With the PF2 sales speculation thread getting a lot of attention these days, I thought I'd resurrect this one with the actual play testimonials. I think the real test of a game is how it handles the table (in person or virtually).
We had a rough session this weekend on in my Roll20 Age of Ashes game. It was so bad that we had to assess whether to continue with the game or abandon the campaign. One of the players asked if the combat was an attempt of me (the GM) purposefully trying to punish the party. I assured him that I am trying my best to run the module as close to actually "by the book" as possible so the system can get a fair test by the group.
Without getting into too many spoilers, there is a towards the end of the first adventure with a monster that is completely beyond the party's capabilities. The DCs to get out of fighting the monster are so high that most parties are not only likely to fail the check to avoid combat, they will probably critically fail the check. The opponent specifically wants to fight and will only back down after he's 80% dead (by comparison, my group managed to get him about 15% down before killing off the barbarian and fighter in a couple rounds). So we had a half-TPK. If the rest of the group didn't run away (or if I had the enemy choose to pursue them), it would've been complete annihilation of the party.
This is more of an issue of adventure design than the system itself, though I think the action economy is part of the problem. Three attacks per round by a vastly superior foe is going to quickly drop a party. Nearly every attack from him hit. The characters can only probably hit on their first (non-penalized) attack.
So we're going to try again. This time I'm attempting to build a few encounters on my own to give the party some training with their 50% new character party.
We had a rough session this weekend on in my Roll20 Age of Ashes game. It was so bad that we had to assess whether to continue with the game or abandon the campaign. One of the players asked if the combat was an attempt of me (the GM) purposefully trying to punish the party. I assured him that I am trying my best to run the module as close to actually "by the book" as possible so the system can get a fair test by the group.
Without getting into too many spoilers, there is a towards the end of the first adventure with a monster that is completely beyond the party's capabilities. The DCs to get out of fighting the monster are so high that most parties are not only likely to fail the check to avoid combat, they will probably critically fail the check. The opponent specifically wants to fight and will only back down after he's 80% dead (by comparison, my group managed to get him about 15% down before killing off the barbarian and fighter in a couple rounds). So we had a half-TPK. If the rest of the group didn't run away (or if I had the enemy choose to pursue them), it would've been complete annihilation of the party.
This is more of an issue of adventure design than the system itself, though I think the action economy is part of the problem. Three attacks per round by a vastly superior foe is going to quickly drop a party. Nearly every attack from him hit. The characters can only probably hit on their first (non-penalized) attack.
So we're going to try again. This time I'm attempting to build a few encounters on my own to give the party some training with their 50% new character party.