considerably's page

I really like the Book of the Damned trilogy which covers Devils, Demons, and Daemons. Still reference it from time to time - most recently on a daemon subplot. The trilogy has a gritty, pulpy-ness to it that I just love.

Obviously some parts are out of date (notably Nocticula having ascended), but by and large most of the info and hooks are still viable.

Love this topic.

Shadow Army - Really cool visual on this spell and I think it's pretty decent AOE spell since the effect only targets enemies. The defensive benefit here is pretty nice, too, when it works.

Boil Blood - Okay, it's a Fort save spell, but man the theme of this spell is really cool. Because of the drained effect essentially reducing HP, you will do some serious "damage" if they do fail their save. Against the right creature, this could really be impactful. Since it does reduce Fort saves also, if you land this once you can follow up with another one to finish them off, or your allies will be able to pile on.

All good suggestions so far.

My party has been 3 players and they have had a rotating cast of NPCs join them to fill that 4th slot. There's some good and easy to use options in the GMG, and you can easily tweak those to fit a certain NPC's style or whatever. I just follow the tables in the GMG for adjusting their stats as the party advances in levels.

Extra work but it helps the roleplaying opportunities. For example, I had Carman Rajani (slightly weakened from his book 2 stats) join them for a short time. It made the decision at the end of book 2 even more difficult for the players as they had come to like the abrasive scoundrel.

I've run a mix of homebrew and modules/APs over the years. I think both are good and really, for me, it depends on the mood I'm in. On the whole, when I run from a module, I can deliver a more complete experience to the players. I don't have to worry about treasure, creating filler rooms or encounters for a dungeon, writing a plot, foreshadowing villains. It's all taken care of for me. I can focus on sprinkling in scenes that let certain characters shine, creating cool unique items to hand out as treasure, and bringing in backstory NPCs as either side-quests or, if I can manage it, weaving them into the main plot.

I'm loving running James Jacobs's Abomination Vaults currently for exactly this reason. It's an archetypical adventure but you can see his understanding of how to write an adventure for a home GM in how he's composed it: there's a complete megadungeon and a few things that happen in Otari, but much of it is left open-ended so that it's incredibly simple to tack on additional NPCs or plots that are going in within that simplistic setup. And I think you should add stuff tailored to your players, or perhaps more interesting, tailored to the themes you're trying to convey. At this point, my players don't really know what's part of the module and what I've added in myself.

The fact that I don't have to spend hours drawing maps and scouring bestiaries for traps and creatures means I can focus on the things that matter to telling a good story.

I tend to find that in any homebrew game, at least one of the core game loops takes a backseat. They tend to have great worlds or stories, but maybe the GM doesn't care about evenly interspersing treasure and just gives big chunks of gold occasionally, maybe there are a dearth of combat encounters and sessions tend to center around a single epic showdown with a villain-of-the-week, maybe traps go unused, or other similar things. It's still a really fun game, but often I feel that if a GM just lifted and shifted some content from a module, they could have done even better.

In all fairness, I've heard that the more recent APs like Abomination Vaults and Ruby Phoenix don't have the plethora of brutally lethal encounters the early APs are known for (especially Age of Ashes and Agents of Edgewatch). That alone makes me more likely to give 2e another try.

This is completely true. I hope it's a conscious design decision, but from playing through Abomination Vaults and FotRP (and this is also true from scanning SoT), the core "problem" people most people have has been fixed. That is - an overabundance of single-entity Severe encounters that make it feel like PCs are always heavily outmatched. Beatable, but not fun for most players if it's the norm.

AV in particular has a handful of these types of encounters but they are intended as optional side encounters and don't stand in the way of the plot. I think the adventure could do with foreshadowing them a little better, but as long as the GM is aware and leans into it, it should work out fine for your parties and allow them the agency of whether to face these extra challenges.

For older adventures like AoA, it's unfortunate, but there's only two solutions. Either Paizo decides to rebalance and reprint them (my hope; though since they are not sold out yet it's unlikely), or folks can implement the advice that has been shared multiple times in this thread to offer a less challenging experience to your players. I believe "rebalance" should be the defacto answer for groups that come complaining about AoA struggles - it tends to already be on Reddit, anyway.

While an experienced 2E party can handle AoA and other early adventures as written, it sucks that these adventures are probably too difficult for most new groups and they're literally the first adventures you're likely to play, but it's also not at all difficult to rebalance with the 2E system. So I hope folks don't get caught up on a couple of poorly balanced adventures written in the dawn of a new system before even the authors of these adventures had probably played their first game.

Yes, I interpreted it as the researcher starting by that table.

It runs all the way up and then east to reach the east wall just south of the secret door leading into C3 (right next to C5). That wall is described in the text (though not on the map) as having the control glyphs for the transparent wall.

This was my interpretation as well, though I am not really sure how it's supposed to work in practice since the pathway is too narrow for the large sized Seugathi Researcher. Maybe this is my own misunderstanding of the rules, but I am not sure how a large sized creature is supposed to move through an area smaller than they are. There is an exploration Squeeze action, but that's not really applicable in a combat situation as described.

I am probably going to give the Seugathi a wand of shrink; it makes sense with their Magic Item Mastery ability. The fact that they'll have to spend 2 actions activating it gives the players an opportunity to stop the seugathi before it reaches the controls to release the destrachan.

PDFs are better resolution than they use to be but we won't supply 300 dpi, aka print quality. Digital piracy is bad enough in this industry. Providing commercial print quality would be even worse.

Huge thanks for the improvement you guys have done so far, particularly in the Interactive Maps PDFs. It has made a VTT play much better. No more suffering with SNES graphics pixelated maps.

Obviously, we'd love to get access to the full DPI quality of the fantastic maps & character art your artists produce, but the piracy issue is well understood. Hopefully something can be figured out that is value add for all parties.

You can acknowledge Deriven experience and keep your point of view. Something like: PF1 may be tactical when you push the difficulty, but otherwise it is not as tactical as PF2.

You're completely right here and this was a point I made many, many pages back. A reason that PF2 is such a deep game out of the box is inherently because if you make suboptimal decisions in battle you're going to get slapped around. You're not doing enough to shift the dice in your favor, basically. This is why the core idea in the thread title ("why don't we make enemies hit less and therefore easier") is flawed, it would inherently make the game easier and therefore less interesting.

Yes, you can make PF1E more difficult and you can make DND5E more difficult, and that adds depth to those games, but that's not really the out-of-the-box experience. It requires a lot of GM work, as Deriven did. Comparatively, PF2E requires zero work to give a solid tactical experience, but if you do want an easier dice-and-beer game, you can just put Weak templates on enemies and boom: you have that too. Very little work for a VERY flexible experience.

Well tuned difficulty is not the only thing PF2 does well in terms adding tactical depth. I think others have made good points about how PF2E's action economy and the interplay between PCs to set each other up is an improvement over other games, but the very fact that monsters are powerful and aren't just walked over by PCs is significant reason that the game is interesting tactically.

The tactics that many people seem so proud of being able use might be know; But that does not mean those options are available to the player in question with the character and scenarios that cause problems.

Then the problem is about specific format of PFS or the scenarios not really PF2 itself. If you're not having fun with PFS because it's too difficult and too restrictive, the possible answers are: 1) play better, 2) don't play PFS & play a home game instead, or 3) lobby for Paizo to make easier PFS modules, but I don't think a generalized thread about PF2E is the best place to make that case.

Disclaimer: I hate to even list the "play better" one since it's condescending in a way and I don't think it applies to every situation. But it is true for some of the time. There was a guy saying a couple pages back that Tripping is weak, for example. Even for experienced players, it's easy to overlook an option that would give you an advantage. In a recent session, I didn't think about using my Champion's Athletic Rush focus power to Long Jump until after I got stuck in a grease spell. There's usually an element of hindsight you can apply to improve.

If you're playing a home game already and the adventure is too difficult/unfun for the party, the party is already playing really well, and the GM refuses to make things easier in any of the ways we've listed, then seemingly that's the kind of game he wants. Again, it's not a problem with the PF2E, it's a GM problem, and folks on forums can't fix that.

Relevant to this thread.. Jason Bulmahn gave a response to a question about difficulty in a GenCon interview here: https://youtu.be/xItPNyvCAc4?t=369

Really well said, Sporkedup.

People who bother to post on this wasteland clearly WANT to love the game but are frustrated.

I think this is true for some people but also not true for others. Some folks just want a different game. We have given in this thread lots of suggestions to make the game feel more heroic, different ways to build encounters, different ways to play your turns in combats, different ways to prioritize actions. It's turned into a point of pride for the detractors to say that they do all that and still the game isn't fun/is too hard/is too complex/is too easy.

But it's hard for us to understand. Tons of us have lots of fun playing every week with this game. We play modules and complete the APs without the feeling to being crushed every battle that some folks here are saying is inherent in the system.

For those that aren't having fun, they have to accept that they can take and improve the game with the suggestions we gave. Whether that's playing more dynamically or streamlining certain systems just like people tweak and improve the rules to their satisfaction in any PnP game (especially 5E, which is notorious for heavy homebrew). But a thread that started with a complaint that creatures hit "too" often, which I think was pretty thoroughly explained in the earlier pages of the thread, has morphed into people who were unhappy with that original explanation complaining about every single system in PF2E.

The game isn't changing dramatically, like these posters seem to want. Maybe in 3E. Paizo will continue to make incremental improvements in character option and adventure design, as they already have, but again, these posters are not looking for incremental improvements; they're acting like the game is broken and needs an overhaul. Maybe it's not fun for them, and that's fine, lots of games are not fun for me, but the game is not broken. Paizo is not going to suddenly start publishing +2 attack and +2 AC feats like 1E or whatever it is that people are expecting.

About the only thing I can tell you for sure is the power gap between monsters and players shrinks as you rise in level. It starts very difficult, then gets easier and easier and easier.

This is true in my experience as well (primarily vs. single enemies). I think it's for 2 reasons:

Regardless, I think Paizo is completely aware of this. Abom Vaults, for example, did not have ANY Severe encounters at first level (or 2nd, iirc), and only a handful of Moderate ones. Haven't read Strength of Thousands since I'll probably get to play in that one, but I would be interested if they avoided this in that AP as well.

Hopefully PFS modules pick up this design doctrine as well, if they haven't already.

2. Player options open up; more spells, more feats. Not valid for PFS I guess, but the highly popular Free Archetype rule really accelerates how quickly PCs can get a full suite of tricks.

PnP games are traditionally deadlier at low levels, and I know the detractors on this thread would disagree, but based on my experience and how many low level deaths we had in 1E, I still feel it was far deadlier. Getting downed in PF2E isn't rare, especially at lower levels, but getting downed is not that bad or risky, honestly, unless your GM is the type that murders downed characters. Don't forget the rule about shifting your intiative to before the creature that downed you; as long as your party has a way to heal, they can easily get you back up in time to take your actions for the turn so you don't even lose a turn.

Again, after two years of PFS and some APs the most reliably way to win encounters is to simply out damage the NPCs. And that becomes easier at level 4. I haven't seen any use of non-damaging technicals that has had any demonstrative effect in PFS or can be the basis of why we win. So far, in my AP and PFS encounters, it always comes down to who kills faster. I'm not trying to discount peoples love of Trip and Grapple and Demoralize, but IME, it is not a difference maker as compared to hitting with weapons/spells.

I haven't played a single PFS scenario or even read one, but I have played through 2 complete APs and am currently GMing a group through a 3rd (AV). We use disabling and debuffing abilities regularly and have no problem completing the APs, typically as written. We do typically have some sort of story rewards/relics/bonus feats, that obviously give us an edge later in the campaign, though I can't imagine not getting stuff like this - would be a boring campaign.

I'm a wimpy GM and pull more punches/tweak fights more than the other GM in my group, so my players have been stomping my game, but the other GM for my group does not at all, and we still did not have any TPKs and had only 3 player deaths that I recall across 3 campaigns (1 of which was late in the campaign and we were able to resurrect).

We do, as of recently, tend to play with Free Archetype because it's just more fun, but otherwise I don't think our parties are overly optimized. In our AoA game and also in our current AV game, we have had a Trip Fighter that seems to consistently be a cornerstone of party tactics. We had a Lightning-punching Grapple Monk in AoE that was really effective as well. Besides that, I really don't think any of our other characters have stood out as especially powerful or broken, typically just basic builds. We had a melee Sorcerer that survived all of AoE somehow, even.

This here can be a HUGE shift difficulty and peoples perception of it: What Recall Knowledge checks get you vacillates wildly from DM to DM. Individual DM's can hinder or facilitate what you called adaptive tactics, so it might not be "each individual tactic only works in some cases" but they also might work more or less often depending on the DM: often what works great for one party doesn't translate to a winning tactic for another group/DM.

100% true. To add to this, we play exclusively on VTT (Foundry). Every roll is out in the open except for Secret checks (when we remember they're supposed to be Secret, anyway). I guess some groups would consider it metagaming, but we have no problem seeing that a creature had a high Will save when the Cleric tried to Fear it, and shifting tactics.

If your GM is rolling in private, obviously this cuts off an avenue for learning and adapting to an encounter. That definitely makes things harder. IMO it's unrealistic to not be able to realize a NPC is highly Reflexive just by watching her dodge a Fireball, but I know lots have differing opinions here.

SuperBidi wrote:

PFS adventures are made with random players/characters. They have a strong potential in going south.

Yes, but also no.

Because yes, you might be in a party with no synergy. But also, a starting PC has an AC of 18, 20 with shield. So the boss monster hits on a 6, crits on a 16, and has a pretty decent chance of insta-killing an L1 PC. It may be a PFS thing that those numbers are so stupid high, but the problem isn't a lack of PFS player co-ordination.

If it's hitting on a 6 vs 20 AC (+14 attack bonus), then it almost certainly is a level 4 creature (especially considering the damage you described). That's a Severe challenge for 1st level characters.

Severe encounters are going to be nail-biters, that's the whole point. I still don't think you should be straight up dying to it, though. The biggest risk would be if it downed a character with a critical hit, no one Stabilized them, and then they rolled a 1 or 2 on the DC 12 dying check.

If you don't want to have Severe difficulty encounters, then ask your GM to scale back stuff. I guess that's not an option with PFS, though.

Is that so? Honest question, because I haven't spent money on PF2 content since Plaguestone bombed for us. There've been a few comments in this thread about how Plaguestone and AoA were both poor starting experiences, with someone commenting on an AoA update to clean things up. I don't have a yardstick to know how major or minor the differences are.

Plaguestone was especially brutal. I ran it. Not only is the pacing a bit.. rough.. but it had a number of creatures that were technically within the math but tended to really punch above their weight.

AoA is not quite as bad as Plaguestone but still very rough. I haven't played but I believe Extinction Curse is also rough.

I think it gets better after EC. I know at least Abomination Vaults feels like a really solid experience. There are tough fights, but overall it is a more even experience. The adventure doesn't put you on any time crunch so players should never feel the need to rush ahead unprepared. It's an old-school dungeon crawl, so players I think will intuitively expect to get popped if they make mistakes, just like in Grandpa Gygax's day. (Disclaimer: there's one particular fight in the first level that is basically "bugged" in video game terms, check out the discussions in the AV GM thread on these forums for more info on how to fix it).

One more thing that I think is important as a GM in this edition, especially with novice groups, is that you really need to take the initiative in making fights more dynamic. Avoid having your creatures just spend 3 actions attacking. Use their unique abilities or do things like Trip/Grapple/Disarm, etc. The most prep I tend to do is looking over a creature's stat block and thinking about what it's going to be trying to do in a battle based on its lore, environment, etc.

Great, but has nothing to do with what Sherlock is talking about. I'm not understanding why that isn't obvious.

Sherlock is pointing out that there are many ways to make things challenging, some of these are more enjoyable than others. He post is predicated on the idea that there is some percentage of people who do not like the feeling of the asymmetrical crit mechanic. That as NOTHING to do with difficulty.

To be honest I wasn't ever really responding to his post as a whole because it wasn't a very compelling post, and frankly I thought your posts were better written, even though I disagree which is why I have been responding to you.

But.. here we go: Sherlock's points as I read them were:
1.) PF1 was actually a hard game, PF2E difficulty should be more like PF1E.

But it wasn't, unless you used encounters way over the "recommended" difficulty level. I feel like this doesn't need explanation since anyone casually familiar with 1E knew that game was pretty easy for an experienced player, but lots of other posters in this thread have given great explanations.

2.) He said that in his own home games for Starfinder what he does is just make things easier by lowering AC and saves.

..Which is exactly what I'm saying to do; use those Weak templates!

3.) Finally, he said another way to fix the balance is to increase resistances/HP.

This last point is primarily what I have been responding to the entire time and I have thoroughly explained why this is not sufficient to keep the difficulty the same. It wasn't a suggestion "I came up with", that is literally what Sherlock said. I'm pretty sure you said the same thing in one of your previous posts, too, but I could be wrong and don't feel like going through the post history.

Again...Sherlock's point is not about difficult vs easy

As above, 2 out of the 3 things Sherlock suggested inherently make the game easier. He may say he doesn't want it easier, but what he's asking for makes it easier. Which is fine. But I'm not going to act like it doesn't to assuage egos.

To put it another way, some of us believe an encounter can be more difficult and yet more enjoyable if it didn't include asymmetrical critting. I don't know why that's hard to understand. or why you keep trying to frame this as "easier encounters."

Another way to understand it is like this, I have two choices to increase difficulty:

A: The PCs are fighting in noxious air and have to make Fort saves every round or suffer damage.

B: The PCs are fighting with weapons that get magically greased and every round they have to roll Reflex to avoid having the weapons fly across the room.

This is already in the game. Plenty of creatures have disabling abilities instead of damage dealing ones. Abilities that completely disable a character 100% like what you're saying (remove their weapon and throw it across the room) are pretty rare because that's actually kind of unfun for the player. Players don't show up to stand around making paralyze checks or chase their weapon around the room. It's cool once in a while, and accordingly some creatures have abilities like this, but no one wants every encounter to do that.

Even for "brute" creatures that mostly rely on high attack and damage, they typically have a high Athletics too, and as a GM you should be using that Athletics to Grapple, Trip, Shove, or Disarm (though to be fair, Disarm kind of sucks) your PCs. Not only is it often tactically favorable, it makes the encounters more dynamic as opposed to just walloping a player for some amount of damage that will be healed up after the battle with a Medicine check.

Almost, but you're conflating the argument with specifics about HP/resistance/healing. There are innumerable techniques Paizo can use to shape the experience without affecting the average challenge.

Paizo does do this! My party just faced a Greater Shadow last night, it did crit often, but that was primarily because it was abusing its ability to hide in PC shadows to flat-foot them. Even when it crit, though, its damage was not particularly high - I remember players actually laughed at its crit damage on one particularly low roll.

But when they found out it spawned another Shadow and Enfeebled the crit player, the dynamics of the encounter shifted fast!

Not only did the players need to figure out what to do with the Shadow hiding repeatedly, now they had another foe, and a risk of more spawning..

It was only a Moderate encounter and my players were never at risk of dying as long as they respected the abilities the Shadow had, but I feel like this is exactly the kind of thing you're asking for? Neither side in the battle had the convenience of just sitting there and trading blows. The Shadow had to abuse its full toolkit to have a chance to deal with the PCs or it would have been surrounded and beaten to death in one round, and the PCs similarly had to find a way stay mobile and avoid casting shadows that were giving the creature a place to hide.

considerably wrote:

However, if you get hit less or hit more often, the game is easier.

No. The difficulty of an encounter is determined by many things. Environment, Magic Items, Numbers of Mobs, Tactics, Pacing, Resistance, Stats, Action taxes, etc. A Boss can be highly accurate and do little damage. Or, they can have low accuracy and do lots of damage and both will have the same expected damage. So getting hit more or less when combined with other variables, is not the sole determinant for difficulty.

Come on man. I didn't say that accuracy is the only factor that influences difficulty anywhere. What I said and you quoted isn't even really pulled out of context there, so I'm not sure how you could read it as if I said "the ONLY thing that matters is accuracy".

Obviously all those other things matter and most of them are accounted for in the core math of the game (such as magic items, number of creatures, resistances, stats, etc). Everyone here is saying use tactics. Pacing is a big one, you're right, and I think everyone agrees some APs screw up their pacing in a few places (especially the early ones). Environment is not directly covered in the core math but is called out several times in the CRB and GMG as something to consider, and I think generally it is. Creatures can and do have slightly higher or lower accuracies (and ACs, saves, etc.) - look at the tables in GMG.

I'm not sure you're treading any new grounds with these suggestions. All of these are levers that are already being used to adjust encounter difficulty, variance, balance, and feel. I think PF2E is probably the best game on the market right now in terms of the depth and variance in its official bestiaries. The creatures are pretty darn well written. But it does require some creativity on the GMs part to do something beyond attack with every action (which isn't even really optimal).

considerably wrote:

However, if you get hit less or hit more often, the game is easier.

I mean, if that's the only change you make, yeah, but that's not really what they're proposing.

It feels like kind of a strange assertion because there are a lot of games, tabletop or otherwise, that are very hard without being predicated on the idea that certain characters have a high chance of failing with their core abilities.

No, the other guy was saying give more hit points and/or resistances, but that is wildly insufficient which I clearly explained in my post.

Of course it's possible to have a different balancing point and I cover that in my post as well if you read it and didn't quote out of context. That quote is specific to PF2E's mechanics. Everything is PF2E is balanaced around the core accuracy math.

The fact that you can't hit every attack is why you have such a powerful ability (Trip) that works on basically everything in the game, even the most powerful bosses, and they have to waste an action to stand up like schlubs. 1E basically banned you from Tripping half the creatures in the game to prevent you from doing this, and trip builds were still super powerful in that game because they basically could nullify an enemy. 2E lets you do it to whomever you like, you just can't always succeed. Just one example.

So to reiterate the point I made in my previous post: if you let people hit all the time, and don't also change all these spells, abilities and feats, the game will be easier. Adding some hitpoints or resistances as the person I was replying to is insufficient.

YES, it is possible to make a game with a different balancing point. But you can't change the balancing point, but not adjust everything else that is downstream from that and expect the balance to remain the same. It's completely inane to say otherwise.

Sorry, asking the poster to theorize on how how the majority of the player base feels about an illustrative does not allow one to assert I think my "preference is universal." Not even remotely. You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

Frankly I think we're really having trouble understanding your point, so cut us some slack here. I'm going to do my best, but maybe consider if you aren't explaining it very well or that perhaps you might be mistaken before attacking folks.

Your logical argument is perplexing. If anything is going to devalue other mechanics, it would be changing the difficulty, a path you're advocating. Yet you are asserting that if we keep the difficulty the same and the rounds it takes to defeaet said creature, we would be devaluing the other mechanics. That doesn't follow.

Nothing I am saying is perplexing. Yes, lowering the difficulty does devalue mechanics & tactics. That's.. obvious? I didn't know I needed to explain that point. The entire reason many people may choose to have an easier encounters is to to be able to beat those encounters without needing complex tactics, or if they do use tactics, they will absolutely crush these encounters. It's a power fantasy, and a cool one. Nothing wrong with it. The game recommends you should have some easy encounters, all I'm saying is have more of them if that's what you want!

So I want to make sure we're on the same page, so to restate: the core of your argument is that is that you can make some changes to hit ratios, and yet somehow the difficulty would be the same, as long as you give more HP/resistances/healing.

However, if you get hit less or hit more often, the game is easier. I'm not sure how more plainly this can be explained. You're saying that I'm not getting it, but you're not explaining how to account for everything else that changes when you adjust the core math.

If I can hit very often, I'm just going to Slow the enemy and Trip them every round and they can do nothing. And then it's just a matter of chewing through those extra hitpoints or whatver else you decided to add. In this scenario, the extra hitpoints change nearly nothing about the difficulty, just makes the battle take longer.

How critical/fundamental is PCs getting crit with frequency to the roots of PF2? I do not know. I doubt Paizo truly knows. It's a facet of the game that results from how the monsters are stated for accuracy. Can you lower their accuracy and do other things to keep the difficulty the same? I am of the opinion the answer is yes, but it would take playing and player feedback to get deeper insight. Would it take resources on Paizo's part? Yes. Is it worth the effort? It would be for me, but I can't speak for anyone else.

I mean, yes, anything is possible. You could write a game where it's still challenging if you succeed a lot and monsters fail a lot. But it doesn't work with PF2E unless you also somehow change the effects of successes and failures, which would require revising most spells, feats, monsters, and so forth, and I expect most people would then say things like "my sword is a wet noodle!" which would then be its own problem to solve.

This would be an inherent requirement if you wanted the difficulty to be the same, since the effects of all these existing abilities are balanced around the current hit/miss percentages.

It's.. possible? But not realistic.

I don't know. I feel your pain. I love PF2E and want it to be a game for everyone. Maybe Paizo can think of a really clever alternate rule to make it work, but I don't think your plan would work at least as stated.

For the sake of discussion, I don't think you're understanding the underlying issue and the point Sherlock1701 was making. It's not a question of math, but of game design and intent.

Let's try an illustrative example.

We have two encounters A and B.

A) Low AC creature with tons of hit points and fast healing.

B) High AC creature with low hit points.

Paizo maths out these encounters so they both take the same average number of rounds to defeat and both average the same resource drain. Translation, they have the same expected difficulty. Now ask yourself, which encounter do you think the vast majority of people will enjoy playing?

You're missing the forest for the trees. Yes, it's about a certain number of rounds to defeat. But the core math of the game is about more than that - it's about providing value to characters who are focused on debuffing the enemies defenses, removing actions, being defensive, and so forth.

You're acting like it's so simple we should just make stuff easier to hit, but if we somehow did like you imply and figured out some calculation to make it "take some similar amount of rounds", you're still devaluing other mechanics which exist in the game.

If the creature has a ton of hit points and fast healing, what's the point of playing a support character who's focused on disrupting the enemy action economy? What about the feats that apply effects on a miss, or spells with powerful riders even if the creature saves? Who cares, you just need to beat down the beanbag's hitpoints and overcome that fast healing.

What about the implied suggestion in the title of this very thread, which is inverse of what you're saying. They're saying that actually the problem is that monsters hit players too much, not that players don't hit monsters enough. So which is it? Only one, or both?

At the end of the day, what you're proposing would require a complete overhaul of the rules to the point of being almost a different game. I believe it would be a shallower game and I'm glad Paizo didn't go the bag-of-hitpoints route that 4E did. We already tried that and it wasn't great. This is also what GMs did in 1E just to give their creatures a chance to survive the first round of combat and it sucked. At the end of the day, even if your suggestions were better, these kinds of changes are not coming to 2E. Maybe 3E in 10 years. I think it's better to color in the margins, so to speak.

The cadence of difficulty is a reflection of how Paizo thinks the players should experience the game. That cadence is what Paizo wants the game to be. IME, that nominal game experience involves a lot of crits on party members. It doesn't matter what happens in other games, if people playing this game find it unenjoyable, then its unenjoyable. I doubt Paizo knows how that experience is affecting its player base and bottom line. If Paizo used other methods of making encounters difficult that didn't involved what feels like incessant and asymmetrical critting, would more people enjoy the game? I don't know, I can only point out that I empathize with the sentiments being expressed.

I certainly don't have access to any statistics which shed light on how big or small a problem this is. But the only avenue players have is to talk about it on the forums in the hopes their concerns are acknowledged. Alternatively, they simply quit playing and quit supporting the product. That latter is certainly more likely when other posters refuse to acknowledge the issue and engage in victim blaming.

Getting hit and getting crit is part of the experience Piazo is expecting players to have. Posters on here, accusing players who don't enjoy it of badwrongfun, or "trying to save face' isn't helping Paizo in this regard.

If you review my posts, I have not blamed anyone, and I wish other people would not act like the solution is "just play better" all the time, it could be true sometimes, but it's also condescending. I have not taken a stance on whether the difficulty is "too easy", "just right", "too hard", and in my home games which I run APs, I tend to tweak difficulty in both directions. There is no correct stance (in my opinion) because difficulty is subjective. Every modern video game has a difficulty slider for this exact reason. PNP games can't easily do this - it's, unfortunately, the job of the GM.

All that to say, I don't think you're wrong for wanting adventures to be easier. I think that's actually VERY useful feedback for Paizo. My point from the beginning has been to establish what the actual root cause is, and what the solution is. I firmly do not believe there is any core problem with the system, but rather the difficulty presented vs. the difficulty expected. So either the GM makes difficulty adjustments, or Paizo decides to make difficulty adjustments.

Paizo should absolutely do whatever will sell more books.

And to that end, Paizo has already been trending towards easier difficulty in adventures. I really would be surprised if people familiar with the game struggled with Abomination Vaults, for example. It's pretty well balanced aside from a handful of encounters which are either intentionally difficult because they're "secret bosses" or the one or two I've noticed that are poorly designed. On the whole, though it's pretty darn good IMO. The little bit of Ruby Phoenix I've played seemed to be similar. I think they'd be well served by reprinting a rebalanced version of Age of Ashes since it seems to be a popular introductory adventure simply because it's the first one, but it's notoriously difficult, and novice GMs might not be experienced enough to figure out how to fix problems for their groups.

And finally, for everyone in this thread complaining and suggesting wild solutions to "fix" the game. Just try what I'm suggesting for one session. Continue your existing AP or whatever you were already doing, just apply the Weak template to every single enemy. All of them. This is super easy with AONPRD or Foundry and can literally be done on the fly, no extra prep needed. Don't tell your players you're doing it, just try it and see if your players like the easier game or not. You might just find all the complaints about how "bad" the game is disappear. Maybe not, but at least you tried.

In my opinion, one issue is that there is only one level of encounter between Moderate and Extreme. Extreme is out of the question as it's a one chance on two of TPK. Moderate puts the party against a group that is half it's power. 2 against one is in general quite an easy win unless you have a streak of bad rolls or a strange configuration.

And then, you have Severe. Severe means that the enemies are at 3/4 of the party power. That's actually quite close. It's not a battle one should win easily. Actually, with a bit of bad luck it can end as a TPK.
In my opinion, there's an issue with that. If there was a "high" encounter level at 100 xp, the xp progression would be quite nice: 40, 60, 80, 100, 120 and 160. But this level of difficulty would be way better than severe, it would mean the enemies are at 62.5% of the party strength, that's challenging without being really dangerous.
Just a thought.

Low/Moderate/Severe/etc are just signposts. You can have an encounter be worth any amount of XP if you want something slightly more difficulty than Moderate etc. The writers do this frequently in pre-written adventures.

This one's on the top of my mind since I ran it last night, but check out encounter C3 in AV2. It's pegged as a Moderate encounter but only truly has a budget of 75 XP.

It's extremely easy to get hit in this edition, at least from what I've seen. I don't even think armor serves a purpose beyond maybe avoiding a crit.

I think there are 2 core issues contributing to this: first, monster stats are too high. They're hard to hit, they hit PCs the vast majority of the time, and they make most of their saves. The other issue is encounter balance in the early 2e APs seems to be way out of whack. Too many high difficulty encounters too close together. Just my own observations.

I disagree with your first point. The implication is that something is wrong with the math. The math is fine. An encounter that is Severe will feel severe, and encounter that is Moderate will feel moderate, and an encounter that is Low will feel low. Granted, difficulty is subjective, but given a party that understands the game, the math checks out. The underlying game systems are working just fine.

What I believe people really have an issue with is the cadence of difficulty. This is what you're correctly talking about in your second point. The Paizo difficulty cadence is heavily weighted to challenging encounters. You can review most APs and see that more encounters than not are Moderate or above with many Severe encounters (though this gets less extreme in the more recent APs).

Even the GMG recommends you put many Severe encounters in your adventure: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=949

Now: there's nothing wrong with severe encounters. They are hard, but unless you play badly your party won't lose. But they will get smacked around a lot. This is important to understand because the constant refrain in this thread is that people don't want to get smacked around a lot. They want to have a slight challenge but mostly win handily. Perhaps having only set-piece battles against named villains be severe or above.

Is this the right or wrong mentality to feel like adventures should be easier? Neither - that's badwrongfun territory to judge, but I think people should be aware of where the issue really lies. With that knowledge you can very easily homebrew a solution (adding Weak templates if you're playing APs) or simply choosing more low & trivial difficulty encounters if you're running homebrew. Or any number of other solutions such as giving your players extra power boosts, such as increased ability scores or powerful items.

I was the DM for this character... I'm literally here telling you the build wasn't an issue. Yes, he didn't tend to take a lot of damage from mooks, and even some more challenging encounters saw him wade through without a scratch. However, he was far from broken because what is actually broken in 3.5 is ending encounters which he was pretty terrible at compared to the rest of the party.

He was playing a shiny pylon that enemies would have to spend a few turns tipping over before they could fight the rest of the team.

I'm fully aware of what made 1E boring and easy. I maintain that an invulnerable character is boring, regardless. I have played a 1E Monk with very high AC. I had a Shaman that never missed an attack except on a 1 and had 9th level casting to boot. It was a power fantasy, sure, but the gameplay was not engaging.

It could be tough if your character is the only thing in the party left standing but doesn't have the punch to actually down the enemy.

Sounds like a lot of fun for everyone else at the table! Hope someone brought snacks while your character gets to have her little power fantasy.

Did the other players not have a min-maxed build of some sort too? What about the Barbarian pouncing around one-shotting enemies? He went down? The Control Wizard that could have won the encounter right-off, was did her player fall asleep watching your character get missed a dozen times? If we allow your power fantasy, why not these?

Regardless, in your example, it's still trivial. Walk over and heal your allies. Kill the enemies with your BO. It doesn't really matter because you're so hard to hit, you're not going down unless the dice are against you.

If you think an AC stacking Knight is cheesy you never played the game...

I played 1E for almost 10 years. Maybe if you're only talking about low level play, you can get nice AC with pretty basic options, but if you wanted a high AC build at anything beyond 10-ish you needed a cheesy build. Granted, cheesy is subjective. I don't judge, as I said above, I built lots of cheesy characters. Maybe you don't consider the options you'd take cheesy. Whatever, the semantics don't matter and you know that, so if you're arguing semantics, it means you have no substance.

Finally, nothing you have said has refuted the basic premise: your entire idea is 1) boring gameplay (there's no interactivity, it's stat-checking a sheet) and 2) the difficulty is trivial, just like nearly everything in PF1E if you knew what you were doing and made it beyond like level 3.

Can you though? A PF2 defensive character still has things to fear, a PF1 defensive build could get to where you'd be better off just walking away because you simply weren't killing it.

Like I was saying.. trivial difficulty...

As you say, PFS banned a lot of stuff and played a lower levels. They still had rampant issues with munchkin builds dominating tables. Just like anyone who played 1E did unless your whole table was novices or munchkins. A mix always resulted in some characters overshadowing the less-optimal characters.

considerably wrote:

So you want to take no or very little damage. What you're saying is, in other words, you want the threat to your character to be "Low" or maybe even "Trivial" right..?

Boy, do I have news for you! That's included in PF2E's rules.

No, I want a defensive skew build that trades offense for defense and actually gets paid off for the trade. Against equal level foes, I could care less if I'm also doing very little damage as long as I can hold the chokepoint and force foes to cluster up on me. Incidentally, this is exactly what the 3.5 Knight class did and I had a player who loved doing just that.

He picked a Crusader in PF2 and, let's just say he didn't get the same feeling...

No, what you are angling for is a stat-check character that can't be hit because the numbers on their sheet say so.

You can already trade offense for defense by taking actions such as Grapple (technically doesn't help, but most creatures will try to Escape), Demoralize, Trip, Raise a Shield, Shield Block, etc. No, you won't become immune to damage against a Moderate+ encounter, because well, that wouldn't be a Moderate encounter, would it? But you'll still be very durable.

If you want to be nigh-invulnerable because the numbers on your sheet say so, fight Trivial encounters. Done.

Only difference between that and the 1E example of it is that everyone in the party gets to feel powerful, not just the guy who looked up a cheesy build online (or poured over splatbooks and created it themselves).

Rysky wrote:

What fantasy?

The Juggernaut-style character who doesn't seem to get hit until the actual baddy of the story shows up.

Quote:

Playing a heavily armored character that’s tough? Or frustrating the GM and making them have to adjudicate encounters around you?

I've DMed for this exact character. You can honestly just let them do their thing and it doesn't break the game. Defense and a longsword swing per round doesn't exactly end fights. If it annoys you too much, just understand that smarter or better organized enemies can try for a trip or grapple just like people in real life did against actual knights.

So you want to take no or very little damage. What you're saying is, in other words, you want the threat to your character to be "Low" or maybe even "Trivial" right..?

Boy, do I have news for you! That's included in PF2E's rules.

considerably wrote:

So you want easier adventures, at the end of the day. There's nothing wrong with asking for that, but just remember that lots of people have no problem with the adventures exactly as written. The fact that you and OP are struggling does not mean that it is too hard. Difficulty is entirely subjective.

Once again, you're taking my statements out of context. I never said I wanted "easier" encounters or that I was having difficulty. What I said is that getting constantly crit by NPCs is demoralizing, it has nothing to do with difficulty, it has to do with game-play and the associated tactics that one has to adopt to deal with it.

I haven't been a part of any TPKs in PF2 (knock on wood) and I've only seen a fellow PC die at level 1 or so in PFS (yup, crit killed by a boss and then failed a Dying save). That doesn't change the fact that I really don't enjoy the overwhelming asymmetry of the +10 crit mechanics given the way PF2 codes the creatures. As Sherlock pointed out earlier on, there are other ways to make fights more difficult.

I've experienced near TPK's in PF1 and 5e and those were some of the most enjoyable encounters.

I have zero issue with difficulty. It's the nature or type of experience that makes me turn down some invitations to play PF2.

I had two players in a row get killed instantly in PF1 because I crit back to back with a NPC who had a 3x weapon. Not sure that's any different. In 2E the player could have used a Hero Point to stabilize or another player could have administered aid. Their death was not guaranteed.

The difficulty is intrinsically tied to the crit chance. If that mechanic didn't exist, it would no longer be an "extreme" encounter or whatever. It's why the threat is low as a PC if you fight weak creatures, you're going to hit/crit them a lot.

If you don't want to get crit except on 20s, just don't fight stuff that's higher level than you.

considerably wrote:

The adventures do not require or even recommend that you be a level higher. No one is saying that. Folks are recommending simple tweaks that can be applied by a GM for a party who is struggling (for whatever reason).

You're taking my statement out of context.

I am not saying that the "adventure" is making any explicit requirements. I'm responding to everyone saying that you just need to do X to make it fun. Graystone's point, the one I agree with is the more X the GM feels is needed, the fewer APs you're gong to sell.

No part of that assertion is dependent on comparative difficulty to GM between versions of PF.

People are only saying doing X to make it easier IF you're struggling. There's nothing wrong with needing an easier adventure, but just remember that lots of people have no problem with the adventures exactly as written. The fact that you and OP are struggling does not mean that it is too hard. Difficulty is entirely subjective.

That said, as I said my last post: I do probably agree with where you're coming from. If Paizo makes the adventures easier, it will be more accessible. However, I don't think it has much to do with the amount of "work" it takes, because that is so miniscule, but rather it's because so many people have a mental block on rebalancing content to be easier. It's completely evident in this thread in that every single person who dislikes the published adventures for being "too difficult" ardently refuses to apply Weak templates to enemies (which is literally a 1 click button on Archives of Nethys or PF EasyTool). Everyone's got a different reason but realistically it's pride.

Weak templates are an easy route to rebalance, but I have mentioned several times that I think a better a more empowering way for your players is to hand out math-breaking items and feats. Give out a feat that increases spell DCs for fire spells to your Efreeti Djinn Sorcerer, give a +2 sword to your fighter 5 levels early, or a Belt of Incredible Dexterity to your Rogue way before he could get an apex item.

These feel REALLY fun to players, are unique and can be tied to your story, and more than anything make the game a touch easier for groups that are struggling. Players will be so in love with their cool items, they won't even notice they're being given stuff that makes the game "easy mode". So instead of feeling like they're playing on easy mode when they realize they're fighting something with a Weak template, they feel empowered. It's more work though, so YMMV.

Dimity wrote:

N N 959 wrote:

If I have to *constantly* change the difficulty level of the encounters to compensate for the +10 crit mechanics, then I'm not going to GM.

The most common suggestion is to give the players 1 extra level. Done. No further adjustment required.

The average person who buys an AP is not going to search the forums to find out that they need to add a level to any random AP. The overwhelming majority expect to play level 1 at level 1, as they should. When the AP says level 1, expecting a GM to know that's level 2 is nonsensical.

The more burden you put on GMs to have to figure out counter-intuitive changes like adding levels at the start of a level 1 AP, the less people will want to GM.

The adventures do not require or even recommend that you be a level higher. No one is saying that. Folks are recommending simple tweaks that can be applied by a GM for a party who is struggling (for whatever reason).

Plenty of crews of experienced 2Eers trounce these APs. My group is brand new to 2E with the exception of 1 player and they struggled a bit in early AV book 1, and I adjusted difficulty on several encounters. But now they figured out the game and are having no problem in AV book 2 (knock on wood).

I would have no problem if Paizo wanted to make the APs easier by default and let GMs tweak up. I think it might make some sense, since you're trying to lure people in. But for a group who understands the game, the AP balance is mostly fine. Acting like it's required is being obtuse.

YuriP wrote:

If the encounters are too much for them a simple solution is just try to weak the monsters maybe even the hazards or just up them (but if you plan to play until level 20, up the players will make you to review the opponents in the last level anyway.

That was my first thought but since we were new, we want to stick to Raw to get the "normal experience". Are the fights supposed to be that hard/enemies always higher level? PCs run up to the enemy and then both side are just duking it out. Is that expected behavior?

Reducing difficulty with templates is still RAW (per the Core rulebook and Bestiary 1). It's not the same as running the adventure as written, but you're not breaking any rules of the game with an easier experience by applying Weak templates. In fact, those are literally included in the rules of the game.

People gave some great advice in this thread, but just to set expectations: even if they play well your players are going to get beat up sometimes, that's how PF2 works in anything above Moderate encounters. It's not "easy" like DND 5E or PF1E with an optimized party. It's more like a traditional adventure story where the characters get smacked around, rather than a DOOM-like experience where you just trounce everything. They shouldn't have TPKs or regular character deaths, but a character going down isn't unusual. If your players want to win handily, that's fine and is 100% supported by the rules. Just make sure the encounters are "Low" difficulty, or at most Moderate - problem solved.

Here's some relevant rules:
Building Encounters (adjust your average encounter difficulty to a level that better fits what your party is looking for ) - http://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497
Adjusting difficulty (for skill checks) - http://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=555
Creating dynamic encounters - http://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=978. This one is pretty important and even the published APs sometimes don't follow these guidelines sometimes. Tweak as necessary for a better experience.

Teamwork is all well and good if the other players cooperate. I've lost track of how many games I've been in where players forgot my bard's inspire courage bonuses, have charged the mass of mooks my wizard was about to fireball, held onto their healing font even with two PCs down, or not stayed in their flanking position to allow my rogue to sneak attack.

As someone who enjoys the combat to be difficult and has been defending it this whole thread, I don't feel anything needs to change with the core design of the game, but I do think Paizo should make a conscious effort to make APs easier. Have some tough bosses, sure, but the average encounter should be easier I think. Experienced groups can do traditional things like combine encounters or scale up enemies to get more of a challenge.

I get that they need a certain XP budget per page or whatever so that people get level 20 by the end, but you can always say "this adventure is recommended for Fast XP track" or give more generous quest XP to get around that.

My understanding is that the adventure RollForCombat is putting out is supposed to start easy and scale up from there. I think that's a nice middle-ground.

considerably wrote:

they want the difficulty to be low like PF1E with an optimized party or 5E out of the box, and that is in the game already.

For somebody who said upstream that you don't want to judge you're coming off as incredibly judgemental.

You quoted me out of context. I'm specifically referring to "these people" which in this context is the people who often complain that the game is too difficult because they miss a lot or get hit a lot or whatever. They're not new or inexperienced players and often claim to be RPG veterans. The discussions always go like this:

> Stuff is too hard, we get hit a lot and miss a lot
> Have you tried using tactics?
> We use tactics and still the math says we're going to always take some damage and have close calls, but I don't want to get hit very often, and I want to succeed more often (boiled down, this is pretty much exactly what OP was saying in this thread)

That's fine. That's that's a lower level of difficulty they're looking for, and that is already in the game - which is what I said. I personally use a slightly lower difficulty than what APs tend to use in my games, even. It's fine.

For newer or less experienced players, well, that's not really what this topic was about at all, but I agree with you. They may not explicitly be looking for an easier experience but as a GM you should ramp them into the more standard PF2E difficulty by starting easier.

Saying things like "it's hard difficulty for them" is well.. I get what you're saying but it's mincing words. It's not condescending to call it low or easy difficulty, that's just standard game terminology for decades. Maybe calling an easier difficulty "Low difficulty" is not the best practice, since it truly could be difficult for some, but I feel like the debate over terminology here is outside the scope of the topic or even the PF2E game - everyone understood what I meant. And it would be confusing to use different terms since Paizo printed the words Low/Trivial difficulty in their encounter building rules, and that's what I was referring to.

It's true that 18 is recommended for primary stat but OP is talking about AC and specifically a Bard. A Bard, I hope, has 18 CHA primary stat but that won't help them not get hit.

A bard, however, has light armor proficiency so they can get by with 16 DEX and still have "max" AC. If they want to have even less DEX, they could elect to take feats or dedications to get access to Medium armor. Or be content being slightly less defensive out of the gate. You can't have everything.

All said, you do not need 18 DEX to be competent in melee range.

Yeah, not ignoring the importance of tactics. In a previous post, I outlined how the monk was doing things like moving, flurry, attempting trips, and still was consistently knocked on his but because enemies can easily surpass pc armor class.

Again, my issue isn't with *getting* hit, it is with the ratio at which high ac character seem to get hit-- and crit-- by every mob in the game.

And by "bad," I mean, not maximum. Yes, obviously 14 Dex isn't going to be as agile as 18 Dex. But, as people keep pointing out to me, ever number is important, since all the enemies are crit happy. A 14 Dex is "bad" in that it means you are two points behind on dodging attacks or reflex saves, which can get you killed.

Since the game seems to be designed around a player having *at best* a 50% chance of not getting hit or avoiding an effect, being two points behind is not just suboptimal, but suicidal. Or at least, that's...

14 DEX is only 1 point behind 18 DEX in terms of AC. Assuming you're wearing light armor (chain shirt or studded leather). You are 2 points behind on Reflex saves, though. But again, you're intended to be taking *some* kind of action to supplement that further. Are you staying far away from enemies at the end of your turn (using Move actions dynamically), Raising a Shield, debuffing the enemy, etc.

It highly varies based on the creature type, but yes, some even level creature have roughly a 50% chance of hitting you if you have par AC (and the reverse is true). But what are you doing to swing those odds? Nothing? You're just standing there taking 3 hits (or worse, you're letting the enemy creature use its special ability/tactic and you're not countering it)? Regardless, you have a party of 4 against a single creature that hits you 50% of the time. That's Moderately difficult. Even without tactics, unless you get super unlucky, you're probably not even going to have someone get downed.

If you want to hit monsters 65% of the time and for them to hit you 35% of the time, that's Low difficulty per the rules (per common sense, too, I suppose). There's nothing wrong with that, just have the GM use less XP budgets in his encounters, so he's in that Low difficulty range.

Claxon wrote:

I personally am against it, but keep track of PF2 just to see if there are any developments to sway my mind.

If you're counting on Paizo putting out a "hey so um we're totally rewriting the underlying math of the game of PF2 to make it more like PF1, sowwi aboot not getting it like that from the get go" book midway through an edition's life cycle I think there is some chance that you might end up disappointed.

I mean it's already supported. It's called asking your GM to run encounters with at most a Moderate encounter budget, and most being trivial/low. It's literally what these people want - they want the difficulty to be low like PF1E with an optimized party or 5E out of the box, and that is in the game already. Probably use the fast XP track otherwise it will take forever to level up.

If you're running an AP you can apply Weak templates (Foundry does this with 1 button click) to every enemy and it pretty closely simulates this.

A more complex implementation would be homebrewing in more ways to buff ability scores, such as bringing back Belts of Giant Strength etc. It would make the game much easier to have everyone with +2 or +4 higher ability scores than intended on level and would add to the power fantasy. I hope most GMs are handing out unique powers, relics, and items that are story appropriate and increase player power regardless - I feel like most tabletop campaign would be kind of boring if you didn't.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

What are you supposed to use for fighting with STR 14 DEX 14, harsh words and soft pornography?

Lol

The point being, it sucks to have to optimize just to be average. It sucks that having a 14 dex-- which is what my character, the party bard, has-- is considered bad.

I'm not saying my bard is in melee a lot, but just as an example. If you don't have an 18 in a stat, that stat is garbage.

What does "bad" mean? It's fine, and I've played a light-armor wearing Ranger with 14 DEX. But you're less evasive than someone with 18 DEX. That should be pretty.. obvious..? And for what it's worth, at 5th level you can increase your DEX to 16 with the ability score boost and you will be on par for the rest of the campaign assuming you use a chain shirt.

Despite what you're saying, PF2E is not really about stat stacking. As other people keep saying and you keep ignoring, just standing there and imagining your character avoiding blows because he has high stats is not how the game works. You actually need to move your character around the battle field, dancing out of range of enemies. There are Reactions that let you add bonuses to your AC for a single attack as a "dodge". If your caster lands slowed 1 or stunned 1, forcing the enemy to chase after you means they can use at most one attack. Your Barbarian is Demoralizing, I hope, and reducing their DCs and attack rolls by 1 or 2.

Optimization in this game does not happen before the session on your character sheet. You don't select certain feats and then say, "welp, now I have my Monk dip, Crane Style, Dodge, blah blah blah, I can't be hit!" like PF1E.

Optimization happens during the session in the battle. If you want to be a flighty, dodgy character, select options that empower you to do that in battles, and then do that in the battle.

And yes, you are going to get hit and downed sometimes. Especially if your GM runs difficult encounters. If you want more of a power-fantasy adventure where you never get hit and critically succeed all the time, talk to your GM about running more low-level encounters. Ask to play on easy mode. It's okay, no one will judge you.

Part of the problem I think is looking at specializations as specializations.

They aren't. There's no such thing as a Transmuter Wizard. There's only a Generic Wizard who happens to be required to prepare a transmutation spell in at least one spell slot per level.

Sure. But I think conceptually a lot of people like playing a Wizard who focuses on a specific spell school. It's part of the fantasy to be a necromancer, an evoker, a transmuter, etc.

Anyway, that is not really the issue at hand; currently, if you play a transmuter you have very limited options as to what to do with your transmutation spell slots. At higher levels, it's basically turn into monsters and that's it.

The question posed in the title was: "What are transmutation specialization design goals" to which the apparent answer is polymorphing into different creature types. But I don't think that's what people really expect when they envision a transmuter. So it's a mismatch in expectations.

I don't personally believe that a Transmuter specialization wizard is useless, but I do think it doesn't capture the concept of what someone who picks it is looking for. It's an easy fix (more spells) and one hopefully that will make it in Secrets of Magic.

(As for myself, I'm fine with "turning into a housecat" being a really awful combat plan at high levels.)

I get your point but it is a bit of a disingenuous strawman. This is not how the polymorph spells work. Check out Dinosaur Form, which is one of the better designed polymorphs; as you Heighten to higher levels, your size gets larger along with your other combat stats.

A hypothetical animal form spell that let you turn into a house cat for a 1st level spell slot, would in fact turn you into a Gargantuan feline kaiju for a 10th level spell slot. Which is pretty cool.

From 5th level and up Arcane Transmutation has zero buff spells excepting the self-only polymorph spells.

I think Transmutation needs a couple things:
- Magic Weapon should scale via Heightened. It would be cool and useful to buff up your martials' weapons, but this is basically useless after level 3 or 4. It should always be slightly better than what you would get with typical treasure-by-level.
- The Polymorph spells need alternate rules for scaling. Yes, there are higher level polymorph spells. But if you want to be a Wizard who turns into a bug and fights, that's not really feasible because Pest form highest Heighten is 4th. A more robust alternate rule for scaling would be getting attack/damage tables similar to the GMG for creating creatures. Then you could be a 20th level Wizard that casts a 10th level Pest Form or whatever. Great rule option for Secrets of Magic, I think.
- More spells, duh. Goes without saying, but Transmutation needs more high level buff spells, or better Heighten scaling for the lower level buff spells. It's a tricky design space for them since they are trying to avoid the power creep from 1E buffs, but hopefully it can be done.

Comments: I disagree a little about the stat recommendations. Specifically, for a TWF build, it's very reasonable to go 18 STR and as low as 12 DEX. A starting character can afford Chain Mail, or maybe even Breastplate if they don't buy too much else, so a 12 DEX can max out AC for a medium armor class. Hatchets, Light Hammers, and Light Picks are agile but not finesse, and you'll be using Strength for damage in either case. So for a Str-Based TWF Ranger, I'd probably put Wis and maybe Con above Dex.

I agree. Going DEX for melee means you're going to do significantly less damage per strike. Even with a 14STR/18DEX start, you'll hit 2 less per strike which is pretty significant if you're assuming a 1d6 die weapon. It becomes less so in later levels, but still you'll be a wet noodle for the first half of the game.

And as First World Bard pointed out, you only need a 12 DEX to get max AC as Ranger. So the opportunity cost for going a DEX build seems pretty high since you'll have to invest far more ability score points into STR than you would have to invest in DEX.

DEX is totally viable if that fits your concept, but seems clearly weaker unless you really value DEX based Skills and a higher Reflex save.

I am having this issue as well. It's preventing me from subscribing to the new Lost Omens Campaign Setting line.. anyone have a fix?

When using the maps from published adventures for digital VTT gameplay (such as on Roll20 or FantasyGrounds), most players use some method to extract the raw image from the PDF and then place that in their virtual tabletop.

The problem with this is that the lossy compression used when publishing the PDF often results in images with a large number of artifacts, stretching, misaligned grids, and so forth. These kinds issues may not be visible to the naked eye when simply looking at the PDF, but when zoomed in on a virtual tabletop, they're pretty obvious. See this example here. The jpg compression artifacts are pretty noticeable around the grid lines especially.

I know this is a topic that has come up frequently in the past, but I feel like the official answers I have seen are not quite understanding the request, or it occasionally gets confused with customers wanting higher resolution print maps. In this case, I'm strictly speaking about the PDF version of the adventures you can download from Paizo's site. Higher resolution copies of the maps exist, since they are used in FantasyGround's official AP packages (which are great products, by the way!), but it'd be great to have access to these higher resolution maps for use in VTT without needing to purchase an additional product.

One of two options seem available from a technical POV:
1. Increase the resolution of maps stored in the PDF (con: will bloat file size)
2. Offer a separate download zip of high resolution VTT maps (con: more work)

The introduction in book 1 was a little weak in terms of establishing a narrative reason for getting the PCs on board, but they seem to acknowledge that in the Player's Guide:

This Adventure Path relies, to a certain extent, on a group that actively seeks out adventure rather than one who waits for NPCs to approach them with tasks to perform. The first two adventures have a bit of “quest-giving,” but the plots and conspiracies the PCs uncover increasingly suggest next steps and adventuring goals without someone telling the PCs what to do.

Obviously some GMs and players may not like that, but Return of the Runelords clearly carries on the tradition from Rise of the Runelords, in that the characters are intended to be arch-typical heroes.

That aside, Book 1 is otherwise a pretty good adventure. Adam Daigle did a good job I think; he teases and foreshadows a lot of plot points that will come up in later books. The Peacock Manor sequence is probably the highlight of this book - it should be interesting for players to come up with a plan and a GM to adapt to that!

Book 2's first half is really interesting. A good GM could really push this sequence over the top and make it a very memorable "who-dun-it" kind of thing, maybe by adding a couple of extra NPCs. The second half of book 2 is a dungeon crawl, though a seemingly good one. It cribs heavily from a specific dungeon in Dungeons of Golarion, which is pretty cool.

Book 3 is my favorite so far. It has a lot of call backs to Rise, you get to treck around the major cities in Varisia, and several of the plot beats seem relatively easy to adapt to your PCs, to weave in personal stories etc. It also has a length RP encounter at a festival-type thing which I'm really looking forward to.

Both book 2 and 3 have a lot of "dead time" where your players are traveling or otherwise have some freedom to roam without hard-coded plot penalties. For a GM who wants freedom to add in their own content, I think, these are well-suited.

I doubt we'll get an official answer as anything of this sort is most likely slated for Tyrant's Grasp AP. Not to mention, it is unclear if she has even fully manifested as a CN deity yet, or if that will require some as of yet undefined catalyst, so perhaps she does not yet have boons to grant.

That said, thinking up some custom boons, my goal would be to keep the boons similar to the existing boons, since she is still almost certainly transitional at the point, with tweaks to appeal to her new areas of interests: artists, outcasts, and midnight. Additionally, based on the material in the AP, it seems the Redeemer Queen may be granting visions to her followers to guide them along, so I am adding a little bit of that as well. So, something like this:

1: Vanguard of the Redeemer Queen (Sp): crafter's fortune 3/day, darkness 2/day, or shield of darkness 1/day
2: Instant Blindness (Sp): Three times per day, you can cast quickened blindness/deafness (this one is not changing as it still aligns with midnight/darkness)
3: Destiny's Augur (Sp): Once per day, you can cast Foresight

For Obedience, it's hard to know. This really speaks to personality, and we don't have a good idea how her personality will change. My thinking is that she really seems to be targeted at the goth or outsider stereotype, but specifically one who is creative, and spends their nights toiling alone on their work. Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe perhaps, would be followers. Ergo:

Obedience: Spend at least 1 uninterrupted hour during the night working alone on a creative pursuit, such as writing, painting, or composing. Gain a +4 sacred bonus on saving throws against emotion effects.

Interestingly, "Redeemed" Nocticula's domains share a lot of overlap with Ashava's. Both share Chaos, Darkness, Moon, and Revelry. The way they highlight Ashava alongside Nocticula in the AP is interesting. So that may serve as some inspiration as well. If no one is playing a character aligned with Ashava, you may be able to steal some of her boons.

I do know that topic has been already answered, but I still find myself in a tight spot about it so...

How did you get your player from the Peacock manor to the part 5 ? My player heavily distrust Jana - And are on a really tight lawful rope, wich doesn't help - and I feel that simply throwing a small army of fleshdregs to them will get boring quickly.

I could simply have Corstella realize what is happening, and be willing to share the information - or have it be found in her stuff, once dead - but It does come with more complication. (Why didn't she push her advantage being the first one to come)

Again, I'll be glad to hear how you dealt with that if anyone here had the same probleme.

Thanks,
Dez

Here's some ideas:

- The innkeeper at Creekside Tavern (Garleena Knodston) could "find" the entrance to the Underflume in her cold storage. This would be a good way if your players tend to hang out at the tavern & they've interacted with Garleena before.
- Some random people die near the well at the Circle. Audrahni comes to the players mentioning the strange cuts & bite marks she found when burying the bodies. She could push them to investigate around the well, or players could intuit with a Heal or Knowledge check that it is likely the Fleshdregs which caused the wounds.
- Corstela knowing is a good idea. She likely would have been investigating the Horned Fangs after their confrontation.

I'm relatively sure that the poorly aligned grids aren't so much a resolution issue as it is a new cartographer getting used to us needing more accurate maps. It's something we're working on resolving, but it's not something we were able to fix in time for print with every case, alas.

I think you might be right. I went back and double checked some maps from previous APs I've ran and I noticed the same misshapen grids on a few maps that have decent enough resolution. For example, here's a screeenshot from the Lunar Prison in Strange Aeons 3: https://imgur.com/a/Zj9rKU7. Not quite as extreme, but you can see the slightly misaligned/misshapen grid column I've marked, despite the fact that the resolution feels acceptable on this map.

That said, it does seem like it has got progressively better over time.

On a somewhat related note, I really enjoy Matthias Rothenaicher's style. It has a very realistic/unpredictable feel. I hope he gets some more work on future APs!

Open the interactive maps PDF and turn the grid OFF before copying the image and pasting it into Roll20. Then you can use Roll20's grid system to create a grid to overlay the gridless map. This way, you get a nice even grid that isn't subject to the resolution problem, and you don't have 2 competing grids on the map.

This is good advice and something I have done in the past. I do like when the grid squares are truly squares, because I generally am able to line up with Roll20's grid, then make Roll20's grid transparent. It makes for a nice play experience for the players. But in cases where that isn't possible, that works well!

I'm really looking forward to running to book! I'm impressed at how riveted I have been to each book in this AP, as opposed to some past ones where I tend to lose interest towards the end. The amount of foreshadowing and build-up with previous books in the AP is really cool.

I have to harp on an issue I have had with most of the APs in the past: the resolution of the maps. While the previous books in this AP have been mostly good, the Library and Vault are too large for the resolution they're being compressed to. It results in really bad artifacts, misaligned grids, and muddled graphics.

This may not be an issue for players using a traditional tabletop and sketching the map out, but for those of us who enjoy using the maps in a VTT experience, it can be frustrating.

Here's one example screenshot from the library: https://imgur.com/a/Igqgk3d

You can see the poorly aligned grids (grid "squares" are not square at all). I assume this is caused by the low resolution, which can be a big issue when playing in something like Roll20. Not to mention, the low resolution makes it difficult to appreciate Matthias Rothenaicher's excellent cartography.

I am sure there are some kind of technical limitations in your production process that result in this, but I hope in the future we can get a bit higher resolution for these larger maps!