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The mechanical focus for the first module of this teaching AP should be on introducing all the basic encounter types, traps or other skill-based challenges, and the victory points system.

Letting the PCs face a PL+2 foe at level one, in a situation where they have no risk of failure, is a good idea. The idea of a series of arena encounters designed to show off different enemy types is also good. I like Tristan d'Ambrosius's idea of having the bar brawl evolve into a chase so the VP system can be introduced early. That seems like a nice endpoint to level one.

I like level 2 being where the PCs are allowed out into the world. Their placement on repair duty could be framed as a punishment for the brawl or as a mission of mercy to defend an important farm from the local wildlife. This would also be a good point to solidify the cast of low-level NPCs the party will be working alongside after having introduced them in the level 1 scenes. I think a potentially major accident while rebuilding the wall could function as a standalone trap to introduce that mechanic.

The final encounter at level 2 could be a Vermlek, and some PL-1 undead rising from the outpost's small graveyard. For added drama, this should happen just as the PCs are feeling safe behind the wall and congratulation themselves on a job well done. This shatters the illusion that a wall is enough to keep you safe this close to the Worldwound and pushes the party to complete their training and get commissioned as full members of the reclaimers.

The end of this AP should be a final gauntlet of tests, the PCs being commissioned, and then a routine patrol into the wilds. The "boss fight" here would be facing down for PL+0 instructors (including the one they faced at the start of the AP) to show their rapid growth into capable reclaimers. I think I'd favour ending this module without another big fight, but instead ending it with some small skirmishes and a hook to carry the party to the next module.

SuperBidi wrote:

Yeah, Kineticist is weak...

..But overall, the class is nowhere close to impressive, you need to find a broken ability (Fire Aura Junction, Timber Sentinel) and just focus on it to perform ok.

The Kineticist class is not weak; rather, it is a generalist class. Depending on element(s) chosen it heals, tanks, attacks single targets (ranged and melee), does AoE and has area control elements. So don't expect to lead the pack in any of these areas, expect to do a pretty good job in multiple areas.

An area effect attack combined with Safe Elements allows you to get your AoE off in confined areas that are not conducive to Fireball/Lightning Bolt/etc. Sure it's probably less damage, but you get to use it more often. Similarly Ocean Balm/Fresh Produce won't heal as much as a Cleric's font spells, but you get to do it all day long & a Cleric will run out.

In short, stop comparing it to a Fighter and start comparing it to a Bard.

Compared to a Druid or a Bard the Kineticist doesn't look great. Bard, as boring as it can be in play, is highly effective. The Druid can heal, deal AoE damage, and wade into melee as needed.

Kines are stuck in that awkward Alchemist spot where they can play okay, but take more system mastery than they should to be properly effective.

Necron_ wrote:

I do know there are also quite a lot of Precision immune enemies. But what about Physical immune ? Whats stopping, lets say, a Fighter or Barbarian ? Why does everyone else have to deal with enemies immune to them where as some (Non-precision) martials just get to do their thing without thought ?

Fact checking here:

There are 351 creatures that have resistance to all physical damage.

There are 286 creatures that have resistance to fire damage and don't have the Fire trait.

Now, do damage immunity for both.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Mathmuse wrote:

How can we teach new GMs?

Products focused on onboarding new players, playing PFS sessions, watching gameplay-focused shows, etc. There are more resources now than ever for new players wanting to get into PF2.

I'd support making new player-focused APs and adding sidebars to the first chapters of future APs to help with this as well.

An AP for beginners sparks my imagination.

Sarkoris Scar Adventure Path
Here be demons! The Worldwound portal that let thousands of demons invade Sarkoris has been closed, but now people must reclaim the land. Join the immigrants who want to make the land called Sarkoris Scar habitable gain. Go through relentless training and then face the true challenge. A three-module adventure path for 1st to 10th level. Each module contains an article of advice for new GMs.

Beginner Boot Camp
To defeat demons, a prospective reclaimer must train. The drill sergeants know that any lapse could lead to death, so they won't be easy on your characters. But don't worry, because medics are on standby to patch the recruits back together. For 1st-level characters.

Into the Shudderwood
The fey horrors of the Shudderword allied with the champions of Mendev to hold off the demonic horde. As allies they are not particularly friendly. Go into the woods to learn from the creepiest creatures this side of the Abyss. For 4th-level characters.

Demon Hunter
Finally the heroes are ready to hunt demons. Yet their adversaries lie in wait for any slip-up in their tactics. Only remembering and exploiting the weaknesses of these fiends can defeat them. For 7th-level characters.

We should take this to a new thread and work on this idea.

I just wanted to point out that "variance favors/disfavors the players" will not be categorically true. Even with your example, I could counter by saying, "if you run a bunch of trivial encounters with PL-3 enemies, variance will favor the players," since it's the players who will crit and hit more. Who variance favors will depend a lot of the specifics of the game and game balance and can change from fight to fight.

PF2 is designed around removing variance. The whole system puts massive guardrails on things like save-or-die spells, and the 4-DoS system expects you to play with a very specific range of encounters and encounter types. If we remove incapacitation and make a natural 20 always count as a critical success and a natural 1 always count as a critical failure, adding more variance, that same swarm with a few casters becomes terrifying.

Good advice, but it reminds me that the thread's topic, "The game doesn't do a good job at teaching new player's how to play," could also cover teaching new GMs how to run the game properly. Leaving the proper clues for the PCs to follow is tough. I once made a mistake with a single word in a paragraph description and the PCs headed off west instead of north. The word was "first," the enemies were returning to their first oupost. The players decided that the first outpost was the first one that they had discovered, not the first one the enemies had established.

Foreshadowing future encounters is excellent, and it also gives the PCs practice against new types of enemies. But it is a GM tactics that newbies won't necessarily think of.

How can we teach new GMs?

Products focused on onboarding new players, playing PFS sessions, watching gameplay-focused shows, etc. There are more resources now than ever for new players wanting to get into PF2.

I'd support making new player-focused APs and adding sidebars to the first chapters of future APs to help with this as well.

Taking out a sentry to sneak into a camp or castle is low risk. If something goes wrong and the sentry alerts the camp, then the party is in great position to run away. If the quick response to the alert can kill a character, then the camp was too tough to risk in the first place.

If you're sure that the sentry is alone and know the level of the camp, that's likely as close as it gets to low risk.

And my story in comment #557 yesterday about arresting drunken sailboat racers was a zero risk encounter. The drunk who tried to punch Chime-Ringer Virgil missed by a wide margin. I used 0th-level Dockhands for their stats, except with Sailing Lore. The party received 30 xp for good service to the police and no xp for defeating the four drunk people.

That is the exception that proves the rule.

You're treating things as exclusive to each other when they aren't.

You also might be doing the thing many people do where they hold a belief without ever questioning it even as the moments pop up that outsiders can point to as a reason why questioning the belief would make sense.

There's a difference in tolerance for losing due to poor RNG. I'm closer to the high end for that, while I suspect that PF2 selects for those closer to the middle or even slightly below.

Because you're not actually talking about the difference between an open door for bad luck and a closed door for bad luck. I laugh off bad luck easily; in my most recent session of PF2 I critically failed 5 times, even including managing to have 2 hero points provide me natural 1s.

I'll laugh off that same event as my player whiffs 5 attacks and we're being scraped off the floor after a TPK. S%$~ happens. Stack the deck so you survive the bad luck, or accept the outcome.

But if a game makes it so that any bad luck even close to what I experience means massive consequences like sitting out of play or having to say goodbye to the character I have to stop and ask "Why?" I mean, it's one thing if I'm satisfied with having played the character and ready to try something new or if I've intentionally maneuvered my character into risky circumstances, and an entirely different thing if I basically can't ever be in low- to mid-risk scenarios in the first place because of how a games dice mechanics work.

Is any combat scenario ever really low to mid-risk? I'd argue that even the easiest combat scenario is at best mid-risk because poor luck against a motivated foe can and should lead to you dying, messily.

And the "die while creating your character" thing is a great example. In my experience no one is actually amused by those results. It's like rolling for ability scores; even the people that "love" doing it are actually meaning that they love when it goes a particular way - and most of them are going to keep at the random tries until it does go that particular way. The bad results are not a thing they actively enjoy and are not even a thing which improves their enjoyment by providing contrast, they are just a time sink and a pretense that are tolerated because the rest of what happens once they have passed is actually enjoyed. And instead of questioning whether "I like random character creation" deserves an asterisk elaborating upon the points which could actually be removed without spoiling the experience, it's just "I like random character creation." Even as they sigh and groan about the result they rolled this time being obnoxious.

Dying in character creation is a punishment for being risky in character creation. The rewards for taking those paths are often high, but you risk your character dying before finding the spotlight if they're all you take. A less extreme case is the Cyberpunk lifepath system it can hand out rewards, but as is fitting for the setting, it most piles on the s%$* and sets the stage for why your character is at the fringe of society shooting chooms for ennies on the eddie.

Meanwhile I'm over here thinking death during character creation sounds a lot like a video game crashing when you try to start a new game. It's not even really "quirky" for it to have been an on-purpose possibility, it's just someone having had an idea and run with it because they don't care how their choices relate to player psychology, or because they didn't even have the design sense to consider what a player would be experiencing while attempting to play the game from any perspective other than their own.

A system like that, keeping away players that won't vibe with the game's ethos, is a good thing. Not every game is for everybody and putting that up front so players bounce off at intake rather than pitching a fit several sessions in is good for all involved.

Yes, I do like games and stories. But I don't undertand RPG-Geek's statement about liking messier worlds. That is also a game and story to me, but with more potential to be cut tragically short. That works for some stories, such as horror and gritty realism, but not as well for heroic fantasy.

I feel like Heroic fantasy can exist as a messy place where characters die from bad luck. It's the difference between Harry Potter and LotR, and the Stormlight Archive and Wheel of Time. Both are high fantasy, both are heroic fantasy, the first are apt to present their world in shades of black and white and maintain a lighter tone, while the latter are more grey and are willing to kill off cast members more freely.

I like my heroic fantasy to feel grounded, where the idea of combat as sport is a quick way to have your adventuring career ended.

As for entering the wrong dungeon, Trip.H offered a story from Secrets of the Temple-City in which the GM sent them into an unsuspected night ambush because he did not point out that the party's diplomatic mission was very hostile, more hostile than made sense for the plot. They were sent into the wrong dungeon with no choice by the module.

There were a lot of GM errors in that encounter. You shouldn't design around that level of incompetence.

For a third wrong dungeon, a warning to GMs after the Iron Gods' 2nd module Lords of Rust is that many parties will want to head to the capital city Starfall immediately after Lords of Rust because of clues in the module. But Starfall is the setting of the 5th module, Palace of Fallen Stars, and a 7th-level party is not yet strong enough to handle a 13th-level setting. Does the GM let the party get captured and tortured by the Technic League simply because the plot hooks for the 3rd module were poorly expounded? The Technic League won't release the PCs alive to continue the adventure path.

If the GM doesn't do a good job of signposting things, I consider that a GMing error or a sign that the party isn't absorbing the right information from the NPCs. In either case, I'd be tempted to give the party one encounter with an isolated foe from the area, make it clear that this is a basic grunt, and let them figure out what to do with that information. If they push on anyway, yeah, I'd kill them.

In Session Zero I describe the setting, plot, and theme of the adventure path, so that they can build appropriate characters, but I do not provide a road map of dungeons labeled by level. Do we GMs have to clearly label our dungeons with big signs, "Do not enter unless you are 13th level or higher"? Or can we use natural clues, such as rumors in local towns, that our players might miss?

PF2 is bad at being an open world game because of how it refuses to uncouple everything from PL. You can't be Bilbo sneaking past Smaug in PF2 unless the GM fudges things in your favour. OSR games with fewer things decided by the toss of a d20 are better at this style of game because clever tactics can allow for bypassing many foes that would simply toss a d20 and find you in PF2.

There is no guarantee a more consistent game favors the PCs. As silly example to prove the point: if I were to run PL+7 single enemy encounters for an entire campaign, I would wager that would be a pretty short campaign and we'd see some tpks. Is "consistently losing" not a consistent outcome? And as a less silly example, any horror game that wants simulate tropes where the protagonists die or walk away broken by their experiences or newfound knowledge will probably aim to consistently produce anti-player results.

PL+7 encounters aren't a baseline assumption made by PF's design. In play that follows the expected encounter design rules, variance favours the enemy. It's why there's language about PL+3 and 4 encounters that specifically call out bad luck as a way they can turn from very challenging to a TPK.

If you are going to claim that the RNG favors the foes, then justify it with a real reason. Point to a mechanic and show how the imbalance favors the foes.

If RNG doesn't favour the foes, why has PF2 felt the need to ensure PCs start every session with a Hero Point and can earn more? Because they understand that players dislike losing actions (or characters) to variance and prefer a way to combat unwanted outcomes. This directly favours the PCs by reducing variance.

Over any given encounter within the game's expected paradigm, the PCs are expected to win if the dice roll average. They can get lucky and make a hard fight easier, but the conceit of the genre and the game's base math is designed such that the PCs will win every fight where nothing unlucky happens. Over an entire campaign, a game with low variance designed to favour the PCs will rarely kill a PC unexpectedly, barring bad luck, very poor tactics, or a GM putting their thumb on the scale.

In a game with higher variance, such as PF1 with save or die spells that are online starting at level 1, those odds will catch up to the group unless they break the game and, via character build choices, negate that variance. It's why PF1 was a system where entire classes were deemed dead weight due to not having ways to access these systems of variance mitigation and/or not being able to force their enemies to do the same.

The reason games lie about % odds, to the point of even using a pseudo-random roller in a d20 like in BG3, is because the RL math has a disproportionately negative impact on player fun.

This isn't universal. While it's true that, on average, people tend to dislike missing their 90% hit chance shot and getting hit by an enemy with a 10% chance to hit, there are entire sub-genres based on overcoming these odds.

In other words, loosing to RNG feels so s~#@ty, that it's rather normalized in game design to lie to the players about what the odds are. Meanwhile, winning because of RNG doesn't feel as good as it "should" so even though a perfectly mirrored game would be even, it feels s#**ty to play.

This should tell you something about how big a problem it can be to loose a PC to a b++@$%&& turn 1 save or die roll.

It tells me that a lot of people need to take a statistics course.

I think there are some GMs that don't think about the predictability of outcomes as being such an important thing because they are artificially setting the predictability by way of being willing to fudge their dice rolls. Since it's logically less important to have random undesired outcomes be genuinely impossible when you're already set on pretending results you didn't want didn't happen in the first place.

Or we just have groups that understand that a game that uses dice inherently opens the door for bad luck. Some people like PF2's character builder and very guardrailed systems, and some people are risking their character in the creation phase while rolling up a Traveller.

In pf2, the insane RNG variance usually favors the PCs.

I've got no fking clue why, but it's still pf2 standard for Big Bads to literally be single foes, maybe with some backup mooks if the AP feels like it.

This is very imbalancing when the solo Big Bad is -vs- a party of heroes. When a PC rolls a 1, that single PC can be taken out of the fight. But there are still ~3 other PCs, plus all party minions/companions/etc.

If a Big Bad rolls a 1 vs Slow, they cant even use 2A spells anymore, they are cooked by a single bad roll (which can be invoked x Heroes p round by the party).

The math for a single encounter =/= the math for the entire game. Yes, a crit fail could take out a solo threat (this is a good argument for giving important NPCs villain points equal to the number of PCs facing them, or removing PC hero points), but on the whole, the party faces more dice coming at them than any foe ever will. High variance, combined with rolling more dice, means that foes will tend to get lucky more often than the players will.

There's a reason why X-Com fudges the RNG in the player's favour. There are reasons why the best PF1 and D&D 3.5 builds tried to eliminate the dice from the equation wherever possible. Never leave to chance what you can handle through planning.

A more predictable game is also more favorable to the GM, too. The GM and the PCs are not enemies; instead, the enemies are fictional creatures designed to challenge the party. Challenge not destroy.

You like games as games and as a vehicle for telling stories. I prefer messier worlds where the PCs can die because they walked into the wrong dungeon or crossed the wrong person. Have a strong session zero and embrace the chaos. If you die in session one, we'll go from there.

RPG-Geek wrote:

If we want to make companions more powerful, we need to tie them to a resource. Companions that are slightly weaker than we have now, but with their own pool of focus points that caps at two, could be one way to approach this. Even when these points are spent, they'd still be weaker than a full character, even when going all out. The upside is that these boosted actions would allow you to have more agency over when your companion does something cool.

That's a pretty cool idea, though I do feel like it's pretty close to just being the summoner class.

Like if there were an "animal tamer" class I think it's just be an archetype of summoner where you "eidolon" was of more mundane origins.

So if you want a powerful companion class, you want to play a summoner and re-flavor the parts of the class that deal with outsiders to be mundane (assuming you have an amenable GM).

The HP link and shared action pool are issues that I could see keeping people away from the Summoner. Something more companion-focused than what we have now, but less fully integrated than a Summoner, seems like a sweet spot.

Come on dude.

RNG variance is not the same thing as difficulty, those are completely different metrics.

Are you disputing that low variance in a game vastly favours the players and their characters?

If we want to make companions more powerful, we need to tie them to a resource. Companions that are slightly weaker than we have now, but with their own pool of focus points that caps at two, could be one way to approach this. Even when these points are spent, they'd still be weaker than a full character, even when going all out. The upside is that these boosted actions would allow you to have more agency over when your companion does something cool.

No. Absolutely not asking for that. Categorically not asking for that. What I am asking for is slightly less RNG domination. A bit more predictability, and mainly at the lower levels.

That is literally asking for the game to be easier. A more predictable game is always favourable to the PCs, and a more random one is more favourable to the enemies.

Are you unironically bringing up real Life in this? I Hope you're being ironical cause no One in the history of ever has ever wanted true realism in games, games are literally the opposite of realism conceptually and philosophically.

Games are not conceptually the opposite of realism. Games and play are how we prepare for real-life challenges we may face. Why do you think so many kids play at being adults? The idea that games must be unrealistic, pure escapism is completely false.

When you play Tekken do you want mcrgregor to punch you in the face?

No, but I prefer the UFC games to Tekken and prefer sparring as close to the edge as possible. HEMA > SCA > LARP in terms of my enjoyment as an observer and a participant. BattleTech Classic > BattleTech Alpha Strike. If there's an option to add depth and pedantic realism to a game, I'll take it.

Wait has anyone here lost a character to Belcorra at that point in the AP?

Or are we just talking about her downing a PC to show her power and getting healed after?

The worst we have as an anecdote is Trip being cursed with Feeblemind for several in-game days. Days which could pass in minutes at the table as the GM vignettes the scene and describes the repeated attempts to remove the curse, each casting slowly unravelling the magic afflicting the stricken PC.

Again, at some level, there has to be agreement to an "arbitrary" measuring stick to then use to separate good from bad.

If you don't then there's literally no way to discuss the game, as it's all vibes with 0 foundation.

There is no way to "prove" such an aphorism, it's either agreed with or it's not.
It's not an evidenced claim, like "L1 HP math results in a lot of one-shots and full-->downs."

So you admit that it's possible that what you see as unacceptably random is within the tolerance of players and groups that are less inclined to see fair and good as synonymous with one another in terms of game design?

We are talking about a heroic adventure game.

And yes, a game where you can insta-die after 0 errors, or literally before making a single move, is a s+#+ty outcome. Players quit tables over that kind of thing happening dude. Why tf are you defending the most extreme possible case like that?

Unless the campaign starts with a roll for initiative, and your character dies before getting to act, this is never a true statement. There are always actions that your character has taken which have led to their ending up dead. Under some circumstances, this can lead to a situation which appears to be unfair and which appears to have robbed you of agency. These feelings are generally incorrect.

Even in the case where a fight starts with your character being removed from the action. You, as a player, still have agency. You can urge the party to rescue your character, urge them to leave you behind, ask the GM if they have any plans or story beats you can participate in while stuck in the afterlife, etc. Just raging at the situation being unfair and stewing is immature and counterproductive.

RPG-Geek wrote:

... In PF2, there aren't any unavoidable attacks. Even your example gave you a 40% chance, with a reroll to avoid the effect of Belcorra's Feeblemind spell. ...

Dude... an RNG outcome is not player agency, how is this something that needs to be explained. Rolling the RNG generator has 0 choice involved, it's not agency. Holy crap I didn't expect to get this far in with that kind of misconception being present. Rolling a save is a cutscene that the player is forced to advance, there's 0 agency involved.

That's the trade-off for using dice rather than having to physically perform the actions of your character or using some other skill-based method of action resolution. It's inherent to the design of any game that uses dice, cards, or other pseudorandom means to generate a range of outcomes.

If the PC has 0 hero points, the idea that it is *literally* possible for Belcora to go first, and then use Feeblemind to end a PC with 0 decisions/variable actions taken by the PC, is completely nuts.

(and the existence of such spells itself changes the meaning of hero points, which then need to be saved due to being the one single lifeline against such instant, unavoidable death)

"If a person is just sitting in their living room, the idea that it is *literally* possible for them to get hit by a stray bullet without any warning or time to react is completely nuts." (and the existence of such events itself changes the meaning of being comfortable in one's own home. In some cases, one might feel compelled to design their home to be bullet-resistant or wear a bullet-resistant vest to feel safe. This is clearly unacceptable and an example of poor design.)

Do you see how wrong it sounds when you apply your ideas of what make a good game to real life? If we want to simulate risk and chaos with dice, we have to accept that certain undesirable outcomes are and should be possible. The further we stray from the idea that, as unlikely as it may be, bad stuff can and will happen with little chance to react, the further we remove ourselves from the world our PCs live in.

The actual, hyperbolic hypothetical "0 misplay full-->down" is not supposed to be literal, it's supposed to be the hypothetical example of what we can use as "conceptually bad" and avoid to create "good" gameplay.

You keep using these terms, and I keep asking you to prove that these concepts are objectively bad. When will you do this instead of blindly asserting the inherent truth of your position?

It's core to the concept of player agency itself.

If the player has no meaningful ability to change their fate, or change the story/outcome, then they are not really a player, but a spectator.
If one cannot make any gameplay decisions to affect the encounter, the game is outright preventing them from "playing," lol. Which is why this is in the realm of a "rule 0" that is outright foundational to all forms of gameplay.

In action games, truly unavoidable attacks/damage is considered "bad gameplay" because that removes the player's agency, and invalidates character builds with low HP.
If the game gives the player the option to play a glass cannon, then the game is expected to respect that and enable that build to have a chance at victory.

In PF2, there aren't any unavoidable attacks. Even your example gave you a 40% chance, with a reroll to avoid the effect of Belcorra's Feeblemind spell. The game never leaves you entirely without a chance, but by the nature of being a game that resolves actions with dice, poor rolls are often what ultimately ends your character's adventuring career.

That "unavoidable hit" in PF2 is you messing up, panic dodge-rolling into a rock, and getting smacked by the boss. That's what rolling a failure or a crit failure looks like in those games.

The role of luck in a d20 game is to be the *unbiased* x-factor that can screw with both sides, and force them to improvise. It's how and why no one can get too comfortable and run the same attack plan every time.

And it does this. Where is the issue?

It's worth mentioning that the first of Belcorra's attacks had the Sorc hit her w/ a crit fail Slow, and the GM was cackling with how anti-climatic it was. Finding out she had Spell Immunity: Slow for the 2nd ambush was a great moment, but one that was immediately undercut with me getting a Feeblemind crit fail on a rather high roll, and the whole table going "uhhh..." as we realized it was an instant save or die.

I really struggle to buy the claim that it's abnormal to label such moments as b@&*@%$~. I'm like 90% sure the GM targeted my PC with that spell thinking that hitting the non-caster Alchemist w/ the Stupefy debuff was him pulling a punch, because at the time going for the PL +3/4 AoE nukes is the more deadly play at first glance.

Her attacks are completely fair. They don't use some special rules only found in that AP. She's strong and written to come out to smack the PCs around once they get too close, but nothing she does is unfair. If she were unfair, the sidebar would have her attacking in the nastiest places she can and aiming to TPK the party. Instead, they made her personality such that she would rather drive you off and focus on her own goals.

This is directed at the earlier post, but it/you/they are seriously underselling how stupid easy it is to kill a PC or outright wipe a party when piloting Belcorra.

Because of the crazy level gap, the crit fail of Phantasmal Calamity stun/trap effect is super likely to trigger on one of them, and it's a 500ft range 30ft burst nuke.
It averages 38.5 dmg on reg fail. My HP8 Alchemist had 102 HP at the time.
One reg fail and one crit fail would be enough to full-->down. (and again, 40% chance of crit fail, 10% reg success, 5% crit success)
For a 500ft AoE spell, that's absurdly lethal.

While slower, it's even more grim if she uses Black Tentacles/ Slither due to the crazy spell DC gap.
Her spell attack is +25, my PC's Fort DC is 26. She literally has to nat 1 to fail.
My PC would've needed to roll a 17 to Escape.
That's another AoE spell that's going to hit the whole party.

Even something as seemingly minor as R6 Aberrant Whispers as an opener is crazy bad news, once again because of the crazy spell DC. The spell normally has serious issues, as it's got a short range and does nothing on save success. Both of which are not a problem for a PL+ 3/4 ghost that gets to rise up out of the floor.

It's a good thing that she's written specifically not to aim massive AoE attacks at the party and that she backs off once a single PC goes down. If she was supposed to TPK from the first time she reaches you, that would indeed be nonsense.

I honestly don't know how a GM can attempt to play "the heroes have a lens, it's killing time" Belcorra without pulling punches or killing PCs. If a GM attempts to run her "honestly" as written, piloting her with the scripted intent to kill, someone's going to die, lol.

Almost like throwing the final boss to ambush the party w/ 0 nerfs is a bad idea, lol.

Once you have some lenses, she explicitly tries to kill off PCs carrying them. She just backs off after a single kill, not wanting to continue expending a huge effort to finish the party.

Maybe what we should point to is how much less influence tactics have at low level compared to high level, in specific? Thats probably the biggest discrepancy.

This is only true if you take the stance that tactics only start once initiative is rolled. When you look at things beyond that, even a level 1 party can do a lot to shift the odds in their favour.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Asking for perfectly flat level curves is something that makes sense for a fixed PoV, but once you look at anything beyond building a narrow set of "fair" encounters as applied to your group, the changes start making less and less sense. You've seen the pushback from others in this thread and the reasons why we like how the first few levels feel different from everything else.

I guess my response to that, is you can still have that feeling (if that is your goal) if changes we're made. And to someone's earlier point you can achieve the feeling I'm looking for by applying the weak template to enemies at levels 1 & 2.

The problem is that people new to the system and without spending a lot of time in forums talking to experienced people, won't understand the difficulty curve at early levels.

I think it would be better to have that flat consistent curve for a better entry experience.

At this point, we're both talking about preference. I just happen to think my way would be better for a new player experience when they don't have an experienced person to guide them.

Hence why I've repeatedly called for yearly releases of beginner-focused modules and sidebars for GMs on how to tailor the game to their players.

Anyone who thinks everything is up to the players is playing the game wrong. Anyone who thinks everything is up to the GM is playing the game wrong.

This is a cooperative game folks. Everyone should have buy in and agency. It doesn't work* when things become one-sided.

This.

PF2 isn't a video game where everybody else is an NPC. The rules are far less important than your group having fun. If your table likes the early levels having +10 HP on everything, do that, but don't expect that the game's rules will change based on any whim except that of the design team as informed by playtest data.

All true, but my preference as a GM and player is not to let those situations transpire in the first place.

My goal as a GM is the illusion of challenge. Because let's face it, the challenge is an illusion.

When you stick to hard and fast rules about killing PCs and what is and isn't fair, players stop believing the illusion. The last thing you want as a GM is for the players to start looking for the trick rather than immersing themselves in the narrative.

The GM always got to decide what CR they were going to put in front of the players, and while there are guidelines nowadays for unfavorable terrain and other conditions, the rules aren't hard and fast. A GM can absolutely build brutal deadly encounters and be "within the suggested rules" if they want to.

Players still use PF2 to run hex crawls where difficulty is based on the hex and what was rolled on the random encounter table. This seems like the sort of game you'd avoid, but there are groups the love the risk inherent to exploring a world that doesn't conform to their level.

All of which is to say, how challenging something is/intended to be, is arbitrary and varies between groups. What's important to me, is that the rules for building encounters help a GM build the right kind of encounter for their group. And wrapping it back around, that's why consistent encounter building rules that give the same feel at all levels is important to me and why I feel like there should be a correction for the lowest levels of play.

Asking for perfectly flat level curves is something that makes sense for a fixed PoV, but once you look at anything beyond building a narrow set of "fair" encounters as applied to your group, the changes start making less and less sense. You've seen the pushback from others in this thread and the reasons why we like how the first few levels feel different from everything else.

Many games do not expect you to take the narrative seriously at all.

Are we talking TTRPGs here or every game ever created?

[I]t's very safe to say that pf2 is among a genuinely tiny minority of games that put the narrative experience as the topmost goal.

In pf2, the combat and other systems exist for the sake of the heroic adventure story. This is why it's okay for PCs to find ways to bypass combat, but they cannot bypass the goal of the narrative.

PF2 is weak at puuting the narrative first in terms of TTRPGS. It doesn't, for example, give players explicit mechanical ways to shape the story outside of the player character interacting with the game world. Something like FATE is almost entirely narrative-driven, with players being allowed to spend resources to shape the scene and the world around their PC.

This narrative-first architecture is and always will be in constant tension with the gameplay of encounter mode. From SoT's pacifistic adjacent narrative clashing with all the "fights to the death" people, to emergent results like a veteran PC hero failing a simple task because da rules have that be a roll.

This is only true if you don't find ways to fold the will of the dice back into the story. A Veteran PC failing could be because an old wound acted up, or the mental weight of their many battles caught them at just the wrong time.

So, I'll try to keep those limited to something like "0 error full-->downs are bad gameplay."

You keep asserting this but have yet to show that it's true.

I endeavor to not give out arbitrary free passes, even if I really liked my time in Abomination Vaults. The "Belcorra Attacks" mechanic is a perfect example of "0 misplay, and my PC is ~dead." It can be a great narrative moment, but it is a quintessential example of bad *gameplay.*

You can try to sort narrative and gameplay into distinct buckets to prove that mechanical outcomes you find distasteful are objectively bad. However, doing so ignores the fact that a TTRPG isn't a game of dice with some improv theatre happening across the room. The mechanics and narrative both impact the characters and thus the players. The two experiences simply can't be separated without PF2 becoming a very different game.

Again, Abm Vlts was my first pf2 AP.

I had no expectations, and didn't even think her showing up meant a direct attack, but was bad news in another way. And I certainly didn't expect a dev would have a guaranteed to happen event carry such an absurdly high chance of insta-ending a PC. And our GM definitely went easy on us by having Belcorra attack only when she was alone, and during points where we were on-guard and moving. When we understood she could roam and show up again, the GM did a great job of helping us newbies not take the mechanical implications of that too seriously.

That wasn't the GM going easy on you. The sidebar that explains how Belcorra attacks tells the GM not to hit the PCs while other enemies are present.

An intelligent L12 spellcasting ghost switching to kill mode, even when played "fair" would absolutely wreck 95% of parties. Our GM had to more or less go over the table and imply a hard time limit of once per day, so we could actually make progress.

That same sidebar also tells you that Belcorra shouldn't attack more than once every few days but that she should attack at least once per floor. Your view of how the GM played the encounter is skewed by your lack of perspective on the intention of the AP's designers when they added Belcorra's attacks to the final floors of the dungeon.

(Again, the tiniest possible plans / mix ups can make her attack essentially a free kill or worse. Floor 8-->9 has a big ladder to go between them. Post-attack, this simple ladder is now a literal death trap, no way are we as players touching that if she's able to ghost out of the wall and attack. This is the kind of "newbie realism thinking" I'm trying to communicate. Pf2 is usually pretty good at avoiding this, but when it overlooks something, oh man, does the dissonance skyrocket quickly.)

Your characters should be thinking of how to avoid that scenario while also understanding that if they give up or fail to end Belcorra, bad things will happen very shortly, and it's unlikely the PCs will be spared. The PCs are in too deep to just walk away, so Belcorra's attacks should both put them on edge and motivate them to finally end her existence for good.

For us, we needed the GM to (literally) pause the game to explain what the devs did and didn't mean, and that we just have to pretend that evil mastermind is absurdly stupid, because that's what the devs expect due to their long personal history.

As a player, I had to brainstorm spitball ideas off the GM in a "would doing [__] be valid or not valid tactic?" manner because of how open-ended the system is. A genuine noobie will have no idea what kinds of "cheap shots" are allowed, like sleeping ambushes, and what are not, like waiting at a ladder. It's legit arbitrary.

Both of your examples are 100% fair game. If it works in the rules, it's on the table for PCs and NPCs alike to use. That some tables use more or less of the dirty tactics that are open to them speaks to personal preference and then story that group wants to tell more so than what is objectively allowed or disallowed.

"I'm a GM running a home game. I have the PL+4 BBEG stalk and ambush the party every now and then. Last session he attacked and killed 2 PCs. My players are pissed, but they don't get it. He's the big bad! It's okay if he can show up and force a save or die turn 1, because of course level 12 Belcorra should be able to do whatever she wants to a level 8 party in a fight."

That sounds like a great way to run a horror game where a spirit feeding off terror wants to ripen the PCs via repeatedly killing one of them before backing off. A sadistic being that enjoys the game for the game's sake would absolutely pick away at the PCs this way.

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Rather than focusing on everything in life as hard and fast rules where a thing is either 100% good or 100% bad, try nuance for once. I get that many forms of neurodivergence can make this difficult and that this same difficulty can manifest as a hyperfixation on fairness and trying to parse messy realities as a series of "if-then" statements, but that's just not how the world works. No game can account for the specific dislikes of a person hyper-focused on what they perceive to be a flaw.

While your analysis is not untrue, the problem I have with it is that if you're the player who loses their character or has to jump through a lot of hoops to get back to fighting condition it stops being fun. Sure could always bring in another character and retire your old one, but for me that ruins/is disruptive to the narrative.

When this happens in my games, as rare as that is, I bring the player on as a co-GM until their PC is back in action. They get to play out key monsters, ham it up as NPCs, etc. It doesn't work for everybody, but it's poor GMing to let a player sit there unengaged so I always aim to offer something.

Everyone's taste for that sort of thing varies. I don't mind spending a few minutes of table time to an hour resolving that kind of thing. But if it takes time and I have to sit out because my character is dead (and I don't want to bring in a new character because I'm attached to the one I made for the campaign) then it just sucks.

I have quit a game before my character was dead for two sessions in a row and still hadn't been revived and decided the game with those people was no longer worth my time.

That's fair, but no skilled GM should let a player get that frustrated by a PC death or incapacitation. There is always something you can offer as a carrot for a player impacted by something you know is irking them.

The party performing badly happens without player mistake quite often in pf2. Most especially at the low levels, where the only "mistake" can be rolling lower on initiative.

If the party walks in formation when the fight breaks out, that "tank" in front can easily drop before they get a turn. But only if the GM has all the foes attack that leading PC, instead of pulling punches and spreading the foes around the party.

I disagree. There are steps that even a 1st level all-martial party can take to swing any battle they initiate to their advantage. Basic things like scouting, proper spacing, and being willing to retreat can all lead to escaping with at worst one or two PCs lost rather than a defeat, a complete TPK.

In an even fight, luck is more of a factor. I don't favour taking a fair fight if you can avoid it. If you're ambushed, priority one should be escaping the situation.

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Belcorra can't cause the party to fail with her attacks before the final battle against her. If anything, her showing up and showing off her spells allows the party to prepare for when they finally do face off against her at the end of the adventure.

Yeah, it's annoying if she hits you with a spell you can't easily save against or remove, but the worst she can do is kill a single PC and force a few days of recovery time to get the party back to full strength. You seem to be a player who is easily thrown off kilter by the appearance of anything that seems unfair, even if objectively such an event is designed as a warning or is the result of GM error rather than anything inherent to the system or the adventure as written.

I do like the presented ideas to alter outcomes *after* death / tpk, as the moment encounter mode ends, the "fair outcome" has happened, and the GM is free to improvise in a way that doesn't break the notion of a fair fight.

This is also why I am drawn to pre-fight changes, like the L1 HP boost, as they also keep the adjustments outside of the mid-fight pulled punch realm.

And after re-reading that old post in the thread Mathmuse linked, I would like to echo that I still think that pf2e really has a *very* good sweet spot in terms of a cannon PC death being both very painful to fix, but also being completely doable.
Getting the body is not automatic, and the gp is not negligible. Likely, the dead PC will have one or two potent items liquidated for the cost, and the party's detour may be a full sidequest to find an NPC who can cast it. As such, getting a resurrection is "reliable", but not in a way that seriously damages the threat of death.

All steps of that process RaW are quite good as is, but it's also just as important that the GM can tweak any step of the resurrection for the sake of the narrative. Such as an NPC having a pre-paid scroll, etc.

Once a GM has the understanding of the resurrection process in mind during the initial death event, because it is such an "outside the page" event, they have full agency over the details.
If the party retreated, then they may find the body the next day, stripped of valuables (side quest to recover?), or they could find the body with only the sword gone, find no body but a trail to follow, etc, etc.

All of that flexibility can help tremendously, but imo the combat being "as fair as possible" is still more significant for a GM to allow PCs to die / refrain from punch-pulling. The more the GM feels that the foes/ an encounter is BS, the harder it is for them to let that BS result in a PC death, even if later resurrection is possible.

.

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To bring it back around to the OP topic, and to put a pin in this sidebar, I will say that a GM...

Aren't a lot of the issues you're seeing, like a GM pulling punches, down to the party performing badly? If you play smarter, your GM won't see you as needing the "help" and the issue goes away.

I have an idea for a new way to spend your Hero points:

Beginner's Grace

Reaction.

Beginner's Grace can only be used at level 1. It can be used while unconscious.

Spend a hero point to heal 1 HP and end all ongoing damage effects currently affecting your character.

I've moderated groups and sometimes it is more practical to remove or lock a thread than attempt to moderate a torrent of uncivil posts. There's not an unlimited supply of time/labor to make things "perfect".

IMO Paizo customer service has been on the lighter side of moderation (2009-2021 as I am not active on the PF2 side). It is heavier in the PFS discord group. Reddit... lol... *no comment*

For the readers here - there are internet readers/crawlers (advanced feed reader) and they have filters. "Paizo Campaign Tools" is a simple Firefox option for these boards. You should check them out.

Locking is fine. Deleting a good thread turned bad shouldn't happen.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

Downing PCs is not so GM dependent, but finishing PCs is highly GM dependent. How aggressively enemies target downed players is entirely up to the DM, and players die with much more regularity if so targeted. It's not odd you'd see a lot of variance.

If we are going to differentiate between unconscious and dead, as we should, then we should probably differentiate between players and their characters too.

;)

You don't dump your players out of their chairs when their characters are downed? What kind of Carebear GM are you? ;P

Downing PCs is not so GM dependent, but finishing PCs is highly GM dependent. How aggressively enemies target downed players is entirely up to the DM, and players die with much more regularity if so targeted. It's not odd you'd see a lot of variance.

On that note, have a Level+2 boss and give his minions flasks of oil and torches. Players will be much more careful about getting hit when going down means burning to death.

I think there is either an exaggeration or a major play style discrepancy happening if critical hits at level one are regularly killing level 1 PCs at people’s tables. I can buy that level one PCs are falling unconscious fairly regularly, but fully dying 4? I have seen that maybe 2 times across 10+ campaigns. With 4 PCs per campaign that is like a 5% chance of dying during level 1, and usually it was more than bad luck that played a b mm ig role in it. That seems very reasonable to me.

I can't help but wonder if people are using killed when they mean downed.

To address the just apply an elite template argument, my issue with that is that far more experienced players play APs than new players. So any system that requires adjusting power up to meet current expectations is a lot of work. Sidebars suggesting tuning things down and specific beginner modules only impact those new players, and only for a short time, while they adjust. I favour the solution that impacts the fewest players.

You can handle it that way, the issue is for new people not familiar with the system and all sources of knowledge out there to know that they need to do that.

Bluemagetim considers it a feature. I consider it a bug.

Fix the bug so it's consistent across all levels. If you want more of a challenge, apply the Elite template.

When you tell me "Why can't you apply the weakened template?" I ask you can't you apply the Elite template.

Most people, after playing for any amount of time, will have zero trouble with the current difficulty at all levels. So, an across-the-board nerf will lead to the D&D 5e issue where everybody just starts games at level 3.

The better solution would be at least one beginner-focused product yearly, and sidebars about how to customise your game aimed at said new players. It's better to give people tools to learn themselves than to make it so they can make it through without needing to master the system.

When my household wants a super-tactical game, we pull out a board game. Focusing on the best decisions every turn is easier without roleplaying at the same time.

My group RPs in Gloomhaven when it could just be pure tactics, so I can't relate on this point.

One member of our household is a genius scientist. He carefully plans his strategy in a board game. Sometimes the plan works but sometimes random elements sabotage it. I have a more freeform style, adapting to the random changes without thinking ahead as much. The scientist's wife keeps her eyes open for opportunities and exploits them to the maximum. The weird case is my wife, who simply plays by seeing the game clearly. She wins half the games, exceptional because we have four players.

Just reading the board quickly and accurately in Eurogames is a huge advantage. It lets you see what paths are open, who's a threat, and when you need to push your chips in.

We copy my wife's style in roleplaying games. We play for the enjoyment of the events we create. We invent fictional people and their stories while also solving strategic obstacles and combat. The plot resolution and character growth do not go as expected and that makes the story feel more real. Why bog down in super-optimized tactics when the story could be about students engaging in a school's community in Strength of Thousands or in leshies isolated in the deep forest venturing out to the wider world in A Fistful of Flowers? Would the movie Casablanca be more enjoyable if every ten minutes the characters paused to strategize on defeating the Nazis? Would the novel To Kill a Mockingbird be better if it focused more on lawyer Atticus Finch carefully planning the legal defense of Tom Robinson rather than on his young daughter seeing the reaction of her town to her father defending a young black

...

That's fine, but from what your accounts of games played say, your group uses above-average tactics, especially those related to mutual support. You don't need to go full try-hard to avoid common pitfalls and taking bad fights.

I don't mind pulpy action, but even in Casablanca, you can see the results of experienced people doing their thing. Tactics don't need to take 10 minutes; they can be as simple as everybody knowing their role and what they can do pre-combat to tilt things in their favour.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic, but if its sequel were a dense legal treatise going over case law relevant to the events of the book, that would have been awesome.

RPG-Geek wrote:

I don't get this mindset at all. If you don't need to sweat at least a little, where's the fun in overcoming challenges coming from?

Great question, maybe the lizard brain.

Or maybe because I have a challenging and stressful job and a 3 year old. I have enough challenges in my life already. I don't need or want more.

And massacring imaginary enemies soothes that lizard brain inside my head.

If that's what you want, what's the issue with the GM tossing the weak template on everything, including more minions and troops in fights, and letting you go to town? It really feels like the experience you want is there in the core system from level 1.

Claxon did specifically say that the critted PC had not had their turn yet, so that character could not just back off before dying.

That's bad luck; it happens. Hopefully, the party can get the down member out of there, and if not, hopefully they can revive you when they come back for revenge.

Backing off is a good but underused tactic. My players excel at it: whenever a frontline martial character has too few hit points after a few hits to remain standing after another hit, they tell the party they are backing off and a relatively tough non-martial character such as an alchemist or kineticist takes their place as a defender of the vulnerable people in back. The party carefully distributes the damage among them all so that everyone remains standing, even if a few martial characters have to switch to ranged weapons while cowering in the back. However, this tactic requires that moment when the martial character realizes that they cannot take another hit. Going down in a single critical hit requires the emergency healing tactic instead.

I prefer to combine your strategy with more military style tactics. Make the fight unfair, if it's not unfair back off before it even gets to crossing blades. If you have to fight a battle you didn't choose, either hit them hard and fast or immediately make the call to retreat.

Scouting to determine what the enemy is like before engaging in battle is a strategy to learn. The style of kicking in the next door and being surprised by the monster there was so common in early Dungeons & Dragons that it has been parodied in the rules of the Munchkin card game.

I'm surprised it isn't common among all parties by now. They even make spells that all but do the scouting for you.

Usually the ability to take 3 hits gives enough time to rethink tactics. 5 hits is excessive.

I've played too many systems where one hit is enough to be willing to take hits to figure out how tough the enemy is.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is not an Old School Revival game. And Old School games had a lot of kicking in the door.

You'll still do better in PF2 if you treat the game as if it's OSR levels of deadly. Just remember that your characters have no idea this is a fantasy game of carefully crafted encounters. To them, every fight is one where they may not get to go home afterwards.

EDIT: You can still have a lighter tone while playing smart. You don't need to act like a unit of special forces members to play your character to their strength and us their abilities to get the drop on enemies.

At low levels you're options are limited, and if a fight starts 30ft apart and an enemies goes first and crits you....there's nothing you could have even done. You existed and then were dying.

If a fight starts 30 feet apart and you don't want to engage, just back off. Let them come out and fight you, and if they won't, because perhaps they're guarding something, wait until they go back to low alert and use dirty tricks to get the upper hand. The idea that PF2 combat needs to be two sides engaged in puzzle-like combat using only the abilities on their sheets is silly.

Not saying this should be the actual goal, but let's pretend that the number of hits a character can take from an on level enemy is 5. Theoretically something like that should give you an opportunity after 2 to 3 hits to go "Hey, this is going poorly I need to change my strategy".

You should be thinking of that before you enter the fight. What are they wearing? Are they ready with weapons in hand? What kinds of weapons? Do they look like anything you've fought before? What does the room look like? If you only start to make a plan after getting bloodied you deserve what happens to you.

I would say from my perspective, a character needs to take at least one hit in combat before they should need to think "Hey, I should use a different strategy here" and they should still have at least one more turn to implement doing something different. At least for a moderate encounter.

Try that approach in an OSR game or a game built around any shot that passes armour being deadly. You'll quickly learn that you should try to win every fight before the enemy knows there's even going to be a fight.

The intention of the thread was absolutely valid and civil! Unfortunately, literally over night, it had divulged to vindictive name calling and personal harassment, not to mention over 50 flags. I agree with you that if the original forum poster wishes to make a new thread where everyone keeps things civil, we welcome it!

Necro, but wouldn't it make more sense to delete the worse of the offending messages, post an explanation for how a new thread woul need to be handled, and lock the thread? Mass removal of an entire thread is simply not a good way to handle things.

Putting a warning here for the discourse in this thread! Not at all because of the sentiment of the overall thread but rather for the degradation used in multiple responses that were removed. Also, please do not mark people as Spam when you just don't like what they're saying. That's very bad form.

What should off-topic and inflammatory posts be marked as?

Edit: Also, and I'm not blaming you Maya,this delete everything with no individual explanation method of moderation is a poor choice for a forum. It ruins the flow of conversations, doesn't give feedback as to what's near the line and what's over it, and is generally worse than moderation on most subReddits run by volunteers. The better method is to edit out the part of each post you take issue with and add an explanation as to why that section was edited. This has been the forum moderation best practice for decades now.

I want to nitpick this.

Easy low-level encounters teach wrong lessons just as readily as hard ones. Indeed, watching my players go through Book 1 of Season of Ghosts, our premaster oracle looked borderline useless in combat a lot of the time. Most of her larger contributions were invisible or difficult to parse, and it was clear that a lot of her damage from cantrips or focus spells was getting overkilled by the exemplar's flowing spirit strike or fracture mountains, starlit span magus's spellstrikes, or rogue crits. Her best contributions were some amped guidance casts, a particularly critical fear cast, and one good inner radiance torrent.

I wouldn't say she had a great moment that made the casting feel truly strong until just this session, when a Pl-2 enemy failed and a PL-1 enemy critically failed against calm and it swung an encounter very hard into the party's favor.

That's a fair point and one I've been making myself in an effort to push back against the idea that the early levels, as they are, have inherent issues.

I began as a forever GM in 2011 and have run four adventure paths to completion. I view myself as an experienced GM. But my estimate is that I have spent only 1,800 hours running roleplaying games.

And the skill I had to hone the most was improvisation when the PCs did something sensible but unexpected, because that is their style. I also gained skill at redesigning the adventure path's encounters to double the difficulty because their teamwork made them twice as strong as an ordinary party. My skill at judging the balance of encounters mostly comes from my mathematical interest in game design.

That's not surprising. Given your math background, I imagine the encounter building and game math came easily to you while the social aspects may have been why you sought to play the game in the first place. You seem the sort to want to stretch areas of weakness, and a math-based game is the prime place to do that.

We know. Back on May 10 in Trip.H had posted a so-called Moderate Threat 12 encounter from the module Secrets of the Temple-City that the GM had to nerf in mid-combat to avoid a TPK, and we wrote many comments discussing it. This Moderate Threat encounter had caught the party unarmored in their sleep because they lacked the experience to set up a watch or an Alarm spell on a presumed safe inn room.

Likewise, a new kind of attack, such as the party's first major flying creature, their first incorporeal creature, or their first dragon, could catch them unprepared for the proper counterattack.

Experience helps preparation greatly. When the champion in my Strength of Thousands campaign gained Blessing of the Devoted (called Divine Ally before Remaster) at 3rd level, the new player asked the experienced players which weapon property out of fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing he should grant his weapon. In unison, they answered, "Ghost touch!" By 7th level, ghost touch had been vital twice and the alternatives would have been nearly useless.

*Nods in agreement*

I super agree on letting niche games be niche.

My reason for calling this out as "a problem" is because of that observation of GMs working to erase that lethality via all means available to them, including incredibly obvious foe lobotomies.

(Again, the only time I've seen *any* PC death was from a GM who specifically didn't want to cheat, and even then there were 8+ aborted PC deaths via intervention, w/ 5 deaths that were allowed to happen (because they felt fair)).
That 5 "valid" vs 8 "prevented" is a pretty dang poor ratio.

You seem to play with groups that are extremely averse to PC death, and it's colouring your perception. I would expect the degree to which GMs pull their punches will vary greatly from group to group and even campaign to campaign.

I also think it's relevant to bring up the "should a GM attack a downed PC" debate, as the notion of a foe going for the kill is something that *should* be a rather niche discussion topic in a healthy system.

In pf2, a whole lot of PCs seem to drop dying, but PC death is suspiciously rare.

That again will depend on the table, but also on the encounter. Some enemies will kill downed foes, and others won't.

What you see online is often the outliers. People are making noise about something they find upsetting or worthy of comment. This tells us nothing about how common such an event is.

The point of criticism is that the maths of the game in the first few levels teaches very different lessons to the maths of the game after those levels, and I think that it is clear to see that: a): the community online went through a phase of treating those early level lessons like they were true the whole game, and took years to get past it, b): new players often encounter issues at early levels where they either learn these not-always-true lessons themselves or are taught them as a solution to their problems at early levels by others, and c): many of the most common reasons for new players bouncing off the game are connected to these difficulties at lower levels.

A) That was mainly due to poorly balanced APs being the only published options for ages and GMs, much like the designers at Paizo, building as if we were still dealing with PF1 and not PF2.

B) We've had just as many stories of new players with zero TTRPG expectations jumping in and adapting faster than PF1 vets. So please square that with this idea that new players have trouble picking up PF2 narrative you're weaving.

C) You've yet to prove this hypothesis that new players find PF2 too hard and thus fail to connect with the system. At best, you'll have anecdotes from Reddit, Twitter, and other such places from a fraction of the entire player base. You'd need access to Paizo's player feedback to prove the point you're arguing.

None of that requires new releases to be marketed at new players to fix - the maths could be changed so it takes ~3 hits from a boss mob to take you down at all levels, instead of ~2 at level 1, and ~4 at level 20. That way people would learn the same lesson across the whole game, and it'd be less frustrating when you go from full hp to 0 hp without having the chance to take any action against it. Sure, you could carefully design all low-level prepublished content to avoid these weak points of lower level play that lead to frustrating situations, but you could also just change the maths. Presuming that people frustrated with this would leave the game anyway doesn't have any firm grounding, I think - if the game was constantly at risk of my PC dying before I took action in any given boss fight I probably would enjoy the game much less, I just know that it stops being like that quickly where a new player might not.

Given that experienced players rarely have issues at low levels and experienced GMs understand what a fair challenge looks like at those levels, it would seem that the only players who need teaching are very new players. So it would make sense to make products catered to them rather than changing an early game that many existing players enjoy.

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level - hell, you start out the game able to wrestle a camel into submission with about a 50% success rate, that's not the right vibes for a weak peasant thrown into the deep end (unless the story is very specifically trying to tell that by putting you up against higher level creatures). This description feels like it lines up more with the 0th level variant, where I do think it should feel like you're in over your head. I do feel like this is just a weirdness of the maths at low levels, and I don't think the game is better for having it present.

Your level one character is on par with, in terms of combat effectiveness, innkeepers, gardeners, farmers, dancers, etc. It hardly seems as if you're meant to be anything much above a fit commoner with a bit of extra gear and a dream. The backgrounds also reflect this less-than-advanced start.

Being able to go into battle equipped with heavy armour, large professional weapons (including backup weapons), perhaps with some minor magical items like a healing potion, is "peasant's concerns"? You aren't an expert in combat at level 1 (unless you are, like a Fighter or Gunslinger), but you're a well-trained combatant, not someone inexperienced in the field.

That's why you're evenly matched against such known threats as innkeepers, gravekeepers, herbalists, dancers, and agriculturalists. Your training is really serving you well to be merely on par with such heroes of the realm. Level one is many things, but "well-trained combatant" it is not.

RPG-Geek wrote:

The game still hides high threat creatures at the same CR as easy creatures - lesser deaths anyone? So the GM should always be aware of what makes an encounter go from challenging to deadly, what kinds of threats are easier or harder for their party, and when to give the party an opening to run versus finishing them all off.

Yes, it does. And also yes, that was a bad choice on the part of the designers.

There is no upside for their having chosen to make it so that we don't just have things which are accurately labeled and things which are errors awaiting errata, we also have things that are just plain "wrong" on purpose. There is, however, the downside that now we all have to always second guess whether something is an error awaiting errata or an intentional deviation - also known as not being able to trust the designers to design correctly.

Without using any incorrectly tuned monsters, you can still defeat the PCs if you build an encounter to attack a weakness or set the fight in terrain that doesn't favour them. The point is that you always need to be aware when building encounters and that building a "too hard" encounter can happen at any level.

SuperBidi wrote:

You mean that the GM has less things to learn. Because it's a question of experience, not something you can't control ever.

It's not about fewer things to learn as a GM, it's about what it actually means if one of the things the GM needs to learn is when the game itself cannot be trusted.

That is what makes consistency a key thing. If things are consistent then they can actually be learned - meaning what was true in a previous case can be assumed to be true of a future similar case and that assumption not prove to be wrong. Without consistency, it's less learning how things work and more guessing whether or not one case is like another case or is not.

And this is actually a thing you can measure the effect of by looking at people that play in situations where their rules are less consistent in how they work out, whether it's because their GM is regularly altering things purposely to tinker with them, or that they play with multiple GMs that have noteable "table variance" differences. The more inconsistency a person sees in the play experience the more they will feel the need to ask how something works, even if it is something they've done repeatedly over numerous sessions, instead of feeling able to trust that they already know how it works.

The game still hides high threat creatures at the same CR as easy creatures - lesser deaths anyone? So the GM should always be aware of what makes an encounter go from challenging to deadly, what kinds of threats are easier or harder for their party, and when to give the party an opening to run versus finishing them all off.