In 10-11 years, another set of game developers will claim to have figured out the "perfect RPG" and build it based on the same absolute balance of 4E and PF2e.
50% odds, unified system and equal game experience from lv1 to 20 is not the only requirement for a good game. Some of those are probably not required at all.
If what we want is a die-toss game, that already exists.
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...the math is constructed in such a way if you aren't a super specialist with max attributes and the right gear and supporting magic, the best thing you can do for the party is never contribute. Just shut up and stand in the corner, or play X-box or something.
And that's terrible for a game.
This was a major failing in 4E skill challenges - besides Aid Other, only the best character should EVER roll. Please, Paizo, never try to take us back to that. People will jump ship if you do.
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This happened because monster saves are WAY too high.
Agreeing with you in principle, but there's a hitch. Saves are also used as DCs for skill checks (Athletics, Deceit). They have to scale with skills.
What is needed is not weaker saves, its higher save DCs.
Moving the goal posts to between a 60% and 75% success rate for a level-appropriate challenge would work for me. The former can be for a competent build, and the latter for optimal. People who are highly specialized should be able to succeed at such a task 3/4 of the time.
I was about to respond to another post just before I went to sleep, and realized something. If this holds true for the entire game, what does that mean for boss enemies, i.e. enemies 2-3 levels above the PCs? If we start with a 60-75% chance, that means that a martially-focused enemy would be hitting 75-90% of the time on their first attack on levels alone, critting on 25-40% of them. Same thing with a spellcaster-type enemy, whose saves would be crit failed 25-40% of the time, and only succeeded against 10-25% at best.
I'm not sure that's a great direction to go down, and also unsure that the snap solution (change crit success/failure to +-15) would be helpful for that case.
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I've said this before - but the solution to lower level enemies hitting more often isn't a bigger bonus - just make 17-20 auto hit (not crit). Change a roll of a 1 on skill checks - if you would still hit the DC you can roll to confirm a fail. People who are masters of their domain (whatever it is) can still fail, it happens - it's just much more rare - this makes it so.
Without 'math so tight enemies more than 3 levels below you become chumps' - you fix the to hit problem. This still leaves the 'crit if you are 10 over' thing - but I'm going to be honest - I'm not finding that fun at all.
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There's fun math?
As someone with dyscalcula, I know that the math balance is important to make a good game, but I want it simple and in the background. I like Chorik's solution of autohit without crit on a 17-20.
Though I personally enjoyed the crit by 10 thing. That was easy math and fun for players when it happened, while still being scary when it comes from the monsters...
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A lot of things look "fun" on paper but aren't that "fun" in practice.
Take the classic 3.5/PF situation, where I have +15 to a skill with my Slayer, which makes me feel that the math is fun because double digits and I hit high numbers and I got rewarded for being specialised. And I'm better than the Cleric, because with her crap skill point count and ACP and whatanot she's at +5 to that skill.
BUT
it also means that the GM has a very hard time making a challenge for a group when one person is at +15 and the other are at +5. Such challenge is either impossible for them or trivial for me. If it's trivial, well, where's the challenge, if it's impossible - woe be to the party if I don't turn up for the game, or if my PC gets kidnapped by the bad guys, or if for any other reason my super-specialised ability is unavilable. Bummer.
I think this is an aspect that gets overlooked or at least not talked about enough: The math also needs to be fun for the GM. The PF1 math-discrepancy has led to quite a lot of frustration on my end as a GM and has made the game not fun on my end, especially since quite a few unexperienced players have joined our group over the years. I know quite a few GMs who had similar problems and it made designing encounters quite difficult and tedious, which led to no one running any Pathfinder games anymore in my area, even though the hobby has grown quite a bit over the last couple of years.
With PF2 math, most common challenges (eg. sneaking among sleepy orcs, climbing a cliff, swimming upstream) can be attempted by the entire party, not just by one or two super-specialised PCs. Does that take away some fun out of hyperspecialisation? Sure it does. But on the other hand, it allows more challenges where the entire party can succeed, leaving them less dependant on hyper-specialist, discourages gamey character advancement ("OK we need everybody to max Perception and now we need to split Knowledges, Sense Motive, Stealth, Diplomacy etc. among us so that we have everything maxed out) and leads to fewer situations where the party is split because only the specialist stands a chance, while others are a dead weight or worse, a liability.
And woe be to a PF1 party that has turbo-optimizers mixed with people who don't powergame at all. The discrepancies in math between those quickly reach the levels where frustration arises as the former feel dragged down by the latter while the latter feel pressurised to keep up with the former.
Lowering the floor does take some empowerment out of the game, but it does that for the sake of being more a collective experience and less an evening of vignettes on how one specialist handles the situation while everybody else gets to sit and watch.
While I think the math needs some tweaking, in favour of the specialists and maybe even PCs in general, I still find the math to be much more fun as a GM, but it seems like most people on here only, or mostly, consider the player's point of view. I think that's a serious mistake or shortcoming of the discourse on the boards here, because without any GMs to run any games and campaigns there won't be any people playing.
I hope Paizo finds a happy middleground to satisfy both players and GMs, but in my experience so far I have been very happy with the tighter math that Paizo has chosen to go with. Also, I think that some players will have to accept that with the current math auto-success or even 80 to 90% success rates are gone, and I appreciate that fact.
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A lot of things look "fun" on paper but aren't that "fun" in practice.
Take the classic 3.5/PF situation, where I have +15 to a skill with my Slayer, which makes me feel that the math is fun because double digits and I hit high numbers and I got rewarded for being specialised. And I'm better than the Cleric, because with her crap skill point count and ACP and whatanot she's at +5 to that skill.
BUT
it also means that the GM has a very hard time making a challenge for a group when one person is at +15 and the other are at +5. Such challenge is either impossible for them or trivial for me. If it's trivial, well, where's the challenge, if it's impossible - woe be to the party if I don't turn up for the game, or if my PC gets kidnapped by the bad guys, or if for any other reason my super-specialised ability is unavilable. Bummer.
I think this is an aspect that gets overlooked or at least not talked about enough: The math also needs to be fun for the GM. The PF1 math-discrepancy has led to quite a lot of frustration on my end as a GM and has made the game not fun on my end, especially since quite a few unexperienced players have joined our group over the years. I know quite a few GMs who had similar problems and it made designing encounters quite difficult and tedious, which led to no one running any Pathfinder games anymore in my area, even though the hobby has grown quite a bit over the last couple of years.
With PF2 math, most common challenges (eg. sneaking among sleepy orcs, climbing a cliff, swimming upstream) can be attempted by the entire party, not just by one or two super-specialised PCs. Does that take away some fun out of hyperspecialisation? Sure it does. But on the other hand, it allows more challenges where the entire party can succeed, leaving them less dependant on hyper-specialist, discourages gamey character advancement ("OK we need everybody to max Perception and now we need to split Knowledges, Sense Motive, Stealth,...
Speaking as my group's Constant GM, I find the PC success rate frustratingly low. There's a definite hit to player morale that I've seen across my playtest games. And, for me, if my players are feeling frustrated then I'm not really having fun either.
But I also know the pain of nothing ever being a challenge for the party. So I do like the math being tightened - I just think that it's been tightened too much. I would rather my players who specialize and put effort into an area feel confident of success - not be guaranteed it, just not approach each skill check with the defeatist attitude that multiple playtest sessions have instilled in them.
EDIT: for clarity, I have not yet gotten a chance to play since 1.3. So whether or not that makes a difference for my group yet I can't say.
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Moving the goal posts to between a 60% and 75% success rate for a level-appropriate challenge would work for me. The former can be for a competent build, and the latter for optimal. People who are highly specialized should be able to succeed at such a task 3/4 of the time.I'd definitely be fine with slanting the bar 10% in the direction of success, so that we don't run into stalemate problems. Also to say implicitly: "hey, taking actions is better than not taking actions".
Give a bit of advantage to the active party, and avoid perfect equilibrium.
As of right now, 75% is actually about accurate at high levels (you hit that by point by 15th or so, I believe), it just takes too long to get there, IMO. I'd like to see hitting 70% before 10th level if possible.
And giving the advantage to the one acting rather than being acted on is more or less exactly how monster AC/to-hit makes combat work (as their to-hit tends to be quite high while their AC is mediocre at best). How well that works is a matter of some debate, but I actually think it's fine.
My issue remains with skills.
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1) Math is so tight that there isn't room for hyper specialization.
This is an interesting contrast to what Red Griffyn said up in comment #51.
Just finished playing one of the L5 PFS scenarios. The boss has a +14 ref save vs. our DC19s. That means there is a 30% chance of a crit success, 50% chance of success, 15% failure, and 5% crit failure. The group was 3 casters and a rogue. He crit saves vs. 2 fireballs, 2 lightning bolts, and 1 gust of wind. He also saves vs. 1 fireball, and 1 sound burst.
So across 7 spells (5 at the highest spell slot clearing out all of two caster's highest spells) he took 12 damage. This happened because monster saves are WAY too high. The math is bad because monsters are easily within a 70%+ range of making saves for most of the game. ...
I see that the three casters chose their 3rd-level spells as three Fireballs and two Lightning Bolts. Both spells take a reflex save and the boss has an unusually good reflex save aided by good dice rolls. He critically saved (no damage) against four of them and regularly saved (half damage) against one. In contract, the 2nd-level Sound Burst and 1st-level Gust of Wind require Fortitude saves and his critical success rate was only 50% rather than 80% against them.
The casters put their best eggs into a single basket, Reflex save. The boss was allowed to hyper-specialize, and happened to be unusually good against that one basket. At least, I hope that boss was specialized in Reflex saves. He would be overpowered if most of his bonuses were that good. A 55% percent success rate against DC 19 would be a +9 rather than a +14.
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1) Math is so tight that there isn't room for hyper specialization.This is an interesting contrast to what Red Griffyn said up in comment #51.
Just finished playing one of the L5 PFS scenarios. The boss has a +14 ref save vs. our DC19s. That means there is a 30% chance of a crit success, 50% chance of success, 15% failure, and 5% crit failure. The group was 3 casters and a rogue. He crit saves vs. 2 fireballs, 2 lightning bolts, and 1 gust of wind. He also saves vs. 1 fireball, and 1 sound burst.
So across 7 spells (5 at the highest spell slot clearing out all of two caster's highest spells) he took 12 damage. This happened because monster saves are WAY too high. The math is bad because monsters are easily within a 70%+ range of making saves for most of the game. ...
I see that the three casters chose their 3rd-level spells as three Fireballs and two Lightning Bolts. Both spells take a reflex save and the boss has an unusually good reflex save aided by good dice rolls. He critically saved (no damage) against four of them and regularly saved (half damage) against one. In contract, the 2nd-level Sound Burst and 1st-level Gust of Wind require Fortitude saves and his critical success rate was only 50% rather than 80% against them.
The casters put their best eggs into a single basket, Reflex save. The boss was allowed to hyper-specialize, and happened to be unusually good against that one basket. At least, I hope that boss was specialized in Reflex saves. He would be overpowered if most of his bonuses were that good. A 55% percent success rate against DC 19 would be a +9 rather than a +14.
Actually, if they're referring to the module I think they are, the boss has no ability that allows them to treat a success as a crit success. That means the boss only crit saves on Reflex around 30% of the time and on Fortitude saves 20% of the time. While the boss did seem to have saves closer to a creature 1 level higher than its stat block said, its HP was lower than average. The fact that the boss crit saved on five different spells can be chalked up to both bad spell choice and really good luck on the GM's rolls.
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Just finished playing one of the L5 PFS scenarios. The boss has a +14 ref save vs. our DC19s. That means there is a 30% chance of a crit success, 50% chance of success, 15% failure, and 5% crit failure. The group was 3 casters and a rogue. He crit saves vs. 2 fireballs, 2 lightning bolts, and 1 gust of wind. He also saves vs. 1 fireball, and 1 sound burst.
So across 7 spells (5 at the highest spell slot clearing out all of two caster's highest spells) he took 12 damage. This happened because monster saves are WAY too high. The math is bad because monsters are easily within a 70%+ range of making saves for most of the game. ...
I see that the three casters chose their 3rd-level spells as three Fireballs and two Lightning Bolts. Both spells take a reflex save and the boss has an unusually good reflex save aided by good dice rolls. He critically saved (no damage) against four of them and regularly saved (half damage) against one. In contract, the 2nd-level Sound Burst and 1st-level Gust of Wind require Fortitude saves and his critical success rate was only 50% rather than 80% against them.
The casters put their best eggs into a single basket, Reflex save. The boss was allowed to hyper-specialize, and happened to be unusually good against that one basket. At least, I hope that boss was specialized in Reflex saves. He would be overpowered if most of his bonuses were that good. A 55% percent success rate against DC 19 would be a +9 rather than a +14.
Actually, if they're referring to the module I think they are, the boss has no ability that allows them to treat a success as a crit success. That means the boss only crit saves on Reflex around 30% of the time and on Fortitude saves 20% of the time. While the boss did seem to have saves closer to a creature 1 level higher than its stat block said, its HP was lower than average. The fact that the boss crit saved on five different spells can be chalked up to both bad spell choice and really good luck on the GM's rolls.
Once he said "boss fight," the 50% save rate jumped up to about an 80% save rate due to nothing more than the +3 levels that he boss likely had on the party. Most problems people have with spells is that they attempt to use them in boss fights, and it is utterly disheartening to use a limited resource and get nothing out of it... over and over again. Level disparity means the boss fights are going to be times when frankly nothing any player does works particularly well because the math says so. Already-too-low hit % and please-don't-save-on-this % get punished even further into a high likelihood of the negative outcome for the PCs.
What casters ought do is prepare the only spell that works: Heightened Magic Missile. It's not going to be flashy damage, but it's hit chance is 100%. That alone makes it a superior turn to most everything else you could do.
Greg.Everham's point is good. Since saves now have +1/level rather than the PF1's +1/2 per level for good saves, a boss three levels above the party has higher saves than we PF1 players expect. In addition, since PF2 high save rolls can result in no damage rather than half damage on a non-Evasion Reflex save, that extra-high Reflex save matters more.
However, LuniasM's remark prompted me to download the Pathfinder Society Playtest Scenarios and seek out that boss. The most likely character for that mystery boss is not 3 levels above the 5th-level party. He is creature 6.
Here is a non-spoiler summary of his stats:
Mystery Boss Creature 6: AC 22, TAC 21; Fort +12, Ref +14, Will +11; HP 88; Melee morningstar +15 (versatile P), Damage 2d8+6 bludgeoning
For comparison, here are some other level-6 creatures from the Playtest Bestiary:
Cave Bear Creature 6: AC 20, TAC 18; Fort +13, Ref +9, Will +10; HP 110; Melee claw +15 (agile), Damage 2d8+6 slashing plus Grab
Dinosaur, Ankylosaurus Creature 6: AC 23, TAC 18; Fort +14, Ref +9, Will +7; HP 72; Melee tail +14 (backswing, reach 15 feet), Damage 2d8+7 bludgeoning plus punishing tail
Dragon, Young White Creature 6: AC 20, TAC 17; Fort +13, Ref +11, Will +9; HP 120, Immunities asleep, cold, paralyzed, Weaknesses fire 5; Melee jaws +14 (reach 10 feet), Damage 1d10+8 piercing plus 2d6 cold
Manticore Creature 6: AC 20, TAC 18; Fort +13, Ref +10, Will +7; HP 95; Melee jaws +15, Damage 2d8+7 piercing
Mummy Retainer Creature 6: AC 20, TAC 17; Fort +9, Ref +6, Will +12; HP 90, negative healing; Immunities asleep, death effects, disease, paralysis, poison; Weaknesses fire 8; Melee fist +15, Damage 3d6+5 bludgeoning plus mummy rot
Wraith Creature 6: AC 20, TAC 20; Fort +7, Ref +10, Will +11; HP 65, negative healing; Immunities asleep, death effects, disease, nonmagical attacks, paralysis, poison, precision; Resistances all 5 (except force, ghost touch, or positive); Melee spectral hand +14 touch, Damage 2d8+5 negative plus drain life
But suppose I made some hostile NPCs of character classes.
Half-Orc Bandit Fighter 6: AC 26, TAC 23; Fort +9, Ref +11, Will +8; HP 82; Melee +1 necksplitter +13 Damage 2d8+4 slashing, forceful, orc, versatile P + 1d4+1 bleed on crit
due to Str 19, Dex 18, Con 14, Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 10
AC 26 = 10 + 4 (+1 hide armor) + 4 (Dex) + 6 (Proficiency) + 2 (circumstance from Raised Shield)
Weapon Mastery on knives, and the orc necksplitter is a knife.
The mystery boss has +2 to every save beyond the average creature 6 and +3 beyond the half-orc bandit. By the standards of the tight math of PF2, he is hyper-specialized in saves, despite lacking Evasion. His Ref +14 is +6 level, maybe +1 expert, +2 Dex modifier, and +5 monster bonus.
Since the boss has other defenses, too, blasting seems a smart attack against him. (Well, his picture does look high Dexterity, so not 100% smart.) This is a trap and it is not fair.
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Well, a 50/50 success chance (against level-appropriate challenges) is at least consistent and doesn't discriminate, unlike the "will always succeed/will never succeed" of PF1. Melee-oriented PF1 characters (except Rogues and Monks) would ALWAYS hit due to +atk scaling up faster than AC, but they would *never* grapple (unless hyperspecialised after a massive dumpster dive through sourcebooks) against anything bigger than Large. Repeat for several other dichotomies, add the binary pass/fail nature of things and you end up with an optimizers heaven and a casual players' nightmare. Wheee, so much fun, as long as you have way too much free time in your life to twink your character. And as long as everybody at the table does the same. And people wonder why 5E has pretty much beaten Pathfinder to the ground.
But PF1 is not going anywhere away, you can still have your +37 Diplomancer or archerdin.
That’s not just a pathfinder 1 problem, you can break 5th edition easily as well in fact magic in 5th edition is better than in pathfinder, as for people being ‘too good at skills’ that’s the point if I invest feats and skill ranks in being better at something guess what I want to be BETTER, in the playtest trying to optomize skills is pointless since NPC’s remotely close to your level are just better than you, there’s no feeling of progress when you level you are merely treading water just trying to remain relevant in a system where everything is designed to upstage you and remind you that you’re actually not the heroes of the story you’re the side characters who’ve lasted longer than the GM expected.
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A lot of things look "fun" on paper but aren't that "fun" in practice.
Take the classic 3.5/PF situation, where I have +15 to a skill with my Slayer, which makes me feel that the math is fun because double digits and I hit high numbers and I got rewarded for being specialised. And I'm better than the Cleric, because with her crap skill point count and ACP and whatanot she's at +5 to that skill.
BUT
it also means that the GM has a very hard time making a challenge for a group when one person is at +15 and the other are at +5. Such challenge is either impossible for them or trivial for me. If it's trivial, well, where's the challenge, if it's impossible - woe be to the party if I don't turn up for the game, or if my PC gets kidnapped by the bad guys, or if for any other reason my super-specialised ability is unavilable. Bummer.
I think this is an aspect that gets overlooked or at least not talked about enough: The math also needs to be fun for the GM. The PF1 math-discrepancy has led to quite a lot of frustration on my end as a GM and has made the game not fun on my end, especially since quite a few unexperienced players have joined our group over the years. I know quite a few GMs who had similar problems and it made designing encounters quite difficult and tedious, which led to no one running any Pathfinder games anymore in my area, even though the hobby has grown quite a bit over the last couple of years.
With PF2 math, most common challenges (eg. sneaking among sleepy orcs, climbing a cliff, swimming upstream) can be attempted by the entire party, not just by one or two super-specialised PCs. Does that take away some fun out of hyperspecialisation? Sure it does. But on the other hand, it allows more challenges where the entire party can succeed, leaving them less dependant on hyper-specialist, discourages gamey character advancement ("OK we need everybody to max Perception and now we need to split Knowledges, Sense Motive, Stealth,...
The reason it’s looked at so heavily from a player perspective is pretty simple, if your players hate it you won’t have a group to GM for, furthermore if people wanted a game where it’s always 50/50 most of the time they wouldn’t bother rolling up characters they’d have the gm tell a story where we let coin flips decide everything, same thing but no one has to wast 30-60 minutes rolling characters.
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So there's an idea I've seen floated around a bunch that PF2 HAS to have tighter math because of the +10/-10 thing making it so that people would be critically succeeding all over the place, and I'm not actually sure that is true. I don't recall the devs saying it specifically, and I pay unusually close attention to the Paizo staff when they talk about the design of PF2.
Yes, if bonuses get higher, critical successes will be more common. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing? Like, if you invest in something enough to not fail at it, you probably will be pretty happy if you critically succeed at it a lot. This is especially true in a system where somethings can only be achieved with a critical result-- I'm looking at disarming and pinning enemies, for example.
I think the reason for the tighter math has been made stated up front-- to reduce the ridiculous disparity you could get within the same party between two characters who invest in the same thing. I think there's room for that to be true and still move the needle in the direction of characters succeeding more often than failing.
The +10/-10 thing DOES make each +1 more valuable, but that doesn't mean you can't have a great bonus. It just means that bonus can be even more awesome. In PF1, by the time you crossed certain thresholds your bonus stopped mattering. If you hit on a 2, the die roll only mattered if you rolled in your weapons crit range. In PF2, if you hit on a 2, that means you crit on a 12 and that is exciting.
I don't know that the Paizo has the needle in the right place, but I don't think the system itself prevents them from getting it there.
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So there's an idea I've seen floated around a bunch that PF2 HAS to have tighter math because of the +10/-10 thing making it so that people would be critically succeeding all over the place, and I'm not actually sure that is true. I don't recall the devs saying it specifically, and I pay unusually close attention to the Paizo staff when they talk about the design of PF2.
Yes, if bonuses get higher, critical successes will be more common. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing? Like, if you invest in something enough to not fail at it, you probably will be pretty happy if you critically succeed at it a lot. This is especially true in a system where somethings can only be achieved with a critical result-- I'm looking at disarming and pinning enemies, for example.
I think the reason for the tighter math has been made stated up front-- to reduce the ridiculous disparity you could get within the same party between two characters who invest in the same thing. I think there's room for that to be true and still move the needle in the direction of characters succeeding more often than failing.
The +10/-10 thing DOES make each +1 more valuable, but that doesn't mean you can't have a great bonus. It just means that bonus can be even more awesome. In PF1, by the time you crossed certain thresholds your bonus stopped mattering. If you hit on a 2, the die roll only mattered if you rolled in your weapons crit range. In PF2, if you hit on a 2, that means you crit on a 12 and that is exciting.
I don't know that the Paizo has the needle in the right place, but I don't think the system itself prevents them from getting it there.
As someone who I think falls into the group of those who think the +/-10 system necessitates tighter math (not that I think this is inherently bad or good), I want to posit something:
If you assume a hit rate of 55%, then +3 to attack bonus is +50%, as if your damage on a successful attack is X, then the damage base is 0.5*X+0.05*2X, for 0.6X, where as with a +3 bonus, it's 0.5X+0.2*2*X for 0.9X. If you assume different hit rates, the impact of each +1 will tend to be lower, as for most hit rates, you reach a value of less than +16.67% for each +1. Now this might not be an issue much, but will deviate from the assumptions of the devs, and might make crits too assumed, or too overpowered, depending on the assumed hit rate. By deviating from the +/-10 system, the assumed hit rate doesn't have to be tied to the effect of crits on their design of monsters.
Now I don't know that they couldn't adjust for monster HP and monster AC, to allow for monsters that are more easily hittable, but take more hits to take down (accounting for the increase in crits), and this is even something I've advocated for, but the longer I've considered this, the more I don't know that tying crit chance and hit chance as a 1:1 ratio is a reasonable option. I don't disagree with some of the posivives, such as ease of play or the value of a +1, but, I don't know that it works best on the whole, in part due to tighter math, and in part due to the values desired by that math.
The mystery boss has +2 to every save beyond the average creature 6 and +3 beyond the half-orc bandit. By the standards of the tight math of PF2, he is hyper-specialized in saves, despite lacking Evasion. His Ref +14 is +6 level, maybe +1 expert, +2 Dex modifier, and +5 monster bonus.
Since the boss has other defenses, too, blasting seems a smart attack against him. (Well, his picture does look high Dexterity, so not 100% smart.) This is a trap and it is not fair.
Lemme do a breakdown.
The boss has the attack bonus and damage of an average Level 6 creature, and slightly less HP than most Level 6 creatures. Personally I would've given it HP closer to a Level 5 creature to offset its higher defenses, but Your Mileage May Vary.
The party consisted of 1 Rogue and 3 unspecified spellcasters. From my DPS calculations I can say that Rogues really need to get Sneak Attack to keep up with the more offensively-inclined martial classes, and flanking is usually the easiest way to do so. Without flanking the Rogue would need to find a way to make the boss Flatfooted, which can be hard for a Rogue to set up without support (especially since Bottled Lightning, the second-most reliable source, would likely miss due to range penalties).
As for the Casters, while we don't know their builds we do know that 5/7 spells given were damage spells targeting Reflex - the boss's strongest save. Even then, the boss has a 30% chance to take no damage and a 50% chance to take half damage. The fact that the boss critically saved on 4/5 is unusual - the GM would've needed to roll a 15+ four times. The GM even crit-saved vs Gust of Wind, the one spell cast that could've possibly limited the boss's mobility long enough to set up a flank for the Rogue. They needed to roll a 17+ to crit save against that. Basically, the GM's dice were on fire.
So, recap - the party's only martial character depends on the Flatfooted condition, and the two easiest ways to make that happen were countered by high mobility. Without Sneak Attack, the boss easily outdamages the Rogue. The party's casters focused heavily on damage spells targeting Reflex, and on top of being the boss's strongest save the GM also had a lucky streak of high rolls. The only spell that could've made the Rogue's job easier was negated, again, thanks to a lucky roll.
IMO, this fight was hard but doable. Any single factor being different could've evened the odds - if the boss hadn't crit-saved against as many spells, if the party's spell selection was more varied, if they managed to reduce the boss's mobility, if they had spells targeting TAC instead of Reflex, etc. It seems to me that a number of factors combined to create the perfect storm, and as a result the encounter ended up being far more difficult than usual. Personally the boss didn't have a low enough HP to compensate for higher defenses, but I'd call it either a strong Level 6 or a weak Level 7 creature based on its stats.
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The mystery boss has +2 to every save beyond the average creature 6 and +3 beyond the half-orc bandit. By the standards of the tight math of PF2, he is hyper-specialized in saves, despite lacking Evasion. His Ref +14 is +6 level, maybe +1 expert, +2 Dex modifier, and +5 monster bonus.
Since the boss has other defenses, too, blasting seems a smart attack against him. (Well, his picture does look high Dexterity, so not 100% smart.) This is a trap and it is not fair.
Lemme do a breakdown.
** spoiler omitted **...
Yeah I honestly don't see anything wrong with these numbers for a boss fight. Bosses should be hard to take down. And you should feel like you need to spend absolutely everything to take them down. Especially if you are targeting their best saving throw.
A complaint I always had with PF1e was that boss fights very rarely feel epic. It's usually goes like "ok we survived his turn now let's just try to end him with our turns" and with the all damage design of PF1e where you are actively punished for making defensive characters that usually mean't every boss fight lasted 2 or 3 rounds of full attacks and spells. Or even 1 round if you managed to get off a save or die spell like hold person at lower levels, or baleful polymorph.
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Yeah I honestly don't see anything wrong with these numbers for a boss fight. Bosses should be hard to take down. And you should feel like you need to spend absolutely everything to take them down. Especially if you are targeting their best saving throw.
Everything, or everything they have left? There's a difference. And, if the boss is too far out of whack defensively, then you won't be able to touch them and it just becomes a lethal grind. Grinds are not fun.
A complaint I always had with PF1e was that boss fights very rarely feel epic. It's usually goes like "ok we survived his turn now let's just try to end him with our turns"
Boss fights in general do not work because of the action economy. You have to add minions, mess with the terrain, impose conditions on the party, and other trickery to make them expend their resources on more than just killing the boss. That's how you get an epic fight.
The epic battle against the solo boss is great in movies, but it doesn't work in turn-based RPG's. Buffing the boss is not a great solution to this problem because it just becomes a grind and, as above, grinds are not fun.
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A complaint I always had with PF1e was that boss fights very rarely feel epic.More hit points (always the best thing to target in any encounter) and less save or die/suck helps. They seem to be addressing both of those, which is nice.
There are no official boss monsters in 3rd Ed/PF1, per se, it would be nice for PF2 to have boss/solo types with more actions and reactions (something like Legendary monsters in 5th Ed, which could be improved).
Yeah I agree. Stuff like multiple reactions, maybe even giving them two initiatives where they get to act twice in one turn. That'd be interesting.
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Yeah I honestly don't see anything wrong with these numbers for a boss fight. Bosses should be hard to take down. And you should feel like you need to spend absolutely everything to take them down. Especially if you are targeting their best saving throw.The mystery boss has +2 to every save beyond the average creature 6 and +3 beyond the half-orc bandit. By the standards of the tight math of PF2, he is hyper-specialized in saves, despite lacking Evasion. His Ref +14 is +6 level, maybe +1 expert, +2 Dex modifier, and +5 monster bonus.
Since the boss has other defenses, too, blasting seems a smart attack against him. (Well, his picture does look high Dexterity, so not 100% smart.) This is a trap and it is not fair.
Lemme do a breakdown.
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I am not familiar with playing Pathfinder Society Scenarios. I have purchased the PDFs of two scenarios before in order to borrow elements for a campaign, but I did not play by PFS rules.
Does your explanation mean that a Creature 6 is supposed to be a full-fledged risking-TPK boss against a 5th-level party in PFS? He appears to have been the final encounter.
A complaint I always had with PF1e was that boss fights very rarely feel epic. It's usually goes like "ok we survived his turn now let's just try to end him with our turns" and with the all damage design of PF1e where you are actively punished for making defensive characters that usually mean't every boss fight lasted 2 or 3 rounds of full attacks and spells. Or even 1 round if you managed to get off a save or die spell like hold person at lower levels, or baleful polymorph.
I learned how to fix that. Preparing for an epic battle requires building the battle around the strengths of the party and the strengths of the opponent. Knowing how each side could fare against the specific attacks favored by the other side let me keep it difficult.
PF1 does not punish defensive characters. PF1 punishes characters who rely on passive defenses such as AC and saving throws. Characters who defend themselves by hiding, or by turning incorporeal, or by flying before the party can fly, or by distracting the party with champion lieutenants, or by slamming and barring a door in their faces stay alive. I have had bosses survive by taking a 5-foot-step backwards and casting Dimension Door. One of my nastiest bosses had multiple simulacrum of himself scattered around the stronghold and would swap places with them. That boss was finally taken down by Baleful Polymorph, but I had made tracking him down the main part of the followup adventure, so it wasn't a disappointment.
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Setting up challenges that reward specialisation (eg. being a Master/Legend in a skill) and provide the party with optional yet relevant rewards is one thing, ensuring that a relatively simple task (sneaking past a bunch of hobgoblin guards, swimming across a ford) doesn't become a festival of hilarious failure by supposedly heroic characters is another.
They're not mutually exclusive, but under 3.5/PF1, you could do the former, but the latter was virtually impossible. Sure, you could magic the problem away, but that only reinforced the status of caster as godlike beings and martials as meatsack beatsticks.
Thats still a problem, though. Skills that have critical failure conditions are best not used by the entire party. Like Recall Knowledge. You want your specialist doing that.
Why?
They have much less chance to critically fail and thus avoid actively sabotaging the group. If your entire party rolls that, the untrained guy is far more likely to completely screw the whole thing up by getting wrong information the party will then have to stop and argue about.
The real problem here is that there's only a narrow range of numbers where you won't wind up with a specialist banging out critical successes and everyone else banging out critical failures frequently. That leaves the game keeping everyone in that narrow range, and thus it doesn't feel like you're progressing at all or that your "legendary" skill character is actually particularly better than the guy who took the basic two day course in how to do the same thing.
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But when rolls like Lingering Composition and Medicine automatically increase in DC as you increase in level, it just feels WRONG. You are automatically getting worse every level, your level increase, ability increases, skill feats, and items have to be spent just to fight this all-consuming entropy.
This reminds me of the Oblivion. When I first got it, I wandered around a bit. Ended up in a dungeon or something. Killed a few things. Gained a level, so I rested to apply it.
Suddenly, everything in the dungeon I'm in has also levelled up. Some stuff also got gear upgrades, and they actually gained more that level than I did because of it. It felt so ridiculous and cheesy that I never picked the game up again.
That's how I feel when the DC to do a thing like Medicine goes up for no apparent reason just because we levelled. That +1 we gained to it for levelling is negated automatically and really what was the point?
It makes no sense that it gets harder for me to bandage a papercut at level 10 than at level 1. None.
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But when rolls like Lingering Composition and Medicine automatically increase in DC as you increase in level, it just feels WRONG. You are automatically getting worse every level, your level increase, ability increases, skill feats, and items have to be spent just to fight this all-consuming entropy.This reminds me of the Oblivion. When I first got it, I wandered around a bit. Ended up in a dungeon or something. Killed a few things. Gained a level, so I rested to apply it.
Suddenly, everything in the dungeon I'm in has also levelled up. Some stuff also got gear upgrades, and they actually gained more that level than I did because of it. It felt so ridiculous and cheesy that I never picked the game up again.
That's how I feel when the DC to do a thing like Medicine goes up for no apparent reason just because we levelled. That +1 we gained to it for levelling is negated automatically and really what was the point?
It makes no sense that it gets harder for me to bandage a papercut at level 10 than at level 1. None.
But you heal more HP. People keep forgetting (or just avoid considering) that.
I would still like an option to "undercast" Treat Wounds, but it's NOT like your DC increases for nothing.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
But you heal more HP. People keep forgetting (or just avoid considering) that.
I would still like an option to "undercast" Treat Wounds, but it's NOT like your DC increases for nothing.
I like the succinctness of this reply. One short paragraph explains the correct aspect of the math and the other short paragraph contrasts it to the fun aspect of the math. It fits right into the topic, "Correct Math vs Fun Math."
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I like the succinctness of this reply. One short paragraph explains the correct aspect of the math and the other short paragraph contrasts it to the fun aspect of the math. It fits right into the topic, "Correct Math vs Fun Math."But you heal more HP. People keep forgetting (or just avoid considering) that.
I would still like an option to "undercast" Treat Wounds, but it's NOT like your DC increases for nothing.
If they are clashing then why not redesign the ability so it no longer is frustrating?
Treat Wounds: You make a Medicine check DC 10. You heal 1 hit point to up to 6 creatures +1 hit point for every number over 10 your check results in. If you roll a 1 you can no longer use this ability for the day. If you roll a 20 double the result healed. (some conditions may change the critical failure/success ranges of this ability).
Now you never get worse - you can still fail no matter what level you are - and your skill always gets better. Numbers can be adjusted (like - if you are expert in medicine double your healing per DC beat, if you are master in this you can remove ability damage as well etc).
Just saying there is design space to allow for the effect to work, without needing 'undercasting' or needing scaling DC's.
The reason you cannot lower the DC of heal checks is so that you don't have guaranteed success to heal any HP. If you could do that then you'd just make 50 treat wounds checks in a row to max out HP, even if each one only heals a little from the low DC.
The logic was that if DC is high, then you'd at least Crit Fail eventually.
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The reason you cannot lower the DC of heal checks is so that you don't have guaranteed success to heal any HP. If you could do that then you'd just make 50 treat wounds checks in a row to max out HP, even if each one only heals a little from the low DC.
The logic was that if DC is high, then you'd at least Crit Fail eventually.
My one experience with Treat Wounds was this Tuesday in the In Pale Mountain's Shadow chapter of Doomsday Dawn. The wizard and barbarian were badly injured--the barbarian had been dying until her player spent a Hero Point. The Superstition-totem barbarian used her once-an-hour self heal. Next, the alchemist with a +5 to Medicine started using Treat Wounds, DC 16. Thirty minutes later, after one success, one failure, and one critical failure, she passed the Healer's Tools to the wizard with a +4 in Medicine. Thirty more minutes of Treaat Wounds yielded two successes and one failure. The barbarian used her Superstition self-healing again and suggested that the wizard drink the alchemist's Elixirs of Life so that they could get moving again.
Time, rather than critical failure, appeared to be the limiting factor on Treat Wounds. And another success would have healed everyone to full, so that was another limit, perhaps the real one in this case.
The reason you cannot lower the DC of heal checks is so that you don't have guaranteed success to heal any HP. If you could do that then you'd just make 50 treat wounds checks in a row to max out HP, even if each one only heals a little from the low DC.
The logic was that if DC is high, then you'd at least Crit Fail eventually.
My one experience with Treat Wounds was this Tuesday in the In Pale Mountain's Shadow chapter of Doomsday Dawn. The wizard and barbarian were badly injured--the barbarian had been dying until her player spent a Hero Point. The Superstition-totem barbarian used her once-an-hour self heal. Next, the alchemist with a +5 to Medicine started using Treat Wounds, DC 16. Thirty minutes later, after one success, one failure, and one critical failure, she passed the Healer's Tools to the wizard with a +4 in Medicine. Thirty more minutes of Treaat Wounds yielded two successes and one failure. The barbarian used her Superstition self-healing again and suggested that the wizard drink the alchemist's Elixirs of Life so that they could get moving again.
Time, rather than critical failure, appeared to be the limiting factor on Treat Wounds. And another success would have healed everyone to full, so that was another limit, perhaps the real one in this case.
Yep. I see no reason everyone wouldn't get Trained in medicine just to keep the healing rolling as long as you have the time.
Yep. I see no reason everyone wouldn't get Trained in medicine just to keep the healing rolling as long as you have the time.The reason you cannot lower the DC of heal checks is so that you don't have guaranteed success to heal any HP. If you could do that then you'd just make 50 treat wounds checks in a row to max out HP, even if each one only heals a little from the low DC.
The logic was that if DC is high, then you'd at least Crit Fail eventually.
My one experience with Treat Wounds was this Tuesday in the In Pale Mountain's Shadow chapter of Doomsday Dawn. The wizard and barbarian were badly injured--the barbarian had been dying until her player spent a Hero Point. The Superstition-totem barbarian used her once-an-hour self heal. Next, the alchemist with a +5 to Medicine started using Treat Wounds, DC 16. Thirty minutes later, after one success, one failure, and one critical failure, she passed the Healer's Tools to the wizard with a +4 in Medicine. Thirty more minutes of Treaat Wounds yielded two successes and one failure. The barbarian used her Superstition self-healing again and suggested that the wizard drink the alchemist's Elixirs of Life so that they could get moving again.
Time, rather than critical failure, appeared to be the limiting factor on Treat Wounds. And another success would have healed everyone to full, so that was another limit, perhaps the real one in this case.
This.
The 50 easy checks mentioned mean that you are resting for more than the canonical 8 hours, after all. If you have that much time, you can just camp and sleep.Now, rolling the d20 fifty times can be boring, that's true.