Trip.H's page

I guess I just disagree (strongly) with this one.

Part of the reason Slow is such a staple is not because of the direct incap mechanic, but because of the 2ndary emergent result. The lack of incap means one can cast it from a lower rank slot, either 3 or 6, but never any other. It's not just the good effect, it's that the resource cost of using it goes down as higher R slots become available.

If there's ever 3 foes that can be subject to the same Grease, you can bet I'm considering it. That only happens because R1 Grease still keeps it's non-incap functionality.

Incap breaks normal rules to force the caster to spend their most precious resource, the top R slot, if they want to get any reliable usage out of them. This is imbalanced very much against the heroes, as I've never once seen nor heard of a foe with simulated spent slots.

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Most importantly, it also seems incredibly rare as a player to get hit with (and fail) a lower-level incap effect.

I honestly do not know of a single time at a table I've seen incap downgrade an effect that was attacking the party. It's possible someone has rolled to save vs a penalized incap, but a lot of the monster incap effects are already "does nothing on save," so you need to first fail a roll that's not % likely.
I played AmbVlts, and I didn't even know ghouls had incap, but I did learn about the elf special resistance, because a party member invoked it.

... we know incapacitation was designed to help PCs navigate the very intentional enemy progression chart of facing a solo enemy early on being a real challenge and potentially facing that enemy again later on as a minion for something else.

Uh, well, instead of me pointing at it as a "bad" unit of design for hurting the game more than helping, I can instead refer to incap as a "design failure," lol.

If their intent was one thing, but in practice the emergent result is another, then that's kinda how one can define a failure as a concept.

Best for the game? What exactly does that mean? You are using concepts I'm not sure how you decide that for the "game."

It genuinely comes down to design "universals" like "players hate getting KOed by b%~#@*@*" as the shared starting point, then working to pin down what "b#!+#!@%" means, subdividing it until you can get to fundamental points of agreement / disagreement.

This is why my starting point is "no mistake" full-->downs. If the player doesn't make an error, a "punishment" like one-shotting them is easy to see as "BS."

... Remove save or die spells. Now save or suck spells are vastly reduced. Focus everything on damage with short-term bonuses and penalties.

You seem to catastrophize a lot, there is no reason that a reduction of save-or-die magics would lead to an over-focus on damage. It's kinda closer to the opposite. When a spell doesn't have a "the target is out of the fight" crit fail, and that save-or-die nonsense is removed, it leaves more "power budget" to make the spell more useful in the general case of other outcomes.

Incap as a concept is a way to artificially "reduce" the power of many of these spells specifically to make them worse in the player's hands, but not their foes.

The more pf2 I play, the less I think incap "worked" as a design concept. It's the definition of an artificial barrier. Higher level foes already have the save advantage.

I don't know what your process is in these games, but my process is to take the new game and play it as it is out of the box. Then modify to suit my and my groups tastes.

And this is what most people are doing here. Your issue is that "most people" have less bias to favor 30+ year old "bad" math. It really doesn't take a degree in game design to understand that the HP growth is FUBAR.

I'm telling you how it works while you are arguing how you think it should work. It doesn't work like that.

No, and this is why you find this conversation so frustrating.

People do understand how the math and systems express themselves emergently in game play right now. Someone can understand that having the HP durability of paper causes the player to feel weak, and then still disagree with that being a "good thing" mechanically.

They are attempting to converse to pin down what specific elements are "flaws." Rephrased, what specific elements are hurting their fun more than helping it.

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They are doing exactly what you claim, taking the as-is game and then discussing how to modify it.

This is why I didn't enter this thread convo until I had a system change ready to offer, a +X increase to starting PC HP.
(and this bonus can be reduced with a [-Y * level] if they want to leave high level untouched, or any other tweak to the base concept)

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I'll also head off and preempt your repeated "rebuttal:"

There are many countless ways to uses systems and math to make low level PCs feel like neophytes in combat, without cursing them to explode Dying all the time from a lack of HP.

For starters, there's all the static DC skill checks. Even when putting class feats to the side,
there's the chassis class progression where rather key parts of one's kit are denied at low level.
Everyone's genuinely happy that Alch get's to use Powerful Alchemy for their daily prep items now, but it's easy to forget that it's a L5 power. You get 0 DC scaling at all until L5. That's a huge "not a newbie anymore" moment.

Unicore wrote:

Why is that the case, though? It's not the case at higher levels - you can comfortably throw level+2 creatures there without issue. So why should the maths of the game make it unwise to regularly use level+2 creatures in the first few levels? ...

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What's especially frustrating is that a rare advantage of a d20 game that uses flat numbers, is that it genuinely *can* have level gaps be equally dangerous across the levels.
(just from a d20 % |success|fail| PoV, that math can genuinely be consistent)

A lot of games will have tiny accelerations or other % and multiplier based weirdness in stat growth that can make the idea of a level gap break down if they're not careful.

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But a system where each level up is a flat +1 or +2 to different stats, that is supposed to be the rare case where you don't have to worry about it. The net difference between the two sides is always going to be that same [level gap] * [stats per level] number.
There are a lot of imo problematic tradeoffs, but that's a genuine positive of this "flat additive" level up approach.

The "real problem" is that you CANNOT treat HP the same way as stats like Strength. Attributes like STR are there to be plugged into formulas like attack rolls.
HP is a resource pool, it's fundamentally a different "job" and needs different math.

If the system adds flat +HP and +dmg as levels go up, you get a weird (not really, but for simplicity) "no change" outcome if +HP & +dmg is even,
and a really bad "drift" in "hits till down" when it's not.
(which is super common when you have variable +HP growth, like Barb vs Wiz)

It's common for PCs with "below par" HP growth to end up reaching that one-shot territory at a later level, which is where I'm used to seeing this.

And that's only because it's so dodo-level rare for the math to *start out* broken in the other direction, where they forget to have a substantial starting pool of HP.

The notion that pf2's formula is to start at 0, then add ancestry, class, ect, is just completely wild to see in an "add flat numbers" system like pf2.

It's why you end up with an Alch going from L1 -->2 being a +60% max HP change. That's still just as mind-blowing to me today as it was a month ago.

This "all about" making the game just a bit better, specifically in regard to the new player experience.

You really seem to be stating the way things are, and then claiming it "should," be like that.
When you don't engage with the arguments mechanically, we cannot respond properly, only with emotional arguments of our own.

Because level 1 and 2 characters are considered green newbies and high level characters are grizzled fantasy superheroes.

The best I can do is cut out the emotional appeal and translate it to a mechanical one.

Do you think L1 & 2 PCs "should" always be 2ish reg hits away from Dying? In a system where *single* foes can make 3 attacks, let alone what happens when a 2nd foe is on the map?

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To be clear, my beef specifically with the HP growth is secondary/emergent.
(I have beef w/ it because it's the systemic cause of the "real" problem; if I thought a different change would be better at the job, then I'd switch my advocacy.)

This is also why I'm trying to steer away from "should" be able to fight PL+2 as a question. It's valid to ask, but we're not there yet.

I think the real "problem," one that's especially harmful to newbies, is the [end turn @ 100%] --> [Dying] being a math-normal situation to deal with. It shouldn't happen in a system of small numbers like pf2, at any level.
I'm just glad it's mostly only a low level problem, else I'd have a much bigger challenge getting others on board.

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In the past, whenever I can keep a hold of that core (dare I say universal) issue, that's how I've been able to get through to people.
So, I'll try to maintain that discipline a bit.

Does anyone here think it's "okay" for a ttrpg adventure game to have math where the 100% HP Fighter spends their turn to:
[Raise a Shield] --> [Stride] --> [Shove boar off ally].
Then, two (PL+0) boars flank and maul him. The next time it's his turn, he's making death saves.

Does anyone think that makes for a fun gameplay experience?

I still very much want difficulty which is measured by how close you come to death.

If you wish for difficulty, which is roughly ~"player skill challenge," to be related to how close one is to death, then you should be in full support of making that metric of "proximity to death" aka "hits till dying" to be a consistent and usable yardstick.

This very notion of "hits till down" being how players conceive of the "measure of difficulty" is exactly what I'm talking about, rofl. That is the normal psychological default.

This is exactly why that metric being so wildly variant based on level is such a problem. Player naturally adjust to a norm, it doesn't matter if it's a high or low HP game.
In ttrpgs, they can also take and tune the system up/down for their preference. But a core problem is that pf2 is not consistent.

Right now, the question of "how close am I to Dying?" cannot be used to measure difficulty because of the present HP growth.

Every newbie first time player will try to use it as a metric, but without knowing about the "old fashioned" HP growth pf2 inherits, they will be incredibly misled.

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If someone could make a Foundry mod that magically tweaked the "HP till dying" number to be more consistent across all levels, without "lowering the difficulty," would you still oppose that?

Considering that you've now reached the point of agreeing with those you think you are refuting, it really seems that there is a lot of "sacred cow" and anti-change stuff going on.

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Edit:
to be clear, dropping Dying at low level *does not* mean the fight was actually difficult.
While the chances of Dying happening are way high, the odds of overall victory are also still quite high. Low level fragility/lethality could be called "illusory" difficulty.
(Though it does make the chances of an unlucky PC death waaay too high in an otherwise easy fight)

How can you make it so players are stronger/literally mathematically succeed more often than before without also making things easier for them?

The issue is that due such wildly varying balance in terms of feats, access to consumables, etc, by and large pf2 is a "choose your own difficulty" game.

And when players get full-->downed, they are going to "turn down the difficulty" by swapping into more power.

Once you get a little familiar with it, know which consumables are busted, it's genuinely playing the game on easy mode. This is why a "phantom failure" with low level HP math making Dying so unavoidable, is imo such a fun-killing infohazard.

As Mathmuse spotlighted, it's all about the illusion of difficulty. You want players to think the odds are against them, without actually having math where it's 1/3 chance you'll end your turn full, then be dying before you get your actions.

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No one should give a flying f$#& about "difficulty" for the sake of it. It barely exists in a ttrpg like pf2. We should care about the game being fun to play.

To be as crystal clear as I can: a % chance of failure IS NOT DIFFICULTY.
That's just RNG. The "real" difficulty in a game like pf2 is the variable choices. How hard is it to find an optimal action, or how obvious is the correct move. That's the "real challenge" a player grapples with during play.

All you can do is make the most of your available tools to give your party the best chance of success. The RNG result is just a dice roll; yes it factors into the choice, but the outcome is completely disconnected from the player's success/fail in their choice of action. They can make all the right moves, and still die by RNG. Or, the Magus can Leory inside the foe formation, and stay standing.

Hence: "Pf2 does a bad job of teaching newbies how to play"

This is why "simple" boss fights are so dead-boring in pf2.
There is no "difficulty" in fighting a melee Strike only foe just because it's PL+5.
If the decision-making process is the same as if the foe were PL+0, the fight is just as difficult for the players. The only difference is the math % odds of win/loss.

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Focusing back into the core issue of the thread:

I cannot overstate how capital B Bad it is for a game to have "no mistake full-->down" events. That just nukes fun.

This is because of its affects on how players make choices, and how they can no longer chew on choices.
Chiefly, the possibility of full-->downs means that they cannot make proper strategic choices around defense, or even future payoffs.
When PCs are that fragile, players are in a constant state of that dreaded yolo "sniper mindset" where they just hope the guy next to them explodes before they do.

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In my opinion, avoiding those full-->down events is such a priority, that I have very little concern over any worries that the game "getting easier" will result in a less fun play experience.

I've not played it, but I have heard good things about Season of Ghosts, and iirc it's the top rated AP. It's also considered to be one of, if not the "easiest" in terms of combat difficulty. I really don't think that's a coincidence.

Because, yeah, most people are there for the group storytelling experience, and save or fail, they do not find the situation of a save-or-die spell fun. And when an AP understands that "fun challenge" comes from mixing up the player's action choices, they can get creative with weird combat scenarios and create something fun.

I would be very upset to see the core rules of the game bend to add a bunch of HP to either the PCs or especially to creatures and no other changes made to the game. We just don't need every martial using D12 2 handed weapons and casters essentially disappearing from the game.

I don't know why exactly you think that would be the result of such a change, so I cannot precisely tune my response to address the specific worry.

I can say that one of the benefit from a flat +HP bump is that flat increases in HP does induce a (small) downward shift for flat damage increases compared to all non-dmg options in terms of meta balance.

This means that 2H d12 martials would in theory be less common;
the payoff for that investment got a tiny bit worse due to the % of foe HP changing, while Trip's target of Reflex DC did not change, etc.

I'm guessing you've said that out of a worry that +HP would encourage more glass cannon play, and I've said before that going all-in on offense is a common reaction to a system where it's math-normal for the party to suffer no mistake full-->down events.

If players feel that an investment into defense in and out of combat can make a real difference in their survivability, that's when you increase the likelyhood of that choice.

The "worst case" example of bad lessons is when a player gets pancaked, then swaps into a shield/defense, then gets pancaked again with no meaningful difference.
This can and does happen in (low level only) pf2, and yeah, the player then saying "F it" and going 2H d12, for the rest of the campaign, is a normal and rational reaction to that low HP norm.

(I keep saying full-->downs because I don't want people to think about outright oneshots. That's a distraction edge case, and it's normal in pf2 combat to get 2 foes dumping all their offense into a PC before they get their next turn. They need to be able to survive a reasonable gap between turns, have the option to retreat/heal/etc. )

Ah, yikes, I was hoping it would not be that bad.

If I could construct my own "example breakpoint scenario" for what kinda "minimum survivability" I'd say is needed to keep things fun,
it would be 2 foes Striding up to a PC in a flank, and each making their attacks before a PC gets a turn.

IMO, that's a prototypical example of a danger that's unavoidable to the PCs.
A 2 foe flank is such a "basic spice" that I'll speculate it's normal to even some of the most mild GMs.

Looking at those examples, it seems like if you add in just a flanked +2 attack from a 2nd foe, that would make a whole lot of the bestiary enter that "full-->down" territory, which is hella yikes as far as I'm concerned.
(and who knows how bad it'd look if the example was 4 attacks from 2 foes)

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It's fine to use other games / systems as a point of comparison, but you have to be able to articulate & argue why a difference of that system makes for a *better* game, and would be appropriate for pf2.

Just pointing and saying "that's the way they did it" is a textbook example of a bad methodology. Even if you've not got charts to "mathematically justify" a position, you've got to explain / argue in a way that's claiming an improvement, like:
"a longer time to kill means more time for setup --> payoff tactical play, and that changes the meta in a way that is more fun"

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As far as "how would you know what the community thinks" I can only speak to those I've played with first hand, and those whose communication I've seen and read elsewhere. This should be the default assumption whenever someone talks like that.

A whole lot of newbies post online because they feel like they are "playing the game wrong," and seek advice

And what is the #1 "reason" they always cite for how they judged themselves to be failing?

PCs going Dying. More than any other reason, someone from the group makes a post because it's normal in their combats for PCs to hit Dying, sometimes multiple times.

The Dying state is "by default" a "mark of failure" for players, like it or not, most will interpret the event in that way.

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It is absolutely possible for them to min-max and get coached to a point where Dying doesn't happen that often at low level.

But this kind of low HP math, and the psychology of what it does to players, is imo rather plainly having this negative effect. And yes, all sorts of sample bias, etc, etc.

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To be clear, I'd like to emphasize what exactly is happening during these newbie Q&As.

The newbie is under the impression that they are "loosing" too much, and ask for advice to avoid this. The community's answers serve to "lower the difficulty" for this group by empowering the PCs to change the balance of future fights. It's literally a process of "lowering the game's difficulty."

Again, I want to emphasize player psychology and the notion of HP and the dying state. IMO, every one of those posts is an example of "The bad HP growth math causing players to make the game easier."

And this "lowering the difficulty" is forever, once you learn optimizations, once you change around those attribute points, that info never goes away.

This is how I ended up needing to story-nerf my Stolen Fate PC to keep things fun. We really don't need Timber Sentinel at high level to avoid the "loss indicator" of the Dying state. I can leave that as a dead feat slot and be fine.
But you can bet your butt that it's one of the only tools in the system that's effective at that job in low level play.

Adding hit points at level 1 changes more than just how quickly characters creatures drop.

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Absolutely.

However, making other changes like weak / elite templates, etc, would seem to have many *more* knock-on changes than a +HP boost would.

It's also a bit reductive/inaccurate to say things like healing get "worse" when they are able to reverse the exact same amount of damage as before; it's just that the damage is instead a smaller % of the HP total.

As far as damage-dealing options becoming less appealing due to doing less % foe HP, umm. Yes?

That's part of the point? I'm pretty sure I'm not stroking out, and that the community considers it a bad thing that low level meta play is dominated by damage, while buffs/debuffs struggle to get used much at all.

More swings before the foe drops means Bless gets a little more viable to cast, etc.

I didn't strawman you at all.

We have all been here for the thread so far.

You say the game design is bad for low level play. You assert the math at low levels is bad. When you say bad you mean the assertion that low levels don't do as well against PL+2 and 3 creatures as higher levels do.

You wanted 20 more hp at level 1 to fix what you perceived as a problem. But now it seems your asserting that you can give those 20 HP and not change the difficulty of those low levels?

And I will stand by my statement that vulnerability at low levels is a different thing than difficulty. That low level characters are more vulnerable but because of all the other circumstances at those levels the game is actually less difficult.

When you say bad you mean the assertion that low levels don't do as well against PL+2 and 3 creatures as higher levels do.

I have no idea why you are so invested in being so obviously wrong, you refuse to let this go, and you keep twisting my assertions into things that I never said.

As stated above, I've got those 3 core assertions around the low level math. None of those involve PL+X. I kept it all PC-side as to the "bad HP growth math."

Iirc Mathmuse keyed into the fact that the absurd early acceleration meant that a PL+X fight would make the "hits till down" metric even more absurd.

My entire point has always been about how a full-->down meta changes how people play the games, what is and is not meta, etc. It's effectively a time to kill of 0.
IMO, math that results in that kind of "0 agency downs" is "bad math."

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Yes, you are still strawmanning me a fair bit. I can directly say

The main "hard" reason to do something like +20HP is to change the breakpoint of when PCs exit one-shot / full-->down territory due to HP growth.

yet this somehow goes in one ear and out the other. You still keep putting words in my mouth.

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I'll go ahead and pin you down a bit. Do you or do you not think that low level pf2 play has a significantly lower "hits until PC's down" metric compared to higher level? I'm talking about this "end your turn at 100% HP, then are Dying before you get to take the next turn" scenario.

You seem to be contradicting yourself, so I'd like to get at least this straight.

Well, looks like my rather tame post got mod deleted. Super frustrating that there's 0 notification when that happens.

Good think I copied it out just in case, lol. Edited down as the post it was partly replying to also got mod removed.

honestly, might as well start separating out my comments into multiple posts. That way, the spicy responses to a!$~#+! comments don't get the real talk shadow nuked.

Anyways, below is the copy/paste:

If I can inject any meme, how about this one:

difficulty is relative and in pf2, it may depend more upon the specific optimization and state of the PCs before combat than it does upon the encounter itself.

A Wiz Linguist full of fun feats and neat spells, in contrast to a "meta" Wiz is simply a bigger difference than if a fight is PL +0 or +1.

This was most blatant when I started AP 2 & 3 so soon after clearing my first. I even played a Chirurgeon for all three. Even though PCs were still falling Dying (at low level), it wasn't "difficult" because of how absurdly quickly foes were being popped in Gatewalkers, and how the SoT party quickly gained defense & mitigation greater than the damage that the foes could output.
The "noobie dif" of it no longer being our first pf2 AP was just that massive.

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IMO, when noobies play the game, they play it at their "normal" until they get pancaked.

After that, you have the "sniper mindset" problem, where their entire approach changes because of the unreactable full-->down threat.

I've seen this mean something as small as swapping a cantrip for Shield, then escalate to larger spell/feat changes.
I've also directly seen a player get thrashed, then on the spot ask the GM if they can rework their PC between sessions.
(I've also seen a player who didn't react to combat outcomes (pancaking) at all, and kept Leroy-ing inside foe formations until the GM talked to them about it over PM)

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The presence of easy full-->downs changes the psychology of play in a way that "makes the game easier" because of how the players react on a meta level.

What's really a systemic fun hazard for pf2 imo, is that nothing the players can do will likely work to stop them from getting pancaked at those starting levels, so there is no "pressure release" until the uneven HP growth outpaces the incoming damage growth.

Yet, the "real danger" of getting pancaked is actually quite small in pf2 imo. Wounded is not a performance-affecting debuff, and it's not going to persist for any significant amount of time.

Even the notion that noobies may not take 10 to clear Wounded is one tiny example of how this low HP math affects difficulty. If dropping becomes a sometimes thing, they will have less opportunities to engage w/ the Wounded condition, and will be more likely to enter combat already Wounded.
(Because I have to clarify else it'll be misrepresented: I'm not saying that noobies adventuring while Wounded, while vets never do, is a "good" thing. I'm only saying that it increases the difficulty in an irrefutable way)

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Rephrasing the prior point: pf2 is a game where it is "normal" for low Lvl PCs to get dropped Dying.
This is abnormal to most player expectations, putting a strong, yet phantom, pressure upon them to power game and optimize to avoid that "normal" bad outcome of the Dying state.
Because this is so baked into the game via low HP math, they never feel comfortable and exit the "sniper mindset" until they see PCs eating crits and staying up, for sake of discussion, after hitting L6.

Parties of players that normally would be having fun with sub-optimal builds and archetypes are pressured to re-do those choices. It's already seen as "mandatory" to max one's starting attribute points a certain way. It's a common Q&A change to edit a PC with KAS of +2/3 into a +4, which is literally just making the game easier. There's no other way to phrase the outcome of such a stat change, that kind of optimization has the function of "decreasing the difficulty."

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So, no, I disagree with the notion that upping starting HP will net-total make the game "easier," especially the notion that it'll make the game "easier in a way that's less fun."

As I have said before, I do genuinely think that increasing the time to kill via an HP bump would not significantly decrease "difficulty" due to how turn based ttrpgs are so massively influenced by the PC's build and RNG. Giving the players more room to exhibit risky behavior can often result in them doing exactly that, with those risks leading to difficult situations.

A change like +20 starting HP absolutely will increase the number of hits it takes to down PCs, and that in isolation will give the PCs an advantage.
(Though if the +HP is ~mirrored, that wonderfully de-fangs that objection, so let's assume that's the assumption going forward)

I'll just throw a mention of how busted the action economy can be based on the creature count.

A party of 4 PCs vs a single foe is just kinda impossible to balance when the players understand the implications of the 3A economy.

If the PCs all examine their kits for action-stealing options, they can neuter just about any single-foe (or 2 foe) combat that doesn't have custom immunity effects.

The main 3 generics that are easiest to stack & find ways to "reliably impose" are Prone, Slowed, and Grabbed. If a party can spam these conditions, just about any foe is going to have a hard time.

The most busted type of ability to keep an eye out for is any debuff that clings until a foe spends an action to remove, especially an Escape. Simply imposing the effect w/ no save is a multiplier on this value.

So, something like a Bola Shot that requires a hit, but:

Compare the attack roll to the target's Reflex DC to determine the shot's other effects.

Critical Success The target falls prone and is stunned 1.
Success The target falls prone.

Is in the "A" good/great tier. It does key into the attack roll, so the Prone is not automatic, but it's not a second roll which gives the foe a fortune-adjacent advantage.

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Something like Exemplar's Only the Worthy being a no-fail automatic debuff, and one that requires a MAP affecting Force Open to remove, is "S" tier when the party has an action economy advantage.

These are the kind to look for, and each PC finding one will make the fight honestly hard to loose.
(note that Bola Shot combos with Only the Worthy so well, that this single pairing is viable all they way into such super-boss territory. Add a Slow effect, and you're pretty much done.)

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It's important for the party to coordinate a bit, as some action-stealers don't stack.

You need to make sure that someone is imposing Slow, but not doubling up, etc. The Slow spell needing a crit save to avoid, does make it A tier, or S+ when used with Quickened Casting.

Black Tendril Shot is another one that "doubles up" in a way that's easy to miss. It does require a hit, and then imposes a save, which is pretty low / bad on the scale of effect mechanics.
But, on save success, it still imposes Slow 1. This is also a "must Escape to remove" type effect. Meaning that only after the target has lost an action via that Slow, may they then spend a MAP action to remove the slow. This ammo needs +1A to activate before shooting, and adds a "crit save or you loose 2 actions" effect to the shot.
Not as guaranteed as others, but the payoff makes it genuinely worth it. But, check that the static DC of 39 for the L17 is up to snuff (it probably won't be for the main boss).
Or use a Thaum's ability to scale the DC.

For a logical debate to clear up a strawman argument or an accussation of a strawman argument, the debaters should clearly state their positions. Trip.H has partially stated his position: he never said to make the game easier. (And he made a more recent post that I have only skimmed so far.)

Every time I try to state a flat position, the entire conversation backslides thanks to surprise contrarianism against what's supposed to be a mutually agreed premise, lol.

Like above where now tim's suddenly arguing that low level play *doesn't* have a significant different "hits until PC down" number compared to high level play.

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I'll re-stake a flag upon these claims:

* The "hits until PC down" (theoretical) metric changes across pf2's levels, being much lower at low level

* It is statistically unavoidable in low Lvl play that PCs will suffer "full-->down" or "pancake" events with no way to react and interrupt that sub-outcome. This can be outright one-shots, the dreaded: reg hit --> nat 20 combo, etcetera.

* The specific difference in player perception between being able to survive one unit of aggression and retain agency to retreat/heal/etc, |VS| the perception of a likely full-->down event, is hugely impactful upon the player's choices in and outside of combat.

I'll leave it there for the moment, as I gotta take a whiz.

Dude, you still cannot stop putting words in my mouth and arguing against a straw man that does not exist.

I've never once said low level play is "more difficult," nor that it should be "easier."

FFS, stop.

Definitely could benefit from a training moment where PCs are put into a wresting match.

Key details would be putting the combatants up on a 15ft ish ledge to trigger fall rules, so the players can learn all that stuff at the same time.

Not knowing how useful Athletics can be might be a missed opportunity, but not knowing that foes can Shove you off a ledge, nor how deadly that fall dmg is at low level, can easily be lethal.

Could even make the opponent an ooze, and hand out a bags w/ many doses of high level Implosion Dust. That'll teach them about the size limitations of athletics (and that consumables are usable!).

If they can get the ooze to hit Tiny, then that'll also help with understanding how good a Reach advantage can be.

I've got no clue why you are protesting this now.

Furthermore, it's a little disingenuous to bring up monster abilites/etc increasing, without putting it into context of PCs also growing in defensive abilities, such all the different forms of passive damage resistance, tHP effects, etc.

It kinda feels like you are needlessly re-litigating what has more or less already been agreed up.

Low level combat is known to be much more lethal, with a much lower "hits till down" number than higher level pf2 play. This includes special abilities, etc.

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Again, what "PL+2" even means changes based on the level.

Which is why, even if it was an easy to edit variable (which it really is not), I don't think focusing on PL +- is the right tool for the job. That changes a whole lotta math in ways that may be harder to predict than one might assume.

Flatly increasing the time to kill via +HP would imo be a better way to let players have room for more setup-->payoff style tactics, feel less pressure to power-game optimize, avoid the "oneshot mindset," etc.

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And you seem to oddly unable to accept that I enjoy high difficulty games.

It's has been a looong time since I've seen a PC death at a table.
I *want* the threat of PC death to be genuine, but the asterisk is that a PC death has to be earned, and it needs to be legit. No scripted save-or-die nonsense.

We actually did get pretty close in Stolen Fate a few sessions ago. The Barbarian was just so far from the party that when they dropped, it was a long run to get them back up.

Yeah, I'm not attempting to frame it as some kind of cure-all.

The main "hard" reason to do something like +20HP is to change the breakpoint of when PCs exit one-shot / full-->down territory due to HP growth.

How someone plays will be suuuper different psychologically if they are confident they can take a hit/ stay up until their next turn, versus how they play if they think they will drop from a single unit of aggression.

Think about a shooter game, like TF2. You are running around doing your business, then get 1-shot sniped.
Now that you know there is a sniper able to one-shot, that completely changes your approach.

Again, it's not about it being "imbalanced" or "difficult," but it instead enforces different playstyles, one that players generally see as un-fun.

Bringing that back to pf2, it's not even consistent across the levels.
It's like if a sniper's headshot damage changed after the payload hit the first checkpoint, and can no longer one-shot.
It's just a very abnormal outcome resultant from their chosen math, one that's completely alien to most gamers.

Again, it has never been about the as-is math making the game "too difficult." Suggested changes are not about making it "easier," it's about making the combat more fun to play.

The specific tactics and strategies that "become meta" in a low HP, high RNG game are imo not fun.
(and high RNG swings really do make it harder for newbies to figure out what is and is not a good strat)

Right now, low level play involves a lot of fretting outside of engagement range. Once exchanging blows is unavoidable, combat devolves into a rocket-tag style rush down.
(this is also why leaving PCs Dying to do more offense is very common at low level)

As someone who plays Alchemists, low level play mostly means loading the party with prebuffs before the fight, especially Fast Healing from Soothing, maybe using one bomb, and then spamming Electric Arc.

The balance between different options is completely different at low level, where low HP means damage is king.

And I'll say again, now that I have been through it, it's not "hard." It's just an unfun slog where you *have* to shrug at the crazy RNG swings dropping creatures on both sides, because the only thing you can "do" about it is to level up as quickly as possible.

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To summarize: it's never been about low level play being "difficult" (as pf2 is not a game you can really loose) it's about the differences in math making low level play unfun. Especially the differences in what a "good combat choice" is for a PC.

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As to the "what to do about it" phase, it's a pretty serious lift to suggest editing every encounter.
Most pf2 play is with their published APs. I'm not talking about homegrown campaigns, and never have been.

For a GM running AP. If a single bonus to PC HP can help at least the PC side of the "bad math," then that imo is a much more appealing edit.
Even if editing the foes is on the table, adding a flat HP bonus to them as well seems a much easier, and more predictable, alteration than trying to edit a level change.

Saw this post over on reddit, it's a post from a newbie player seeking advice & asking for a "is this normal?" check. Very fitting for this topic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1kthhlz/are_we_doing_somethi ng_wrong_our_party_feels/

They are currently L4 in Kingmaker.
Interesting to see what is, and what is not, being talked about in regard to OP's rough low level experience.

(And yes, I'm pointing the finger at the low-level HP math as having a lot of the blame.)

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.

Dude, you are not logical.

The Hero Point mechanic allows PCs to reroll. This means that while both sides have to make saves vs the same spells, etc, only the PCs have the ability to get a 2nd attempt.

This is a systemic, mathematical advantage provided by the RNG. It's insane to see a mechanic that clearly gives the PCs an advantage, and somehow claim it's evidence they are at a disadvantage. Like, genuinely, you pretending it's evidence of the exact opposite has made me realize I have wasted my time trying to reason with with a dishonest fool who cannot/will not defend his positions.

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Because of Hero Points, when a PC rolls a 1 vs Slow, no they didn't. They instead got a much less extreme roll. They reduce the negative impact of RNG, while keeping the benefits.

The high variance in outcome based on RNG, where a Slow spell can have 0 effect vs Slowed 2 the whole fight, is an advantage for the heroes.

The unbalanced action economy & actor count, the Dying mechanic, all of these are PC advantaged in the face of RNG.

I think it's about time I played offense for once, not going to let that s@#& slide without a callout.

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.

I presented more than enough to make my case, you don't get to just say "nah, the action imbalance isn't there for every fight, so your whole position is bunk."

Well, you can say that, but everyone here will see how hollow and empty the counterargument is.

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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.

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.

I'll be completely honest in that I don't know what the goal of this thread is anymore, because it seems wildly off topic now more than ever. All I can say is if being downed by an errant crit or having a boss downed by an errant crit early in battle isn't fun, that's a problem for your table to solve in how they run encounters somehow, or by removing/modifying degrees of success. But this really has nothing to do with teaching the game anymore and is just complaining about unrelated parts of the system, so I'm checking out of this.

My goal is always seeking a way to improve things. I can only make an edit that'll *improve* the present norm if I can figure out what's "objectively bad" right now, and what system/rule/math is responsible for that present "bad" thing, and how one creates the other.

This is why I opened by locking onto the crazy HP growth math and pf2's ~"game dev abnormal" low HP & one-shots.

People cannot know what to homebrew if they don't understand what systemic issues are responsible for the present outcomes.

The only reason someone could think to +20HP all PC starting health is if they thought it would help improve the gameplay.

Trip.H wrote:

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?

I didn't know that was your perception, and I most certainly will contest it.

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).

(Foes designed to be used in solo vs party fights "should" have more than 3A to make sense in the 3A system. Else every action-stealing effect becomes imba as hell)

Whoops, almost forgot Hero Points (and fortune effects in general). Even if how many is very table dependent, that alone is biiig weight on the scale that makes the RNG nonsense benefit the PCs.

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Even the Dying mechanic itself is absurd when it's not mirrored for foes to use it too, as that REALLY imbalances the RNG nonsense in the PC's favor.

If a foe goes down to a lucky crit, they are dead--dead.
If a PC goes down to a crit, then they can get back up for 1A from another PC. Or even 0, thanks to things like Fast Healing, 3A Heal, etc.

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Like, maybe actually sit and ponder a bit before making such claims, please.

As stated previously, it's not agreeing with any specific case that's important.

In order to establish "bad" and "good" design principles, some base premises needs to be agreed upon to then be used in conversation as measuring tools.

If "green is good, and blue is bad" then we can try to talk about how much blue a thing has, and how much green. If we can never agree that green is good in the first place though, there's simply no way to meaningfully talk.

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(in encounter mode)
I hope we can agree it's good for players to be "rewarded" for expressing good tactics, such as by taking less damage, dealing more to foes, etc.

I also presume the opposite is a fine point of agreement, that it's "good gameplay" for a player's tactical "errors" to be mechanically punished via damage, etc.

I'll also add that the better the mechanical punishment can match with the degree of misplay, the better the gameplay.
(EX: an rpg where I use a sub-optimal spell *should* punish the player less than it would for some more egregious misplay, such as moving a squishy backliner into the melee. One will cause the combat to take longer due to lower dps, the other might get a character killed/downed)

These are unprovable game design principles we can use to measure with, but only after they are agreed upon.

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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?

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."

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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.

We are talking about a heroic adventure game.

... 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.

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)

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.

Yet in pf2, it's easily possible to loose your PC with truly 0 ability to act due to the use of those save or die spells in the most PL+X encounter I've seen.

I will admit that I am confused by the "you shouldn't lose without making errors" deal. [...]

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.

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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.

Because of the serious swings of RNG, even at it's most predictable, combat is more like a flowchart, where each possible fork in outcome cranks up how incalculable the present moment becomes. It's still pretty doable to "know" what to do / how round 1 will play out, but as soon as the top of round 2 begins, it quickly reaches the point where it's just too complex and variable to use that kind of approach.

Because there's so many crazy meaningful variants in roll outcome, games like pf2 are games of contextual improv, and avoid issues endemic to other kinds of rpgs where you can fall asleep because you already know the correct response to the game's prompt.

Some rpgs solve this "snooze gameplay" via timing minigames, a la Paper Mario or now Expedition 33. If you start to snooze, you'll get killed by the QTEs.

Pf2 is of the type where it is mathematically simple enough to theoretically be solvable, but has so many choice-relevant contextual considerations that white room math is often an unhelpful exercise.

I do mean that "snooze gameplay" literally, btw.
Some people read a book to fall asleep, and while I was in college, my sleep aid was pokemon mystery dungeon.

At some point we have to have a real question / measuring tool to use and establish and separate the "dos" from the "do nots"

Which is just another way of saying that, at some level, I will insist that games do require ways to identify "objectively" good & bad gameplay.

Which is why my flag is staked upon such an over-compressed and universal principle of game design; that it's bad gameplay if players fail/are punished when they didn't have mechanical agency to even make a "real" mistake in the first place.

If we cannot agree on something that basic being "objectively bad gameplay" then it kinda kills any potential for meaningful discussions.

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If your table doesn't want that as a possibility from the BBEG, then the GM should have had a discussion with the players about expectations long before arriving at the 3rd book of an AP[...]

Yes, I super agree. This is why I was happy to see others correctly identify that the #1 priority in any AP is consistency within that AP.

Even if the system math supports / facilitates some types of AP more than others, that's secondary to the packaged adventure being consistent / setting proper expectations.

Any specific bit of "bullsh.t" can only be clocked as BS in context, which is why I have to point to AP examples in the first place. I'd argue that even in the context of Abomination Vaults, the gameplay of the Belcorra ambush is such a low player agency event with such insanely high chance of death (aka bad math), that it is a perfect example of "bad gameplay."

That specific judgement, of "Belcorra Attacks!" being BS, is an opinion of mine.
Others may need for a situation to be even more mathematically likely to kill PCs w/ even fewer bits of agency to reach that "BS" bar.

Crucially, my thesis only needs for the bar to exist at all. Agreeing w/ the example isn't the point.

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And similarly, pointing to an AP boss ambushing and harrying the party is not a system issue, if it's an issue it's a writer issue and take it up with them, not the system.

Eh, I'll push back against that a bit. When we are talking about published APs, they are a part of the system.

Your argument is like saying that one specific world in a mario game is not a real issue, because the it's just a problem of the level design and not mario's platforming moveset.

Any unit of "gameplay" is created when both halves exist in the context of the other.
The raw mechanic math requires creatures/encounters to fill them.

Why assume i meant people outside the game?

Because that's the literal meaning of the words you are saying, even in your very next sentence.

I meant players at the table, the group you play the game with each session, those folks just not getting to the game cause they want to catch up on whats going on in their lives.[...]

I never talked about the people outside the playing of the game, nor why they were at the table.

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Yes, a BBEG curb-stomping the party can be "cool" from a narrative PoV, but that is completely irrelevant to the question/issue.
If it's still a "no misplay full-->dead" event, that it still invokes the "... is bad gameplay" follower.

"What about players that play mario games for the story? Not everyone is there for the platforming!"

Again, you are still attempting the same distraction tactic that grows weaker and less effective with each iterative attempt.

The system, and its game design, exist outside of hypothetical players. I'm not here to talk about the psychology of group play, I'm using specific anecdotes and example cases only as tools to get to the bones of systemic issues.

Trip.H wrote:

Your forgetting BSing at the table for the entire game session and never getting to the game that day. Players decide their goals. Thats pointlessly contrarian but also makes my statement 100% true doesnt it.

No. (In context) you are making an outright erroneous statement.

You are so invested in the idea of refuting anything I say, that you really are not thinking about the meaning of your words.

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I am talking about pf2. You know this.

But, in order to continue your contrarianism, you instead pretend there's an entirely different conversation happening, and you talk about the people outside the game.

In isolation, your quote can appear correct. But, when it's in context, attempting to use this "argument" results in a kind of "does not compute" error, because it's a carefully adjacent non sequitur of nonsense.

Sure, hypothetical Harry may show up to the pf2 session for the free snacks. It's a completely irrelevant distraction, and you would clock it as such if someone attempted to use it against you.

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My prior statement, that pf2 is a rare example of a game where the narrative story is what has primacy, and that gameplay like encounter mode only exists in service to that narrative, is still 100% correct.

Actually players can bypass the goal of the narrative.

They decide what their goals are not the GM.

You're really going to go with that? Of all the angles, of all the nitpick exposed corners in such a long post?

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No. Your statement is 100% false. (imo)

The players can forge a different road than the one forecast by the narrative. They may even appear to subvert the initial call to action and side with the ~BBEG.

But the fundamental nature of pf2 as a ttrpg means that even if it's not the planned conclusion, "A" narrative conclusion is literally one of two possible ways for a campaign to end.

The other possibility is that of a premature end before a fitting narrative conclusion has been reached. Many of these may scramble for some closure in a final session, or even via out of session storytelling.

Gameplay in pf2 exists to service and facilitate the narrative storytelling, period.

An "um actually" type of response would have had real utility in keeping the record straight.

But, attempting to "argue" as above, is to be pointlessly, uselessly contrarian. What does it add to the conversation?
(sorry, it's not uselessly contrarian; it's a distraction technique to avoid confronting the actual thesis.)

Many games do not expect you to take the narrative seriously at all. Countless games do not expect the player to take combat mode to even be a cannon representation of what the fighting/conflict looks like.

Whether it is signposted with dissonant bits of sardonic humor to tell the player to not take the story too seriously(ugh), or if it's due to an outright lack of narrative, it'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.

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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.

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When I make a declarative statement, I try to mean it, as in an "all the time" way. If the statement is only true contextually, it is a personal mistake to leave that context out.

So, I'll try to keep those limited to something like "0 error full-->downs are bad gameplay."
It's expected/ normal that even those will get some pushback due to clashing with pf2's math.
But, once the cloud settles a bit, this refined nugget more or less can find purchase.

However, it is a much longer process to go from finding theoretic agreement with that idea, versus getting it to be accepted in practice.

Core design ideas/statements like this *create* discomfort, because it causes one's present perception to change and disagree with their memory's coloring of something. That new dissonance often sparks rejection of the new idea.

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After pages of forum talk, people can come around to at least the "0 error full-->downs are bad gameplay" idea, but when you point to an experience they have a preexisting positive association with, that's dissonance.

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.*

As explained in the core ethos of that other thread by Mathmuse, it's the job of the game devs to sell the illusion of difficulty, to make such an event feel *more* scary than it really is mathematically.

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Keeping it on topic:

Getting ambushed by a ghost in a scripted event should never invoke a 40% save roll of "your PC is gone." Yall, come on.

Bad game math is bad game math, even when a (possibly) cool narrative moment is attached, it can still be bad gameplay.

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As soon as you exit the example and return it to a hypothetical, this is blatantly obvious.

If I made a post like:

"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."

Sorry, but I'll happily double down and disagree with that as strongly as I can. That's the exact "logic" that is the core of countless "rpg horror stories"

Whether or not it makes "narrative sense" for the BBEG to stomp a PC, that's still bad gameplay for everyone, and is something that we know should be avoided.

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I just have to remind myself that it's normal for something like "0 error full-->downs are bad gameplay" to be more or less agreed with in the abstract, but still have a long climb before that aphorism can be honestly applied in real example cases, like the Belcorra ambush. Personal anecdotes / memory really does just create an iron wall of mental gymnastics.

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There's countless ways to use the bbeg to surprise scare a party of heroes, but Belcorra's: "Boo! Now you worm, save or die!" is the what I would write as an over the top hypothetical example of what *NOT* to do, lol.

Trip.H wrote:

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.

"Well, yes, but actually, no."

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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.

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And if we get into specific AP scenarios, this "made no mistakes and is still screwed" cases get kinda just dumb. The SoT night ambush has been talked about to death, so here's one where I've got the .pdf to read from.

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 changing the difficulty mid-fight absolutely does cause symptoms expressed in the thread's OP.
The on-the-fly cranking of a bunch of invisible knobs to reduce the chance of death makes it all the harder for newbies to learn the system.
I supposed in addition to the "bad math means one cannot separate good tactics from good luck," I'll add another, that: "a single GM pulled punch makes one less able to distinguish good tactics from (the uncertainty of) GM intervention."

In many ways, imo GM mode-swapping is a much thicker smokescreen that's harder for newbies to see through. Math is math, so it's straightforward to write some scribbles and test some theories. Invisible levers being changed is who knows how hard to notice, as now we are outside the system and into the realm of social performance. Yet, as the whole point of the GM doing the mode-switch is to alter the outcome of the encounter, this is more or less "required" for players to eventually understand this switch and its impacts in order to account for it in their play. The ambiguity, and complexity, grows tremendously.

I don't get how this is somehow me stating "bad wrong fun" when I'm describing a personal experience as shared one.

The players are expected to take the narrative seriously, which includes encounter mode.

If the PCs get in a fight to the death, it's incredibly immersion breaking if(when) the GM babies the players to spread the damage out, shapes an AoE to avoid the dying PC, etc.

We've all seen it happen, and any time as a player you "clock" that the GM switched into "easy mode" it sucks the fun out of the encounter.

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Yes, sometimes it makes sense that the foes want to capture rather than kill. It can even sometimes make sense that a foe may not expect healing magic, or they could be an ooze incapable of comprehending healing magic.

It is also fair to say that, in quite a lot of cases, it's completely absurd when creatures fighting to the death will overdose on stupid pills and leave dying PCs alive. Or spread themselves out instead of flanking, not using their special abilities/spells, or any number of incredibly blatant pulled punches (that only happen *after* the fight becomes legit dangerous).

Clocking a GM swapping into baby mode is contextual, which is such a "no s%+*" statement, I shouldn't have to specify that, yet ofc I get the least charitable reading. It's asinine that I cannot talk about my own feelings without that being mischaracterized as a personal attack on others. Not every opinion needs a g&@+** chart to justify it.

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When obvious lobotomies happen, it sucks all the fun out of the encounter, and now I'm second guessing every choice the GM's making to see if/how much of "baby mode" has been activated.

I get why this can be so triggering to hear, but when I as a player realize the GM is cheating in my favor, it completely breaks the promise of the ttrpg and trust of the player in that GM. How am I supposed to care about a campaign if there's a reality-warping shield keeping PCs safe?

This is the other side of the "0 agency deaths are BS and should not exist" coin. "Dynamic" difficulty that's cheating for the players to win is also fun-killing BS that should not exist.

This is why I recommend GMs talk about stuff like this over the table. As an example, if an encounter table roll is BS that'll 95%+ likely tpk everyone, it's imo a better approach for the GM explain the situation, say "we're not doing that" and reroll openly or homebrew. Being secretive only promotes distrust.

In large part because of the mechanic of the dying state, it can be incredibly obvious when the GM hammers in the lobotomy pick and puts on the kid gloves.

If simply saying that "GM's often cheat to keep PCs alive" somehow sounds like a personal attack to you, I'd like to ask you to think about why you've taken it that way.

(and yes, this issue is deeply entangled with the low level HP math / over-lethality.
I've seen this specific "a PC is dying, time to hit the lobotomy" many times in the few APs I've played, to the point I'm comfortable saying it's "normal" pf2 GMing to do so)

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And quick tip/reminder, all persistent damage happens at once, so a creature can only every get dinged one extra Dying stage at most.

The damage you take from persistent damage occurs all at once, so if something triggers when you take damage, it triggers only once; for example, if you're dying with several types of persistent damage, the persistent damage increases your dying condition only once.

If most deaths happen due to things like persistent damage, that would completely align with and support my claim that right now GMs are working to prevent the "real lethality" in the math from killing PCs.

IMO, this is not a good thing for the game, at all.

It feels incredibly cheap every time the GM blatantly lobotomizes a foe to prevent them from killing the PCs.

There's little worse for the feeling of victory and "merit" than for the player to realize the GM is cheating in their favor, and will defy logic to bail them out any time there's real danger.

You know, go for it. I don't there is anything wrong with setting up the experience you want.

I think though it will make classes that focus on defense/in-battle recovery less valuable at those lower levels. defensive characters will make fights take longer unnecessarily since the more offensive characters would get to unload damage without worrying about dying before getting it in.

That's a totally valid worry, and might be the outcome for a vet table playing L1 with that new change. They've already been conditioned into rocket tag, and thus would likely keep doing that by default.

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That said, part of the logic is that games where you get one-shot result in players investing in becoming even more of a glass cannon. Very common for them to respond by investing just enough into def to be able to survive a single hit, then maxing offense.

There's also the "induced power gaming" response as a coping mechanism to the one-shots, which has some considerable weight behind it in a ttrpg like pf2. Archetype balance is all over the place, and basically every PC can break combat balance over their knee with consumables.

A party of system-fresh newbies with the +20 would have *less* pressure to go all-in on offense & power like that. Being able to reliably survive a turn *should* net-total reduce the party's dps due to more investment into other actions (speculation).

There could still be a need "to fix the fix," though I'd definitely want to watch the outcome for a bit before mutating the homebrew into a "mirrored" HP boost to give the enemies a chance to take another hit.

(and to be clear, all my tables have some power~adjacent players that can sometimes just nuke the bejeezus out of foes, so there likely is already a bit of a need at many tables to give those foes a bit more HP, lol)

Tyvm for the charts, that +20 outcome is way closer to exactly dead-on than I was hoping for.

The frailest squishy of Wiz just barely slipping down .03 for a bit before resuming that "barely growing" pace is as close as it gets in terms of consistency across the levels when doing such a simple fix, imo. Trying to get that tuned even better is where you'd start needing some level-scaling formulas.

Even the Barb going from just barely being able to eat a +2 crit, to being able to just barely eat a 2nd at L1 is actually a great outcome imo.
If any class *should* be taught they are the one who can eat a crit, it's the Barb.
So the notion that it's kinda dicey eat a single crit at low level with the raw math is imo improved by the +20 change letting that be a safe bet at L1.

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To be honest, I still kinda feel that the huge HP gulf between Wiz & Barb is a bit "yikes" and a balance issue/challenge
(if you're designing a monster, how do you set it's damage to be dangerous to a Barb, without reducing a Wiz to giblets?), but I'm super happy with that +20 outcome being a very noticeable boost at low level that *really* helps remove the full-->down issue, and does so without messing with any other numbers.
No need to apply templates to foes, manually edit their dmg, etc.
Just a one-time HP boost. Could not be any easier to implement at a table.

If I ever do sit in the GM chair, my current ruleset's definitely going to include that +20HP. Alongside what imo are the no-brainer variant rules: Automatic Rune Progression & Gradual Ability Boost.

Real quick I do feel the need to correct this a bit. The main reason we didn't think about setting up a watch or anything like that was because the party *did* have info, which itself made a murder attempt outside the realm of thought.

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.

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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.

If it's such a taboo to attack a PC that's in the dying state, that really does indicate there's been an establishment of a "community easy mode" that we are not really looking deeper into.

Same goes for the GM attacking a PC's familiar. That also seems incredibly taboo / stigmatized, and no surprise, I'm pointing the finger to the "too fragile" state of familiar HP pools as *a* (not the only) systemic cause of that norm.

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Basically, if you look around while holding the question "would expected full-->downs math affect this conversation?" you'll quickly start spotting a whole lot of norms that are (imo) negatively impacted by PCs being "too fragile".

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To rephrase: the "objective" observation, we can (hopefully) all agree on, is that GMs typically "nerf" combat to be less lethal, instead of "buffing" combat to be more lethal.

If the GMs are tweaking things in just one direction, that is the key hint that the system may be "too lethal" and that changes would make for a positive improvement to the system.

(and if there's an observation that indicates GM-danger-intervention declines as levels go up, that'd be even more evidence to this idea)

[How many PL+2 Strike crits can example PC survive chart]

I really hate to ask, but if you assembled this in an easily mutable spreadsheet, I'm super curious to see how this changes if all PCs start with a flat increase of +10 or +20 HP.

I'm pretty confident it'll make a real difference at low level, without really putting the game into "easy mode" later on. Because the PC HP and foe dmg are both climbing alongside each other, the PC starting w/ more HP shouldn't be all that noticeable outside the early game.

For the few that *want* their low-level PCs to get one-shot, yeah, it would change that math quite a bit.

The point is that the HP math scales differently than any other stat, and in an inconsistent manner.

As far as Chrono Trigger's math, idk, but it depends.

Most jrpgs have a defense value that reduces incoming damage, so getting the same HP can be more or less eHP depending on things like that. What the math does with that defense value also varies quite a lot.

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And to be clear, there are plenty of modern games that release with similar "bad math" somewhere in there.

I distinctly remember seeing Dragon's Dogma 1, watching a PC do 1 dmg per hit, and that tripped my radar. Double checking again, DD did decide (who fking knows why) to use defense as a flat minus from incoming damage (at least somewhere in the formula), same as pf2's "resistance" (though with a min damage of 1 instead of pf2's 0).

This made the damage math rather atrocious, as players would rapidly become pipsqueaks once there was a significant stat spread. It made rapid-hit attack PCs paradoxically terrible and very OP. If you knew the math, and could get a high enough attack, every little hit would benefit from the full boost to shred everything. But the opposite would also be true, and you could end up doing nothing but 1s pretty quick.

If you have ever heard about "split type weapons" being trash in any number of games, this can be part of why.

Not properly handling split damage typically means that damage gets reduced by defenses twice, which is especially math-breaking when a game uses defense as a raw attack subtraction like that.

You can swing a 250 AR sword that's 100% phys, and deal 50 dmg a hit.
Then, you swap to a 350 AR weapon that's split 50/50 and deal 1 dmg per hit.

Because now that 200 phys defense | 200 magic defense creature gets to double-dip its defenses.

I'll limit myself to a single resultant math consequence:

That 7x variance of 37% | 5% means that a PL+1 foe will expect that amount of HP that the -L PC does not have, that is how much the "above norm damage" one can expect to be incoming during a PL+ engagement compared to an on-level foe.

If the foe is PL+1 versus that L1 PC, then the PC is 37.5% short of the "expected" max HP.

If the foe is PL+1 versus that L19 PC, then the PC is 5.1% short of the "expected" max HP.

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Basically, think of the level minus of a PL+1 fight as a debuff imposed upon an on-level PC. You'd have the -1 to all stats, at most a -3 during a prof gain.
That's all relatively smooth across the levels. But the "HP down" penalty is extremely severe at low level, and steadily becomes less of a concern with rising level.
This HP loss is a multiplier on the difficulty, as all those stat minuses make it easier to take damage, yet you have less room to survive that damage.

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This is a large part of why those low levels are so unstable. This also gets dramatically more severe when checking the PL+2 math;
that L1 PC is 15 actual, 33 expected at L3. Meaning there is a 18 expected:actual HP gap, for a gap greater than the actual HP.

That's absurdly massive; it's like the PC is starting the fight with less than half HP left, on top of all the other statistical disadvantages.

The PL+2 of L18 --> L20, meanwhile, is 222 --> 246 HP, for a 24HP gap, and an 10.8% jump. Only a 2x jump from the PL+1 HP gap, which is much more inline with what one would expect.

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So a L1 PL+2 matchup has a "120% missing expected HP" danger,
but a L18 PL+2 matchup has a "10.8% missing expected HP" danger.

Again, this HP number is the core most number for matters of difficulty and death, as HP is the final number that ends all typical combat scenarios. So it really does matter a whole lot.

Edit: fixed the math and removed the +1 CON from gradual ability boost as that's not the norm.

Because Trip H tends to post as though his opinion is absolute and irrefutable when it is their personal preference.

Stating something is bad game design as though we all can just see it and agree is a statement I'm not seeing. It's not something anyone has brought up much in the decades I've played.

Objective statements are always made by actors of subjective opinion, so when I claim "the low Lvl HP & HP growth math is bad game design" that is similar to someone looking at a newly remodeled bathroom and saying "that is a badly built shower."

I can point to objective observations for evidence, such as there being hardened grout smeared across the surface of tiles, but it is *always* possible to plug one's ears and shout "opinion, not fact!" as you keep doing. No list of factual observations can nullify such a "counterargument."

Then Trip H is stating percentages based on some calculation I'm not seeing given how different the hit point totals are for different classes across all levels. So what class is Trip H basing this on? A 10 hit point martial, an 8 hit point class, a 6 hit point caster? What is this percentage based on?

This is an especially silly thing to type when the thread is still there, and when this math was spelled out as a direct reply to you, rofl.

When you try imply that I'm making up numbers, maybe check first? I don't know if it's worse if you didn't read it/forgot, or if you are pretending you didn't, and hoping to not get called out on that.

And I don't know what you want. Less damage from the monsters? Fourty hit points at first level so you never have to worry about getting crushed?

Trip.H wrote:

Example HP gain on that example Alch level up:

L1 --> L2: 15 -- +9 --> 24 | + 37.5% max HP
L4 --> L5: 46 -- +10 --> 56 | + 21.7% max HP
L9 --> L10: 105 -- +11 --> 116 | + 10.4% max HP
L14 --> L15: 174 --> +12 --> 186 | + 6.9% max HP
L19 --> L20: 234 --> +12 --> 246 | + 5.1% max HP

[...blah blah blah...]

This comes from the pathbuilder sheet for my Stolen Fate Alchemist, just opened it and clicked the level up & down while noting the HP real quick.

And yes, I will 100% stand by the claim that the % HP boost gained on level up changing by a factor of 7x is a unit of "objectively bad math." I take that factual 7x observation, and argue that this math is responsible for a lot of the commonly observed issues talked about all over pf2 discussions. This one math equation adds a huge amount of ambiguity as to what the difficulty of a PL +1 encounter means, as there is an inconsistent increase depending on which specific L we are talking about.

Among other negative consequences, with this math going on, Paizo cannot possibly make an accurate statement about how difficult a PL +1/2/etc is in the general case, lol. They would have to make a variable chart or give up and say: ~"it depends (a lot) on which level."

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Looking at system math like this is how you find a systemic (and therefore editable) cause to "blame" for player-facing observations / outcomes.

Such as the (math) observation of single 1A Strike crit being able to drop a huge % of PCs at L1, but by L12, it requires a scenario like an HP 6 squishy to crit fail a 2A Chain Lightning to then have a 50/50 chance of one-shot.

The gap in lethality there is enormous.

The steady "decline of PC fragility" as levels go up perfectly matches this smooth decline of % HP growth. "Suspicious" associations like that are the things that game designers are supposed to notice, then investigate if the relationship is perhaps causal, and then take steps to make changes for improvement.

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You can keep trying to bold-name call me out, it's not going to help, lol.

If you keep making dismissive "prove it" accusations, I'll keep bringing the numbers and calling that bluff.
I'll also keep ending with a reminder that you have completely failed to (attempt to) defend your own opinion on the matter with substantive claims.
As I've directly asked you before, in what way is the gameplay improved by having math with common full-->downs? How would you convince a stranger to play that game A versus game B that was different only in it's lack of full-->downs?

I can easily repost my list of cons created/enhanced by that math, but am still waiting to hear a single positive counter claim from you.

I'll repeat, "real" difficulty requires agency and error.

As a design choice, HP low enough to full-->down in one go makes it incredibly easy to deaths to happen without agency nor error.

In most other game genres, there are factors to mitigate the anti-fun of these events, from quick checkpoint restarts, to one player piloting a whole party of actors.

A ttrpg has none of those luxuries, if a PC dies from b%$@!&++, that's about as bad an outcome as can happen. Again, this is the one genre where a PC can be played for a literal year.

To loose them to a nat 1 on a save with 0 agency is the kind of fun anti-spiral that doesn't even exist in most gaming spaces. Even if the GM bends reality to get them alive later, that fun is forever fractured.

Deaths *need* to feel legit to the players.

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I'll also repeat that pf2 has trained GMs to hide this math problem from their players as much as possible.

I personally think I was seriously underestimating how much on-the-fly BS removal GMs typically need to do for pf2 to be fun to play.

That SoT night ambush is one example that I've spoken about so much, *because* I honestly doubt many parties can survive that when run legit.

As such, I have to think that the "normal pf2 default" is to pull similar "cheats" as my own GM did to minimize the BS. This puts a serious strain on the GM to constantly keep the random spikes of over-lethality in check.

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This is why when a GM "lowers the difficulty" as per that post, it can lead to such a good outcome, where the GM no longer has to constantly warp reality and can let the dice really fall where they may.

Rofl, I get back on, check Reddit, and there's a top pf2 post on this exact same issue from the other angle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1klr33w/perspectives_from_a_ chill_pathfinder_table/

Where the GM insisted on playing it on ~"easy mode" and the results have been great enough for the player to post about it. The consistency (lack of BS difficulty jumps) of that experience has allowed everyone to have more fun.

Even the exact point about "easy mode" paradoxically allowing for increasing the difficulty because of that trusted norm is present in this post. With extra emphasis on the lack of "power game pressure" enabling players to make non-meta feat selections (thus making weaker PCs that are more fun to pilot).

Quote like this abound:

“It allows the system to breathe” is a very eloquent way to phrase it and summarizes the point I was trying to make super well.