[3.5/Pathfinder] Numbers by Level

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violence in the media
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[3.5/Pathfinder] Numbers by Level

Post by violence in the media »

Is there a resource or table anywhere that lists what values PC need or "should" have in various statistics, broken down by level? Like, what should your overall attack bonus be at level 5? What should your touch AC look like at level 9? What should your saves be at level 12? That sort of thing.

I'm not looking for something that answers this with "as high as possible" or "your numbers here can max out at X" but rather a par type score that would indicate whether you're punching above or below level expectations.

Does a similar table exist for monsters and creatures by CR?
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virgil
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Post by virgil »

For Pathfinder, they 'technically' follow a guideline for monsters...

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/mons ... ation.html

The benchmarks for PCs are notably more fluid. For many, pinning those down is verboten. The closest we've got for objective guidelines is the SGT.
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Post by MisterDee »

The only resource I've ever found for that is:

http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... benchmarks

I have no clue if it's any good however.
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Post by NineInchNall »

This post / thread has relevant information using the 3.5 SRD for its data set: http://community.wizards.com/forum/prev ... ds/1118841
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Josh_Kablack
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Re: [3.5/Pathfinder] Numbers by Level

Post by Josh_Kablack »

violence in the media wrote:Is there a resource or table anywhere that lists what values PC need or "should" have in various statistics, broken down by level? Like, what should your overall attack bonus be at level 5? What should your touch AC look like at level 9? What should your saves be at level 12? That sort of thing.
For rough guestimating 3.5 benchmarks for PCs who are only moderately optimized and not cheesed all-out, something like:

Assume a 16 in primary stat to start, this becomes an 18 at level 8, and gains roughly +2 in enhancement/inherent every 2 levels thereafter.

Other stats can be assumed to be 4 points behind primary stat.
Assume weapons, armor and shields get a +1 per every 4 full level enhancement bonus. When in doubt apply a similar bonus progression to other stats.

At low levels, Saves are all about primary stat bonuses and the initial +2 from good save progressions. After about 6th level total save bonuses will mostly fall in the range of 0.75 * level to 1.5 * level

So for overall attack bonus at level 5, you'd be looking at +5 BAB +3 Stat, +1 Enhancement = +9 for someone who was good at it (this could be higher with feats, temporary buffs or positional battlefield stuff), or +2 BAB +1 Stat +1 enhancement = +4 for someone who was bad at it (this could be lower due to multiclassing or dump stats). So the "par" range would be +4 to +9.

By my suggestions, touch AC at level 9 is going to be a "par" range of roughly 14 (+2 Stat, +2 magic) to 17 (+5 Stat, +2 Magic), although in practice size increases, armor penalties and the oddities of stacking AC types will likely make the low end lower than 14.

And for 12th level saves, I would expect most PC bonuses to be in the +8 to +18 range. Although the realities of multiclassing and some buff spells mean that the actual variance is going to result in a lot of PCs having numbers more divergent than that range. Also, by 12th level in 3.5 PC immunities are often substituting for saves.
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Pixels
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Post by Pixels »

I wonder if there are repositories anywhere of a large number of used Living Greyhawk or Pathfinder Society characters. If there was, it would be easy enough to check out mean/median/max values per level. It also would be interesting to know things like race and class distributions by level.
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Post by Seerow »

Other stats can be assumed to be 4 points behind primary stat.
What? So your typical character is 16 and 5 12s, and picks up enhancement bonuses for off-stats as frequently as he does for his main stats? And gets inherent bonuses to every stat? Without being cheesed out through infinite wishes?

I don't see how that is in any way a standard benchmark.
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Post by ishy »

Here a nice table of IIRC bestiary 1 monster stats:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... tMFE#gid=3
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Post by fectin »

Seerow wrote:
Other stats can be assumed to be 4 points behind primary stat.
What? So your typical character is 16 and 5 12s, and picks up enhancement bonuses for off-stats as frequently as he does for his main stats? And gets inherent bonuses to every stat? Without being cheesed out through infinite wishes?

I don't see how that is in any way a standard benchmark.
Standard, no. But it's probably a good quick estimator, especially when you're looking for what an average, cheese-light party might be capable of doing off-label.
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