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I've been following the Treasure by Level table pretty closely for my game. However, I wasn't super familiar with what items were required until the Automatic Bonus Progression rules came out. So now I know that at just about every level, the system assumes they get some numerical bonus, from attack potency, armor potency, striking, resilience, skill bonuses, and perception bonuses. And every player is expected to get these, with some exceptions (spellcasters don't typically need attack potency or striking). It feels like there's no room in the magic item budget to throw in things like bags of holding or bracers of missile deflection.
Is there anything I can do without switching to ABP? I don't want my players to feel like they've wasted gold on the runes they have.
Hmm, I've only looked at the handing out treasure rules a bit because I've been running Age of Ashes, but my parties in both campaigns of AoA have had sufficient resources to cover both their required progression items and elective stuff... with enough left over for a few backup weapons and other odds and ends.
I thought I read somewhere these APs were consistent with the standard guidelines on treasure? If so, it probably works out in the end...
Also, keep in mind that most party comps won't need every person to get up to date bonuses immediately the level they're available. Generally, I've seen the party give the bonuses to Frontline combatants first and then upgrade everyone else after there other needs/desires are satisfied.
I've been following the Treasure by Level table pretty closely for my game. However, I wasn't super familiar with what items were required until the Automatic Bonus Progression rules came out. So now I know that at just about every level, the system assumes they get some numerical bonus, from attack potency, armor potency, striking, resilience, skill bonuses, and perception bonuses. And every player is expected to get these, with some exceptions (spellcasters don't typically need attack potency or striking). It feels like there's no room in the magic item budget to throw in things like bags of holding or bracers of missile deflection.
Is there anything I can do without switching to ABP? I don't want my players to feel like they've wasted gold on the runes they have.
Most of those things don't need to be invested, so there is no "limit".
Hmm, I've only looked at the handing out treasure rules a bit because I've been running Age of Ashes, but my parties in both campaigns of AoA have had sufficient resources to cover both their required progression items and elective stuff... with enough left over for a few backup weapons and other odds and ends.
I thought I read somewhere these APs were consistent with the standard guidelines on treasure? If so, it probably works out in the end...
Also, keep in mind that most party comps won't need every person to get up to date bonuses immediately the level they're available. Generally, I've seen the party give the bonuses to Frontline combatants first and then upgrade everyone else after there other needs/desires are satisfied.
I'm not super familiar with how adventure paths typically do it. I started with Fall of Plaguestone and used it as a jumping off point for a homebrew campaign. Most of the items in Plaguestone were numbers based, with the exception of
Most of those things don't need to be invested, so there is no "limit".
I was referring to this table, not the investing mechanic.
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The fundamental weapon and armor runes are only 6 items over the course of 20 levels, and are less if you build a character at higher levels. Skill items are nice but not mandatory unless you have a god skill like Nature on a Master Monster Hunter or Deception on a scoundrel. Perception items are obviously helpful but not everyone in the party needs them.
If you assume 1 item per character per level (which IIRC lines up fairly well with the WBL tables) and a character gets items for all 3 of their key skills, that's only another 3 items unless you're constantly replacing them, which means your party members can get a hand me down or you can sell the old item. Also, most skill/perception items grant another nifty ability, like a cantrip or darkvision, so they aren't just item bonuses.
I dunno, I haven't found any problems yet. Admittedly I haven't designed loot drops from scratch either.
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I have run a couple of low level short adventures, and am only starting on running my first AP now, Extinction Curse. I have a party of 5 so I know I am going to have to add treasure to help them keep up. From what I have looked at, it doesn't hurt to be a little extra generous with lower level treasures as the party advances, making sure everyone should be within a +1 of their needed item bonuses with little difficulty. Maybe it will all add up to too much, but the APs seem to level players up so fast that it is not hard to get back to an even balance if you do give out a little too much.
That said,
I am not generally a fan of math items myself, so I do eventually plan to move to ABP, but I wanted to see PF2 core before I threw in too much variant rules. I am not sure if my whole 5 person party will keep up once quarantining is over, but I'm hoping enough of them will for us to continue all the way through it, but it slows down or ends, I will probably make the jump to ABP when I eventually move to something I home brew.
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Before my group switched over to ABP, I played my character as a smith aiming to make his two weapons legendary in their own rights. Because I have a group who is invested into the RP, especially since my character loved his weapons, I ended up bankrupting the party every time the weapon increases came up. ABP is the best thing that has happened since core came out for my group.
Also, we’re playing Age of Ashes.
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Yeah, the fundamental runes on magic items definitely feel like a hold-over from PF1: things that (humanoid, weapon-using) NPCs "need" to stay relevant, and therefore force lootable items into the game economy.
5E's take is just soo much more elegant and easy.
I'm sorry, but absolutely no.
While I may have been a major annoyance with all the threads on item math and mandatory bonuses during playtest, and definitely welcomed the reduction, there is a very important factor to be considered, and that is the amount of power they contribute.
I am -almost- okay with the magic item math in PF2 (+1 to +3, with large variance on player side), and I was absolutely against it in Playtest (+1 to +5, with small variance on player side), but dragging 5e on a podium is absolutely off. A +3 in Pathfinder gives you the equivalent of 3 levels of extra power. A +3 in 5e gives you 12.
Any talk of magic items being "purely flavour" in D&D has to deal with the harsh reality that a 15% variation by any other way is basically impossible to obtain, and that increased / decreased hit ratio is basically the only way to gain damage / resistance in that system.
It's a multiplicative increase in a system with zero variation.
You can delay a magic item in Pathfinder. In fact, you're almost expected to do that, if you look at wealth values. you'll only be off by one level.
You can delay a magic item in 5e. You're not expected to have them. So it's said. But either you're not expected to have them, and having them busts the numbers, or you are, and not having them busts the numbers. Premade adventures grant them at specific levels, so I'm leaning towards "it's all marketing".
As for the OP:
Don't sweat it too badly. One point off ideal math isn't going to ruin characters, and there's plenty of interesting loot you can grant without harming your players. If you want to hand out some extra, use valuables and cash - that way they'll be able to do their "basic" upgrades themselves and you can showcase all the fun and useful items in the book.
If you use ABP, same thing - keep distributing interesting items, have fun with them, and tighten up the cash a little bit so that they don't overload on scrolls, but that's really all you need to do :)
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The playtest indicated that people really wanted items that did this (ie: provided sizable and thus necessary mathematical bonuses).Only sort of true. The survey questions, from my recollection, were a lot more general than that.
People wanted meaningful magic items. It's less clear whether or not people wanted a magic item economy as demanding as PF2's.
They (I could say 'we' but I disagree with the majority on this one in many ways) were pretty clear they wanted 'math booster' items.
In a rules set with math as tight as PF2's that results in the economy we have. Whether that's a good thing is another matter entirely, but people doing the playtest wanted it at the time.
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You can delay a magic item in 5e. You're not expected to have them. So it's said. But either you're not expected to have them, and having them busts the numbers, or you are, and not having them busts the numbers. Premade adventures grant them at specific levels, so I'm leaning towards "it's all marketing".
Magic items in 5e are one of the worst parts of that system IMO. Its an ok system to play (I found that over a campaign, it just got boring due to its limitations) but that +1-3 weapons completely destroy its "base assumptions" and put you in a serious have/have not situation.
There's just no other way in 5e to make up for what a +x weapon gives you - no tactics, no nothing. If your party mate has one and you don't ("its just a bonus") welcome to always overshadowed-s-ville.
It doesn't help that magic weapons aren't just about increasing accuracy and damage in 5e. There are a lot of creatures which are either going to take half damage or no damage from non-magical attacks. My GM threw werewolves at us a few weeks ago, and then had to retcon that we had silver arrows to actually let us fight the things. PF2 has a few creatures that are resistant to non-magic attacks, but also spells out when you should have magic weapons.
What is the general opinion on ABP?
Because in my 1E game ABP + 50% wealth seems to have resulted in far far stronger (or at least much more versatile) characters than 100% wealth
Mainly because they can use slots for things that the old mandatory items would have taken. It has literally saved two characters that would otherwise not be alive - one had a talisman that auto cast breath of life (neck slot) and another had the dimension door cape to get out of a certain death situation
So far more than the numbers - the extra options tipped the balance
Is this a risk with using ABP in 2E?
I totally agree that the combination of item bonuses + striking weapons + extremely tight math resulted in a system were certain items are really mandatory. I don't think every group is bothered by this, though, but mine certainly is, it takes away a lot from the fantasy of being an epic hero for us, so we're just using ABP. It has been working pretty smoothly so far.
@Lanathar I think it depends a lot on how you decide to balance ABP as a GM, because there are no clear guidelines on how much you should remove from the wealth tables, and that's by design. If you want to keep the balance the same, you can remove enough that you're left with the same amount of items you would have after buying all the mandatory things. I didn't want to do this, so I did remove part of the wealth but the players still effectively have more magic items than they would have otherwise. It hasn't been a balance problem at all so far, but the party is level 5.
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While definitely part of the "base math", I'm talking "invisible" bonuses. Bonuses baked into the core of your character; not things you get from external sources.
Finding a weapon is external, but so is a variant rule in the GMG. A player can trivially tell that's a "bolt-on" bonus, as opposed to just part of the core level progression.
If heroes got +2 or +3 damage bonuses at various levels, nobody could say which bonuses come from the part of the math currently served by granting bonus dice. It would be "invisible", as in indistinguishable from all the other bonuses.
That is exactly how I see ABP in the GMG. It is an addition to the standard level progression of the characters. Right along side of the increases to Ability scores at 5, 10, 15, 20, and the skill increases at whatever levels those come at. You also get character level based increases to your weapon attack bonus, weapon damage dice, and armor protections. It just becomes part of leveling up.
My players probably won't even realize that it wasn't included in the initial rules since they don't read the rule books that closely.
I also would have preferred that ABP was baked into the core system. Further, I think the Christmas tree could have been another variant of the "no proficiency" where instead of proficiency bonuses you got item bonuses from all over the place to boost your core 8 "stats" (AC, Attack, Damage, Perception, each save, skills).
The mathletes would have a BALL trying to figure out if the level 16 cloak of resistance was more important than upping your dagger of spell strike from 15 to 17, and would that answer change if your character was a monk instead of a witch?
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My initial take on ABP was that it was really solid, and neat.
And then I thought about it, and the entire idea made me depressed.
By removing the numerical bonuses from items, you essentially reduce most magic items to fancy shaped wands.
If you keep non-potency/striking runes, weapons and armor keep something... but there's a lot of stuff like Cloaks of Elvenkind that go from being masterful and utilitarian items to a wand of Invisibility you wear on your back.
I realized getting those minor bonuses which were broadly applicable alongside the fancy spell effects helped make it feel like a really cool stealth cloak even when you weren't using it to disappear with magic.
So I think I'd consider ABP instantly if I wanted to do a low magic game setting, but I don't foresee myself including it in anything that resembles typical DnD.
None of which is a judgement on the rules portion of it - its totally workable and solid. I just think it takes too much out of magic items for my preference.
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@KrispyXIV You could always use only a portion of ABP. What I'm currently doing is that I removed Striking/Resilient runes and gave the adequate bonuses from ABP while keeping the rest intact. This was the satisfying middle ground I found between my players wanting magic items to be less mandatory but not wanting weapon and armor upgrades and skill items gone completely.
I don't mean people need to do exactly this, of course, but the ABP rules let you use or ignore as much of them as you want or fits your group without breaking anything, which is really nice. I've also replaced Potency for High-Quality, but that's mostly because my group likes the idea of a weapon or armor being strong simply because it's extremely well-made.
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@KrispyXIV You could always use only a portion of ABP. What I'm currently doing is that I removed Striking/Resilient runes and gave the adequate bonuses from ABP while keeping the rest intact. This was the satisfying middle ground I found between my players wanting magic items to be less mandatory but not wanting weapon and armor upgrades and skill items gone completely.
I don't mean people need to do exactly this, of course, but the ABP rules let you use or ignore as much of them as you want or fits your group without breaking anything, which is really nice. I've also replaced Potency for High-Quality, but that's mostly because my group likes the idea of a weapon or armor being strong simply because it's extremely well-made.
That was what I hoped for them to do during the playtest. Especially for weapons. The power should come from the PCs themselves, while magic just adds extra options. Having expertly, masterfully and legendarily (?) made weapons add +1, +2 and +3 to to-hit would have been okay (also better item boni for armour) since that came from the skill of the weapon-/armour-smith, and thus potentially from the PCs too.
I would have hoped, magic would do things like adding elemental damage, deal with incorporeal creatures or resistances, add properties like Slick or Shadowed to armours. And these properties would ideally not have added numerical boni as such, but rather performed like the Pickpocket feat, negating penalties or opening up other options.
I suppose one can use the ABP rules to eliminate the mere math boosters and still have useful and flavourful magic items. So if a Shadowed armour for example (least, lesser and greater variants) would allow someone with Expert/Master/Legendary stealth to perform ever increasing feats of remaining undetected, just not by means of adding to the skill bonus but rather by eliminating penalties and restrictions.
Of course that would be a lot of work to do, but maybe we'll see specific magic items in future publications that can be twisted in such a way to serve exactly that purpose. One can hope.
What is the general opinion on ABP?
Because in my 1E game ABP + 50% wealth seems to have resulted in far far stronger (or at least much more versatile) characters than 100% wealth
Mainly because they can use slots for things that the old mandatory items would have taken. It has literally saved two characters that would otherwise not be alive - one had a talisman that auto cast breath of life (neck slot) and another had the dimension door cape to get out of a certain death situation
So far more than the numbers - the extra options tipped the balance
Is this a risk with using ABP in 2E?
well, there are no "neck slots" anymore AFAIK in PF2, so there is no issue...you have a fixed limit on invested items
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I think the issue with the implementation of the "math booster" items in general is that the game expects you to always have them, once they become available.
Which means they're required rather than actually being a bonus.
I think the issue with the implementation of the "math booster" items in general is that the game expects you to always have them, once they become available.
Which means they're required rather than actually being a bonus.
That's oversimplifying things a bit. Part of the game is seeking these items out, acquiring them, and managing limited numbers of them. As well, sometimes you're forced to use a less effective weapon due to resistances and such.
My party was level 13 before any of them got a greater striking rune, and I think only one of them had a +2 armor rune up to that point. I don't think they are that required.
Also, I'd argue that you only really need the armor ones plus the weapon ones as a martial. Skill boosting items are nice, but skill DCs don't scale as fast as things like AC do. A level 17 DC is only 36, where a level 17 enemy probably has an AC of 41. The skill DCs are designed to get easier to beat at higher levels if you invest in them, so if you don't fully invest you shouldn't be doing worse than lower levels.
Other solution: transition to automatic bonus progression as appears in the GMG, but award the same amount of treasure (whether by exact items or by total value.) Your PC's will have more 'neat magic items' in their budget, keep up mathematically and you have a steady guideline of how much to give.
I'm planning this for the guild game after the end of my current campaign.
Other solution: transition to automatic bonus progression as appears in the GMG, but award the same amount of treasure (whether by exact items or by total value.) Your PC's will have more 'neat magic items' in their budget, keep up mathematically and you have a steady guideline of how much to give.
I'm planning this for the guild game after the end of my current campaign.
Use the maligned consumables as you move to ABP? There are so many of them that I can’t see anyone actively buying - only using if found as treasure ...
My main problem with ABP is that some APs seem like they really benefit from findings stacks of treasure (or having real limits on items)
So survival type ones don’t become as bad (Tyrants , Serpents etc)
And there are cases like Skull and Shackles where you expect lots of treasure
I am looking from a conversion stand point really but I assume future APs will also have themes like this. Switch to silver standard AND a seeming devaluation (so 300 gold is not only now silver but seemingly fewer silver coins) also hurts these types of games as well...
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No one disputed that.
But too often those survey results are used to justify this particular implementation of magic items, rather than just math-adjusting gear in general. That is a misrepresentation of the survey, because it was never that specific.
In this very thread we have people only a few posts up who seem to be interested in math boosters, but not a fan of the raw power PF2's math adjusting items have. So clearly the insistence that these positions are synonymous is off base.
My point was that, in a system with math as tight as PF2's, there's really no way for math booster items to not have this large an effect, and thus be 'required'. So, since people wanted math booster items, this was the inevitable result of that.
I think the issue with the implementation of the "math booster" items in general is that the game expects you to always have them, once they become available.
Which means they're required rather than actually being a bonus.
Again, given the tight math, this is basically unavoidable. I mean, you could go the other way and base all enemy math on PCs not having the items, but in that case given how powerful they are, APs would, in order to remain balanced, have to not include them and not allow their purchase, which is very much counter to people's desires.
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Look, I read your response twice but I can't figure out what you're saying no to. I mean, if you just want to dump on 5E that's cool. But sticking with making required stuff lootable *was* a holdover from PF1.Yeah, the fundamental runes on magic items definitely feel like a hold-over from PF1: things that (humanoid, weapon-using) NPCs "need" to stay relevant, and therefore force lootable items into the game economy.
5E's take is just soo much more elegant and easy.
I'm sorry, but absolutely no.
Dumping on 5e isn't particularly difficult (I sometimes did that without noticing), but no, if I did it wasn't intended.
What I intended was simply note that a +1 item in 5e is much more meaningful and impactful than a +1 item in PF2, and stating that 5e did "a better job" in terms of mandatory bonuses is just ignoring this key point.
I'm migrating a PF1 Campaign to PF2 and the party is level 10. Level 10 is when +2 weapon potency becomes available. Should I expected every single party member to start with +2 weapons? How long can they go without them? I know level 10 enemies already got like a +2 or +3 AC to basically negate the attack boost so it seems like it will hurt to not have them on everyone ASAP.
I wish the bestiary had given a bit more breathing room to the bonuses. It feels as if you need to get the +2 weapons at level 9 to be ready for level 10 rather than getting them during it.
They (I could say 'we' but I disagree with the majority on this one in many ways) were pretty clear they wanted 'math booster' items.No one disputed that.
But too often those survey results are used to justify this particular implementation of magic items, rather than just math-adjusting gear in general. That is a misrepresentation of the survey, because it was never that specific.
In this very thread we have people only a few posts up who seem to be interested in math boosters, but not a fan of the raw power PF2's math adjusting items have. So clearly the insistence that these positions are synonymous is off base.
It was actually very specific. I can't remember if the specific question was an objective one or it was on the open survey. But the question was quite clear on the subject of math-enhancing items.
People voted. They remained because enough people preferred it that way. Even though I think that they never really thought about the whole situation to begin with. They went with the familiar and traditional, but forgot that due to their very nature, these items will be accounted for in the monsters, thus making them irrelevant if you have them and weaker if you don't.
They're items with unconditional and constant bonuses, all players will opt to buy them even if they're not cool, then the game assumes that and compensate with the monsters so that these players don't get too strong. In the end, it becomes a non-choice, you must have them because the monsters expects you to have them.
Well, at least we had the ABP printed really fast this time around.
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I'm migrating a PF1 Campaign to PF2 and the party is level 10. Level 10 is when +2 weapon potency becomes available. Should I expected every single party member to start with +2 weapons? How long can they go without them? I know level 10 enemies already got like a +2 or +3 AC to basically negate the attack boost so it seems like it will hurt to not have them on everyone ASAP.
I wish the bestiary had given a bit more breathing room to the bonuses. It feels as if you need to get the +2 weapons at level 9 to be ready for level 10 rather than getting them during it.
IMO, the official expectation that 10th level is when you will get 10th level items, holds up. So them not having them at the start of that level is fine. If it were an 11th level game, then they'd be expected to have them.
I mean, yes, monster AC goes up by 2 at 10th level, but that's to account for attack stats going from 19 to 20 due to level-up Ability points, not magic items improving.
Which is not to say that PCs won't appreciate them at 10th, they certainly will, but it's not expected, and even if it was monster AC math in particular is actually fairly forgiving (way more so than other monster stat). Being behind a Striking rune or defensive items hurts a lot more than being behind +1 to hit.
I mean, looking at level 10, a high AC monster is AC 30. A martial PC of that level should hit that on a 10 with a +1 weapon. Going to 9 with a +2 is great, but being one behind would only make for an 11, which isn't the end of the world, and that's a high AC.
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To reinforce Zapp's point, the tightness of PF2's math is much more about keeping the D20 at the center of any actions success of failure, rather than a specific set of items, or character build. Players want to get those boosts as quickly as they can, but mostly because they can feel the difference the +1 makes, not because the game is impossible without it. It really only becomes a problem when one player is vastly out performing the others, in which case, letting the party stumble upon the items that will boost the player that is struggling first can be a way to help restore balance.
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What I intended was simply note that a +1 item in 5e is much more meaningful and impactful than a +1 item in PF2, and stating that 5e did "a better job" in terms of mandatory bonuses is just ignoring this key point.
People keep saying this but can someone explain it to me?
On paper it seems like it would be the other way around where +1 in PF2 is much more important.Isn't a +1 (and soon thereafter a striking rune) in PF2 similar to getting Keen and double damage?
A +1 in 5e seems fairly insignificant since you already hit pretty often and at worst you might do half damage against some monsters with resistance to non-magical weapons which isn't that common and usually bypassed pretty easily with a Magic Weapon spell or lots of spell availability to most classes.