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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8136950" data-attributes="member: 6801252">You know, I think this is the flaw with your emphasis on official adventures-- no adventure can be designed for every type of play, usually in this genre when a monster has the kinds of interactions you're claiming pf2e can't handle, they instruct you on where the monster wants to go and what encounters come in. If the game assumed all encounters have to be combine-able, then by nature, no encounter could ever be truly challenging on its own.I've seen that lots of times in various adventure modules in other places, but I think the Pathfinder modules are designed to tax the GM less, they can just play out the encounters as singular set pieces, for the most part and they'll be a fairly balanced challenge-- they don't have to set up or juggle some complicated series of interactions to offer their players a challenge.But that's a choice the adventure itself makes, and I don't think it makes any sense to assume that new GMs are defaulting to shoving encounters together, the kind of behavior involving retreats and such that we're discussing is actually something the community has to train new players to do, its a very common point of advice for how to spice up games when players get bored of stand and deliver encounters. It makes more sense to assume they aren't doing that, and give them satisfying and challenging encounters right out of the box.I Don't think most people are actually running OSR style dungeon crawling games, I think they're running pretty linear set pieces, and those of us that are running OSR style dungeon crawling games have the experience to make it work, and the system supports us very well in that endeavor (exploration rules, accurate encounter guidelines with linear scaling on encounters, etc.)Similarly you don't have to be skilled to make it work, not every Pathfinder GM has Age of Ashes to base their encounters on, but every GM has the Core Rulebook where the encounter building guidelines I keep referencing can be found, its more or less required reading.  Placing encounters with the idea they could be combined as relatively low difficulty by themselves isn't some skilled technique, it just means paying attention when the book tells you whats already difficult by itself.  Most players aren't running published adventures, even in Pathfinder, they're running home games where the encounter guidelines are the only example that matters.This reminds me of the killer encounters at the beginning of 4e's Keep on the Shadowfell, and 5e's Rise of Tiamat. Neither of which I would consider to be especially 'killer' games in terms of difficulty, and no one else really considers them as such either (though I suppose level 1 5e has a reputation.)EDIT: <a href="https://paizo.com/threads/rzs438xq?A-lot-of-monsters-in-Paizo-APs-sit-in-their#12">In fact, literally just now, a designer wrote a super cool post about how encounters are designed in terms of static vs. dynamic that describes this exactly.</a></blockquote>

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