My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me?

I read an article online somewhere about bounded accuracy, and it brought a question like that as a litmus test for if you like the idea. Should a novice archer, no matter how lucky they are, be able to shoot the ominous black knight? For a scratch? Or a lucky hit in the throat?

D&D 3e says no. You can only hit them on a natural 20. I think PF2e also says no in the same way.

D&D 5e tried to say yes, the archer should be able to hit the knight. The knight’s armor is probably ~22, and the archer is rolling at +5, so there’s decent odds. But he certainly won’t be able to kill him, because HP is what scales up with power.

Other systems are more deadly.

Personally, I don’t like the “these goblins can’t even touch me anymore” mode that much. I prefer less superhero heroics, where a goblin with a knife can be a real threat

i do have a group that we’ve been playing since covid lockdowns via roll20 and later foundry and Unfortunately i don’t have blocks of time for more games (i wish i did!). My comment was mostly just aimed at that all local my friends play d&d and don’t want to switch.

But if you’re looking to play pathfinder2e online there are communities like the pathfinder2e subreddit which has an active discord community. Foundryvtt has a very active pathfinder2e community (but LFG is done through main foundry discord).

And if you’re not opposed to Organized Play (paizos version of adventurers league) then they have in store and online one-shots you can join. It’s actually how i met my group but we branched off and did our own thing.

I have never seen that happen in PF2e printed adventures. A lot of the time they use monsters straight out of the Bestiary without modification, and when they don’t they usually put the statblocks in the back of the AP so that they can all be referenced from wherever they need to be.

I just pulled down my copy of “The Enmity Cycle” (the closest Paizo adventure I have at hand). It’s a level 4-6 adventure published in 2023. I haven’t read it since shortly after I bought it, but the encounters go like this:

• The first encounter is with 4 bandits, and it references the Gamemastery Guide directly for their statblocks (though you can also get them on AoN). There is a note about a change to their favored terrain and what skill they roll for initiative (in PF2e, you can roll different stats for initiative depending on what you’re doing; usually it’s perception, but in this case, the bandits roll their stealth for initiative). It also notes their tactics (they try to threaten the party before attacking, and if you kill or capture two of them, the other two flee). This is standard for any encounter.

• The second encounter is with two sand wolves, the stat block for which is printed in the back of the module.

• The third encounter is with four gnoll hunters, taken straight from the Bestiary, page 178. If this were a more recent, post-OGL book, it would’ve referenced the Monster Core instead (page 208).

Then the party enters a temple (read: dungeon). Here the encounters are themed, but they don’t pull any shenanigans like you mentioned. There are encounters…

• with two Scorching Sun Cultists (stat block inline with the adventure, mechanically and visually distinct from previous enemies) and a Filth Fire (Bestiary 2, page 110);

• with three cultists (this refers GMs back to the statblock printed above);

• with two cultists (again, reference back to the previous page) and a named priest of the cult (who is similar to the cultists, but also has some unique features befitting his position);

• with an atajma (an undead cleric monster who honestly looks super cool; reference to Book of the Dead p112, though I can’t find it on AoN for some reason), and two more cultists;

• and an elite poltergeist (reference Bestiary, page 264). “Elite” is a template you can use to make a regular poltergeist more scary, so in fairness that is a way that they could do what you’re saying, but they don’t here.

That’s the end of chapter one. Characters are supposed to level up around this time. In chapter 2, you fight:

• four elite nuglubs;
• a named jinkin boss;
• elite jinkin mooks;
• Usij cultists;
• sand wolves;
• several Scrapborn;
• two Scrapborn with the “weak” template;
• a named Ceustodaemon;
• a clockwork soldier;
• and a named gnoll priestess

…in various configurations, both before and in the dungeon. All of the enemies here refer to the same statblocks each time they appear, with the exception of the ones that have the “weak” template (which is like the “elite” template above, but in reverse). The sand wolves are the only repeated monster from chapter one, and they seem to be used as a power level indicator to show how much stronger you are, so they also appear with the same stats.

In chapter three there are more sand wolves and more cultists, some new creatures, some creatures that have been seen before, but none of them are reskinned soldiers dealing suspiciously different damage.

That was fun, incidentally. Makes me want to run this adventure I bought two years ago. Alas, the enemy of every campaign is the schedule.

And as we all know, Nintendo suffered for their terrible decision. /s

I mean, yeah, it wasn’t the most consumer-friendly choice. I’m just saying I get why they made it.

That does seem nice. One of the many reasons I DM 5e from a “does it make sense” perspective over a rules as written perspective.

I think the level scaling fits Golarion, since “becoming a god” is a semi realistic goal for someone to set for themselves

But people who want to play in grittier settings do use the proficiency without level rules, and from what I’ve seen all the major third party tools support that option. As a gm, It can be hard to balance for though! The +level to everything mostly serves to give your level 10 cleric a fighting chance on their stealth checks, and without that boost there are some actions some characters just can’t perform.

As the other commenter says though, this isn’t true for most other systems.

It was true for 3.5. Nevermind 4e, which was a naked play to shoehorn D&D back into the then-lucrative war-gaming miniatures market.

Also, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

I don’t think it’s bad either. I just find it’s a design decision that shifts how the game is played.

You lose a lot of the more avant guard aspects of table top RPGs in favor of a ridge, easier to export system.

I think the level scaling fits Golarion, since “becoming a god” is a semi realistic goal for someone to set for themselves

First you get really really drunk.

It’s only a TTRPG if you can win it in character creation. Everything else is just sparkling video game.

And then you take the Test of the Starstone. As a joke, of course.

Accidental ascensions are never the punchline to a joke.

I’m looking to DM kingmaker on pf2e! Let me know if you’re interested.

Did D&D polymorph into a faucet?

PF2e tries to have it both ways:

• If you meet or beat the AC, you hit. If you exceed the AC by 10 or more (for example, roll a 25 to hit an AC 15) you crit.

• If you roll under the AC, you miss. If you roll less than 10 under the AC (for example, roll an adjusted 4 to hit an AC 15), you critically miss.

• Rolling a natural 20 increases your level of success by one step (a crit fail becomes a normal fail, a fail becomes a success, a success becomes a critical hit).

• Rolling a natural 1 decreases your level of success by one step (a crit becomes a normal hit, a hit becomes a miss, a miss becomes a crit fail).

In most encounters that are properly balanced for the players, a natural 20 and a natural 1 function like they do in D&D.

But when you’re out of the proper range of balanced encounters, you start to get into the really fun territory, where threats feel more epic. Can a novice archer shoot the ominous black knight? Maybe! Maybe not, and even rolling a natural 20 merely upgrades their crit miss to a regular miss. Uh oh. That means it’s time to run.

Maybe, if you work together with your party and stack on enough buffs and aids as you can manage, you can eke out a normal hit on an otherwise impossible enemy. That makes it even more exciting, because then you have a very remote chance to actually crit as well! Any +1 you get from any source increases your chance to hit by 5%, but it also increases your chance to crit by 5%. That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.

Your mileage may vary if that works for you or not, but it works for me. I think it’s a pretty elegant system.

D&D is one system.

That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.

That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I’ve heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much “everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again”.

I like how Fate lets anyone “create an advantage”, so your party face that can’t throw a punch can use their “Bravado” skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that

It’s more formalized than Fate, but absolutely. There are feat trees, even entire classes that make that their whole deal. Buffs, special moves and tactics, AOE debuffs, heal spells that target a different number or area of creatures depending on how many actions you use to cast them, the whole thing.

Paizo just released “Battlecry” last month, and the new classes in the book would be terrible for a solo game: the Guardian (literally a big sack of hit points with high AC, but with special powers to force enemies to attack them and only them) and the Commander (a class that the RPGBot guys called “Dual-Wield your friends!” because they have, among many other support actions, an ability that lets them give one teammate the ability to shove an enemy toward another teammate, who can then hit it. On the commander’s turn.)

But every character can use the Aid action, which is very powerful, and often worth sacrificing an attack for; especially if your multiple attack penalty is at -10.

Also the sheer amount of stuff they print. They are continuously putting out high quality adventures with a storyline that makes sense and doesn’t have giant blank spots that you’re expected to fill in for a few levels. They’re switching to a quarterly hardcover model instead of a monthly adventure next year. The rulebooks are nice and paizo isn’t shy about making new ancestries, classes, and options for existing ones, and they balance the more odd or possibly unbalanced options by making them uncommon or rare such that they require GM approval to take. And a whole bunch of setting books that examine all corners of their world, from over views of whole continents to deep dives into specific cities.

Sure but Pathfinder 2E is explicitly about teamwork and positioning. One archer will not be able to hit the death knight unless it’s very lucky (which IMHO makes sense), but an archer supported by some melee fighters flanking the knight and giving them some off-guard malus has way better odds. “Every +1 matters” is true for both the party and the NPCs

I understand heroic fantasy not being your cup of tea, that’s the beauty of having lots of RPGs to choose from. But beware of thinking that bounded accuracy makes things more gritty. In my experience it just makes things more heroic for the party (which can now take down a dragon at level 2) and just breaks down after the first dozen levels

Hmmm, okay. So I have a personal affinity for Swashbucklers. Compared to a proper fighter, they don’t lay down much damage, but they can move, and then when you get where you need to be, you can lay down pain in other ways (love a good tumble through + trip).

I remember immediately seeing the value in all that when it was first released, even though my party said that it felt way to convoluted. I think I’m just in the other side of that kind of conversation here.