"At its core, the story of both games is essentially the same. You still build your own character, venturing off on daring adventures, risking your life for a chance at fame and glory, defeating deadly foes that threaten your friends, your family, and perhaps the very world itself. Beyond the narrative, there are many things that have changed, but mostly in the details of how the game works. You still pick a race, even though it is now called your ancestry. You still decide on your class—the rulebook includes all of the core classes from the First Edition Core Rulebook, plus the alchemist. You still select feats, but these now come from a greater variety of sources, such as your ancestry, your class, and your skills.Where the changes really shine through is in how the game is played. Gone are the confusing action types like move, standard, swift, and immediate, instead replaced with a simple system of three actions and one reaction each round. All of the varied systems and formulas for determining your character's bonuses and statistics, like saving throws, attack bonuses, and skills, have been unified in a single, easy-to-use proficiency system based on your choices and your character's level. You no longer need to collect a specific set of magic items to be a balanced character, relying on specific magical statistic bonuses. Instead, you get all of the bonuses you need from your regular armor and weapons, allowing the rest of your items to be truly wondrous."

[video=youtube;UlBP0lEQ1Qo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlBP0lEQ1Qo[/video]​

Basic Info

"We considered that, but didn't feel like that would be fair to our brick and mortar retailer partners, who are a significant part of the Pathfinder ecosystem, and one that we're trying to support more and more."

"The March 20–May 1 preorder window is only for placing preorders on paizo.com . Retailers who accept preorders will have different windows. (Distro has to place their order with us by May 1, so they will probably want preorders from their retailers sometime before that.)"

Paizo Blogs

Other Articles & Links

Playtest Products

"It will be much like the Limited-Edition versions of the Starfinder Core Rulebook or Curse of the Crimson Throne . We'll release a mock-up image before we begin taking preorders."

"That is in fact the correct explanation for putting Seoni and Valeros on the cover. And the goblin alchemist is there to show you that this is something new. The white dragon is there to show you that this is also something old ."

"The playtest document doesn't have everything that will be in the 2nd edition CRB (it's important that people know that and don't worry too much if something particular isn't in the playtest yet), so I can't speak beyond the playtest doc. As to mimicking a 3.5 WotC PrC with a big subsystem of grafts and implants, obviously you won't be able to do this directly. That said, I can easily dream up a character that fits that theme of aberrant weird stuff and raging using the playtest CRB."

"This massive 400-page rulebook contains everything you need to create characters and run Pathfinder Playtest adventures from levels 1–20! With gorgeous new illustrations by Wayne Reynolds, the Playtest Rulebook lights the path leading directly to Pathfinder's future. Available in three editions: softcover, hardcover, and deluxe hardcover with foil-debossed faux-leather cover and ribbon bookmark."

"Note that Black Book will also be translating the Playtest Edition. And our German translation partner, Ulisses Spiele, is also onboard for Second Edition as well as the Playtest Edition. Here's their page ."

"We have a structured plan that will allow us to get us the answers we need from a huge number of people in a focused way. We'll talk more specifically about what that means a bit later, but August 6 is the day it begins."

"You may have seen people in the forums saying that they want to make sure that we aren't listening only to a single segment of the audience. Allowing people who download the PDF to give us feedback long before people who buy it in stores can, or before people who play in French or German can, would prioritize one segment of the audience over others."

"That "early look" is a verbal explanation of the rules they need to play through the session. It's very much like the one that you can hear right now via the Glass Cannon Podcast (and in many cases, the convention sessions aren't that long, so they don't even get that much)."

"Not going to happen. This is a coordinated worldwide campaign—our German and French translation partners are in on it too, and they don't even get to start their work in earnest until the English edition is locked down. We have other licensees working on playtest support as well, and most of them also need us to finalize things before they do the bulk of their work. And we're not going to treat people who choose to participate by picking up the book at their favorite retailer or at Gen Con as afterthoughts. As far as the time requirements for the playtest goes, we have a guided plan that will ensure we get the feedback we need in the time we have. Playtest products release August 2. The playtest itself begins August 6. For everyone."

"One of the primary drivers for telling people now is that we have to tell our retailer channel about things that are happening in August months in advance, and we picked this week because it gives us the opportunity to talk to retailers about it face-to-face at the game industry's biggest retail-oriented trade show next week. Believe me, I wish we could announce it and drop the PDF on the very same day, but that would be horrible to our distribution network."

"The Pathfinder Playtest Adventure, entitled "Doomsday Dawn," takes players on a tour of the Inner Sea region of Pathfinder's world, bringing us back to several important locales from throughout the years we've published Pathfinder—the adventure title itself is tied to a campaign plot point that stretches all the way back to the 2008 module The Pact Stone Pyramid . You'll also find a bit more of the setting appearing in the rules themselves. We'll get to updating the campaign setting in a major way on the other side of the playtest, with many more details on this front to be released as the playtest continues and as we near the actual Pathfinder Second Edition release in 2019."

"This 96-page super-adventure contains seven multi-encounter scenarios designed to introduce the new rules and put them to the ultimate test on your game table! With adventures spanning all 20 levels and featuring most of the game's newest rules, Doomsday Dawn provides a thrilling tour of the new rules, and of the Pathfinder world itself!"

"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."

PF1 is more useful to specify between editions, i.e. "they did this so much better in PF1." If Pathfinder First Edition is called simply PF, it loses function as a catch-all abbreviation for the game in general, its world, the culture and customs associated with it, etc.

" Speaking just for myself, I'm gearing toward PF1 and PF2. The lowercase "e" is superfluous, as the number denotes the edition. PF1 is more useful to specify between editions, i.e. "they did this so much better in PF1." If Pathfinder First Edition is called simply PF, it loses function as a catch-all abbreviation for the game in general, its world, the culture and customs associated with it, etc. Anyway, just my two cents."

Future Products

"Lots of things to think about when it comes to treatments of Golarion in second edition, but for me, within the context of a single book, the main questions are "how wide is the focus" and "how deeply do we explore the topic. Right now, as in the case of the Dragon Empires book, the answer is usually REALLY WIDE, ALL-INCLUSIVE, REALLY and NOT PARTICULARLY DEEP. I am starting to think that might not be the best option in second edition... Yeah, to be totally honest I'm not really interested in publishing a book with four pages on each of the Inner Sea nations. I kinda feel like people have already bought that.

"Department of Expectation Management: Being able to run on the fly if you have the new version of the monsters does not mean that all the numbers are the same. It does mean that when they aren't the same, we provide you with the tools to quickly determine what the new number should be."

"I wanted to jump in immediately even before reading the rest of this post to state clearly that THERE WILL BE NEW MONSTERS IN THE FIRST MONSTER BOOK. And ALL the monster books. We want to convert as much PF1 content as we can, but we're not just starting at the beginning and re-doing everything we have done before. There will ALWAYS be new monsters!"

"I'm VERY sympathetic to the folks who want a really decent-sized chunk of the "core plus" Pathfinder monsters, classes, ancestries, etc. right out of the gate, and all of my current thinking is focused on trying to deliver a credible version of that relatively quickly. That's part of the reasoning behind the idea of a potential "bigger" first monster book. Buuuut, that book's going to end up costing $60 or $70, and I don't think people have the endurance for that price level year after year after year, even if it does mean getting the whole of PF1's conceptual content out sooner rather than later. And we're gonna do a bunch of new stuff, too. I'm not interested in waiting until we've re-done everything in PF1 before treading new ground. I always want to be doing that. So. The first monster book is very likely going to be bigger than the later ones."

"I'm going to have to be cryptic for the moment, but I've been thinking about you and your heavy book concerns, and I honestly think I've come up with a non-digital solution that allows you to read a bunch of cool lore AND run games without having to heft around the Book of the Damned."

"I don't think we've fully committed one way or the other yet. The playtest monster book is going to be mega stat block dump without a lot of description of what, say, a skeleton looks like or eats.As for special abilities and how they're formatted, while I know the design team has been hard at work on this stuff, I haven't interacted with it too much yet (I just finished going through magic items last night!)."

"The first monster book has got to be a basic reference, so there will be a lot of key monsters in the book for sure, no matter how long it ends up being. That said, I refuse to publish the same exact book, so we'll be adding a lot of stuff that isn't in the B1 book, moving a few weird choices to later books, etc. So it won't be exactly the same. This is honestly part of why I'm curious about a bigger book. With more pages, there can be even more "new" stuff."

" I'm guessing a truly credible version of that book would be at least 600 pages. Are you willing to pay $60-70 for such a book? I'm genuinely interested in people's answers, because to tell you the truth I am strongly considering a base monster reference that is significantly larger than Bestiary 1's 320 pages. So... don't be shy about your opinions, please."

"I'd also very much like this, but this also adds pages if you don't want it to come at the cost of more options and stat blocks."

Compatibility

"Some of them are riffs or more powerful versions of alternate race abilities already in PF1 (Advanced Race Guide and elsewhere), so I bet you could mod them and call them "Improved XX" or make up a name when they share a name. The awesome poison one our dwarf had probably would take some work due to poison not working the same way in PF1, but it shouldn't be too hard to get similar functionality."

"Honestly, the main barrier to doing that, and the reason it's harder than vice versa, is simply PF1 itself. By which I mean, If you have an appropriate PF1 monster or NPC handy already (like if you're fighting a troll and you have the B1 troll handy from PF1), it shouldn't be too hard, with the main task being treasure adjustment. If not, then just the fact that making a monster/NPC is always inherently complicated in PF1 is going to slow you down in that direction."

"I have been directly running Shattered Star in PF2 out of the PF1 AP volumes for a while and am nearing the end of Book 3. I can do the whole thing on the fly, even including converting monsters and NPCs that hadn't been converted yet on the fly, but I suspect for most people there will be a little time beforehand converting those monsters and NPCs (and that probably in Part 4 I will run into an NPC too complicated to convert on the fly)."

"Treasure is your biggest wild card here. Money will need tweaking, and you might have to add in more +1 longswords and the like. Individual items may or may not be in the P1 Core Rulebook, but you kind of already know the sorts of replacements you might be able to drop in."

"Most of the encounter groupings will work pretty well. Converting a 2E monster to a 1E one will take some time (more time than going in the other direction anyway), but is pretty doable. For interaction and all that, certainly all the same concepts will be there, just implemented in different ways. And any adventure featuring downtime heavily will probably require Ultimate Campaign and some work by hand."

"For the upcoming Pathfinder Playtest Rulebook, we will be offering a sort of cheat sheet to help you with some of the big changes in the game, but there will not be a detailed conversion guide. The focus here is to test the new edition of the game, not convert pieces of the old edition. That said, once we are done with the playtest and the game has been forged into its final form, we will provide guidance for using material from First Edition."

"It depends on what you mean, especially early on in the life-cycle of the new edition, when we're dealing with 12 classes and 8 ancestries. You won't be able to convert a 15th-level aasimar arcanist, for example. On the other hand, if you listen to the Glass Cannon Podcast posted to this thread you'll hear Jason Bulmahn run Crypt of the Everflame without too much trouble right out of the book, with some pre-prepared monster stat blocks just off to the side. It was very simple, and as far as the story is concerned you can't really tell much of a difference."

"While many of the rules of the game have changed, much of what made Pathfinder great has remained the same. The story of the game is unchanged, and in many cases, you can simply replace the old rules with their new counterpart without having to alter anything else about the adventure. As for individual rules, like your favorite spell or monster, most can be added with a simple conversion, changing a few numbers and rebalancing some of the mechanics. If you'd like to witness conversion in action, our partners at the Glass Cannon podcast are releasing a multi-part session of designer Jason Bulmahn GMing the First Edition Pathfinder Module Crypt of the Everflame, converted for the Playtest Edition largely on the fly, with the aid of some pre-converted stat blocks."

"Their license is ongoing. What they choose to implement (and when and how) is largely up to them, and any announcements they make will be on their own timeline. (This goes for all of our digital game aid partners.)"

Support for 1E

Overall Style & Complexity

"I think that one comes early in the master levels, actually. Don't expect trained or expert (and all characters start with at least something at expert at 1st level, even if certain categories are much harder to reach expert) to be drastically breaking real world records; these are characters at their earliest levels in the game. The world record for even a running high jump is about 8 feet up."

"The best part about proficiencies is the way they push the boundaries for nonmagical characters, particularly those with a legendary rank. If you're legendary in something, you're like a character out of real-world myth and legend, swimming across an entire sea while beating up sea monsters like Beowulf, performing unbelievable tasks like Heracles, or hunting and racing at astounding speeds like Atalanta. While we did perform a bit of research on things like real world Olympic records and average expectations when it came to the lower ranks, masters and especially legends break all those rules. Want your fighter to leap 20 feet straight up and smash a chimera down to the ground? You can do that (eventually)!"

"It's a fundamental design goal that someone with enough martial prowess, especially if they're legendary (but not precluding those who are not) can do unbelievable and completely unrealistic-in-the-real-world things. So much so that down the line we've gotten questions back about some of the more powerful skill feats "Can you really do Extreme-Thing-X just because you're that good at the skill?" Yes. Yes you can."

"I put a lot of time into unarmed attack language, and I’m hoping it’s close. We’re aiming to be more precise about not defining a thing that’s not a weapon as a weapon. (See also 1E natural “weapons” vs. unarmed strikes). Yet unarmed attacks need to live in some of the same categories for weapon groups, etc. Challenging!"

"I'd say it's about on par with PF1E in that regard. We haven't playtested TotM style because that tends to be less common among our fanbase. I should give it a shot so we can know what to expect for that style of game. My guess is that it would be easier for me personally to visualize what was happening when using three-action turns, but I'm not entirely sure! If you end up playtesting in this style, I'd be really interested to hear how your experience goes."

"We're keeping it in mind for sure. That's one reason we've rejiggered the number of bonus types, altered the action economy to make choice clearer, and (at least mostly) made it so you have options for static feats instead of only giving options to expand your list of actions. We'll see in the playtest whether that mix is right."

"There were skill points in 3.5: each level, you received skill points that you then invested into skill ranks on a 1:1 basis. When we were working on Pathfinder First Edition, I pointed out to Jason that was a completely extraneous layer of abstraction, so we just skipped that whole pointless transaction and gave you ranks to invest directly into a skill. (I think very few people actually noticed.)"

"They have the same name because they work the same way. Once you understand how proficiency works with weapons, you understand how it works with armor, and with skills, and with saves. And once you understand how ancestry feats work, you understand how skill feats work, and how class feats work."

"As for the issues at hand, we have been working hard to shift some balances around a bit. Making an attack more accurate over the levels of play, while adding some variability and scaling to damage. This gives us more "levers" for design, and will result in a better play experience. The math of the old system, and the way some feats interacted with it caused serious balance issues over the life of the system. We hope to have corrected them, but only a full playtest will give us any indication as to whether or not we have succeeded. We hope you will hold off on judgement until then."

"One thing that I think we could explain a bit better is the fact that every character has a breadth of options open to them when it comes to social and out of combat abilities. Some come from classes whose theme and purpose aligns closely with those parts of the game. For those classes, they usually get some additional choices so that they do not feel that they are lacking in combat ability (sacrificing social for combat, or vice versa). That said, everyone has access to skills, skill feats, and general feats that allow you to tune your character to perform in the way that you want outside of combat (exploration mode and downtime mode). We will be looking at the modes of play on Friday and I am going to sneak in some information on this topic then to give you a sense of what's out there."

"Just wanted to chime in here to say that the depth of options in character creation and advancement is a core principle of Pathfinder's design philosophy, and that has not changed with the new edition. If anything, there are even MORE ways to customize your character with the new rules, but we hope that they are better explained and work together a bit more seamlessly than all of that type of stuff does in the current version of the game."

"Considering some of the worries I am seeing about Pathfinder Second Edition being streamlined and easier to play, think I might need to do a blog on this topic and how it relates to our design philosophy... reducing complexity doesn't mean less depth. As it turns out, complex burdensome rules that you are familiar with and understand are still complex and burdensome. I want to keep the options, the choices, the tactics, but I want your access to them to be easy and intuitive. Not that I want to seem like I'm undercutting a genuine concern, but I think it might be good to explain the methodology and design approach. Let's folks know the how and the why..."

"I mean to be fair, proficiency is also a concept from Pathfinder, older editions of D&D, and a lot of other RPGs. I think people are reaching this connection because 5e is popular right now (and, from what I've seen of it so far, a cool and fascinating system designed by some really talented designers), and so it's in the zeitgeist. But that's not really what Pathfinder is, so we don't really have any interest in replicating that."

"...there are quite a few ranks of proficiency you can gain in a skill.... your proficiency modifier and ability modifier are not the only bonuses you can ever add to your skill. Is just proficiency+ability modifier with no other additions possible what 5e does? I actually don't know 5e solidly enough to be certain (I likely should learn 5e better, but with PF1, Starfinder, and PF2 rattling in my head, there's just too many games in there right now).... In that case, no, that's not what we're doing at all."

"I imagine that there would be a small series of mathematical steps that you could perform that wouldn't require any particularly challenging math-fu to get closer to that goal if you want to tell that story. The math juke could have some side effects, but I think it would work for what you want (depending on the level of the basic brigands and the swordmaster in the example)."

"The math we chose makes it much easier to tell stories where the PCs are oversized heroes critting left and right against weaker opponents or underdogs struggling against disaster against a powerful foe that requires serious teamwork to scratch, but the flatter proficiency from 5e would allow multiple weaker opponents to remain relevant threats for many more levels or greater foes to be defeated quite a few levels sooner by sufficiently tactical characters outnumbering them. Both can be awesome depending on which kind of story to tell! For instance, I remember when I was reading some fantasy novel where a ridiculous swordmaster was accosted by 8 brigands with swords all at once, and he thought to himself that no matter how good he was, the sheer numbers would make him likely to die here. That's honestly more realistic. But most of the books, TV shows, and movies I had seen before reading that book taught me that the high level swordmaster would annihilate eight basic brigands. This latter truth is very much the reality in the new game."

"The fact of the matter is that [Pathfinder 2 and D&D 5E] are branches of the same tree to some degree; the design goals that they had with D&D 5th Edition were "4th didn't really work, how do we take the basic 3.5 rules, or really going back to 1st Edition, and evolve those into today", and they had a set - I assume - of design goals. We're doing the same thing in the sense of we had Pathfinder, which is an off-branch of 3.5, and now we want to make Pathfinder the best version of Pathfinder, and so there's going to be some things that are similar but in no way is there an intent to make this 5.1. Quite frankly, we're so busy playing Pathfinder, which we enjoy, that we're not experts at 5th edition. We wouldn't dream of making "an even better versions of 5E!"; that's not the goal. The goal is to make a better version of Pathfinder, and it may be that some of the solutions we come up with are similar to some of the solutions that they came up with, and frankly some of the solutions that they came up with are very similar to Pathfinder in the first place!"

While it's reasonable to assume that developments in other games have gone into some of our thinking with this new edition, it'd be wrong to assume that we're explicitly trying to make the game more like 5e, or like any other game. What we're trying to do is make the very best version of Pathfinder that we can."

This thing is far less 5e-inspired than people are assuming based on the first day of information we've dropped and the use of some similar terminology." ...

Iconics

Characters like Valeros and Harsk will be given different gear to highlight how new class features work (for example, Harsk has two axes and Valeros will be carrying a shield)

Characters like Valeros and Harsk will be given different gear to highlight how new class features work (for example, Harsk has two axes and Valeros will be carrying a shield)

"Funny story. 10 years ago, when most of us were in our late 20s or early 30s, making old-man Ezren 42 didn't really ping anyone's radar. Whelp, I'm 42 now, and holy gods Ezren should have been older in first edition."

"Longsword/shortsword is actually pretty solid now, or at least, I've seen that build putting out good damage. The switch to have Valeros also carry a shield, as I've heard it explained, is more to allow the iconic character to have access to the iconic sword and board style. But he still has his short sword, and there's no reason you couldn't build for two-weapon fighting with longsword and shield and then switch in a short sword for better damage and lower defense on occasion."

And there are no half-orcs, either. I wish we'd done it differently back in 2007, but fixing it within the core 12 means saying goodbye to some very good friends, and we're not really interested in going there."

Miscellaneous

"The damage per foot in the podcast was not done correctly (it should be lower). Logan actually did the math for terminal velocity and we have an extremely high max falling damage based on terminal velocity."

"I messed that up in the podcast, having misread the sentence in the rulebook. To be clear here folks, we are not going for super realistic physics here. This is an RPG after all, but it would be nice not to have to have pits in dungeons that are 50 feet deep just to deal reasonable damage to a character (it always messed up dungeon floor plans.. where are those pits going down into the level below). The rule that is in place does reasonable damage over distance fallen. It does not try to simulate the 1 in a million chance of falling out of airplane and living or dying after falling off a curb."

"The basic poison rules are streamlined to be easier to use, deadlier to the poisoner's foes, but also less math-intensive and hit-or-miss in their mechanic, which leads to abstractions (perhaps not less unrealistic than before though, you'll have to let us know when you check out the book).

"a relationship between proficiencies and crafting that will undoubtedly be the topic of a future blog post. Suffice it to say, the higher your proficiency, the higher the quality of the items that you can craft.

"Crits are no longer confirmed, there is a weapon property called deadly. It was on a short bow, and it mean that a crit did double damage +1d10. Rapier also has deadly."

"Scimitar has sweep and forceful. Sweep reduces the penalty to hit a second person. Kind of like a soft cleave. Forceful does extra damage if you hit the same person more than once."

"the bonus to AC from shields is very nifty. In a similar situation (enemy hits on an 8 without shield, on a 10 with shield), the AC alone is going to net you 25% less damage (much of which comes from avoiding big bursty crits that you really want to avoid), not even counting that you could do a shield block."

"Well that depends. Certainly it will be drastically better of a percentage of a fighter's output without dropping spells and actions on buffing yourself than a sword-swinging wizard would be in PF1. But the question is: Would your group benefit from having a character that can melee a respectable but still diminished percentage of a fighter while also casting not quite as well (but still with full spell level access) as a casty wizard? That's going to depend on the group. I think that character is obviously not going to be any sort of deadweight, though, even if maybe your group composition would have worked better with a full specialist than a hybrid character."

"For just one attack, 27% more or so without crits, 50% more with crits. I can see why the new crit method is being used. You’ll need to be careful with attack buffs, then."

"Suppose you are a wizard who wanted to be a muscle wizard. You managed to keep apace with the fighter's Strength, bought magic swords at the same pace, and generally narrowed the difference between you and the fighter down to mostly the proficiency. Let's say that difference between you two was that the fighter had +3 more to hit than you did. Doesn't seem like much. Now you're fighting a monster that you hit on a 10, and the fighter hits on a 7 (since he had +3 more than you). On that attack, how much better on average, in terms of expected damage, do you think the fighter is going to do, expressed as a percentage (for instance, you might say "15% more damage")."

"Starfinder uses an offshoot of an earlier version of the bulk system that Logan had been designing for PF2. If I recall, one of your problem cases had to do with a very big character having trouble moving a smaller character around; there's a chart to help with bigger and smaller creatures in the playtest doc (that you can totally probably use in Starfinder for unusual-size creatures and bulk too if it would help!)"

"Hazards are now a more important part of the game, from rangers creating snares to traps that you have to actively fight against if you want to survive. Poisons, curses, and diseases are a far more serious problem to deal with, having varied effects that can cause serious penalties, or even death."

"The new initiative system probably took the most getting used to, but after the first combat, even that made sense and felt fine

Game Modes

"Use of the word mode just lets us have sentences that make sense. When in the middle of running text we might say, "while exploring", but we also like having the ability to say "During encounter mode, you can..." . Its not really worth delving into on this thread (and seriously.. I do not want to derail things), but we are trying to take a little bit of a lighter hand with hard-coded grammar constructions for our rules so that the text is a bit easier to read and parse."

"...we have broken play up into three distinct components. Encounter mode is what happens when you are in a fight, measuring time in seconds, each one of which can mean life or death. Exploration mode is measured in minutes and hours, representing travel and investigation, finding traps, decoding ancient runes, or even mingling at the queen's coronation ball. Of all the modes of play, exploration is the most flexible, allowing for easy storytelling and a quick moving narrative. Finally, the downtime mode happens when your characters are back in town, or relative safety, allowing them to retrain abilities, practice a trade, lead an organization, craft items, or recuperate from wounds. Downtime is measured in days, generally allowing time to flow by in an instant.”

Characters

"For folks who are wondering about backgrounds, we will be talking about those in detail later. They're not that similar to Starfinder themes or to 5E backgrounds, for the record.

"We support your decision to only use modifiers, the tradition of ability scores is too strong to remove them. It shouldn't be hard for you to just stick with modifiers though."

"We are not using [the Starfinder] generation method. As Logan hinted in the blog itself, the stat generation is more organically tied to your character concept and helps you spread around your ability scores if you like. As it so happens, you also wind up with slightly higher overall starting stats, than in Starfinder mainly in your less important ability scores that you're fleshing out for RP purposes, though I'm considering using the PF2 statgen system the next time I run a Starfinder home game as it's more generous to multi-stat classes at low levels, like solarians."

"Rolling your stats is an optional rule in the Playtest book. Because we want to get the playtest results from a more stable dataset, we prefer people use the default ability system for characters they'll be giving playtest feedback on, but we did want to show how it could work."

"Would you believe that it still manages to be drastically more forgiving than PF1 towards nonstandard ancestry/class combinations? We absolutely did not want to say "Alchemists and wizards who aren't humans or elves are always behind" or the like. You still might be behind a little bit if you pick an ancestry that traditionally has a penalty, but not nearly as much as a dwarf sorcerer in PF1 (which would have 4 less Cha than a human, halfling, or gnome who spent the same effort). It all comes down to the extra customization inherent in ancestry. If it seems like this might be impossible to achieve alongside the other features I mentioned to Daedalus, it wasn't easy. We worked really hard cracking this nut and had to reject many false starts before we found it."

"Characters in the new edition have MORE options in most cases than they did in the previous edition. You can still make the scholarly mage who is the master of arcane secrets and occult lore, just as easily as you can make a character that goes against type, like a fighter who is skilled in botany. The way that the proficiency system works along with skill feats gives you plenty of choices when it comes to skills, allowing you to make the character you want to make... Beyond skills, every class now has its own list of feats to choose from, making them all pretty different from one another and allowing for a lot of flexibility in how you play. And just wait until you see what Archetypes can do..."

Hit Points & Healing

"Here's what my playtest groups have seen in terms of healers (I've run a lot of playtests at this point; we try to meet once a week if we can for a year and a half):

So, we have gone round and round on these rules throughout the design phase. At one point in time we had three competing systems, all trying to reach for the same goals.1. Make falling unconscious a point of focus in the narrative of the combat. When someone goes down, everyone should stop and take notice. If the other players just shrug and stop worrying about you because you have 8 rounds to live, that is not great for game play.2. Add an element of randomness to the dying process. It should not be something that is easily predictable (as this violates point 1). 3. Make the condition of the character obvious to the player, so that they know how much peril they are in, even if they cannot predict how that will turn out.4. Prevent character's from "yo-yo-ing" between conscious and unconscious by giving a system that allows them to possibly return with a handful of hit points.Taking these into account, we ended up with the system that is currently in the game. Once you get a chance to use it, I think you will find that it is really no more complicated that being poisoned or afflicted with almost any other condition in the game.

So, we have gone round and round on these rules throughout the design phase. At one point in time we had three competing systems, all trying to reach for the same goals.1. Make falling unconscious a point of focus in the narrative of the combat. When someone goes down, everyone should stop and take notice. If the other players just shrug and stop worrying about you because you have 8 rounds to live, that is not great for game play.2. Add an element of randomness to the dying process. It should not be something that is easily predictable (as this violates point 1). 3. Make the condition of the character obvious to the player, so that they know how much peril they are in, even if they cannot predict how that will turn out.4. Prevent character's from "yo-yo-ing" between conscious and unconscious by giving a system that allows them to possibly return with a handful of hit points.Taking these into account, we ended up with the system that is currently in the game. Once you get a chance to use it, I think you will find that it is really no more complicated that being poisoned or afflicted with almost any other condition in the game. ​

"...assuming that nothing is attacking or damaging you after you already dropped and also assuming that someone in your party provides stabilize or some healing as part of their next turn, you actually can't die, even from the dreaded critical hit -> critical failure on Fortitude save. Now those caveats above don't always happen, so we have had characters die, but it's not super common."

"I want to point out one subtle point here that really changes the dynamic. In PF1 if you were at death's door, (16 Con fighter at -15) and you got healed to 5 hp by a spell, you would indeed get right back up and be in danger of going down again with almost any hit. In PF2 that same healing effect would put you up to 20 (because we don't do negatives). Once you made the save to get up, you would stand a much better chance of staying up for at least a hit or two, giving you the time needed to get some more healing if needed. We want you to feel the pressure of being so close to death that it alters your actions and the actions of the other characters around you. When an ally is critically hurt, we want the narrative to respond."

"I mean you can try to do it based on damage, but that scaling doesn't really work and takes a lot of math to be close to working. Even assuming you found a good multiplier on damage taken such that the dying save was something you had a chance to both recover or die more (beyond a natural 20 or 1 of course); let's pretend that was a DC 10 + 2/3 of the damage you took or something like that, you're still going to be in an impossible situation on any critical hit because it's going to double the damage. Let's see that in action: Suppose I have +20 to Fortitude saves and got hit for 30 damage. OK, that's a DC 30 (10 + 2/3 of 30) in this hypothetical system, and it looks great. These are even numbers you might roughly see in the game if the stars align. But if the same attack is a crit for 60? Now the DC is 50 (10 + 2/3 of 60), and I need a Natural 20 to succeed (it isn't even close; a Natural 20 is 10 below the DC!) You can try to get around this by making the DC based on the base damage before the crit, but then that defeats the purpose of using damage to determine the DC and you're moving towards having it based on the monster's stats anyways."

"I think due to the lack of context from the GAMA game, there's some misunderstandings here. There's not a game term designation of "boss" or "mook" that changes anything about a creature. Rather, a powerful hard-hitting creature that's significantly higher level than you (aka, a boss unless your GM is particularly cruel) is going to make it harder to recover from dying than getting hit by a weakling. If a weakling with tepid attack hits you for 3 damage with a shuriken, it doesn't matter if the GM calls it a "boss," it's still going to be easier to recover than from a powerful creature. It's not a narrativist mechanic like a death card where the GM just decides to make it harder to recover; it's mathematical. Now it does end up having a beneficial side effect that you're much more likely to die to a boss fight than an easy random encounter with weak enemies, but that's not due to handwavium."

"Weirdly, we were just talking to editor James (not to be confused with Creative Director James) about an ability that does that without spells."

"Condition called sick [x]. "Take -[x] on all checks and DC's, cannot willing ingest potions or anything else. Can spend action to attempt to recover to reduce by 1, or 2 on a critical success". Party could not try to recover until they exited the effect."

Conditions now have a number which designates the degree - nauseated 1, for example, means you are nauseated and take -1 to whatever checks the nauseated condition specifies. Nauseated 2 is worse and gives you -2 on those checks. Seemed pretty clever!

"It is on our radar. We're already considering some changes to monsters based on our playtests. (They're kind of the last thing scheduled to get done since the document doesn't need to be printed.) We'll also be closely monitoring people's satisfaction with combat speed and complexity during the playtest."

"In general it will help you perform awesome feats and avoid rocket tag situations where the bad guys one-shot you with regular attacks (especially if your character couldn't afford to pump Con). I still strongly recommend raising your Con, but the less you do, the more this is going to help you survive and flourish (for instance, at 10 Con, it basically does double your HP, but the higher you go, the less of a percentage more this gives you). Ask anyone about the stats for Reiko, the iconic ninja, and the first thing you usually hear is "I wish she didn't have 10 Con." The way the math worked, those first few points in Con had an outsizedly big impact (raising your HP by nearly ~30% for going from 10 up to 12 on a low HD class). And it was sort of a secret hidden feature that many newbies learned at the end of a killing blow before making their second character (before someone mentions, yes, in PF1 you can focus on various defenses heavily enough to try to avoid taking HP damage in the first place and survive just fine on 10 Con, but you have to be experienced enough to get that up and running)."

"...let's consider a level 11 wizard with 18 Constitution. In PF1, that wizard would have 6 at level 1 + 35 from 10d6 on average (assuming you didn't give half rounded up) + 40 from Con to make 81 HP on average (86 for half rounded up). In PF2, you also get some at level 1 from ancestry, let's say 8 for this example, so you'd have 6 per level (66) + 8 ancestry + 40 from Con 114 HP on average. Double would have been 162 (or 172 if you use half rounded up)."

Ancestry

"We've mentioned ability boosts and flaws a few times now, so let's go into more detail about how those work! At 1st level, your ability scores all start at 10. Your ancestry then gives you ability boosts, each of which increases the score by 2. Most ancestries get three ability boosts, two of which have to go into specific scores. The remaining free ability boost can go into any score except the two set ones. Most ancestries also get a flaw, which decreases a designated score by 2. You can put your free ability boost in the same score as your flaw if you want to get back to 10."

"It's one of ways you get to really customize your ancestry to fit your character concept, melding the story and life of your character to the mechanics. Plus you can play the class you want without worrying about as much of an uphill battle with ability scores if you don't match the bonuses from the race with the class you had it mind. Incidentally, it provides a really nice design space to much more easily create and handle subraces that have different ability modifiers..."

"Concerning goblins and how they fit in Golarion: Times change and so do people's opinions. Goblins as PCs have been a part of our world since the first "We Be Goblins" adventure. Many of the comments here echo those from back during the launch of 3.0 when Half-Orcs returned to the game as a player choice. There was a lot of conflict at first, but the tone of them shifted over time. We always knew this would be a bit controversial and that there were some who would loudly proclaim "not at my table" and I get that. It's your table and your game after all. We are moving forward, trying to allow players to explore these characters, their culture, and their viewpoint. We are hoping to give you plenty of reasons, both mechanically and story-driven, to allow goblins in your game."

"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."

"One answer to your second question (and a little bit to your first) is that there's only so much room in the Core Rulebook.

"...tengu will not be too far behind, but we're keeping the core of our game similar in terms of classes and races, partly because people would literally murder us if we did otherwise."

Classes

"A PF1 level 20 wizard who chooses to attack those threats with just a normal dagger is probably in for a boring and lengthy combat, but the wizard is strongly expected to win, just because those opponents only hit the wizard on a natural 20 and the wizard has more than enough HP to soak a few unlucky 20s. In PF2, a level 20 wizard low-Strength wizard using a non-magic dagger against a low-level fighter might have an additional problem to contend with: The fighter's shield. If the fighter makes two attacks and then moves back, the wizard moves up and makes two attacks, one of which the fighter can entirely block. Now, the fighter still needs a 20, just like in PF1, so the wizard will eventually win on the 2nd attacks. But if the fighter attacks once and moves back twice (assuming this wizard doesn't have enhanced mobility options because this is a weird example where the wizard is just not using magic for some reason), the wizard is in trouble."

"during the first round of combat, the rogue treats any creature that has not taken its turn yet as if it were flat-footed."

"You can make a character with lots of smaller but fairly accurate attacks (agile based), or a character with fewer enormous attacks (Power Attack), or something in between. I really like my agile build especially whenever I can get some haste, but I mostly just think it's cool that we can finally have something different but also cool for the lighter weapons to do that works out to good damage in a different way than the heavy ones do."

"That hasn't been revealed yet. It will definitely be more than 2 trained skills at 1st level for pretty much any fighter you build, potentially quite a few more, and we have fewer overall skills (with Athletics covering Climb, Swim, Jumping, combat maneuvers, and more, for example) so that's worth even more than it seems."

"This particular aerial combo [jump up and smash flying oppo to the ground] is an ability available exclusively to fighters, and it is available in the level range of master (pre-legendary), but that doesn't mean you can have the whole thing going at a particular level. You'll at least get some anti-aerial options around the time the wizard is first able to fly."

"We had a crazy chase/fight up a spiral staircase in my Shattered Star playtest game where the Sudden Charging fighter was chasing a rat-form wererat, kicking off the walls and over her ratty-form to block her off while the wererat would squeeze through the fighter and continue upward (the rat was faster but was slowed down by not always succeeding to squeeze through the fighter). They eventually dropped her low enough to cry mercy just at the top of the stairs. The fighter mentioned that it was one of the craziest and coolest action scenes he had seen in a long time, and I was thinking it seems like the kind of fight scene they would choreograph in a kung fu movie."

"It occurs to me that I forgot to include a mention of Reactive Shield in this blog, which is a bit of an oversight. The preview version we ran all weekend had this ability, which allows you to spend your reaction to raise your shield. You can't block with it if you use this ability (since you've already spent your reaction), unless you get the extra reaction to block. I may try and get an edit in there to add a note about this."

"He does still have armor proficiency, and it does improve a bit for him, but for the fighter, we decided that weapons were his prime focus. This leaves a focus on armor for another class..."

"As I mentioned in another thread, there is a PC ability somewhere to strike back at an enemy as a reaction if they critically fail to attack you. Sounds kind of like a riposte, eh?"

"There are several class-specific options that could help with each of these (except underwater is covered well enough by skill feats that the fighter doesn't really focus class feats on the matter)."

"One of my favorite moments of the playtest in that regard was when Starfinder Developer Jason, Keeley, Software Test Engineer Erik Keith, and I all built 9th-10th level fighters who used sword and board and wanted to deal damage, but we all built in different ways. Erik built a character who used abilities like Power Attack to get in one big hit. I built a character who used agile weapons to get in a series of hits with a more favorable multiple attack penalty. Jason Keeley built a TWF sword and shield using Double Slice. And they all worked and played differently (my build was pretty powerful against some enemies but just didn't work like theirs did against high resistance foes)."

"As mentioned in I think one of the interviews, you should expect prerequisites to be based on things that your ability actually builds off, not other unrelated feats. So you wouldn't have a giant chain like that to take Whirlwind Attack."

"First we tried an accuracy penalty, and that didn't work. Then we tried the extra action for a flat add on damage (I believe it was something like +4 that eventually doubled to +8), but that just meant that tiny little daggers got the most out of Power Attack, which didn't fit the fantasy of Power Attack. Then we moved to the extra die (doubling to two dice), and suddenly it all worked out!"

"PF1 Power Attack is worse in all but extreme edge cases where you can barely hit at all or where you hit by a mile... If you run those numbers, you will find that PF1-style -1/+3 Power Attack nets you roughly 1 expected damage over an entire round compared to not even doing anything special, and PF2-style Power Attack dramatically increases your damage."

"It's quite powerful, but it does use more actions, so your +1 greataxe character might be moving in and swinging once for a mighty 3d12+bonuses while my build might be several quick attacks for 3d6+bonuses that work out to more potential damage if I get very lucky and a little less vulnerable to bad luck. They wind up feeling more different too. Basically, it helps build different niches that make the various weapon styles wind up feeling a lot more different to use for me, whereas in PF1 I enjoyed different weapon styles, but ultimately they came down to a similar routine of full attacking whenever I could."

"Power Attack gives you one (and actually, eventually two without taking another feat to improve it!) extra damage die and does not penalize you on accuracy; and you don't want a penalty on accuracy. For a d12 two-handed weapon that might have gotten +3 damage (+3 more every 4 BAB) in PF1, that's 6.5 damage on average, going up to 13. It wasn't until BAB 16 that you would do more damage than that in PF1, and that was at a cost of -5 accuracy."

"Fighters' proficiency in weapons is earlier than most characters gain mastery in anything else. Fighters are just that awesome, and it also allows other martial classes to gain expertise while the fighter is ahead."

Skills & Proficiencies

Skills -- a critical skill check is one which beats the DC by 10; a fumble is one which misses by 10. A fumble might give you a condition, such as Hampered (-5' speed). (Glass Cannon Podcast, as are all the below items). This critical mechanism (+/-10) applies to attacks too.

Skills are untrained, trained, or expert. Acrobatics & Athletics both skills.

Medicine skill can treat dying/close to death creatures. Higher level can unlock actual healing.

Society replaces Knowledge (Local) and Knowledge (Nobility). " This skill covers knowledge about towns, people, their customs, and their history."

"Seek" (an action), could use Perception or Arcana skill.

Perception is no longer a skill.

Most of the maneuvers—grabbing, disarming, tumbling, and tripping—are now associated with the Acrobatics or Athletics skills.

The Survival skill can be used to navigate in the wild, make a shelter, and find food. In this case, instead of making shelter, the skill was used to simply find a good, defensible place to camp.

"Skills are consolidated somewhat (Spellcraft and Knowledge Arcana seem to be a single skill now, for example)" (source)

(source) From a play tester -- "Skills were indeed condensed, and I did not see a spellcraft skill. There was a lore (arcana) that Eaten had, but he also had a skill called occultism (or something like that; not a lore). When I asked about the relationship between these two skills, Jason was kind of elusive. I personally hope that occultism, spellcraft, and lore (arcana) all get condensed I to a single spell. Valeros had lore (warfare) and lore (farming) among several other skills."

"Thievery is a skill, a fumble caused the characters lock pick kit to be "dented",which gives an unspecified penalty." (source)

(source) "Occultism is a skill, having to due with "strange runes or symbols" (source)

(source) Knowledge (Religion) is still its own skill (not sure if that had been confirmed yet). (source)

It appears that knowledge skills are now called lore instead. (source)

Lore skills can be done untrained, it is up to the GM to decide if someone with out training would know a specific piece of lore/knowledge with no training. (source)

Nature skills feats -- allow you to heal people, or train an animal.

Seifter describes Intimidation in his latest playtest game -- "Oh man, I just got home from my PF2 playtest game. In our third fight, Luis's fighter Randyll, a master of Intimidation, intimidated a pukwudgie with his battle cry, two-hand smacked the pukwudgie then shifted his bastard sword so he could smack and grab the thing (eating the spine damage and critically succeeding against the poison), and on his next turn, he grabbed it by the neck and started shaking it and critically succeeded on his Intimidation check, thus ending the fight with his social skills, as the pukwudgie ordered its undead to back off and let the party explore unimpeded. Luis also had an ability such that the pukwudgie will never inform his dullahan boss because he's too terrified of Randyll."

If monsters roll against players, they PCs have their own Difficulty Class (DC) now. Using Acrobatics to move through an enemy space is vs. their reflex DC. "That Acrobatics use isn't trained only." (Seifter)

Knowledge checks take an action.

To get a bonus, spend more actions on a skill check.

Unlocks. Skills have "unlocks" at higher levels. Medicine skill unlock allows you to heal HP.

Skills -- on Perception no longer being a skill -- "It's everyone's "favorite" (at the very least most powerful) skill. That's a big part of why we give it to you for free (the other part is that it interacts with the game world a bit unlike any other skill). That way you can spend all your skill rank increases on other things that are more of a choice." Your class gives you an initial proficiency in Perception and might possibly increase it over time.

Seifter indicates that -1 is not necessarily the penalty for using an untrained skill -- "Stat - 1 is certainly what the total bonus worked out to for the playtest podcast, with those characters. That doesn't mean it's always true."

Skill degrees of success -- Seifter was asked if there was more than just pass/fail. He replied "My crystal ball says you are going to be very happy!"

Auto-success at mundane tasks -- "There is a skill feat that, depending on your current rank, lets you just succeed at tasks with your skill when they are below a certain threshold without even rolling. This is particularly useful if you are under stress, debuffed, or in bad circumstances, as you can just succeed at those tasks despite your penalties. It's not an especially giant threshold; it's mainly to help you auto-succeed at tasks that have become mundane for you by now, like you said."

You don't have to max any skill you want to be useful -- "This is one of several nice benefits. You can put in as much as you want and get something useful if what you want to put in is "not much" or something awesome if what you want is "all in." For instance, in one of our 14th level playtest games, my alchemist was trained in Thievery because it was really easy for him to do with all that Intelligence, and that let me pick locks and disable some types of traps if necessary. The rogue was still way better than I was, but I was a competent if not stellar replacement when we were forced to split up our efforts in different areas and wasn't just useless like someone with 1 rank would be at 14th level in PF1."

On playing weaker characters -- "We're also increasing the accessibility to play, for instance, deaf characters. But as with Starfinder, this is a choice you (and possibly your group/GM) make for RP reasons."

Logan Bonner in response to a post about replacing feats like skill focus with skill unlocks -- "You're in luck!"

On skill stagnation -- "If you want to mimic the idea that your skill you raised at 2nd level and never used again stagnates with disuse, we have the tools for that too! Using the retraining rules, you can not only return yourself to untrained to represent that stagnation, you'll even get to pick a new skill that you actually want to keep up to date too!"

Number of skill ranks -- Total possible skill ranks -- "I believe that a character who was hellbent on increasing their skills as many times as possible and sunk all possible resources into it could increase their skills a hypothetical ~50 times (aside from the fact that you might run out of useful skills to raise with some of the options before then, so more realistically more like 40 times). That is a lot of times." (Seifter)

(Seifter) On getting fewer skill ranks than PF1 -- "That's true; a PF1 rogue with the hypothetical 10 skill ranks per level gets 200 ranks over 20 levels, but each of those individual ranks is going to be far less meaningful to your character in terms of maxing out your skill and gaining special benefits than each rank is in PF2 (stay tuned for Friday's blog)." (Seifter)

(Seifter) On skill spreads of +/-20 between characters -- "...it seems like people are thinking that the system is so tightly designed that you can never get into such a skill spread. In fact, by level 20, it's possible for two characters designed to diverge dramatically to have a difference of somewhere around 17, before accounting for buff effects or circumstantial benefits like "+2 circumstance bonus to Intimidate giants," so you definitely can get into that 20 spread situation and we're not limiting the math in a way that everyone has to be close. But in that case, not only is the character that's ahead a paragon of that skill, the character who's behind is being really inattentive to that skill. By comparison, in PF1, it was pretty easy to have a +20 advantage, or even more, against your fellow PC who was actively trying to be good at that skill, maxing their ranks, etc." (Seifter)

(Seifter) How many skill ranks will a level 20 rogue have? "Oh, you can get 40-50 increases on the right rogue hellbent on getting skill rank increases instead of other skill options, not counting your starting trained skill picks. The range represents how increasingly unlikely you would be to put that many resources into it for diminishing returns on the sorts of skills you can pick. A more realistic rogue will be in the 30s at level 20 counting starting trained skill picks." (Seifter)

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 untrained 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)."

Proficiencies -- single unified proficiency system replaces saving throws, attack bonuses, skills. Skill proficiencies are not like in 5E. "Not at all. You get to pick how you gain the levels of proficiency with your skills. It's your choice." - Jason Bulmahn The new Paizo blog (by Mark Seifter) takes a dive into the proficiency rules found in Pathfinder 2nd Edition! You start with a number of proficiencies decided by your class, and increase them based on class and feat choices. Your proficiency modifier to a weapon, skill, or save, is your level plus a bonus based on your proficiency rank. Proficiency comes in five ranks, with a 5-point difference between the top and bottom: Untrained (-2) Trained (+0) Expert (+1) Master (+2) Legendary (+3)

Seifter compares Pathfinder 1, D&D 5E, and Pathfinder 2 -- "OK, I think I see where you're drawing the parallels here, but I feel like by that metric, you could also claim that D&D 3.0/3.5, PF1, and D&D 4e are in the same boat, even D&D 2e and earlier to an extent even though some of the THAC0 math is backwards. Ultimately, many game systems with ability scores and levels have some sort of scaled level-based component and some ability-score based component as parts of their math. The question is, how do those apply and scale, and how do other components factor in. And in those regards, all the systems mentioned differ from each other." "Each of the different systems works a little bit differently, sure. But to take your attack bonus examples, looking at the level-based component only. On one side we have PF1's BAB, where say a cleric goes from +0 to +15 for the level based-component and a fighter goes from +1 to +20. On the other side, we have 5e, where maybe the cleric stays put at +0 and the fighter goes from +1 to +6. If the new game comes in with the cleric going from something like +1 to +20 and the fighter going from something like +2 to +23, that seems an awful lot closer to PF1, were we to try to draw parallels. They're all different though!"

Mark Seifter on proficiencies -- Other modifiers to your check -- "...proficiency modifier is only one modifier you apply to your check. Ability modifier, anything you get from your item, bonuses from your spells, circumstance bonuses, etc are still going to add on." On the difference between being trained and having a high level-based modifier -- "Your tomb raider actually wouldn't be able to practically sail at all, though you might know basic facts like the names of different ships that you read about somewhere. An actual sailor trained in the skill would be able to practice sailing. Now if your tomb raider became trained in it, that's a different story." Again on that difference -- "Disabling traps, performing the profession of a lawyer, and constructing and building a complex building would all be trained uses of the skill, so the untrained barbarian can't do any of those. The level 15 barbarian who actually trained at being a lawyer throughout those 15 levels (reminds me of the monk/rogue lawyer PC in one of my 3.5 games) would have a higher bonus than a 5th-level NPC expert lawyer would have (probably 4 or 5 higher assuming the lawyer had better Intelligence), though the expert lawyer might have some skill feats (to make some up off the top of my head, perhaps a skill feat to help read potential jurors and select a more sympathetic jury, to coax extra info out of a witness, etc). Then again, at that point the barbarian decided that being a lawyer is a significant enough part of her superhuman 15th level character that she spent resources to make it so." .... "The untrained barbarian is more likely to know that Justice Ironbriar is the harshest judge in Magnimar than the law school student, but she still can't actually practice law effectively at all, let alone superhumanly well." ... "This is really hard overall because there is a separate skills blog, so I'm trying to keep this as tied to proficiency as possible. However, essentially, the skill you'd use to be a lawyer, working like Profession did in PF1, has a list of uses, and practicing law (Practice a Trade) would be listed in the trained only uses." And again on that difference -- "As I've said in another thread, not counting any sort of temporary buff effects or circumstance bonuses or penalties, it is possible to build two level 20 characters in PF2 with an all-day gap between their bonuses in the same skill of around 17-18. Proficiency is one piece of that split, with a potential gap up to 5 (and 5 is a really big advantage; all other modifiers being equal, which is almost certainly an overestimate of the untrained character, and rolling the same number on a d20, half of the untrained character's successes are critical successes for the legendary character, and half of the untrained character's failures are successes for the legendary character)." And yet again on that difference -- "I have no doubt that Cosmo's goblin bard in one of our 17th-level playtest games had almost as high of an Acrobatics bonus as my Strength-based monk in the 12th-level playtest did; maybe even equal or a point higher. But the bard was not able to use Acrobatics to balance in mid-air in order to navigate reverse gravity and deal with flying enemies with ease." And again! -- "The level 20 near-demigod character who is trained in baking can make all the kinds of baked goods you'd expect in a basic cookbook, with what is probably a higher bonus than the level 10 master after spending 100 years baking cookies, cupcakes, brownies, and more in her timeless demiplane. But the level 10 master might be able to invent a brand new food that nobody else has ever heard of before, something the level 20 character just doesn't have enough of a frame of reference to do, even if she's exceptional at following the basic recipes she knows." And... again ... "This is another good example. The 8th level swim-focused master in Athletics might just flat-out have a swim Speed, for instance, and not even be rolling while moving let's say 30 feet per action, while the 20th level untrained Athletics character does have a really high bonus to Athletics, so will usually critically succeed at the DC to Swim in running water and move, say, 15 feet (using the PF1 success by 5 or more on Swim checks to go half speed here as an example for a critical success)." Same difference for a level 7 character -- "I happen to have some numbers handy for level 7, so let's see: It's looking like a skill gap up to about 11 at that point." Comparing that to D&D 5E -- "I've heard the 5e gap is smaller from other forum posters and took their word for it, but my knowledge of 5e isn't very thorough, so I'll take your word for it as well. It's certainly been a better feel for me so far to be able to have a wide spread like that but only between a character who's exceptionally bad at the skill and one who is amazing than it is to have a situation where two people sit down at the table and both think they are playing a specialist in a given skill, but one of the two of them is +20 or more better than the other is so the other one is actually vestigial, which can happen easily in PF1 (it's happened to me a lot; I'm usually the one with the PC who is better, and it's very awkward as a player and I'm sure frustrating to the other player)." On how the system opens up more options for players -- "Broad competence is also a hallmark of many fantasy stories (and actually many stories in a lot of genres). At some point, all the PCs are going to want to try to do something together involving untrained skill uses, like disguising as actors to infiltrate the Lord Mayor's mansion and its sharp-eyed guards who are certain to be on the lookout for charlatans. In PF1, you had a few choices: you could just never try to do that, you could try it straight out and pretty much fail automatically because Amiri has no ranks in Disguise, you could maybe find some spellcaster-only option that granted an enormous bonus that essentially erased the other characters' investments anyway so it's fine that Amiri didn't invest, or you could have the GM decide not to use the skill system because the idea was so cool and to handwave that Amiri doesn't have to make a Disguise check. In PF2, it's still going to be dicey and the group might want to come up with some ways to help Amiri (like thflame's idea of shifting the best gear onto her to help out) because she's still the most likely to land them all in hot water from a critical failure, but the plan also might succeed." Could there be ranks above Legendary? -- "This is similar to one of the "where would mythic go" (and also "what about reskinning for superpowered stuff at low levels like in mythic") conversations we had a while back. In theory, mythic could be a new rank above legendary that gives +4 and unlocks better benefits for all the rank-based abilities, plus even more ridiculously awesome new mythic-only abilities, and then if you wanted low level mythic (or legendary) play, you just do as you say and give some mythic (or legendary) ranks way earlier than normal. It's much easier to make this change than it would be in PF1. So many exciting possibilities for tweaks and modifications and further customization for players and GMs with some of the new rules; I'm pretty excited about how cool of a book we can make with those kinds of topics!"

--