Pathfinder 2E Pathfinder 2e: Actual Play Experience

[CapnZapp]

a tough encounter really is a tough encounter, and I love this, over the years my players had become a bit blase about monsters, so it's good to bring back the fear

Yes this.

Let's never forget that fearsome monsters should be a feature, not a bug

That said, if you feel a published scenario (such as the AP's) turns into a slog since there's just an endless stream of challenging encounters, switch it up for a while. Choose an encounter and... just make it way easier somehow - maybe the monsters are drunk and uncoordinated! Or add an encounter that violates the guidelines just because!

I added an encounter where seventeen level 1 to 3 critters of the main antagonist race ancestry rushed the heroes at the start of the level 6 dungeon of Extinction Curse, precisely because of this. Made my players feel properly awesome for a change!

 

[dave2008]

With the PF2 sales speculation thread getting a lot of attention these days, I thought I'd resurrect this one with the actual play testimonials. I think the real test of a game is how it handles the table (in person or virtually).
We had a rough session this weekend on in my Roll20 Age of Ashes game. It was so bad that we had to assess whether to continue with the game or abandon the campaign. One of the players asked if the combat was an attempt of me (the GM) purposefully trying to punish the party. I assured him that I am trying my best to run the module as close to actually "by the book" as possible so the system can get a fair test by the group.
Without getting into too many spoilers, there is a towards the end of the first adventure with a monster that is completely beyond the party's capabilities. The DCs to get out of fighting the monster are so high that most parties are not only likely to fail the check to avoid combat, they will probably critically fail the check. The opponent specifically wants to fight and will only back down after he's 80% dead (by comparison, my group managed to get him about 15% down before killing off the barbarian and fighter in a couple rounds). So we had a half-TPK. If the rest of the group didn't run away (or if I had the enemy choose to pursue them), it would've been complete annihilation of the party.
This is more of an issue of adventure design than the system itself, though I think the action economy is part of the problem. Three attacks per round by a vastly superior foe is going to quickly drop a party. Nearly every attack from him hit. The characters can only probably hit on their first (non-penalized) attack.
So we're going to try again. This time I'm attempting to build a few encounters on my own to give the party some training with their 50% new character party.

Thanks for bringing back actual game discussion.

 

[dave2008]

When you fight a monster+2 or +3 level, you really feel like you're in a knockdown, drag out fight where a single monster might can challenge the entire party. I have not seen this in D&D in any addition including 5E.

Just wanted to point out this was the case for 4e as well. A solo monster of +3 levels could be quite deadly.

Regardless, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Tough monsters is one of the interesting aspect of PF2 to me.

 

[CapnZapp]

The only creatures that seem somewhat weak are caster NPCs that rely on spells. Given how much weaker spells are including summons, an enemy caster casting summon spells it not a real good threat. I have to say +3 enemy casters are weaker than a +3 martial. Any time a creature uses a spell versus a powerful melee attack, you generally have a weaker outcome.

Yes - and that's not only limited to NPCs:

Pathfinder 2E - Martials > Casters

This discussion revolves around low levels, maybe up to level 5-7 or so. The message from my play experience is loud n clear: PF2 is definitely a throwback to the time before 5th Edition - martials are significantly stronger than casters at low levels. This goes both for player characters and...

www.enworld.org

(Edit: I see you found your way there already)

(Do remember: all my experience with PF2 is low level so I make no statements re: double-digit level play)

 

[CapnZapp]

Are you finding that +3 level monsters are regularly a solo challenge for your large party? My 4th level party (of 4 players) nearly dropped to a 7th level creature and had to run away.

Not Celtavian, but official adventures certainly doesn't make it "regular".

Most encounters, by far, feature L-1 to L+1 monsters. But since you have at least a dozen encounters each level, you will encounter L+3 bosses on every one of them. (So, it depends on your definition of "regular" - each level does feature at least one such encounter, but seldom more than one or two. Semi-regular?)

And while one L+2 encounter can be really really hard, another L+3 encounter can go down easy. Again, while the math is tight, it does allow for some variance. (In particular player tactics - and therefore also monster tactics - since the game is built to make your decisions in the fight more prominent at the expense of your decisions before the fight aka your build choices)

 

[Retreater]

The player of our Champion is certainly not playing optimally. He has used his reaction once in 4 levels and has the ability to bestow effects on his weapon. He could have turned the tide of the battle against the barghest, but instead climbed up a cliff and threw down a rope for others to run away while the barbarian and fighter perished in bloody heaps.
That particular player seems to have a desire to play the least effective type of character imaginable (regardless of the campaign or system) and then complain that he isn't effective like it's a dig at the system that they even gave him the option.
I feel like I might have to give him some tactical coaching for the future, but I'm still learning all the characters and their abilities.

 

[CapnZapp]

@Retreater Well, as long as you know your party you should be able to adjust.

 

[kenada]

It’s been a while, so I figured I’d post an update. We’re having our 11th session this Saturday. I think we’ve been using the Proficiency without Level for over half the campaign at this point. We’ve also settled on the Gradual Boosts and Skill Points variants from the GMG.

Overall, I’m happy with the way Proficiency without Level variant has worked for my group. It’s given me much greater flexibility in picking monsters that I think would be appropriate for the environment versus fitting into the narrower curve in the CRB. The toughest thing they’ve fought so far was a +3, but that encounter almost immediately rolled into a +0 that left the party nearly exhausted of resources and almost out of hit points.

The revised encounter-building math in the GMG seems to work pretty well. I’ll second the opinions on this system’s math. Paizo seems to have done a really good job tuning the general framework, and the fact that it can accommodate fairly big changes like removing level from proficiency is a credit to the work they did on it.

After that encounter with the +3 followed by the +0 (a deadly encounter under the old system but just a severe one here), the party returned to town for a few days and then came back. Since this is a sandbox game, I rolled to restock, and a necromancer and his zombies had moved into the first floor. When they got back, they fought waves of zombies without rest. The zombies were a mix of −3s and −2s, but they were still a threat to the party. Rotting Aura is pretty nasty (maybe too nasty without a save), so they ended up with a few of them below half hit points.

I’m also reasonably happy with the creature creation rules in the GMG. I’ve used a fair number of homebrew monsters. My PCs ran across a kruthik adult (−2) and young (−4) I converted from 4e, and in spite of the level difference, the kruthik adult still dropped the ranger (who admittedly only had half hit points because the party didn’t want to spend more time recovering).

After that fight, the party encountered the necromancer, so I used the VP system from the GMG to handle the parlay. It seemed to work out well. It let the PC who had invested in Diplomacy get a chance to show off, which the player enjoyed. Sadly, the party missed the Grimtooth’s inspired trap I set up for them, so I didn’t get to see how the hazard creation stuff from the GMG worked in practice, but I’m going to guess it’s fine.

This weekend, we’ll have a smaller group, so we’ll be switching back to one of the other (smaller) parties that were also out exploring. This should give me a chance to try some of the changes I made to my exploration procedure. I’m not using hexploration for the most part, but I am going to be trying out some of the DCs it has for random encounters.

I’m really looking forward to the Bestiary 2. It’s hard to have too many monster books, especially when the monsters in them are generally interesting. The APG will be a nice source of more options, but I’m not sure how into it my player will be. They like customization, but the amount PF2 has so far seems to be a relatively sweet spot for us.

 

[Jester David]

With the PF2 sales speculation thread getting a lot of attention these days, I thought I'd resurrect this one with the actual play testimonials. I think the real test of a game is how it handles the table (in person or virtually).
We had a rough session this weekend on in my Roll20 Age of Ashes game. It was so bad that we had to assess whether to continue with the game or abandon the campaign. One of the players asked if the combat was an attempt of me (the GM) purposefully trying to punish the party. I assured him that I am trying my best to run the module as close to actually "by the book" as possible so the system can get a fair test by the group.
Without getting into too many spoilers, there is a towards the end of the first adventure with a monster that is completely beyond the party's capabilities. The DCs to get out of fighting the monster are so high that most parties are not only likely to fail the check to avoid combat, they will probably critically fail the check. The opponent specifically wants to fight and will only back down after he's 80% dead (by comparison, my group managed to get him about 15% down before killing off the barbarian and fighter in a couple rounds). So we had a half-TPK. If the rest of the group didn't run away (or if I had the enemy choose to pursue them), it would've been complete annihilation of the party.
This is more of an issue of adventure design than the system itself, though I think the action economy is part of the problem. Three attacks per round by a vastly superior foe is going to quickly drop a party. Nearly every attack from him hit. The characters can only probably hit on their first (non-penalized) attack.
So we're going to try again. This time I'm attempting to build a few encounters on my own to give the party some training with their 50% new character party.

This is very likely the result of a designer writing an adventure for a system that wasn't finished and they hadn't played, and likely had a loose idea of the balance and encounter design rules for. And the ruleset was likely changing as the adventure was written. While Paizo encourages its AP writers to playtest, this isn't a requirement and many are not run.
Doubly so as the monster design rules were likely still in flux and so a few monster numbers might be off.

Also... Paizo likes hard encounters. It's player base tend to be good at optimization and the adventure writers often turn things up beyond the baseline. Especially boss fights.

 

[Retreater]

This is very likely the result of a designer writing an adventure for a system that wasn't finished and they hadn't played, and likely had a loose idea of the balance and encounter design rules for. And the ruleset was likely changing as the adventure was written. While Paizo encourages its AP writers to playtest, this isn't a requirement and many are not run.
Doubly so as the monster design rules were likely still in flux and so a few monster numbers might be off.

Also... Paizo likes hard encounters. It's player base tend to be good at optimization and the adventure writers often turn things up beyond the baseline. Especially boss fights.

True. We remember what happened with Hoard of the Dragon Queen.
I don't have the system knowledge of PF2 yet to be able to effectively tweak encounters, and it certainly doesn't help that we lost 2 of our players (now down to 4) when we transitioned to VTT from in-person gaming.
As an exercise, I'm going to design a few of my own encounters for this weekend's game. Hopefully they will be more in-line with the challenge I want to present. I don't have a problem with tough encounters, but I feel like that one just came out of nowhere. It wasn't a particularly "important" fight - it wasn't a boss fight or anything. All the others up to that point have been pretty easy ("mulching" I think one of the players described them).