Meaningful character advancement and Proficiency


Playing the Game


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For as long as there have been RPGs, there has never been a question of wether we should try to make charcter advancement feel meaningful. Advancing in your class and becoming more powerful is one of the pillars upon which RPGs are built. However, how do we achieve this has varied a lot and ranges on two gradients, that I will refer to as Flavour and Power.

Flavour: is the measure of how "cool" something you can do feels. How glad you are you can do it and how good you feel when your character gets to do it. An example of Flavourful character advancement in 2e is the skill feat "LEGENDARY THIEF". Being able to steal a sleeping guard's armor while he's wearing it feels incredibly cool and is a great capstone for the most legendary among thieves!

Power: is the measure of how impactful something you can do feels. How much will it change the status quo if you do it, and how high is the chance of it being successful. An example of Powerful character advancement in 2e is the level 20 figther class feat "WEAPON SUPREMACY". Being able to make an extra action every turn without any magical help is very powerful and can provide enourmous amounts of combat power (Assuming of course, there is not an easier way to Quicken the Figther).

With those terms defined, I would like to say that, while no advancement is ever completely lacking in A or B, there are some great examples of things very lacking on either of them. For a flavourful Advancement that is not powerful, we can take a look at the level 14 monk class feat "TONGUE OF SUN AND MOON". This ability, while incredibly flavourful to the idea of the mystic monk that transcends the barriers of mortality through asceticism, is not very powerful. In this slot, it contends with other, much more powerful monk feats such as "MOUNTAIN ROOT QUAKE" and "WILD WINDS GUST" and is less likely to be picked, which hurts how much the player "feels like a cool monk" in favour of combat power.

And for an example of pure power without flavour, Let us talk about my biggest problem with 2e so far:

Armor and Weapon proficiency

For those uninformed, the Difference between Expert, Master and Legendary profiency is the number that (Added to your character level) is added to your Armor class or Attack roll. Specifically, every advancement in proficiency increases it by 1. While I do understand that the worth of a +1 has been discussed to death and resurrected a million times, it bears discussing again because of how prominent these +1s are in the playtest.

The fact of the matter is that, in my opinion, a +1 to a DC or Roll is about the definition of power without flavour. It does nothing more than add to the math, leaving the player feeling maybe amused at her increased combat prowess but dissapointed at how uninteractive it is. A +1 gives you no actions, involves no gameplay and has no variance. It is design by math for the math, pure and simple.

The issue with this is not that statical bonuses are somehow wrong or bad, but the role that proficeincy intends to take in the game design. According to the first pages of the rulebook,"If you’re legendary, your statistic or familiarity with the item is so high that you’ll go down in history." That is a very flavourful thing! it means the character in question has earned the prestige and recognition of others due to their skills. And to compliment this, getting a legendary armor of weapon proficency is VERY hard. A Paladin or a Monk can earn it at level 17 and a Grey Maidem (A very specific subset of figthers from an established city in Golarion) can earn it too, at a somewhat high level.

So you have reached perfection in training, or total devotion to justice, or overcome your massive indoctrination and mental trauma and achieved legendary status with your armor. What does that mean for you?

+1 to AC

This provokes a dissonance between how much flavour something should have from the way its described and how much it actually has. If I were to describe to my players that their use of armor is now so legendary that it will go down in history, its ridiculous for this to simply mean +1 to AC, when the skill equivalents are having the rogues going through walls, and others playing concerts for the gods and falling harmlessly from space.

How do we fix it?:

If we wanted to keep the concept of armor and weapon proficiency as it is, I would argue for the creation of "Riders" to the +1 increases. As an example, legendary armor proficiency could grant a 25% chance to ignore a critical hit (As per Fortification in 1e) and A Master weapon proficiency could grant players the ability to deal Piercing, Slashing or Blunt damage with every strike (As per the 1e weapon versatility feat).

This way, we can add back the flavour that we expect from proficiency without compromising the power level too much. After all, knowing that you are so skilled with your armor that you can deflect enemy blows to non vital areas, and thus being hopeful even in the face of a critical threat, is very flavourful and meaningful.

Well, this was just my 2cp, I would like to see your thoughts on this and what effects would you give to the ranks if you were to design the riders.


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The +1s are powerful, but indeed a bit underwhelming. This is specially egergious on spellcasters who lose CLASS FEATS (the most flavorful things) to gain increased proficiency on spell DCs, which is pretty lame.

Still think a solution would be expanding the General feat system and putting in some that require Armor proficiencies to be a certain level and unlock new abilities with them (Like Skill feats do for skills).


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I like PF2 overall, but I definitely agree with this. A lot of the classes get a legendary proficiency as their 19th level ability, and while it does SOUND cool, getting an extra +1 to my main thing is underwhelming in practice.


I agree with the premise, there does need to be some fleshing out in regards to what the proficiency levels mean for weapons and armor. At least the skills have “legendary” capstone feats that can be taken to do crazy things with legendary proficiency.


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C4S4ND4L33 wrote:

For as long as there have been RPGs, there has never been a question of wether we should try to make charcter advancement feel meaningful. Advancing in your class and becoming more powerful is one of the pillars upon which RPGs are built. However, how do we achieve this has varied a lot and ranges on two gradients, that I will refer to as Flavour and Power.

Flavour: is the measure of how "cool" something you can do feels. How glad you are you can do it and how good you feel when your character gets to do it. An example of Flavourful character advancement in 2e is the skill feat "LEGENDARY THIEF". Being able to steal a sleeping guard's armor while he's wearing it feels incredibly cool and is a great capstone for the most legendary among thieves!

Power: is the measure of how impactful something you can do feels. How much will it change the status quo if you do it, and how high is the chance of it being successful. An example of Powerful character advancement in 2e is the level 20 figther class feat "WEAPON SUPREMACY". Being able to make an extra action every turn without any magical help is very powerful and can provide enourmous amounts of combat power (Assuming of course, there is not an easier way to Quicken the Figther).

With those terms defined, I would like to say that, while no advancement is ever completely lacking in A or B, there are some great examples of things very lacking on either of them. For a flavourful Advancement that is not powerful, we can take a look at the level 14 monk class feat "TONGUE OF SUN AND MOON". This ability, while incredibly flavourful to the idea of the mystic monk that transcends the barriers of mortality through asceticism, is not very powerful. In this slot, it contends with other, much more powerful monk feats such as "MOUNTAIN ROOT QUAKE" and "WILD WINDS GUST" and is less likely to be picked, which hurts how much the player "feels like a cool monk" in favour of combat power.

And for an example of pure power without flavour, Let us talk about my...

great idea.. i really like it.

would be even better if those additional proficiency ranks gave like a +2 per level, which would be more meaningful too.


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To me, math has flavor and texture and flow and meaning. And when I look at the flavor of the proficiency math with its +0 for trained, +1 for expert, +2 for master, and +3 for legendary, it says something different from those English words. It says, sometimes the little boost matters, but when it does, the +1/level matters even more.

The argument in favor of the small bonuses from TEML is that the bonuses are only part of the expertise. Skills are unlocked by being trained, too. That is nicely flavorful. Everybody can try to remember some Nature knowledge they heard to identify a tiger, but only someone trained in Nature can learn a primal spell. Anyone can try to repair a damaged shield, but a trained craftsman can make a shield from scratch.

And then when the character reaches expert proficiency, they learn, er, nothing new. They receive that tiny +1 boost, and they meet the qualifications for skill feats that they have not learned yet. They have to pay for the feat twice: once by reaching expert proficiency and twice by taking the feat. It is disappointing.

But in my playtest game for In Pale Mountain's Shadow, my wife insisted on a new skill ability. Her Mountain-Lore nomad barbarian was an expert Athlete with several climbing feats. She was such an expert that she had a climb speed. And she wanted to be able to belay a fellow climber, to set up ropes and a safety harness with her expert-quality climbing kit so that she could stop the fall of someone who critically failed a climb check. That action--well, reaction--was not described in the playtest rulebook. Nevertheless, as an expert, she should know it. (See Expert Climber Aiding Trained Climbers.)

I believe that Pathfinder needs a freeform skill system. The player describes what he or she wants to do: "I want to push that stone so that it rolls down the hill and hits the wooden pallisade." And the GM says, okay, I figured out the DC, roll Athletics. The rulebook should have several actions as examples and guidelines, but a player can invent more. Quandary said in my Expert Climber thread that the Grab Edge reaction should be generalized to Grab to allow other forms of grabbing such as catching a falling climber. That's a good example of a more freeform action.

And sometimes the GM should say, only an expert could do that. And the expert-proficiency characters will be able to do that. Could an Errol Flynn character swing from a chandelier for something like the monk's Flying Kick action? Or is swinging on a rope limited to the Boarding Action action from the Pirate archetype? Surely a high enough Acrobatics proficiency lets someone swing on a rope with one hand while wielding a rapier on the other, and the feats merely give better action econony.

I am less sure how weapon and armor proficiency will reveal new abilities naturally at higher proficiency. Combat requires stricter rules than skills.


I think that we should definitely get more higher-tier skill feats, something that really makes a player feel that their character is a master, or a legend, in their art.

About plain mechanical advantages, I would go another way: let challenges make it clear what level of proficiency they require, and give advantages when they are attempted by an higher proficiency character. An expert doing routine work (which requires trained proficiency) could have a free reroll, or treat any success as a critical one, or treat a critical failure as a simple one, or give help for free to an ally attempting the same task, or even have an additional, simple +1.
A legendary character doing the same work would have more of these advantages.

EDIT: idea: the plain additional +1 could be applied to the die result, negating natural ones and hightening the chance of a critical success even for high DCs, when the basics of the job are easy. Like, jumping very long.

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