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Let's play prophet and see how accurate I am!
So, from the blog, the podcast and Mark's posts on the subject, here's my understanding of what the different proficiency tiers actually mean or are supposed to mean in PF2, as presented to us so far. I'll present examples of what I think the PF2 system represents for a few different skills, and I'll also include Reflex for comparison because we know saves will scale the same way. This may all immediately get proven wrong when the Skills blog comes out, but I don't think it will. We'll see I guess!
Untrained: Skill check is at Ability Mod + Level - 2. Can perform Knowledge checks and basic tasks that in PF1 would be DC 10-15 depending on the skill.
Trained: Skill check is at Ability Mod + Level. Can perform all routine skill tasks. Can take skill feats. Can take 10 when not in a pressure situation. Supposed to represent someone with all the basics down, maybe because they had to for their job or to pass high school, but not actually focused in it.
Achievable skill tasks include stuff that wouldn't really be feasible for someone with no training under pressure. Hopefully none of these are locked behind trivial Animal Call feats and instead are stuff you can just do for being trained. Stuff like:
- Acrobatics: Kipping up; pole walking.
- Heal/Medicine: Stitching wounds; treating poisoning for Heal / Medicine.
- Handle+Ride: Training an animal; quick mounting.
- Survival: Following tracks; knowing which sources of food and water are good/bad.
- Reflex: We know that Evasion is quite a ways off at Master, so feat upgrades or checks here would be for lower tier stuff like rerolling a failed Reflex save, or a dodge roll as an alternative to a shield block.
Expert: Skill check is at Ability Mod + Level + 1. Can obtain at level 1, but maybe only for class and ancestry skills, with other skills coming later (3rd?). Doesn't actually get access to new skill tasks, per se??? (not actually sure about this), but at this tier and above can start taking higher-tier skill feats that do give new skill uses. Supposed to represent a highly trained professional, like a pro football player, a chef good enough to start her own restaurant, or TV survival show personalities.
This is the tier at which you can do tricky stuff a merely trained person wouldn't normally be able to pull off under pressure. Again I'm not sure if this is a separate table of new skill tasks you just get access to once you're Expert, or if these would all just be feats. It's stuff like:
- Acrobatics: Wall running or wall jumping.
- Heal/Medicine: Using massage and qigong to provide buffs; using surgery and pharmacology to repair stuff like stat drain, insanity, and affliction end states; using pressure points for stuff like "Stunning Fist" and similar old combat feats.
- Handle+Ride: Protecting a mount from harm ("Mounted Combat"); inducing an animal to use a feat you have and know how to use but it doesn't.
- Survival: Reducing environmental hazards by several tiers for you and your party; navigating for miles underground / in a blizzard without getting lost.
- Reflex: We know Evasion comes at Master so feats or checks at this tier would have to be for stuff not as good as Evasion. This is stuff like rolling to negate half the damage on an attack that would otherwise drop you, or deflecting a projectile or thrown weapon.
???: I feel there is a missing tier here that they skipped. This would be the tier that actually covers the pinnacle of normal human achievement, doing stuff that would be world records in the real world. In the skill system as presented to us so far, when you go from Expert to Master you jump from being a professional right past world records and directly into the superhuman realm. Because this tier is missing, it may create some awkwardness with distributing tasks / skill feats alternately down to Expert or up to Master depending on the writer.
Master: Skill check is at Ability Mod + Level + 2. Can't obtain until level 7, probably later if it's not a class or ancestry skill, except for gear like weapons and armor in which case the minimum level is 5. Can start automatically succeeding at checks up to around DC 10 + character level without rolling, even in combat. Skill feats start representing 1st level spells that you can "cast" at will or 2nd level spells that you can "cast" every so often / with a larger time investment. Supposed to represent low-tier superhero or mythical hero stuff, things that are actually beyond human ability in the real world but not by /too/ much... or in some cases, stuff that is achievable by modern humans with technological assistance, but actually would not be reliably doable by ancient / medieval humans who lack our specialized gear.
Because of the awkwardness of that missing tier I mentioned, some "world record" skill tasks end up here when they should have been in the missing tier, and others probably end up all the way down in Expert. In any case, this is likely to be the tier where you get things like:
- Acrobatics: Running on water as long as you either keep moving or you end your move on solid ground; jumping as high vertically from a standing start as a lesser mortal could do horizontally from a running start; using parkour to literally run up a vertical wall as far as your speed allows instead of merely a few spaces along it (though maybe this steps on Athletics/Climb territory, if they even care?).
- Heal/Medicine: Reviving the recently killed; adding grafts like extra limbs; not just curing someone of disease or poison but actually extracting it in physical form to reuse later, as well as being able to do this to monsters that have such abilities and stripping said abilities from them in the process.
- Handle+Ride: Speak with animals and magical beasts; duplicate the Animal Messenger spell; train a beast to actually raise its physical stats, such as making an animal actually stronger, faster and tougher.
- Survival: Survive without food or water, or alternately your skill check effectively "wills" food and water into existence for you and your team even in the most barren alien desert by allowing you to find /something/ fit for human consumption;
- Reflex saves: We know from Mark that this is where Evasion procs, which forms the baseline for my other Reflex supposition, and we know Evasion means regular successes become critical successes. This seems to be a base feature of being Master in Reflex, rather than a feat, which means that maybe the same methodology applies to skills because of how much they're trying to keep things on the same page - so maybe regular success in Master Acrobatics or Master Survival also automatically becomes a critical success? I'm just drawing inference, I don't actually know this. It could just be due to Saves not being skills and so not subject to improvement by skill feats, whereas something like this would have to be taken as a Master feat to apply to skills. If saves can in fact improve via feats, then this tier would be where you can take feats to get abilities equal to or better than Evasion while being worse than Improved Evasion. This is stuff like being able to roll a Reflex save on someone else's behalf if they're within 5-10 feet of you, catching and immediately attacking with a projectile or thrown weapon, or batting aside a spell with a physical manifestation (ie, ray spells).
Legendary: Skill check is at Ability Mod + Level + 3. Can't obtain until level 15, probably later if it's not a class or ancestry skill, except for gear like weapons and armor in which case the minimum level is 13. Can most likely "take 20" whenever they would be allowed to take 10, without taking any longer than taking 10. Skill feats start representing 2nd and 3rd level spells that you can "cast" at will or 4th level spells that you can "cast" every so often / with a larger time investment. Supposed to represent the deeds of Avengers or Justice League-level superheroes, as well as major mythological hero figures like Maui or Heracles.
- Acrobatics: Kingdom Hearts aerial combat where you can literally fly for so long as you connect at least one attack / grapple / whatever each turn; balancing to walk along light beams and clouds of dust so long as you keep moving or end your turn on a solid surface, or to just flat out stand indefinitely on more "solid" surfaces like water;
- Heal/Medicine: Removing curses and ending demon possessions through psychomedical judo; treating afflictions and deadly wounds in one round or one action instead of taking a lot of time to do it; turning regular hits with weapon attacks into critical hits.
- Handle+Ride: Ride on / in a school of fish, flock of birds or swarm of insects; charm hostile beasts; train an animal to actually raise its mental stats, such as making an animal actually smarter and able to hold a conversation in human language at the level of a child.
- Survival: Survive without food, water or air and slow down your aging process; survive buck naked at the South Pole or in a volcano or in a cave filled with poisonous fumes; spend enough time and you can find fissures in reality that allow you to navigate to other planes along ley lines and nodes without an explicit magical gate.
- Reflex saves: Since Evasion is at Master then Improved Evasion would be at Legendary, namely turning critical failures into regular failures, regular failures into regular successes, and regular successes into critical successes. Again, who knows at this point if this is a general feature of Legendary skills, or something only saves get for free. I have to assume Fortitude and Will get their own similar abilities - presumably called Improved Mettle and Improved Resolve, or somesuch. Any feat upgrades would have to be at least as good as or better than Improved Evasion. This is stuff like getting to take a guarded step every time someone attacks you and misses, or actually redirecting a spell with physical manifestation (ie, ray spells) back at the caster or another target of your choice.
Now, assuming I'm right or at least close about all of this, I really think this is a cool system. I feel like the people expressing concerns about the "verisimilitude" of getting training at higher levels and suddenly being badass are missing that you can ALREADY DO THIS in PF1 by taking a feat, sleeping overnight at levelup to suddenly wake up at 1st level in a new class, spending all your skill points at level up to instantly be an expert at a skill, and so on. I just have a few main concerns.
The first is that feeling of a missing tier, like I mentioned above. I feel like "pinnacle of human achievement" should really be its own tier under a system like this, rather than awkwardly merged and meshed between professional Expert and the fairly explicitly superhuman Master. I feel a black ops supersoldier "Ranger" would really be between those two tiers, not just an Expert with high level and skill bonus. Maybe someone can explain this discrepancy into a way that will help me grok it better?
The second is that, yes, I agree with the people who think the actual bonus part of it is too flat between characters of the same level but different tiers of training. I'd really like the jumps to be in multiples of 2 at the very least - a 10% shift on a d20 - rather than only 1. So this could mean Untrained -2, Trained +0, Expert +2, Master +4, Legend +6, or it could mean +0/+2/+4/+6/+8, or whatever. On the same note, while I know this system is being used for "BAB" and save bonus and so on, and so I get why they don't want huge disparities between an untrained person and a trained person... can't untrained at least be at 3/4 level with Trained and up at full level? Presumably even a wizard will be able to pick at least one "weapon group" to be fully trained and full BAB in, so it doesn't matter if they have 1/2 level on everything else, they do still have one standby weapon they can bludgeon with. Meanwhile, more martial classes get way more weapon options at full level.
Anyway. This turned into quite the wall of text. XD Curious what others think and curious how accurate I'll end up being.