Monkey Bars's page

I'm not interested in doing random encounter checks for my AV game; I don't feel like (from what I've read so far--only the first book) that the dungeon nor PF2e really support that style of play.

But I do want to create some kind of time pressure on the players, so taking an exploration turn to search a room, or making repeated checks, or the like, has a cost to it.

Any ideas (especially from those who know the lower levels in books two and three) of what I could make happen at night? It shouldn't be an instant kill type of thing, but something that would chase them out and force them back to town, or at least to the first level. I'm thinking of something like a magical darkness flooding the area.

My first thought is the spell Darkness is cast over the area (heightened so PCs with darkvision are affected as well)?

Is there any reason this wouldn't work, or would create problems later--like they have to do something at night and aren't at a level where overcoming Darkness is more trivial?

Aura of Courage states:

Whenever you become frightened, reduce the condition value by 1 (to a minimum of 0). At the end of your turn when you would reduce your frightened condition value by 1, you also reduce the value by 1 for all allies within 15 feet.

Does this mean the Champion needs to have the Frightened condition to reduce the value for all allies?

My feeling is the Champion doesn't need to be frightened, since

• the Champion still would reduce the Frightened condition if they had it, and
  
• if the Champion needed the Frightened condition, it would say "At the end of your turn (when/if) you reduce your frightened condition value by 1..."

It just feels like very confusing wording, when it could simply say, "At the end of the Champion's turn, all allies within 15 feet with the frightened condition reduce the value by 1 (minimum 0)."

Is there a way to randomly generate creature HP?

I don't like every monster of the same type having the exact same HP, but there's no Hit Die in this system so I can't just roll xD8 to generate them.

Anyone have any ideas?

Dungeon Crawl Classics has a mechanic that lets magic users sacrifice HP/ability score/etc. to get a bonus on their spell rolls, upgrade the magic effect, or whatever.

Has anyone tried implementing anything similar? Seems like a fun risk/reward option.

Something like, sacrifice HP times the spell level to add to the roll/save DC, and you can choose how much HP you want to sacrifice. Casting a level 3 spell, you can sacrifice 3 HP to raise the attack/DC by 1, 6 HP to raise the attack/DC by 2, etc.

Players could also play with the different spell effects and what they could sacrifice to boost them. Like, how much HP (or something else?) would it cost to cast a level 3 spell when you don't have any level 3 spell slots left? How much would they have to sacrifice to fire two fireballs in a single spell? (it would be a lot!)