One thing that greatly irritates me about Pathfinder is the plethora of conditional modifiers. There are usually very good game-world reasons for those modifiers, but the more of them there are, the harder it gets to keep track of everything.
I just noticed one of them in the latest blog entry on PF2, Secrets of Alchemy.
Now, thematically this is a fantastic item. It’s very evocative, and you can understand why the modifiers work the way they do.
BRAVO’S BREW
This flask of foaming beer grants courage. For the next hour after drinking this elixir, you gain a +1 item bonus to Will saves, and a +3 item bonus to Will saves against fear.
Awesome huh? You get braver, and slightly more resistant to anything that depends on your Willpower. The complexity comes from keeping track of all the modifiers – and I prefer to be playing without computer aid.
One of the great innovations of D&D 3E was to have named modifiers – bonuses or penalties. You could have enhancement modifiers, item modifiers, morale modifiers, and many more. The idea was that in AD&D, it was hard to work out which items worked together. Occasionally you’d get both bonuses, but other times you’d only use one. The naming of the modifiers fixed that. If you gained a +1 morale modifier to attack rolls and a +2 morale modifier to attack roles, because both had the same name, you’d only use the higher one. Conversely, a +1 enhancement modifier and a +2 morale modifier would stack, giving you a +3 bonus.
The trouble with this system came from too many modifier types. Designers would invent their own, allowing modifiers to stack to create large numbers. The general idea of D&D 5E is to eliminate modifiers; the advantage/disadvantage system mostly replaces it. In 3E, with no such limitation, there was a huge gap between target numbers and skill bonuses, and it was very, very hard to predict where the numbers would fall. DC 40? For one group of optimised characters, they’d need to roll a 2 on the d20 to pass it. Another group, who hadn’t optimised that way, couldn’t pass it at all.
If I were designing a system that had named modifiers these days, I’d list each thing that could be modified, and make sure the same number of modifiers could be applied to each one. That way, parity. And you’d have to check that the modifiers balanced out in how rare they were to find…
Of course, once you’ve limited the number of modifiers, you also limit the number of feats, magic items and spells that can reference them in interesting ways. If two feats give a +2 morale bonus to attack, then there needs to be something else to distinguish them, as they don’t work together. Unfortunately, then smart designers start giving you conditional modifiers. “Yes, it’s a +1 item bonus, but it’s a +3 item bonus if this condition is met!”
This can get quite complex. Consider the following feat from the current Pathfinder game, found in Ultimate Combat:
NIGHTMARE FIST
While fighting within an area of magical darkness, you gain a +2 bonus on damage rolls with unarmed strikes, or a +4 bonus against opponents that are shaken, frightened or panicked. You also gain a +2 morale bonus on Acrobatics and Intimidate checks.
The prerequisite for that feat requires that the character is able create magical darkness, so at least it’s not a feat that only works when the DM is kind to you. Handling one feat of this type is fine, but once you have a few, it gets tricky to keep them all in mind!
This gets worse when the feat is applied to a NPC or monster. Players, at least, get to use these conditional modifiers all the time. The DM rarely has the learn the stats of a monster well, as they have so many to deal with. Does anyone know how monsters will be built in PF2?
Feats that modify non-core attributes can be hard to notice. I’m sure that, with PF2, the alchemist will be very aware of Calculated Bomber (increase splash damage to their Intelligence modifier). And all the other feats they have. There are meant to be EVEN MORE FEATS in PF2, split into General and Class. It’s one of the things that interests people about Pathfinder: they get to customise their characters. I like customisation, but not when it creates unbalanced characters or ones that are difficult to run. Let’s see what happens here!