A systemic issue and an elegant and easy fix.


Running the Game


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A “proficiency” bonus based on character level being added to literally every player roll is a concept that works against the system in many different ways.

At first look, as a gm, the scaling DC of everyday tasks only adds difficulty in running the game. No longer can I know the DC of various tasks by heart, but must consult a sliding scale that is constantly changing throughout gameplay. Characters gaining every skill by level makes for a bland and confusing approach as it trivializes character development and choices without benefit. Now a level 10 Fighter is better at arcana than a new wizard and better at sneaking than a rogue? It’s nonsense but it’s not only immersion that suffers, but gameplay.

As the DC of hazards increase, so also must the mobs now scale quickly with character level, effectively making mob building rules unintelligible and so quickly trivializing monsters that were only recently challenging. Now my players must encounter only mobs that are very close to their level otherwise the outmatched party is quickly crit to death while unable to land a single blow on the higher level group.

One example is to have a group of level 10 characters cross a pond full of crocodiles. Crocodiles, as a level 2 creature, are virtually unable to hit an armored character at level 10, while the players would be unable to miss except on a natural 1. Once characters reach a certain level, no number of lower level creatures can create even a low challenge and this effectively eliminates 95% of the beastiary(sic) as a possible choice of encounter at any given level.

An elegant and easy fix is to eliminate any sort of proficiency or BAB and allow character choices (training level, ability scores, and gear) to be the defining elements in any sort of encounter. The effects of this sort of system are numerous and wonderful. Mobs remain relevant threats even as they become outclassed and the players will still feel that they are getting stronger when the orc that was once hard to hit is now fairly easy and instead of taking 3 strikes, this fancy new magic sword now makes it 1. An army of orcs is still scary, as it should be!

My character choices have now not been trivialized, but indeed are the only way to advance my abilities. If that wizard who so focuses on arcane wisdom is still bad at climbing ropes, so be it! All the more fun to find other ways to surmount that challenge!

I'd be surprised if this hasn't been noticed and suggested elsewhere but I couldn't find it.


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Yes. I love so much of this new game but the +1 level for untrained skills (and to a lesser extent, AC) just breaks it for me.

I truly love the levels of proficiency: untrained, trained, expert, master, legendary. These are so much better than the old niggling skill ranks. But the modifiers attached to them barely make any difference compared to how powerful +1/level is.

I would really prefer a system without +1/level but where the bonus is strictly determined by your level of proficiency. It might even end up with very similar math for those achieving legendary status in a skill or their armor.

Whether your level of skill in a weapon or a skill or a type of armor would give you a flat bonus, or perhaps something like 1/3 level, 1/2 level or (for legendary only most likely) a bonus equal to your level, I don't know.

But this kind of system I could really get behind, and it wouldn't needlessly inflate the DCs of ordinary threats.

This would not be a particularly complicated fix. You could have one chart with 1-20 on the vertical axis and the five levels of proficiency on the horizontal, and this would be all you'd need to figure out your bonuses to AC, atk, skills, saves etc.


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You, like most everyone else who has shown serious disagreements with this system, have a fundamental misunderstanding of it.

First off, hazards do not scale with level. Climbing a tree is climbing a tree is climbing a tree regardless of what level the players are; it simply ceases being a major challenge to a higher level character.

Secondly, the level 10 Fighter is not better at Arcana than the level 1 Wizard, assuming the Fighter is Untrained. The only thing you can do with Arcana is Recall Knowledge; as such, the level 10 Fighter probably has a pretty good idea of what a dragon is. He does not, however, have the means to identify magic items of any kind because he lacks the training to do so.

Thirdly, Pathfinder characters outleveling monsters is nothing new. A mob of level 1 orc warriors is just as meaningless of an encounter to a level 15 PF1 party as it is to a level 15 PF2 party. The only reasonable explanations for you thinking otherwise is that you either came here from 5e and have never played Pathfinder before or have never played Pathfinder at a high level before.


Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
Joshhand wrote:


At first look, as a gm, the scaling DC of everyday tasks only adds difficulty in running the game. No longer can I know the DC of various tasks by heart, but must consult a sliding scale that is constantly changing throughout gameplay.

Where does it say everyday tasks scale with level?

You're not talking about the DC of (for example) climbing a ladder, are you?


WatersLethe wrote:
Joshhand wrote:


At first look, as a gm, the scaling DC of everyday tasks only adds difficulty in running the game. No longer can I know the DC of various tasks by heart, but must consult a sliding scale that is constantly changing throughout gameplay.

Where does it say everyday tasks scale with level?

You're not talking about the DC of (for example) climbing a ladder, are you?

To back up WatersLethe's point - Page 336 Playtest Rulebook:

Quote:

It’s important that you don’t simply make the DC

arbitrarily higher or lower with the PCs’ level. Any increase
must be justified based on how the challenge actually
increased, and thus how success is more impressive. For
checks against opponents’ DCs, higher-level adversaries
have higher skills, so the players can clearly see improvement
as they challenge and surpass more powerful foes.

Many tasks are not opposed and have no reason to
change in level. If you decide climbing the ordinary pine
tree next to the temple is a level 0 task, climbing it doesn’t
arbitrarily get harder when the PCs are higher level; its level
stays 0. If you need a task with a significantly higher DC to
challenge your PCs, you should choose one that’s inherently
harder rather than artificially inflating the level of a simple
task to increase its DC. For instance, when the PCs’ level
is relatively low, they might be faced with climbing a stone
wall with handholds, but later in the campaign they should
encounter tougher obstacles, like a smooth iron wall.


I’m not talking about the same activities going up, but that the encounters are meant to scale with level. The explanation is that the party will run into harder and harder walls to climb etc. as they reach higher levels. I’m suggesting there be 3-4 DC of wall to climb and characters vary from bad to good at climbing.

Also, I am not suggesting that Pathfinder didn’t have some of the same problem with characters leveling past things being any sort of challenge. I’m just saying a better system would not have that issue.

Paizo Employee

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Joshhand wrote:


Also, I am not suggesting that Pathfinder didn’t have some of the same problem with characters leveling past things being any sort of challenge. I’m just saying a better system would not have that issue.

I think that you may be jumping the gun by assuming it's a "problem" or an "issue" that characters level out of certain threats (though it may certainly be so from your perspective.) Pathfinder has always been a very high-powered fantasy game, with high level wizards easily surpassing most of the feats of Olympian deities, up to and including Zeus, at the upper levels of play. A world that uses a level-based scaling system says some very definitive things about both the value of a level, and what it means to be a hero in that world. An 11th level fighter is going to be so far above simple 1st level threats that attacks which would critically strike a 1st level fighter with the exact same equipment instead barely touch him, and regular attacks simply glance off. Meanwhile, all of that 11th level fighter's attack are racking up criticals and obliterating weaker enemies. So a fighter of that level has ascended to a more powerful state of being, beyond simply becoming more experienced.

The +level framework also allows for some very elegant and interesting encounter design, where encounters comprised of larger numbers of lower level opponents allow the characters to really leverage the most exciting parts of the +/-10 success system, and challenges against more powerful opponents don't invalidate certain options for non-specialists. For example, an elven wizard who magics up their bow and uses lots of divination and buff spells is a very interesting and viable option under the new framework, whereas it would have been exceedingly difficult to assemble without the level+proficiency paradigm since their attack bonus in the current system lags so far behind. The whole +level set-up actually mitigates a lot of the late game issues with PF1, where specialists quickly hit a point of auto-succeeding at even extremely difficult tasks while non-specialists will always auto-fail (with some exceptions like natural 20s for specific subsystems.) There's an extensive number of tasks across the whole breadth of play that are accomplished by the +level system, spanning the gamut from setting tone to emphasizing group dynamics.

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