Aetrimonde

Today, I’m going to go over how characters–and the enemies they face–scale with level. This is tied into one of Aetrimonde’s core design principles, Solid Level Scaling, so I want to get it right, and that means putting some thought into the math.

Player Character Scaling

Let’s start by going over how PCs scale with level. This scaling is split into three parts: some aspects of a character, like defenses, scale automatically as the character’s expertise bonus increases with level. Other aspects, like attacks, do not automatically scale, but a character can improve them by taking feats that allow them to add expertise or otherwise gain a bonus. And finally, a character can gain additional, non-scaling bonuses from magical equipment.

Built-In Scaling

From level 0 to level 20, an Aetrimonde PC’s expertise bonus will increase from +2 to +6. By default, this increase translates into an additional:

• +2 to all defenses (half expertise bonus).
• +4 to trained skills and any check they have a perk related to (full expertise bonus)
• +8 to hit points (double expertise bonus).
• +2 to large heals (half expertise bonus).

Feat Scaling

Characters can choose to apply their expertise bonus to certain additional aspects by taking feats. Various feats can allow a character to add:

• Half expertise to certain attack rolls (attacks using specific kinds of weapons, or magical attacks with specific keywords).
• Half expertise to armor resistance.
• Full expertise to certain damage rolls (in the same manner as attack rolls).

Because characters do not already add expertise to any of these things, these feats provide a small boost at low levels, which can be valuable in its own right, and that boost gets larger at higher levels. For example, Weapon Aim would grant a +1 bonus to attack rolls using certain weapons at low levels, increasing to +2 at level 10 and +3 at level 20.

Other feats provide a smaller, constant bonus to aspects of a character that already benefit from expertise:

• +1 to AC.
• +1 to Brawn and Poise.
• +1 to Wit and Composure.
• +2 to trained skills (one skill per feat).
• +4 to hit points and +1 to large heals.

Item Scaling

Aetrimonde’s magical items are a topic for another post, but for now, suffice to say that magical items can provide a character with additional bonuses equivalent to the constant bonus from feats discussed above. This works out to:

• +1 to AC.
• +1 to Brawn and Poise.
• +1 to Wit and Composure.
• +2 to trained skills (one skill per item)
• +4 to hit points and +1 to large heals.
• +1 to certain attack rolls.
• +2 to certain damage rolls.
• +1 to armor resistance.

Total Possible Scaling

The greatest possible numeric advancement a character can get from level 0 to level 20 therefore works out to:

• +4 to all defenses.
• +4 to all trained skills.
  • An additional +4 to specific trained skills.
• +16 to hit points.
• +4 to large heals.
• +4 to certain attack rolls.
• +8 to certain damage rolls.
• +4 to armor resistance.

To max all of this out (assuming a character specializes in only one kind of attack, and not counting skills, where scaling is purposefully less stringent) would require 7 feats and 7 enchantments applied to magical items. 7 feats are certainly affordable for most characters, since they would have 21 feats by level 20: this leaves 14 feats to customize a character in other ways. 7 enchantments are even more affordable: the magical items that a PC would acquire by level 20 naturally varies depending on the campaign (and how the character spends their money), but the guidelines in the Game Master’s Handbook would allow a character to amass magical items with around 20 enchantments in total.

Notes on Skill Scaling

Skills are a little different than other aspects of character scaling, because I don’t necessarily want skill difficulties to increase at the same rate that characters’ skill bonuses do.

To be more specific, I want the difficulty of a given task, like climbing a rocky cliff, to remain constant so that characters become more likely to succeed as they gain levels. At the same time, I also want characters to be able to tackle more “epic” tasks, like climbing a smooth wall of glass, as they approach level 20. I’ve previously discussed the calibration of skills and difficulties, and I think that this is already in a good place.

Which is to say, I’m not going to assume that characters fully max out their skills by taking feats and acquiring magical items. Getting +4 to all their trained skills by level 20 is, I think, enough of a difference to make characters feel more skilled all by itself. The option of getting an additional +4 from feats and magic items exists partly for the sake of completeness and symmetry with other scaling factors, and partly for players who really want to max out certain of their characters’ skills.

Enemy Scaling

With this in mind, I’m going to balance enemy scaling around the idea that a character will, between level 0 and level 20, max out their numeric advancement in every aspect that matters to them. Support characters that specialize in aiding allies and making few attacks themselves may not see a need to max out their attack and damage scaling, while characters that do not have access to good armor resistance to begin with (like a wizard) might not see the point to maxing it out. But I will assume that a character gets the maximum possible scaling by level 20.

As I’ve discussed already in my Bestiary posts, enemies are grouped into tiers corresponding to levels where the PCs’ expertise bonus increases. Each tier encompasses 5 levels, so at level 0, Tier 0 enemies are an appropriate challenge, while at level 20, Tier 4 enemies are an appropriate challenge.

If you’ve been attentive, you may have noticed that all of the maximum scaling bonuses are divisible by 4. This is not a coincidence! The way that I’m going to handle scaling is that, for each tier, enemies gain:

• +1 to all defenses.
• +1 to all trained skills.
• +4 to hit points.
• +1 to large heals
• +1 to all attack rolls.
• +2 to all damage rolls.
• +1 to armor resistance.

What does this mean in practice?

On average, a PC will improve at the same rate as the enemies they face. Over 20 levels, PCs and their enemies will improve by the same amounts (with some exceptions like attacks that a PC has not chosen to fully specialize in, which will become significantly less accurate against high-level foes).

But, a PC probably won’t improve at exactly the same rate in every aspect. At various levels between 0 and 20, a PC can expect to be ahead of the curve in some aspects and behind in others. For example, a character who takes Weapon Aim and acquires a magical weapon giving them a bonus to attack rolls using it will have a total of +2 to attack rolls (relative to their baseline) by level 5, while level-appropriate enemies will only have gained +1 to defenses. However, if this character hasn’t taken any feats or gotten any items to increase their defenses by level 5, the appropriate enemies will have +1 to attack rolls while they still only have +0 to defenses.

In these middling levels (from levels 5 to 15, roughly) part of the challenge of the game, and the tradeoffs in character-building, will come from the fact that individual characters, and possibly the entire party, have bad match-ups against certain enemies.

At lower levels, characters will tend to be quite good at one or two things that they have invested in, relative to the difficulty posed by a typical enemy, but a little subpar in other areas. A low-level character specialized in making their attacks very accurate will do poorly against a Brute enemy, since Brutes tend to be easy to hit anyways, and deal lots of damage that the PC can’t deal with.

At higher levels, characters will have the resources needed to be a little above par in most areas, but might have one or two glaring weaknesses where they haven’t invested enough to fully keep up with their enemies. A high-level character who has invested in every aspect of their character except their Wit and Composure defenses will suffer dramatically when faced with illusionists and mind-controllers.

Up Next

This is where I’m going to leave level scaling for now, but I’ll be following up with a second part looking at some of the math involved here in more detail, to try and see just how much more difficult an enemy becomes when they get adjusted up or down by one tier. Stay tuned!