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

Warning: this post contains minor spoilers for a certain adventure path.

Last post I was talking about encounter fundamentals, specifically foreshadowing. First a definition: by foreshadowing I mean giving the characters (and players) a warning or indication that an encounter can occur.

Foreshadowing is important for multiple reasons: one is to help drive player agency; by being able to see encounters coming, players get to choose how they engage them, thus making the game more interactive. Another reason is that it allows certain types of characters (such as the mutagenic alchemist) to shine as they can perform pre-buffing. Yet another reason is that it makes combat easier (above and beyond pre-buffing): action economy can be improved by recalling knowledge, hunting prey, getting into advantageous positions, raising shields, etc. before combat starts. Additionally, by foreshadowing you are giving the players fair warning that combat/danger is coming and it will reduce feelings that the gm/game is arbitrary and capricious and thereby improve the attitude of the table.

So when should we foreshadow? Always, unless you have a very specific reason not to. How heavily should we foreshadow? This depends on the players but I default to blatantly, though specifics can be hidden behind skill activities such as recall knowledge (try to avoid asking for perception checks to see them). Don’t worry about your players having information, enjoy what they do with it.

Amusing Anecdote: as the result of a survey wildlife check I once told the players outright that there were dangerous aerial predators in the area. Two characters still went off by themselves without any ranged weapons to predictable results (well mostly, after one character died, the other used his body as a lure, hide and managed to kill the thing by sneaking up on it after it landed to eat). The players were kicking themselves after that one.

Okay, so we know why and when to foreshadow. The next question is how? Especially in a published adventure where creature selection and environment have been laid out for you? I recommend the following procedure:

1. Read the adventure before hand. Note each encounter.
2. See if the adventure has foreshadowed an encounters for you and note these. For example: the first book of Age of Ashes has several creatures that can tell PCs about other areas of the keep and places where sounds can be heard from other areas.
3. Go back and read the adventure again. Consider each encounter (including those already foreshadowed) and try to think of the impact that it would have on its immediate environment (the room it is found in a dungeon) and make a note of it. A giant bat living on the ceiling of a room would probably cover the floor in quano. Then think of the impact it would have on the nearby areas (adjacent rooms in a dungeon) and the inhabitants therein. The goblins living several rooms over might be tired of getting eaten by the bat and put crude graffiti on the door to the room warning of the danger (if only you understood goblin graffiti marks). Or maybe it’s their friend and there are bowls of mostly consumed fruit all over the room. Finally, consider the impact of the creature on things distant to it. In our bat example, the goblin diplomat in town might be able to tell the characters that Carl the Bat is a good dude but he gets a little (a lot) bitey if annoyed, or startled, or he’s having a bad day... or anytime really. And all the goblins (including the diplomat) have strange marks that can be determined to be healed up bite wounds from a giant bat.
4. For each piece of foreshadowing determine what if any, checks are necessary, to perceive or interpret it. Beware that it is tempting to try and hide information by locking it behind perception or survival checks. Resist that temptation: the purpose of foreshadowing is to give players information and see what they do with it. However, it is perfectly reasonable to describe things through the senses: instead of saying there is bat quano in the room, say there is a horrible stench and strange brown lumps all over the room, but mostly on the desk to far right. And then let the players draw their own conclusions or ask to recall knowledge to further interpret what they are sensing.

And that is pretty much the whole process. At first it may seem like a lot of work, but like the old advice that if you are struggling with math homework then do every problem in the book, the repetition will build up your skills to the point where you can do it reflexively. It will also uniquely make each adventure your own.

Side effects of following this advice include: wanting to run every adventure you read, ability to improvise sophisticated encounters on the fly, insomnia, and desire to write extremely long posts trying to explain your procedures to others.

kenada said:

The barbarian, clearly. Just send him down the hall first to check for traps.

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You jest, but given how deadly traps can be, coupled with the basic fact you can't specialize in traps to reliably defeat them, just having the character with the most hit points trample in, coupled with a Cleric standing ready to heal, is a reasonable alternative.

The point of having a "thief" character is that his or her odds of finding and disabling the trap should be drastically better than anyone else's.

In their blind drive towards balance, this is yet another thing Paizo completely forgot about.

(Just have a look at the Rogue class feat Delay Trap to get an inkling of what Paizo considers a "trap specialist". You don't really get a benefit unless you critically succeed at a DC +5 roll! What that means in practical play is that you need to roll a 20! This will probably make no sense if you come from another game, but in Pathfinder 2, balance is everything - there is no way for any character to get "ahead of the curve", and the "curve" basically says "you never have more than 50% chance at any check, save or attack against a higher-levelled effect")

This basically means that there's no point in specializing against traps. What you need is sturdy characters in general.

So you see, you probably thought you were joking, but your suggestion actually makes a lot of sense in Pathfinder 2.

Retreater said:

I suppose I shouldn't have included the other attackers from a balance perspective, but the character pushed the door open and triggered those enemies. Perhaps I should have said "well as soon as you touch the door and before it is opened, this hazard happens, and you guys deal with that first."
I'll take the blame for not knowing how deadly Phantasmal Killer can be when attached to a higher level hazard. The party's wizard regularly casts it and the effect is never this nasty.
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.

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Absolutely. The point here is that your and your group's mistakes are very natural to make in almost any other game. In fact, there they might even be "heroic deeds" rather than mistakes!

Level is everything in PF2. And the fact that monsters are lethal.

Our wizard's spells are never nasty either, or at least, weren't (before Chain Lightning at level 11).

The first time a monster mage cast Fireball at them, easily dealing more than double the damage of the Wizard's own Fireball, they were speechless.

Retreater said:

8th level as the adventure recommends, with a bonus 8th level character for whom I don't heighten the difficulty. The characters were all built at 8th level as a result of our last TPK, so everyone should be maximized with gear and optimization for 8th level play. (None of that "I took this feat because it was helpful at 3rd level.") Plus characters were created to synergize at a session 0.

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I'm running a group of very experienced D&D minmaxers, and I have no problem whatsoever challenging them almost to tears running the Extinction Curse AP as written, despite them being five characters. (I abandoned the advice to adjust the encounters to account for a fifth player a loooong time ago)

I have even written in a couple of encounters featuring distinctly lower-leveled enemies just to let them feel awesome once in a while. Official APs are ruthless about wanting every encounter to be "challenging". There are very few instances involving "trivial" foes where combat isn't simply skipped. The gulf between how Paizo and WotC writes adventures could not be larger.

!DWolf said:

Consider the following “random” encounters:
1. A hill giant crashes out of the brush and attacks the party. Roll initiative. Combat ensues.
2. The party comes across a wagon that has been smashed, the horses are dead, and the whole thing reeks of wine. There are large humanoid tracks leading away into the forest and a pained, whimpering sound is coming from just inside the forest on the other side. What does the party do? I can’t tell you because in this scenario the players have agency: they can follow the tracks or check out the whimpering to find the badly injured wine merchant in the forest. Or maybe they just shrug and continue on. Also note that the hill giant is clearly foreshadowed. It is not a surprise: there are multiple ways they can learn what they are up against (identity the tracks, talk to the merchant, stealthy follow the tracks and see the drunken giant, etc.)

(To be continued in my next post, hopefully this doesn’t come across as too preachy)

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It doesn't come off as preachy. I believe you are genuine.

Problem is, it has almost no bearing on official adventure paths as written.

Plus, it... doesn't work.

The game is clearly and obviously geared toward fighting monsters in scenarios resembling your type 1.

If you get to spot the monster at a distance (much more than what it can cover in a single turn's movement), you have basically won already. (The Giant is an outlier here since it has such an extreme ranged attack.)

Sure you can fix this in your own home game, perhaps by giving the Giant an entourage of sycophantic Orcs that make it much harder to ambush and take out the Giant (without first dealing with the Orcs). Or by giving the Giant a mate, so that the encounter of "fighting one Giant" is disguised - you would then be fully expected to take out the first giant at range, but the idea is that once you would have done so, the second Giant would have caught up to you, so the encounter could STILL play out as in your take 1. (Obviously, this is playing with fire, since if the ambush fails, the heroes have two Giants on their hands and will likely die)

But here I just want to point out that official APs almost never start encounters at range. Playing an official AP is playing out maybe two hundred encounters over twenty levels, nearly all of your type 1.

Your advice is not wrong. But it basically amounts to rewriting the adventures...

ronaldsf said:

And I agree with CapnZapp -- I've taken a look at this encounter area and the designer/author clearly had the idea of the party taking extended rests between encounters while every monster sits in their room waiting to be killed. If you want to run a more dynamic/intelligent enemy, you will need to adjust the encounters downward.

PF2's encounter-building guidelines are accurate, BUT they assume individual fights, and Severe encounters assume a party that is not far from full health.

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As far as I understand it, this is endemic to the entire Adventure Path idea.

It certainly is the assumption of nearly every level's "dungeon" (cave, house...) in Extinction Curse. Many such places even offer up a room where you're told "the monsters never check this space, so you can probably rest overnight here".

But this is nothing new.

What's new is the incredibly unforgiving encounter math of PF2. In almost every other version of D&D, you can easily smush together two encounters as one without the heroes breaking a sweat. And for the few exceptions, we're talking blindingly obvious ones - of course, you can't expect to take out both the Witch King and Sauron in the same fight, so it's fairly safe to assume the GM would never have them meet you in the same area.

In Pathfinder 2?

See those three Orcs? If they join the four Goblins before we can butcher them, we're probably toast. Fighting four Goblins. Low to Moderate. Fighting three Orcs. Moderate to Severe.

Fighting all seven critters at the same time. We instantly jump to Extreme to Impossible.

Just do the math. It's not hard. Let's say 70 XP for the gobbos and 100 XP for the Orcs. That equals 170 XP. Then just look it up:

!DWolf said:

Right . What you want to do is to turn down encounters by about one level (keep XP the same). Moderate to low, etc. there is a “weak adjustment” in the rules that should help with that. Alternatively, you could try increasing the parties level by 1 over where they should be, though you have to be careful of the wealth by level guidelines, Xp rewards, and suchlike if you do that. You should also focus on foreshadowing encounters (allowing better combat tactics from the players and making the encounters easier) and maybe houserule/hand wave out of combat healing.

I will still make my post on foreshadowing in published adventures though, since while you may know, others reading this thread might not.

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In my view, by far the easiest fix is "run the level 8 adventure for level 9 heroes" without changing anything else.

Sure that means a level 9 hero will be underequipped (since she will get gear appropriate for level 8) but that's a minor issue. After all, the gear will be what the adventure expects. What's important is getting that extra +1 to everything (which sometimes will be +3, at skill proficiency jumps). Also Incapacitation.

CapnZapp said:

You jest, but given how deadly traps can be, coupled with the basic fact you can't specialize in traps to reliably defeat them, just having the character with the most hit points trample in, coupled with a Cleric standing ready to heal, is a reasonable alternative.

The point of having a "thief" character is that his or her odds of finding and disabling the trap should be drastically better than anyone else's.

In their blind drive towards balance, this is yet another thing Paizo completely forgot about.

(Just have a look at the Rogue class feat Delay Trap to get an inkling of what Paizo considers a "trap specialist". You don't really get a benefit unless you critically succeed at a DC +5 roll! What that means in practical play is that you need to roll a 20! This will probably make no sense if you come from another game, but in Pathfinder 2, balance is everything - there is no way for any character to get "ahead of the curve", and the "curve" basically says "you never have more than 50% chance at any check, save or attack against a higher-levelled effect")

This basically means that there's no point in specializing against traps. What you need is sturdy characters in general.

So you see, you probably thought you were joking, but your suggestion actually makes a lot of sense in Pathfinder 2.

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As an addendum to my earlier post:

Yes, I probably come across as viewing class selection from a coldly calculating utilitarian viewpoint. Which can feel alien when you're just itching to play a Rogue.

However, I posit that you don't have to take this view in a game like 5E.

If there is a 5E feat that, say, gives you advantage on trap-disablin' that is a substantial benefit.

A substantial benefit is what you need to rationalize playing a low-AC medium-hp character on the frontlines. It helps that everybody's chances of success are good to begin with (so you go from good to awesome at your job) and that traps are seldom killers in the first place.

Now contrast this with Pathfinder 2. Since both traps and monsters are very deadly, you need a very good reason for playing anything less that the most sturdy classes.

And getting a +1 bonus at level 1 ain't it. (The bonus eventually being increased to +2, and you getting that crappy reroll at level 8 I mentioned earlier, is still not it.)

It doesn't help that the basic step of trapfinding is done by Perception, something everybody gets in this game. And that Thievery is just a skill that again everybody can take.

So tell me again why I should be playing a trap-expert Rogue when I could be nearly as good playing a trap-expert Barbarian...?

Point here: in most D&D games you don't need to take the utilitarian view, since the devs have remembered to give each class the tools they need to justify their existence, and because the game is friendly enough that "everybody can be a hero".

In sharp contrast, Pathfinder 2 (at least when playing official APs) strongly encourage you to make the very best adventurer you can. There, the notion of bringing along a thief "because it's fun" is much less compelling, since a thief doesn't bring enough extra thiefin' to the table.

(Luckily Rogues in PF2 remain viable since they're competent fighters. I'm talking about how the CRB introduces Rogues as "You’re a great asset,
since you can disable traps" as if that made you special in any way)

Retreater said:

@!DWolf thanks for the insightful response. I'm fairly accustomed to both OSR-style games as well as the "stream-of-combats" type of game. I think PF2 gives the illusion that it is a "stream-of-combats" style game, not to mention that the newer/casual players come from a that background. I think the group's overall style is closer to that style of game, since they just recently mentioned that they want less tension and stress in a casual game. I don't think they mind the crunch or options. Just that they don't want a game with a really slow pace that means that they have to gather information, retreat, choose their combats wisely, etc.

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Have you considered using the Proficiency Without Level variant? It reduces the threat of higher-level creatures, which would let you run the module as written without having to manually tweak everything down. If would also make accidentally getting two encounters less immediately catastrophic.

CapnZapp said:

You jest, but given how deadly traps can be, coupled with the basic fact you can't specialize in traps to reliably defeat them, just having the character with the most hit points trample in, coupled with a Cleric standing ready to heal, is a reasonable alternative.

The point of having a "thief" character is that his or her odds of finding and disabling the trap should be drastically better than anyone else's.

In their blind drive towards balance, this is yet another thing Paizo completely forgot about.

(Just have a look at the Rogue class feat Delay Trap to get an inkling of what Paizo considers a "trap specialist". You don't really get a benefit unless you critically succeed at a DC +5 roll! What that means in practical play is that you need to roll a 20! This will probably make no sense if you come from another game, but in Pathfinder 2, balance is everything - there is no way for any character to get "ahead of the curve", and the "curve" basically says "you never have more than 50% chance at any check, save or attack against a higher-levelled effect")

This basically means that there's no point in specializing against traps. What you need is sturdy characters in general.

So you see, you probably thought you were joking, but your suggestion actually makes a lot of sense in Pathfinder 2.

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Thanks for the explanation. The more I read about official adventures, the happier I am to be doing my own thing. I make liberal use of traps, including some from or inspired by Grimtooth’s Traps (picked up the compilation a few years ago at Origins, so I have use it, obviously), but I’ve yet to put one in my dungeons that is as out of whack as this one here.

Also to !DWolf’s point about foreshadowing, traps can be boring or not boring. The sequence of events here was: make an impossible check, make two difficult saving throws, or die. That doesn’t strike me as a very interesting trap or a recipe for a fun time at the table. There needs to be more going on than that.

To your point CapnZapp, there should be enough detail in the trap that players can deal with it in ways other than just making a skill check. That helps makes traps less overtly punishing and more like another way to engage the dungeon. The examples in the CRB and GMG are usually good about this, so that this one is seemingly not is a bit vexing (another case of problems caused by developing an adventure without a finalized ruleset?).