Pathfinder 2E Encounter Design in PF2 works.

[Thomas Shey]

Fortunately I don't really care about balance

Don't take this wrong, but if you don't care about balance, why would you care about tight math in PF2e? Balance, in the end, is about the numbers and benefits not producing stupid and unfun results.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I still think this is caused by the propensity for people (and I've seen it in multiple games in the D&D sphere) for even people who were involved in a new edition to subconsciously design modules for a while like they were designing for the prior edition, even when that produces dumb results. Its notable that, like 3e, you not only could but probably wanted to put a lot of opposition out that was avowedly over-CR, because the CR calculation really just didn't work that well and tended to (usually) overrate opponents compared to most PC groups.

That doesn't work in PF2e.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Good advice, and maybe this is a case of bad (mechanically) first adventures spoiling the experience. Its quite common for the first several adventures in a new system to go awry of the best way to experience a new system.

I'd be willing to put money on this often being the case, and for exactly there reason you state.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I just want to say this thread has inspired me to give PF2 another go. I’ve tried running it three different times, converting volume 1 of both Legacy of Fire (the first time) and Wrath of the Righteous (the second time) and Lost Mines of Phandelver the third time.

This time my intention is to try Abomination Vaults and see if my issues are conversion related or system based.
There are aspects of the game I enjoyed but I just felt like there was little PF2 did that 4e didn’t do better.
Ill give it one more shot.

Well, depending on what about 4e it just may be a better choice for you. 4e and PF2e are similar in some ways, but PF2e is not down the same road as far (which is part of what I like about it, since I respected the 4e design but it also put me off at the same time).

Personally, I'd expect a converted scenario might well work better for getting a sense of what the game is about than some of the early APs, given my experience. I think the latter have actually given people a false sense of the game in many cases.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You need to do a lot of encounter futzing to do without magic weapons (or ABP). I don't think the biggest issue is the attack bonus, but the extra damage magic weapons put out. Striking weapons (usually a level 4 thing) deal an extra die of damage (two dice at 12 and three at 19).
'

This is largely my feeling too, though I think its possible to understate the crit range effects of those +'s. Either way, its why I say being light on magic items (like always) impacts non-spellcasters more than spellcasters because the latter are not nearly as dependent on items for their combat output.

(Caveat: Of course if you're very light on combat, this will be less visible, but at least some of the classes are also less and less having a point when that's true--fighters and barbarians in particular, though I'm not sure there's much a champion can do in a low combat game that a bard couldn't do better).

Also, low-magic games that don't compensate in other ways are much harsher on martials than they are on casters. My level 11 sorcerer would be unhappy if he had to do without magic items, but he'd still have 14d6+6 cones of cold or dragon shape letting him fight at +22 dealing ~25 points with a primary attack or ~20 with an agile one. The 11th level champion in the same party would be devastated by losing 2 points of attack bonus, ~5 points of damage per hit, and the returning rune on his weapon which lets him use Retributive Strike at a short distance instead of just in melee. Martials need magic items not just to be competitive on numbers, but to gain useful abilities.

Yup. I'm playing a champion/bard hybrid as I've mentioned, and in a low magic game I know which part of my operating procedure would be taking a hit. Other than things like Resistance items which benefit everyone, I'm not even sure I've got any magic items that would matter overly much if the character was a pure bard. Even his armor would matter less.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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!)

My concern is probably another element of my general dislike of exception based design; I kind of hate doing ad-hoc design that's going to effect a character throughout their career, and Ancestry and Archetype design is mostly that.

I mean its not impossible for the designers to bork one up either, but they presumably have the system internalized when doing new ones, and from my reading have only occasionally done this (they're actually more likely to have problems with new classes based on concepts outside the normal PF2e matrix, because there's so many moving parts), where I don't have faith that I'd do a good job with this.

(That said, its probably not normally going to be a major issue as the system expands, because there's likely going to be something that's close enough without doing a new one; really exotic concepts are liable to butt up against some of PF2e's system assumptions in the first place, and if I'm going to do that with a campaign I likely just wouldn't use the system anyway).

 

[Thomas Shey]

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).

I have to seriously question whether, for the most part, uphill combats are usually going to feel good no matter what you do if they're genuinely uphill. I suspect at least part of the issue with PF2e is that people come to it from games (often PF1e or 3e era D&D) where that uphill property was more illusory than true.

 

[dave2008]

Don't take this wrong, but if you don't care about balance, why would you care about tight math in PF2e? Balance, in the end, is about the numbers and benefits not producing stupid and unfun results.

I need to clarify: I don't worry about balance in race design, but want some balance in the rest of the system. The reason I can probably say this is that my players are not the type to build characters to get the best numbers. The don't look for the best race, background, class combo to try to max. their numbers, so balance has never really been any issue for us

 

[Thomas Shey]

I need to clarify: I don't worry about balance in race design, but want some balance in the rest of the system. The reason I can probably say this is that my players are not the type to build characters to get the best numbers. The don't look for the best race, background, class combo to try to max. their numbers, so balance has never really been any issue for us

They don't have to do it deliberately to be a problem in play, though. If some particular thing or things an ancestry gets feel too valuable (or worthless) that can cause bad feelings in a group even when no one meant anything by it.

(This is the issue with a lot of mechanical imbalance; it doesn't require deliberate abuse to be a problem).

 

[kenada]

I have a hypothesis regarding the combat focus of PF2 adventures, particularly parts 1 of adventure paths.

That’s possible. Pre-PF2 adventure almost never went to max level, so they had a bit more flexibility with how they progressed. However, I’d still describe them as being very combat-centric. That’s pretty safe to say about many adventures released in the last twenty years from WotC and Paizo. That’s not a criticism — just a contrast between what I like to do in my game.