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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8106442" data-attributes="member: 70468">Your argument has a problem in that early adventures did follow the guidelines. The Forge of Fury had an encounter with a roper, which was an overwhelming encounter. People got upset. Adventures then stopped doing that. Like you say, people do what adventures do, so the norm became having encounters that were appropriately challenging (meaning not too easy and definitely not overwhelming).The overall point of the article is advice to GMs on taking full advantage of the rules (note that Pathfinder 1e hadn’t even been released at the time of its writing), but it’s really just the historical elements that are relevant to this discussion. What I’m trying to show is a progression from an old-school style (where encounters are what they are, and sometimes they’re just too hard) to what I’m calling “3e-style” where they are appropriately challenging for the party.If you think there’s a passage in the DMG that contradicts his claims, please cite it. I’ve reproduced the part he’s discussing below.You’ve focused in on the trivial encounters, but that’s a red herring. What people got upset about were the “impossible” encounters. 3e introduces that table by saying that “a well-constructed adventure has a variety of encounters at several different levels of difficulty.” I thought this might just be old-school stuff that snuck into 3e (like the accidental facing rules), but 3.5e’s DMG says the same thing (pp. 49–50).What I think really helps underscore the evolution in adventure design is PF1’s CRB. It discuss things in terms of a “well-constructed adventure”, but the <a href="https://www.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Designing%20Encounters&Category=Building%20an%20Adventure" target="_blank">building an adventure</a> tells you what CRs are appropriate. Given that PF1 is (more or less) compatible with 3e and 3.5e, that tables effectively constrains you to challenging and very difficult encounters. PF1 basically dropped the easy and overpowering categories.Having seen that PF1 dialed in on appropriately challenging encounters, I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that PF2 set out to fix the problem with challenging encounters not actually being challenging. If you play badly, a moderate-threat encounter will kick your butt.If we look at the breakdown of encounters that have been posted for Cult of Cinders, most of them are moderate-threat or higher. People got what they said they wanted, but is that what they actually wanted? I suspect not. I think some people said they wanted challenging encounters without understanding the implications, but I think other people wanted them as something to trivialize with their character-building prowess.It’s something you’ve pointed out here before several times. There’s just no way to get an edge in PF2. In PF1, you could build your way past a difficult encounter. If players knew the system, and built good characters, they could beat those challenging encounters without a problem. In PF2, they can’t. Your only option is to work together well as a team. That shift in system mastery from out-of-game (character building) to in-game (teamwork and tactics) is probably better for the game in the abstract, but it’s certainly causing issues with people picking up adventures and then getting destroyed.I say that this shift is better in the abstract because I was once convinced it was the better approach, but I’m currently questioning it. 5e doesn’t approach balance so meticulously. A group that doesn’t use feats and just plays their classes is obviously weaker than one with e.g., a paladin/blade-pact-warlock multiclass and all the right feat synergies, but it people have figured out how to work around it because the system in general tries not to make too many assumptions about power level. I mean, the system claims not to consider magic items, but magic items make a pretty big difference too.Anyway, I’ll say it again. For old-school play, PF2 works really well. I love having tools that work because I can just not blow up my party all the time with nonstop moderate-threat encounters. It kind of sucks for people getting destroyed in official adventures, and that’s ultimately going to be bad for adoption. It’s actually kind of ironic that PF2 might need its own OSR moment given its heritage and overall design.Well, yes. That’s the point. Adventures responded to what the market wanted. That’s not a flaw or a criticism of what happened. It’s just what it is. If Paizo is sensible, they’ll respond likewise by continuing to refine how they design their adventures, and we’ll see future ones designed to be less difficult overall.This is where we that discussion on play style goes. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😉" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" title="Winking face    :wink:" data-shortname=":wink:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

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