Pathfinder 2E Embedding Level Into The Narrative

[Campbell]

One of the things that really differentiates Pathfinder is the way it directly embeds level directly into the narrative of the game. One of the design goals for the game is to tell Pathfinder stories as well as the game possibly can. One of the core things that makes a Pathfinder story a Pathfinder story is that level matters and it matters deeply. They want fighting a higher level monster or character to feel desperate, a creature of your level to feel like an even match, and a lower level enemy to feel like you have the upper hand. This is irrespective of the details of individual monster designs. This is accomplished using a combination of mechanics :

• Extremely tight character and monster math.
• Level based scaling. You add your level to everything you are Proficient from including saves, spells, armor, weapons, and skills.
• Instead of challenge ratings monsters have a level. A monster of your level is roughly an even match. They will similar numbers in just about every respect. There is individual variance for monster's design.
• You achieve a Critical Success whenever you beat a DC by 10 and achieve a Critical Failure whenever your result is 10 less than the DC.
• Critical hits are strong. You double your damage and there is often an impact beyond the damage such as an archer pinning an enemy in place.
• Multiple Attack Penalty. Whenever you make more than one attack in a round your second attack gets a -5 penalty. Subsequent attacks beyond that suffer a -10 penalty.​

This all combines to make facing higher level opponents feel desperate. When you face off against a higher level monster you hit less, your spells are less effective, you get hit a lot more, and because of the way critical hits work you get critically hit more. Those critical hits hurt a lot. You also suffer the effects of their spells and abilities a lot more often. You really have to work as a team to bring those advantages down. Stuff like flanking, positioning, and invoking status effects become a lot more critical to success. You need to bring out all the stops. This is especially true because not only does your first attack succeed less often that second attack has such a low chance of success you often better off doing other things to help your chances.

Against a monster of your level your first attack will generally succeed about half the time. Your second attack will succeed about 25% of the time. You are generally better off using your third action to do something else.

Against a monster 3 levels higher your first attack will succeed about 35% of the time. Your second 10% of the time. Your third 5%. Generally only the first attack has a good chance of success.

These numbers can obviously change through tactics, status effects, and doing things like targeting weak saves. Against higher level monsters these things are all the more critical.

 

[Campbell]

I will have more on how this actually feels in play later this weekend.

 

[BryonD]

No mention of dragons or orcs or demons or giants. No mention of weapons or setting or justifications.
There is nothing that engages the spirit of narrative. Your description sounds more like craps than a TTRPG.

The core mechanic doesn't care how an orc is different than a ghost. If you know something is three levels higher than something else, you know 80% of everything you need to know. Your post demonstrates this well.
A wizard vs. orc or a rogue vs. a ghost will have refinements. But what you said stands as the default truth that everything else tweaks.

 

[MockingBird]

This is why I like bounded accuracy so much more. I could be totally wrong because I havent played PF2e, but this makes me feel like lower CR monsters will become useless as a tool for the DM. Is there any form of bounded accuracy in PF2e to combat this?

 

[Parmandur]

This is why I like bounded accuracy so much more. I could be totally wrong because I havent played PF2e, but this makes me feel like lower CR monsters will become useless as a tool for the DM. Is there any form of bounded accuracy in PF2e to combat this?

No, PF2 very intentionally eschews that concept for reasons of Paizo's preferred style of story. Not my cup of tea, I'd rather keep things in play longer.

 

[dave2008]

Against a monster of your level your first attack will generally succeed about half the time. Your second attack will succeed about 25% of the time. You are generally better off using your third action to do something else.

Against a monster 3 levels higher your first attack will succeed about 35% of the time. Your second 10% of the time. Your third 5%. Generally only the first attack has a good chance of success.

This concerns me. Just three levels provides such a big difference?

 

[Xenonnonex]

This concerns me. Just three levels provides such a big difference?

The criting at beating the AC by 10 is a big deal. A huge deal. If the monster is poorly designed this will lead to a total party wipe. Which happened a lot in the playtest.

 

[Campbell]

No mention of dragons or orcs or demons or giants. No mention of weapons or setting or justifications.
There is nothing that engages the spirit of narrative. Your description sounds more like craps than a TTRPG.

The core mechanic doesn't care how an orc is different than a ghost. If you know something is three levels higher than something else, you know 80% of everything you need to know. Your post demonstrates this well.
A wizard vs. orc or a rogue vs. a ghost will have refinements. But what you said stands as the default truth that everything else tweaks.

I am using the normative case for purposes of analysis. There absolutely is a baseline set of benchmarks for designing a creature of a given level and design process is based on the end result. However, I would not describe the variation between monsters as refinements. Many monsters vary dramatically from the expected baseline in ways that capture how the monster should feel.

As an example zombies typically have the hit points of a higher level monster, extremely low Armor Class for a monster of their level, are slow so they only get two actions a turn, have significant weaknesses to positive energy and slashing damage. They are immune to death effects, disease, mental, paralyzed, poison, and unconscious. They are also damaged by healing. They also do above average damage for creatures of their level.

Taken together you have a slow, lumbering husk that is easy to hit, but takes a hit and keeps on going. If you can keep away from them you can stop them before they get to you. Still if there is a decent number of them they just keep on coming.

A lot of monsters break the rules. The baseline is the starting point, but alterations are made against the baseline to achieve ludo narrative harmony.

I feel like the monster design process is definitely based on the feel and narrative role of the monster. They seem willing to deviate from the baseline in some pretty substantive ways. Monsters have specific weaknesses, resistances, and immunities. It does not feel like the benchmarks are overly constraining. I have not seen a monster with better ludo narrative harmony than the Pathfinder 2 hydra which requires you to kill each of its heads to bring it down. It can even spring additional heads if you do not cauterize a head in time.

That being said it is very much based on the final result. There is no process for defining the monster's stats, skills, and abilities. When designing a monster you decide how tough you want it to be based on existing bench marks and make adjustments to get the right feel, sometimes some pretty drastic ones. There are no rules for creature types, hit dice, ability score generation or the like. You just give the monster the things you think it needs.

I know this is like not your bag, but the monsters are plenty different in my opinion.

 

[Campbell]

This is why I like bounded accuracy so much more. I could be totally wrong because I havent played PF2e, but this makes me feel like lower CR monsters will become useless as a tool for the DM. Is there any form of bounded accuracy in PF2e to combat this?

By default Pathfinder 2 utterly rejects bounded accuracy. The narrative of the game is one in which goblin warriors are scenery to a 5th level party and are not included in the encounter budget. I expect we will eventually get some kind of troop mechanic to represent larger groups. They want lower level enemies to make you feel strong and powerful.

There will be extensive coverage of removing the level bonus from the game in the Gamemastery Guide. They will explain in detail how it effects the narrative of the game, what it means for encounter design including new guidelines for the variant. One of the things they are focused on is when they provide a variant is adequately explaining how to implement it and its impact on play.

 

[dave2008]

By default Pathfinder 2 utterly rejects bounded accuracy. The narrative of the game is one in which goblin warriors are scenery to a 5th level party and are not included in the encounter budget. I expect we will eventually get some kind of troop mechanic to represent larger groups. They want lower level enemies to make you feel strong and powerful.

I think it is a probably a good idea to have a different default than 5e, but I must say it is one of my favorite aspect of 5e. I much prefer BA to the massive increases in ability you see in 3e/PF1/4e and now PF2e. That being said, I don't think it will matter much to a player. I hope to give it a try soon and find out.

There will be extensive coverage of removing the level bonus from the game in the Gamemastery Guide. They will explain in detail how it effects the narrative of the game, what it means for encounter design including new guidelines for the variant. One of the things they are focused on is when they provide a variant is adequately explaining how to implement it and its impact on play.

So the GG will allow one to extract level from the narrative then? That could be good, I'm just not convinced embedding level into the narrative is a good thing. 4e embedded level as well, but it also provided a method to adjust this (with solos, elites, standards, minions, and swarms) from the get go that allowed more flexibility. Without that flexibility I think 5 levels is to short of a period of relevance. Maybe I will feel different when I play a game, but it definitely bothers me as a DM from a world building / game narrative perspective.