I've been doing a couple of tests recently to see how exactly shove works. Let me copy a post from another topic.
According to the description, shove takes into account the strength and size of the target as well as the value of the target's athletics or acrobatics. For some reason, shove doesn't appear in the combat log.
I did a few goblin tests in the village. Indeed, athletics and target acrobatics have a great influence on the chances of success.
I tested it on a character with strength 8. One point of athletics / acrobatics reduces the chance of being pushed away by 5%.
This makes acrobatics / athletics quite useful for a melee character. Just having proficiency reduces the enemy's chances by 10% (increases with character level).
I will describe it using the example of Lae'zel. At level 4, she has 18 strength points and proficiency with athlethic, so a character with 8 strength points has only a 20% chance of success. For comparison, after drinking a potion that sets strength to 21 (this is more than most humanoid enemies should have) the chance increases to 50%.
Due to the fact that the shove takes into account the athletics / acrobatics of the target, characters with high strength / dexterity have a rather low chance of becoming its victim, especially if they invest in appropriate proficiency.
At least it makes sense to choose those proficiency
Of course, I do not take into account the bosses because they have their own laws.
In my opinion, the shove should also depend on the size difference between target and pusher.
This would solve a lot of shove problems. Currently, the size only affects the push range.
I think a -2 / + 2 penalty / bonus would be ideal for each level of difference between the target and the pusher.
Thanks to this, a player who does not have indecently much strength would not be able to push large creatures without a lot of luck.
On the other hand, it would practically protect players from being pushed by small creatures like goblins (as long as the character invests in athletics / acrobatics), which is perhaps the biggest complaint about shove.
Of course, it also has some drawbacks (or advantages depending on how you look).
If the player were the victim of some large creature, he would fall over much more often. This is quite logical, the minotaur shouldn't have any problems with throwing a wizard from a rock.
