Necrotifice's page

So, I'm running a non-AP adventure. I'm building my own encounters and some of my own traps and whatnot. I've noticed some issues related to challenge.

So, Table 4 of the Bestiary lists 2 creatures of same-level as a "High" difficulty encounters. Two Lemures is not a "High" difficulty encounter for four level 2 adventurers. Same goes for almost any Level 2 creatures (except Animated Armor, see my other post).

A "high" difficulty encounter is just an utter non-threat. It's trivial enough that I wouldn't use them against players because victory is so assured that it's just wasting player time. We set aside about three hours every week or two to game from out schedules, why should I waste 10-20 minutes of it on something we already know the outcome of?

I can chalk that up somewhat to "our group likes difficult encounters". The second issue, XP for traps, I cannot disregard as a difference of style.

A Level 2 trap (Spear Launcher) can do 2d6+6 damage. A Level 2 Elf Alchemist or Rogue with 10 Con has 18 HP. That trap, should it hit them, could 1-shot that character. Even if it doesn't kill them, it's going to cost the party resources in the form of healing or downtime.

That trap, on it's own, is more dangerous than a "High" risk encounter... but it only gives 12 XP? That seems really minimal for the cost in resources/life. I'm not saying it should give 80 XP like an encounter, it should just give more for being so risky.

tl;dr - Encounters as listed in the Bestiary seem too easy and designed to waste player time, Hazards are too dangerous for the low amount of XP they give.

So, I'm GMing that non-test AP game. I'm picking out treasure for rewards in this dungeon as per Table 11-1 (page 347 of Rulebook, for the curious). And I notice something about most of the Trinkets - these require skill proficiencies and sometimes even feats.

Adding feat or skill requirements to items functionally narrows the list of magic items a player can use. I could see an argument for this on certain items, but for trinkets and consumables it just feels like too much balancing against the items.

Items already have several balancing factors - use of action economy and scarcity. Many players will already not use consumables because they want to "bank" them for when they need the most. I don't think consumables need to be made worse than those two factors.

Firstly, I want to apologize because I'm probably about to lay down three threads at once unless the forum policies stop me, but I have three distinct things to bring up from my last two sessions. Rather than clog one discussion, it makes more sense to just have three.

So, I'm running a non-AP game. I know, the AP is the stuff they are intending to test, but it's also useful to try out new things. I've been running really difficult encounters because I find that the guidelines make everything far too easy (another post on that later), so I threw four Animated Armors at my 5 Level 2 players last night.

This was an impossible encounter. Luckily, this encounter was more of a puzzle, with the ability to stop the Armors with the right choices. Still, for some players doing over 9 damage was actually impossible. For others, it was pretty darn close - he could do 10 if he got the two highest rolls.

Level 2 creatures with Hardness 9 isn't okay, and really Hardness for creatures as a whole is broken. Other creatures like Devils can get away with it because you can bypass it with their weaknesses, but in this case it's not possible.

The player who could hurt it on the two highest damage rolls had a +4 attack roll using a Warhammer, so at AC 18 he has a 30% chance to hit period. He then only has a 25% chance to do ANY damage after that (1d8+2). If my math is correct, each attack only had a 7.5% chance to do ANY damage.

After that first hit, his chance to hit it would increase to 50% (AC changes to 14 because it gains the Broken condition). However, that's still only a 12.5% to do any damage, which would be either a 1 or a 2. This thing has 20 HP.

Our party is a a Halfling (reflavored to Kobold) Rogue, an Elf Paladin, an Elf Alchemist, a Half-Orc Monk, and a Human Bard. Alch and Bard can't hurt them period, the Rogue could on a lucky Sneak Attack, and the Monk was in a similar boat to the Paladin where they could hurt them, but it was stupidly difficult.