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Is this right? According to the playtest, proficiency bonuses are:
- Untrained: level -2
- Trained: level
- Expert: level +1
- Master: level +2
- Legendary: level +3
This means every level-up all skills effectively gain a rank, all saves improve by one, and everyone has full BAB (in PF1 terms). Does this seem a bit steep?
For comparison, Star Wars Saga Edition had a proficiency bonus of half character level. 5th ed. is much lower than that.
The fallout of a bonus progression that is too steep is level differences become large. By this, I mean the recommended party level range that finds an encounter challenging but not a cake-walk becomes too small. This is due to rapid AC increases making slightly higher level creatures too difficult to hit, or having saves too high, etc.
I wonder if the system would be better at a slower proficiency progression, particularly for Society scenarios. This would permit a broader level range to participate meaningfully.
That was afaik a design decision to emphasize the difference between characters of different levels and on other points knitting the math somewhat tighter
I don't personally thinks its to steep (and martials basically always had that for their attack)
As someone who played 3.0,3.5,4E,PF1 and 5e and also 4E without +1/2 per level treadmill, I can say that decision to keep the number treadmill and even enlarge it to cover absolutely everything IS wrong.
They will have to fill monsters/traps/poisons for almost every level by itself.
Anything more than 2 levels from party level is going to be either too hard or too trivial.
Better growth for characters is that the grow more horizontally than vertically.
That means more options per level what you can do with small increase in power rather than large boost in power.
Also HPs are growing more than PF1 and with increase in AC every level that will lead fast to nigh-immunity to low level monsters.
If you take IE 1st level orc that deals 10 damage and hits you 50% of the time and you are 1st level human fighter with 16 con.
You have 21 HP. That means that that orc has to attack you 5 times on average to kill you.
Now if we advance you to 3rd level human fighter, your AC if 2pts higher and orc now has 40% hit chance and you have 47 HPs.
Or now needs 12 attacks to kill you. +140% more attacks.
If we go to 5th level and bump up con to 18(and we will 99% of the time)
and AC by another 3 pts.
You now have 78HPs and orc now has 25% hit chance.
32 attacks on average to kill you. +540% from lvl1 or +167% from lvl3
At lvl5 6 orcs are less dangerous(if we remove flanking or they come one by one)than 1 orc at lvl1.
Now, if we remove +1 AC per level then we get.
1st level: 5 attacks
3rd level: 10 attacks
5th level: 16 attacks
20% less attacks for 3rd level(not much, but noticable) and
50% less attacks for 5th level. With this orc grunts are still scary in numbers.
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The worst part of this is that the best +level is doing is giving an impression of progression. The same number is added to ac for monsters at your level, and the skill difficulty table increases by one every level, to keep the actual target roll consistant. It's a waste of effort. You could literally have no +level progression and have exactly the same chance of success.
This is of course not consistant with gaining skill points every level as in first meaning skill progression and to-hit would only increase with stats, proficiency level and buffs from players/items. But they do that anyway whilst quickly rendering lower level monsters irrelevant as has been stated elsewhere.
That +level looks great but it is totally meaningless.