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I dunno, guys. The difficulty level is hard to adjust. For instance, there are certain scenarios I won't run for new players. Party death is just entirely too likely. And I agree with Doug Miles in that a lot depends entirely on how prepared the GM is. If the GM knows the NPCs as well as the players know their characters, then it's much, much more difficult. Usually, when my group has a cake-walk in a 7-11, it's because it was run by a GM who's unused to running high level play. However, I have another GM that the players are starting to get frightened of because he understands the mechanics better than almost any of my group, and plays the bad guys exactly like he plays his own characters. (I steer him towards 7-11s instead of 1-5s for that reason.)
If you make the scenarios challenging for the min-maxers, you create a culture where new players cannot get started because they don't know HOW to min-max yet. And that's a dangerous proposition.
In The Silver Mount Collection just Sunday, I killed one of my power-gamers and one of my new players at the same table. The new player basically committed suicide (walked into a pit cast by a party member containing a bad guy while blind and nauseated) but the power gamer was just unlucky. I think we've got a decent balance right now.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Yeah, I think the difficulty in the recent seasons has been pretty okay. Personally I'm not into Hard Mode; I want to be challenged but not to an insane degree. I'm glad that some scenarios offer Hard Mode for the people who do want that sort of thing.
With regard to things like Silver Mount - right now people are saying it's way to dangerous. (I survived, but it wasn't easy.) I think next year, people will have learned more about how to fight robots, and people will consider it to be more reasonable than they're considering it now.
Basically, if a season shifts the kind of enemies you need to deal with, there's a period where people need to learn new tactics, and that's a dangerous period.
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Things that make harder more annoying and less fun than the players
Surprise rounds. Overdone, done at a drop of a hat, done to make the players feel like complete moron by explicitly being done by arbitrary fiats like "you didn't announce you were looking for an ambush, even though you were explicitely told you're being used as bait and a turnip would know to be on the lookout "
Denying players agency. confusion, Charm, dominate, blasphemy, Confusion, and confusion. Its not fun not being able to control my character for 45 minutes, and its kind of like beating someone at pool by running the table: doesn't matter how good you are and you're just watching someone play.
Things that are hard because you can't do anything to them. Swarms. Incorporeals. Swarms. Incorporeal swarms. Elemental resistances so ubiquitous you have to spam 1-2 spells, Hardness damn near reasonable damage at that level. Swarms with hardness...
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I would say that comes down to the a priori knowledge of the BBEG and his/her prep time. I don't think a 6 sec round is a reasonable time to to an "elf check" and cast a spell.
The PCs make knowledge checks as free actions all the time. Unless the PCs have taken precautions to disguise their race, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a BBEG to get to make the DC 5 Knowledge: Local check to recognize and Elf or Elves in the party. If the PCs can take enough time to recognize the difference between a ghoul and a ghast, shout out all its weaknesses, and still do their full round of actions, the enemies should be able to do the same. The last thing we need to do is weigh the action economy even more heavily in the PCs favor by allowing the PCs to take a free action, but not allowing the enemy the same.
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I would say that comes down to the a priori knowledge of the BBEG and his/her prep time. I don't think a 6 sec round is a reasonable time to to an "elf check" and cast a spell.The PCs make knowledge checks as free actions all the time. Unless the PCs have taken precautions to disguise their race, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a BBEG to get to make the DC 5 Knowledge: Local check to recognize and Elf or Elves in the party. If the PCs can take enough time to recognize the difference between a ghoul and a ghast, shout out all its weaknesses, and still do their full round of actions, the enemies should be able to do the same. The last thing we need to do is weigh the action economy even more heavily in the PCs favor by allowing the PCs to take a free action, but not allowing the enemy the same.
I suppose that's fair enough.
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Remember, Paizo published the Granule Construct Swarm, Gray Goo and these boyos.
What a sick company!
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Remember, Paizo published the Granule Construct Swarm, Gray Goo and these boyos.
What a sick company!
Yay!
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Yeah, I think the difficulty in the recent seasons has been pretty okay. Personally I'm not into Hard Mode; I want to be challenged but not to an insane degree. I'm glad that some scenarios offer Hard Mode for the people who do want that sort of thing.
With regard to things like Silver Mount - right now people are saying it's way to dangerous. (I survived, but it wasn't easy.) I think next year, people will have learned more about how to fight robots, and people will consider it to be more reasonable than they're considering it now.
Basically, if a season shifts the kind of enemies you need to deal with, there's a period where people need to learn new tactics, and that's a dangerous period.
That's alot of people ;)
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Kyle, the granular construct swarm has blindsight, which is even better than see in darkness. (But it is missing hardness)
I spit out my coffee when I read "It is missing the hardness." A swarm with hardness would be hilarious. It is most definitely necessary.
But these things are pretty gross already. Hahah those bastards gave it fire resistance and DR.
Defensive Abilities construct traits, dispersion; DR 10/magic; Immune weapon damage; Resist fire 10
EDIT: Anybody else think that Granule Construct Host could make a cool... uh... "boon?"
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Also, there's a lot of assumptions in this thread that don't hold up. While it is definitely true that some characters can easily get init in the 10-20 range with minimal resources expended, I would argue that there's not enough characters that can get in that range with minimal resources that would require adventure design to change.Any Charisma based caster can easily get a an extra +3-+6 on initiative with one feat and one circlet. Wizards can get an increase to their initiative just by picking a school, without having to take anything else to boost it. Gunslingers get an automatic +2 to initiative once they hit level three, which is great for a class that is already dex based. Swashbucklers have a similar increase. That's quite a few classes there that have a pretty high initiative bonus, not including the builds from other classes that can focus on initiative. That's a lot of classes.
It's actually about 1/3 of the available classes after Advanced Class Guide. And two of your examples are really more examples of "If you focus your build on Initiative, you can have a high initiative": The Charisma-based casters must burn their 1st level feat for it, and the wizard has to pick that one out of the 10 available (more if you include the sub-schools and elemental schools). If I focus two or three of my character choices around a single thing, I will do that single really, really well. As I should.
To your overall point about difficulty:
The problem I see is more that the difficulty levels are out at the extremes: things are often way too easy or way too hard. It's really hard to find that sweet spot in the middle, where challenges are hard but not demoralizingly impossible (a shadow in a 2nd level module? Really?) and the party can confidently kill the bad guys without one-shotting them.
It's even harder to find that sweet spot when you can't know what the character mix will be, or the size of the tables.
I would like to see more options on adjustments to scenarios. For example, if we let GMs choose one of the random encounters from the list instead of rolling it, it would will allow the GMs more flexibility to adjust to the table: if there are three two-handed barbarians in the party, you can pick the swarm instead of the giant fleas, etc.
Another possibility is making an actual three-step CR rating instead of a two-step rating with a 4-player adjustment. For a table of 6-7 level 3s, playing up with the 4-player adjustment isn't always the best option. Since the 4-player adjustment is usually "remove X number of bad guys", the 6-7 player tables will usually overwhelm the encounter just from numbers alone.
A note on 6-7 player tables:
In our area, we have a lot of 7-player tables forced on us by limited table availability. We have plenty of GMs to split off a new table: what we don't have is another physical table to put them at. When possible, we will send a group offsite, but usually our only options are turn people away or suck it up and play 7 at a table. If "no 7 person tables" becomes a hard rule, we will have to turn away 2-3 players every week.
Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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I think See In Darkness has no range limit, so it's useful when things are beyond your Blindsight range.
The swarm has blind sight 100 ft: There are are very, very few adventures where you need more than that. It also negates invisibility, concealment (so no obscuring mists) blindness, displacement, blur, etc.
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Neck slot is pretty valuable so people often take other things.
Not a big deal. You put on the swarmbane clasp, and then put on your other neck slot item (such as the amulet of natural armor). If you aface a swarm, just use a move action to take off the nat armor, and activate the swarmbane!
Easy peasy.
But, mention it to your GM first... In case he doesn't play the rule that way. Then, just use two move actions to swap out.
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It's actually about 1/3 of the available classes after Advanced Class Guide. And two of your examples are really more examples of "If you focus your build on Initiative, you can have a high initiative"I disagree with this statement somewhat. For example, taking the issues with Gunslingers aside, most built Gunslingers are likely to have something in their Dex score, just to help them hit. While I have seen Gunslingers without a Dex mod, they're already going to have to a decent initiative bonus before they get a +2 just for leveling.
If you pick Divination school, you can easily just select what your two opposition schools will be. And they'll likely be the spells you weren't planning on casting anyway. Charisma based casters are much worse. Part of character building is picking and choosing what things your character will be good at. Generally, having a high casting stat means that there's an exchange for something else. But with one feat at first level (and let's face it, there's not many feats that first level sorcerers take anyways), you can easily have a +4-5 initative modifier along with more spells and higher save DCs.
I'm not saying that the character isn't focused somewhat on initiative, but it doesn't take that much of an investment in order to get both high spell DCs and high initiative.
But there are several other, much more useful feats that must be taken at 1st level. Not to mention that you're putting off the basic spell casting feats like Spell Focus and Combat Casting until at least 3rd level. Also, to get +10 to initiative in the mid levels (your original examples), a Charisma based caster would have to take Improved Initiative and probably one of the +2 initiative traits. Two feats and a trait seems like at least a secondary focus for a build.
For the wizard, you have to choose Divination school, which means you chose to focus your build on the Divination school.
It is easy for a character to get a high initiative, true, but it doesn't just happen accidently. Players make tradeoffs to get a high initiative. You can argue that the tradeoffs aren't significant enough and that it should be harder, but I don't think it's correct to imply that most characters are walking around with a +10 initiative.