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

[Ancalagon]

However, the players really want to complete this AP. They have liked the story and the ability to claim a stronghold. I think more importantly, they don't want to quit from the challenge of it. They don't want to abandon it after feeling beaten.

as an aside: If the players feel that strongly about the campaign, you must be doing a very good job as a GM. So well done!

 

[Retreater]

Oof

See, as someone who runs some OSR games too, I find this... disturbing.

Encounters shouldn't necessarily be balanced to the party. It's up to the party to avoid threats and un-winable fight. See a big dragon at level 3? avoid it. you can't avoid it? Try to bribe it, offer it services, something.

The assumption that every encounter must be "balanced" bothers me. It can end up feeling extremely contrived. And not be able to have the monsters react to the PCs? Yikes....

Totally get you on that. I also run (and write) OSR adventures. A big difference is in the presentation. I haven't come across an OSR adventure that is so linear as to not allow options. The PF2 Adventure Path I'm running does just that. You tweak it a bit, and you might upset some detail that is important 3 books later. There's one thing to accomplish in the dungeon - and you have to do it in maybe a couple of ways. Another big difference is the time investment. You can roll up an OSR character in 5 minutes. In PF2, it can take an hour or more. You kill a character, and that player is going to be out for likely the rest of the session. That kills the fun.
It's not like Gunderholfen or Barrowmaze with a big subterranean environment to explore where the players get the choices of their directions and get to pick their fights. It's not like Hot Springs Island, a big open hexcrawl that characters can navigate. Pathfinder 2E presents an Adventure Path. If you don't go in that specific dungeon and walk through it through one or two prescribed ways, well, you just have to play another adventure.
When given no other choice to progress, players have every right to expect that an encounter is balanced. If they die, that's the end of the story. If they run away, also the end of the story. There's nothing else there to do. (Unless you want to just abandon the Adventure Path and write your own material.)

 

[Ancalagon]

Totally get you on that. I also run (and write) OSR adventures. A big difference is in the presentation. I haven't come across an OSR adventure that is so linear as to not allow options. The PF2 Adventure Path I'm running does just that. You tweak it a bit, and you might upset some detail that is important 3 books later. There's one thing to accomplish in the dungeon - and you have to do it in maybe a couple of ways. Another big difference is the time investment. You can roll up an OSR character in 5 minutes. In PF2, it can take an hour or more. You kill a character, and that player is going to be out for likely the rest of the session. That kills the fun.
It's not like Gunderholfen or Barrowmaze with a big subterranean environment to explore where the players get the choices of their directions and get to pick their fights. It's not like Hot Springs Island, a big open hexcrawl that characters can navigate. Pathfinder 2E presents an Adventure Path. If you don't go in that specific dungeon and walk through it through one or two prescribed ways, well, you just have to play another adventure.
When given no other choice to progress, players have every right to expect that an encounter is balanced. If they die, that's the end of the story. If they run away, also the end of the story. There's nothing else there to do. (Unless you want to just abandon the Adventure Path and write your own material.)

I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I will simply ask - are you saying it's a railroad? Because it sounds like a railroad...

 

[kenada]

I've seen the argument made against critical hit charts/decks in the past that it unduly punishes the PCs. If a PC gets an exceptional damage from a critical hit or inflicts a debilitating injury on a typical monster - whose lifespan is measured in rounds - that doesn't matter so much.
But what PF2 has done with its +10/-10 critical mechanic is that it is strongly against the players, in my experience. PCs are more impacted by huge damage from a monster's critical hit or critically failing a saving throw.
If the party kills 5 goblins - great, that's a successful combat. If the monsters kill 5 PCs - well, that's the end of the campaign.
Without feats, special equipment, etc., the odds used to be that enemies would get a critical success only 5% of the time. It seems like 25-35% of the time now, often with weapons that trigger additional effects and damage as well.
This is a slight departure from the original issue, but that also stemmed from the frequency of criticals in the game (in that case, critically failing a saving throw that led to a death effect).

The ±10 crit mechanic seems to be what makes encounter scaling work. Higher level things do considerably more damage, but as you approach parity, the average damage levels out. I don’t think the system would work if one just eliminated it or tried to reduce its severity. However, it can be mitigated somewhat by using Proficiency Without Level. The scaling is still there, but it tracks much more slowly with creature level.

I’m not sure how badly it would break APs to run them as written modulo using Proficiency Without Level. Harder encounters would definitely be easier, but the easier ones could potentially a bit nastier. It would be interesting to see how the threat levels came out, but that’s probably a non-trivial amount of work.

 

[kenada]

I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I will simply ask - are you saying it's a railroad? Because it sounds like a railroad...

I haven’t run this AP, but I have run others. Paizo adventures are structured around an overarching plot. The ones I’ve run were fairly flexible in how you went about going through them, but at the end of the day the point was to see and do the story. Even something like Kingmaker, which presents itself as a hexcrawl, was more of a facsimile of one. The hexcrawl ran essentially like a big dungeon except you visited hexes instead of rooms, and it was outside instead of inside. Whether one views that as a railroad ….

However, that’s official adventures. Paizo has been producing them in this style for a long time, so I wouldn’t take them as an indictment of the system per se. Yes, obviously PF2 was designed to support those adventures (and PFS), but it actually works really well for old-school style games. Some of us would actually say it works better (especially with Proficiency Without Level).

 

[CapnZapp]

In this case, I assumed that PCs got involved with the ogre, and now they have to fight it on that map that’s included in the adventure. They probably win (because moderate-threat encounter), but they’ll probably have to stop for the day (because newbies), and someone might have died (because massive damage). While using a different creature eliminates the last one of those three things, it won’t necessarily eliminate the first two.

On the other hand, only the last one of those three things is likely to be considered problematic...?

"probably win" = that's nice, and not something we want to eliminate
"stop for the day" = the adventure is IIRC completed and won, so no issue there

 

[CapnZapp]

I've seen the argument made against critical hit charts/decks in the past that it unduly punishes the PCs. If a PC gets an exceptional damage from a critical hit or inflicts a debilitating injury on a typical monster - whose lifespan is measured in rounds - that doesn't matter so much.
But what PF2 has done with its +10/-10 critical mechanic is that it is strongly against the players, in my experience. PCs are more impacted by huge damage from a monster's critical hit or critically failing a saving throw.
If the party kills 5 goblins - great, that's a successful combat. If the monsters kill 5 PCs - well, that's the end of the campaign.
Without feats, special equipment, etc., the odds used to be that enemies would get a critical success only 5% of the time. It seems like 25-35% of the time now, often with weapons that trigger additional effects and damage as well.
This is a slight departure from the original issue, but that also stemmed from the frequency of criticals in the game (in that case, critically failing a saving throw that led to a death effect).

I agree to the mathematical angle. You can't make a game more deadly unless you a) make it deadly only to the monsters, or b) accept more character deaths.

I don't agree with the loaded language. Nobody is "punishing" anyone.

I'd say it is actually quite reasonable to accept some level of risk at low levels. (Not Ogre levels of risk, mind you) In fact, D&D has always been risky at low levels. And a level 1 D&D character is simpler and faster to create than in almost any other ttrpg. The fact this changes fast as you level up doesn't change the fact that losing a level 1 D&D character is not losing a great time investment.

We've all heard the stories of old, where you waited to flesh out your character's background story until you had reached maybe 3rd or 4th level. Doing it before there was just too great a risk of it all going to waste because your character didn't make it out of the risk zone of the lowest couple of levels. Dying meant whipping up a new hero, which you did in 15 minutes tops. Then when you had a couple of 'ventures under your belt, you would probably also have come up with all sorts of background details. Conveniently, the risk of actual death quickly recedes at this point, and once higher-leveled save or die effects become common you have resurrection magic as well.

PF2 is definitely like this. It is far from a given that anyone is "punished" by this.

---


But while the Ogre example is unquestionably risky, I'd say that PF2 is pretty good at presenting the illusion of risk without actual risk.

Once off the lowest levels, yes, a player character might go down every other fight, but this very rarely leads to actual character death. Mostly the combat system works insofar that after one or two rounds the players think everything is lost, and maybe it's time to flee. However, even as little as one round later, it's obvious to everybody that the fight is under control, we got this, there's no problem here, even if it will take us another couple of rounds to actually deplete all the monster hp.

That's a good thing. Perhaps even worth the actual gauntlet you're running to reach that 4th level (or so) alive!

 

[kenada]

On the other hand, only the last one of those three things is likely to be considered problematic...?

"probably win" = that's nice, and not something we want to eliminate
"stop for the day" = the adventure is IIRC completed and won, so no issue there

If my goal is selling people on a system, I probably don’t want to knock out their characters in the very first fight (even if they survive, and the party can retreat and rest) regardless of what’s doing it.

 

[kenada]

What’s weird is they had a pretty decent demo adventure when I played it at Origins. It started off against some undead. You got to set up your exploration activities, and most characters had a chance to do their thing in that fight. After that, you went into a cave where you could Investigate some runes or whatever to get a bonus, and then you fought the evil high priest that was the reason you were out there. That would have been a much better two-encounter adventure than Torment and Legacy.

 

[CapnZapp]

Oof

See, as someone who runs some OSR games too, I find this... disturbing.

I can absolutely understand this.