Pathfinder 2E Encounter Design in PF2 works.

[kenada]

My only real complaint with PF2e is to some extent it lives and dies by Ancestries and Archetypes, and I'm not at all confident of keeping the balance present when doing my own.

I used all custom ones for my campaign. If we had continued playing, I was considering doing a revamp. I wouldn’t say any were too powerful (compared to the core ones), but some were just kind of bad. There’s definitely an art to it. However, the easiest thing to do is MacGuyver a new ancestry out of existing feats. I don’t think that would be too problematic. (It also lets you make sure no one has darkvision. Yay!)

 

[kenada]

I think they're too frequent for enemies, who normally outrank the levels of characters (at least in the published adventures I've run). Their attack bonuses are often so high they crit very often, and their save DCs are so high that it's easy to crit fail. And in the case of spells and monster abilities, a crit fail is often worse than just "more damage."

I’m pretty sure that’s working as intended. PF2 tries (and mostly succeeds) at making the old encounter building guidelines actually work. In 3e, a monster two levels higher was supposed to be twice as dangerous. Two monsters together were supposed to be CR+2. That didn’t quite work out in 3e because that’s not how the math worked. PF2 fixed the math by using criticals to make the damage scale based on the difference in levels between the attacker and defender. It’s a clever hack, but I can see how it could feel bad when the monsters always seem way more competent than the PCs (especially with riders or extra effects that the monsters get often and the PCs get less frequently).

 

[dave2008]

Getting critical successes or failures at +10/-10 is already problematical in its frequency, shifting that to +5/-5 would exacerbate the situation.

The concept would be to marry the change in crit range with the removal of PWL. When you use PWL the expected to hit range is reduced in half, thus I reduced the crit range in half. It should be the same frequency, that is the intent. I would just adjust the numbers until that goal was achieved.

I don't advocate using variants like ABP or PWL because the system isn't designed for that.

Then I wouldn't play PF2 at all. The PWL really bothers me.

ABP removes the place of many magic items which both I and my players enjoy using, that have been a part of RPGs since their inception. It's also predicated on the mistaken belief that the bonuses given by magic items at various levels are essential to the game. They aren't. It's true, PCs won't have the same potential for power without the "expected" magic items, but a DM can work around that.

I am not sure what ABP stand for, but we run a low magic campaign and the few magic items I do have, rarely give bonus to hit. Not sure what this would mean for the base PF2 system, but I would have to modify it to accommodate our setting.

PWL, I'm less sure about. I simply don't see the point.

I do, so it, or something similar, is a must in my game (if I am going to play PF2).

 

[payn]

It’s a clever hack, but I can see how it could feel bad when the monsters always seem way more competent than the PCs (especially with riders or extra effects that the monsters get often and the PCs get less frequently).

Yeap, that killed my enjoyment of PF2 more than anything.

 

[dave2008]

My only real complaint with PF2e is to some extent it lives and dies by Ancestries and Archetypes, and I'm not at all confident of keeping the balance present when doing my own.

Fortunately I don't really care about balance

 

[Retreater]

I’m pretty sure that’s working as intended. PF2 tries (and mostly succeeds) at making the old encounter building guidelines actually work. In 3e, a monster two levels higher was supposed to be twice as dangerous. Two monsters together were supposed to be CR+2. That didn’t quite work out in 3e because that’s not how the math worked. PF2 fixed the math by using criticals to make the damage scale based on the difference in levels between the attacker and defender. It’s a clever hack, but I can see how it could feel bad when the monsters always seem way more competent than the PCs (especially with riders or extra effects that the monsters get often and the PCs get less frequently).

That's fine for the occasional, thrilling fight. My tastes are closer to 25% easy, 50% average, and 25% hard. The default encounter in the published adventures I ran seemed like 10% easy, 15% average, 50% hard, 25% over-the-top.
If I put on my designer hat, I think this is because PF2 has an "encounter-based" design, meaning each and every encounter is supposed to be thrilling, pushing the characters to the limit - and it's basically assumed that character abilities reset after every encounter. What happens in a previous encounter or between encounters doesn't matter in PF2 - it's assumed you're fresh at each one.
The problem with assuming that your characters can deal with mostly hard encounters is that they are frequently out-ranked by their opponents when you have such a level-dependent game. They fail (and crit fail) more than the law of averages would suggest. Their opponents succeed (and crit succeed) more than you'd expect.
And that is disheartening for a player, not to mention bad for pacing and gets very tiresome to GM.

 

[dave2008]

I’m pretty sure that’s working as intended. PF2 tries (and mostly succeeds) at making the old encounter building guidelines actually work. In 3e, a monster two levels higher was supposed to be twice as dangerous. Two monsters together were supposed to be CR+2. That didn’t quite work out in 3e because that’s not how the math worked. PF2 fixed the math by using criticals to make the damage scale based on the difference in levels between the attacker and defender. It’s a clever hack, but I can see how it could feel bad when the monsters always seem way more competent than the PCs (especially with riders or extra effects that the monsters get often and the PCs get less frequently).

Yes. I think as others have noted it seems the sweet spot is to use primarily lvl equivalent monsters and the +3 and +4 ones sparingly.

 

[kenada]

That's fine for the occasional, thrilling fight. My tastes are closer to 25% easy, 50% average, and 25% hard. The default encounter in the published adventures I ran seemed like 10% easy, 15% average, 50% hard, 25% over-the-top.

My preference is “what makes sense”. I’m not a fan of “modern” published adventures because of how much focus they put on combat encounters as how they plot gets advanced. I do think it’s telling that those with the most positive experiences with PF2 seem to be doing their own thing while those running modules have struggled with it to various extents.

If I put on my designer hat, I think this is because PF2 has an "encounter-based" design, meaning each and every encounter is supposed to be thrilling, pushing the characters to the limit - and it's basically assumed that character abilities reset after every encounter. What happens in a previous encounter or between encounters doesn't matter in PF2 - it's assumed you're fresh at each one.

I don’t think having PCs rest up after encounters is problematic in itself, but PF2 makes it a bit tedious. If I every ran PF2 again (which is very unlikely), I’d want to look at making Treat Wounds give a fixed amount of healing per proficiency level (e.g., trained = 2d8, expert = 4d8, etc) and use Stamina or System Strain (from SWN/WWN) as a way of providing attrition.

The problem with assuming that your characters can deal with mostly hard encounters is that they are frequently out-ranked by their opponents when you have such a level-dependent game. They fail (and crit fail) more than the law of averages would suggest. Their opponents succeed (and crit succeed) more than you'd expect.
And that is disheartening for a player, not to mention bad for pacing and gets very tiresome to GM.

This gets back to what I was saying about how it’s a clever hack but can feel bad. I’m not really sure how you could fix it and keep the encounter math as it is. Proficiency without Level helps by reducing the frequency of crits and spreading out the range of threats, but Paizo wanted the scaling to be like it is.

 

[Philip Benz]

I am not sure what ABP stand for, but we run a low magic campaign and the few magic items I do have, rarely give bonus to hit. Not sure what this would mean for the base PF2 system, but I would have to modify it to accommodate our setting.

To be clear, "ABP" stands for "Automatic Bonus Progression."
What it means is that all +x weapons and armor, as well as striking runes (which increase damage) and resiliency runes (which are placed on armor and improve saving throws), as well as skill bonus items, IIRC, are eliminated from the game. Instead, PCs are given the bonus at their appropriate level regardless of what weapons and armor they are using.

As I said before, this is predicated on the mistaken belief (shared by many forum posters and discord users) that without level-appropriate gear, playing a PC in PF2 is impossible.

This is absurd, as Dave appears to agree. You can very easily run a low-magic campaign with few or no magic weapons available, on the condition that the DM adjusts his encounter math to make encounters less deadly - generally by lowering the level of adversaries, and avoiding certain foes that can only be harmed by magic weapons.

Some folks are in love with ABP, and swear by it. I'm sure they have great games, and enjoy them a lot. My players and I would miss the lowly +1 weapons early in their career, and the other bonus items, but perhaps that is simply a matter of the RPG habits we've developed over the years.

 

[Philip Benz]

Are you saying its too frequent? My concern was PF2 I had the lowest amount of critical rolls ever. Getting criticals is fun, but I do see a problem with them becoming too frequent at <5>.

I don't see how this is possible. In DD3.5 and PF1, you only get a critical hit on a nat 20, and must still confirm that critical with an additional roll (with the exception of a few weapons with expanded crit ranges).

In PF2, nearly every nat 20 is a critical hit (unless that roll would actually be a miss, which is fairly infrequent outside of 3rd attacks) and you also get a critical hit whenever your total score is 10 points or more over the adversary's AC.

What I'm hearing from other folks is a very valid criticism: in most published PF2 adventures and APs (from Paizo, of course) there is a marked propensity for using adversaries that are 3 or 4 levels above the PCs' level. This leads to the feeling that adversaries get very frequent critical hits, and very rarely suffer from critical hits themselves. This feeling is of course completely justified, and it's the way the system was built to work.

Now, I do realize that this is expressly allowed for in the Building Encounters guidelines. Level +3 and +4 adversaries are slotted right into this system.

But my experience (and a whole slew of comments on Discord and forums) shows that is a mistake. Perhaps a highly experienced team of players can field such adversaries without breaking a sweat. On a lucky day. But my group is having a lot more fun facing larger numbers of lesser adversaries. My group has reached 12th level, and very rarely do I go above a level +2 adversary. Just last night, they faced a 14th-level foe who they could barely touch - although his judicious use of a pre-cast Air Walk spell had a lot to do with that, too.

My advice to folks running homebrewed or adapted PF2 adventures is to avoid adversaries more than one level above the PCs for the first few levels (say, 1-4), stretch up to two levels above them for a bit (say, levels 5 to 8 or 10) and hold off on the really out-of-their league foes until they've graduated into the mid to upper levels of character advancement. Or if it turns out that they are having a cakewalk with what you've been serving up, and then pump up the volume.

Aside from this single caveat about higher-level adversaries (PC level +3 or +4) I think the Building Encounters guidelines work very well.