(started a new thread since playing an official Adventure Path isn't necessarily identical to general PF2 play. Feel free to merge with the existing threads if you disagree a separate discussion is warranted. Thanks)
Thought I'd add a few observations on a specific example of playing Pathfinder 2: gamesmastering the Extinction Curse AP. This thread might have a couple of very light spoilers; any real secrets will be protected by tags.
I'm running the Extinction Curse official Adventure Path for five players: barbarian, cleric, fighter, ranger, wizard. The party is on the verge of reaching level 7 at the time of this writing.
In general: each level brings new surprises. Don't know how to say it otherwise.
It began with a hard, very hard life lesson right out the gate: Pathfinder 2 is nothing like 5th Edition. Monsters above your own level are unrelenting and deadly. Starting out with 15 or 20 hit points might feel like a lot, but make no mistake - at 1st level, you're just as close to death's door as you have always been at 1st level in Dungeons & Dragonsey games.
Hazards are notorious for their difficulty, even the Paizo forumists acknowledge that. Even then I wasn't prepared for...
...the level 8 Hazard featuring a Krooth summoning rune to completely wreck the party. Put simply, since there's no Rogue in the party, disabling the rune was impossible for them - they need a character with Expert Proficiency in both Acrobatics and Thievery to even get to roll. And since the rune was more than one level higher than the characters, they gave up on the idea of dispelling it - since they need a critical success, they basically need twenty spell slots of their highest level before they succeed, on average... (No Siree, 5th edition this is not! )
And the crocodile eater itself easily chewed off over a hundred damage before they could kill it...
...so there was nothing to it - even though they came at it fresh for the day, they had to stop for two hours to heal back up. Sigh.
However, there are clear... undulations. For instance, when they reached level 5, and had cash enough to upgrade their weaponry, that meant that level 4 monsters became outright easy. What I mean is that some levels bring greater upgrades than others. (I've heard that level 7 is another major upgrade. We will shortly see)
I can emphatically confirm that low levels are hard on spellcasters, at least if you have illusions of killing monsters. Put simply: you won't. That is firmly the domain of the martials. Spellcasters can heal and charm and do utility and lots of stuff, but even the once mighty Fireball comes across as decidedly unimpressive in this game. 6d6 with save for half is... just not a lot in a game where weapons at this level do two weapon damage dice, and where you can do three attacks already. (And martials have higher attack bonuses, meaning a greater shot at the double damage of a critical)
Sure, if and when you catch three or five bad guys in the blast, you might do slightly more damage than a martial. In that round. You might even be able to pull that off three or five times a day. They, on the other hand, can do it every round, all day long. At least in the context of this thread (running an official AP), each level pits you against ~11 encounters, which the martials can do in one day, no sweat. All that's stopping them is if the casters run out of spells and if they can persuade their friends the game is more fun for everyone if the casters get to reload on their spells. If you bring up this subject over at Paizo, you'll get swamped by people hotly defending Paizo, but if you ask me I'll simply say that where blasters come into their own at level 5 in 3E or 5E, they are still waiting to do so at level 6 in PF2...
Which brings us to attrition and resource management. At least in my game, there isn't any. The Medicine skill and related feats allow a group to heal up completely in about an hour, not involving any resources (such as spells or potions). (Don't get me wrong; in-combat healing is definitely a thing in PF2, and a Cleric is a very valued addition to a party)
But since fights are so hard (more about that in a sec), players are loathe to continue adventuring without all their hit points, and since Medicine allows them to heal up completely at no cost, they quickly got used to doing just that after every fight.
However, this is a big problem for me, since this messes with pacing. It's a bit like the way 5E changed "short rest" from 5 minutes to one hour, except that in 5E it isn't really a problem, since you simply never have to take short rest after short rest - you can nearly always pull of a whole sequence of encounters between rests, and indeed the 5E system is predicated on just that.
In my game, however, fights are brutal, since Paizo is relentless in making every encounter "level appropriate". You ALWAYS meet monsters that are one or two levels above or below you. In fact, since PF2 features a full level bonus to... everything, the basic math of the game basically demands it. A monster more than four levels higher than you are off the charts difficult, as in, the official encounter guidelines don't even have any guidelines for it. And a monster more than four levels below you are again not part of the guidelines, and gives zero xp.
But more than that: encounters are invariably hard. Facing three foes at L-1 or two foes at L+1 are hard slogs, that routinely shave at least a hundred damage off of the party.
Which brings us back to the pacing issue: if a character has taken more than 50 damage, he or she will require an hour's recuperation (give or take). Since this happens more often than not, regardless of a fight's stated difficulty, it basically means that the party takes one hour after every fight.
This in turn means that the credulity of dungeon runs is sorely tested. Why aren't the monsters reacting to invaders? In 5E or maybe AD&D the answer is "because it all happened in the last hour or so". In PF2, I'm getting a bad taste of videogame in my mouth as I struggle to justify why each encounter remains static and isolated, even when the heroes have cleared out half the dungeon over several hour's worth of exploration. Yes, PF2 (at least in this AP) features the bad old "classic" trope of fighting some monsters in one dungeon room, while the denizens of the next room - less than 60 feet away! - are expected to just sit on their hands, at least until most of the first room's monsters are dead enough for reinforcements not to break the game's encounter math!
Even that wouldn't necessarily be a problem if I could just have monsters react "naturally", and prop up their defenses. But I'm running the game as written, with the default level-to-proficiency bonus intact. And the math of the game basically prevents me from having monsters band together for security. You simply can't take two encounters worth of XP and combine them unless both are average or below: this would immediately create an encounter with an XP budget above "extreme": something the game isn't built for. Even two "low" challenges combined creates a "severe" challenge. Believe me when I say you don't want to pitch more than one or two of those suckers each dungeon/level!
Again, had heroes been able to catch their breath in 5-10 minutes time between encounters, or if encounters didn't always do so much damage they had to rest at all, I could explain and justify this: everything bad for the monsters would then happen in less than an hour (except when the heroes retreat for the night), as I'm used to. In Pathfinder 2, there are intricate and complex rules for non-magical healing that doesn't cost anything - except lots of time.
I'm not sure what to do, if anything. I need to get a read from my players, of course - do they feel there's a problem here? I know they are curious about getting the "default" experience, so this is not the time for quick fixes and lots of experimentation.
But I'm getting a 4E vibe from the way the adventure dungeons are set-up; which deadens my inspiration and drive.
What I mean by that is that the idea that the adventure is a movie where you focus only on the dramatic set-pieces, not caring about any of the stuff in-between, doesn't work for me.
For one thing, it denies the heroes the chance to feel truly awesome. In order for level-up to mean anything, you need to face the same old enemies, right? Previously, you struggled a lot, now you cut through them like butter! That feeling is to me essential to injecting true value to the level treadmill of D&D games.
For instance, this adventure features a lot of troglodytes. But the heroes fight the Bestiary troglodytes (which are level 1, 2 and 3 critters) only at the lowest levels. Now they're level 6, and lo and behold, there are level 5 and 6 trogs! In future installments, they will (not really a spoiler) fight level 12 troglodytes at levels 11-14... and so on.
Call me a traditionalist, but I actually like the notion that "Orcs are low level enemies while Dragons are high level enemies". Not sure what to do with the idea that you can fight (and almost lose) against bloody troglodytes at every step of the way, regardless of your increasingly epic heroism...
So in summary, I'm struggling a bit with the format. The tl;dr: might be "GM gets momentary fatigue with hard slogs".
As far as I can see, official APs are geared towards players who enjoy every fight being an isolated challenge, players who are okay with skipping over the easy parts, and players who don't think too hard about logic and verisimilitude.
Which to me is too similar to my objections of 4E. (I need to be very clear: the game does not play anything like 4E. PF2 is not 4E. But there are too many... philosophical similarities and design sensibilites... that carry across for me to be truly happy)
I think I need to downgrade some of the encounters for my own sake. If the party could power through more encounters without having to break off adventuring for 20 or 60 or 80 minutes, that would kill two flies with the same stone: it adds desperately needed variety (of the "we're awesome" kind, mind you, since the other kind of variety, "we're completely outclassed", is not as needed ) and it helps me explain why the remaining monsters haven't had time to react to the invaders. It would also mean that the non-social less-fun half of the AP (the trog dungeons) runs a wee bit quicker.
Thank you for reading. I really needed to get that off my chest
Also keep in mind this concerns running official APs, and running them as written, which is far from all kinds of Pathfinder 2 play.
For instance, I GMd a cool little sandbox while awaiting the release of the AP (we started out as soon as the rulebook was published - don't think Age of Ashes was even an option back then), and my current woes wasn't an issue there.
Of course, I had to create my own encounters in that campaign, and I guess I didn't ever think of creating a string of ten or twelve encounters, that all were of unrelenting difficulty... ¯\(ツ)/¯
(That campaign used gold-for-xp and was set in a slightly more decadent version of Sandpoint, so a typical adventuring day was much less taxing for them. They would do a short excursion outside the city, and then maybe have a mishap while carousing at night. In short, the question of why monsters don't gang up for defense never appeared)
I think I need to downgrade some of the encounters for my own sake. If the party could power through more encounters without having to break off adventuring for 20 or 60 or 80 minutes, that would kill two flies with the same stone: it adds desperately needed variety (of the "we're awesome" kind, mind you, since the other kind of variety, "we're completely outclassed", is not as needed ) and it helps me explain why the remaining monsters haven't had time to react to the invaders. It would also mean that the non-social less-fun half of the AP (the trog dungeons) runs a wee bit quicker.
That seems like the way to go. Remember playing by RAW is no the same as following an AP explicitly. It seems to me it might make sense to just keep using those lvl 1-3 trogs instead of constantly upgrading them. Might solve several issues as you surmise.
Hey thanks for posting this CZ. I've gotten my feet wet with some PF2 homebrew and I'm about to restart it once things open up again and I'm always interested to see what people are running into with a new set of rules.
While I liked 4E I am totally with you on the idea that monsters should generally be set at a certain range instead of leveling with the party. Unless this is some legendary band of troglodyte heroes I'd be asking where the heck they came from?
After playing in some, running some, and reading many ... the APs are weird. Lot of unwritten or at least lightly explained assumptions in them that often don't even follow their own game's rules and a fair degree of inconsistency from book to book.
Again, thanks for some actual play experience that isn't a session recap!
Yeah, but we all went into this with the mindset of first playing it "by the book" before switching it up - no house rules, no AP changes; playing it the way Paizo "intended".
Not that it's easy (or even possible) to understand how some things are meant to work...
Nah, it's just that regular troopers always be your level or slightly lower.
At first, you fight "warriors". They're level 1. Followed by "leaders". They're level 3. That's from the Bestiary. Then the AP adds "spinesnappers", "stonelieges", "roughriders" and so on. They're level 5, 8 and 11, respectively...
That's from the first four installments. I fully expect more Xulgath coming in the final two scenarios.
Yeah, but we all went into this with the mindset of first playing it "by the book" before switching it up - no house rules, no AP changes; playing it the way Paizo "intended".
Not that it's easy (or even possible) to understand how some things are meant to work...
I know that is what you wanted; however, I don't know if the AP is really the way Paizo "intended." It is possible they didn't fully understand the ramifications of some of the choices they made in the AP. With PF1 they had all of the previous 3e/3.5e experience to write PF1 adventures. With PF2 the are starting from scratch. It may take a bit to design APs that play as "intended."
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