Balancing Options and Experience

[lemuelmassa]

I'm currently running Season of Ghosts Sundays and Sky King's Tomb Thursdays and both campaigns are closing in on their end points. For my next campaign I'm thinking to run Kingmaker (possibly with the Sunday Knights and Thursday Knights running on the same map in parallel ... ) but I had an idea for giving players more options for their characters and thought I'd like to hear some other more experienced GMs chime in with their thoughts with these systems:

During character creation, a player can choose 0, 1 or 2 of the following:
A. Mythic rules (10 extra feats by 20 and mythic points instead of hero points)
B. Free-archetype (10 extra feats by 20)
C. Relics (2 relics from 1-20, unlocking a gift every 2 levels for essentially 10 extra "feats" by 20)

Players that choose:
I. 0 options advance using fast XP track (800/level)
II. 1 option advance using standard XP track (1000/level)
III. 2 options advance using slow XP track (1200/level)

The one player I asked about this said he'd just take 0 options, fast XP every time to unlock spell ranks quickly and get extra bonuses across all his rolls rather than explore the other options, which defeats the purpose of having players explore different builds and options. After a little talk with him I thought, maybe I'd just say that each player can choose one option and every stays on the standard XP track...

So basically my questions to the community here are:

1. Would you also **always** choose 0 options to get fast track XP and ignore the options? Does any combination of extra feats balance slower XP progression?
2. How well balanced are these three options against each other?

[The Raven Black]

So, when reaching 12.000 XP.

III. I would reach level 10

II. I would reach level 12

I. I would reach level 15

That is a HUGE discrepancy.

In fact, I think this might be the only way to actually get the kind of imbalance between PCs that plagued PF1.

[NorrKnekten]

Yeaaaah, never ever do this.
Don't split the party trough different XP tracks and don't separate them by mythic/relics/FA.

The party should progress by the same standards and not doing so is going to feel horrible. If you want to use relics then everyone should have a relic at the start or there should be relics to find. If you want to do Mythic then everyone should be mythic so they can handle Mythic level threats. If you want to do FA then everyone should have FA.

Even if they stay on the same track, Mythic gives vastly more powerful options than any of the other two, Remember they gave us Mythic level threats just because of this. And relics is pretty much just another flavorful magic item so picking this over FA is just a mistake.

Rather, Decide which of these will be included in the campaign and apply it equally across the characters.

[Tridus]

Levels are the single most powerful thing you can get in PF2 as they make you better at everything. The gap between your options here is absolutely massive, to the point that an enemy meant to be a severe threat to the group taking option I would be a guaranteed TPK for the group taking option III. No amount of extra feats/powers can overcome an effective -5 to all proficiencies at 12k XP*.

And on the flipside, an extreme encounter at max level for option III is a trivial encounter for option I.

Options II and III are trap options that will only lure people in who don't know the system well enough to realize just how powerful multiple levels worth of progression is. Trap options are bad. Please don't do this, as anyone not picking option 0 will have a bad time. Just to illustrate: take two Fighters, A and B, with identical builds & gear. A is option I, B is option 3, both with 12k XP.

B is fighting an enemy that they hit on a 10 on the dice and thus crit on a 20. A has 7 more attack (+5 from levels and +2 from a proficiency bump at 13), so they are hitting the same enemy on a 3 on the dice and critting on a 13.

This only levels out when the first option caps at level 20 and the other options then start catching up, but you're talking about massive amounts of play time given how long Kingmaker is. There will also be a limit to how far ahead option I gets as they'll start gaining less XP per encounter as they get ahead in levels, but its still the strongest option easily given how much difference even 1 level makes.

What you should do instead is just talk with your players about what option they'd like to use, and give it to everyone. That keeps people much more on the same footing and avoids the horrible intraparty balance problems that plagued earlier editions.

As for the options themselves... FA is widely used and works well, with some minor balance issues that can arise depending on what your players do. But it's very manageable and lets players make characters that have a large toolbox.

I don't have much experience with relics, but they feel like more work for less benefit than FA so given the choice I would pick FA.

Mythic is... I mean with the right picks it can be extremely powerful. But the options are poorly balanced with each other and some things are vastly better than others. It's probably stronger than FA but you're more limited in what you can pick and some classes have relatively poor support from mythic abilities.

If your goal is "let people explore more build variety", let the whole group pick an option and everyone gets that. But "give them free archetype and call it a day" is a very common way of doing this in PF2.

*Proficiency Without Level variant would flatten this somewhat, but I'm still not sure it'd be enough and it has knock-off effects on other areas of the game.

[Pixel Popper]

My game group loves the Ancestry Paragon and Gradual Ability Boost variant rules alongside Free Archetype.

[lemuelmassa]

Thanks everyone for your feedback. I don’t have the experience yet with PF2 to make this call so it’s very valuable to me as a post-OGL 5e refugee