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I'm not even sure what you want here. Shouldn't encounters continue to be challenging as you go up levels? Why shouldn't an at level lock be as much of a challenge for the rogue at any level? How is it an "at level" challenge, if a 1st level lock is a struggle at 1st level, but a 15th level lock is trivial at 15th level? What does "at level" challenge even mean if that's the case?
Okay, final post here. Because not a PF2 player and I don't really want to crap all over your game or tell you you're having badwrongfun. I just wanted to answer the question about why I bounced off Pathfinder 2.
(I only stumbled in here because I was looking for a timeline on the Kingmaker AP reprint and this thread's title made me curious.)My issue is really what I've heard described as Red Queen's Race design. Based on Through the Looking Glass:
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Where the game has constant advancement and Ability Boosts and magic items and increases that are cancelled out by equivalent boosts to the monsters. So you're just advancing and advancing and advancing but not really getting any better. It's masturbatory increasing numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers. The illusion of progress and improvement.
It's a hamster wheel.
When instead you could just have monsters have smaller numbers but more deadly powers and abilities that could be potentially countered by PC powers. Non-mathematic advancement.
And, yes, I know there's rules in the GMG about removing level from proficiency. If I were to play PF2 I'd probably implement that rule along with the Automatic Bonus Progression. (Or, more likely, decrease DCs/ AC by the amount on that table instead.)
But at that point I'd be re-writing every single monster & hazard I was going to use. And from experience running PF1 with heavy house rules, that is a lot of busy work that I could spend doing literally anything else to prep for the game.
It's just easier to find one of the dozen other games on the surprisingly expansive market that interest me and play that instead. Because, y'know, new golden age of RPGs.
But, as I voiced in my original post, that makes me somewhat sad as I'm not supporting Paizo anymore. I wanted to like the game but it just doesn't do what I wanted. I invested a lot of time in the community, learning the world, reading the APs, and generally thinking "Pathfinder" and it's a sad end-of-an-era to turn away from the game and the company.
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Another real problem I see with AP design/GMs struggling to figure out how to use effectively, is giving PCs enough down time between things the story expects them to do right away. Crafting takes 4 days. Retraining takes 7 or more. Even purchasing new items can take days and require access to large cities. Players need down time to come much more frequently than 1 break every 4 or so levels. PFS spaces this out really well. A player is likely to have almost a month of down time per level. In games where the down time is going to be rushed, GMs need to shower PCs with consumables that are too cheap and useful to hoard.
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In games where the down time is going to be rushed, GMs need to shower PCs with consumables that are too cheap and useful to hoard.This reminds me of Numenera and other Cypher System games. The rules didn't particularly fit me, but one cool thing about the system is that for mumbo-jumbo reasons, there's a maximum number of consumables (called cyphers) any character can have, and that number is fairly low (as in 5 or less, IIRC). This, combined with the GM guidelines explicitly telling GMs to provide lots of them leads to them actually being used a lot more.
I'm not quite sure how to implement a similar rule in PF2, however.
Players in Pathfinder Society use consumables all the time. They get them like hero points and grow use to looking for situations to use them in. It makes casters a whole lot more fun to play when you feel like your character has time to scribe scrolls that will be useful to you in the next adventure and If retraining time was not some precious commodity for parties but something worth doing even between chapters of an AP, then players will feel better about gathering information about the next challenge and picking feat, skill and item options useful to that challenge, rather than assuming they will be stuck with those options for 4 levels of play.
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I respect Jester David's decision and I understand their point about running in place. However, you don't have to do that as a GM. You don't have to constantly give them at-level (or higher) challenges. In fact, the higher level you get, the more variety of enemy you can face. Yes, if every obsacle was lower level it would seem odd. But, I would counter that the opposite is true as well.
As a player I would not want to roll through an adventure in its entirety facing all lower level enemies. I want some challenge. That said, I very much enjoy (every so often) facing a hoard of lower level enemies to show how cool/powerful my character has become. This can easily be part of storytelling.
This falls into that category I harp on of look at you options [GM edition!].
I will say that the new Item's By Level system for making higher level characters is actually far superior than the "here is a pile of gold" system of old, and does in fact encourage you to pick a smattering of side items to help in areas not of your specialty.
I do agree with that, I just think a lot of players won’t think about picking up a second weapon with a level -2 or -3 item whereas they will likely have one or two lying around that they haven’t sold off yet in actual play and that can really pigeonhole a martial.
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I GM five PF2 groups, and two D&D 5e groups. For one, I got 6 players together to do a short Level 20 adventure: the final chapter of Extinction Curse.
Two of the players were PF1 veterans. Three of them were middle schoolers. There were a number of jaw-dropping moments, things that would do NOT happen at lower levels.
Obviously, spoilers for Extinction Curse:
- Marilith demons having 6 Attacks of Opportunity, and being able to do a Focused Assault (6 attacks at their most-accurate attack bonus)
- Demons causing earthquakes that opened fissures in the ground that trapped characters, that they needed Athletics or flight to climb out of.
- Psychic enemies who could consume your mind, and make you slowed 1 and limited to basic actions for 1 minute on a regular Will failure.
- Titans so large that they warped characters' perception of reality and made walking up to them use more movement, and could shut down the party's oracle from casting divine spells for 1 minute on a regular failure.
- Balor demons that could dispel a spell every round, disrupt spellcasting with a regular success, and reposition enemies to any other place within its whip's 20' reach for free.
- Demons that could spew a soulfire breath to deal negative damage to a 60' cone, and use their next action to inhale their life force and heal 10hp for every creature they damaged.
I'm not very familiar with 4th Edition, but I imagine the sense of running a treadmill could have been prevalent, as a saw a lot of powers across classes and monsters in the Monster Manual that seemed to be similar and sometimes even identical, just with a different name. A cursory look at some Level 18+ monsters in the PF2 Bestiary shows abilities that don't happen at lower levels.
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I think part of it is the Illusion of Choice the video linked by the OP mentioned. When you advance you have all these choices: new feats, Ability Boosts, gp to spend on magic. But you're always going to focus on your specializations, because to do otherwise means you fall behind the curve. There really isn't a choice. You have the option to make a sorcerer and then not boost Charisma with any of your 5th level Ability Boost. But you're not going to. That's not a real choice. It's a hypothetical choice at best. Cake or death.
You do have three other ability boosts. And as a reminder, there have been quite successful monks with Dex mod of 0, even before Mountain Stance existed.
You also can totally do that, but it makes it a little harder to focus on offensive spells or spells that can counteract. However, you do get significantly increased versatility as a result from other stats.
Where the game has constant advancement and Ability Boosts and magic items and increases that are cancelled out by equivalent boosts to the monsters. So you're just advancing and advancing and advancing but not really getting any better. It's masturbatory increasing numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers. The illusion of progress and improvement.
It's a hamster wheel.
When instead you could just have monsters have smaller numbers but more deadly powers and abilities that could be potentially countered by PC powers. Non-mathematic advancement.
You say that, but this is doesn't work at all in 5e. If you go up against 20 bandits at level 20 in 5e, you're still very much at risk. If you go up against 20 bandits in PF2, they are not a threat at all.
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What is particularly funny about people suggesting that PF2 forces you into hyper specialization is that if you play it that way it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, that confirms your bias. You have invested all of your resources in to trying to do something one way, at it will work the 75% of the time that approach faces challenges with a weakness to that approach or have average defenses against that approach, but you will have nothing to do the 25% of the time you run up against something that is strongly resistant to that approach.
And so you will call the system broken because your character is caught unprepared for a challenge because you are rushing to pick up every extra +1 for your specialization, which might be 3 points of accuracy ahead of a solid second action you could relatively easily have a situational +1 to 2 on and only be one point of accuracy behind on, facing a defense that is 2 to 3 points lower against. But your party never uses recall knowledge anyway, so you never know what the encounter’s strengths and weaknesses are in the first place and everything feels arbitrary and unfair.
I do think players can build themselves into these Dilemmas without realizing it, but a good GM can help them build back out of it too.
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Though true, Jester David already noted that encounters with enemies that literally can't touch you generally don't happen because that'd be a waste of time, and I'm inclined to agree with that point. Maybe you'll have a comic relief bandit commanding some megalizards or whatever and who starts to panic when all of their crossbow shots miss spectacularly, but actually facing the same 20 bandits at high level strikes me as the stuff of theorycraft.
Still, there's definitely more variation in advancement and more horizontal growth than in 4E. Most proficiencies spike upwards at different rates for different classes, skill feats and such offer more and more capability to deal with niche situations, and you don't mandatorily replace your old abilities so that you always have the same amount of resources.
And despite that, I can still respect David not wanting to go with a system with core math that runs counter to the intended experience. Pathfinder 2E hung its hat on a certain impression and deviating from it seems like it takes a fair amount of repetitive work. (Thankfully it's easier to switch away from magic item progression, which I really don't like either.)
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Jester David's phrase "Red Queen's Race" is nostalgic to me, because he used the same phrase during the PF2 playtest. In contrast, Vic Ferrari called the effect the treadmill. I prefer the Lewis Carroll reference.
The level-up in the adventure paths also gives an out-of-place feeling, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," (1939 Wizard of Oz movie). My Iron Gods campaign started in the town of Torch, which at population 4,320 is the third-largest city in Numeria. The highest level characters in Torch were elderly 6th-level cleric Joram Kyte and mysterious 6th-level wizard/rogue Khonnir Baine. The captain of the guard Aaronlu Langer was a 4th-level fighter.
Five modules later, the party entered Starfall, the 2nd-largest city in Numeria, population 32,400. Notable NPCs are the ruling monarch 15th-level barbarian Kevoth-Kul and leader of the Technic League 14th-level magus/technomancer Ozmyn Zaidow, but we expect such people to be extraordinary. However, everyone else is high level, too. The random encounter table on page 83 starts at CR 12. An Elite Technic League Patrol, CR 12, is led by a 10th-level Technic League captain. A palace guard is an 8th-level barbarian. The city gate is guarded at all times by a group of four gearsman battleguards, CR 10 each. Saoria, the bartender and bouncer at the Red Reaver Tavern, is a bard 6/rogue 3.
The level inflation of the townsfolk between the two cities occurs because the PCs enter Torch at 1st level and enter Starfall at 13th level.
The level difference was especially noticeable with the robots in Numeria. In the 1st module the party encountered repair drones, collector robots, and gearsmen. They never encountered those models again. Instead, the gearsmen were replaced by a different model, advanced gearsmen. As you see, in Starfall the advanced gearsmen were replaced by gearsmen battleguards. The low-level robots were confined to low-level areas and the high-level robots to high-level areas, despite supposedly having been scattered randomly.
In Ironfang Invasion, the player characters frequently encounter patrols of the Ironfang Legion that invaded their country. Yet the hobgoblin soldiers evolve with the modules.
1. The 1st module, Trail of the Hunted, has Ironfang Recruits CR 1/2, Ironfang Scout CR 1, Ironfang Heavy Trooper CR 2, plus some named hobgoblin individuals of higher level.
2. The 2nd module, Fangs of War, had Ironfang Forest Prowlers CR 2, Ironfang Forest Soldiers CR 3, Ironwing Squad Sergeants CR 4, plus some named hobgoblin individuals of higher level.
3. The 3rd module, Assault on Longshadow has Hobgoblins CR 1/2, Ironfang Deserters CR 4, Hobgoblin Lieutenants CR 4, Ironfang Engineer CR 5, Ironfang Sharpshooters CR 6, Hobgoblin Forerunners CR 6, Hobgoblin Troop CR 6, Hobgoblin Bombardiers CR 7, Ironfang Guardians CR 8, Hobgoblin Phalanx Troop CR 10, plus some named hobgoblin individuals of various levels. The Hobgoblins CR 1/2 are not the same as the Hobgoblin Recruits CR 1/2 from the 1st module; instead, they are a catapult crew.
In converting Ironfang Invasion to PF2, I replaced a lot of them with Hobgoblin Soldiers creature 1 and Hobgoblin Archers from the PF2 Bestiary 1. I added a level and heavy armor to a Hobgoblin Soldier to replace the Ironfang Heavy Trooper. I grouped together 4 Hobgoblin Soldiers into a Hobgoblin Troop creature 5 to replaced the Hobgoblin Troop CR 6. I have been trying to keep the fundamental Hobgoblin Soldier active at many levels, adding them to other encounters as low-level grunts helping higher-level specialists. Only recently with the party at 7th level have I grouped them into 5th-level troops. I could handle running 15 distinct Hobgoblin Troops but not 60 distinct Hobgoblin Soldiers. And fewer soldiers would have not seemed large enough to be an army.
The Red Queen's Race is part of encounter design rather than the level-up system. And I like to defy it.
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I like having low CR enemies in high CR encounters, mostly as a distraction. Knowledge checks to identify become more important as it helps avoid wasting a high level resource on something that can be taken out with a basic action.
Hopefully, the shorter APs will help with the problem of escalating past early challenges to new ones, as the level band is smaller and those lower level challenges can be included better.
My Iron Gods campaign started in the town of Torch, which at population 4,320 is the third-largest city in Numeria. The highest level characters in Torch were elderly 6th-level cleric Joram Kyte and mysterious 6th-level wizard/rogue Khonnir Baine. The captain of the guard Aaronlu Langer was a 4th-level fighter.
How did you know they were the highest? Did the module actually say that?
Would anyone even know it if there were higher level characters in the town living a low profile? If there was a 20th-level character in the town, but they had no reason to take on the task that the heroes are expected to do, and would never likely encounter the heroes, then there isn't much reason to mention them in the module.
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PF2 works pretty well to counter the red queen's race through low to mid level play with the way that level -1 creatures have really high attack bonuses and thus stay dangerous for levels 1 to 3, with the GM just being able to add more and more of them. Level 3 creatures are brutal against level 1 and still tough in equal numbers at level 3. By level 7 they are attacking you in droves and will usually be no serious threat, but the math of PF2 is so tight that a single level 7 leader with decent buff abilities and 8 or 9 level 3 monsters can make an encounter quite challenging. The math on encounters is better than it was in the playtest.
I looked into running a game with the no level modifier but the problem with it isn't the work (it isn't much to subtract level from everything), it is that leveling up doesn't feel very significant. Players have to level up 2 or 3 times to actually feel like they leveled up. At the time I started by homebrew campaign, I thought that it didn't feel worth it.
In retrospect, one thing that still doesn't feel quite right to me is how quickly characters level up. As a player though, leveling up is awesome and fun so it never feels like a problem, but character power feels like it goes up way, way faster than story plot lines can handle. Talk about weeks of maximum gains and then long plateaus, in APs the characters sometimes level up in one day and then go 3 months without developing in any significant way.
I don't think this is a system problem so much as an adventure writing problem and am trying to get better at balancing it, although I did badly with the low levels in my homebrew game. This really boils into needing to write more down time into adventures at regular periods and not having mega dungeons where the party feels compelled to fight on every day, with no longer term research challenges or crafting/tunneling otherwise planning challenges that take time to develop. These were problems in PF1 and most other RPGs as well.
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Second, even those things that do scale, don't keep up with PC advancement. That difficulty gap narrows by a fair margin at high levels.Which always struck me as a somewhat strange concept however as most people that do play high levels (not there yet personally) report that they feel more confident playing levels 15 to 20 than levels 1 to 5. So why am I worse off fighting a hobgoblin soldier at level 1 than I am fighting a Pit Fiend at level 20?
Don't get me wrong I understand that people want a feeling of getting better as they level, however for an easy start (and many complaints about PF2 stem from not having an easy start) why not have a math advantage during the early levels, which then flattens as the character has more and more tools in his toolbox and the player becomes ever more experienced to teamwork and using those tools instead of the other way round as it is now?
If anything the game should become more difficult as level progresses which would also make a lot of in-game sense from a commoners point of view, who probably will never be able to understand how you can go on for days about the hobgoblins that almost managed to kick your behinds while you stomping over a couple of Pit Fiends is barely worth a tale.
This is kind of just a natural issue with games, especially turn based games, that actually make an effort to challenge your mastery of the system. Pick a random Atlus RPG and chances are the first boss is going to be one of the most difficult in the whole game because you just don't have the tools to succeed when you're a level 1 scrub with no spells.
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My Iron Gods campaign started in the town of Torch, which at population 4,320 is the third-largest city in Numeria. The highest level characters in Torch were elderly 6th-level cleric Joram Kyte and mysterious 6th-level wizard/rogue Khonnir Baine. The captain of the guard Aaronlu Langer was a 4th-level fighter.How did you know they were the highest? Did the module actually say that?
Would anyone even know it if there were higher level characters in the town living a low profile? If there was a 20th-level character in the town, but they had no reason to take on the task that the heroes are expected to do, and would never likely encounter the heroes, then there isn't much reason to mention them in the module.
The module Fires of Creation had a 6-page article on Torch. It listed 11 notable NPCs in the city stat block, ranging from 3rd level to 6th level, and described those characters in more detail when describing their homes on the map. It was founded around 4605 AR, a little over a century before, so it was unlikely to have an overlooked family that secretly had high-level members.
Sure, a 20th-level character could have been living in town, but if so, he was pretending to be unexceptional, just another 3rd-level smith or similar role. If this character would never encounter the heroes in a meaningful way, then that character is not in the game.
In my game Torch did acquire higher-level characters. A 7th-level cleric, Dinvaya Lanalei, moved to Torch later at the invitation of the PCs. She kept subordinate to her old associate Joram Kyte, so the town probably falsely assumed that she was less prestigious than Joram. And the PCs themselves still resided in Torch at 12th level while pretending to be 2nd level. But during Fires of Creation no such higher-level person was mentioned and as the GM I had no reason to add such a person.
Furthermore, my main point is not about the most powerful people in a town but about the baseline townsfolk. If a 3rd-level party of villains gets into murderous brawl in the streets of the town, what is the level of the guards who show up to make arrests? In Torch, I expect Captain Aaronlu Langer to show up with four 2nd-level town guards and two 1st-level guard recruits. That would be 220 xp of constabulary authority. Yet if the party was really 7th level, those guards would be 55 xp, a low-threat encounter incapable of dealing with the unruly party. Captain Langer would have to call up 4 times the force, which would require more time.
Starfall is 8 times the size of Torch, so giving them 8 times the resources would be fair. They could have neighborhood constabulary teams like Torch's, a 4th-level patrol leader, 4 2nd-level town guards, and 2 1st-level guard recruits. But once the team sees troublemakers flying in the air, transforming into dinosaurs, and shooting lasers, then they call the elite constabulary team, 8 times as strong with with a 10th-level elite patrol leader, 4 8th-level elite guards, and 2 7th-level elite candidates. Alas, to a 13th-level party, that is 55-xp low threat. The elite guard team would the equivalent of a 10th-level party, so they would have to struggle against the 11th-, 12th-, and 13th-level groups of monsters that regularly walk the streets of Starfall, because "the PCs have a 35% chance of a random encounter every hour they spend in the city." And the neighborhood constabulary team would be dead.
The module Palace of Fallen Stars scaled the difficulty of Starfall beyond what its ordinary residents could survive, unless those residents are all 8th-level or higher. Starfall is supposed to be an important city in a dangerous landscape, but the PF1 Red Queen's Race made it a deathtrap instead. This was frustrating to me because my players snuck into Starfall by using their low-level Torch identities, beneath the notice of the evil Technic League:
Inconspicuous PCs Unmotivated in Palace of Fallen Stars. I had to emphasize Starfall as a city of opportunity and intrigue rather than a potential battleground to give them adventures.
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I completely agree the red Queen's race is an issue of encounter design rather than the system. It's sad because pf2e actually provides the tools to the GM to run a wide variety of styles. You can run a Dynasty Warriors style rampage through weak mobs, an elder scrolls type on level challenge, a dark Souls type deadly fight unless the tricks are figured out, and a horror game where frankly you're supposed to flee. And best of all you can mix and match to create what feels like a living breathing world with a variety of situations.
The problem is paizos APs don't really guide GMs to this easy sort of customization.
For myself I always heavily modify them to remove what I feel like are boring and/or repetitive encounters that don't add to the narrative.
There's a lot of them! It always feels like they're there to fill out xp for the xp system but I've always used milestone. Removing them keeps the game moving and reduces the chance of combat feeling repetitive.
The other issue really is that paizos adventures really need a difficulty select option. The base encounter design system assumes a competent, tactically minded party with some synergy in party composition and the system mastery to use it. Which is to say it's somewhere between Normal and Hard mode.
Really should have been tuned to a party of newbies who aren't really sure how to work together or Easy mode. With plenty of repeated suggestions to the GM on how to increase the difficulty once the players start to get the hang of the game.
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In any case. It's *so* easy for any GM to fix. If your players are getting frustrated by not being able to exceed as much as they expect then just get your players to level up once or twice faster than originally planned. Hand out hero points more liberally when they do 'fun' things that get laughs and engagement.
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Another real problem I see with AP design/GMs struggling to figure out how to use effectively, is giving PCs enough down time between things the story expects them to do right away. Crafting takes 4 days. Retraining takes 7 or more. Even purchasing new items can take days and require access to large cities. Players need down time to come much more frequently than 1 break every 4 or so levels. PFS spaces this out really well. A player is likely to have almost a month of down time per level. In games where the down time is going to be rushed, GMs need to shower PCs with consumables that are too cheap and useful to hoard.For sure, the APs could start to denote where things are time sensitive and where they are not. We would have to ask the design team their justifications, but my guess is that it will match what they've said about many of the APs: "These are suggested structures, but at the end of the day, it's up to the GM to modify this where needed."
I think a lot of GMs have this idea that down time is a boring gamest mechanic unless it gets spiced up with a lot of extra social interactions. The way video games work today, many players expect to get to know the local black smith and spend play time doing these things, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, except for how it often works out at an TTRPG table.
If each player has their own things they want to be doing with their down time, then a session that includes down time can mean getting 15 minutes of your character doing something and then 45 minutes of waiting for other characters to do their things. The very point of down time is that it isn't time the characters all need to be in immediate proximity to each other for fear of instant attack and having a separated party, and thus I see a lot of GMs struggle to work it in, because it feels like it is a drain on the "action" of the game.
In my games, I try to give players downtime integrated into the background of the story, even while the party is doing other things. There might be limits on the kinds of downtime activities they can do when they are actively out exploring a jungle, but when they are in a city, even if I am going to have them interacting with locals and having some different encounters thrown in the mix, I give the downtime days anyway, breaking it up like this: A day has 3 sections. Most days are broken up into 1 section of rest, 1 section of high activity adventuring, and 1 section of downtime back ground activity that the player can just narrate for themselves and I try to make fit into some version of downtime. If there is going to be a period where the party isn't going to be adventuring, I give 2 downtime days instead of one for the players to double up on their activities if they want. If the party tries to adventure for more than 1 section, I give them the fatigued condition for the second section of the day as adventuring seems like it is being on extremely high alert and would be quite exhausting.
This also helps relieve the pressure on me to make their downtime memorable, and I can still have interesting things happening upon occasion without feeling like I, the GM, have to be in full control of the entire world around the PCs. I have only been running things this way for the last 6 months so it is relatively new to me and I don't think I've perfected it, but it gets me in the habit of asking what players want to do with their down time, gets them looking at longer term plans, but doesn't eat up nearly as much play time as when I feel like downtime is a wholly separate part of the game that I have to prepare whole sessions to handle.
There are elements of downtime challenges and encounters in the first two APs, but having them run off into their own subsystems, and feel like something that happens as an additional requirement to things the players might want to do with downtime actually eats into players feeling like their characters get to build their own stories with downtime. I think this also contributes to the murder hobo feel of the game for a lot of parties, because every NPC has to be controlled and plotted by the GM instead of the players, meaning every NPC is "them" and not "Us." I think GMs need more help and direction ceding some narrative control of story elements over to the players and downtime is really the best place for it.
I realized one way that adding level to proficiency, the source of Jester David's Red Queen's Race, could contribute to the repetition that Cody observed. It makes leveling up too automatic.
Leveling up in Pathfinder 1st Edition is a real Red Queen's Race, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." A 3/4 BAB class, such as cleric, has to cast stronger and stronger buff spells to gain the same attack bonus as the full BAB martial classes. A full caster has to cast their highest level spells to make the saves difficult, which means new spells every two levels. A martial melee character has to master ways to attack flying creatures or incorporeal creatures as they appear on the roster. A martial ranged character has to find a way to defend against Attacks of Opportunity from a nearby enemy, especially as enemies grow bigger with level and gain reach. AC does not increase, unless the character upgrades his or her armor.
However, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has no 3/4 BAB classes. Everyone's attack bonus increases at the same rate. The save DCs on familiar spells also automatically increase with level, and many spells have heightened forms that keep them useful at higher levels. Cody observed in his follow-up to his Quitting video that a ranged character's best option after a PF2 monster closes in to melee range is to keep shooting, because that monster probably lacks Attack of Opportunity.
Pathfinder 1st Edition requires more system mastery in leveling up a character to keep up with the changing environment of stronger monsters. Pathfinder 2nd Edition removed that need for mastery, but it meant that a PF2 character could continue in the same habits and ignore new ways of fighting.
Spellcasters are partly resistant to that, because new spells are better than heightened spells, but the druid in Cody's game, assuming he was a wild shape druid, followed his 8th-level Ferocious Shape feat for dinosaur form with the 12th-level Dragon Shape for dragon shape and used the two forms similarly. Likewise, several ranger feats, such as Far Shot, do nothing to change the use of a longbow away from Hunt Prey, Hunted Shot, Strike. If the ranger had taken Hunter's Aim or Deadly Aim, he would have had choices. Deadly Aim is favored in PF1 to keep a bow's damage scaling upward with the monsters' hit points, but PF2 offers Striking Runes as a more convenient alternative.
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I honestly don't understand how you would expect a system to work if you didn't fight stronger opponents as you leveled up. It works fine in PF2 because your toolbox grows. Your horizontal growth gives you new abilities that can make fights more interesting. The monsters are also designed with new abilities to keep things interesting. While numbers go up all around, this is merely stratification of power. The fun comes from the new tools and new, more complex enemies to face.
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This "it's a hamster wheel" argument applies to literally every RPG game ever created.
Not really. Because in a lot of games the balance breaks down at high levels and the 'level appropriate' opponents become trivially easy to beat.
PF2 fixed this issue. Only it turns out that not everyone wanted it fixed.
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I'm not even sure what you want here. Shouldn't encounters continue to be challenging as you go up levels? Why shouldn't an at level lock be as much of a challenge for the rogue at any level? How is it an "at level" challenge, if a 1st level lock is a struggle at 1st level, but a 15th level lock is trivial at 15th level? What does "at level" challenge even mean if that's the case?Okay, final post here. Because not a PF2 player and I don't really want to crap all over your game or tell you you're having badwrongfun. I just wanted to answer the question about why I bounced off Pathfinder 2.
(I only stumbled in here because I was looking for a timeline on the Kingmaker AP reprint and this thread's title made me curious.)My issue is really what I've heard described as Red Queen's Race design. Based on Through the Looking Glass:
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"Where the game has constant advancement and Ability Boosts and magic items and increases that are cancelled out by equivalent boosts to the monsters. So you're just advancing and advancing and advancing but not really getting any better. It's masturbatory increasing numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers. The illusion of progress and improvement.
It's a hamster wheel.
When instead you could just have monsters have smaller numbers but more deadly powers and abilities that could be potentially countered by PC powers. Non-mathematic advancement.And, yes, I know there's rules in the GMG about removing level from proficiency. If I were to play PF2 I'd probably implement that rule along with the Automatic Bonus...
JD, maybe you could play a few PFS2 scenarios or part of a recent AP to get a better feel for how the final system is working. You might have a pleasant surprise.
Obviously, if you did this already and did not like it, no problem. I wish you many excellent adventures in the years to come.
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3 very good things this thread brought me :
I learned many things.
I favorited posts from people I never thought I would before.
I got the impetus to try and post my rules to win at PF2 (currently working on them).
So big thank you to all involved on every side :-D
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As mathmuse pointed out earlier, building new high level characters in PF2 can result in players overspecializing and getting caught up in single action routines that are actually suboptimal in many encounters because PF2 encounters are usually/designed to be fluid, with different tactical challenges presented by unique monster abilities and an interactive environment. An inability to adapt to either the environment or your enemy is a much more major flaw than past editions.
But, I am honestly at a loss of trying to imagine a 12 Druid who’s best action usage is going to be to transform into a dragon on the first round of combat and then sit still fighting with tooth and claw every action.
First of all you are a full caster never using spells in combat? And you are acting optimally?
Secondly, dragons don’t fight this way in PF2. (Nor should they in any version of D&D. They are incredibly fast fliers with a powerful AoE attack, and the ability to move attack move on their other turns, or attack attack move as necessary to be almost unhittable. Polymorphing into one to assume a tanky-brute roll seems like a recipe for getting clobbered.
Combining a tactical ranged archer and a dragon shaping Druid who uses battle field control spells to make it difficult for enemies to get close, or then funnels them into lanes for then dragon forming and blasting is a very difficult strategic combat style to imagine getting repetitive against the incredibly varied level 9 to level 15 foes you are likely to encounter.
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First of all you are a full caster never using spells in combat? And you are acting optimally?
Secondly, dragons don’t fight this way in PF2. (Nor should they in any version of D&D. They are incredibly fast fliers with a powerful AoE attack, and the ability to move attack move on their other turns, or attack attack move as necessary to be almost unhittable. Polymorphing into one to assume a tanky-brute roll seems like a recipe for getting clobbered.
Steve at Mage Tower Creations in the video Reply to @Taking20 quitting Pathfinder 2e from someone who knows said, "I actually know Cody and the people in the game he's referencing and I've some inside information." He mostly wants to debunk the Stormwind Fallacy. When he returned to the repetition issue, he said (time 8:45), "I know his players have had their characters do different things. For example, his swashbuckler would sometimes feint or goading feint instead of tumble through to gain panache. His druid would sometimes cast spells or while in wild shape would attack buildings or walls or use a breath weapon instead of simply biting the nearest foe. His bard player has tried to disguise himself and use his intimidation skill."
Cody of Taking20 clipped the story he told.
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My issue is really what I've heard described as Red Queen's Race design. Based on Through the Looking Glass:
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"Where the game has constant advancement and Ability Boosts and magic items and increases that are cancelled out by equivalent boosts to the monsters. So you're just advancing and advancing and advancing but not really getting any better. It's masturbatory increasing numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers. The illusion of progress and improvement.
It's a hamster wheel.
When instead you could just have monsters have smaller numbers but more deadly powers and abilities that could be potentially countered by PC powers. Non-mathematic advancement.
If you take the view from a mile away and compare the numbers at level 1 and 20, you might very well think that it's a Red Queen Race situation, but when you look a bit closer a more interesting pattern emerges.
Because you don't increase in power by the same amount every level, and the DCs don't increase by the same amount every level. Sometimes you increase a lot more (moving from Trained to Expert attacks at level 5 for some classes, and level 7 for others). You'll probably subconsciously by around level 4 that damn, monsters are hard to hit. And then at level 5 when your to-hit gets better, suddenly they feel a lot easier to hit. And then a while later, just before your armor training gets better, enemy to-hit goes up, so for a couple of levels you're getting really pounded, but then it gets better again.
So it's less like a race with everyone staying at the same relative spot, and more like a race where sometimes the monsters overtake you, and sometimes you overtake the monsters.
And to add some extra fog obscuring the stark naked structure of the race, not all classes advance at the same levels in the same way. When martials get their Expert weapons at level 5, casters still have to wait a bit to increase their spellcasting proficiency. However, they do get quite different spells - stuff like Fireball, Haste, Slow, Fear3 that really raise the scope of what casters can do.
By level 7 or so, you also start to see a parting of ways between people who really choose to master a skill, the ones just keeping pace, and the ones falling behind a bit. Overall you need to be about Expert in a skill to stay even, so everyone has to choose which skills they're going to be above the curve in (Master, priority for these skill items) or in which they're choosing graceful decline (Trained).
And monsters start doing different things at different levels; getting more aggressive action economy like Improved Grab, more reach because they're bigger and such. And difficult things like flying enemies that don't need to come into melee reach at all because they have breath weapons, or Reach and maybe AoO - stuff that require PCs to start coming up with backup plans when simply engaging in melee doesn't work anymore.
So yeah, in the background there is an element of red queen racing going on. No game can really do without some of it, if you want the PCs to become stronger than some of the things they fought before, while at the same time also presenting things that are currently challenging. But this necessary RQR is disguised by staggering the levels at which particular classes get better at particular things. And also, there is genuine change in what monsters can do. Both players and monsters get more tricky later in the game.
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First of all you are a full caster never using spells in combat? And you are acting optimally?
Secondly, dragons don’t fight this way in PF2. (Nor should they in any version of D&D. They are incredibly fast fliers with a powerful AoE attack, and the ability to move attack move on their other turns, or attack attack move as necessary to be almost unhittable. Polymorphing into one to assume a tanky-brute roll seems like a recipe for getting clobbered.
Steve at Mage Tower Creations in the video Reply to @Taking20 quitting Pathfinder 2e from someone who knows said, "I actually know Cody and the people in the game he's referencing and I've some inside information." He mostly wants to debunk the Stormwind Fallacy. When he returned to the repetition issue, he said (time 8:45), "I know his players have had their characters do different things. For example, his swashbuckler would sometimes feint or goading feint instead of tumble through to gain panache. His druid would sometimes cast spells or while in wild shape would attack buildings or walls or use a breath weapon instead of simply biting the nearest foe. His bard player has tried to disguise himself and use his intimidation skill."
Cody of Taking20 clipped the story he told.
Interesting. The Swashbuckler's style is the one considered the worst / most difficult. Yet the very experienced player kept at it, even though it is not optimal.
Great for them if they wanted the feel of a feinting Swashbuckler. But it should not be presented as the optimal Swashbuckler build.
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My issue is really what I've heard described as Red Queen's Race design. Based on Through the Looking Glass:
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"Where the game has constant advancement and Ability Boosts and magic items and increases that are cancelled out by equivalent boosts to the monsters. So you're just advancing and advancing and advancing but not really getting any better. It's masturbatory increasing numbers just for the sake of bigger numbers. The illusion of progress and improvement.
It's a hamster wheel.
When instead you could just have monsters have smaller numbers but more deadly powers and abilities that could be potentially countered by PC powers. Non-mathematic advancement.If you take the view from a mile away and compare the numbers at level 1 and 20, you might very well think that it's a Red Queen Race situation, but when you look a bit closer a more interesting pattern emerges.
Because you don't increase in power by the same amount every level, and the DCs don't increase by the same amount every level. Sometimes you increase a lot more (moving from Trained to Expert attacks at level 5 for some classes, and level 7 for others). You'll probably subconsciously by around level 4 that damn, monsters are hard to hit. And then at level 5 when your to-hit gets better, suddenly they feel a lot easier to hit. And then a while later, just before your armor training gets better, enemy to-hit goes up, so for a couple of levels you're getting really pounded, but then it gets better again.
So it's less like a race with everyone staying at the same relative...
To add to this, it then varies quite a bit by choices and build-- a fighter who takes double slice, and a fighter who takes sudden charge on the same build are going to feel like they have very different success rates on their turns (although an argument can certainly be made one isn't intrinsically better than the other, especially situationally.)
I kind of think that more analysis needs to focus on hit rate (and average damage numbers) over the course of a turn, because of the way action economy intersects with build, and the way MAP works, its pretty clear that hitting with every attack is not an expectation a player should have in this game, but instead that getting a hit in, and your odds of doing so, are more relevant.
So even if it is, in some context a "Red Queen's Race" it still seems like it departs from that based on specific build choices-- or in other words, while the base numbers don't go up unequally, good selections and play can certainly create winners and losers (who still don't lose quite as hard) in this game.
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First of all you are a full caster never using spells in combat? And you are acting optimally?
Secondly, dragons don’t fight this way in PF2. (Nor should they in any version of D&D. They are incredibly fast fliers with a powerful AoE attack, and the ability to move attack move on their other turns, or attack attack move as necessary to be almost unhittable. Polymorphing into one to assume a tanky-brute roll seems like a recipe for getting clobbered.
Steve at Mage Tower Creations in the video Reply to @Taking20 quitting Pathfinder 2e from someone who knows said, "I actually know Cody and the people in the game he's referencing and I've some inside information." He mostly wants to debunk the Stormwind Fallacy. When he returned to the repetition issue, he said (time 8:45), "I know his players have had their characters do different things. For example, his swashbuckler would sometimes feint or goading feint instead of tumble through to gain panache. His druid would sometimes cast spells or while in wild shape would attack buildings or walls or use a breath weapon instead of simply biting the nearest foe. His bard player has tried to disguise himself and use his intimidation skill."
Cody of Taking20 clipped the story he told.
All right, so the dude just lied about his players' experiences in order to make it sound more samey than it actually was. That's cool. Everyone's cool