Hi again folks,
I was wondering, did the devs say anything about the most powerful characters and monsters possible? For instance, do you cap at 20th level always, or are there ways to become more powerful than that, even without levels perhaps? What's the most powerful monster you know of? Can monsters also have classes?
Also, related, do we still have npc classes or perhaps they'll now be just low-level adventurers if anything? Or treated as monsters perhaps?
I ask because I'm looking at the low and high ends of some npcs in my campaigns. For instance, I'd need a good way to multiclass, too, plus something to represent commoners, obviously, something to stand in for experts and aristocrats of various levels, and as I hint at in the title, even something for almost-gods.
In Golarion, per se, I don't need godlike beings like right now, although having stats for the most powerful demons and angels will definitely be useful one day, but in Eberron I'll need to homebrew the Overlords of the First Age, and those kids are... well, almost gods. One, for instance, was a wizard 36/archmage 4 in 3.5.
I don't need to replicate concepts slavishly, I'm just wondering whether the buck stops at 20th level or anyone has heard anything about epic levels or similar stuff.
20th level is probably the cap on player power as it is in PF1, though monster levels definitely go way over that as they always have. IIRC the Grim Reaper is level 21.
Arachnofiend is talking about 2nd edition
Ah that will teach me for not reading more carefully, though to my defense what confused me is grim reaper has a "level" of 21 in PF2, in PF1 its 22 CR. I missed he was talking about both editions being capped at level 20.
So pcs can only reach level 20... mmm, it'd be nice if there was a way to go beyond that, sort of like epic levels... but in 3.5 it was really hard to run them well and in PF mythic paths weren't very well-received, am I right?
But monsters could theoretically multiclass and be something like fighter 15/rogue 15, for instance? Or would that break the math?
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So pcs can only reach level 20... mmm, it'd be nice if there was a way to go beyond that, sort of like epic levels... but in 3.5 it was really hard to run them well and in PF mythic paths weren't very well-received, am I right?
But monsters could theoretically multiclass and be something like fighter 15/rogue 15, for instance? Or would that break the math?
It seems to be a rather common misconception that mythic is PFs analogue to the Epic Levels of 3.5, but that is not the case. Mythic levels run parallel to normal levels, while Epic levels come after regular levels ended. I just wanted to clear that to begin with. And yes the reception of mythic level and adventures was rather mixed.
For the other parts of your question: It's simply to early to answer without a massive amount of speculation. We know nothing about multi-classing at the moment and very little about monster/NPC generation. We know though that a quick-build guide or tool will be provided for encounters, alongside the traditional way, so I could easily see templates ranging from CR1/4 to CR30, but too little has been shared to know for sure right now.
We know that they intend to improve the play experience for levels all the way up to 20, by consolidating and flattening the progression curve so that high levels are less mathematically broken. A side effect of that should be that levels beyond 20 are less ridiculous.
Obviously this won't be directly addressed in either the playtest or the final Core Rulebook, nor in any of the early rulebooks.
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While I doubt there will be a ton of material supporting level 21+, because everything has been standardized it probably won't be hard to continue. The only gap is going to be class features.
Spells may get a little tricky since 10 level spells break the mold a little bit, but my suggestion would be creating 11th level and higher spell slots which can only be used for heightening spells rather than creating new spells. So you can upcast meteor Swarm to keep the damage competive as HP rises, for example.
10th level spells may wind being a unique thing that can't be cast more than once even at higher levels. Hard to say yet. However, getting more 20th level feats is gonna be crazy. The druid examples are incredibly powerful.
So for example, a epic level cleric might look like this:
21 cleric feat, 11th level spells
22 Cleric feat, skill feat
23 12th-level spells, general feat, skill increase
24 cleric feat, skill feat
25 13th level spells, ancestry feat, skill increase, ability score boosts
Obviously, there's gonna be a finite number of legendary feats, so you could theoretically run out. But it will get more flexible and potent as splat book content is released.
Your skills will become more broadly competent since you can't go beyond legendary. But your numbers will all still scale as easily as they did before.
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Mmm, okay, let's first play the normal 20 levels then, and in a while we'll see if they'll remove the cap and implement some kind of rules to advance farther.
But yeah, you're right, it's early and we don't even know how they will address multiclassing. We'll see.
When it comes to power, level isn't the only source. Double the wealth of a level 20 character, and it will become significantly more powerful. Add some templates, and it is improved again. Finally, Paizo used mythic in PF1 as another track of advancement.
So you can totally play a level 20 character with the power of a CR 30 creature.
I know with PF1, there are rules to continue playing past 20th level provided, not sure where they are listed, but they are there, because my monthly group uses them. I'm currently running a group that is 26th level with 3 mythic tiers, so I would have to imagine that optional rules for that will be provided somewhere in PF2 at some point. There are plenty of us that don't cap our campaigns at 20th level.
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When it comes to power, level isn't the only source. Double the wealth of a level 20 character, and it will become significantly more powerful. Add some templates, and it is improved again. Finally, Paizo used mythic in PF1 as another track of advancement.
So you can totally play a level 20 character with the power of a CR 30 creature.
This was certainly true in PF1. Hard to say if it will be in PF2. Level kind of is everything there because it literally adds to everything. It even determines how powerful the items you can craft are, and the amount of gear you can use is limited by your level (Resonance.)
We also don't know if templates will still exist. It looks like they may as well not, for things like numeric bonuses. Instead of the Advanced Template you can just give a monster a +2 level adjustment for example. I can pretty much tell you the stat block of what a +2 Red AP will look like with the exception of its hit points. You'll only really need templates for turning creatures into undead and what have you.
Which isn't to say we won't get these things in PF2. But I think leveling is such a straight forward and universal process that going past a 20 cap seems trivial, so I'm not sure we need them.