With polymorph spells like animal form, how do you adjust the attack and skill bonuses to remove level?
With the flat checks for medicine, how do you adjust the DCs for higher proficiency checks?
Thanks!(I don't need the "official" answer, just reasonable ways to figure these things out as we go.)
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With spells you just need to look at the level the spell would be obtained at (Spell level * 2 - 1) and then remove that from the bonus.
For the treat wounds dcs use the simple dc chart replacements trained and up (it is what they used anyway)
So animal form is a +6 to attack and skills as a level 2 spell?
+9 as a level 3 spell, +9 as a level 4 spell and +9 as a level 5 spell?
That feels pretty jarring at first, but I guess that it is getting trained and +4 attribute bonus for a level 3 character, and getting Expert proficiency, a +4 attribute bonus and a +1 item bonus for level 5 through 9.
And when I extrapolate it to something like nature incarnate at level 19, it becomes a +15 so a +8 Legendary, +4 Attribute, and +3 item bonus which seems pretty fair. Your athletics bonus is even better. I guess it just felt off at first.
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So animal form is a +6 to attack and skills as a level 2 spell?
+9 as a level 3 spell, +9 as a level 4 spell and +9 as a level 5 spell?That feels pretty jarring at first, but I guess that it is getting trained and +4 attribute bonus for a level 3 character, and getting Expert proficiency, a +4 attribute bonus and a +1 item bonus for level 5 through 9.
And when I extrapolate it to something like nature incarnate at level 19, it becomes a +15 so a +8 Legendary, +4 Attribute, and +3 item bonus which seems pretty fair. Your athletics bonus is even better. I guess it just felt off at first.
As a house rule for my own game I actually remove the level and add level scaling to the various "form" spells.
I figure if they get AC scaling, they deserve to also get ATK scaling. (nothing else scales outside of spell level)
But yeah, mathematically it works out. Although there are all sorts of things that are thrown off by the no level scaling mod sadly. The game really doesn't account for it well when it comes to things that improve tiers of success or have major effects tied to tiers of success.
What’s the issues with summons?
Ah, hmm. Yeah. I’ve seen complaints that summoning is a bit weak, so I suppose one could just live with it as a buff to summoning. Otherwise, couldn’t you just scale back the level progression of summoned creatures when heightening? It would still be slightly better than core but not as drastically. Something like:
- 2nd — level 0
- 3rd — level 1
- 4th — level 2
- 5th — level 3
- 6th — level 5
- 7th — level 7
- 8th — level 9
- 9th — level 11
- 10th — level 13
Agreed. Also things which are checked by level bonus becomes a bit unbalanced. {'Summon X' for example}
Sadly I don't know how to fix this, I ran into the same issue while trying to find a way to houserule a fix for summoning spells to continue to scale like the form spells mentioned above. But it had too big of an influence in my tests.
A lower scaling tier might work well though, but with higher AC and a decent amount of HP without the ability to easily be crit I can see summoning being incredibly powerful in a level free proficiency game (I wonder what it will look like when we get summoner or a summoning archetype).
Yeah, having a risk of losing the summon without being able to mitigate that (through class feats, items, etc) would probably mean higher level summons don’t get used except by clever players who figure out ways to work around it (fly?). It also feels clumsy to balance something by making players not want to use it.
The one alternative I can see if its a really big problem is that summon monster has some sort of built in penalty. Something like idk -2 to all stats? Enough that its noticeable, but not so much they become useless.
Maybe apply the weak adjustment, or a modified form of it? I wouldn’t normally use the attack modifier with PwL, but a -1 here might be okay.
Usually Summons put a secondary or even tertiary ally on the board, one whose DPR is much like a 2nd or 3rd attack by a martial (depending on several factors).
With flattened proficiency, their attack roll is comparable to a primary attack albeit for less damage. And though they'll have fewer h.p., their AC & Saves will also make them tougher than intended. That upgrade's pretty darn significant when the caster's at full power (casting 2-actions spells each round).
With a little party coordination, this could grow swiftly out of hand, and this holds true for enemies as well. A lot of lower level casters (plus perhaps a Bard) casting Summon spells could swamp a party.
One solution would be to restore the party's overall balance whenever a Summoned creature hits the board by damping down the power of the caster. I think the simplest way to do that would be to have maintaining the spell cost 2 actions. With how strong Summons become under this system, I'd find that reasonable as I'd still remain interested in Summons.
ETA: One could also lower the proficiencies of the monsters based on how many levels below they are. Maybe -1 per level, sort of retroactively adding back in the level adjustments, which seems like it'd put them nearly the same as where they'd be in a normal PF2 game.