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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MaskedGuy" data-source="post: 8136531" data-attributes="member: 6916225">Thing is though, it isn't an "issues" per say. Most of published adventures of any system don't usually seem to assume combining encounters unless the adventure itself states they do so. Like I said, issue is more of that in most systems, game isn't actually in balanced, so adding mooks to "difficult" encounter doesn't make it "impossible" encounter.Like in 2e, you can easily combine "easy" encounters with each other to make them into "sem difficult" or "difficult just in sheer numbers" depending on the monsters itself, but you can't combine "easy" encounters with "difficult" encounters and keep them as just "difficult".Like thing I disagree with CapnZapp is this particular feature being 2e exclusive per say. Like yeah the balance being stricter means its harder to do in 2e without killing PCs, but if you go with logic of "Don't have monsters act intelligent" then problem with that is... Well, most intelligent thing for monsters to do technically and game mechanics wise would be "after alarm starts, gather EVERY monster in same room". Which even in PF 1e or 5e tends to be a tpk unless PCs have passed the "they are so broken they are basically gods on earth" level. So I think its false to say that in "2e you have to make monster act dumber than they usually do" since that is core of how dungeon design works in almost every system: Either the dungeon is designed as "massive single encounter where by time pcs deal with first wave, the second wave arrives", or its designed as series of roms with their own challenges where the encounters aren't assumed to combine as its assumed players go the rooms one by one <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />In terms of Paizo adventure designs, they avoid the old school D&D thing of "Wizard built a room of challenges just because" and tend to go more with "the dungeon is ancient ruins with different creatures having their own different territories and they don't like interacting with each other" or "this dungeon is base of a gang or group that took it over and uses it as fortress". In first case, combining encounters doesn't make much sense because the creatures in dungeon aren't aligned together, in latter its easy to assume that "well, why wouldn't they just combine the encounters, they could kill pcs easily that way!" but its not like in real life castle sieges were solved with "throw all the men in large pile in one cramped room!" so you can justify it in character why the bandits would stay in their "defense positions" waiting for pcs to reach bottle neck they are protecting.But yeah, game design wise most dungeon don't seem to be designed with intent of "okay, its like monsters pour out of their cool locales to find pcs" and more of "pcs go deeper and deeper into the dungeon" and that isn't just PF thing, its universal D&D thing as far as I can tell.If you design the dungeon yourself, then yeah, you can pretty easily plan it around concept of encounters combining as long you know system well enough. But that is the thing, I don't actually think most gms either design dungeons around with concept of "all encounters combine into one", when they tend to do large scale encounters, the dungeon seems to be more of "you walk through several traps or series of enemy free rooms into one big room with lot of enemies" rather than dungeon being composed of lot of small rooms with each having their own encounters. That is my impression from internet tales and livestreams and such at least <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Like I think its way more common for gms who read published adventures to combine encounter because "well it seems like it would make more sense" than combine their own dungeon encounters. Because usually the gms design it in same way as adventure writers do: as a series of encounters rather than as one single encounter. But when they read someone else's adventure, they tend to be like "well from enemy perspective, wouldn't it make sense to do this instead?" Does that make sense? Dunno if I explained my thought process there well</blockquote>

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