Feel of Character Development (#); Rocket Tag Requirement?


General Discussion


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Personally, I prefer the "+Level to everything" policy of PF2's playtest (why not play 5E if your 20th level Fighter can't curb-stomp troll warlords ungeared and sleepwalking). However, I also know well that the fact defense and general DCs scaling too also robbed the "feel" of character improvement, since in the end, your "natural X on the d20" either stays the same, or can't catch up and go up.

So I wondered; "If you want the feel of numerical character development, is Rocket Tag inevitable?"

When both sides of a dice rolling contest in game has level scaling, for the proactive side to feel stronger as they level up, they will eventually require lower natural X's, which means their bonuses towering over the reactive side's respective bonuses, eventually. As the GM's side of the table will eventually get similar bonuses too on their own stat blocks, I can only see the rocket tag phenomenon as inevitable, at least in the numerical statistics part of the game...


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Yeah I mean lets look at PF1. The martial characters got to the point where the die roll only matter for their later attacks. saving throws divide up so greatly that you can pretty well assume you'll always make one and never make the other versus the right or wrong DC. then when the spells end fights at once or a martial damage kills a monster outright it gets very rocket taggy. I had a lot of experience with rocket tag when I played high level 1st edition D&D characters it was rare that fights went past the second round. I think other iterations had similar problems at high level 3.5 sticks out in my mind because I remember (average level 30 so really crazy) having the party fight a combat I specifically balanced which was a advanced great worm red dragon. I wanted a little warm up fight so I grabbed a monster of lower CR and threw it at them (a wraith type from ELH) it almost killed 2 characters in the first round the insta died pretty well as soon as the party realized it was a threat and reacted. Very rocket tag.

So I've seen it be reduced by simply scaling down the numbers but eventually it happens just takes longer unless you end the game before it does.

I know for about 3 iterations of D&D now they've been working on this theory that the sweet spot of D&D math happens between 8-12 level. Where the numbers are pretty balanced and you tend to need a roll between 8-12 to hot or succeed and the design decisions seem to be to extend that 8-12 sweet spot to all levels.

PF2 has been my favorite way of doing it so far. Still needs some fixing here and there but that is how play test works.

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