Pathfinder 2E Encounter Design in PF2 works.

[miggyG777]

As I've commented in other threads, I think over-dependence on online tools can be bad.
1) You can lose them if the service goes out of business, stops supporting your edition, etc.
2) From my experience, no VTT is completely stable. My Foundry crashes several times per session.
3) You have to pay monthly or annual subscription fees, hosting fees, etc.
4) If you stop paying subscription fees, you usually lose access to your content.
5) If you are at an in-person game day, you can't just casually play the game.
6) It requires a lot more prep than an in-person game - adding maps, tokens, etc.

The thing that is amazing to me is that PF2 was designed before the pandemic, before the explosion of VTTs and automated tools. Paizo actually thought this game was playable without these resources and would be a more streamlined edition of their previous game.

1) You can self host Foundry VTT on your own computer, back it up on a HDD, never lose anything (unless your house burns down).
2) Foundry VTT has never crashed once for me (self hosted) in over 500 hours of usage.
3) Not if you self host.
4) see 3)
5) Never tried it but in this day and age your players could use tablets to access their Foundry character sheet perhaps?
6) I disagree, it takes some time to get used to the system (arguably easier if you are computer savvy and like to tinker with programs) once you've done that it saves you a lot of prep time as per my experience.

 

[miggyG777]

That is a good point. Once you have internalized table 10-2 (which is pretty easy to do), is very easy to know if a monster / group of monsters will be easy, challenging, or hard for a group.

Then my only issue would be making sure to telegraph an appropriate challenge, which I don't like to / am not good at doing normally (but I could always improve). It is also hard do with random encounters which I use extensively in travel adventures and certain types of dungeons. Hard to telegraph it if I don't know what it is!

You could also just let them run into the encounter and give them the opportunity to relatively easily retreat in case it becomes necessary. But I'd assume signposting wouldn't be too hard, if you remember the 10-2 table stated earlier. All it takes is a glance for you to know that they are likely heading up to a trivial or an extreme challenge. The rest is narration i'd assume.

 

[dave2008]

You could also just let them run into the encounter and give them the opportunity to relatively easily retreat in case it becomes necessary. But I'd assume signposting wouldn't be too hard, if you remember the 10-2 table stated earlier. All it takes is a glance for you to know that they are likely heading up to a trivial or an extreme challenge. The rest is narration i'd assume.

Yes, if I know what is coming. Like I mentioned, I do use a fair bit of random monsters and even I don't necessarily know what is around the corner sometimes.

 

[miggyG777]

Yes, if I know what is coming. Like I mentioned, I do use a fair bit of random monsters and even I don't necessarily know what is around the corner sometimes.

If that's the mode of play, I would consider home-brewing a retreating mechanism perhaps. Make retreating part of the game loop and let your players know about the randomness of monsters they can encounter.
By signposting this way, you as a DM don't have to know what's coming, but your players are prepared to retreat if necessary and it's all tied into a cool mini-game.

 

[payn]

If that's the mode of play, I would consider home-brewing a retreating mechanism perhaps. Make retreating part of the game loop and let your players know about the randomness of monsters they can encounter.
By signposting this way, you as a DM don't have to know what's coming, but your players are prepared to retreat if necessary and it's all tied into a cool mini-game.

Perhaps also making random tables in advance that are within the party ability band. Adjust up as they level. More up front work but as the thread says encounter deign works (if you stick to the >4 party level).

 

[Thomas Shey]

My experience with the guidelines for building encounters is that they worked pretty well, but you have to make adjustments based on its assumptions regarding how tactically well the PCs will fight. My players weren’t super savvy about that, so I ended up having to shift things over a step (e.g., considering a moderate-threat encounter as more like a severe threat one). After doing that, it seemed to work pretty well for us.

That's absolutely the case, but I'm not sure its possible to avoid that in any encounter building system; the only question is where the default capability level is assumed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

The word "can" in your question is doing some heavy lifting here.

What I mean by that is you can absolutely do what you ask, but if you don't provide some useful tools for retreat, its only a matter of time before you get a TPK. I've observed before that because of how dying works, a TPK is actually more likely in its way than individual death most of the time. You can't just count on normal movement mechanics and processes doing the work of making a retreat possible, because some opponents are just going to be faster than the PCs as a whole and have motivation to pursue, and if those are the ones the PCs discover are past their abilities, without something that allows a successful retreat, just using what's there is an invitation to a TPK that the PCs might well not be able to, in practice, avoid.

There's, of course, a lot of ways to telegraph that an encounter might not be one the PCs want to get into, so the question is whether you're good about that and how certain you are your players will take the hint.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Well, to be honest, I don't think that works in any game, let alone any incarnation of D&D; if you don't have any idea whether something is too dangerous for the PCs, you can't convey that to them, and if you don't, they're always potentially walking into a deathtrap. I don't really think that's not true with 5e either; I suspect you've just got internalized when its true there rather than doing it by calculation (which is probably a good thing since I gather the 5e encounter building guidelines are kind of junk).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Honestly, the "disparate power levels" conundrum has existed in any RPG ever invented. In OD&D, if you sic a troll or a red dragon on low-level adventurers, they are going to bite the bucket, guaranteed.
The difference with PF2 is that those differences have been codified, and you know in advance (if you care to do the calculations) what is beyond their grasp.

Yeah, that was my view of it too. Sure, the to-hit/ac bonuses might be closer in OD&D, but there were too many things where the amount of damage delivered was too high or they had group damage or takeout abilities for it not to be trivial to walk into an encounter you weren't going to win unless the GM had a sense of such things. That's one of the reasons there were "dungeon level" encounter tables and a lot of early games were so dungeon-centric; if you walked a low level party out into parts of the wilderness you might as well have been dropping them down a garbage disposal.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Also, just as a side comment, if 5e will let a troll be a reasonable encounter for first level characters, its the first incarnation of D&D I know of where it is. I know one would absolutely go through that level group like a grinder in 3e, and I don't recall it being much better in OD&D.