There are already many discussions about this, saying the spread isn't wide enough. You should look them over as the developers go into details, but the short of it is the math disagrees with you.
In the +/-10 crit/fail system, that +5 is huge, and then compounded by stats & items likely being suited to the skill too.
A good rule of thumb is to treat PF2 bonuses & penalties as being twice as valuable as PF1's because in the standard range of challenges, they are.
(Trivial & Severe challenges will alter this.)
For example, a +3 advantage to attack represents a +50% damage for the first strike (for normal enemies who can be crit). With critical successes for skills, climbing for example would be 50% faster, and with critical failures, the +3 may reduce a "falls on 4 or less" to a "falls only on a 1".
Just realized those discussions have likely been wiped out like most/all of the pre-launch posts were.
Oh well.
ETA: And you ruin any playtesting data coming from your group.
ETA: And you ruin any playtesting data coming from your group.
Ofcourse I'm not using any houserules during the playtest.. but if said system is not changed by release i will..
Dont really know what you mean by my math being off? How is it off?
In part one, the bump to Int's value imbalances it both mechanically and in verisimilitude.
In part two, you're right, it does need work.
As for Performance, one might argue people would and do pay more/react better to a living legend giving a bland performance than a skilled virtuoso. And who knows what would be in that hero's backstory! He may have slept with a Muse or have an Angel's soul woven to his or merely draw upon the depths of emotion only available to those who've held the fate of nations at stake or faced the eyes of ancient (fill in the blank). A 7th level PC (perhaps less) goes beyond earthly limits even for mundane tasks so we can pretty much interpret level differences beyond that however we like. Especially with 10 which mechanically implies the higher is 32x the person/being/legend/whatever that the other is.
Since you're going to try the system, why not wait until afterward to fix it if it fails to deliver the fantasy experience you crave? BTW, I have zero issues with you doing you, it just seems advocating a change this extreme would seem to require more rigor & experience.
Have fun!
1) Int mod skill points seems awfully low - unless you really intend for players to only be able to max out 1-4 skills and not even able to max out one skill if their mod is 0 or -1. It makes int too key and skills to difficult to maintain at level. No-one is specialising in anything. And it leaves you with all the problems with PF1 skills and parties not being able to jointly attempt many tactics.
2) is just over complicated - flashbacks to FASERIP Marvel - which is fine for a game built around it, but for essentially a subsystem. nope just messy.
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What I dislike is how arbitrary the proficiencies are. More specifically, how they're named and how they interact with their bonuses. A rather extreme example, but still: A level 7 Bard with 14 Charisma is a Master in Diplomacy. A level 6 Sorcerer with 18 Charisma is only an Expert in it, despite having more Charisma and is equally good at it.
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I feel your proficiency shouldn't be determined semi-arbitrarily. Slapping a "you must be this tall to ride" on skills is unnatural. Also, coupling rank and bonus together is weird. "I am better at this skill because I'm better at this skill than you." It's a bit more text, but something like "once you've reached a static bonus (without magic items or buffs, only innate powers) of +X, you're a Master at this skill," would be much more natural. Yeah, there'd be the possibility of players min-maxing their builds to get it ASAP (in PF1 there's enough traits and racial traits to boost certain skills way more than intended, but if you think of this beforehand, you can nip it in the bud). The only problem is people reaching certain proficiencies earlier than intended, and getting those proficiency boosts as well. I'll come back to that.
So now that we've decoupled proficiency level from actual level, we can think about rewards. Paizo wants to lock certain abilities behind proficiency level. That's okay. An ordinary locksmith shouldn't be able to design a mythical vault. Makes sense that you can only do really awesome stuff once you're good enough at it. That's just your reward for reaching a certain level of proficiency. The idea of "if I reach a certain level of proficiency, I'm better at it" is circular logic. One option I see is simply implementing a class feature for everyone that states you get to choose a skill you get better at. Like Starfinder's level 3 Weapon Specialisation, give players an option to just increase their bonus at a skill by an X amount. If that sounds suspiciously like the skill rank system, that's because it basically is. But this way we have more control. A proficiency level might have a cap. Just like real life, you can't improve more without seeking more help. High school can make you only as smart as the curriculum allows. After that, you go to university, and so on. At certain levels, you can improve your proficiency level to the next level, allowing you to reach a higher cap. And because you only get a predetermined amount of cap increases, reaching a certain cap actually means something. Now, using that stupid example from the start of my post is relevant again. That level 6 Sorcerer and level 7 Bard might actually achieve the same result, but that Sorcerer will forever be stuck at that level, while the Bard will eventually surpass him, even with his dinky Charisma.
As for the part I told you I'd get back to: you can probably guess that by now. A character might be able to reach Master earlier, but since he has to wait for his level to allow him to progress again, he'll be stuck there. And the next proficiency level might have text saying "you can only take this at level X," meaning you stop improving at some point. Yeah, he got a head start, but he'll stagnate and not spend points into that skill, forcing him to spend his resources on other skills. This also evens out his lopsided (and neglected) other skills, preventing him from becoming too much of a one-trick pony.
TL;DR: I basically combined the skill rank system with the proficiency system. While I kept the "you reach proficiency level X at level Y" in, I just capped their maximum. There is no level requirement for Master, but once you reach it, you stop improving until the system allows you to continue. See it as a progress bar that only unlocks at certain levels. It's still somewhat gated, but it feels better to me. You're looking forward to reaching that level, because it allows you to improve more, rather than just giving a measly bonus.
Yes, adding your level to everything is very problematic. I'm shouting to Piazo to just remove it from everything its added to. The +5 proficiency system, combined with ability differences, and magic is enough of a spread.
If they don't change it I'll either stay with 5e, or I'll houserule it out.
If I'm playing in a game I'll just have my old wizard who does no physical activity and is untrained in athletics just go around in every town and city and look for the fittest young person he can and challenge every single one of them to a foot race. And he'll win, just because of +level.
I'll do this until the DM gets sick of my 70 year feeble old man, with a 10 Str(maybe even voluntarily flaw it lower) who is untrained in athletics continually challenging every fit young person who aren't all going to be leveled to races.
The DM will get sick of it. They will either fiat it away in which I will make them admit how stupid +level is and point out what they are doing to bandaid over a glaring issue. Either they will houserule it away, or I'll leave.
Paizo's chances of getting money out of me amount to will my current group like P2 and want to houserule it. If paizo fixes this I'll buy all the book and my group I run will switch over, otherwise we might just stay with 5e.
I left 3.P because of bigger numbers. I actually stopped playing. 5e's bounded system got me back in and I've bought everything and run a successful weekly group for 2+ years.+level is exactly why I left 3.P, and if I'm going to play P2 it will be houseruled, or preferrably Paizo will fix it.
/rant
don't try and make PF2 into a poor mans 5e. PF is about the big numbers. Take that away and you no longer have PF.
I want a high level character to roflstomp a low level character. I don't want a competition between a level 1 and a level 10 to come down to a coin flip.
A level 20 person is supposed to be how much more (fill in the blank) than a level 2 person?
The answer should set your parameters.
So if you want 10x, then a flatter system works, remove all the "+1 per level" bumps and you get your gritty, cutthroat world.
But if you want something fantastical, with a Campbell hero's journey with gods and all that, then go with 512x. Which is what PF2 is (loosely) tuned for.
And if you want cosmic anime shenanigans, go +2 per level!
The weird thing to me is that Pathfinder has never seemed to pretend to want to be the game of mythic god beings dreading ravines behind them in the earth in that Campbell Hero's Journey sense. You start Rise of the Runelords fighting goblins in Sandpoint, you end up exploring a ruined city in the mountains and fighting an archmage in a demiplane.
Exalted this ain't. You aren't grabbing Cerebrus by the neck and knocking his heads together, you're just more or less the same scruffy adventurer you've always been, fighting in the coolest, most dangerous place in the adventure path.
The trouble is when you conflate how the mechanics work with the feel of the story. I think the mechanics of Pathfinder are largely a relic of how the 3.5 system worked things. Things got numerically gonzo and they just try to roll with it and tell the best story they can within those parameters. Most of the time what you get is a creature that could easily be scaled down numerically and fought by anyone and as a story no one would bat an eye. Most things you fight are still mostly large sized corporeal monsters with pointy things and magic. Seldom do you end up necksnaping kaiju or jumpkicking the sun.
I think people assume it's supposed to be a zanier insanity level because the rules tended to skew it that way rather than the story.
I think Monte Cook talked a little about this problem in a blog post, that if you have a character who goes from a +3 to hit to a +13 to hit and all the monsters in the game go from AC 13 to AC 23, you have effectively inflated all the numbers but they don't mean anything different. Nothing in the world has changed.
To a degree, I approve of this. Ultimately in level based fantasy gaming you have to make a choice: do game terms like level and hit points really mean anything, are they a quantifiable part of the world, or are they just game elements because players like to see their numbers get bigger. It's pretty clear that in most cases things like level and hit points don't really mean anything. Characters progress from 1st level to 15th level within the span of a single adventure path, in months to a couple of years they outstrip military veterans with decades and campaigns under their belts. If hit points were any kind of literal thing it would mean the characters were either swelling into enormous monstrosities as their hit points double every two levels or else getting superhumanly dense as their flesh condenses like a meaty neutron star.
That isn't what's happening.
So I prefer the left hand path--the characters aren't really changing all that much. The DCs and ACs are all scaling with their growth and in truth you could scale all the numbers from the last issue of any given adventure path and run it for 1st level characters and it would be just as fun an adventure. Likely no one would even notice. Because really the increased numbers are just a reward for players because they like to put them on their character sheets.
And that's all they are.
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"But last time i did the exact same thing it was only DC 15, why is it 20 now???" and with all right.
See. This post perfectly demonstrates why the current guidelines aren't good enough.
The DC doesn't change. If you throw a DC 15 against a level 1 character then you are giving them a severe challenge. This is something they shouldn't reasonably expect any old character to pass (untrained level 1 character with an ability score of 10 has a 20% chance of succeeding). Someone who is trained in it and has a good ability score would have a descent chance at passing (trained level 1 character with an ability score of 18 has a 55% chance of success). 5 levels later this has gone from a severe challenge to a trivial one. Now that untrained character with an ability score of 10? They've gained enough experience that even they can expect to pass without any issue (50% chance of success).
The bigger question is why are you throwing the exact same challenge at them 5 levels later? Would you throw a party of 3 kobolds at them at level 6? If you are, then goodo for you. I'd be bored at your table though. Instead I expect you are giving them bigger threats to face in combat. So why aren't you doing that outside of combat?
I personally don't necessarily like the paradigm that PF2e is operating under (I am genuinely torn). But misrepresenting the paradigm doesn't help us discuss it or get it changed.
Only thing the +level to skills does is make it niegh impossible for a GM to keep the world realitic and still fun, challenging and engaging past level 5. after level 5 either the world "levels up" for some reason or the players start having no challenges other than combat. and if the world "levels up" then players will start complaining about stuff like "But last time i did the exact same thing it was only DC 15, why is it 20 now???" and with all right.
I usually never say "No you cant do that" i just say "Ok Roll X" and set a DC for how challenging i think it should be. In this system i will have to say "no you cant do that" to ALOT of things and if a player asks why, my only answer is "Because level".. Because now i need to take into acount that the DCs go from like 10-50 so the hardest acrobatic feats should have a DC of 50.. the moderate ones should be at 35 and the easy at 10... this means that most moderate things cant be achived untill high level..
really, the answer is you aren't good enough yet. it happens all the time in the real world. I have a drivers license, but I am no way skilled enough to drive indy. and I can use a scapel but I cant do surgery. there should absolutely be things players cant accomplish, that's the whole point of leveling, so you can can accomplish more things.
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I think there are two aspects, both of which the playtest addresses, but maybe could have been clearer because some of this had to be clarified by dev posts.
There are definitely static DCs in the world, and these shouldn't change due to PCs leveling. Climbing a tree has been the default example. Also of note, tougher enemies will tend toward dwelling in more dangerous areas and setting up more dangerous hazards, but this isn't a measure of DCs being tied to PCs, but rather PCs going into more dangerous areas as their adventures become more extreme.
There are also scaling DCs tied to higher level sources or extraordinary settings, and the DCs should reflect this. Since PCs generally engage with these at a level they can tackle (depending on your playstyle), the DCs tend to tie to the PCs' level.
Since the latter situation can feel mechanically flat, it's pretty important for a GM to note the difference between knocking down the rickety door of a goblin warren and the rune-carved obsidian doors of the Fire Giant King...even if the natural roll needed on the die is the same.
Also, it can be nice to revisit old dangers as it gives PCs a sense of accomplishment. So if your players have had a particularly tough time with Trolls in the past (tee hee, love me some Trolls), then having the party dominate in a Troll battle, maybe even a "Trivial" one in encounter terminology, can be quite fulfilling.
And if the party would have to cross the fiery plains of the Lord of Ash to enter a place they cannot handle, then having higher level "Hard" DC to navigate safely can be a good deterrent.
And which when navigated later on, the fiery plains serve as a good benchmark of achievement. And makes escape that much more difficult!
Cheers
I am not sure what the designers can do with alternative suggestions that ignore the need for the math fixes provided in the playtest other than (re-)explain why they changed the system.