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

[CapnZapp]

I totally agree. Even the starter adventure they released for free starts off against a nasty encounter. Paizo really needs to crank the difficulty down a notch to broaden the appeal of their adventures beyond just those who like challenging combat.

You're thinking of the way the simple starter adventure that pitches the freshly hatched heroes against an Ogre, right?

This monster is technically "only" two levels above the heroes level so I can see how an inexperienced writer selects it for the "final fight".

But the problem is that its attack deals 1d10+7 damage.

What's the problem with that, you might think. A PF2 hero doesn't start with 1d4 hit points, they will all have between 14-20 hit points even at level 1.

Except it stands a ~25% chance of scoring a critical hit... which not only doubles the damage but adds an extra d10 damage on top!
Or example hero has 18 hp and AC 18 (many characters will be worse off than this). With a +12 attack bonus, the Ogre needs to roll 16 on the d20 to score a critical hit against this character.

Even the sturdiest and tankiest fighter thus stands a real chance of going from fully healed to irrevocably dead in a single hit, with no comeback possible in any way.

Sure that risk isn't exactly overwhelming, but.. what were they thinking? If even 5% of prospective gamers walk away with a character sheet torn in half for being killed in a way that would come as an utter surprise and involve zero mistake on their part... isn't that kind of a bad introduction...?

Specifically: we're talking about the massive damage rule. It really only matters at very low levels, but that's exactly when you don't want to scare away newcomers, before they're hooked on your product that is...

You die instantly if you ever take damage equal to or greater than double your maximum Hit Points in one blow.

Massive Damage - Rules - Archives of Nethys: Pathfinder 2nd Edition Database

You die instantly if you ever take damage equal to or greater than double your maximum Hit Points in one blow.

2e.aonprd.com

So imagine a character with 18 hit points. She dies instantly if a single hit deals 36 damage. If the first d10 comes up an 8, 9, or 10, there's a real risk of the second "deadly" d10 taking you over the top. For instance: (1d10 rolls a 8+7)x2+1d10 rolls a 6=36

I can't be bothered to calculate the exact probability for this outcome, but you should easily see we're not talking one-in-a-thousand. I'd guesstimate something like 4% - it would happen to one in every twenty-five groups playing this adventure.

And even that's conservative - it assumes

• the Ogre only gets a single attack before being killed, which - given that it is a L+2 creature with an ally - is not really realistic
• the Ogre never gets a swing against something less sturdy than a mainline warrior
• the Ogre never manages to flank with its Kobold(?) buddy, and that it never manages to first trip a character and then attack him

and maybe most worrying...

• the Ogre never attacks an already-wounded hero!

 

[CapnZapp]

The system entreats you to customize them. I’ve also run my share of PF1 APs, and you can (and should) tweak them for your group. If something is bad, I just throw it out. I hadn’t gotten to the point yet of using adversary rosters and running dynamic complexes, but that is how I would run them today (making changes to the encounters as necessary to make the adversary roster work). I don’t think the two things are as incompatible as you say. However, I admit it’s a style preference. You’re definitely entitled to do things by the book if that’s your preference or interpretation of how they should be done.

It's our first Paizo Adventure Path, ever. My players have specifically asked for the "default experience".

That hasn't stopped me from making stuff up, of course, but I try to contain the urge to move stuff around or to strike things entirely.

I will definitely not run my own adventures as so unrelentingly hard. I would prefer a "game pace" where rests have meaning. For a decision to have meaning both doing it and not doing it must be reasonable choices. But in PF2 on default difficulty moving on without always topping up your HP is a death sentence. In order to have three encounters in a row, this must be an adventure decision, because the players have learnt never to voluntarily go for that. I guess you could say that I want the game pace to be more in control of the players rather than them just sitting on the roller-coaster that sometimes goes fast, and sometimes goes slow.

So in future campaigns I'll need to explore variant rules where rest healing is less free and less powerful (and also less fiddly and faster to administer out-of-game), in exchange for not every encounter requiring you to be fully recharged.

 

[CapnZapp]

It’s not that I think it’s invalid. You’re saying, “poking everything with a stick is boring, so we’ll just assume everyone does that,” and I’m saying, “poking everything with a stick is boring, so let’s not bother with hazards when they don’t contribute anything interesting to the game.”

Hey, I'm just running the traps as written on the page.

If that makes for a less than satisfactory experience (which is how this thread got started) that should not be met by "you the GM need to step up your game", as some posters have been inclined to do. It's entirely reasonable to put this squarely on the game and module design.

 

[CapnZapp]

Yeah, there’s a big focus on a certain style of play on reddit and the official forums. I’ve limited my participation to non-advice stuff there because suggesting a different approach gets a mixed response, and I just don’t want to deal with it. I almost feel that way about here. I mean, look at where this thread has taken us.

Yes, I'm quite often baffled by the way forumists on Paizo forums manage to completely ignore anything bad about their game, conjuring up one fantastical reason why what-you-consider-bad-is-actually-good after one another... It's a bit like talking to religious fanatics I imagine... (not that I'd ever make the mistake of participating on forums that allow religion & politics talk...)

It's also the reason I prefer to have my rules discussions here at EN World. You guys are considerably more open to the idea that a rule written in the book might not be as ideally perfect that it can't be improved further...

 

[CapnZapp]

Rather ironically, I do not think Pathfinder 2 is well set up for Adventure Path play.

THANK YOU!

This is exactly my sentiment - there's something distinctly wonky about how the scenario expectations clashes with what the rules actually produce.

 

[kenada]

You're thinking of the way the simple starter adventure that pitches the freshly hatched heroes against an Ogre, right?

This monster is technically "only" two levels above the heroes level so I can see how an inexperienced writer selects it for the "final fight".

But the problem is that its attack deals 1d10+7 damage.

What's the problem with that, you might think. A PF2 hero doesn't start with 1d4 hit points, they will all have between 14-20 hit points even at level 1.

Except it stands a ~25% chance of scoring a critical hit... which not only doubles the damage but adds an extra d10 damage on top!
Or example hero has 18 hp and AC 18 (many characters will be worse off than this). With a +12 attack bonus, the Ogre needs to roll 16 on the d20 to score a critical hit against this character.

Even the sturdiest and tankiest fighter thus stands a real chance of going from fully healed to irrevocably dead in a single hit, with no comeback possible in any way.

Sure that risk isn't exactly overwhelming, but.. what were they thinking? If even 5% of prospective gamers walk away with a character sheet torn in half for being killed in a way that would come as an utter surprise and involve zero mistake on their part... isn't that kind of a bad introduction...?

Specifically: we're talking about the massive damage rule. It really only matters at very low levels, but that's exactly when you don't want to scare away newcomers, before they're hooked on your product that is...

Massive Damage - Rules - Archives of Nethys: Pathfinder 2nd Edition Database

You die instantly if you ever take damage equal to or greater than double your maximum Hit Points in one blow.

2e.aonprd.com

So imagine a character with 18 hit points. She dies instantly if a single hit deals 36 damage. If the first d10 comes up an 8, 9, or 10, there's a real risk of the second "deadly" d10 taking you over the top. For instance: (1d10 rolls a 8+7)x2+1d10 rolls a 6=36

I can't be bothered to calculate the exact probability for this outcome, but you should easily see we're not talking one-in-a-thousand. I'd guesstimate something like 4% - it would happen to one in every twenty-five groups playing this adventure.

And even that's conservative - it assumes

• the Ogre only gets a single attack before being killed, which - given that it is a L+2 creature with an ally - is not really realistic
• the Ogre never gets a swing against something less sturdy than a mainline warrior
• the Ogre never manages to flank with its Kobold(?) buddy, and that it never manages to first trip a character and then attack him

and maybe most worrying...

• the Ogre never attacks an already-wounded hero!

Yep, I’m talking about that one, and I have the exact same issue with it. On average, a crit kills most of the pregens outright. The fighter can be killed by a slightly better crit. However, even if it were a different creature, being a moderate-threat encounter is still a problem.

The reason for that is moderate-threat encounters expect the players to play well (or the adventure day will likely end after that encounter). If you’re running a game for new players, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t have enough system mastery to play well (especially if they’ve played other RPGs and use tactics that are self-defeating in PF2).

If I wanted to run that for a group of new players, I’d grab a map and fill it up with trivial- and low-threat encounters, running it as a dynamic complex with an adversary roster filled up with mites and their buddies. I’d keep the ogre as a patrol, and the wizard would be the boss who usually hung out in the back in his wizard lab or whatever.

That kind of setup would give the players a chance to also experience exploration mode and make meaningful decisions. If they’re smart, they can avoid the ogre or even fight it in a situation where they’ve created an advantage for themselves. I think that would be a much more compelling introduction to the game than what Paizo released.

Even if Paizo wouldn’t do the dynamic complex stuff, I still think it would be better with mostly easier encounters. Paizo needs to court players who aren’t just in it for the hard (and sometimes punishing) combat. Instead, we got something that starts off with the dial cranked up. If you love RPG tactics, then you probably loved what you got (even if it included a TPK), but I wonder how many players noped right on past PF2 because of the difficulty.

 

[kenada]

It's our first Paizo Adventure Path, ever. My players have specifically asked for the "default experience".

That hasn't stopped me from making stuff up, of course, but I try to contain the urge to move stuff around or to strike things entirely.

I will definitely not run my own adventures as so unrelentingly hard. I would prefer a "game pace" where rests have meaning. For a decision to have meaning both doing it and not doing it must be reasonable choices. But in PF2 on default difficulty moving on without always topping up your HP is a death sentence. In order to have three encounters in a row, this must be an adventure decision, because the players have learnt never to voluntarily go for that. I guess you could say that I want the game pace to be more in control of the players rather than them just sitting on the roller-coaster that sometimes goes fast, and sometimes goes slow.

So in future campaigns I'll need to explore variant rules where rest healing is less free and less powerful (and also less fiddly and faster to administer out-of-game), in exchange for not every encounter requiring you to be fully recharged.

Like I said, if your group wanted “by the book”, then that’s totally valid. It does stink that the system doesn’t really convey what that means, since you subsequently had issues with pacing (i.e., resting and being prepared for encounters). If it had said, “we expect players to be clever and avoid encounters, and GMs to appropriately foreshadow difficulty,” that would be one thing. It doesn’t, so GMs are left to guess or fall back on existing habits (hence why I’d run things dynamically because that’s just what I do anymore).

My first AP was Council of Thieves. We only got through book 1 because the group fell apart when people couldn’t reliable show up. That’s a shame because I thought the play in book 2 would have been fun to do. After that, we did Kingmaker. I didn’t think it at the time; but, in retrospect, that was a really good AP and probably the best one we’ve done. We did some other ones after that (Rise of the Runelords, Shattered Star) but never finished. We ended RotR on a TPK, and I just pulled the plug on Shattered Star because I got tired of how it was written. We did Dragon’s Demand after that and then some non-AP campaigns set in various areas of Golarion.

I’d always customized and tweaked things, but I usually didn’t feel the need to adjust encounters. I did rebuild a few NPCs that were too weak (because the default assumptions regarding class level and CR don’t really hold). That’s why I say I think we’d have bounced off PF2 if I’d have run an AP. I’d probably tweak things, run the rest of the encounters at the default difficulty, and then my group would have TPK’d a time or two and decided PF2 wasn’t for them.

 

[kenada]

Hey, I'm just running the traps as written on the page.

If that makes for a less than satisfactory experience (which is how this thread got started) that should not be met by "you the GM need to step up your game", as some posters have been inclined to do. It's entirely reasonable to put this squarely on the game and module design.

I’m not reading it that way, but I’m also not on the receiving end of the argument. I don’t want to invalidate your experience, so I’ll just leave it at that.

I think it’s a recurring theme that PF2 suffers for not teaching GMs how to run the game. It’s obvious from these battle reports that it’s making some assumptions that aren’t shared across the groups that run or play them, and that’s causing problems.

I can pick up and run a copy of OSE for my group, and we know we’re doing the dungeons correctly because it tells us exactly how that works. Wandering monsters and even evasion are built into the rules. If I just follow the rules, we’ll have the intended experience. Moreover, I don’t need to fall back on my existing experience to know what to do.

Or I could pick up a copy of Apocalypse World and just run it. The game is pretty explicit about your agenda and principles, and it uses those to tie together its mechanics. If I follow the rules as the MC (and that is expected because winging it is cheating), then we’ll have the intended experience.

For whatever reason, modern games just assume people know how to run a dungeon. They’ll talk about dungeons and their contexts in adventure, but they usually don’t drill down into the nuts and bolts of taking the various systems and making them function together at the table.

That’s why people assume that some form of railroading is the default in a story-driven game, or how people can pick up PF2 and get completely obliterated by the difficulty. I was looking at some of the posts in the official Age of Ashes forum, and some people were like: yeah, we’ve already had a couple of TPKs. Like that’s a matter of fact normal thing that happens. I run combat hard and have my share of deaths and TPKs, but I wouldn’t consider any of that just a matter of course.

 

[CapnZapp]

Yep, I’m talking about that one, and I have the exact same issue with it. On average, a crit kills most of the pregens outright. The fighter can be killed by a slightly better crit. However, even if it were a different creature, being a moderate-threat encounter is still a problem.

Except that I actually looked at some other possible level 3 creatures in the Bestiary 1, and IIRC none of them came even close to the Ogre's "oneshotting" ability*.

Again IIRC but it came across as if the writer hadn't thought through the implications of choosing this particular creature. Let's just say that trusting the encounter guidelines blindly is an understandable mistake to make... except possibly when you're tasked to write an official intro scenario meant to attract new customers...

I guess we need to appreciate Paizo's honesty here.

"This game requires you to wear your big boy pants."

If you have a problem being randomly instagibbed you're not ready...

(*two-shotting, now there's a different topic )

 

[Retreater]

THANK YOU!

This is exactly my sentiment - there's something distinctly wonky about how the scenario expectations clashes with what the rules actually produce.

This is similar to the adventures produced in 4E. It was a big departure in gameplay expectations, yet the adventure series they produced (the only in-print one they managed - the one that started with Keep on the Shadowfell) was written in the style of older editions. It was a flop, it is universally reviled, and probably was a factor in why 4E failed.
A stellar opening campaign/adventure is critical for the launch of a new edition, especially one with little backwards compatibility. Hoard of the Dragon Queen wasn't great by many opinions, but at least there was the solid Lost Mines of Phandelver.
I don't know if any official adventures or APs for PF2 are any better, but the Playtest was bad, the Demo adventure is horribly imbalanced, and the two adventures I've run from Age of Ashes show a weakness of design that doesn't support the gameplay.
Coming strong out of the gate with an adventure that really showed what the system could do that was written in the style that isn't just a Paizo-standard based off PF1, would have really promoted the system.
A comparison would be the release of a new video game console. The only games available are ones originally designed for the PS4, for example. But every time you load the game into your PS5, it stutters and crashes.