Is that a bad idea?Well, there IS a wizard in the party...
Is that a bad idea?Well, there IS a wizard in the party...
This is probably part of the problem. Buffs on top of debuffs are really potent. You can boost your hit and crit rates by 15~30% if you’re stacking them up right.
From a tactical perspective, traditional RPG tactics can be self-defeating. If everyone charges in to fight the boss, then you’re just saving it the trouble of spending actions to move over to engage with the party. Make it waste those actions, shooting it as it approaches. If they won initiative, have the melee martials delay, so they can be ready to attack once it gets close.
The same goes for third actions. Unless you’re a flurry ranger fighting your hunted prey, you really shouldn’t be making a third Strike. It’s not likely to succeed, so you’re basically fishing for crits. You probably have a better chance trying to Demoralize your opponent. Even just moving away can be decent effective healing when the boss is likely to hit on its third attack.
Is this a matter of expectations or perception? Like, a “low-threat” encounter feels more difficult than what you would expect a “low-threat” encounter to be in another system?
I played a wizard in our game (up to level 5). It seemed to be consistently underpowered compared to the other characters.Is that a bad idea?
I played a wizard in our game (up to level 5). It seemed to be consistently underpowered compared to the other characters.
It probably depends on the group. If the players feel like they’re at risk for future encounters, then they’ll pull back and rest regardless of whether that’s actually necessary. Specifically, forcing them to burn daily resources makes them more inclined to think they’re “down” and need to stop and rest. That’s easy to trigger if they had used some prior to last fight.I'd expect the latter, honestly, because even the rough fights I've been in just didn't last long enough to burn through most of anything but someone's absolute top level spells. We definitely needed some Treat Wounds at the end there (I've been playing pretty much the damage sponge in both games, a Fighter in one and a Champion/Bard in the other, so I was often the person who needed the most propping up; I went down in a couple times, so its not like I didn't see some rough ones), but the real issue is that there's just not time to spend all the resources involved. If people are having fights that last the 6-8 rounds routinely in kind of needs for that, I'd be interested in, well, how (and I don't mean to be critical in saying that, I'm just genuinely puzzled).
It depends on the player. Some will fish for that crit because it’s exciting when it lands (even though it’s a worse option tactically). We have one player like that, but he’s playing a flurry ranger now, so at least he’s supposed to be doing that now.The only time I recall making a third strike with my fighter was the one time his shield got broken and I was fighting a golem. I just had nothing else useful to do (moving away was undesireable because I didn't particularly want it closing up with the cloistered cleric.)
I wonder how many people don't use the exploration activities? They can be very helpful to preventing you from walking into an ambush.Since we’re talking tactics I figured I would add this to the discussion:
I just ran a low-level game and my players stomped the encounters hard (one low, two severe one in which they didn’t have armor on, and one trivial). They aren’t tactical geniuses by any stretch but they are exploration focused and fairly cautious in combat: they really like to a) use shields instead of third attacks and b) at the start they do a lot of positioning/raising shields/readying actions/ranged attacks instead of rushing to engage opponents (the party is also dwarf heavy). This leads to a sort of flow of battle:
- perceive danger and arm up (ready shields and weapons get on armor if necessary/possible, initial positioning and recall knowledge checks, occasionally altering the terrain, making general plans; note the wizard wants to do more here but currently lacks the slots for a lot of utility spells).
- combat starts: positioning, raising shields, and readying, with a scattering of ranged attacks (all of the characters have ranged weapons now - why would you not have at least a sling?) and the enemy moves up (getting hit by readied attacks and AoOs). With a dwarf and shield heavy party, the PCs generally hold up really well to the initial assault.
- the party counterattacks the opponents, generally shredding them. Notably the wizard has, in two severe encounters, been absolutely devastating with blasts in this stage. Also two fighters working together (occasionally with bless from the cleric) are absolutely killer at these levels.
It probably depends on the group. If the players feel like they’re at risk for future encounters, then they’ll pull back and rest regardless of whether that’s actually necessary. Specifically, forcing them to burn daily resources makes them more inclined to think they’re “down” and need to stop and rest. That’s easy to trigger if they had used some prior to last fight.
It depends on the player. Some will fish for that crit because it’s exciting when it lands (even though it’s a worse option tactically). We have one player like that, but he’s playing a flurry ranger now, so at least he’s supposed to be doing that now.
I wonder how many people don't use the exploration activities? They can be very helpful to preventing you from walking into an ambush.
Well, that's a problem with any resource-consumption game, honestly; if people have a very low threshold of risk-taking and see resource renewal as a significant way to bolster that, you're always going to get some form of the five-minute work-day if it can be done. I've seen versions of it in every system with limited amount of magical or psionic power ever (I just watched someone put off directly dealing with a problem in my Mythras game tonight because one of the players had burned through his Devotion Points and wasn't about to take a chance he'd need them, even though even without them he's probably as capable as the one non-magically oriented character.).
I’m grouping these together because I think they’re getting at the same underlying issue: different groups have different levels of expertise (tactical acumen, char ops, etc), which affects the overall balance of the system — or perception thereof. I agree a system needs an intended audience. Even if you choose not to have a one, you’ll still end up designing one for an implicit audience.Well, at the end of the day, a game system is going to reward smart play or it isn't. If you balance it so that smart play doesn't completely overwhelm the game challenge, then there's always going to be an opportunity for people who just want to do what they want to do to feel the game is too hard. The alternative is that people who do play smart roll right over things. Pick one.
(The other alternative is that there's no real meaningful tactical choices to make, of course. That's definitely a thing, but its hard for me to see it as a virtue).
I’m grouping these together because I think they’re getting at the same underlying issue: different groups have different levels of expertise (tactical acumen, char ops, etc), which affects the overall balance of the system — or perception thereof. I agree a system needs an intended audience. Even if you choose not to have a one, you’ll still end up designing one for an implicit audience.
I think it would behoove Paizo to recognize that the mathematical underpinnings of PF2 gives it the flexibility to work with multiple groups. What I mean is explicitly calling out that the default assumes a decent level of tactical play. If your group is less interested in or just not good at that, then you downshift the difficulty. If your group is really good at that stuff, then you can upshift to even harder ones.
In a sense, that’s what people are doing to make PF1 (and other games) “work”, but PF2 offers a structure that can scale up or down. From what I’ve seen, I think it would be enough to make the default moderate-threat encounters and suggest that groups that are bad at tactics can use low-threat ones as their staple encounters and really good groups can use severe-threat ones.
The benefit of making this an explicitly tunable knob is it helps groups that don’t realize you can turn it, and it should help normalize different levels of play in the community. One could argue this will just create opportunities for toxic people to crap on people who prefer the lower difficulty, but those people already exist, and they’re doing it anyway.
Official adventures present a problem, but if the difficulty knob is now an assumption, then they could include guidance like they do for adjusting for party size. I’m not sure whether that would be in the CRB or the adventure because I’m not sure how party size is handled now. I’d expect the guidance on difficulty tuning would work similarly to how they do party size today.
The guidelines for encounter building are pretty up-front that tactical play is expected as the level of threat increases. The assumption conveyed in the GMG is moderate-threat encounters by default. I skimmed back over it, but I don’t see anything about changing the default based on your group. So maybe.I have a vague memory of some reference to doing this, but I could be conflating things from other games.
Hence the quotes around work. It was really an art in PF1. I pretty much just winged it when I ran my own stuff. I had a good feel for my group, so I could just do that. That’s obviously not scalable, and experiences will vary a lot between groups.The problem with doing this with PF1 and its precedents (and its cousin D&D 5e) is that, bluntly, it wasn't very well balanced internally; rather than just balancing encounter levels or the like, you had to juggle a lot of individual things based on the specifics of the player (and character) group. PF2e isn't, of course, perfect in this regard as when you start to approach perfect balance there are some knock-on effects that some people find very distasteful; D&D 4e probably approached it closer, and you can see the, shall we say, widely varied responses to that (it was, I think, on the whole a bridge too far for me, though I'm not actively hostile to it the way many people were). PF2e is a compromise here where there's still a little wobble in the structure, but where the degenerate cases tend to be fairly fringe, whereas they could be in (for example) D&D 3e all too common.
That’s a good point. I you’d need to entreat GMs to use their intuition to gauge what works best for the group and then make adjustments using the tools the system provides.You do also have the unavoidable problem that groups are often not evenly skilled/interested internally. This is obvious in anecdotes one hears where one group is groaning about that one guy that always goes off half-cocked, or another group that rolls their eyes about the guy who always second guesses what they do in a battle. These are clear cases of the one-man-out who is not in sync with the rest of the group, but its not uncommon to see some sometimes serious variation among a group, which can make setting such things complicated.
So pretty much just what the CRB has. I wasn’t sure whether they offered specific suggestions for how to change the encounter (like the demo adventure Torment and Legacy does).Generally speaking, party size modifies the expected experience budget you're supposed to use when constructing encounters (with the careful note that its usually better with larger groups to increase numbers of opponents than quality).
My understand of 5e is that difficulty can vary a lot by the group and how optimized the PCs are. Balancing around that is difficult, particularly at higher levels. It’s essentially the same problem that PF1 has.Is it more effort to make 5E harder or PF2 easier?
Is it more effort to make 5E harder or PF2 easier?
I would have agreed with you a few weeks ago, but I’m not convinced of that now (see: Know Direction #233 at around the 18m mark). I think they made a mistake. Specifically, I think the playtest didn’t adequately account for survivorship bias.I think this makes it harder for published pf2e adventures, as they cannot build for as wide a range of groups. I think they ere on the side of difficult so people don't complain the adventures are a pushover.