Encounter-based, story-driven adventures is what Paizo does. Even something like Kingmaker, which appears superficially like a hexcrawlx, is really just a dungeon with a wilderness setting. It’s a core assumption in PF2 that you are running a story-driven game. It’s probably even a reasonable, though it doesn’t mean you have to run that kind of game.
What I found running a hexcrawl sandbox is that I ended up drawing on techniques from outside PF2. There are a handful of gaps (discussed previously in this thread), but the system otherwise works fine. You just need to know how to make use of the tools it gives you. The same goes with the VP subsystem.
If you are familiar with progress clocks in other games, it becomes obvious how you can use VP to run all sorts of contested situations. The GMG doesn’t really try to teach you that though. It just uses it as a framework to describe a handful of subsystems. However (to borrow an example
from reddit), if you wanted to run a scene where the PCs are trying to escape from a t-rex, clocks are perfect.
The reddit example used a skill challenge, but the problem with skill challenges is the “successes before failure” construct. What is the failure state? The PCs get eaten by the T-rex? No, you’re recommended to fail forward, so nothing is at stake.
The way you do this with progress clocks is with a clock to track progress. How would decide how many segments (i.e., the total VP). PCs would then take actions to get away from the t-rex. This structure acknowledges the PCs will succeed, but you are figuring out the cost. You can them create a secondary clock to track problems. For example, a clock to track getting lost. You can even let PCs advance the clock to escape without rolling, but it also advances the clock to get lost.
What this gives you is a structure that focuses on the dramatic needs of the PCs instead of on what the GM decides. How lost you get or what steps you take to escape are all a product of the PCs’ actions. There is no need to launder failure into success. Actions are meaningful because the outcome is a product entirely of the PCs’ choices and results.
That example is funny because I had been thinking about it for a few days (after seeing that post), and that is exactly what happened in our Scum & Villainy game today. We were infiltrating a space station. There was a clock to track when someone would become aware of our presence and respond, and at one point there was a clock to track our progress as we made our way into a research area to get an item we had been hired to retrieve. At one point, I even intentionally advanced the awareness clock (called taking a devil’s bargain) as the cost of succeeding at one of my rolls.
Anyway, PF2 is full of stuff that just isn’t tied together well, but it’s super useful if you know how to use it. It’s a shame that Paizo is stuck in a rut with how they design adventures.
