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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8114079" data-attributes="member: 70468">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.</blockquote>

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