Me experience differs. I actually think PF2 is not particularly well suited to the sort of set piece combat encounters we often see in the APs. My best experiences with the game come from leaning into things like exploration mode, like managed recovery, monsters that make use of long term afflictions, etc. When you embrace the entire game it plays much better in my experience.
I disagree slightly. I have run a fair number of set-pieces and I think PF2e is excellent at running them (especially compared with my experiences with 1e).
Speaking of styles/types of play and what the game is good at, though. Here is a rundown of the ways I have played Pathfinder 2e and how I would rate them. The rating is completely subjective and based on how much fun I had running that style of game in Pathfinder 2e.
1. Dark Souls– I take a map of a fairly large area/structure, print it out at scale and seed it with plots, interesting NPCs, secrets, shops, etc. for the characters to discover. Think the tabletop version of a dark souls or bloodborne game with much less combat: usually the only combat is what the character's decisions lead too and combat is avoidable.
Rating: 10/10. This style works fabulously, I just sit back and the game practically runs itself as the players explore.
2. Urban Occult/Investigation– I take a city-scale map, divide it into districts, create a random encounter table for each district, and then place a node based mystery/investigation scenario (or two, or three) on top of it (such as Carrion Hill which if you like Actual Play podcasts, do yourself a favor and check out the Swords of Nerdom's fantastic play through of it). Because the players are split-up most of the time, combat is either encounters that can be resolved quickly or elaborate set-pieces (for example the Vat works in Carrion Hill) that the players need to discover and reunite to tackle.
Rating: 9/10. This style works fantastically once it is prepped. The only problem is the prep time: because it is non-linear all the nodes have to be prepped before starting and elaborate combat set-pieces need a fair chunk of time to design and prep. It is far faster to prep than pf1e though: in pf1e I would have to do multiple test runs/revisions over a couple days to make sure the results were somewhat reasonable while in pf2e I can get superior results in a couple of hours.
3. Hex-based Survival – This was survival on an island. I used hardcore survival rules (tracking food, water, disease exposure) calibrated to be unwinnable without exploration. The island was a small-area hex map with lots of keyed locations for the characters to discover and explore and a static monster population so that over time the island got less dangerous. Random encounters were used to foreshadow dangers, indicate nearby places of interest, and simulate monsters wandering away from their lairs. Keyed location set-pieces were ran on maps while other encounters were ran theater of the mind.
Rating: 9/10. Fantastically fun. Would run again, though it suffers from the same prep problem as the Urban Occult/Investigation scenario.
4. "Old-School" Dungeon Crawling – I take an old-school dungeon, shrinking it down in both scale and by removing/rearranging things to make them more compact and less linear. I then run it totally theater of the mind with emphasis on out of combat-decision making and environmental exploration and manipulation. To keep up the pacing I use lots of simple to run combats: one or two unique creatures or up to four of the same creatures (I use troops if there are more than that) with a bimodal difficulty distribution, either easy/trivial or severe. I don't use random encounters as I found that shrinking down the scale and running the dungeon dynamically (creatures move around) gets similar results with less mental overhead on my part and makes attrition a feasible strategy.
Rating: 8/10. These are fantastically fun to run and the conversion is extremely simple. I gave it an extra rating point from the sense of nostalgia I got when running them.
5. "Modern" Dungeon Crawling – This is what you find in new adventures/APs like Abomination Vaults. If in doubt look at consecutive encounters: if the authors are deliberately switching types (say social, combat, puzzle, stealth, social->combat) then it is probably what I would classify as a modern style dungeon. These also tend to have player-facing maps and more/more elaborate set-piece combats than most old-school dungeons. I have found that I need less prep for these than old-school dungeons, mostly just increasing foreshadowing/verisimilitude slightly and making a GM copy of maps with lairs and starting monster locations indicated.
Rating: 7/10. They are pretty fun and run well.
6. Closed Location Based Horror – I build an interesting environment such as a small town or haunted house, make a horrifying overwhelming monster that can't be fought directly (very easy with pathfinder 2e), and let the characters explore an environment while being stalked by the monster.
Rating: 6/10. Pathfinder 2e's system makes it possible to easily run this type of game (as opposed to every other version of D&D which fails hard at it), though I only really run them as one-shots because bad choices easily lead to PC death and, if I am going to be running a one-shot there are more appropriate systems out there. Still, I had a lot of fun running them (and am going to be running another one for Halloween this year if things go as planned).
7. Wilderness Travel – This is travel to distant places along a predetermined, but flexible route. To make it interesting I use expeditions with a morale/intraparty conflict system and lots of encounters and hazards that the characters get to decide how to engage with/avoid.
Rating: 6/10. The system works pretty well but too much travel gets a bit monotonous and the characters ability to explore is too limited for my taste. I found that breaking the travel up with other types of play (they get to a village that has an investigation/mystery in it for instance) for a session or two makes it work a bit better. Still pretty fun to run.
8. Railroad Wilderness Travel – I am currently running this. Basically travel along a fixed route, with no deviation possible. Combat is set pieces that are encountered along the railroad. I am trying to maintain player engagement with intraparty conflict (which my players have been extremely good at shutting down so far), persistent enemies that stalk the players over long periods of time that degrade moral leading to more intraparty conflict, and a mystery as to what exactly happened to previous groups traveling down the river.
Rating: 4/10. I find it very difficult to give my players interesting decisions with this style of play and I'm not very happy with the way it is going from a player engagement perspective. It is still fun though, I just find myself quickly exhausted trying to keep player engagement and energy up. I am probably going to experiment with how I run the morale system to try and make it a bit harder for players to keep on top of morale. Maybe stress ratings for each NPC and then having set-piece events with stress rating results baked in based on the decisions that the characters take.
9. Speed Dungeoneering — this is a style of game session I used in PF1e. I would take a dungeon, create printouts for all the encounters, grab a large chessex battle map (partially predrawn) and we would blitz through an entire dungeon in a single session. The dungeon was run statically. Out of combat one player would determine the groups actions (after a quick discussion if it wasn’t obvious). It worked because most of the dungeons had very little of interest besides encounters and very linear structures (perhaps a single A/B choice to proceed). Additionally, with PF1e everyone had solved the combats before it started and they were just executing predetermined actions, so combat was incredibly fast (unless I spent an incredible amount of effort designing them). With a couple of surprises, traps, and twists sprinkled in here and there, these were engaging and fun to run, though I was exhausted by the end of them from keeping the pace fast enough and the energy up.
Rating: 1/10. This was fun in PF1e, I couldn’t even begin to get this to work in PF2e.
