Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder Encounter Difficulty?

[Sheepat]

So my group is trying out Pathfinder for our next campaign, with me as DM. I decided to run the Adventure 'Hollow's Last Hope' and the PCs (a gunslinger, an alchemist, a swashbuckler, and a barbarian) got to the first encounter

SPOILERS AHEAD (Just in case)

It was the fight between the hobgoblin hunter and his two crows, and he was using a firefoot fennec as bait. The crows were 1/4 CR, the hobgoblin 1/2.

The party absolutely DECIMATED them. They barely got a hit off, and were easily taken care of.

Is this just because 1. I'm still a bit unfamiliar with the Pathfinder rules, so I could use them to their best advantage, 2. It's a small encounter that doesn't add much to the overall story, and is just there for flavor, or 3. Pathfinder is just naturally easy and I should add more difficulty to the encounters?

Any reply would be helpful!

 

[Campbell]

I don't think you can draw too many conclusions from a single combat encounters. Unevenly distributed dice rolls can have a dramatic impact on how easy or difficult an encounter seems. At low levels this is particularly true.

 

[Spatula]

It also depends on what kind of stats you gave them. In theory, PF is balanced around a 4-person party using 15 point buy.

But that's a CR 1 encounter. It's just supposed to drain some resources, really.

 

[Wicht]

The Party should be able to defeat any CR that is equivalent to them, if you want a challenge increase it to about 1 above them. But do so very cautiously, as you can overwhelm them if not careful and a few bad dice rolls could get them all killed. But at low levels, most of the encounters are going to seem fairly easy when the CRs are equal to level, in large part because of the monsters low hp.

You likely didn't do anything wrong.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

One note for Pathfinder(though I blame this mostly on it being a 3.5 derivative) is to take CR rating with a hefty grain of salt.

CR in 3.5 was very badly designed and a creature's CR and actual difficulty were at best very tangentially-related. For example, the Monstrous Crab(nicknamed "That Damn Crab") is a near-TPK if you throw it at a party who, by the CR rating, should be able to take the beast. Pathfinder working off of 3.5 for it's design means that mostly carried over.

So use CR if you want, but make doubly sure you double check the enemy's abilities, since a CR 3 encounter can range anywhere from a cakewalk, to a good encounter, to a TPK waiting to happen.

 

[Ahnehnois]

The only way to reliably determine the difficulty for any game is manually. That basically means ignoring the CR ratings, looking at the actual statistics and the context in which they will be used, and making a call. Using the PF CR's will usually result in trivially difficult encounters, but sometimes it can go the other way; they're really meaningless numbers.

 

[Wicht]

they're really meaningless numbers.

Now I disagree with this. Firstly, there are definite objective reasons for each CR being what they are in Pathfinder. A given CR creature is supposed to have stats within a narrow range of AC, HD and saves of a parity with other creatures of the same CR. However, the CRS do not reflect the variability which comes from the powers that any given creature has, and these powers are not factored into the CR except by the intuition of the designers. But this variability still does not make the CR completely meaningless.

The CR provides a definite set of guidelines for planning. It cannot replace the experience, intuition and intelligence of the DM, but in a game as flexible as Pathfinder, it shouldn't be expected to. Anything so narrow would make the game bland. CRs also provide a platform by which to plan out experience and treasure in design. Again, its a guide, not a straight-jacket, but as a guide its not broken.

So, the DM has to learn how to anticipate the outcomes (in general) of an encounter, taking into account environment, weapons and armor, available equipment, powers, numbers of attackers or defenders, and a host of other unknowable (to the game designers) factors. The CRs should not be taken as a final word on anything, but rather simply one of a number of variables. But they are not meaningless.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

So my group is trying out Pathfinder for our next campaign, with me as DM. I decided to run the Adventure 'Hollow's Last Hope' and the PCs (a gunslinger, an alchemist, a swashbuckler, and a barbarian) got to the first encounter

SPOILERS AHEAD (Just in case)

It was the fight between the hobgoblin hunter and his two crows, and he was using a firefoot fennec as bait. The crows were 1/4 CR, the hobgoblin 1/2.

The party absolutely DECIMATED them. They barely got a hit off, and were easily taken care of.

Is this just because 1. I'm still a bit unfamiliar with the Pathfinder rules, so I could use them to their best advantage, 2. It's a small encounter that doesn't add much to the overall story, and is just there for flavor, or 3. Pathfinder is just naturally easy and I should add more difficulty to the encounters?

Any reply would be helpful!

That's a pretty "weak" encounter. Altogether that's maybe CR 1. Worse, the crows aren't much of a threat, since it's not natural for crows to attack if they're not being directed to do so. A spellcaster could have taken the whole bunch out with a single 1st-level spell.

For CR in general, it's hampered by a lack of clear goalposts. There are goalposts for some stats by CR: hit points, AC, high/low attack bonus, high/low damage, primary/secondary save DC, good/poor saving throw. For a CR 1/2 creature those values are 10 hit points, AC 11, +1/+0 to hit, average 4/3 damage, save DC 11/8, and good save +3/bad save +0.

I don't know if I've ever seen a CR 1/2 creature with stats close to that. A 1st-level orc barbarian, a CR 1/2 creature, has an attack bonus of at least +4 to hit (15 Strength +2 from racial +1 BAB, so +4 to hit, before rage, giving another +2 to hit) which is 3 to 5 points above the curve. It will also have about 14 hit points, not 10, and that's before rage. The monster math doesn't make it possible to match the goalposts. Then again, finding a starting PC with an AC of only 11 is pretty rare. (First-level wizards have spell-like abilities, so can afford the spell slots to cast Mage Armor.) Those stats aren't really all that adequate, either. A good save is +3, but the starting save DC is at least 13 and probably a lot higher (starting stat 15 + 1st-level spell gives a save DC of 13, but a starting stat of 16 or even 20 is much more common, so save DC 14 or 16!).

Making matters worse, many secondary stats aren't given goalposts at all. Touch AC, CMB, CMD... it's trivially easy to have a creature with a nearly unstoppable CMB for its level, or one with an incredibly low touch AC, leaving them easy fodder for gunslingers.

And to top it all off, Pathfinder PCs can be markedly more or less powerful, both within and between classes. CR is just a very rough guide, less about "level matching" and more about "this monster is more powerful than that monster".

Once you have an idea of how powerful your PCs are, you can tweak encounters upward. Most APs aren't built with optimized PCs in mind (optimizing not just builds but tactics) and so you often need to beef up encounters. Three hobgoblin warriors might not have been much of a match for the PCs if they were bunched up. (A sneaking rogue could probably kill one during the surprise round, a wizard could fry at least one, a fighter could laughingly squish one...)

 

[Starfox]

I feel CRs in pathfinder work reasonably well, but encounters are overall pretty easy. Your players got the drop on the enemy and knwew what they were fighting. Under such conditions, an equal-level encounter just is not a problem. But it is still an interesting challenge and makes the scouting worth the effort.

An intelligent party that scouts ahead will start to feel challenged at around party level +2.