this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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To me it feels meaningful in a way that the ludicrous numbers never did in previous versions. The expanded crit system makes degrees of success matter, and they do a great job of making you feel heroic; especially when you go back and fight underleveled enemies and crit on every attack. (Or, alternatively, when you roll a natural 20 and it just upgrades your crit fail to a regular fail. That's when you know it's time to run.)
How often do pathfinder games do the thing like "The soldiers in the first area attack at +4, but these basically identical soldiers two plot beats later attack at +12, because you're higher level and I want the math to be challenging"? Because I've always disliked that in games. That's more of a video game trope, but I've seen it leak into tabletop games before. I liked the idea of bounded accuracy, and how a goblin is always a goblin. You don't need to make mega-goblins to fight the higher level party, because even the little ones can still hit and wear you down.
Either you send mega-goblins, or you send MORE goblins.
A lower level party might fight 3 goblins fair and square, so 4 levels later they confront 6 goblins and 2 lieutenants.
The idea that the same enemy stays a challenge despite the level increase is actually what I despise in D&D. 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
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
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.
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.