Pathfinder 2E Encounter Design in PF2 works.

[payn]

It has been a while since I seriously looked at PF2 (bought the core rulebook, bestiary, and GMG when they came out), but I remember it being a very tight system. My question to those with experience in the system: can you run the game without balancing encounters? As a DM I don't want to have to worry about monster level / CR and balanced encounters. I just want to build the world and let the players run with it. Though I loved 4e, it didn't really lend itself to this style. That is my favorite part of DMing 5e. Everything I have read suggest the encounter math tends more to the 4e spectrum and that as me a little uneasy. Love to hear your thoughts.

It's tricky building a world first in PF2, as its intended to be different than 5E. PF2 has bounded accuracy, but in limited bands dependent on level. So, for sandbox style play signposting is very important.

 

[kenada]

It has been a while since I seriously looked at PF2 (bought the core rulebook, bestiary, and GMG when they came out), but I remember it being a very tight system. My question to those with experience in the system: can you run the game without balancing encounters? As a DM I don't want to have to worry about monster level / CR and balanced encounters. I just want to build the world and let the players run with it. Though I loved 4e, it didn't really lend itself to this style. That is my favorite part of DMing 5e. Everything I have read suggest the encounter math tends more to the 4e spectrum and that as me a little uneasy. Love to hear your thoughts.

It depends on what you mean by “without balancing encounters”. PF2 can do an OSR-style game where you don’t care about the encounter building math, and some things will kill parties that are foolish enough to pick a fight with them. If it’s something more like, “just do whatever because characters are stronger than what the math assumes, which is broken anyway, and it will work out,” then no.

 

[dave2008]

It depends on what you mean by “without balancing encounters”. PF2 can do an OSR-style game where you don’t care about the encounter building math, and some things will kill parties that are foolish enough to pick a fight with them. If it’s something more like, “just do whatever because characters are stronger than what the math assumes, which is broken anyway, and it will work out,” then no.

The world / setting / campaign style I use is rather organic. By that I mean, I build the world in a way the makes sense to me in relation to how things would naturally develop (could be literally natural or socio-politically "natural"). I also want the world to react naturally based on the influence of the PCs. That is what I want to do without having to worry about a TPK around every corner if they get there head a bit below water. I want the characters to be able to survive accidents, but not necessarily completely foolish mistakes / decisions.

 

[dave2008]

It depends on what you mean by “without balancing encounters”. PF2 can do an OSR-style game where you don’t care about the encounter building math, and some things will kill parties that are foolish enough to pick a fight with them.

My worry is what is that range of a fight that is too tough?

 

[kenada]

If the PCs expect to fight through everything, they’re going to get into trouble if you build things out organically. You’d want to make provisions for allowing them to escape or retreat (not part of the core rules but easily added), basically applying an OSR-style approach to things.

 

[Justice and Rule]

My worry is what is that range of a fight that is too tough?

Again, the big thing here is to signpost and give people outs. You shold be able to tell how an encounter will go based on the actual encounter-building rules, so you'll know if it's too tough or too easy for them. The bigger thing here is to make sure that the players get an idea that it's a bad idea to do this. If they just die because they ignored your hints and decided to just attack something, then they can't really get angry at you. If they die because you ambushed them with a monster they had no chance of knowing about, then that's on you.

 

[Staffan]

Yeah, the encounter building rules work in both directions. You can either go "So the party is level 4 and I want them to have a Severe encounter, so that could be four ogre warriors", or you can go "Four ogre warriors makes sense here, and the party is level 4... ooh, so that's a Severe encounter, I should probably make sure there's some kind of warning about that."

 

[dave2008]

Again, the big thing here is to signpost and give people outs. You shold be able to tell how an encounter will go based on the actual encounter-building rules, so you'll know if it's too tough or too easy for them.

That is kinda what I am trying to avoid. I don't want to know if it is to tough or not. As the DM, I don't necessarily want that knowledge. I'm probably just being a lazy DM, but I know longer want to spend my time determining if something is to hard or easy, I just want to play.

I think I will stop here, as I can't quite get across what I am looking for and it feels like different people are giving different opinions (socking that). I'm sure if I knew the system better I could get it to work for me. Thank you for the input!

 

[Justice and Rule]

That is kinda what I am trying to avoid. I don't want to know if it is to tough or not. As the DM, I don't necessarily want that knowledge. I'm probably just being a lazy DM, but I know longer want to spend my time determining if something is to hard or easy, I just want to play.

I think I will stop here, as I can't quite get across what I am looing for and it feels like different people are giving different opinions (socking that). I'm sure if I knew the system better I could get it to work for me. Thank you for the input!

No, I get it. You want to be surprised with what you create, right? I suppose that standard PF2 is not a good choice for that because it's math is relatively tight. If you play Proficiency without Level you could probably do that in the same way as 5E, though it'd likely still be a bit more predictable than that. Hopefully that helps.

 

[Philip Benz]

What I hear, is folks bemoaning the fact that PF2 has fairly tight mechanics dictating what a group of adventurers can and cannot be expected to fight.

While that's true, you also have to account for the DM's instinct, his rule of thumb. You're not going to sic a family of cloud giants or an ancient red dragon on a hapless party of 1st or 2nd-level PCs. An experienced DM is going to adjust the threat to the capabilities of the PCs, on an intuitive level, even if he doesn't take the time to calculate the exact encounter balance using the Building Encounters guidelines.

Sure, you may have some situations where the PCs should objectively take flight and try to evade the overwhelming power of the beasties they have encountered. The players should know their DM well enough that they realize that they can't expect to bull through everything in their path, and sometimes escapaing with their lives is as good a result as they can hope for.

I don't think PF2 is more poorly adapted to this type of creature populating approach than any other RPG. If you want to populate a region with a variety of threats, some of which are beyond the capacity of the PCs to fight toe-to-toe, you can do that, it simply requires the DM to telegraph the severity of the threat, so that it becomes a test of their ability to escape rather than a full frontal combat that they can hope to overcome.

Regardless of the game system you choose to play under, these sorts of situations will require a different approach on the part of the players.