FrozenNorth
Hero
Off topic, but when I was a tween and a teen, the principal factor in buying a book was whether I had the money. These days, it is all about the shelf space (and time).
Pathfinder 2E Another Deadly Session, and It's Getting Old
It's a problem because the challenge scales so sharply. Higher-level monsters (traps, hazards, etc.) are much more likely to have devastating critical effects that can decimate a party. Lower-level monsters see this reversed, where they aren't an adequate challenge. I have seen this in my table many times, and numerous posters in this thread have said the same thing.
And I've found that so much as one character moving a single square that wasn't perfectly tactically optimal led to the party getting stomped. So yes, it has to be perfect, because the balance is so integral to the game.
Thomas Shey
Legend
My argument is that this was also largely true in PF1e, and in 3e D&D. You might be able to make up some of the difference at the bottom end with numbers, but it was still enough of a known issue that 3e explicitly tells you that below a certain level monsters weren't even worth experience.
I simply can flat out state it isn't true, because I'm hardly an absolutely optimal player and I've not gotten myself or my party flattened. So either you're being hyperbolic or you're over-extrapolating from some bad luck.
This doesn't mean that that PF2e can't be more unforgiving than some versions of D20, but the idea its absolutely so is pretty eye-rolling. If that was true it'd do that every time someone was having a bad night, and everyone has a bad night sometimes.
I'm not being intentionally hyperbolic. Like there are combats that there seems no wiggle room. One guy isn't standing in the protection aura of another character and gets destroyed, which turns the tide of battle. Or if one character would've shifted, that +2 to hit would've resulted in enough damage to drop the foe who later took out another character.
And maybe we just have bad luck. One player is convinced that's the case. But the math seems so tight that there is no wiggle room. If you don't take every advantage, then you're going to lose. And I'm running for extra players, higher level, and with better equipment than the suggested levels for the AP.
If your players love the system, but you’d rather do something OSR, why not meet them half-way and do an OSR-style game using PF2? I hate to sound like a broken record, but several of us have had good luck running that style (to varying degrees) of game in PF2. No, you can’t use an AP, but you probably weren’t going to be doing that in your hypothetical OSR game.
Don’t use moderate encounters as your staple encounters. By design, they’re meant to risk ending the adventuring day if the party doesn’t play them well, so combining them yields dangerous results. If you stick with lower-threat ones (and if you’re not using an AP, that is easy to do), then you can let things snowball and combine more organically.
As far as using monsters outside the intended band, use Proficiency Without Level. It doesn’t help with combining (because two moderates is still a severe either way), but it gives you a significantly expanded roster of creatures to use. At 5th level, I’ve got ~88% of the bestiaries I could throw at my PCs unmodified. Obviously I need to use the tools to make sure I don’t do something silly like surprise them with five level 12 enemies (but that might be okay with foreshadowing).
As an aside, it was mentioned on reddit that the encounter-building guidelines are tuned incorrectly. I’m not sure if this will end up in the errata or the FAQ, but it was suggested that you should treat everything as one level higher for encounter building purposes to make things work as intended. That means a moderate-threat as currently written should actually be considered a severe-threat encounter.
Supposedly a blog post about the next errata is coming soon, but I don’t know whether that will actually be included. However, it would certainly explain why the APs are just so incredibly difficult unless your group is really savvy at teamwork and tactics if it were true that they messed up the encounter-building math.
Anyway, this is only a half-serious suggestion. You’re the GM, so you should be running what you enjoy. I summarily declared one day that I wouldn’t run PF1 anymore, and that was our last PF1 campaign. If you feel likewise about PF2, then definitely go do something that better does what you want out of a game.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Well, let me do a couple of elaborations on my position here:
1. If you're dealing with a particularly tough encounter in PF2e, it can be unforgiving. A bad series of decisions or a bad set of die rolls and things can go very wrong. This is important because some encounters in the early APs were distinctly overtuned. The place where the game can be more forgiving is that, well, put simply, the only thing you're normally really worried about is a TPK; its actually much harder to lose an individual character than in most versions of D20 (not impossible, but it requires somewhat unusual circumstances). But that's far from every encounter, and if its turning up in every encounter, either they're all set up overtuned, or something else is going on.
2. Again, I have to point out if what you say was literally true, it'd be happening to everybody. Yeah, it makes a difference if you have a set of players who are paying attention, trying to engage with the game system, and keeping an eye on ways to support each other, rather than just blindly doing the same thing all the time with no attention to the the situation. But even without that, like I said, everyone has bad nights and every group has people with varied levels of attention. If it was as tight as you think it was, don't you think even they would be having problems?
Things can absolutely get hair-raising in PF2e, and some of the APs make this more true than others. I'm playing in Age of Ashes now, and we just hit an encounter that could have been much hairier if I didn't happen to get a couple crits in relatively early; my character was down to five hit points at one point. And that's counting the fact that the four of us were playing hybrids, which, while not as big a thumb on the scale as some might suggest given the action economy unless you actively choose the classes to super-reinforce and the limits of hybridization, does help.
But that encounter shouldn't be typical. We had others we just breezed through, and even some slapdash play or bad die rolls wouldn't have changed that unless it was extreme. And that was true of the limited-run campaign we did before with normal 5-7th level characters.
That said, as Keneda says, if you're really not happy with it, you're not. Your experiences have been your experiences. I'm just leery of generalizations that clearly can't be true because of the obvious experiences of others, especially when there are other explanations.
PF2 makes some pretty strong assumptions about tactics and teamwork, especially in moderate- and higher-threat encounters. It might be only day-ending in moderate-threat encounters, but those are pretty common in APs (apparently). At higher-threat encounters, bad luck is cited explicitly as something that can get you killed.
I don’t run APs, but I’ve seen that same effect at my table. My group does not consistently use good tactics, and the alchemist tends to play very conservatively (typically just throwing a bomb and then hiding behind his shield). Consequently, moderate-threat encounters are about as high as I can go. When they finally do run into a severe-threat (or worse) encounter, it’s going to be ugly.
I'm involved in three campaigns. One that is leaving 5e for Swords and Wizardry (I'm the GM), one that is leaving 5e for Old School Essentials (I'll be leaving as DM to be a player), and the PF2 Age of Ashes campaign, which I am GMing. The group wants the "authentic Adventure Path" experience - they want it as close to the RAW (and the design of the AP) as possible to see how the system holds up. I'm frustrated, but I think I'm not as frustrated as some of the players are - yet, they want to stick with it, and I'm willing to do the same as long as they are.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
Looks like you're getting that - in spades. One suggestion - take one of the encounters that really pounded your group, step it down a level, and try it again with as close to the original conditions of the party as you can. That may give you a bit of a test of the idea that things are tuned a level too high.
Thomas Shey
Legend
I'm not sold its day ending even in moderate ones; a big part of that is burning through spells, and its really hard to do all that in one encounter no matter what you do in PF2e, just because its really hard for a battle to last long enough to give you time.
(I don't disagree with the latter part of your statement, as long as what you mean is "can potentially lead to a TPK." With most opponents the way death is handled means its generally very unlikely that you'll get a solitary kill of a PC).
It may very well be that groups that are really bad with tactics will have severe problems with post-moderate encounters. I don't see that saying anything but "If you can't get them to change that, stick to moderate encounters". You can answer "Then what about APs?" to which my answer is "Its not the only game where a certain minimum level of play is assumed for published adventures." In fact, I'd argue most do.I don’t run APs, but I’ve seen that same effect at my table. My group does not consistently use good tactics, and the alchemist tends to play very conservatively (typically just throwing a bomb and then hiding behind his shield). Consequently, moderate-threat encounters are about as high as I can go. When they finally do run into a severe-threat (or worse) encounter, it’s going to be ugly.
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