Hey, and thanks in advance to anyone who has advice and thoughts to share on this topic.
I'm going to run my very first game of Pathfinder soon, and want to do things a little differently from the PF baselines. Specifically, my campaign is going to be grounded in a much more realistic mechanics system that tamps down hard on the epic fantasy assumptions of the baseline. My specific design goals here are:
- Keep things feeling "real" across levels. Being stabbed in the gut with a knife should always be a troubling thing, no matter what level you are; and even the greatest heroes should be worried about what happens when 20 level 0 goblins have them surrounded. And just because I'm a level 20 mage should not mean I'm better at shoving people around than a level 1 Fighter who has invested massively into Str and Athletics. Levelling up lets you get better at the things you invest in, not just getting arbitrarily better at everything.
- Make combat feel a bit more like real life, where getting wounded doesn't simply mean "still feeling just dandy, but marginally closer to keeling over dead!". Getting stabbed, slashed, or smashed by weapons should always feel meaningful, without opening the door to hyperrealistic one-shot player deaths.
Also to introduce more fun, interesting considerations to how players choose their weapons. I've always disliked how D&D has always treated a d12 sword and a d12 spear as essentially the same once they stick you (putting aside resistances, which generally only come from magical effects), and it erases the real-world rationales between different kinds of weapons.
So, here is the in-house system I'm planning to use:
1: I'm adopting the variant rule to remove Level from proficiency bonuses, this is the relatively easy part.
2: New mechanics for additional wounding mechanics on-hit, as follows:
- Whenever a hit lands, the natural die roll for the attack is compared to a threshold to determine if it is a Solid Blow or not. This threshold is calculated as:
10 + Defender's Fortitude bonus + Defender's armor bonus - Attacker's weapon Potency, maximum 20.
Whenever the natural d20 roll for the attack meets or exceeds this value, and the attack is a hit, it is a Solid Blow, with additional effects based on damage type:
- Slashing: Slashing weapons are designed to open grievous, bleeding wounds on unarmored targets. Their effectiveness against armor is severely diminished, but they should be terrifying to unarmored or lightly armored targets.
On a Solid Blow, a Slashing weapon applies Persistent bleeding damage to the target equal to the damage die type of the weapon, -1 step for each point of Armor bonus to AC. So, a d10 damage Slashing weapon against +3 armor would inflict 1d4 bleeding damage per turn.
- Piercing: Stabbing wounds penetrate deep, even if they're not as gruesome as slashing wounds, and are effective at applying force to weak areas on an armored target. A solid blow from a piercing weapon has 3 effects:
- inflict 1dx persistent bleeding damage, where x is their Str or Dex bonus, as appropriate to the type of attack
- when determining if the attack was a critical hit only, add the attacker's Strength or Dexterity to their attack total, depending on which stat was applied to the attack roll (ie, armor does less to prevent hits from becoming Critical Hits)
- the DC to remove the persistent bleed damage is increased by the attacker's Str or Dex bonus, again as appropriate to the type of attack (a small, deep hole in your gut isn't going to bleed as profusely as a huge gash, but is a lot trickier to staunch)
- Bludgeoning weapons lack the raw killing power of bladed attacks, but have the significant capacity to knock down or otherwise disable an opponent to allow for a coup de grace, and are particularly effective at pummeling heavily armored targets into submission. On a Solid Blow from a bludgeoning weapon:
- Inflict upon the target either the Shove effect, or knock them Prone
- If the hit was a Critical Hit, inflict Stunned X, where X is your Str or Dex bonus, depending on the type of attack
I have some additional modification to how persistent damage is handled that I'll circle back to later, but for now, I'd love the advice of the community on how these rules will play in terms of balance, keeping combat intense but not "oops ur dead lol", and maintaining a more down-to-earth, violence-is-scary feel. Particularly, if there are any character builds that get under or overpowered, or if there are other mechanical interactions I should be considering, I thank you for your insights!
Although I can very much agree with having optional rules for grittier combat, it feels like the net result of your proposed changes would simply be more lethal games, with buffs to martial classes mainly. I also don't necessarily believe your proposals would make combat grittier in PF2e, since the reason why heroes feel so difficult to kill is because they can recover from damage easily during exploration, and the rules for recovery are fairly lenient.
I think there are two separate things to isolate here: if you want combat to feel scarier to the PCs, I would recommend things like making the wounded condition a bit stickier and making recovery checks more difficult: for example, the pre-errata rules for recovery checks in Player Core had you add your wounded value to your dying value increase on a failed recovery check, which made the dying condition much scarier. Doing stuff like preventing the wounded condition from going down by more than 1 in-between each time your condition increases and only resetting after a full night's rest, a bit like how Refocusing worked prior to the remaster, could also make the prospect of dying much more real during the adventuring day. You could even stretch this further and have a full night's rest only reduce the condition by a fixed amount, so wounds would carry across adventuring days.
As for making damage types differ from each other more, that sounds like a separate thing to tackle, but if you really want to do this, I'd recommend including non-BPS damage types as well. It'd be a much bigger undertaking in my opinion, and I'd probably think some more about what you specifically want out of this distinction you're driving, whether it's more damage, more utility, or a mix of both.
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Well, it wouldn't really be my cup of tea - I'm definitely more someone who enjoys the epic fantasy genre. But hey, it's your game and if this is more your taste, not my problem.
It's very valuable though to make sure you're on the same page about this as your players. It'd be no good if you as a GM felt combat had to be grittier, while your players felt things were quite harsh already!
I would say Pathfinder 2 combat doesn't feel too safe or easy, but the game is certainly set up so that level differences matter a lot. So under standard rules, a level 5 party in a Severe encounter is definitely sweating it. But a level 5 party fighting level 0 monsters is not at all scared.
With regards to balance: yeah, if you use the "Proficiency without Level" variant rule, you should definitely count on it doing weird things with balance. The rest of the game is really built around the normal expectations, and this optional rule has a little less than 1 full page devoted to how to change things. It just can't fully cover all the things you're going to bump into.
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With regards to your second point: I understand the motivation, but it feels to me like you're building something that already exists, to a large degree. Your system of "solid hits" and special effects based on damage type is a lot like the Critical Specialization effects that all the different weapon groups have. Instead of it being specifically a Slashing thing that a really good thing does persistent damage, it's something that Knives do. And instead of bludgeoning damage in general doing knockdown, that's something hammers do. But the overlap between what you're proposing and what already exists is pretty big.
And of course those weapon groups and damage types are already pretty strongly linked. Knives mostly do piercing and slashing damage. Hammers do mostly bludgeoning damage.