Pathfinder 2E Another Deadly Session, and It's Getting Old

Not 100% relevant to this exact situation, but in my experience, the way it works is that one or two high stealth characters sneak forward while the rest hang back covering them with ranged weapons. The high stealth characters (and those who can Follow the Leader) then sneak up and secure an area (either by watching the guard patrols for an opening or eliminating them) and the rest of the party moves up into it. Repeat until the infiltration is complete or the alarm goes up. They often argument their approach with magic (silence, invisibility, pest form, spider climb, etc.) and occasionally mundane items: pitons, ropes, traps, etc.
I could read you wrong but... frankly, this sounds as if only half your team is adventuring while the other half is sitting on their hands? (In my group, everybody wants to join in on the action, so we rarely send out scouts that aren't disposable)

Plus: In my experience, sight lines are seldom very long on indoor maps. How far back do you require a character to hang in order to not have to make a Stealth check?
I have used "two full round's worth of standard movement" as my default GMing yardstick since way before PF2. In 5E, the default Speed is 30, which amounts to 60 ft per round. In PF2, the default Speed is 25, which amounts to 75 ft per round. So I require a character to stay 120 ft behind the point man in 5E and 150 ft behind in PF2. Want to be closer to the action? Make a Stealth check! Even if I'm prepared to give you a reasonable bonus for staying behind, you pretty much need the skill - you're either good at something in PF2 or you're atrocious. There's some middle ground in that you could have a bad ability score and only be trained or something, but generally the gulf between the haves and the have-nots in PF2 is vast and wide...
Plus: I have a hard time imagining you to use the official encounter budgets or playing official APs - how do your players take out Moderate or above encounters using only half a team (without great pain and suffering)...?
 

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As far as Stealth goes do not forget about Follow The Expert which makes things still pretty difficult, but doable.
That helps mitigate the "I'm untrained" problem, but that's not really the main issue with Stealth.

In our experience, Stealth doesn't work in the context of a group game. There are many facets to this.

The main issue with Stealth is that your group's stealth is only as good as the worst roll of the team.

What that means in practical play is that unless you have an ability (magical or otherwise) that let's you make a single roll for the entire group or gives everybody a ridonkulous bonus cold hard mathematics pretty much say a hard no to everybody tagging along. In other words, Follow the Expert can easily be a trap choice. (A "trap" choice is a choice that seems reasonable enough on the surface, but turns out to actively make your situation worse)

Note I said "can be", not "must be". If you need to make the rolls anyway ("Everybody make a Survival check to see how you cope with the grueling march") obviously Follow the Expert is a nice upgrade. Plus, Bob failing on a Survival test might make him fatigued or some such. When it means the whole group is dragged into danger ("the avalanche triggers on a failure") the situation is comparable to Stealth, but in most cases a failure has personal, not group, consequences.

I'm instead talking about cases where not Following the Expert is the better choice, such as where having just a single character scout ahead, or indeed, where not bothering with Stealth at all is the key to survival...!

After all, the old adage "Never split the party" has never been truer than in PF2 - the game is simply not equipped to handle a situation where a single character is caught red-handed by the big bad. Keep in mind that very much unlike most other editions of D&D, in PF2 even a moderate encounter is likely to be a practical death sentence for any character that is caught snooping around, especially given how your bad Stealth check is used as your equally bad Initiative roll - you need actual luck to survive until your first action!

More generally, for Stealth to be worth it needs to be reliable and the payoff needs to be worth it. If you only fail on rolling a 1, that passes for reliable in a D&D context. If you can bypass monsters that won't just bite you in the back later on, or you can set up a significantly more lethal death attack than a regular combat round's worth of damage output, that passes for worth it in a D&D context.

In our experience Stealth is neither reliable or worth it. Especially in PF2 where Stealth is a joke for purposes other than "me gaining sneak attack". (Even fully loaded with bonuses, you still struggle to reach more than just maybe a 60% success rate against any monster high level enough that you actually want or need to hide from it) And the benefits to an ambush are tuned down to the point where they're nearly non-existant in PF2. Sure your great Stealth check might allow you to take a special action, deal a couple of extra sneak damage dice, and act before the monster. But you can't down even a monster of your own level with that. But the monster can certainly down you!

I'd say that you basically need a different game engine to enact your Assassin's Creed fantasies.

And then we haven't even discussed the elephant in the room: nobody wants to sit on their hands while one or two players experience the adventure for themselves. D&D is a group game, which pretty conclusively rules out Stealth as something other than a rarely used niche activity.
 
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But to be fair, the party was at 100% strength, their first encounter of the day. They have several characters who can deal with things like this with Disable Device and Dispel Magic. The rolls were just really bad, and they burned through their Hero Points. I just didn't expect it would go that badly, and based on the description of the adventure, I ran it pretty close to how it was intended, I think.
Unless I am misunderstanding how it went down, why could the first person not killed by the trap and used their hero point to survive that? If they were at full strength and initiative had not even been rolled yet, what else could they have spent it on?

It might not have made any real differnce in the long run, but it just struck me as odd. I have not played or run as much PF2 as I would like (partly due to COVID), so I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding something important!

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glass.
 

Unless I am misunderstanding how it went down, why could the first person not killed by the trap and used their hero point to survive that? If they were at full strength and initiative had not even been rolled yet, what else could they have spent it on?

It might not have made any real differnce in the long run, but it just struck me as odd. I have not played or run as much PF2 as I would like (partly due to COVID), so I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding something important!

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glass.
The actual order of what happened. Character opened door, and the hazard automatically triggered on him before Initiative was rolled. Character critically failed Will saving throw against the Phantasmal Killer. Character spent Hero Point to re-roll Will saving throw and critically failed a second time. Character then rolled a Fortitude saving throw against the death effect, and got a regular failure there. Save DC was 29.
 

The character likely did not have two hero points.

Not coincidentally this lack of "hero point oomph" is what I foresaw in my thread on better hero points (can't link here and now).
 

The actual order of what happened. Character opened door, and the hazard automatically triggered on him before Initiative was rolled. Character critically failed Will saving throw against the Phantasmal Killer. Character spent Hero Point to re-roll Will saving throw and critically failed a second time. Character then rolled a Fortitude saving throw against the death effect, and got a regular failure there. Save DC was 29.
Ah, that makes more sense. I did not think it anyone would try a reroll with a small chance of success when using the do-not-die is guaranteed to work, but on reflection even an ordinary failure would have left them with considerably more than zero hp, so I can see why they might have thought it was worth the gamble.

To be fair, 25% to crit fail is only a 6.25% chance to crit fail twice in a row, so they can consider themselves pretty unlucky from that point of view. Although by the time the decided to spend the hero point the first crit fail had already happened, so the chance was back at 25%. They might not have known that I guess.

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glass.
 

Ah, that makes more sense. I did not think it anyone would try a reroll with a small chance of success when using the do-not-die is guaranteed to work, but on reflection even an ordinary failure would have left them with considerably more than zero hp, so I can see why they might have thought it was worth the gamble.

To be fair, 25% to crit fail is only a 6.25% chance to crit fail twice in a row, so they can consider themselves pretty unlucky from that point of view. Although by the time the decided to spend the hero point the first crit fail had already happened, so the chance was back at 25%. They might not have known that I guess.

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glass.
For those who want to math all the odds out, I accessed the character sheet for the character who died to the Phantasmal Killer hazard. The character is an 8th level fighter with a +12 to Will Saves and a +15 to Fort Saves. The spell's DC was 29.

If I'm correct, that means that this character critically fails the Will Save on a roll of 1-7 (35% chance), then also has at least a regular failure on the Fort Save on a roll of 1-13 (65% chance).

This was before Initiative was rolled, and it would continue targeting the closest character each round on its Initiative.
 

For those who want to math all the odds out, I accessed the character sheet for the character who died to the Phantasmal Killer hazard. The character is an 8th level fighter with a +12 to Will Saves and a +15 to Fort Saves. The spell's DC was 29.

If I'm correct, that means that this character critically fails the Will Save on a roll of 1-7 (35% chance), then also has at least a regular failure on the Fort Save on a roll of 1-13 (65% chance).

This was before Initiative was rolled, and it would continue targeting the closest character each round on its Initiative.
Whatever the final number ends up being, it is considerably more lethal than anything in D&D usually is (at least off first level).

PS. Rolling a 7 with a +12 bonus gives a total of 19, which is the "DC" of "not crit failing. That is, if you reach the DC, you succeed. If you reach the DC -10, you "only" fail.

So the probabilities are 30% and 65%.
 

Ah, that makes more sense. I did not think it anyone would try a reroll with a small chance of success when using the do-not-die is guaranteed to work, but on reflection even an ordinary failure would have left them with considerably more than zero hp, so I can see why they might have thought it was worth the gamble.
This is not directed to Retreater specifically (and no judgment is implied either way), but as GMs, do you normally tell your players what they need to roll to save against a trap?
 

This is not directed to Retreater specifically (and no judgment is implied either way), but as GMs, do you normally tell your players what they need to roll to save against a trap?
In our case, I told them specifically after the session when we were "armchair quarterbacking" the encounter to see what went wrong. Additionally, in PF2 there are degrees of success and failure (being 10 from the target, respectively), so it's easier to extrapolate that target number based on a critical success or failure.
 

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