT!!!???

Yes, I know supposedly the task it represents gets harder, but that isn't necessarily how it gets played or seen.

I think you are misinterpreting the intent. The narrative would change to accommodate the increase in DC for the higher level challenge. The higher level wall has no handholds, is covered in grease, has thousands of wriggling worms coming out of it...whatever you want.

That chart on page 337 is great for coming up with DCs on the fly. If I think the wall is something that should be easy for someone at 12th level, I'd go with the trivial column.

The intent is to have the DCs escalate and the narrative behind the difficulty also increase to help the players feel "cooler".

Here's a problem with that. 4th ed did the same thing and it wasn't enough to stop DMs from doing exactly that.

Difficulty Classes is a segment of the book 3 pages long. That's 6 columns of text. The chart is half of one column. On the very next page, two-thirds of the page (1 and 1/3 columns) is given over to examples like you asked for. The levels of these challenges only range from 0 to 5, but it shows what they should be, what sort of situations could complicate the task and make it more difficult, and at what level the challenges can be viewed as trivial challenges.

This other thread is also relevant:

Which has:

I think I'm missing something.

The difference between trained in a skill and legendary is only +3..

Which hardly seems worth much :-(

I get that it also opens up the ability to buy some special abilities. So, I'm looking at diplomacy as an example. At level 15 I can buy an ability to let me make diplomatic checks quicker.

So, my legendary diplomat is only a little more likely to succeed than the equally charismatic sorcerer who is barely trained in the skill. But I can do it quicker? And that is the ONLY effect of being legendary?

Doesn't feel all that legendary to me :-)

Oh, and my legendary diplomat STILL has a 5% chance of failing at a DC 5 check :-).

To bring this back to skills, in 5E with BA (bounded accuracy) your skill is training plus proficiency plus stat mod. The difference between high levels and low is pretty minimal. The GM decides when things are possible or not for various levels of training.

In PF2 you add level to all that so the gap between a level 1 and level 20 is much larger. On top of that, there are feats that are supposed to gate what different characters can do.

Really the issue isnt BA but the universal progression system. It is easier to understand and design for, but is overall homogenized and awkward in situations like this.

In the game master section on DCs, they actually talk about some checks possibly requiring certain proficiencies to even attempt, and give examples of which would be the most common. They do state that you should be wary of making the requirements too high for a level, though (i.e. not putting Master on a level 6 or lower check, or Legendary on a level 14 or lower). Also, if I remember right, there were some mentions of snares only being able to be seen if the opponent had certain a perception proficiency, but I don't remember exactly where.

Now my personal opinion:

The concept of bounded accuaracy is something I like: the discrepancy between high and low levels is not so big. In the context of skills, it makes building skill-based challenges easier.

Comparing to D&D 5e, go DC 5 for very easy and +5 up to DC 30 (nearly impossible). A 1st level will usually have a bonus of +5 in a skill, while a 20th level has +12. So, even a high level character has some trouble with doing a nearly impossible task without magical aid, but it is still feasible. This makes coming up with skill challenges very straight forward

I am found of this, because I like my skill challeges requiring players creativity to make it easier (lower DC, or have an advantage), instead on relying only on the roll of a dice.

The way the skills scale in PF2, you have to fine-tune each challenge according to players' level by consulting table 10-2 on page 336. By the end of the day a GM will be making the same task with arbitraly higher DC, even though it is advised against, because it is easier and faster. If you are carefully preparing the adventure, that may not be a big of a issue (nonetheless I find consulting tables very boring), but coming up with challenges on the fly mid-session will be a problem, making the game slower-paced.

What can be done? I suggest applying the bounded accuracy concept for skill. How can this be done (maybe a golden rule?).

I was looking in some PDFs I have; found one that is 98 MB (398 pages) and the loading of each page is very fast. I don't know why the loading of each page of Pathfinder's Playtest Rulebook is so slow, which really bothers me.

I use Evince to read my PDFs (the lightest I know so far). Does someone have a work around for better/faster Rulebook reading experience?

I agree with you. Too much arithmetic makes everything confusing and cumbersome.

I have players who like to min-max. They actually like this. I also have players who think of a character concept, choose appropriate stats and be done with the sheet as fast as possible.

This lowers the ease-to-play grade. Which, I think, is bad to attract new players.

Hi there!
Title says it all,

The PDF files are too big and heavy. The loading of each page takes too long.

Also, there could be clickable hyperlinks in it. For example, when you click the word Gnome, you are taken to the Gnome Ancestry page.

I usually build my PDF documents (thesis and the like) using LaTeX with figures, hyperlinks and such. They are always lightweight even with many figures, hyperlinks, etc.

I hope you can optimize the PDFs to be lightweight and add the hyperlinks features.

Thanks for your attention,
Pedro