Well I think for higher level challenges they are also thinking of proficiency and higher attribute and magic items by that point. Which really shouldn't effect it one way or another for the +/- level thing.
Still not going to happen, the damage and hp values will prevent that.
That's working as intended. Lower level enemies die more easily and are less threatening in terms of damage dealt, but still retain some relevance by virtue of having semi-competitive AC and to-hit values.
The to-hit values are important, because it means lower level enemies can be meaningful in an attrition sense even if they aren't practical encounters on their own.
The classic scenario of a boss with a swarm of followers doesn't really work in a game like PF2 without some sort of compensating system. PF1 had the troop template. 4e had Minions. 5e has significantly reduced scaling.
I think the biggest change that dropping level will have is basically making it so you can't handle a large amount of Mooks as you could with it.
Vrs encounters are your level their should be no difference.
Lower level encounters will be harder then they would have been and higher level encounters will be slightly easier then they would otherwise.
I feel like people that really liked E6 will like this way. I'm personally all about the characters becoming super hero's at higher levels.
Still not going to happen, the damage and hp values will prevent that.The classic scenario of a boss with a swarm of followers doesn't really work in a game like PF2 without some sort of compensating system. PF1 had the troop template. 4e had Minions. 5e has significantly reduced scaling.
...actually I have a bossfight scheduled for my next session with creatures spanning 4 levels in a dungeon that covers a 6-level range. But sure.
(I might poke to report how it went - for now, the level differential was really a strong component of the assault, as most enemies were way below the characters’ level but their number meant players had to burn a lot of resources anyways. Also, never underestimate mooks using Take Cover and diversion tactics)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Well, imagine I ran my last session again, but without level to proficiency. Players stormed a bandit camp, mostly clearing the low-level enemies to avoid being swarmed after, and are now left with leadership and big guns (they noticed a drake already and successfully avoided that).
Most of the mooks were low level bandits. The party never really risked death (2 of them went half hp, others got light damage, wizard got grappled a couple times but got away. Everyone's a little lower on spells and resources). However, that was 11 lv-4 mooks, 4 lv-3 captains, 4 lv-2 leaders of various kind. All suddenly gaining bonuses. Most encountered in two large-scale fights.
I am not sure if that would have been a tpk, but... I doubt I could run this without level without additional changes and still have them finish the camp.
Won't be posting exact challenge levels, but of what's left, only a couple aides are lower-level. And they don't have much more available rest time before someone goes to check on what's happening.
Sure, if you give players plenty of time after each encounter, and keep things to small numbers, removing level might work, but how are you going to make a real adventure function? Beside the major hassle of recalculating everying, you have to either remake every single encounter or adjust things in some other way.
PS. Also the monk really enjoyed critting on grapple and the Fighter really enjoyed his duelist's riposte. Two tricks that would never work that well without level difference. I'll save you how level affected the Wizard's spells and escape rolls, because that would just be bullying the nerd.
I get your point Zapp, but they will not get an automatic critical success. Assurance is 10 + Proficiency Modifier. No other bonuses apply. A level 5 character who is an expert gets a result of 19. That is an automatic success, but not a critical success.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Assurance is invaluable in exponential failure challenge (or multiple check resolutions). It’s in a similar category as Quiet Allies, just more versatile.
...you know when an adventure gives “players must succeed at 3 checks...” or “each player must pass...”? Those are exponential failures. Assurance boosts success immensely there.
(And if Assurance isn’t high enough, the group isn’t going to succeed anyway)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Assurance (athletics) is really great bypassing MAP.
So Strike + Strike + Auto-Trip (no -10 penalty).
But to the OP, it should be mostly good to just subtract the level from everything. But some stuff like Treat Wounds have a flat DC's will need adjusted.
I don't think it's bad for players to make a decision based on what they guess the DC is, as that is them both IC and OOC evaluating the difficulty of a check. So if they decide they think it's below Assurance threshold, that's the character just cruising along with the task business as usual. If it turns out Assurance fails, or if they suspected that at the start and wanted to roll, that represents the character coming up against a tougher challenge and needing to focus on it to succeed. I don't think you need to intentionally fail Assurance to try and avoid metagame knowledge, as your character should be able to assess what they are capable of easily handling with a practiced skill. The only time it's an issue is if you think you wouldn't make the check due to some OOC knowledge, but that's not really Assurance's fault and is a problem inherent in any skill check being made.
I mean, it would be bad if you're saying "this is a level 3 adventure so I think the DC is X", but saying "the ground is uneven and slippery so I think the DC is X" is fine to me.
Edit to add, as a GM I would probably even give it to the player whether they can use Assurance or not if it's something the character can tell using their senses. I might say "Yeah, this slippery slope should be trivial for someone of your acrobatic skill", for example.
Yup. And yet I’ve been hearing “ah, just subtract level and it’s fine” ever since the preview blogs.
(Mind you I used to be one of them. I just happen to like doing maths, so it didn’t last)
I don't see any underlying issue.
You just loose a lot of the utter hopelessness of fighting a ogre at level 1. And you lose the feeling of awesomeness of easily crushing it later at level 15.
But I presume that is exactly what you are going for. And you still have damage scaling, and proficiency scaling, so levels still have some meaning.
For loot I think as long as you keep to the "expected wealth by level" tables then you're fine even in a variant like this.
XP is the one for which I think the GMG needs to offer guidance. Since "lower level enemies" are supposed to be easy, and reward XP appropriately. If you remove the effect of level, you will need to bump those up. Correspondingly you should probably decrease the XP increase from fighting a higher level antagonist, since that fight got easier.
If all else fails- use milestones.
Common sense to me includes ‘don’t do things at random’, but okay.
I’m not suggesting to never change the difficulty, but I’d really be curious to see that encounter play out. After all, if a change works, it should be usable. And uh, applicable to the system, which looks like a bit of an issue to me.
Necromancy!
Has anyone been playing with the Proficiency without Level variant from the GMG? How have you handled spells that have default flat modifiers they give PCS? Polymorph spells like Animal form seem to have level baked in, in a way that feels a little tricky to extract.
Also how high of level has anyone gotten to with this variant? Does leveling up feel significant for your players?
I ask because I am thinking about running a longer, grittier wilderness exploration campaign, and I am waffling between Proficiency without Level or just requiring 2000 xp per level with giving out some added boon feats between levels.
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I’m running a sandbox hexcrawl using Proficiency without Level along with a few other variants (Gradual Boosts and Skill Points). We have a rotating cast of characters, so there are multiple parties, but the highest leveled PCs are 4th level.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed is my players no longer mess up leveling up, forgetting to increases all of their modifiers correctly due to proficiency. That was one of the things that initially prompted me to propose the switch, but I think it’s been good for me as a GM (having access to a wider range of creatures without needing to modify them for a given level).
I’ve pinged my players to get their thoughts on how it feels to level up. I have a feeling gradual boosts probably outweigh anything other than gaining HP just from a mechanical change. Otherwise, I expect they probably care more about their abilities than their raw performance, but my players have never really care a lot about that.
I have noticed there are a few things that seem to assume the original progression. As I find them, I house rule them to fit better with Proficiency without Level by seeing how they compare to the original simple DCs or level by DCs tables in the CRB. For example, a couple of my players took Assurance, and I changed it to give a flat progression because (T: 13, E: 16, M: 19, L: 22) it’s just awful otherwise.
I also went with a different simple DC progression. The one they recommend feels to punishing and out of step with the DCs by level table they included. I am using 10/14/18/22/26 instead of 10/15/20/25/30. With my changes to Assurance, this means gaining proficiency in a skill lets you succeed automatically at the old rank (like it would normally when including level in proficiency).
Another thing I’ve noticed (mostly in creature creation) is just subtracting level from the guidelines in the GMG sometimes yields unintuitive results. I’ve tried re-deriving the underlying pattern by interpolating between 1st and 20th levels, but that doesn’t always work right for ones past 20th.
Thank you for sharing that progress report! You gave me a lot more to consider.
Does the rule variant suggest to subtract the monster level from ac/DC? If you subtract the pc's level, balance should be unaffected, while keeping the numbers on their sheets nice and low...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Does the rule variant suggest to subtract the monster level from ac/DC? If you subtract the pc's level, balance should be unaffected, while keeping the numbers on their sheets nice and low...
No, you just subtract it from anything that uses proficiency. Proficiency without Level is trying to do something different from the core rules, so it doesn’t try to keep the same balance. Consequently, the creature XP table in the CRB no longer works for encounter building, so they provide a replacement one. You’re on your own for hazards, but that’s easy enough to derive from the replacement table.
Proficiency without Level purports to offer a “grittier game”. That can mean a lot of things, but what I’ve found is it lets me design dungeons and populate them with more of an eye towards what makes sense in the world versus what needs to be there to provide appropriate challenges to the PCs.
The main exploration party has entered a small megadungeon. I’ve taken a cue from old-school games and planned my floors with increasing difficulties as the PCs go deeper, so the first floor is tuned for a level 1 party, the second for a level 2 party, and so on. On the first floor, that party (3rd level at the time) encountered a giant tarantula. Additionally, there were some hazards.
If they’d encountered the tarantula at 1st level, then it would have been between a moderate and severe encounter. Because they were third level, it was about a moderate encounter (including the hazards). If we were using the core rules, I’d have needed something around a level+2 for the same fight, which would have been trivial for a level 3 party by the time they found it.
Admittedly, I could just use the core rules and scale the fights, but that would feel pretty bad from a sense of verisimilitude. Especially in an exploration-based game, the world needs to exist to be discovered rather than just as a set of challenges for the PCs to overcome as they proceed through their quest. I like that Proficiency without Level gives me more tools to run that style of game.
Kenada,
Thanks again for sharing your experiences. I remember a fair number of folks talking about this variant rule from the playtest on, but not a lot of feedback about how it has worked out.
I have been looking at it pretty closely, and the thing that is kinda spooking me away from trying it is things like casters getting no bonus to DCs or attack rolls until 7th level. I guess the heavy impetus is on getting new spells to cast, and knowing that the monsters are not getting better either, but I am having a lot of initial resistance to imagining my players feeling like they are getting better as they level up. Do you implement any other additional house rules or variants?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Do you implement any other additional house rules or variants?
Yeah, I do a few things.
From a progression perspective, we’re using Gradual Boosts and Skill Points.
We actually tried using Point Buy with a larger starting pool (25 instead of 15 points), but it proved too much hassle to track in roll20 (I thought I could use the notes…). I also keep record of their characters in Hero Lab Online, which makes tracking Gradual Boosts pretty easy, but it probably wouldn’t be too bad on paper.
I think Gradual Boosts complements Proficiency without Level nicely because it lets characters get a little bit more powerful as they level up without throwing things out of balance. I also think it helps characters catch up who need or want a couple of really good ability scores (e.g., our bomber alchemist took Dexterity as his first boost, so he could have an 18 in both Dex and Int).
We’re using Skill Points because one of my players is vocal about liking that sort of thing and not liking 5e for getting set proficiencies at 1st level (more or less). If you only save and spend your skill points on increasing your highest skills, it has the same effect as the standard progression, so it seemed like a harmless change. I think one player has taken advantage of it so far. Most of them seem to be saving. We’ll see what happens as the number of skill points they get as they level increases.
The rest of my house rules don’t really affect character advancement directly. The documents are all up on Dropbox if you’re interested. Otherwise, if not, you can skip the summary of them below.
I run a homebrew setting with custom ancestries (no core ancestries, no Lost Omens content at all). The setting got its start in another system, and I’ve since converted it to 5e and now to PF2. I do something a bit different than PF2 by also distinguishing homeland, so you can potentially play an ancestry from a different homeland if you want.
I have a pretty extensive exploration procedure. It draws on ideas from OSE, the Alexandrian, and Hexploration. The Alexandrian was probably the biggest influence. I wrote about that on reddit back around the time PF2 was released. I did end up incorporating the idea of group activities from Hexploration since using the standard ones ended up never gelling all that well with my group. I’m otherwise not particularly fond of Hexploration. We ran Kingmaker in PF1, and I find that I do not like player-known hexes or being able to exhaust them through exploration.
I also do some old-school stuff like use morale and reaction checks. I also changed the progression rate to take longer to level as you go up. Morale in particular helps make fights a bit less dangerous for PCs because they really just need to break the morale of their foes to start deescalating. The progression rate change was made to help get players past the first few levels quickly but also to slow things down such that getting to really high levels is impractical.
I think the additional uses of hero points are my favorite change. Giving the players a way to spend their hero points to help each other out has gotten them to spend theirs much more freely. There were sessions prior to the change where people would just sit on stockpiles of hero points (just in case?). That’s not been a problem since the change. They help each other out, and sometimes they troll each other (like when the fighter did 1 damage, and then someone turned it into a crit).
Edit: Oh, and champions are more like surgebinders from the Stormlight Archive, so there is a WIP conversion of the champion.
The original simple DC table goes to DC 40, and the level-based table goes up to level 25 (DC 50). Are you referring to some other table?
Ah, yeah. That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that you could just subtract the corresponding level from the DCs on the simple DC table. The resulting progression is pretty narrow (14, 15, 18, 20), but I suppose that works.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Also how high of level has anyone gotten to with this variant? Does leveling up feel significant for your players?
I finally got responses from a few of my players. They said they’re happy with it. They feel like they’re advancing. We dug into that a bit, and they seem to be happy with getting cool stuff to do when they level up. I asked if they thought that was more important than getting bigger numbers, and one commented that he felt like their numbers were going up too. The reason for that was our use of Gradual Boosts.
Something else one of them said is they felt fights felt more forgiving. In the beginning, they felt more binary. It was like they were totally awesome, or they totally sucked. He also commented that it seems like they’re using more of their powers in fights, but I attributed that to the dungeon exploration stuff I’m doing and its affect on attrition (there’s an opportunity cost to resting, so they’re opting not to always heal all the way up to full HP after a fight).
Hopefully that helps clarify how it feels for players.
that helps a lot. Thanks for your feedback! And thank your players as well!
|
Apologies for the thread necro:
I'm about to start a West Marches style game using PWL and this thread has had some really valuable insights, I'll be able to apply to my own games.
As far as combat challenges go utilizing PWL I can still use the normal advice for encounter building since hit points and damage output still scale pretty effectively based on spells, items and abilities players accrue over the course of a campaign.
The GMG also recommends the following:
-2 for non-proficiency and Automatic Bonus Progression.
Since I want a bit of greed/treasure accrual to be a motivating factor I've decided against Auto Bonus Progression, but I'm not sure I see the value of -2 non-proficiency since I feel it just discourages people from attempting checks they aren't proficient in.
Yes it shrinks the difference between proficient/non-proficient but I feel the psychological disincentive for non-proficiency is worse.
Thoughts?
The -2 for ABP doesn't make sense at all. ABP just avoid the must have factor of buy items for their bonuses.
But -2 for PWL make sense once in higher levels the difference between non-trained and trained improves with the level and the -2 is the to adjust this to make a better distance between untrained and trained proficiencies.
I'm wondering if anyone who has been running with some variant of PWL or reduced proficiency has settled on the best combination of proficiency progression (or no proficiency increase) and DCs and rewards for a fun experience that works well for more hexploration oriented campaigns.
I've read through the thread and see a lot of pre-release feedback and a little post-release feedback but I'm curious to hear more from those who have been playing with this since release.
|
|
I'm wondering if anyone who has been running with some variant of PWL or reduced proficiency has settled on the best combination of proficiency progression (or no proficiency increase) and DCs and rewards for a fun experience that works well for more hexploration oriented campaigns.
I've read through the thread and see a lot of pre-release feedback and a little post-release feedback but I'm curious to hear more from those who have been playing with this since release.
I'm running a PWL West Marches sandbox. I have characters between 1st - 3rd.
I leave numbers for PL 0 and PL -1 the same just so I can have multiple low-level critters for the low level characters.