I would like for you guys to explain to me what you think being a Level 1 Adventurer means. I am soon starting a Level 1 Starfinder 2E campaign using the new Playtest material this Friday but we are starting at level 1. I would like to know what you guys believe being Level 1 means in the grand scheme of things. So I thought to ask here out of curiosity sake.
Do you think Level 1 Characters have a large role to play in the story or do you think it just happened stance they get into fortunate or misfortunate situations where they can "Level Up" so to speak. Where do you think PCs become extraordinary level wise? Since according to PF-2E's NPC list a City Guard Captain is considered level 8.
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A 1st-level player character is an inexperienced adult just beginning their adventures. They are typically young, but they could be an older townsfolk who never challenged themselves before, or an elderly veteran who forgot many skills after retiring from adventuring. The young ones are trainees, recruits, or apprentices, who ordinarily would be guided by a mentor, but in a campaign they are thrown together with similar 1st-level characters.
Ordinary townsfolk tend to be 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level. The most impressive leaders in a town or city typically range from 6th to 8th level. Note that "level" refers to combat ability. A Harbormaster could be only 3rd level, but could wield 7th-level mastery of skills in managing the ships and trade in a harbor.
Searching Archives of Nethys for "City Guard Captain" turns up nothing, so I don't know where the 8th-level City Guard Captain came from. Captain of the Guard is only 6th level. Different cities will have their guard captain at different levels, because both individuals and cities will vary.
Most NPCs level up after a few years of experience in their ordinary life. They gradually learn new skills and refine their existing skills. Player characters, in contrast, are on a mysterious fast track for leveling up. PCs can level up in a week. This is partly because they face extraordinary challenges that force them to rise to the occasion, but they advance even faster than the challenges would train non-player characters. This is a cheat because we players are enjoying a game and can't wait a reasonable time for our characters to level up.
We could pretend the rapid advancement is destiny or fate, but lampshading the rapid advancement without explanation and ignoring it is the least immersion-breaking way to handle it. The PCs in my Ironfang Invasion campaign escaped the invasion of the town of Phaendar at 1st level. They returned to Phaendar at 12th level to free their captive former neighbors about four months later in Golarion time. Two PCs had been residents of Phaendar, so their neighbors knew their capabilities at 1st level. The villagers assumed that 12th-level Zinfandel, an apprentice ranger training under the retired 6th-level ranger Aubrin the Green, was really lower than 12th level and was still in training under the other 12th-level heroes. The villagers assumed that 12th-level Sam, a scoundrel rogue willing to lie about his background and his species, was really a 12th-level fey folk who had been only pretending to be a 1st-level halfling goat herder while he lived in Phaendar. The evident rise by 11 more levels in only 18 weeks was too incredible to believe.
The PCs don't have a so-called large role in the campaign's story. Instead, they are the campaign's story. Any other story with large and small roles, such as the invasion of Nirmathas in Ironfang Invasion, is only a background of events against which the PCs' story is played out.
let me take a different stance on this.
Although level limits the kinds of creatures a party can consider an appropriate challenge it is not a limiter on story importance for any character.
A level 1 party can be fledgling adventurers saving towns from goblins and negotiating safe passage through kobold territories but those are not the only stories that can be told. A level 1 party can have inherited an empire as scions of noble houses now facing turmoil as the empire is on the verge of war internal or external and corruption/collapse from within after the death of the former emperor.
These characters might just be level 1 in experience but are facing huge sweeping changes where they take center stage in the events shaping the future of an empire.
These kinds of stories provide some perils that a level 1 party couldn't face head on in many forms and can lean heavily into social encounters, infiltration. chases, and influence subsystems. Encounters can still be prominent but the party wouldnt be wise to take on a high profile corrupt uncle with forces at his command, but could gather influence with other powerful figures to either erode the uncles stranglehold on power or to gain strong allies with resources to build your own army.
PCs are extraordinary at level 1 having statistics better than the vast majority of the population. What a level 1 character is depends on the background. Even at level 1 a character has pretty good mastery of weapons, magic, or whatever their specialty is. In the context of a level 1 to 4 adventure, a level 1 character is the main character hero. So level ends up being relative to the threat you face, but the PCs regardless of level are always the main characters and extraordinary by virtue of being PCs.
You as the DM must create the appropriate ladder of challenges to ensure they are the main characters of the tale regardless of level.
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To me, a Level 1 PC is distinctly different from a Level 1 NPC like a Guard or Innkeep. The latter are at a state of equilibrium with their environment, personal comfort, and strengths. They may rise in level slowly as they live life and gain experience, but they're not expected or motivated to gain the ability to throttle the life out of a dragon in the next couple weeks.
A Level 1 PC is capable and motivated to rapidly expand their personal strengths. They're a computer with a lot of slots left open for upgrades. They have potential.
In terms of combat most regular folk are Level -1 or 0. Being a Level 1 PC alone puts you on the tier of a reliable local that village folk might go to for help, or a wanderer the local guard might keep an eye on. By and large, you're not blending in with the masses.
A PC can be extraordinary at level 1 when they're helping the level -1 granny with the rats in her basement in a remote village, even though in the big city they'd still be pushed around by the high level guard captain. Those high level guards might be able to sense the PC's potential, or a lord might as well and decide to sponsor them in the hopes of building up a team that can help them with the dragon problem down the road.
TL;DR: PCs are extraordinary from level 1, and their potential for rapid growth in power is part of why that is, and the other part is that most people are level 0 or lower.
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Since others have already talked about narrative anchoring, I decided to tackle this question by putzing around with the game's math.
As The Raven Black said, level is a simplified abstraction of combat prowess. There is a predictable range of numbers that go with each level that tells us how good a given creature is at killing dudes and avoiding death. The abstraction isn't perfect--in published adventures, big picture consistency is often thrown out in the name of nailing the correct situational feel--but thanks to the encounter building guidelines and actual play experience, we can pretty easily extract a "rule" for what level says about overall power.
The rule is as follows: something two levels higher than something else is twice as powerful. We can see this reflected in XP values, as every two level jump between creatures results in double the XP, suggesting these creatures are doing twice the work within the same encounter. Put another way, one guy at level 8 can take on two guys at level 6 in a fair fight (and four guys at level 4, and so on).
A commoner, the most basic type of guy in the world, is a level -1 creature, which is equal to one minus two. This means that, at level 1, your typical PC--with smart tactics and a bit of luck--could fight two completely average guys at once and win. Her presence on the battlefield is worth twice that of a random, average dude. By level 7, she will be worth 16 average dudes, and over a thousand by level 19.
I know it's kind of silly to reduce level down to how many guys you could take in a fight, but that's precisely what it's measuring on the GM side, so why not? It lets you guesstimate the kind of jobs PCs should be doing based on how many normal guys it would take to accomplish the same. So, at level 1, a PC adventurer is twice as efficient at solving your giant rat problem (and half as likely to get killed) as your neighbor Jim would be. Get a group of 4 of them, and they're removing rats with the efficiency of Jim's entire household (including the in-laws).
Level is the measure of combat ability.
Level 1 is the lowest level of combat ability for a PC.
NPCs can have a lower level of combat ability.
That's it.
It is not just combat ability though in PF2.
Level (not just level 1) is character power. It determines a pretty narrow range of the anticipated numeric value of all abilities any character will likely use. This applies to combat for sure, but it also applies to every other kind of encounter a character might participate in. Any NPC a character encounters might be considered a different level as a combat encounter than as a non-combat encounter, but they still have a level for whatever kind of encounter they are likely to be encountered in.
Level 1 is interesting also in PF2, because it is not the bottom level of creature in the world. It actually starts off at essentially level 3 comparatively to all other creatures that a character might encounter.
SO a level 1 PC is exception to many NPCs in world, because they are a level +2 creature/threat to the vast majority of common folks. I think using the encounter difficulty framework for thinking about what level means is a good general place to start for thinking about the OP's original question.
It also helps explain why people can have such different answers.
Level in PF2 is both a static objective measurement and a subjective elastic tool of measurement. When comparing your character to the world at large, you are always gaining power when you level, but you can only really tell that if the subjective experiences your character have are not always moving up exactly in parallel to you. This is why it is important to keep encountering creatures from your past when you play, because they really help show the growth of your character. If you never fight a similar creature again, it can be very difficult to see how much more powerful your character has grown.
So what is level 1? Level 1 is your (the player's) starting point for understanding your character. They have essentially leveled up twice already compared to their starting place, but you didn't see that growth in play, you made it up with your ancestry, background and class choice. Some campaigns start higher than level 1 too, and this all becomes true for characters starting at level 10 as much as it does for level 1.
If this is confusing, I suggest maybe just looking at level 1 creatures in the bestiary and what makes them different from level 0 or less and what makes them different from level 2+ creatures of the same general type. Are they leaders? are they foot soldiers?
For most humanoids, level 1 represents "your community is now willing to trust you with a lot of freedom and autonomy to solve community related problems, without making you the full leader of the community."
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One way of looking at it is comparing say a Level 1 Guard and a level 1 Fighter.
The combat numbers are about the same. However the Guard is trained in 3 skills, the Fighter is trained in 6.
The Guard has one good save. The Fighter has Two.
Both have AOO/Reactive Strike. But that's all the Guard has while the Fighter has an Ancestry Feat, Skill Feat and Class Feat on top.
Against a gang of simple bandits both will be about equally effective. But against something weird like an Akata The Fighter is much more likely to have something in their tool kit to handle things while the Guard could be out of their depth.
So a PC and NPC of the same level are about the same in terms of raw combat power. But the PC is far more versatile and can handle a much wider range of problems and threats.
So that's why towns hire Adventurers rather than use their own guard. To deal with things that are abnormal.
I wonder how this applies to the caster classes. Or if magic itself is that much of a game changer. How does Strength of Thousands handle levels for students?
I also remember PF1e and its predecessor using ‘NPC’ classes. Level two aristocrats, level three commoners, et cetera. Good or bad idea?
I wonder how this applies to the caster classes. Or if magic itself is that much of a game changer. How does Strength of Thousands handle levels for students?
I also remember PF1e and its predecessor using ‘NPC’ classes. Level two aristocrats, level three commoners, et cetera. Good or bad idea?
2E already does this to an extent. Check out the Surgeon. As a character they're level 2 in combat but level 6 in medical matters.
This is another way to distinguish NPCs and PCs. NPCs as a rule of thumb are specialized and leveled in a narrow focus of expertise and lower level in everything else. PCs are generalists and are their level in everything they do and every ability they have.
As a side note does anyone else find it hilarious that a Dancer a professional entertainer is just so damn fit that they're just as capable in combat as a professional guardsman like I linked in my earlier post? An Acrobat even more so. It's no wonder that in Extinction Curse the Circus is the one to investigate the local monster attacks.
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I might add a cross-media point here and say that PF2 treats player "levels" much like MMOs treat levels - not necessarily as exclusively an objective "power level" per se, but an individual's experience, comfort, and reliability when dealing with danger and unfamiliarity. There are correlations and even causation between the two at points, but they are not one and the same.
Now, to get the obvious out of the way: I understand that this is done, gameplay-wise in MMOs, to present the OOC player with an appropriate challenge for their character as they climb the "ladder" of levels. I do not think there was much "thought" put into it, but I also don't think we cannot extract a ludonarrative purpose from it nonetheless.
To expand on my point, I'll bring up Final Fantasy XIV specifically, since it's the MMO I currently have the most experience with. Nothing spoilery, but for the new areas within each expansion, monsters increase in level like a ladder. Even basic beasts within later expansions dwarf the levels of beasts within earlier zones, despite the two creatures likely being equally as dangerous to the peoples who reside in those areas. Hunters who are CLEARLY much less capable than you can still hunt them just fine? That seems wrong, right? Incongruous with reality, even.
As I played through FFXIV I had always wondered why, exactly, the same kinds of creatures were presented as somehow greater threats despite my Warrior of Light being, frankly, a combat veteran. I had felled creatures that commonfolk would describe as gods, but then a single mammoth can somehow take some decent blows from me before felling it? That didn't make much sense. But sometimes through Stormblood/Shadowbringers, I started to realize something: creatures in MMOs aren't leveled according to absolute power; they're leveled according to how familiar I am with them and the surrounding area. Or, put another way: my character's level represents how far I've come from my origin point.
The most obvious "translation" of this in PF2e is the proficiency system. You become more familiar and proficient in areas that you continuously expose yourself to, and those things you never deign to train stay useless throughout your career. This is why lower-level town NPCs can have pretty massively disproportionate proficiencies in trade skills - they've spent their life bartending or blacksmithing or lifting heavy boxes, but they don't go out slinging combat spells or swords enough. The reason PF2e's levels scale both in the ideas of "combat power" and "proficiency" simultaneously is because, well... you're an adventurer, even if not necessarily by name. You WILL experience danger that requires you to amass familiarity with "dangerous encounters" so you will still outpace your hometown's commoners, or even their leaders. Going out of your comfort zone as a living will just make you more capable than those who need to stay in their bubble, so to speak.
As a TL;DR and succinct conclusion: level 1 is when your character is proficient enough to leave their comfort zone and challenge themselves when compared to their origins. Your "class" and initial proficiencies and feat and background selection is a representation of how your character has approached challenges in the past that they carry forward with them into their new adventure.