Pathfinder 2E PF2: Second Attempt Post Mortem

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'm going to disagree here. The encounter guidelines never provide you with the explicit guidance to make a dangerous solo battle. They don't exist in the RAW guidelines, so you can't overshoot them.

However, if you do get into the math, it is pretty clear what you need:

1. Ideally a Legendary Monster for the action economy (which I think is better than 4e solos or PF2 monsters)
2. Use 50-100% of the daily encounter budget. Here is a table to make it easy for you: Encounter Building - It's not Deadly, its Epic!

The mistake people make is seeing "deadly" (also the mistake in WotC's naming) and assuming it means deadly without reading the description or actually looking how that encounter's XP cost compares to the daily XP budget.

My criticism comes from a place of understanding all of that and GMing and playing 5e for several years, tried many different solutions, none of them work as half as well Paizo's approach, especially since Paizo's isn't as dependent upon attrition as a means of creating difficulty. By the end, I could do it in 5e, but it was a lot of effort for limited payoff, especially since my players were less than thrilled with the way legendary stuff works (and funnily enough, I came from 4e before that, where I also preferred the bosses.)

Also, 5e does not handle optimized PCs very well at all, which is a big problem for our playstyle in terms of 5e's bosses, even with legendary stuff in play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Huh. Oddly, the Legendary and Lair stuff was one of the few things I liked about 5e when I read it. Maybe I'd have felt differently as a player.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Huh. Oddly, the Legendary and Lair stuff was one of the few things I liked about 5e when I read it. Maybe I'd have felt differently as a player.

My players disliked it because Legendary resistances felt like a bad meta to them, they didn't like the boss just turning their abilities off (psychologically, the low chance that any spell could penetrate in pf2e is more appealing) the meta of "fling saving throws at them to get rid of the resistance, then drop the save or suck" also felt pretty cheap. All of this was exacerbated by the fact that the monsters couldn't stand against them in a material way, so once those were gone the bosses went down like wet pool noodles without us customizing hellish bosses for them to fight because 5e is out of whack with its own optimization meta.

Similarly players didn't love that the boss monster got extra actions in the fixes since it felt arbitrary, and it limited our capacity to use the same creature in different circumstances. My level 9 PCs should not be able to crap all over a Balor unless the Balor is using guerilla tactics, or has a tripled HP pool, or has been customized into a super special boss balor with new funky mode featuring dante from devil may cry (snark at 5e, not you guys.) Its nice to be able to just whip something out of the Bestiary, have clear guidelines for how to use it for a cool boss battle, and have it function, especially since pf2e creatures do tend to have cool powers I can use to spice up the fight that really come alive in these solo encounters where the creature has a lot of staying power.

 

[Campbell]

I was not a fan of extra actions and other meta elements in 4e solo monsters, but could stomach the abstraction level by treating it as alternate way to present power differences solo->elite->normal->minion being a way to represent the same creature in different ways for different power levels. The abstraction was somewhat consistent in my mind. Legendary creatures somehow feel more blatant to me, especially stuff like Legendary Resistance.

At it's core I have strong aesthetic preference for D&D levels to be more meaningful in terms of the fiction. I want to eventually treat that dragon as my equal or even my lesser. That's the entire appeal of levels to me. Otherwise I would just play something with more consistent power levels and organic advancement.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Legendary Resistance is just terrible, but it's reflective of how "Save vs. Suck" works in 5E. It's certainly better than other editions, but at the same time they did not find the sweet spot and thus there's a really unsatisfying band-aid put on it. I've seen people complain about Incapacitation as a concept, but I think it ends up working better by comparison. At the least, with the gradated results you were more likely to get something out of it.

Legendary Actions, though, were pretty good. My biggest problem was that they didn't commit harder to them: they were really good ways of breaking up the action for solo monster threats, and they definitely should have been used more. Generally speaking I liked to give big monster with multiple attacks a few legendary actions at the cost of extra attacks. It worked well with giants, and I got creative in creating a bunch of different attacks for them to use and spread out.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's all fair. I think there's a problem with 5e in that it wanted to do that whole bounded-accuracy thing, but still wanted solo opponents to be viable, and especially as long as you also have SOS style spells, that's a problem. There's no good way to deal with it. The alternatives are just to make solo monsters generically tough as hell, and there's some prices to be paid for that approach, too.

 

[payn]

Then again, your description reminds of Raiding in WoW or FFXIV and I've always really enjoyed that kind of experience, since the 'if you're not careful' part is skillful, pulling through feels like an achievement.

Thats interesting I was thinking earlier about how severe encounters feel like MMO raids, and how I don't want that experience in my TTRPG.

 

[Retreater]

Thats interesting I was thinking earlier about how severe encounters feel like MMO raids, and how I don't want that experience in my TTRPG.

My "coming of age" as a DM was running a Ravenloft-inspired campaign back in 2e. For one of the adventures I had taken inspiration from an obscure German Expressionistic novel from the early 20th century called "The Golem." The party had been disincorporated from their bodies and put in the bodies of townspeople while a berserk golem was rampaging through the slums of a city. They had to use traps, rig buildings to collapse, etc., to stop the creature since they couldn't stand toe-to-toe with it. It was thrilling. It felt like a big achievement without feeling like an MMO raid. That adventure I wrote as a teenager felt better than anything Paizo has put out for PF2.

 

[dave2008]

My criticism comes from a place of understanding all of that and GMing and playing 5e for several years, tried many different solutions, none of them work as half as well Paizo's approach, especially since Paizo's isn't as dependent upon attrition as a means of creating difficulty. By the end, I could do it in 5e, but it was a lot of effort for limited payoff, especially since my players were less than thrilled with the way legendary stuff works (and funnily enough, I came from 4e before that, where I also preferred the bosses.)

I have the opposite issue generally, I have to try not to destroy my PCs in 5e. If I used the epic encounter guidelines with my current group it would be a TPK every time. No effort for me with great payoff.

So, just curious, what is so difficult about throwing a monster that is 6-10 CR above your groups level? How did that not work for you? What didn't pay off? What are is the pay off you are looking for?

PS It sounds like you left 5e, but did you get a chance to use any Mythic monsters. I really nice wrinkle to add to solo monsters.

Also, 5e does not handle optimized PCs very well at all, which is a big problem for our playstyle in terms of 5e's bosses, even with legendary stuff in play.

I can't really speak to that to much. Though I have built many a monster to defeat optimized PCs, and I have been told they work well, my players are not optimizers, nor to we have a lot of magic items.

I much prefer the solo tools in 5e (legendary actions & resistances, lair actions, mythic trait) conceptually to what PF2e offers (higher level). But everyone has different desires and wants. I personally feel I have a lot more freedom to make the monsters I want in 5e, but to be honest it has been a long time since I tried to make a PF2 monster.

 

[dave2008]

That's all fair. I think there's a problem with 5e in that it wanted to do that whole bounded-accuracy thing, but still wanted solo opponents to be viable, and especially as long as you also have SOS style spells, that's a problem. There's no good way to deal with it. The alternatives are just to make solo monsters generically tough as hell, and there's some prices to be paid for that approach, too.

I think think there is a way to do it. I think 5e Legendary monsters are close and 5e Mythic monsters closer. The big issue I have with them is Legendary Resistance, though simple, is not the best solution to SoS spells / effects (to punitive to the PCs). I don't think a one-size fits all approach to this issue was the right way to go (though I understand why they did it). I have come up with a few different alternates myself.

There are a few other tweaks I would make too, but the general concept of legendary and particularly mythic monsters in 5e are the best "official" solos I have seen/used in D&D or a PF. The big problem people have, IMO, is they often try to use them at the wrong CR.