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At first I liked the +/- 10 success system. I thought it was cool, and there is a pleasant, natural consequence of beating (or failing) a DC by such a large margin. It feels like something ought to happen for managing that, and I do very much like that it does.
But over time I've come to realize that PF1 did it better. In the places where it matters (because even with the PF2 system not every check has a result for all 4 tiers of success) I think that codifying everything to +/- 10 turns out to actually be unnecessarily limiting at best. Allow me to explain a little more in-depth.
Let's look at survival as a prime example. PF2 survival has the following results: Success: You survive with enough to sustain yourself; Critical Success: you survive with enough to sustain yourself and 1 other, or make your own survival comfortable; Failure: You don't get enough to survive; Critical Failure: Not only did you suck, but you also broke your legs and an owlbear came by an urinated on you (paraphrase).
Now let's look at PF1 survival. It still has a DC you must achieve in order to sustain yourself, but it has the ability to assist in the survival of others for every increment by which you beat the DC. If you are a survivalist, you can reasonably expect to use your skills to help your whole party and (pulling a little from Ironfang Invasion) if you have a party of survivalists, you can reasonably expect to use your combined skills to feed and shelter yourselves plus a gaggle of refugees. But consider that same situation converted into PF2. At best you can provide food and shelter for N*2 creatures, where N is the number of survivalists in the group.
There are several other places where one can make a similar comparison between PF1 degrees of success and PF2 degrees of success, and in many cases the PF2 crit success having only one, and fixed, increment turns out to be more limiting in terms of over-success threshold and what reaching that threshold allows. Sure, the math is easy - adding +/- 10 is trivial for most people, I think.
But what if, instead, we made the system a hybrid of the PF1 degrees of success and the spell heightening mechanics?
Let's take a look at survival again and I can give you an example of what I mean:
Success: You forage for enough food for yourself and your shelter gives you basic protection from the elements, providing a subsistence living.
Success (+X): You also provide basic food and shelter for 1 additional person, or provide comfortable subsistence living for 1 creature for which you are already providing basic food and shelter.
Failure: You are exposed to the elements and don't get enough food, becoming fatigued until you get enough food and shelter. (The skill text can provide the stipulation that if you don't attempt the check yourself, you automatically receive a result of failure unless another creature includes you in their success).
Now let's take a look at some other, less obvious areas where the 4 degrees of success are partially applied and see how this change might interact with them. Let's look at the Nalfeshnee (Boar Demon) and its Greedy Grab reaction ability.
PF2 Current Version:
Trigger: A creature critically fails a weapon Strike against the boar demon.
Effect: The boar demon tries to snatch the weapon used in the triggering Strike by attempting an Athletics check to Disarm the boar demon(?) at a –2 penalty. On a success or critical success, the boar demon takes the weapon into one of its hands instead of the normal success effect.
Revised Version:
Trigger: A creature fails a weapon Strike against the boar demon by X or more.
Effect The boar demon tries to snatch the weapon used in the triggering Strike by attempting an Athletics check to Disarm at a –2 penalty. If successful, the boar demon takes the weapon into one of its hands instead of the normal effect.
Or how about pick a lock?
PF2 Current Version:
Success: You gain 1 success toward opening the lock.
Critical Success: You gain 2 successes toward opening the lock.
(Bonus) Quick Unlock Skill Feat: When you succeed at a check to pick a lock, you gain 2 successes instead of 1. When you critically succeed at such a check, you gain 3 successes instead of 2.
Revised Version:
Success: You gain 1 success toward opening the lock.
Success (+X): You gain 1 additional success toward opening the lock.
(Bonus) Quick Unlock Skill Feat: Add 1 success to any successful result when you pick a lock.
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I could go on, but I'd like to think that this is enough to show that not only is this revision often more concise, but it's more versatile in practice. It gives the freedom to make that "+X" whatever is most appropriate for the situation instead of one blanket number, but it also now opens up the design space for potentially unlimited degrees of success where appropriate. Legendary survivalist leading a whole army through the hidden path in the swamp to encircle the enemy? Check. Master lock-picker getting the vault open in the time it takes for another character to wonder aloud about the combination? Check. With less reliance on specific numbers and specific categories, the whole thing has the room to breathe and be more robust, and there should also less need to so tightly control the size of the numbers that characters are allowed to have.
EDIT: Forgot to include, if you still only want there to be 1 degree of success you can still use the spell heightening convention. So a DC 15 check that has only one additional success result at +10 might look like this:
Success: Text
Success (25): moar text
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I like it. There are a lot of skills that don't really feel like the critical success is tuned quite right, and skills overall being designed around critical success causes issues. One thing I'm wondering though:
Legendary survivalist leading a whole army through the hidden path in the swamp to encircle the enemy? Check.
Are you suggesting something like:
Success: Effect X
Success (+Y): Effect X, plus bonus.
Success (+Z, Legendary): Effect X, plus bigger bonus.
Because I think I like it, though I wonder how big skill usage blocks would be, if you have multiple degrees of success, in addition to different success conditions based on proficiency. I still think I like it, but it feels like it could get a bit overwhelming for some.
For the most part, I agree. I think that your suggestion is reasonable and simple to implement. Survival should really scale with the only limitations being the total roll and the terrain (e.g. no food in the Astral plane - not that you need to eat there).
I like +10/-10 triggering a critical success/failure. I know it's a major factor in the system's tight math but I'm still a fan largely due to how my players have embraced it. It's intuitive, dynamic, and - at least for my groups - fun.
But I'm mixed on the four degrees of success. I, generally, like them for spells, attacks (noting that Strikes got off easy), and saving throws. I don't like that certain Skill based actions now only have four outcomes - scaling results need to return for certain Skill usages. It's also a bit silly that a warrior can never critically fail a Strike (barring another ability in play) but a Legendary Healer can still critically fail Medicine.
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I like it. There are a lot of skills that don't really feel like the critical success is tuned quite right, and skills overall being designed around critical success causes issues. One thing I'm wondering though:
Legendary survivalist leading a whole army through the hidden path in the swamp to encircle the enemy? Check.Are you suggesting something like:
Success: Effect X
Success (+Y): Effect X, plus bonus.
Success (+Z, Legendary): Effect X, plus bigger bonus.Because I think I like it, though I wonder how big skill usage blocks would be, if you have multiple degrees of success, in addition to different success conditions based on proficiency. I still think I like it, but it feels like it could get a bit overwhelming for some.
I wasn't suggesting that specifically, but such a thing would be simple to implement in the places where it would be appropriate - whether through natural inclusion or by way of feat somewhere. But it's a great example of the versatility of the overall idea in that it can easily expand to encompass that idea, where the +/- 10 system would require much more explanation along the lines of, "replace the existing critical success result with this critical success result," or something like it.
The actual thought in my head at time of writing was that the DC to navigate the hidden path in the swamp was fixed at whatever number, but the Legendary survivalist being high-level and having a large bonus would beat that DC by many more increments than another character might. But I do like what you proposed as an auxiliary way to further reward specialization, either through feat or just virtue of having the higher proficiency.
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I like +10/-10 triggering a critical success/failure. I know it's a major factor in the system's tight math but I'm still a fan largely due to how my players have embraced it. It's intuitive, dynamic, and - at least for my groups - fun.But I'm mixed on the four degrees of success. I, generally, like them for spells, attacks (noting that Strikes got off easy), and saving throws. I don't like that certain Skill based actions now only have four outcomes - scaling results need to return for certain Skill usages. It's also a bit silly that a warrior can never critically fail a Strike (barring another ability in play) but a Legendary Healer can still critically fail Medicine.
One of the benefits of unchaining the degrees of success from the +/- 10 is that it still lets you use 10 as that number where appropriate - it's just not codified as the Always Threshold, which means that in places where a smaller (or larger!) number would work better you don't have to futz with the math or the sizes of the results in order to get the balance you want.
And consider the case of the attack roll, one could make it a single degree of success for +10, or you could go really crazy and add another critical for each 10 by which you beat the AC. The point is that one part of the system doesn't care what degrees of success any other part of the system does or doesn't have and what sizes they're based on.
This is the best thing I've probably read on this forum. +10/10 is sometimes too big of a gap and sometimes too small and the game would benefit a lot more form fine-tuning each mechanic to get the exact odds of triggering it since the +-10 is just too limited to be generic.
With this you could pretty much fix any of those elements in the game that are screwed from the critical math. For example, the power critical hits with weapons causes their success rate to be intentionally small, which in turns also makes it very hard to crit on the much less overpowering skills.
Yes, it's a lot more to learn and will require memorizing/checking tables, but it's worth it for the health of the game.
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I have to say that I like this idea a whole lot, actually - this would also solve some of the oddities with, for instance, the new Treat Wounds ability, where instead of scaling with your character, a higher level character achieves a higher and higher degrees of success against the same check.
This would also solve some of the oddities with, for instance, the new Treat Wounds ability, where instead of scaling with your character, a higher level character achieves a higher and higher degrees of success against the same check.
It certainly feels like a more intuitively consequential relationship of experience to results.
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I've come to similar conclusions about the crit system and its effects on the math of the game. It's too rigid, and has a stranglehold over the system.
My solution would be to adjust crits to +5/-5, and to express the effect of those crits in a similar format to heightening, with multiple levels of crit being possible. If you get a bonus for every 5 points by which you beat the DC it would be crit +1, if you get a bonus for every 10 it would be crit +2, and so on. For the sake of clarity, I would call the levels of critical failure botch -1, botch -2 and so on.
So an entry on might look something like this:
Success: You deal damage normally.
Crit +2: You deal an additional damage die on top of the normal damage.
Failure: You deal no damage.
Botch -4: You drop your weapon and are filled with immense shame at your failure.
Not only would this allow for a tremendous amount of flexibility in the math, it would even allow for multiple crit or botch effects that trigger at different levels of success. And it's simple and takes up no more page space that the rigid 4 degrees we have now.
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I really like this idea, it would make it so we don't need so many scaling DCs to prevent auto-critical on checks from a few levels ago, and needing to roll a Nat 20 to pass something that would be trivial for a higher level character.
But I believe it might have a couple issues if we are too varied with the ranges. For example, a Player wants to do something unexpected, DM finds or sets the DC at 16. In the current system if the player rolls a 26 or a 6 the DM knows if they've Botched or Crit, and if the DM told the player the DC they also know how they did, so fewer hard feelings.
Issue being if crits can be anywhere from +1 to +10 the DM then has to think what a +/-4 critical is worth, then on top of that what hitting +8 means. And then the player rolling a 23 might think they crit when the DM set the crit range at +/-8s, which might make the player feel slightly cheated.
A way around this would be to standardize what types of roll crit with which numbers. For example, keeping Attack rolls as +/-10, then change skill check to +/-5, then for an epic campaign roll like a unique ritual every +/-2 meaning something horrible or wonderful. I think it would help reduce mental gymnastics.
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I really like this idea, it would make it so we don't need so many scaling DCs to prevent auto-critical on checks from a few levels ago, and needing to roll a Nat 20 to pass something that would be trivial for a higher level character.
But I believe it might have a couple issues if we are too varied with the ranges. For example, a Player wants to do something unexpected, DM finds or sets the DC at 16. In the current system if the player rolls a 26 or a 6 the DM knows if they've Botched or Crit, and if the DM told the player the DC they also know how they did, so fewer hard feelings.
Issue being if crits can be anywhere from +1 to +10 the DM then has to think what a +/-4 critical is worth, then on top of that what hitting +8 means. And then the player rolling a 23 might think they crit when the DM set the crit range at +/-8s, which might make the player feel slightly cheated.
A way around this would be to standardize what types of roll crit with which numbers. For example, keeping Attack rolls as +/-10, then change skill check to +/-5, then for an epic campaign roll like a unique ritual every +/-2 meaning something horrible or wonderful. I think it would help reduce mental gymnastics.
I don't really see where the player feeling cheated comes in, as in most instances, it wouldn't be the GM setting the crit range. For attacks, it'd likely be listed in the Strike entry (which pretty much all attacks fall into, outside of spells), and for Spells, in the individual spell entry. For skills, I can see the case for standardization, but not because of GM fiat, but because it'd make it easier in play not to remember "If I roll below DC-6 for Climbing I'll fall, but if I roll below DC-8 for Swiming, I'll start to sink, and if I roll DC +12, on Craft, I'll double my progress." But mainly only for routine skill uses, and I can see the GM changing stuff in some cases, like making a particular bit of knowledge require DC +10 or more, for obscure knowledge or the like, (though, doing this in PF1e, I typically stuck to multiples of 5 anyway). But skill feats I could see breaking this pattern, if necessary (though it's hard for me to picture when that would be), as players would probably be able to either have a copy of that skill feat ready, or be able to note down the DC cutoffs wherever they note the effects of the feat.
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I think there's probably room to have a note for GMs in the Running The Game chapters that suggests that +/- 10 is a good starting point for consideration when coming up with DCs and schemes on the fly, since it makes for easy math and has a good range that makes it special. I included this style of skill writing in my example reworking of the Diplomacy skill, so anyone can check out how I think this would end up looking in more detail. Credit to Tholomyes for the formatting suggestion I used in some places.
After spending some time with the system i feel like the crit system interrupts the flow of the game. I know its not much but every time you have to stop and do some calculations. I'd rather be playing the game than doing math.
I'll say the same thing I've said about the playtest book - I am unsure until I play it in game. However I am familiar with the mechanic due to PF 1 and like how it sounds - so +1 in terms of would love to play it and compare.
That's very similar to a house rule that my group has been using with a number of d20 games (PF1 included): "each 5 points over success do something good". However, we survived by "something good" being arbitrary, at GM's discretion, to avoid extra tables and complications. This is particularly useful with Knowledge and Social skills, which can havce many-many degrees of success.
I know it works great, but I doubt I am going to ever see it in official rules.
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"Each 5 points over" is already a PF1 rule for Knowledge skills...
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Don't they already have a Skill Feat that allows for a character with Survival to provide Food/Shelter for more people? I'm pretty sure it also scales up with proficiency as well.
Forager
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While Surviving in the Wilderness during downtime, you can always find enough food and water to provide yourself a subsistence living (provided you aren’t in an area that’s completely lacking in appropriate resources). If you are trained but not better, finding food and water for another or providing a comfortable living still requires you to attempt Survival checks and hope for a critical success; onany other successful result, you still find only enough for your own subsistence.
If you’re an expert, even without rolling you can always find enough food and water for your own comfortable living or subsistence living for yourself and one other creature that eats roughly as much as a human, and on a critical success you find enough for a second additional creature.
If you’re a master, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and one other or subsistence living for yourself and two others without rolling, and you can provide for twice as many others on a critical success.
If you’re legendary, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and four others or subsistence living for yourself and eight others without rolling, but a critical success provides no additional benefit.
Multiple smaller creatures or creatures with significantly smaller appetites than a human are counted as a single creature for this feat, and larger creatures or those with significantly greater appetite each count as multiple creatures. The GM determines how much a particular non-human creature needs to eat.
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Don't they already have a Skill Feat that allows for a character with Survival to provide Food/Shelter for more people? I'm pretty sure it also scales up with proficiency as well.
Forager
-------While Surviving in the Wilderness during downtime, you can always find enough food and water to provide yourself a subsistence living (provided you aren’t in an area that’s completely lacking in appropriate resources). If you are trained but not better, finding food and water for another or providing a comfortable living still requires you to attempt Survival checks and hope for a critical success; onany other successful result, you still find only enough for your own subsistence.
If you’re an expert, even without rolling you can always find enough food and water for your own comfortable living or subsistence living for yourself and one other creature that eats roughly as much as a human, and on a critical success you find enough for a second additional creature.
If you’re a master, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and one other or subsistence living for yourself and two others without rolling, and you can provide for twice as many others on a critical success.
If you’re legendary, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and four others or subsistence living for yourself and eight others without rolling, but a critical success provides no additional benefit.
Multiple smaller creatures or creatures with significantly smaller appetites than a human are counted as a single creature for this feat, and larger creatures or those with significantly greater appetite each count as multiple creatures. The GM determines how much a particular non-human creature needs to eat.
You know, I overlooked that feat. If I had remembered it I probably would have chosen a different example for my first one. I have other thoughts about skills and proficiency and, if I were to have my way with them, the benefits of the Forager feat would simply be the way that using your survival skill gets better with your improved proficiency rather than a skill feat, much like how several of the existing Diplomacy skill feats got wrapped up as just part of how the skill operates when I made my revisions there. The things I want to tweak with PF2 are becoming so systemic that it's hard to remember what is and isn't actually PF2 anymore.
But Regardless of any of that, I still think that there are many benefits to be had from unchaining the degrees of success from +/- 10. It makes a good default position, and a great starting point, but cleaving to it dogmatically is, in my opinion, one of the things holding the game as a whole back.
Don't they already have a Skill Feat that allows for a character with Survival to provide Food/Shelter for more people? I'm pretty sure it also scales up with proficiency as well.
Forager
-------While Surviving in the Wilderness during downtime, you can always find enough food and water to provide yourself a subsistence living (provided you aren’t in an area that’s completely lacking in appropriate resources). If you are trained but not better, finding food and water for another or providing a comfortable living still requires you to attempt Survival checks and hope for a critical success; onany other successful result, you still find only enough for your own subsistence.
If you’re an expert, even without rolling you can always find enough food and water for your own comfortable living or subsistence living for yourself and one other creature that eats roughly as much as a human, and on a critical success you find enough for a second additional creature.
If you’re a master, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and one other or subsistence living for yourself and two others without rolling, and you can provide for twice as many others on a critical success.
If you’re legendary, you can always find enough for comfortable living for yourself and four others or subsistence living for yourself and eight others without rolling, but a critical success provides no additional benefit.
Multiple smaller creatures or creatures with significantly smaller appetites than a human are counted as a single creature for this feat, and larger creatures or those with significantly greater appetite each count as multiple creatures. The GM determines how much a particular non-human creature needs to eat.
The system would still work even with that feat, since it still allows incrementing. It would take a re-writing of the Legendary level of course, but add another X people per tier of crit. One Legendary person with a good enough check should be able to feed a refugee village, though it should be difficult (say, +4 people per tier of Crit.)
When I first started playtesting, I was really in love with the four-tiered-success rules. The more I play, the more I realise that it's a real problem. Enough that I think that it's not going to work long-term. This sounds like a way to solve it, at first, but the big drawback to the system you propose here is that we will *always* need to look up the result-matrix for every check. There's no way I can memorise that. At least with Xdc +/-10 we only have to remember what the *results* are, not also the # the result occurs at and then do the math to see if it occurs.
But it's true that not every type of check *deserves* a crit success/crit fail result, and certainly not always on +/-10. I'm not sure what the best way to tackle this is going to be. (But I don't think the current system is going to work out long-term).
This is why I'm arguing for measuring crits in increments of +5 or -5 I mentioned earlier. It keeps things easy to memorize and calculate, while still allowing the added flexibility to have multiple possible crit or botch values, so the math can be appropriate to the context.
And any threshold you might have wanted other than 1 or 2 is always going to be within 2 points of an increment of 5, so it's certainly precise enough for any situation. It's about as simple as it can be without giving up flexibility or scrapping crits altogether.
This is a really good idea.
I like the 4 degrees of outcome on skill checks. Failing a roll by a couple points and still having the full effect of failure never feels very good. I like having the more granular amount of outcomes.
Having N degrees of outcome that can be adjusted according to the skill being used at worst, and by the particular skill usage, or even the particular task being done is even better.
I just wanted to say that the use of unchained here is kind of unwarranted since we aren't really chained to it yet.
I just wanted to say that the use of unchained here is kind of unwarranted since we aren't really chained to it yet.
True, but I think 'Unchained' still works, because a lot of both unchained and alterations to PF2e operate based on the fact that revisions to the assumptions of the given ruleset (3.x for PFUnchained or PF2e for this) can provide a better play experience due to flaws found in the underlying system. The fact that Unchained relied on a greater timescale and on an established ruleset, does leave me more skeptical of "unchained" varients of PF2e, but this is a case where I think it applies, as I don't see the timescale or ruleset as fundamentally altering the experience of the issue. With other degrees of success systems already in use in PF1e, I can see enough experience to reason that the 2e system has faults in the application of the same system to skills as saves and attacks.
I just wanted to say that the use of unchained here is kind of unwarranted since we aren't really chained to it yet.
But it's catchy.