Paizo A question about Paizo/PF adventure design

[The-Magic-Sword]

So I looked up the encounters:

Spoiler: Cult of Cinders

I'm gonna put aside the fact that you didn't just combine the encounters, you explicitly ignored the text stating that the creatures in the next room don't leave the room, taking for granted the previous creatures, including the Golem there to guard them, have it and continue their religious service.

But even if you did decide that it was stupid for the Dragon Priest and Elekos to not rush out, it didn't occur to you that ignoring that should probably be a trigger for you to alter the adventure for some reason (since you were now intentionally, and not accidentally, in homebrew territory), I'm not sure why it didn't, but that was a major screwball.

Even then, i want to note its only barely an extreme encounter (and only for a party of 4, if you have any more than that its just severe) so its actually something your party can handle with good play, which you've suggested your party doesn't really do... but that kinda makes it a fair loss.

But wanna know something fun? Slap the weak template on any of the three creatures, (you can do this on the fly easily) and the encounter is only severe, eliminate a creature entirely, say one of the two level 7s, the gathering room encounter is only trivial by itself, and everything together is 130 exp, just barely over the Severe Threshold.

This post, including acquiring a pdf off a friend, plating dinner, checking the encounter, and checking the guidelines, took me about 10 minutes.

 

[Retreater]

So I looked up the encounters:

Well, I guess you weren't at the table.
First off, the door trap's DC to find is ridiculously high. I think the character in the lead rolled pretty well and got a mere "31" instead of the 32 required to find it. Granted the fine print of the adventure says (and I'm just going off memory here) that when a character touches the door, the trap is sprung. But I'm running for 5 players, on a VTT, going back and forth from voice chat software, VTT, a PDF of the adventure, Archives of Nethys, and helping 5 players manage their character sheets. So when the player tells me his character opens the door (not merely touching) the door, it sets off the trap.
So before initiative is rolled, his character crit fails his saves and immediately dies (even after spending a Hero point to try to change his crit failure into a success or even just a regular fail). Bad luck to fail both saves, but the DCs are pretty high for that level. The door is open now and the enemies can't just stand there.
So my mistake was reading "touches" as "opens." For that, my group is punished with a TPK.
And adding templates is nowhere nearly as easy as you'd suggest, especially when you are changing automation on an adventure you had to custom insert into Roll20 because that VTT doesn't fully support PF2.
So congrats on being an expert GM who can do all this in 5 minutes while making dinner. You can keep celebrating as this game continues to drive away new groups, alienate fans, and frustrate a GM who honestly wants to provide a good experience for his players.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well, I guess you weren't at the table.
First off, the door trap's DC to find is ridiculously high. I think the character in the lead rolled pretty well and got a mere "31" instead of the 32 required to find it. Granted the fine print of the adventure says (and I'm just going off memory here) that when a character touches the door, the trap is sprung. But I'm running for 5 players, on a VTT, going back and forth from voice chat software, VTT, a PDF of the adventure, Archives of Nethys, and helping 5 players manage their character sheets. So when the player tells me his character opens the door (not merely touching) the door, it sets off the trap.
So before initiative is rolled, his character crit fails his saves and immediately dies (even after spending a Hero point to try to change his crit failure into a success or even just a regular fail). Bad luck to fail both saves, but the DCs are pretty high for that level. The door is open now and the enemies can't just stand there.
So my mistake was reading "touches" as "opens." For that, my group is punished with a TPK.
And adding templates is nowhere nearly as easy as you'd suggest, especially when you are changing automation on an adventure you had to custom insert into Roll20 because that VTT doesn't fully support PF2.
So congrats on being an expert GM who can do all this in 5 minutes while making dinner. You can keep celebrating as this game continues to drive away new groups, alienate fans, and frustrate a GM who honestly wants to provide a good experience for his players.

oooh 5 players? then let me clarify for you, the encounter was only severe to begin with, if you had adjusted it with a template (no really, just subtract an additional two as the automation does its thing) or by flushing a single monster, it likely would have dropped to moderate. Its well within the realm of possibility that your party could have trounced it.

While you did misread the trap, that wasn't what killed your party, it was a combination of bad tactics, bad dice rolls, and your unwillingness to adjust the adventure they're playing after the first two TPKs demonstrated they need easier content.

I mentioned the time it took me to write the post to point out how little time it takes to check and adjust an encounter, that doesn't just apply to me, it applies to you too if you don't just throw up your hands and give up. Sure, it maybe would have taken you marginally longer, so what?

I don't appreciate the bitter, manipulative tone I'm picking up from you concerning that last part, you're allowed to be wrong, and your party is allowed to lose encounters sometimes, I don't have some moral obligation to leave you unchallenged and the implied threat where refusing to jump when you say jump has some kind of dire consequences for the game is so karen it hurts. You haven't been alienated, you're trying to get back at someone who made you feel as if you were wrong on a forum, cool it.

 

[dave2008]

Plus, there's something to be said for the idea that not every game is for every player-- maybe you would be happier with another system, or retreater would, if they're unwilling to adjust encounters to suit their style and group. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, the encounters they're referring to are probably pretty easy to adjust down to accommodate combination-- and easier than an adjustment in 5e would have been, which I know because I've done a bunch of adjustment in both.

As I have already mentioned, if I get a chance I would probably play a PC in PF2, not GM. That is OK, as you say not every system is for every GM. However, your point about it being easier to adjust encounters in PF2 than it is in 5e is pretty much exactly the viewpoint that is, for me, a problem I have with PF2 from GM perspective. I never need to adjust encounters in 5e, they just work, and the concept of doing so is foreign to how we play the game.

So for me:

• Not really interested in GM PF2 at this time (to much difference from what I am familiar with / comfort zone)
• I am (or was) interested in playing PF2, but the pandemic and lack of PF2 groups in my area is causing a problem with that. Hopefully things change soon.

 

[dave2008]

I don't appreciate the bitter, manipulative tone I'm picking up from you concerning that last part, you're allowed to be wrong, and your party is allowed to lose encounters sometimes, I don't have some moral obligation to leave you unchallenged and the implied threat where refusing to jump when you say jump has some kind of dire consequences for the game is so karen it hurts. You haven't been alienated, you're trying to get back at someone who made you feel as if you were wrong on a forum, cool it.

Wow, you might want to re-read some of your posts, your coming off as a poor ambassador for the game (which I don't think you want to be) and bit of a jerk. I get that your buttons are being pushed about a game you love, but chillax a bit. You're not helping people enjoy the game.

 

[dave2008]

I mean, I think thats fine-- but if you don't want to worry about balanced encounters, then why not just stop worrying about balanced encounters?

That doesn't seem to be possible from what you and others have said

 

[Retreater]

I don't appreciate the bitter, manipulative tone I'm picking up from you concerning that last part

Sorry. I took your tone as differently than you were intending and responded on the defensive and passive aggressively. I apologize.

Its well within the realm of possibility that your party could have trounced it.

The party's fighter went down before initiative was rolled (per the description of the hazard). So we weren't really dealing with 5 characters at that point. The next round, it took out the champion, leaving the monk, wizard, and cleric behind. It was brutal.
Part of the extenuating circumstances at my table was that the group wanted no modifications to how the AP was intended to run. However since things were so difficult, they requested I not up the challenge when we added a fifth player.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Wow, you might want to re-read some of your posts, your coming off as a poor ambassador for the game (which I don't think you want to be) and bit of a jerk. I get that your buttons are being pushed about a game you love, but chillax a bit. You're not helping people enjoy the game.

Honestly, I just looked over my posts expecting to see some obvious thing jump out to me that was rude. I can't really find what you're alluding to. I'm a bit wary of accepting it out of hand because I've noticed some posters use rudeness to broadly denounce disagreement they can't otherwise counter. I'm not thinking of you when I say that, but just in general, I'm aware of it's status as a useful tactic. I'm also not a 'brand ambassador' I prefer to be more real than that, and no one pays me to promote Pathfinder-- I am a person, just like you, or Zapp, or Retreater, who is reading what you are saying, and is trying to clear up the misunderstandings that I see. I'd be glad if people used the content of my posts to enjoy the game, but I can't force them to see the wisdom in the things I say, and sometimes nothing helps but having your position broken down for you, I have had to learn to value it when someone does it to me.

That doesn't seem to be possible from what you and others have said

I'm not seeing why not? When those systems don't care about balance, it means that the GM places the challenges throughout their dungeon with the expectation that players don't have to be able to fight their way through everything directly. In other words, its not much different than if I ignore pathfinder's encounter guidelines and drop what happens to be deadly or beyond encounters here and there. If we were playing one of those games, and you were GMing, you'd drop whatever monsters felt right, and if they were more than I could handle, I'd die trying to fight them head on. You'd have to improvise (and use simulationist rules) as I tried various plans to survive and overcome-- which is also how you'd have to run a game that doesn't care about balance in this game. if you want to create an encounter of orcs thats obviously way more than a party can take on, but want to place a portcullis that can be dropped to divide it into manageable chunks, nothing stops you.

Nothing about the game precludes that play style, and its probably easier than 4e to run that way, since the game has more of the simulation mechanics you need to run the 'alternate plans' we'd use. You're working a little up hill, but it ain't too bad for a game that didn't explicitly have OSR style play as a design goal. Those games all have a reputation of lethality for a reason after all.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Sorry. I took your tone as differently than you were intending and responded on the defensive and passive aggressively. I apologize.


The party's fighter went down before initiative was rolled (per the description of the hazard). So we weren't really dealing with 5 characters at that point. The next round, it took out the champion, leaving the monk, wizard, and cleric behind. It was brutal.
Part of the extenuating circumstances at my table was that the group wanted no modifications to how the AP was intended to run. However since things were so difficult, they requested I not up the challenge when we added a fifth player.

Apology accepted and thank you for it.

Spoiler: More Cult of Cinders

I can see that, and don't misunderstand, I definitely think the game's encounters can be on the hard side. In this instance you technically modified it out of how it was intended to run via encounter combination. Which is what killed your players, while I understand it was an honest mistake, I'm pushing back because it still was one. In addition to misreading the 'touches' language of the trap, it was noted that the wards on the door are designed to keep people out in the preceding text (which I'm reading for the first time, since I don't run APs, I'm not used to how they're structured.) So I'm really just saying the warning there was fair, its also cool that you missed it. Usually when I make a mistake like this, in a way that screws my players, I tend to go to the other side and make adjustments in other ways, I run on an automated VTT as well, so I know it complicates things.

To compare, Not long ago, my party was level 17 and assaulting a massive citadel, they were 7 people (because I'm crazy, but also never doing that again) and I placed their encounter weight in Skulltakers in the room. The healer won initiative, and stepped out despite knowing most of the skulltakers had their turn right after his. He got whammied by multiple horrid wiltings, and then got finger of death'd by the following round, as did another player. I realized something was off, narrated their retreat once they declared it (faking a couple of die rolls behind my screen to ensure it worked, since I suspected they didn't deserve this TPK) and we left the encounter behind and roleplayed the resurrection sequence for the rest of the session.

I did some checking and realized the problem was that the encounter math has no way of accounting for the fact that AOE damage scales up linearly in total as you increase the number of players, and seven players brings enough +1 creatures, that can pack that AOE, they can get whammied pretty fast. Even two such creatures is a lot of damage to take in one turn, since the players can't use their numbers to soak it, the way they normally can with big boi attacks.

I kind of want to recommend to you that you step away from official modules, not because I think they're bad, but because I can see how much the idea of altering them for the party is stressing you, that your party doesn't really wanna get better to compensate, and that playing them as written is straining your sense of realism (regarding reasons some encounters wouldn't combine.)

I can report the system is a pleasure on the homebrewer side, and it would be super easy to scatter very easy encounters around that could chain, the exploration rules actually make that kind of game play better than it was when I tried it in 5e, since this game manages the passage of time better. Even barricading a door so the monsters can't get through ala Moria from the LOTR movies, can be useful for the sake of buying the party the 10 minutes they need to refocus and such. If you want advice on automating this game, I can provide that as well-- I run way low prep because my depression and anxiety often get in the way, so speed is my middle name.

 

[dave2008]

Honestly, I just looked over my posts expecting to see some obvious thing jump out to me that was rude.

IDK, I find this rude (assuming you actually read the tread referenced, though perhaps you only read the encounter:

"oooh 5 players? then let me clarify for you, the encounter was only severe to begin with, if you had adjusted it with a template (no really, just subtract an additional two as the automation does its thing) or by flushing a single monster, it likely would have dropped to moderate."

Perhaps it come off as more condescending than rude, but they are in the same ball part IMO. In reality I think that was what was triggering me personally more then general rudeness. Bad choice of words on my part, Very much a: "your doing wrong, here is how it should be done" attitude. It is more tone than content, which a bad place to make a judgement over an online post - so probably as much my fault as yours.

Though, I am surprised you can't see how this is rude:
"... has some kind of dire consequences for the game is so karen it hurts."

Now I will freely admit that what appears rude when written on an internet forum may indeed have no intent to be rude in reality.

I'm not seeing why not?

I know. Unfortunately I don't see the value in trying to explain my position much more. If it is really something you are interested in I will give it one more shot. Let me know.