Bulmahn on Pathfinder 2 Design Goals; Plus Proficiency Clarifications & Archeologists!

This is my second attempt to do this today, as I had all this compiled earlier and then the internet flaked out on me just as I hit "Save". So... starting again! Today's Pathfinder 2nd Edition news update, remarkably similar to the one I wrote about an hour ago, includes Jason Bulmahn talking about game design goals, Mark Seifter clarifying some things about the new proficiency system, and Erik Mona discovering that the most popular archetype is the Archeologist! All, of course, will be added to the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Compiled Info Page!

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• Design Goals & Pathfinder 1 --
  • Jason Bulmahn on talking about design goals -- "It's been kind of fascinating watching some of the debates go round and round issues that we hashed out a year ago, some of which are deeply nuanced looks at how the math behind a system influences the overall feel and verisimilitude of a system. The fact that many have intuited our intent after just a few blogs is a testament to their understanding of the game. We could do better in talking about our goals and driving motivations, but I am worried that it is a bit too "techie" and not interesting to many. Still, I think it is probably worth giving a try. I think I am going to talk to folks in the office in the coming week about the best way to communicate some aspects of our design philosophy. The "why" behind the new rules. Is that something you want to see?"
  • The design goals for the new proficiency system -- "We knew that this one was going to raise some eyebrows. Fundamentally, this system is trying to replace a fundamental part of 1st edition that caused us HUGE problems at the high levels of play, which distorted character choice and severely hampered design. A huge disparity is statistics between characters/adversaries of equal level really warps the play space and it led to stability problems with the entire game engine. The goal here to find a middle ground that still allows characters to excel in the places that they want, but not in such a way as to dominate the game. To allow monsters to be an appropriate challenge for their level without having an ability that practically auto-cripples some characters." (Bulmahn)
  • On his love for Pathfinder 1 -- "... in regards to PF1. Let me state unequivocally. I LOVE the game. It was my life's work for the past decade. I do not at all want it to go away, but I cannot let my love and efforts blind me to the fact that it is not perfect. There are things that could be even better, making the game more approachable and hopefully widening out the audience of people who love the game just as much as I do."
  • Mark Seifter agrees -- "A hearty agreement here. I would not have left my degree to come work here if I didn't absolutely love PF1. I still play PF1, and in fact I just played in a PF1 Ironfang Invasion game earlier today. PF1 is a great system and works really well for my group, especially with our house rules to match our particular group style. But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve the chassis, fixing some of the issues with, for instance, the fast vs slow save progression compared to spell DC meaning that optimized PC and NPC spellcasters alike can eliminate multiple targets with one spell on any but the luckiest rolls if the spell targets a weak save. The presence of these issues doesn't mean the game isn't great; far from it. But just because the game is great, it doesn't mean it couldn't be even better."
• The Mark Seifter Math Hour --
  • On different types of group skill check -- "We did the math there and suggested some rough guidelines for situations like (in roughly descending order of difficulty): "Everybody can keep rolling until it works with nothing bad on a failure"; "Everybody can roll once, only one person needs to succeed, and trying and failing doesn't do anything bad"; "Only the best person will roll this, possibly with assistance"; "Everyone has to roll and something bad happens to the people who fail"; "Everyone has to roll and if anyone fails, the whole thing fails" ... There's no reason we can't give advice for all of those situations. They all come up in adventures after all!"
  • On not scaling DCs according to the level of the characters -- "...we give examples of what tasks might be by level and elsewhere some suggested DCs for tasks of those levels (with several gradations within each level, to help GMs decide), but we go a step farther and have a significant discussion about the fact that you shouldn't scale things by level arbitrarily; a simple oak tree is a simple oak tree."
  • On auto-successes -- "I'm going to make a minor correction to this because I've been seeing it spread, so I'll repeat what I said about it before with a small clarification as to how this differs: There is an option you can choose (actually before Expert) that gives you the ability to auto-succeed at some checks depending on what your rank is. It is not Taking 10; it scales with proficiency rank and not with your bonus (so the level 7 Master is much better at using it than the level 20 Trained character, even though the level 20 Trained character would potentially have a higher result with 10+modifier)."
  • Legendary high level rogue vs. non-legendary high level guard -- "So a legendary rogue, maybe level 15? Pretty high level. I'm going to actually spot this random guard at least trained proficiency in Perception because a level 15 guard is an incredibly powerful figure on the worlds stage and is weirdly terrible at being a guard if he hasn't trained in Perception. We'll also assume that we've decided to build this guard out full PC style, since the numbers work out similarly anyway. The guard's Wisdom is not his primary attribute, but the rogue's Dexterity is. We'll say the guard has 16 Wisdom? It could be maybe 18 at the most or potentially much lower. If I recall correctly, this guard is going to be under the DC a legendary rogue can just not roll and auto-succeed with the right skill feat. Supposing the rogue didn't bother with that skill feat but does have some kind of magic cloak , we're looking at a situation where the rogue's bonus of ~+28 is going to roughly equal or surpass the guard's DC of 28 (we don't have opposed rolls) leading to near certitude of success. Even if the level 15 trained guard somehow had 18 Wisdom and some kind of magic goggles boosting him to a DC of 31, the equal level legendary rogue is still looking at a 90% chance of success. If the guard was actually untrained? It's even easier, though that just doesn't seem plausible for a level 15 guard."
  • What happens when his untried fighter friend tries the same thing? -- "But the difference is that in PF2, the untrained 14 Dex 15th level fighter is at +15 (or worse from armor, perhaps +14) instead of +2 (or worse from armor, perhaps +1), so while he is still more likely to fail than succeed against DC 28, he at least has a reasonable shot at trying, rather than no chance at all (opposed roll +1 Stealth vs +20 Perception)."
• Ancestries allow for wide variation -- "Just a note, we will be talking a lot about ancestries soon, but I wanted to make one quick note. The way they are built allows for a wide variety of variation and differentiation between members of the same ancestry. We do not want to mandate anything aside from a few basic characteristics. That is half the reason we made this change, to allow your ancestry to speak to who you are as an individual." (Bulmahn)
• Running out of resonance? "...in all honestly, it is very difficult for a low level character to run out of resonance (which is by design). Mass playtesting might show us otherwise, and we are looking forward to that feedback." (Bulmahn)
• There will be monsters! Erik Mona confirms that there will be monsters available for use when the play test land in August -- "There will be a big monster download for free on August 2nd. The actual monster book for Second Edition (no matter how large) will presumably come out with the Core Rulebook in August 2019."

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What are the most popular archetypes? Erik Mona took an informal poll and got these results:

TOP 10 OVERALL
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Archaeologist (Bard) 40 (!!!)
Lore Warden (Fighter) 24
Eldritch Scoundrel (Rogue) 22
Vivisectionist (Alchemist) 20
Arcane Duelist (Bard) 17
Zen Archer (Monk) 17
Tattooed Sorcerer (Sorcerer) 17
Titan Mauler (Barbarian) 16
Mooncursed (Barbarian) 13
Drunken Master (Monk) 12 (TIE)
Evangelist (Cleric) 12 (TIE)
Skirmisher (Ranger) 12 (TIE)​

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Finally, over on TRAILseeker, we have a little poll running:

As you may know, Paizo announced Pathfinder 2nd Edition a couple of weeks ago. The final game doesn't arrive until August 2019, and no third party licensing information is being released until early 2019, so there's no rush on our end of things to plan TRAILseeker's future; we have the luxury of taking our time and consulting with you, our patrons.Here's where we are right now, although nothing is set in stone (and we have 18 months to wait):

• TRAILseeker will continue to support Pathfinder 1E as it always has. That's not going away.
• We will launch a second Patreon, TRAILseeker II, which will focus exclusively on Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

Our question to you is this -- would a Pathfinder 2E Patreon, which works just like this one, be of interest to you? We need to gauge overall interest levels. The team would be the same -- Felipe (editor) and Alex (layout) would be doubling up their efforts to run both Patreons simultaneously, and we anticipate that there will be an eager pool of writers willing to contribute.

Let us know in the poll! And remember, this is still 18 months away. No rush!

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[RevTurkey]

Thanks for the info and the replies. It does seem a bit wonky from what I have seen so far. I don’t understand why the massive numbers by adding level are needed to simulate skill use..if anything it seems counter-intuitive to me.

Here is another example: 2 characters...Jack and Jill, both with equal strength, dexterity and constitution...both human, both the same age, both equal height...in fact...let’s make them twins...both fighters...Jill went out adventuring and killed a lot of beasties with her bow and arrows...reaching 20th level....the other, Jack stayed home. They are faced with the task of climbing the hill to fetch a bucket of water...they both are untrained in this...why is Jill at a +20 advantage on a d20 roll compared to Jack? Seems a bit nuts to me. I hope it’s just me not understanding it properly.

 

[Arakasius]

Dave they have been pretty explicit why they want untrained to be viable. Basically in PF1 at the start even if untrained (lets say something like stealth) the untrained fighter or sorcerer could be pretty decent. Lets compare 3 numbers at level 1.

Rogue: 8 (4 dex + 3 class skill + 1 rank)
Sorcerer: 2 (2 dex)
Fighter: -1 (2 dex - 3 armor class penalty)
You can add 1 more each to sorc/fighter if they take a skill point in stealth, fairly unlikely since both classes are very skill point starved. (both getting base 2 + int mod and neither class having any use for int)

At this point you have a stealth check of likely DC 10-13. That means on a DC 13 the rogue has a 75% change to succeed, the Sorcerer 45% and the Fighter 30%. All fairly reasonable numbers. The fighter can take off his armor and you have a reasonable chance as a group to pass a stealth check.

Now go to level 8 (not too high) and you get this:
Rogue: 16 (5 dex, 3 class, 8 skill ranks) (could be more with rogue talents)
Sorcerer and Rogue are still 2 and -1, but at least the Sorcerer might have a chance to cheeze it from spell usage.

We give something there like a DC 21 and the rogue almost auto passes while the Sorcerer/Fighter auto fail. This behavior is very prevalent in mid/high level PF play, and only gets worse as the party levels up. Any skill is either auto pass for the trained player or auto fails for the other players. Hence they just sidestep all skill checks through either murder-hoboism or spells.

Rev it is a deliberate choice to make skills get better as you level. This does have some issues like you said, but if you go the other way it makes skills completely useless. You either auto pass if you invest or auto fail if you don't. You could solve this by giving every class a glut of skill points to work with, but what does that actually do besides bog down leveling? Allowing all classes to have a broad competence of skills that a party can actually use skill checks and not cheese them has some value. Of course the way to also do this is what 5e does and get rid of skills progressing at all relative to other party members, but that runs into issues of why isn't a level 20 adventurer better at skills then they were at level 1? They've stated here that their goal in PF2 is to make the players heroic so hence they went with level scaling. So now with the above example of 75%/45%/30% those numbers hold as the party levels up instead of the current PF1 reality of 100% for trained characters and 0% for anyone else. (especially problematic with clerics, sorcerers, fighters and most martials)

So instead of gating things based on the skill value, they're gating the actions they do on the skill proficiency. Which I hope doesn't get too complex with the different tiers, but I understand why they did it. If they want players at level 20 to have vastly better skills than they did at 1, they have to keep the party up with them so skill checks don't become pointless. There is no way about that. They need to reduce the spread. 5e and PF2 really have very similar systems atm other than the level being added. Point being the game is not fun when skill checks break down and only one person can roll and everyone else is excluded from the skill system.

 

[Dalamar]

thanks! I thought I remembered something like that. I like the general idea, but I don't understand our that relates to the legendary blacksmith have +4 to craft and the trained wizard having a +20 to craft. I would prefer the pick on or the other, not both.

Maybe get rid of per level bonus and just go with training:

untrained: +0
Trained: +1
Skilled: +2
Expert: +3
Master: +4
Grandmaster: +5
Legendary: +6

If you need a bigger spread, just make each step a +2 bonus, or add more steps, or both!

EDIT: A +3 bonus per step would work well (0-18 spread) and it could be tied into the # of attacks too. (-3/-6 instead of -5/-10)

If there is no per level bonus, then a high level character is not significantly better than a 1st level expert (skilled using the numbers you provided. This means the world will have to be rather flat (if ability modifiers are constrained to a similar range), or your ability scores are going to be the deciding factor instead of your training.

If you attempt to counter this by increasing the bonus each rank of proficiency provides, you run into the problem of having huge differences between characters of differing proficiency levels even if they are the same character level. Do you want the spells of a legendary spellcaster to be unavoidable to those who are not experts in the corresponding save, even if the target is a 20th level hero?

 

[Arakasius]

There is also a small secondary consideration for why similar scaling. Their goal is to keep all d20 rolls on the same scale. Whether that is attack rolls, skills, saves or DC checks. This allows them to do things like use athletics check to do a combat maneuver instead of an attack roll. I could see them doing things to tweak the numbers on what they've done. For example I could see them making untrained penalty much larger but giving classes enough skill points that they can conceivably rank up proficiencies in everything, basically allowing the player to put a bunch of skills to trained without hurting their advancement. But they've decided their goal/solution is more to gate what you can do by proficiency, saying untrained can't really do too many things. Whether that works we'll see (they've released math showing at level 7 there being about an 11 point difference between two same level characters for specialist vs not), but I see why they're doing it.

 

[dave2008]

If there is no per level bonus, then a high level character is not significantly better than a 1st level expert (skilled using the numbers you provided. This means the world will have to be rather flat (if ability modifiers are constrained to a similar range), or your ability scores are going to be the deciding factor instead of your training.

My thought is the levels give you access to feats (training) which can be spent. If your an expert at something you are an expert at it no matter what level you are (at least that would be my preference). The difference is a 20th level "expert" has only spent a little bit of its possible training to be an expert at something, while the 1st level person would have spent everything they have to gain that expertise

If you attempt to counter this by increasing the bonus each rank of proficiency provides, you run into the problem of having huge differences between characters of differing proficiency levels even if they are the same character level. Do you want the spells of a legendary spellcaster to be unavoidable to those who are not experts in the corresponding save, even if the target is a 20th level hero?

Yes, that is possibly a feature of my proposal. However, you could separate defense from offense training if you want, or go with 1/2 level with higher bonuses. There are lots of ways that would be more palatable to me.

To be clear, I am not a PF1 or PF2 player, but I do look at if for ideas for my own game. And to be honest the 1-20 bonus difference is not something I am interested in. My preferred system would be to have static ability score and training increasing a dice pool. So you would have ability score + training as follows:

untrained: d20
Trained: 2d20 (take the highest)
Skilled: 3d20 (take the highest)
Expert: 4d20 (take the highest)
Master: 5d20 (take the highest)
Grandmaster: 6d20 (take the highest)

 

[Charlaquin]

Thanks for the info and the replies. It does seem a bit wonky from what I have seen so far. I don’t understand why the massive numbers by adding level are needed to simulate skill use..if anything it seems counter-intuitive to me.

Here is another example: 2 characters...Jack and Jill, both with equal strength, dexterity and constitution...both human, both the same age, both equal height...in fact...let’s make them twins...both fighters...Jill went out adventuring and killed a lot of beasties with her bow and arrows...reaching 20th level....the other, Jack stayed home. They are faced with the task of climbing the hill to fetch a bucket of water...they both are untrained in this...why is Jill at a +20 advantage on a d20 roll compared to Jack?

The same reason Jack dies after one good hit with a longsword and Jill can survive twenty. In a level-based system, higher level characters become more competent. It often doesn't really make sense, it's mostly a gameplay concession. When you level up, you expect to get better at stuff.

Seems a bit nuts to me. I hope it’s just me not understanding it properly.

Seems like you're understanding it properly. Don't worry, you're not alone in disliking arbitrary level-based bonuses to all d20 rolls. Even as a 4e fan, the +1/2 level to everything drove me nuts there. Fortunately, it's easy to remove. Just say "House rule - no +level to proficiency bonus" and adjust check DCs and enemy ACs accordingly.

 

[trancejeremy]

To me though, the point of a level based system is that higher level characters are more experienced and better able to survive/cope with adventures.

Not that they are better at everything. Or that in order to be great at something, you had to be high level.

But separating the two generally requires two different skill systems (like in older AD&D/D&D where thieves had percentile based skills, while general skills were largely done by ability scores)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Here is another example: 2 characters...Jack and Jill, both with equal strength, dexterity and constitution...both human, both the same age, both equal height...in fact...let’s make them twins...both fighters...Jill went out adventuring and killed a lot of beasties with her bow and arrows...reaching 20th level....the other, Jack stayed home. They are faced with the task of climbing the hill to fetch a bucket of water...they both are untrained in this...why is Jill at a +20 advantage on a d20 roll compared to Jack? Seems a bit nuts to me. I hope it’s just me not understanding it properly.

The main reason is that it is incredibly unlikely for Jack (Fighter 1) and Jill (Fighter 20) to be hanging out together. Jack is mostly going to be hanging out with Bill (Rogue 1), while Jill spends time with Ted (Rogue 20).

Since wide level disparities are unlikely to show up at the table, it makes sense to sacrifice how well the mechanics work in that scenario, in order to focus on making them work well in the situations which are likely to show up. It's a basic principle of efficient game design, that the rules should do a better job of describing scenarios that are likely to occur than scenarios which are unlikely to occur.

I'm not saying that it necessarily makes a ton of sense for how a world is supposed to work, but Pathfinder 1E had a severe issue with high-level characters having such wide disparity in skill checks that there was often no point in rolling; any lock that a rogue could possibly fail to pick was a lock that a trained fighter would have zero chance at. It was the same exact issue which caused 5E to take the Bounded Accuracy route. But Bounded Accuracy comes at a cost, which is that there's very small growth across levels; a high-level expert isn't significantly better than a low-level expert. The universal level bonus solves both of those problems, by guaranteeing that high-level characters can always compete with each other, while high-level characters can still always beat low-level characters. And the cost of solving both those problems simultaneously is that now high-level un-trained characters can beat low-level trained characters, which seems counter-intuitive (and possibly un-justifiable), but is also not something that should be noticeable at the table.

 

[Arakasius]

I don't care that much about the verisimilitude of edge cases like that to actual effects on real gameplay. Unlike 5e I do want trained characters to be 1) better than lower level characters 2) better than their party members by enough to make it matter. I just don't want the gap wide enough that it destroys the skill system and makes it useless. Having at least a low chance of success gives you that. Note this also ties into their crit/fumble thing. You're going to have comparisons where the expert will pass almost all the time and crit a good deal of the time while the untrained will fail and pass in equal measure. That extra degree of success allows more distinction to exist.

 

[RevTurkey]

Saelorn...Is it not possible to design a more elegant and more pseudo-realistic method for situations that both show up at the table commonly and also rarely? Btw, I’m not trying to be negative about this for the sake of it...just questioning the sense of it. If it makes the game simple and fun then fair enough, that is enough of a reason I suppose. I just wonder if there is a way they can do this which serves both the high fantasy, high power end goal for characters without too huge leaps between party members and yet keeps a bit more realism in there for the partial-simulation aspect.