Pathfinder 2E What Are The Changes In Pathfinder Remastered?

Kichwas · Jun 2, 2023

Voadam said:
I am not familiar enough with PF2e to follow here.

What level difference do you need on average for lower level attackers to need a 20 to hit?

There are variables of what each side can stack beyond the base numbers.

But my match wasn't for a 20 needed to hit. But a 20 needed to "only" miss. Because one thing a 20 does is always make the result one step better.

So if you need to roll a 29 to hit something - then you actually have a 5% chance of hitting it... because rolling a 20 means you only failed by 9, a miss, which the 'natural 20' makes a hit.
- That is what means that when we come up with these "impossible" scenarios, they are just "very unlikely", and that then gets moved around with tactics.

In PF2E - tactics play a massive role precisely because things are NOT made to be 'bags of hit points', but are instead 'bags of POTENTIAL modifiers'. Smart tactics turn those modifiers on for your side and/or off for the other side.

Base PCs at a 19 level difference still have 5% odds per hit for the weaker side assuming each side does nothing but stand there and take turns... that chance moves up or down as you change the abilities of each opponent. And there even are tricks a level 1 can use to auto do a small amount of damage which means that enough level 1s can swarm things.

But that's looking at the extremes - ONLY because people were dissing PF2E's lack of bounded accuracy by chasing the extremes rather than looking at normal encounter design. And they were doing that, I would argue - because normal encounter design is so obviously in PF2E's favor with its tightly working CR system.

Thomas Shey · Jun 2, 2023

Kichwas said:
Yes I do want that. Why?

Because people are attacking PF2E's math by criticizing these extremes of wide level or wide group size encounters. They're doing that because we all know that outside of the extremes PF2E's math holds up extremely well for highly tactical balanced play.

The problem is, your example is sufficiently limited not to make the point you think it does. A 10th level character is not just a 1st level character with 9 better to-hit and AC. There's a world of other things that go with that that make it require an extremely contrived situation for those first level characters to have any discernible chances, including the higher level entity allowing the fight to take place on the lowers' terms. As such, in practice, its a statement that doesn't really mean anything.

And in case its not been clear, I'm a proponent of PF2e. Its one of the three D&D-sphere games I'll even bother with. But I'm not going to kid myself--or anyone else--that the difference between 1st and 10th level characters isn't such to make the latter, in practical terms, in no meaningful danger from the former. I just don't happen to consider that a flaw.

Voadam · Jun 2, 2023

Kichwas said:
There are variables of what each side can stack beyond the base numbers.

But my match wasn't for a 20 needed to hit. But a 20 needed to "only" miss. Because one thing a 20 does is always make the result one step better.

It sounds like you are saying a natural 20 only hits if you miss by less than 10. So a little narrower window to possibly hit than PF 1e where a 20 always hit.

PF2e has more things both sides can do to add modifiers as well, but generally I would think that would be a wash and the CR challenge math is pretty tight for the band of difference in levels it is designed for.

Go outside those bands and things get wonky.

Similar to 4e.

With lots of potential modifiers in PF2e though I imagine things can ebb and flow at different points in a fight so there will be times when things are more invulnerable and times when they are much more vulnerable than the base stats suggest.

What happens in PF2e when you are regularly missing by more than 10? Are there fumbles for really missing or just more crits when you overperform hitting?

Zubatcarteira · Jun 2, 2023

A level -1 Goblin Warrior has a +8 to hit, which means they can hit an AC 37 creature with a Nat 20 and no MAP. A level 14 Adult Red Dragon has exactly that, so an army of goblins could theoretically kill it if they all get within 60 feet and shoot it to nothing. Highly unlikely, but, hey, it's possible.

There's also stuff like Magic Missile that automatically hits, meaning a few hundred level 1 Wizards can kill pretty much anything that doesn't have resistance/immunity to the damage, or bombs that deal splash damage, so you can throw a few hundred near a big monster and kill it in one go. That's more cheese though.

Lojaan · Jun 2, 2023

Thomas Shey said:
And in case its not been clear, I'm a proponent of PF2e. Its one of the three D&D-sphere games I'll even bother with. But I'm not going to kid myself--or anyone else--that the difference between 1st and 10th level characters isn't such to make the latter, in practical terms, in no meaningful danger from the former. I just don't happen to consider that a flaw.

Same. I consider it a feature, not a bug.

It's such an odd issue when you think about it. Your character cannot be threatened by an army of much low level characters like in 5e! Um. So? Has this situation actually ever occurred to you in 5e? Of course not. 5e cannot handle mass combat. Any situation like the above would be handled with either one or two fireballs, or a custom ruleset. Just like in PF2.

There are a number of unspoken "core ideas" in PF2 that are really hard for 5e players to get their head around initially (myself included). Not because they are particularly wild or anything, but because 5e players have been trained to accept something else as normal for the last decade.

Some core differences in PF2 are:

The better you are at fighting, the harder you are to hit.
You get all your hit points back on a short rest (the length of which is determined by your party's medicine skill)
Combat is a highly collaborative, tactical team sport. If you don't fight together, you will lose

There are more, but those are some of the big ones. It's crazy how ingrained these core ideas get. It took me so long to be ok with how healing works in PF2 because I had conditioned myself to see "you heal to full after a long rest" as normal and anything else as crazy. Which is crazy in itself.

Retreater · Jun 2, 2023

Some people don't think it's realistic that 100 villagers couldn't kill a dragon. I don't play TTRPGs for realism. I play them to tell epic stories, like how Beowulf was the only one who could defeat Grendel.
I also play games where the mechanics service balance, engaging tactics, etc. That's easier for me to obtain in PF2.

Justice and Rule · Jun 2, 2023

I do understand and respect the idea of "I want lower-level minions to still be a threat", but I think my take on it is if I want goblins and kobolds fighting my higher-level adventures, they'll simply be higher-level kobolds and goblins. You're not fighting regular goblins, you're fighting the elite goblin guard, or your fighting the great warchiefs who have hunted you down to stop you. If you need a mass, you can modify a troop block to work. But really, if I want hobgoblins to go after my PCs I just need to make hobgobbos worthy enough to be tossed to them.

payn · Jun 2, 2023

I'll just say that the legion of lower level threats isnt all that important to me. Really, its the top end of the band is too tight for me. Severe/extreme fights are not high enough. I came around to this in AV AP in which a steady diet of severe/extreme encounters felt a little too limited by character ability tactics and not enough by player skill strategy. I find the proficiency without level opens it up some.

Another thing comes to me too is how PF2 is really an encounters game veiled as an old school resource attrition one. I think the reasons for this are obvious, but with PF2.1 coming soon and the boldness of dropping legacy items, I think the future of PF is encounters based design. Which will make PF even better at what it does well now.

Thomas Shey · Jun 3, 2023

Voadam said:
It sounds like you are saying a natural 20 only hits if you miss by less than 10. So a little narrower window to possibly hit than PF 1e where a 20 always hit.

There are some incredibly degenerate conditions where a natural 20 doesn't hit I believe, but they require the difficulty to be such that any other roll would be a fumble. That's a--pretty extreme outlier, but not impossible.

Voadam said:
PF2e has more things both sides can do to add modifiers as well, but generally I would think that would be a wash and the CR challenge math is pretty tight for the band of difference in levels it is designed for.

These don't tend to be entirely symmetrical because you rarely have a set of PCs up against a set of opponents that have quite as much a variety of options as they do, and this becomes more and more true as a larger PC group occurs.

Voadam said:
Go outside those bands and things get wonky.

Similar to 4e.

With lots of potential modifiers in PF2e though I imagine things can ebb and flow at different points in a fight so there will be times when things are more invulnerable and times when they are much more vulnerable than the base stats suggest.

You have to remember that there's only a limited number of modifier types in Pf2e, however; this is very much a thing that was tamped down heavily with 2e. And two of the five are normally already baked into a character (and one of them does not normally occur with opponents). So in practice you're only chasing status and circumstance modifiers. More important is to apply malign conditions to opponents, which often do things that affect ability (one of the two that's baked in) or simply impact other mechanical elements (like the number of actions).

Voadam said:
What happens in PF2e when you are regularly missing by more than 10? Are there fumbles for really missing or just more crits when you overperform hitting?

Just realized I missed this line. You're fumbling like crazy, but fumbles in to-hit rolls don't really do much unless there's an ability of the opponent to take advantage or some special trait of the weapon (such as with guns) where it applies.

Thomas Shey · Jun 3, 2023

Zubatcarteira said:
A level -1 Goblin Warrior has a +8 to hit, which means they can hit an AC 37 creature with a Nat 20 and no MAP. A level 14 Adult Red Dragon has exactly that, so an army of goblins could theoretically kill it if they all get within 60 feet and shoot it to nothing. Highly unlikely, but, hey, it's possible.

Zubatcarteira said:
There's also stuff like Magic Missile that automatically hits, meaning a few hundred level 1 Wizards can kill pretty much anything that doesn't have resistance/immunity to the damage, or bombs that deal splash damage, so you can throw a few hundred near a big monster and kill it in one go. That's more cheese though.

Notice a lot of these land in my example of "Enemy stands up and says 'kill me'" though. They all require an opponent who cooperates by being in line of fire of all these opponents and within their range without, well, doing anything about it. That might occasionally be possible with something big and dumb, but I should note you start often running into problems with things with resistances at that gap too. Maybe dinosaurs? Dragons? I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that to work out.

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Kichwas

Half-breed, still living despite WotC racism

Thomas Shey

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Voadam

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Zubatcarteira

Now you're infected by the Musical Doodle

Lojaan

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Retreater

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Justice and Rule

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payn

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Thomas Shey

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Pathfinder 2E What Are The Changes In Pathfinder Remastered?

OGL-Based Changes​

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5pm Stream Notes​

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Half-breed, still living despite WotC racism

Legend

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Now you're infected by the Musical Doodle

Hero

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Legend

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OGL-Based Changes

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4pm Stream

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Pre-Stream Notes