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In previous editions there was a sense that your level really mattered. If you were a 1st-level character, you were little better than a peasant. If you were 5th-level, you were probably a local hero. By the time you were 10th-level you probably had enough accomplishments to be known across the land. By the time you got to 15th- or 20th-level, you had saved the world (likely more than once) and were trekking across other realities the likes of which are seldom seen by mortal men.
Likewise, the NPCs around you were largely low level unless they were intended as foes or interacted with your heroic journey in some meaningful fashion. A 1st-level enemy was a roadside brigand while a 5th-level threat might be a hill giant or troll. A 10th-level threat was a powerful demon. A 15th-level threat was generally a dragon or a powerful divine servant of a deity. At 20th-level, you're likely fighting the avatar of a demigod or demon lord. As you became a bigger hero you faced beggar threats. Yesterday it was a wizard. Today it's a lich. Tomorrow a demilich AND its fanatical cultist cabal.
But much of that seems lost to me in 2nd Edition, and I'm curious to know if other people have had a similar sense.
This really hit me after I recently hosted a published adventurer in which STARVING THIEVES were listed as a plausible threat for 10th-level heroes. It kind of begs the question: If starving people are that tough, then who needs the heroes? What exactly makes them heroes when, in another published encounter, even NPC children can stand up to them (at least well enough to survive multiple fireball spells)?
Are the days where high level heroes and foes were the rare exception long gone? Is every barber, chef, and midwife now capable of challenging the PCs at all levels just because Paizo wills it?
Discuss.
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Level doesn't exist in-universe. Hope this helps.
Those level ten thieves are that high of a level because it's a game and the writers wanted to throw some thieves at the players. Them being starving doesn't really matter? Those guys aren't going to go one-shot a commoner offscreen because level only matters when they share a scene of conflict with the PCs.
Mechanically, level matters more than ever.
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As a supporter of the "RPG Mechanics Verse" trope, I do agree wih your (supposed) opposition to the arbitrary level treadmill syndrome.
Although, while I enjoy the idea of randomly progresed heroes and vilains dotted around within a sandbox world influencing its course greatly, some others might detest it for various reasons;
be it practical (as in running a game as a GM, sandboxes needing extreme prep to be "realistic"), or political (as in a world wih physically extant levels of big gaps being terrible for a "true" democracy or any "less worse political system" to nurture).
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This was something that one of our gaming groups felt was pretty jarring when you got really high up in levels; it's less obvious in the lower levels (such as 4-10), but when you start casting 7th level or higher spells, it's really apparent that it's just a treadmill effect taken to its ridiculous conclusions.
Standard humanoid spellcaster NPCs capable of casting 8th level spells, and such NPCs becoming a mainstay just to challenge the players is greatly immersion-breaking if you consider that a lot of other NPCs in the world who protect the city (such as guards) are far, far weaker than said NPCs, much less the PCs whom, if said NPCs were properly sent after the PCs, it'd end the adventure, meaning the plot is purposefully dumb just for continued player participation. Or that such NPCs are actually in need of "help" when they have that kind of power at their disposal. Some of the APs that Paizo develops actually have story-based reasons for why these might be the case, but when it's effectively just a plot device or a meta-game reason for the players/PCs to be there, it's not very compelling to the story you're looking to tell. (Hence why our next campaign involving other traveling adventuring parties is much more immersive by comparison.)
It also made level less significant from a lore standpoint (where you're considered the "1%" of adventurers that make it to the top), and more significant from a math standpoint (being 1 or 2 levels over or under enemies becomes more and more important in the higher levels), whereas it should be able to apply to both evenly; PF2 fails to do that when you can just Chain Lightning or Whirlwind Attack all the enemies by yourself.
5E solved this by having "bounded accuracy," and I think the proficiency-without-level optional rule effectively mirrors that concept. It definitely makes enemies like Dragons and Avatars and such extremely powerful and challenging, and also means that throwing such enemies at the PCs are special and aren't done just to make a numbers treadmill work; and it also makes throwing basic enemies like Goblins and Orcs not just another simple walk-in-the-park encounter.
Granted, 5E isn't anywhere near as mechanically complex, or as varied as PF2, much less PF1, but it definitely handled the "Heroes aren't very Heroic" aspect far better than PF2 ever has. For example, aiding allies in PF2 ranges from borderline impossible from the early levels to "Free +2s" in the late levels, which is just wonky scaling to begin with, and also discourages working together at the levels where it should be most apparent. I wouldn't mind aiding being more beneficial or difficult based on the difficulty of the act, but when even starter adventurers aren't very helpful to themselves, it creates a negative diatribe that actively hurts the eventual expectation of adventuring parties.
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Level doesn't exist in-universe. Hope this helps.
Those level ten thieves are that high of a level because it's a game and the writers wanted to throw some thieves at the players. Them being starving doesn't really matter? Those guys aren't going to go one-shot a commoner offscreen because level only matters when they share a scene of conflict with the PCs.
Mechanically, level matters more than ever.
Technically, it does, though it's not as black-and-white as the mechanics make it out to be. Spell levels and feats being level-gated demonstrates that it takes a specific amount of skill (read: level) to achieve those results, even if not every character of the same class doesn't have that skill. It's the difference between someone casting Burning Hands versus Fireball; mechanically and in-universe, the character casting Fireball is on a level significantly higher than one who merely casts Burning Hands. Conversely, a character who can make only one Attack of Opportunity might be stronger than one who can make two; but those capacities tell us more about what type of character it is, and less so what level they are (though we can safely assume that the character making two Attacks of Opportunity is at least a 12th level Fighter character).
Granted, that makes less sense, given that NPCs don't follow PC rules, but I don't much care for using story elements to create genuine stakes when the mechanics do not line up whatsoever to it being a difficult fight. If starving bandits are a capable threat to level 10 PCs, then every time said brigands get hungry, entire villages and settlements would get razed in minutes with mere fists and torches. It's like saying Superman can be beaten by hungry thieves wielding guns. It's immersion-breaking for the starving bandits to be a level 10 threat without something else at play.
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I find that's more a fault of adventure design than the system. If my players are level 10, I'm not going to throw basic thieves at them. At that point they're dealing with high ranking members of thieves guilds.
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This varies by author, and quite a bit at that, with the situation (which I agree is a problem) going back to 1st edition.
One PFS1 scenario had three brigands casually sitting by the roadside before they accost the PCs. Except (to balance PF1's skewed mechanics) the brigands had drunk thousands of gold pieces (hundreds in PF2) worth of potions beforehand and were one of the toughest fights, each of them higher level (8th) than the PCs. Which is to say some randos resorting to highway robbery (on a minor offshoot road at that) and not knowing how wealthy the PCs are spent far more than they could expect to steal from equally random travelers. Instead they could've been the heroes themselves seeing as they had no ties to the other enemies. (Or hey, maybe the encounter was there to humble the PCs so they went in a bit more scared, a fear-caution which proved quite valuable given how the site would've chewed up brazen PCs.)
Or you can get an adventure where the "standard guard squad" remains the same throughout as PCs level up, but to compensate the NPCs gain access to better pets, closer support, a better leader, or a trap/device that compensates for the difference. PCs can feel like they've progressed. Or you might write in 1 ogre that makes for a good early boss then levels later you toss in 2-3 ogres who are easy just so the PCs feel like, "Ha! Remember when we feared these guys. We rock."
Trouble is we can pick and choose examples supporting good/poor escalation going back to Gygax (who fluctuated himself) so I wouldn't call this a PF2 issue so much as an RPG & authorship issue. Authors should be cognizant that it's not just about matching DCs & threat levels or having an internal coherence. There should be an arc stretching through a PCs whole career. We don't want somebody saving a city then struggling to rescue a farm several levels later.
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Are the days where high level heroes and foes were the rare exception long gone? Is every barber, chef, and midwife now capable of challenging the PCs at all levels just because Paizo wills it?
If we're talking about published Paizo adventures then I think it varies a huge amount.
By the end of Age of Ashes it was kind of a mix. On the one hand, the city guard were something like 17th level NPCs (admittedly in a place where it made sense that they'd be at least pretty high level). On the other hand, a monk PC headlocked the Avatar of a bloody GOD and a different PC (a fighter :-)) outargued a Golden Dragon on the fine points of Arcana and both of those ARE pretty darn epic.
Agents of Edgewatch definitely feels not particularly heroic to me (I'm the GM). We're in the final book and while everything is scaled to the characters level it kinda feels like pretty much the identical story could have been told with the characters 5 levels lower.
On the lower end of the scale, Abomination Vaults felt like we went from L1 to L10 and became city saving heroes influencing the country we're in.
But I think this is also true of PF1. While I loved Curse of the Crimson Throne I think the end could easily have been done with characters and adversaries 5 levels lower. War for the Crown would have benefitted if the first four books were stretched into 6 books while keeping the maximum levels down in the low teens.
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The thieves might be really good thieves who have just fallen on bad times because of some bad decisions they made (like storing their food somewhere a bear could get into). If I was faced with something weird like this, I would really lean into the weirdness.
Like, they might be very talented and very well equipped, but haven't had anything to eat in a weak and the PCs might just make friends with them by offering them a meal.
If those thieves were supposed to be common street toughs, certainly that's a bit of an extreme choice. On the other hand, the heroes have never been assumed to be the only characters who get up to high levels. In 1e a typical person was level 1-5, including all of those whom had what were formerly referred to as the NPC classes. NPCs with player class levels could commonly reach into levels 6-10 as 'exceptional' while levels 11-15 were described as being reserved for the elite warriors and operatives of a nation.
Likewise it makes sense that the larger a city the more extreme the levels available in that city as different echelons of skill overlap. Absalom as -the- largest city is also like to feature some of the most powerful NPCs. Of course the important caveat is in how those NPCS are presented and... I'm struggling to imagine level 8-10 thieves having a great difficulty feeding themselves in the absence of a disaster like a famine drying up the food stores.
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Most authors handle it Ok. Several modules don't. Sometimes players just have to let it go and move on in the name of the game.
I feel it is immersion breaking if your high level characters are not just awesome in the wider world. Most NPCs can't be higher level, only a few, in certain challening areas. I think is is useful game wise to just let that level difference happen it bit so that the PCs feel strong. It helps establish character.
Threats have to mature. I'm all for kitted up Kobolds to challenge players, or giving significant terrain advantages to lesser opponenets.
But a a certain point using starving peasant thieves its not something a designer should do. Unless the goal is not so much to defeat the thieves, and there are story or role playing factors to consider. It is nice to have encounters where the main point is not winning, but how you win.
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If we’re accusing the entire edition of killing the hero fantasy because of a couple enemy statblocks, I don’t know how you ever played 1e. There’s tons of demons, dragons, and whatever on-level threats mentioned in the OP; ignoring them all because of some toughs in a handful of adventures feels silly to me.
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No.
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If anything Pathfinder 2nd Edition has created the ability to have a town blacksmith who is absolutely a fantastic, perhaps legendary, blacksmith who is not someone who is useful in a fight and thus needs the PCs to be around.
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The numbers don't make sense. A Starving Thief sounds like a Creature 0. Four Starving Thieves working together would be the equivalent of a 4th-level creature. The Encounter Budget math breaks down past 4 levels difference, so to go further I would create a troop creature called Band of Starving Thieves that represents 16 Starving Thieves, creature 8. Four Bands of Starving Thieves would be like a creature 12. Sixty-four thieves would be gang the size of an entire hamlet.
But if a hamlet of 64 starving thieves was faced with a creature 10, such as an Icewyrm, then most of them would die. They don't have the special abilities to attack strange monsters, so they have to do it the hard way in melee combat. Woe to them if their foe can fly.
If the hamlet of starving thieves faced a more mundane enemy, such as a squad of town guards, then they would fare better. If the hamlet of starving thieves faced an enemy with multiple tactical abilities, such as a 9th-level adventuring party, they would be toast.
In Assault on Longshadow the 9th-level party spent time to train citizens in defending the city. To reward them for their efforts, rather than just giving them victory points, I gave them troop units as allies, Longshadow Archers, creature 8, that each represented 8 citizens trained as archers. The party was at 10th level when the enemy army attacked Longshadow with their Hobgoblin Formation troops, creature 9, but the Longshadow Archers were valuable in the combat because they were anti-troop units with ranged area-of-effect damage. The party was confident to leave Longshadow in their hands (another reason to create those units) when they went off on the new quest in the next module.
I was inspired by the movie The Seven Samurai, where starving peasants hired samurai willing to work for food to defend them against an army of bandits raiding their crops. The samurai trained the peasants to help in their own defense. Low-level people can help the high-level heroes.
This was something that one of our gaming groups felt was pretty jarring when you got really high up in levels; it's less obvious in the lower levels (such as 4-10), but when you start casting 7th level or higher spells, it's really apparent that it's just a treadmill effect taken to its ridiculous conclusions.
My players invented a side quest before the next module, Siege of Stone, and they had maximum xp reward due to their Great Victory at Longshadow, so they began Siege of Stone at 13th level. It was suppose to start at 11th level. I raised the difficulty of some challenges, but unchanged challenges such as Pedula dragons creature 10 and Carnivorous Crystal creature 11 have been cakewalks to them. The PCs currently feel like the big guys on campus, and 13th-level characters should feel like that often, but stronger monsters await to humble them at their remote destination.
For the 2nd and 3rd modules, I did throw in a few Ironfang Forest Patroller and Ironfang Captain individual creatures that were at the PCs' level, but for verisimilitude I tried to group the basic Hobgoblin Soldier creature 1 into troop units of the right level: 4-soldier Hobgoblin Troop creature 5 and 16-soldier Hobgoblin Formation creature 9. A 64-soldier Hobgoblin Company creature 13 would be too unwieldy, so I will have to find another solution when they return to fighting the Ironfang Legion.
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Preface by saying the I generally love the mechanics and level design of PF2e, but....
This is definitely an AP issue. In EC, I can understand how my 1st level sorcerer got his lunch money taken by a drunk in the stands. However, when we finally go to confront Mistress Plothooklight the carny guards beat on my now enormously experienced and powerful sorcerer/champion who could summon lightening from the heavens. I mean, these guys are basically bouncers... for a circus.
I think there has to be more room for super weak level or whatever encounters. There can offer just as much challenge as on level fights. Does your liberator just murder kill a couple of mooks who are just doing their job? Does you LN warpriest of Abadar take the time to explain the legal ramifications to a couple of level 2 ruffians rather than just walk through them?
In general, I think this a relatively minor thing, but I remember it being quite jarring when we were heading into the climax of the book and we had to stop and first aid after fighting Joe Dirt.
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Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
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In previous editions there was a sense that your level really mattered. If you were a 1st-level character, you were little better than a peasant. If you were 5th-level, you were probably a local hero. By the time you were 10th-level you probably had enough accomplishments to be known across the land. By the time you got to 15th- or 20th-level, you had saved the world (likely more than once) and were trekking across other realities the likes of which are seldom seen by mortal men.
Likewise, the NPCs around you were largely low level unless they were intended as foes or interacted with your heroic journey in some meaningful fashion. A 1st-level enemy was a roadside brigand while a 5th-level threat might be a hill giant or troll. A 10th-level threat was a powerful demon. A 15th-level threat was generally a dragon or a powerful divine servant of a deity. At 20th-level, you're likely fighting the avatar of a demigod or demon lord. As you became a bigger hero you faced beggar threats. Yesterday it was a wizard. Today it's a lich. Tomorrow a demilich AND its fanatical cultist cabal.
But much of that seems lost to me in 2nd Edition, and I'm curious to know if other people have had a similar sense.
This really hit me after I recently hosted a published adventurer in which STARVING THIEVES were listed as a plausible threat for 10th-level heroes. It kind of begs the question: If starving people are that tough, then who needs the heroes? What exactly makes them heroes when, in another published encounter, even NPC children can stand up to them (at least well enough to survive multiple fireball spells)?
Are the days where high level heroes and foes were the rare exception long gone? Is every barber, chef, and midwife now capable of challenging the PCs at all levels just because Paizo wills it?
Discuss.
This seems like more of a writing problem (why make them starving thieves, rather than a legendary band of brigands?) than a mechanical one. The problem isn't 2nd edition, this is a complaint for the writer of the adventure.
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If we’re accusing the entire edition of killing the hero fantasy because of a couple enemy statblocks, I don’t know how you ever played 1e. There’s tons of demons, dragons, and whatever on-level threats mentioned in the OP; ignoring them all because of some toughs in a handful of adventures feels silly to me.
Sometimes the hostile encounters in the main quest feel perfectly justified, but the filler encounters are way too unbelievable. "Fighting Joe Dirt" as Parry vividly put it yet having a tough battle against an unexceptional foe.
For example, in Palace of Fallen Stars, the fifth module in the PF1 Iron Gods adventure path, the main foes are the high-level technomancers of the Technic League and the elite yet corrupt palace guards in the Palace of Fallen Stars. They are justifiably as strong as the 13th-level party members.
But the random encounter table starts its encounters at CR 12 and says, "During the course of the adventure, the PCs have a 35% chance of a random encounter every hour they spend in the city, but should face no more than four random encounters per day." Okay, they would have a CR 12 or worse random encounter every 3 hours except while sleeping in an inn. And then my players decided that their characters would enter Starfall incognito disguised as ordinary people. If the ordinary people of Starfall had to face a CR 12 encounter every 3 hours, they would be dead. Fortunately, the city guard patrols are backed up with four gearsman battleguards, CR 10 each, courtesy of the Technic League. I had to abandon the random encounter table as too unrealistic, when I needed a good random encounter table since the PCs avoided the Technic League and the Palace until they got the lay of the city.
The world leveling up with the PCs has been discussed before. One name for it is the Treadmill, but I prefer the other name the Red Queen's Race.
I try to justify the NPCs that the heroes are fighting.
In my upcoming kingmaker chapter 3 remake, it's basically a tossup between the party's kingdom and 3 major players.
The PC's are expected to go from 10 to 12 in this arc.
One side is varnhold, they are lead by maegar varn, the leader of the varnling host and a celebrated fencer. His advisor cephal lorentus is a powerful conjurer. He has also made an alliance with the centaur clan, lead by aecore silverfiee and her daughter xamanthe silverfire. They are all level 11. They also have several lower lieutenant in the varnling host, but the standard Mook if they fight the PC's is a varnling veteran that is level 6 or 7. I also have troops set up that are level 6-8 to represent hordes of soldiers.
Another side is vordakai. He awoke from his slumber and started raising the dead bodies of his peers as dread zombie cyclops using the create undead ritual. He is a level 13 lich with level 7 spells so he can make undead up to level 9 easily with time and ressources. He also knows the planar binding ritual which means he can summon powerful demons up to level 14, but he doesn't risk summoning any above level 10 just to be safe. Those are his forces.
The last side is a silver dragon living in the mountains above vordakai, the one rumored to have founded lake Silverstep. She's sensed the evil rising under the mountain and has decided to oppose it. She's dedicated part of her horse to using her planar ally ritual to call angels of apsu to help her in this fight. While she needs powerful allies, she only feels confident calling angels up to level 12, despite being a level 14 dragon.
All of these make sense and all of these subordinates are flavorful while being entirely legitimate for the actors present.
It really depends on how you set up your encounters and your ennemies.
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I find that's more a fault of adventure design than the system. If my players are level 10, I'm not going to throw basic thieves at them. At that point they're dealing with high ranking members of thieves guilds.
This is really where it stands for me - I'm sometimes frustrated with the level of the humanoid enemies fought in the APs, but that's almost always because of the way they're framed. The difference between saying "the standard city guard here is level 14" and saying "the city guards that are responding to this issue are the Blue Wyrm Company, an infamous group of guards that began as mercenaries to the Elemental Plane of Earth. After returning to Golarion, their new-found skills were demonstrated in defeating a blue dragon threatening the area, leading to their hiring as mercenaries to protect the town.". That's a few extra lines in one part of the book, and after that you can just name the guards "Blue Wyrm Guard" - led by the "Blue Wyrm Sergeant" - and I'll be perfectly happy to have them be level 14.
Presenting the standard, normal guards/criminals/etc of normal cities as exceptionally high level falls flat to me every time. It's not a pathfinder 1 vs pathfinder 2 thing, it's just when that decision would definitely not have been made had the PCs not been level 15, it would damage my ability to present a reasonable world as the GM, and damage my ability to get invested in the world as a player. I know for a fact that this town would have lower level guards if we came here in book 2, not book 5 - this isn't world-building informed by the constraints of the plot, it is the constraints of the plot actively undoing previously world-building.
This is definitely an AP issue. In EC, I can understand how my 1st level sorcerer got his lunch money taken by a drunk in the stands. However, when we finally go to confront Mistress Plothooklight the carny guards beat on my now enormously experienced and powerful sorcerer/champion who could summon lightening from the heavens. I mean, these guys are basically bouncers... for a circus.
...I remember it being quite jarring when we were heading into the climax of the book and we had to stop and first aid after fighting Joe Dirt.
LOL. I remember that encounter. They did a pretty good number on my players' characters too. If they didn't have a flying wizard, they may well have lost to the bouncers.
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I’ve yet to hear any reasoning for why this is a 2e system problem and not an individual adventure problem, but that would detract from the edition warring.
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Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Is PF2 a fun game?
You were saying.
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Oh by all means, detract away. I was going for attention grabbing, not edition warring, anyways. It's no secret that I frequently start discussions for discussion's sake.
Enjoy the discourse!
If we're going to be snarky with the title, so far 2e has not killed a single one of my heroes. Came very close recently when the party rushed into a more serious fight than they expected and the iron golem divine guardian if Urgathoa exploded for a chunk of damage at the end of a gruelling fight.
On the other hand, as a player I have seen a few party members fall to the mistaken belief that they could handle the alarm sounding and bringing every hobgloblin in the fort down upon our heads. I wanted to regroup because I was out of Lay on Hands and the clerics both used up their fonts.
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I’ve yet to hear any reasoning for why this is a 2e system problem and not an individual adventure problem, but that would detract from the edition warring.
Oh by all means, detract away. I was going for attention grabbing, not edition warring, anyways. It's no secret that I start discussions for discussion's sake.
Enjoy the discourse!
I see this as problem with framing the story, as Arcaian described in comment #21 above. A 10th-level challenge should be a higher-level tale than a 2nd-level challenge. A 2nd-level party might fight a starving band of amateur bandits, but a 10th-level party would be sent against an underfed tribe of magical nomads (think of the exodus of the people of Israel led by Moses) trespassing into your country or an elite band of robbers secretly supported by a powerful duke. Sending a 10th-level party against a starving band of amateur bandits who happen to be 7th-level fighters is a terrible story.
So, as a GM, why would I send the 10th-level party against an ordinary band of 1st-level bandits? Perhaps the party members want to make an impression on the locals and no other threat is nearby. Or perhaps the bandits raided the shop of the semi-retired grandmaster blacksmith who was forging the fighter's new armor. They stole the nearly-finished armor and now their bandit chief wears it. Or perhaps the band of bandits is really the thralls of a vampire lord, who is secretly building their victims into an undead army. Or perhaps the bandit's secret hideout is in a cave that leads to the lost tomb of the king of the stone giants and the bandits are just in the way.
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I don't understand what this has to do with 2e. PF1e and D&D5e and 4e and 3.5 and so on and so forth have high level NPCs too.
... If anything though, the rules for non-combat levels in 2e does the opposite.
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The closest thing to a reasonable argument that this is related to PF2 is that the mechanical importance of levels makes it more likely - with the substantial scaling that PF2 has, you can't really throw 5th level town guards at the 12th level party. In games with less intense scaling - like D&D 5e - you can use those lower level enemies, so if you want the narrative of "the city guard goes after your powerful adventurers", you don't really need to justify as much. PF1 definitely did have substantial scaling as well, but I think it was less required because - theoretically at least - you only scaled well in areas you were good at. Those level 5 guards could pretty reliably hit the casters in the backline, if they could get to them; the 5th level caster casting fireball on a low-Ref frontline would still do some damage. The 4-stages-of-success thing probably exacerbates things here - by the time you're getting to an ~8 level difference, you're probably critically succeeding at a good amount of what the guards throw at you in PF2. That being said, this definitely was something that come up in PF1 as well - it just arises whenever you have significant scaling, I think.
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I don't understand what this has to do with 2e.
My best guess is that there are multiple issues at work here, not all of which can be attributed entirely to 2E, but 2E's "beat your enemy by your actions, not by your math" design might be one of them.
*encounter design (partially 2E)
*encounter presentation (all systems)
*underlying ruleset (2E)
*player expectation (all systems)
All I can say to this topic is that by the end of volume 2 of AoA our group did not feel like the immersed heroes of the story but a band of rag-tag survivors that somehow happend to be in the story, and that much of this feeling was caused by the clash of governing ruleset (encounter design/budget and level bound accuracy) vs player expectation.
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Eh, if you want to talk about underlying system math I'll agree there are some issues with the way PF2 is set up.
But the OP's complaint that some writer upscaled what they feel should be a level 1 encounter into a level 10 encounter without making it feel plausible is pretty much entirely system agnostic.
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1. In PF1, balance on NPC enemies was a lot harder at those levels, because of "gear needed for effectiveness" vs. "loot appropriate for the encounter". Their effectiveness would depend on some decent gear at that level, which kind of precludes them being poor. It was also more work to make some custom rogues than to use some existing monsters. The whole system was set up to have barriers to have NPCs to either be low level or significant.
In PF2, it's pretty quick to throw together some starving thieves and give them level-appropriate stats.
2. In PF1, those could be a gang of level 7 rogues if they had a numbers advantage. Party AC only scales with gear, they'd be assumed to have flanking often, and they'd have good reflex saves and evasion for AoEs. Should starving bandits be level 7? No, but it's less egregious than 10.
In PF2, that would be a cakewalk put in to make the players feel good. Everything scales hard, and because of how crits work, every point is twice as likely to be noticed.
I think PF2 lacks the natural guardrails against this kind of immersion-breaking encounter, and even has some forces that push for it to happen if the writer isn't careful. The mechanics would really like to be thematically supported by appropriately significant enemies, because it sticks out badly when they're not.
Level doesn't exist in-world. It is a rating tool used for encounter building and character ability measurement.
If you think that level doesn't matter, try fighting both a CR+4 and a CR-4 enemy. See if you notice anything.
And yes, it is somewhat difficult as a story author to come up with believable reasons why the heroes are heroes and the NPC's are not, and why the enemies can provide a decent challenge against the heroes even when they are around NPCs more often than they are around PCs.
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1. In PF1, balance on NPC enemies was a lot harder at those levels, because of "gear needed for effectiveness" vs. "loot appropriate for the encounter". Their effectiveness would depend on some decent gear at that level, which kind of precludes them being poor. It was also more work to make some custom rogues than to use some existing monsters. The whole system was set up to have barriers to have NPCs to either be low level or significant.
In PF2, it's pretty quick to throw together some starving thieves and give them level-appropriate stats.
2. In PF1, those could be a gang of level 7 rogues if they had a numbers advantage. Party AC only scales with gear, they'd be assumed to have flanking often, and they'd have good reflex saves and evasion for AoEs. Should starving bandits be level 7? No, but it's less egregious than 10.
In PF2, that would be a cakewalk put in to make the players feel good. Everything scales hard, and because of how crits work, every point is twice as likely to be noticed.
I think PF2 lacks the natural guardrails against this kind of immersion-breaking encounter, and even has some forces that push for it to happen if the writer isn't careful. The mechanics would really like to be thematically supported by appropriately significant enemies, because it sticks out badly when they're not.
That is an interesting point. Heavily-enchanted armor would not be available to starving and impoverished thieves in PF1, but in the creature-building rules in the PF2 Gamemastery Guide, AC is pulled off of a table based on level, with choices between Low, Moderate, High, or Extreme, rather than from their stats and gear.
Animals don't wear armor, but we can still see the difference. The PF2 Tyrannosaurus has AC 21 (+1 Dex, +14 natural, –4 size). The stats in the parentheses describe how the AC was calculated: +1 from Dexterity 13, -4 due to its Gargantuan size, and an enormous +14 natural armor from its thick, scaly skin. A CR 2 Monitor Lizard has similar scaly skin, but only +3 natural armor, so I guess size (the lizard is Nedium) makes the skin a lot tougher. In contrast, the PF2 Tyrannosaurus simply has AC 29 with no visible explanation. The creature-building AC table calls that a Moderate AC for 10th level. Its skin does not matter, its size does not matter, its Dexterity does not matter, expect for deciding between Low, Moderate, and High.
When I put armor on humanoids that I constructed with the Gamemastery Guide, the actual armor does not affect the AC. Instead, I looked at their level and imagined what gear would be appropriate for their level, their wealth, and their culture. A 7th-level Starving Thief dressed in rags would have Low AC 22 and a 7th-level accomplished thief dressed in +1 leather armor would have Moderate AC 24. That difference does matter in PF2, but the difference is from GM decisions rather than the built-in math. An inattentive GM would give both AC 24.
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Rather than killing heroes, you've just become heroes in an elder scrolls game, MMO or JRPG where things scale pretty obviously heedless of internal logic concerns.
If you can suspend your disbelief for those, just do it for this too.
Very true Mathmuse, and it makes those encounters a bit more believable too.
In pf1e if you wanted a fight with some humanoids agiasnt a party of level 16 adventurers, well all of them had to have +2 to +4 gear to even be a challenge.
In pf2e they can get by with just a +1 striking weapon and a +1 armor. If you want them to be memorable or are behind on party loot you can boost that a bit, but it doesnt need to be there because their stats are not contingent on that.
Same thing if you want to give a more ''class feel'' to a monster, you can just give it a class ability, that's it!
I redid the red ghost for my iron gods campaign and it was laughably easy to just slap on some levels and a spellcasting entry for spontaneous occult spells on top of a xill, took me a grand ole 5 minutes.
In pf1e this would have been the work of hours.
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Il the players want their PCs to obliterate low-level foes, then their GM should provide these. I do not expect published adventures to spend precious word count on this kind of one-sided encounters.
That is a topic worth discussing, but what seems to be inspiring this thread is the GM (or module) throwing a difficult encounter at the party while falsely claiming that the foes are low level.
I don't know the details of the encounter with the Starving Thieves, but Parry described an encounter that I can look up.
This is definitely an AP issue. In EC, I can understand how my 1st level sorcerer got his lunch money taken by a drunk in the stands. However, when we finally go to confront Mistress Plothooklight the carny guards beat on my now enormously experienced and powerful sorcerer/champion who could summon lightening from the heavens. I mean, these guys are basically bouncers... for a circus.
Behind the scenes we have more explanation of the unusually highly-skilled minions. The city of Escadar, population 11,700, has a 10th-level chief constable, so the underling's Deception +14 is necessary for the constable to not see right through his ploys. Mistress Dusklight can't send a 2nd-level minion on this errand. She has some other profitable endeavors, so she is probably paying the 6th-level minion much more than a circus worker's pay and also sending him on dangerous errands for her other endeavors. The players might never learn the behind-the-scenes explanation.
In this case, the so-called circus bouncers were only pretending to be ordinary, so their combat skills caught the party by surprise. In other cases, the GM frames a story where the party encounters low-level villains, but the GM built the villains at a challenging level for challenging combat not for a believable story. If NPCs rise in level for no reason other than to match the level of the PCs, then the setting feels like cardboard stage scenery over a treadmill.
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I redid the red ghost for my iron gods campaign and it was laughably easy to just slap on some levels and a spellcasting entry for spontaneous occult spells on top of a xill, took me a grand ole 5 minutes.
In pf1e this would have been the work of hours.
I remember Zagmaander, AKA the Red Ghost, from Iron Gods. I did not rebuild her. Instead, I gave her more knowledge about how to break her curse and she made a deal with the party if they could run the errands for her.
But I did rebuild other creatures in Iron Gods and other PF1 campaigns. The hard part that took three hours was taking the creature apart to find all the explanations for its abilities. Nowadays I port creatures from the PF1 Ironfang Invasion adventure path to PF2 rules. I find a similar creature in the PF2 Bestiaries, add levels, and add thematic abilities. Customizing the abilities and deciding on details still takes over an hour, but not four hours.
For example, Assault on Longshadow had CR 7 minotaur Warmaze Masters. I started with the 4th-level PF2 Minotaur, raised the numbers to 8th level, and decided that the War Maze tactics reminded me of an Investigator's Devise a Stratagem, so I modified Devise a Stratagem to be more visible and added that. My players never assumed that the War Maze minotaurs were ordinary minotaurs, because they incorporated riddle-like Intimidation into their clever tactics.
Later, when I converted CR 8 Lieutenant Kosseruk, leader of the army and teacher of the War Maze, into PF2 Brigadier General Kosseruk, Creature 10, I put that Devise a Stratagem into high gear. Yet surprisingly, one of the most exciting moments of the assault on Longshadow was after the PCs killed the giant who almost bashed down the city gate, General Kosseruk lowered her head and used her Powerful Charge minotaur ability to break down the heavily damaged gate herself. The damage from Powerful Charge had increased to 3d8+10 with her level, due to the Gamemastery Guide rules.
The creature-building guide says to not give the foes invisible abilities that the players cannot see in action. An enemy ranger does not gain Hunt Prey, because Hunt Prey is not invisible. Instead, a ranger-like Hobgoblin Archer always gets the benefit of a ranger's Precision Edge against all its enemies, but only with their crossbow. This relates to the topic of this thread. The Starving Thieves, if built properly, should have a visible sign that they were not 1st-level amateur thieves. If they lacked obvious high-level armor, then they should have magical manifestations or acrobatic stunts to telegraph their level to the players.
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I have to 100% disagree with the OP. I think that P2 has made high level PCs even more heroic.
In P1, a high level PC is almost completely dependent on their magic item tree to stay ahead of lower level PCs. A level 20 fighter in non-magic armor has an AC only a few points higher than a level 1 fighter. If a high level P1 PC loses their items, they are effectively helpless against level 1 Orcs, except for their hp.
In P2, those level 1 Orcs can't even hit a level 10 PC without a natural 19. Even a natural 20 is only just a hit on a naked level 15 PC.
the idea that a PC will become so powerful that even 100 guys attacking them is only a challenge because they can't all be killed fast enough seems much more heroic than the P1 you are only as good as your gear lets you be.
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DM: So, you follow the cloaked beggar until he enters what it seems an old abandoned house. The beggar, after have looked around, closes the door behind him.
Player: Good. Ok, I have the feel we finally found the thieves Den.
Player2: Ok ok, I go ahead trying not to make any sound, and peak through the keyhole.
DM: Let's see... you move forward and then peak through the keyhole... and what you see is 3 persons, probably humans, sitting around a round table. Apparently, they are playing cards.
Player: They are definitely the thieves we are looking for. Let's storm in!
Player2: Wait. Since we have the element of surprise, let me do a RK check.
DM: Ok... you know that they are indeed thieves...
Player2: Ok, get read...
DM: Starving thieves...
And so in the end, the mighty heroes prepared themselves to do what any other hero would have done ... leave the city, vowing that they would never, ever retrace their steps.
Makes me think of the beggar king from John wick.
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I have to 100% disagree with the OP. I think that P2 has made high level PCs even more heroic.
In P1, a high level PC is almost completely dependent on their magic item tree to stay ahead of lower level PCs. A level 20 fighter in non-magic armor has an AC only a few points higher than a level 1 fighter. If a high level P1 PC loses their items, they are effectively helpless against level 1 Orcs, except for their hp.
In P2, those level 1 Orcs can't even hit a level 10 PC without a natural 19. Even a natural 20 is only just a hit on a naked level 15 PC.
the idea that a PC will become so powerful that even 100 guys attacking them is only a challenge because they can't all be killed fast enough seems much more heroic than the P1 you are only as good as your gear lets you be.
True, your defenses scale nicely with level. Shame so much of your weapon damage doesn't though.
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It's no secret that I frequently start discussions for discussion's sake.
While true, the wording in your OP is borrowed from a trope from the edition wars on these boards, and if it wasn't your intent to restart the debate, you should have picked different language.
"Starving Thief" is simply a way to get a different AoNPRD entry than "Thief". Call it whatever you want - Hungry Assassin, or as someone suggested above, "Starving Tyrannosaurus Thief" (and then we could argue whether the starving thief is a tyrannosaurus or whether the thief steals starving tyrannosauruses).
We don't need to rearrange the entire gaming system just because someone named a creature poorly.
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It's no secret that I frequently start discussions for discussion's sake.While true, the wording in your OP is borrowed from a trope from the edition wars on these boards...
It is? I wasn't aware there was any kind of specific trope. Just that there was edition warring in general.
I phrased it the way I did, not to restart old "discussions," but rather because (1) I thought it would get peoples' attention and (2) there aren't too many other things you can really call it without being totally off base.
Has 2nd edition killed heroes?
Has Pathfinder killed heroes?
Has Paizo killed heroes?
Only the first one is specific and on point regarding what game and edition I'm referring to. "Pathfinder" could mean 1st Edition as well. Paizo is a company, not the game, and I wanted to refer to the game.
In hindsight, I do admit that it's more of an adventure/setting design thing rather than being a problem specific to this edition's mechanics.
...and if it wasn't your intent to restart the debate, you should have picked different language.
That's totally fair. What might you have titled the thread?