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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7815138" data-attributes="member: 16586">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 :<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Extremely tight character and monster math.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Level based scaling. You add your level to everything you are Proficient from including saves, spells, armor, weapons, and skills.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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. </li> </ul>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.</blockquote>

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