It’d be nice if it were possible to get an email notification when you received a PM. I find the little red dot easy to miss sometimes. If I don’t check the site daily, I might miss a PM with a question about something I’ve posted.
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Even though I was against "+level" I am not at all excited to implement that variant rule since it's so time consuming and possibly unbalancing. Even if characters are more powerful than I'd like, I was hoping that their height of power is less than that of PF1 or 3.x. We’ve been using the Proficiency Without Level variant since the GMG was released. It mostly amounts to subtracting the level when using monsters out of the book. If you’re using a tool (I’m using HLO) to track things, you can just update them in the tool and not even worry about the numbers. In terms of balance, the GMG provides a replacement experience table that you use for building encounters, and it seems to be spot-on. I ran a party level + 5 encounter recently that was solidly a moderate threat. The only issues it has is the simplified DC chart is too harsh. My 5th level PCs routinely failed checks that were ostensibly just normal for experts (DC 20). I’m experimenting now with a smaller scale (10/14/17/20/23) that tries to better mirror the progression on DC-by-level table. There was a discussion here a while back about the affect on summoning. It could be a slight boost. There are also feats that let you add level when Untrained, but those can be handled on a case-by-case basis. Overall, I don’t think it’s very time-consuming to use, and it doesn’t seem unbalanced. It’s given me some nice benefits like access to ~90% of the bestiaries when the PCs are in the traditional sweet spot levels.
Can you talk about how its worked from the player side -- ie given that you have a player-unknown hexmap, I assume the players have some blank (likely ungrided/unhexed) map they've been building up over time (or do you provide one occasionally). Sure. One of my players likes mapping, so I provide him with a blank hex map (more below).
The way it works in practice is I tell them how fast they’re going and approximately how long they’ve been traveling. The player who does mapping can interpolate from that and fill in his hex map. He mostly just documents landmarks, which is what is important because that is how they will actually find anything. I know for a fact their map is inaccurate. Where they are now is several hexes south of where it is on my map, but that doesn’t matter. The relationship between landmarks is still right, so they can eventually find their way when they need to get somewhere. For example, last session, my party wanted to return to their base camp from the megadungeon they’ve been exploring. When they said wanted to do that, I didn’t just check off the hexes. I asked their characters how they were planning to do that. This prompted a discussion between the players, and they decided they would follow their compass west to the coast and then follow the coast back to their camp. That worked because they knew their camp was along the coast, and they had done that before. Additionally, because it’s almost impossible to fail your navigation checks while following a compass during the day, there was no possibility they’d get lost, so they knew it would work. From my perspective, I consider keeping our maps in sync a non-goal. Because the hex structure is player-unknown, the players need to take whatever notes (including maps) that allow them to successfully navigate the wilderness. It’s very like exploring a dungeon where don’t have a battle mat to see the details exactly. When you’re running hexes this way, it’s critical that you provide good details and especially landmarks, so the PCs can navigate their environment successfully. Justin has a good write-up of what this looks like in practice. Going back to my example, when the PCs headed west, I described as they left the savannah around Orctown and came upon the Scarred Plains. This is an area that’s like a swamp where the pooled water is actually a spectral fog that can turn into things (and attack you, naturally). I also described the Dragon Shrine in the distance as the PCs circumnavigated the area. We had a new player that session, so the talked about what they’d experienced there. One of the PCs was the only survivor of the TPK (the player had been away that session, so she had stayed back guarding their camp) and several of the others had been on the rescue party. While they were explaining to the new PC, I continued adding details as they reached the coast and turned north towards their base camp. All in all, it’s very similar to how one might narrate moving through a dungeon.
Why not just use accomplishment XP for finding treasure? Is it about granularity or removing subjectivity from judging the relative wealth of a find, or something different? I did that initially, but the way I handle accomplishment XP is through group consensus. At the end of the session, players nominate things they think are accomplishments. I have a set of prompts to help facilitate this. We then go through each one, and the group decides by consensus whether they are minor, moderate, or major accomplishments (or possibly not even an accomplishment at all). Beyond facilitation, I have no input in this process. What I found is my players pretty consistently minimized the accomplishment of finding treasure. It’s something that I think is important, especially as a motivating factor in this kind of game, so I decided to make it work more like XP for defeating monsters and overcoming hazards. I tried a few ad hoc approaches before finally settling on the one I posted here. I have also used the consensus-based system in the past for even monster XP (in the 5e version I ran before this one). Players would pick from a set of goals for the session that they wanted to accomplishment, and they would get XP for each one they completed during the session. “Defeat a notorious monster” was one of the goals. When we switched back to PF2, I turned those into prompts (for accomplishments) and decided to lean on the standard approach (XP) for monsters and hazards. Removing XP for Monsters and Hazards If you want to deemphasize defeating monsters and overcoming hazards in your game, remove the XP awards from doing these things. However, you should still hand out accomplishment XP for particularly memorable fight or derring-do, but don’t provide any of XP that you calculated when building the encounter. Of course, and to be clear, you should still feel free to use the tools PF2 provides for determining encounter difficulty when planning an encounter. Just don’t award the XP from that.
Yep, I had your method in mind when I wrote that. If I understand correctly, what you’re proposing positions golds as essentially the primary way to get XP. Like I said before, XP is a way to emphasize what’s important, so the best approach will be the one that emphasizes the right things to the right extent.
I don’t think my views on dungeon design are germane. One could populate the dungeons in the hexcrawl with nothing but their favorite dungeons from all the APs that Paizo has ever published, and that would be totally fine. Even if I think Combat as War is likely to be the more appropriate approach, especially if players are risk-adverse (by choosing only easy fights instead of hard ones to maximize their XP reducing risk) you can still do Combat as Sport. I think going into those things would be a distraction, especially for those who know what those terms mean and have strong opinions on them. And sorry, you meant changing the reward structure. I don’t think that needs changed. If the PCs want to pursue only easy challenges, that’s fine. Maybe that is something I need to point out? That sometimes in a sandbox PCs will decide on a course you may not like, or you think they’re playing it wrong (preferring easy challenges, etc)? I’ll add something below to emphasize that the point of running a sandbox is to let them drive. There’s nothing particularly special about the way Pathfinder 2e handles XP. It’s similar to what 3e did (but less clunky) by having the XP rewards be relative to the PCs’ levels. That Justin wrote his series of articles with 3e in mind and saw fit not to comment on the XP progression tells me he likely didn’t see it as a problem either. Again, this goes back to player agency and not trying to encourage them to take a certain path because you think they should be playing a certain way. Needless to say, I don’t think XP for monsters and hazards needs to be changed. However, I’ll add an update that includes how I handle XP for treasure. That could potentially provide a counter-incentive in your hypothetical (depending on how valuable the troll’s treasure is), and it provides a reward for avoiding fights but still getting the loot. But they sure are the assumption of the official APs that pretty much set the tone as to how Paizo intends the rules to be used, don't you think? No, I think you’ve got it backwards. You’re assuming that because APs are written a certain way, then then rules are intended to be used that way. I expect it’s much more likely that Paizo saw problems with Pathfinder 1e and revised the rules to eliminate those problems. While I think that Paizo assumes that people will be running published material, I don’t think it follows consequently that they intend the system to be used how they use it. Based on what I’ve seen and the interactions I’ve had with them, I think Paizo wants PF2 to work across a spectrum of games. To be fair, I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong for making the inference you did. If you look at the way adventures have evolved over the last several decades, they’ve tended to embrace a certain style. That style is one where PCs can generally expect to win the fights they encounter. That didn’t used to be the way. Did you ever play or run The Forge of Fury? It had an encounter with a roper even though the module was intended for much lower levels. You weren’t expected to fight it, but that was apparently a very controversial thing. Justin has an article on that too. I’m not going to address this specifically in my follow-up, but I’ll keep it in mind. The reason why I’m not going to address it is that past experiences bringing it up in a Pathfinder-friendly venue (not this forum) have not been entirely positive. If someone is so set in their view that encounters should be balanced a certain way, but they want to run a sandbox hexcrawl, then I don’t want to put them off just because I think things don’t have to be done that way. Actions and Consequences When you’re running a sandbox, the PCs are the drivers of the campaign. When the players adopt the persona of their characters, they’ll be making as if they were their characters. It’s possible that what they decide to do is different from what you expected. Maybe you wanted them to go after a troll’s pot of gold but instead they decide to attack a group of raiders for their ill-gotten loot. That’s okay. Even if they are risk-adverse and opt never to go after challenging foes, that’s still okay. In a sandbox, the point isn’t necessarily to fight for the sake of fighting. However, if that’s what the PCs want to do, that’s also okay. Whatever the PCs do, you should always keep in mind that actions have consequences. If through being risk-adverse an NPC’s kidnapped loved-one is killed by marauders, then that NPC is likely to be upset with the PCs, and if that NPC has friends, they’re likely to tell their friends. If the PCs choose to act like murderhobos, then they’re going to be seen as the bad guys. Playing through these consequences is where sandbox play really shines. It gives you an opportunity to explore the relationship between the PCs and the world around them that a story-based game might not otherwise afford. If you want to take this to the extreme, you can even have consequences for leaving the dungeon. If the PCs leave, then creatures might shift around to fortify their defenses. Other creatures might find the dungeon and adopt it as their home, or ones from deeper dungeon might come closer to the entrance now that the PCs have cleared the monsters out for them. You can even have the monsters react to what the PCs are doing in the dungeon. If you want to do this, I highly recommend giving the following articles a read: (Re-)Running the Megadungeon and The Art of the Key - Part 4: Adversary Rosters. I use both of these approaches in my game, and they make dungeons dynamic and dangerous, but I understand that approach may not be for everyone. If you want to run your favorite dungeons from every AP that’s ever been published, then do it. If you want your PCs to clear the dungeon, so they can move on to the next, then go for it. It’s more important that the PCs actions in the setting have consequences (since if they were free to terrorize the town, and that was the optimal way to play, some players would do just that) than it is for dungeons to be living things themselves (even if I think the latter is also pretty cool). XP for Treasure One option you may want to consider is awarding XP for treasure. This helps provide a reward for finding treasure without having to fight for it. You still award XP for defeating enemies, but if the PCs find treasure you’ve placed, they receive XP for finding it. The following is the house rule I currently use, but feel free to come up with your own method if you don’t like it. 1. Record the value of the treasure the PCs find during the session. If they got it from a creature that was using it, consider excluding it from this total, since they already will receive XP for defeating the creature.
For example, if a 3rd level party finds 150 gp worth of treasure during the session, then that would give them XP equal to a moderate encounter and an extreme encounter divided by 5 (40 XP).
It's all a lot to process, but your example really helps for the campaign I'm thinking about Glad it was helpful. :) one weird option I might vaguely consider, is to allow the level of some areas to become 'player-known' or 'player-discoverable' somehow, though that might feel gamist and might discourage exploration off the rails. Having player-known structures is not necessarily harmful. It really depends on what your intent is for how the payers interact with the game. One possibility is to use the same language the CRB uses for encounter building to convey the danger. For example, an area my be extremely dangerous. This can be understood that you’re likely to encounter extreme threats, which has a good chance of wiping out the party. Additionally, by not committing to a number, you can’t be held to a number (“You said this area had level+3 creatures, so what’s with the zombies?” GM steeples fingers and grins as the zombie horde somehow gets the drop on the party).
What you’re describing sounds a lot like a pathcrawl. I haven’t run one, but Justin talks a bit about them in his series on wilderness travel. I think your approach sounds good. You don’t want to key every single hex. Keying just the places that get traffic makes sense. If the PCs do want to travel in some random direction, then you can have a super dangerous random encounter table for what happens when they do that. One minor grace, is that while it could be cool with an open table like concept, I could stick with a pretty steady group of six for a regular campaign, and not have to worry about mixed levels. Though I know the exploration, sharing information, and regeneration of the map as a living world is part of the charm. Yep. I’m not running an open table, but we have a rotating cast of characters to give players opportunities to try something different and to let us continue to play even when everyone can’t be there. In the latter case, we just pick up some of the other characters and send them out to explore. It’s neat how sometimes the various groups’ activities affect each other.
Feel also free to explain what you mean by Combat as War - which is great to bring up in a guide to sandboxing! - that is, how you suggest the reader should tweak the encounter-building guidelines and the awards thereof to achieve Combat as War (as opposed to Combat as Sport, which I take you believe the CRB rules lead to?) I associate concerns about balance with Combat as Sport, and that seemed to be where you were going. While it seems like a default assumption given the pervasiveness of balance-concerned discourse, I don’t think it’s necessarily true that the rules in the CRB lead to that style of play. I don’t think it’s necessary to change the encounter-building guidelines. They work very well for what they were designed to do. It’s up to the GM to make use of them when designing encounters or assessing the threat of an improvised one. Going into how to design encounters is way outside of the scope of this post. The GMG has some good stuff on it, so if one’s not sure, read the GMG. Edit: Since I forgot to include it: what I mean by Combat as War is that combat is not the point in itself. If the PCs can figure out some kind of advantage, then that should be rewarded even if it trivializes the encounter and “ruins” the fight. In contrast, Combat as Sport is about having fun fights, so a fight that gets trivialized is boring. As far as I understand, that’s more or less in line with how those terms are commonly used.
While I appreciate the feedback, please don’t act like you’re doing me a favor by providing it. It comes across as patronizing and needlessly antagonistic. Regarding XP, the very first thing the base XP rules say is that “Experience Points are awarded for encounters, exploration, and progress in an adventure.” It then goes on to discuss awarding XP for overcoming adversaries and hazards as well as for accomplishments. If someone assumes that actually means they only give out XP for killing monsters and overcoming hazards, then that’s their misunderstanding. I address it (to the extent it needs addressing) by pointing out that they should be giving out ample accomplishment XP. Continuing to dwell on it feels like unnecessary pedantry. I alluded to the player-unknown nature of hexes in my opening post, and I call it out in the exploration procedure document I linked. I’ll add something below that goes into it more explicitly. While I would not describe it as mandatory reading, having read Justin’s series on hexcrawls is incredibly helpful for understanding what I am doing here. My procedure takes a lot of elements from it, a very few Old-School Essentials, and a handful from hexploration. The core ideas build on Justin’s. Using Your Hex Map Hexes are a player-unknown structure. That means players are not aware of the structure that you are using to run the game. It’s similar to your random encounter table or any other artifact you use to prep that is not provided to players or presented at the table. When players set out to explore, you start from their current hex and use your hex map to help you determine what happens next. See Justin’s articles on wilderness travel and navigating the wilderness for how to resolving exploration, but make the following changes: * Substitute group exploration activities for his speed and distance procedures as well as for modes and travels. The group exploration activities handle these things in a way that meshes well with exploration mode in Pathfinder 2e. Use the base speed from the linked exploration procedure and the terrain table for determining modifiers and DCs.
You suggest XP-based progression above milestone-based. Yet you also suggest accomplishment-based. To me, that's contradictory. The way I allow players to nominate accomplishments is not RAW, but gaining XP for accomplishments is RAW. Per the CRB, you’re expected to give out XP for several minor, a few moderate, and one (if any) major accomplishments. First, I don't see the difference between milestone- and accomplishment-based. It's all "quest xp" as opposed to "monster xp", just quests chosen by the players rather than the adventure writer. As it’s generally understood, milestone-based leveling does not award XP. You gain a level when the GM says it’s time to gain a level. It can be good for a story-based game where you want to make sure everyone is the right level for the coming challenges, but I’m not talking about story-based games. I’m talking about exploration-based ones. Additionally, there’s a difference of scope. Most accomplishment XP is rewarded for things that happen during the session (vs. multiple sessions for a milestone). Major accomplishments are something of an exception, but most of your accomplishment XP should be coming from minor and moderate ones anyway. Second, I'd say either the sandbox is geographical ("go where you want - choose your own danger level") or it is narrative ("choose your own goals"). In the first case, I believe the point is to stick to monster xp, and treat it as a feature, not a bug, that any session with few and easy fights yield much less xp than any session with many or hard ones. The idea to supplement monster xp with accomplishment xp so the players don't lose the sense of progression directly contradict the original idea behind the hexcrawl sandbox! Put simply: if you get xp at a nice rate anyway, there's no need to seek out the hard targets! The point isn’t having fights. You seem to be misunderstanding what I’m saying. The hexcrawl, the sandbox, and all the things I am doing are in service to one thing: running an exploration-based game. They’re the tools I use to make that happen. The fact that I’m using a hex map is completely hidden from my players. I could just as well use some other tool, and they would not notice because they are experiencing the game through the eyes of their characters and making decisions from that perspective. To address your point regarding XP, it doesn’t matter. How you award XP emphasizes the things that you think are important. If you only award XP for combat, then that’s what the PCs will seek out. However, in an exploration-based game, combat is only one of many things you do. In fact, by emphasizing combat and tying rewards to combat, you effectively deemphasize the actual point of the game (exploration) by giving no rewards for a session spent doing entirely that. Moreover, I’d argue that Combat as War is more appropriate for this kind of game, so avoiding or trivializing or cheesing encounters is preferable to having a “good fight” (since the goal is to survive and continue exploring).
Yeah, Proficiency without Level is not strictly required, so if you want to continue doing things the standard way, you’ll definitely need to be mindful of the level differential when the PCs are likely to get into a fight. One thing you can do, taking a cue from West Marches games, is structure your environment such that it gets more dangerous the farther you get away from town. That would give the PCs appropriately dangerous areas to explore, and as they get stronger, that becomes represented by the greater distances they are able to trek and deeper they can delve. Building on that, you could have a hex clearing procedure whereby PCs can render hexes less dangerous, which would allow lower level parties to start exploring them. Before it was definitively rendered moot last session, I had given some thought to how I would handle hex clearing but not a whole lot. One of the PCs had wanted to secure and build up their base camp, so I was considering how they might go about doing that. What I had been considering was a VP-based subsystem for tracking progress clearing the hex, but I have no specifics to proffer beyond just the idea. Speaking of VP, the influence subsystem is excellent for handling situations where the PCs need to convince someone to do something for them. I found improvising DCs not too bad, and the subsystem itself worked great for giving all the PCs a way to contribute.
Thank you for sharing this Kenada. I am running a golarion homebrew campaign that will feature a long hexploration crawl and it is very helpful to see how you did yours. I hope my players have as much fun as yours have. Hope it’s helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can clarify.
Again, thanks Zapp for pointing out some additional things I could address. I’ve tried to touch on them below. There’s a lot of good stuff in Justin Alexander’s article I linked above. If there’s something I missed or somewhere I can go into more detail, let me know. General Considerations Out of the box, Pathfinder 2e gives you almost everything you need to run a hexcrawl. It doesn’t provide the entire procedure, but the exploration mode framework gives you most of what you need. I touched on this a little bit in my previous post. There are some things you should keep in mind when running a hexcrawl in Pathfinder 2e. If you chose to populate your random encounter tables with monsters based on what makes sense for your regions, then you are going to run into issues with encounter difficulty very easy. The hexploration rules in the GMG also touch on this. They suggest using the chase subsystem to help facilitate an escape. I think that’s a good idea, but this is also why I suggest using Proficiency without Level. Another issue to consider is rate of progression. For an exploration-based game, you should probably use XP-based progression. The issue with milestone-based progression is that PCs can pivot from one thing to another, leaving threads left dangling until they pick them up again. In my current campaign, my PCs interrupted a dungeon delve to return back to their base camp to move everyone closer but also (finally, in their eyes) take leadership of the expedition from the incompetent NPC who had been appointed. There can be multiple threads, and this can get extra messy if you have multiple parties or a rotating cast of characters (whether running a Westmarches game or not). The base XP rules work pretty well. You should give out ample XP for accomplishments. One thing I do in my group (regardless of the type of campaign) is have my players nominate accomplishments at the end of the session and decide collectively how big they are. You don’t have to do that, but an ample chunk of the XP you give out should come from accomplishments because it is likely that you will only have a couple actual fights in a session, and it is possible that you won’t have any (our last session had none). I have found that the default rate of progression feels too slow at lower levels in an exploration-based game. The range of foes, especially if you are using standard proficiency rules, is very narrow, so the PCs can’t really delve very deep in the beginning. You may want to consider changing the rate of progression from the default. I want lower levels to go quickly and higher ones to go more slowly, so I have changed the XP thresholds to be based the next level (200 XP × next level). When stocking your hex map, you should steal liberally from sources. If you have a favorite dungeon, stick it in a hex. If there’s one you like in an AP, stick it in a hex. Find something online? Stick it in a hex. Et cetera. Dyson’s Dodecahedron is also a great source for maps and inspiration. When you design a dungeon, like your random encounter tables, you need to decide what lives there. If you decide to populate it based on what makes sense, you should again consider using the Proficiency without Level variant. My recommendation when starting out is to prepare a reasonably sized hex map (I’m using 11 by 11 hexes) but key only the area in the PCs immediate surroundings. In the beginning, things will probably be slow-going as the PCs explore the areas around their starting hex. After a session or two, you should be able to develop a feel for how likely they are to go in a certain direction, and then you can start keying hexes in advance. Justin Alexander has good advice for finding time to key a few hexes here and there (though I’ve tended to batch them up when I think I’ll be needing them). Lastly, treasure. One of the tricky things about a sandbox is that PCs are likely to get too much or too little treasure. Our primary party went several sessions before finding anything. They just had a knack for avoiding or missing the dungeons that are out there. The CRB suggests placing more treasure than normal for a sandbox game, which is a good approach as long as the PCs aren’t likely to clear or find every single possible thing. The way I approach treasure is to make very heavy use of the Treasure by Encounter table in the GMG. When I design a dungeon, I decide on a tuning level for the party. That sets the ranges of creatures I use, but it also sets the treasure allocation. In our current megadungeon, the tuning goes up as they go deeper (so floor 1 = 1st level, floor 2 = 2nd level, etc), and the treasure gets better commensurately. My PCs are a bit behind on what they should have, so I’m fine with this. You’ll want to keep an eye on treasure and decide how closely you want to keep to expectations. It’s better to have too much than too little because having too little often means not having the runes you’re expected to have at certain levels. One approach you may want to consider is the Automatic Bonus Progression. That will let you keep treasure as cool things to find (possibly very irregularly) while still keeping the PCs capable in combat. We’re not using it, but I think it’s a valid approach. There’s no particular reason why not. We’re just a bit conservative in what we change, and my players are hesitant to change more unless they see a major benefit (and I don’t want to do the bookkeeping on their behalf). Goals in my Approach Something I want from a hexcrawl procedure is to limit the amount of prep I have to do in advance. While it’s true (as noted in my original post) that putting together your hex key does require a lot of up front work, the amount of work you have to do to prepare for a session is very limited. Essentially, you set the stage, and the PCs do all of the driving. This is one of the things I like about Justin Alexander’s hexcrawl procedure, which was very influential in the procedure I adapted to PF2. One of its central ideas is using random encounter tables as content generators, so that traveling through a hex is likely never to be boring. There’s a good chance you will discover something new along the way. We have had several examples where the PCs got lost, wandered around, and found something new. Another important element is that the players experience the game and navigate the world as their characters do. I touched on this a little in my discussion of hexploration previously, but let me go into more detail. When I ran Kingmaker for our group, we used the exploration rules that were available at the time. Travel and exploration was defined in terms of hexes, and that’s how we engaged with the system. Players would decide which hexes on their map they wanted to explore, we’d go take care of that, and then they’d fill in their map, effectively checking them off like a checklist. This kind of approach is problematic because it exhausts content. There are random encounters, but they’re not positioned as content generators. There’s nothing stopping you from treating them as such, but I like having that intention expressed in my procedure. The way that random encounters generates discoveries and wandering monsters helps keep things fresh. From an aesthetic perspective, I simply dislike having the players treat exploration like going through the checklist. It’s much more immersive when they’re discussing how to get home by following various landmarks they’ve discovered. Ultimately, the goal is for exploration to drive the game. The hex key and the content generators let you respond with something interesting based on almost anything the PCs do. Every time you start a session is a chance to find out something new about the world, meet someone new, or go somewhere unexpected. If exploration isn’t the driving force, you may want to consider just using the hexploration rules. This approach can work, but you need to be comfortable with the possibility that the PCs will find and pursue something more interesting than whatever they were doing when they went into the wilderness.
Thanks for the feedback. I tried to put something together in rrsponse to The-Magic-Sword’s request, but it’s a little unfocused. I’ll see if I can tighten it up and get something revised up later today.
If you would consider making a more detailed post (like in its own thread) on running sandbox hexcrawls in this system, I'd be super interested to read it. I'm looking to start one of those at some point after our current campaign and something one of my players wants to do, finishes. Sure, done. I posted something on reddit a while ago, so this is kind of a sequel to that. Hopefully it doesn’t ramble too much.
As requested, here’s how I run a sandbox hexcrawl in Pathfinder 2e. This post is also a follow-up to one I made last year on reddit, so it reflects refinements that I have made since then. Background My game got its start in 5e, and before that the setting got its start in Open Legend. My players have been wanting to do an exploration-based game for a while, and PF2 has really enabled us to do that. Prior to switching systems, I was using a procedure based on Justin Alexander’s hexcrawl procedure. That procedure has remained influential, but I’ve blended some ideas from Old-School Essentials and even the hexploration from the GMG. One might ask: why not just use hexploration now that it’s been published? The truth is it reminds me a lot of the exploration rules from Kingmaker and Ultimate Campaign. Kingmaker is easily one of my group’s favorite APs, but its relationship to the hex map and the role it served is different from what I want in this game. I don’t like that the players are aware of the hexes (Justin calls this a player-known structure), and I don’t like that hexes can be exhausted (explored, reconnoitered, etc). One of the backbones of my current campaign is the use of tables (random encounters, wandering monsters, etc) as content generators. Let me provide an example. Several sessions ago, one of the exploration parties decided to head south to see if they could find food in the jungle for their expedition. They’d started with a month’s worth of supplies, so they needed to find more or establish a way to keep their expedition (~40 people) fed going forward. This is what I have keyed for the jungle.
Ryada’s one of the five nymphs that exist in the setting. She doesn’t leave her forest, but if the PCs encounter her, she can answer any questions they have. The party did eventually meet here (and learned some more about the setting, local goings-on, and prior expeditions to the area), but a lot more happened in that session that wasn’t keyed. It came from my random encounter tables. They encountered stegosauruses, which smashed their way through the dense jungle, followed their trail, found a banana grove, learned that water can be dangerous (yay crocodiles), found a shambler’s lair (that they made a note to avoid), and hatched a crazy scheme involving raising velociraptors for food. The velociraptors thing is particularly interesting because it was almost completely random. I mean that both literally and figuratively. The velociraptors situation was the result of rolling velociraptors on my random encounters table. The party found a nest, and after dispatching the adults, they decided to take the eggs back to their camp where one of the druids could help take care of them until the eggs hatched. I expected them to eat the eggs or do something with them, but I didn’t expect them to do that. However, that’s cool, and that’s one of the nice things about running a proper sandbox — you sometimes get to be just as surprised as the players when stuff happens. Anyway, I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that I’m not just using a hex map and key as a way to let players decide how to go about doing things (to paraphrase the GMG) or to serve as beats in the story. There really isn’t a story beyond the one that emerges through play. That’s why I don’t think hexploration is a good fit. It’s a means rather than the end itself. With that said, I think if you try to do some of this stuff in a story-based game (vs. exploration-based), you stand a good chance of taking things completely derailing whatever you might have had planned. Running a Sandbox Hexcrawl in PF2 You’re going to need an initial hook to get the PCs out into the wilderness and exploring their environment. For my campaign, that hook is they’re part of a generational expedition into a region called the Shattered Remains. They’re supposed to explore and report back regularly via spanreed on their progress. Whatever hook you decide, it just needs to be enough to give the PCs a reason to explore. As I alluded above, don’t try to plan out story arcs or much beyond the initial hook because you have no idea where things are going to go from there. However, there is another big piece of initial prep: your hex key. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend reading Justin Alexander’s article on running a hexcrawl. One of the key components of his system is that you key every hex on the map. That may sound like a lot, and it is, but a hex doesn’t need a lot of detail, and if you’re careful, you can limit how much you need to key before you start. In my hexmap, I started the campaign in D1. I’ve keyed most of the content on the peninsula and have some ideas for other areas, but that’s all I’ve done so far. Because of the constant content generation, they’ve spent all of their time in the brown region (called the Dino Savannah in my notes). I’ve pulled my exploration procedure out from my house rules. I’m not going to recap it here, but I’ll be talking about some of the things it does and how those are used. Once the PCs have a reason to head out to explore, you need a procedure to determine what happens next. Exploration mode in Pathfinder 2e gets you about 90% of the way there. If you just follow the exploration activities in the CRB, things actually work pretty well. This is what I did for a while and was the focus of my reddit post. This is one of the areas where hexploration has been an influence, and that’s group activities. Group exploration activities are what the whole group is doing while exploring. When the party heads out to explore, they describe basically what they are doing. Are they just trying to get from point A to point B? Are they looking for something? How are they doing that? That helps you determine the group exploration activities. This is pretty much how exploration works normally in exploration mode, but the wilderness exploration activities are focused on helping you (as the GM) determine progress and figure out what happens next. For terrain-based modification to speed, I just use normal/difficult/greater-difficult terrain. For some of the group exploration activities, I do use percent-based modifiers. I tried to keep things reasonably easy to calculate without needing a calculator or computer, though rolling six checks for random encounters (six watches in a day) can take up a bit of time if you’re not careful to hide this during downtime in the session (e.g., when the PCs are discussing what they want to do). I’ve used a script to automate my rolls, but I lost the one I had and need to rewrite it. It’s not necessary to use something like that, but it can help. When you get to the point where an encounter is likely to occur, switch to “regular” (or “dungeon” as I label it in my procedure) exploration mode. The PCs declare how they are going about things, and you resolve those like you normally would in a dungeon. The paladin can keep her shield raised, the rogue can sneak, and so on. This lets them benefit from any investments they’ve made in those things, and it provides a familiar framework for when it’s time to focus on their exploration activities as individuals rather than as a group. I follow Justin Alexander’s procedure for tracking time. The day is broken into watches, and I make a random encounter check every watch. I’m using flat DCs instead of a d8, but you can use whatever works for you. The DCs in my document are still a work in progress. I’m still getting a feel for whether they are too high or low. Since you are rolling them more frequently, they are higher than the DCs in hexploration, but you can use those if you want (a lot) more random encounters. When you get a random encounter, you then determine what it is. This is one area where I deviate from Justin’s procedure. Instead of rolling up to four or five times to check the various types, I have a single table (see below) that I roll, and then I roll the corresponding column on my random encounters table. Regardless of the type, I drop the group into “dungeon” exploration mode and go from there. As an aside, I have also changed the labeling of the types of encounters from Justin’s article. To map terminology back: a “discovery” is an “exploration encounter” in Justin’s article, and a “wandering monster” is a “non-exploration encounter”. This just feels more intuitive. d20 Type
Eventually, I want to roll all encounters into a single type and roll on one table, but that will probably require a tool or spreadsheet to produce the final result. This also works well enough, so I haven’t bothered to write that yet. Overall, I lean pretty heavily on Justin’s procedure with a number of modifications to flavor it for PF2. When the PCs explore, they describe what they do from their perspective. When the party last session wanted return back to their base camp from Orctown, they had to figure out in the world how they would do that. They ended up deciding they could head west using their compass until they hit the coast and follow the coast north until they made their way back to their camp. This helps make wilderness exploration feel very similar to dungeoncrawling, and your tools help keep the wilderness exploration interesting because they never know what’s going to happen next. Closing Thoughts My group has been wanting to do an exploration-based game for a while. PF2 has been a really good fit for that. You can almost do it out of the box, but with some adjustments, it works really well. I’m not sure it’s even fair to call these adjustments per se since I’m just building on top of the framework that’s already there. Of course, my players have found a megadungeon, so we’re probably going to spend the next dozen+ sessions in there instead of exploring the wilderness, but that procedure will always be available when they decide to leave town to go do something else. Addendum A: On Urbancrawls The exploration procedure I linked above has some stuff for exploring urban environments. That’s meant to built on Justin Alexander’s urbancrawl ideas. I’d consider my procedure a work-in-progress for that since my PCs are always on the cusp of getting into things in town but then get distracted by something else, so they’ve not gotten a lot use at the table yet. Also, I still need to map out Orctown, so we’ve just been winging it. I expect it’ll come in handy at some point. Addendum B: Proficiency without Level We had a TPK early in the campaign when the party went up against a level+2 creature and engaged in some really bad tactics. It was an gray ooze, which they had successfully kited before, that they decided this time to get into a slugfest with it. The fighter also used slashing weapons, so it made more oozes, and they all eventually died. We regrouped (hence why the expedition is large), but that eventually prompted me to switch to the Proficiency without Level variant when the GMG was released. If you’re creating random encounters tables with a range of monsters, or you’re stocking dungeons with things that make sense to be there (regardless of the PCs’ levels), then you’re eventually going to encounter a situation where things are just too dangerous. The Proficiency without Level variant helps make these situations less dangerous by increasing the range of creatures the PCs can safely encounter. It also lets you have parties with characters of different levels (lower level ones can still contribute as long as they’re careful). — Exploration Procedure download: here
I’ve been running a sandbox hexcrawl since shortly after release. Pathfinder 2e has been absolutely fantastic for this kind of game. Exploration mode provides a very robust framework for running old-school, exploration-focused games. It’s also very amenable to homebrewing and hacking the system. I’ve done custom creatures and some tweaks to the champion, but the largest amount of content I’ve done are homebrew ancestries for my setting. Because feats are the primary mechanism for customization, it’s very easy to create a new ancestry. You’ve got easy benchmarks, and if there’s something cool that fits, it’s easy to reappropriate it. We have hit a few snags, but we’ve been able to work around them. #1: We had to switch to the Proficiency without Level variant. Given that environments aren’t tuned for the PCs’ current levels, it gives us more flexibility in the range of encounters that work for our group. It also works better with mixed levels in the party (due to having a rotating cast of characters). #2: Many of my players assumed character creation worked like it did in PF1, so we had a lot of missed boosts and other problems in the beginning. Things have gotten better with tooling and player aids. That was another reason to switch to the above variant (so people would stop forgetting to increase all their modifiers when their proficiency increased from leveling up). #3: The leveling pace feels off for an exploration-based game. If you’re getting XP consistently, then you end up spending the same amount of time at 1st level that you would at 19th level. I can see how that’s very useful in an AP, but that felt like a slog at lower levels (especially before we adopted the Proficiency without Level variant). I ended up switching to scaling XP based on level, so lower levels would go faster while later ones more slowly. I’ve looked at switching to other systems (including 5e and OSE) for the kind of game I’m running, but there are always major issues with that (such as class options being just kind of awful in OSE). It was so much easier to incorporate ideas from other games into PF2’s framework than to try to fix them when PF2 already does those things so well. I don’t use any of the Lost Omens stuff, so I’m really looking forward the APG. Now I just need my copy of it to ship, so I can start looking over how I’m going to incorporate some of the new ancestries and versatile heritages into my game.
Also how high of level has anyone gotten to with this variant? Does leveling up feel significant for your players? I finally got responses from a few of my players. They said they’re happy with it. They feel like they’re advancing. We dug into that a bit, and they seem to be happy with getting cool stuff to do when they level up. I asked if they thought that was more important than getting bigger numbers, and one commented that he felt like their numbers were going up too. The reason for that was our use of Gradual Boosts. Something else one of them said is they felt fights felt more forgiving. In the beginning, they felt more binary. It was like they were totally awesome, or they totally sucked. He also commented that it seems like they’re using more of their powers in fights, but I attributed that to the dungeon exploration stuff I’m doing and its affect on attrition (there’s an opportunity cost to resting, so they’re opting not to always heal all the way up to full HP after a fight). Hopefully that helps clarify how it feels for players.
Yeah, having a risk of losing the summon without being able to mitigate that (through class feats, items, etc) would probably mean higher level summons don’t get used except by clever players who figure out ways to work around it (fly?). It also feels clumsy to balance something by making players not want to use it. The one alternative I can see if its a really big problem is that summon monster has some sort of built in penalty. Something like idk -2 to all stats? Enough that its noticeable, but not so much they become useless. Maybe apply the weak adjustment, or a modified form of it? I wouldn’t normally use the attack modifier with PwL, but a -1 here might be okay.
Ah, hmm. Yeah. I’ve seen complaints that summoning is a bit weak, so I suppose one could just live with it as a buff to summoning. Otherwise, couldn’t you just scale back the level progression of summoned creatures when heightening? It would still be slightly better than core but not as drastically. Something like:
Ah, yeah. That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that you could just subtract the corresponding level from the DCs on the simple DC table. The resulting progression is pretty narrow (14, 15, 18, 20), but I suppose that works.
What’s the issues with summons?
The original simple DC table goes to DC 40, and the level-based table goes up to level 25 (DC 50). Are you referring to some other table?
Do you implement any other additional house rules or variants? Yeah, I do a few things. From a progression perspective, we’re using Gradual Boosts and Skill Points. We actually tried using Point Buy with a larger starting pool (25 instead of 15 points), but it proved too much hassle to track in roll20 (I thought I could use the notes…). I also keep record of their characters in Hero Lab Online, which makes tracking Gradual Boosts pretty easy, but it probably wouldn’t be too bad on paper. I think Gradual Boosts complements Proficiency without Level nicely because it lets characters get a little bit more powerful as they level up without throwing things out of balance. I also think it helps characters catch up who need or want a couple of really good ability scores (e.g., our bomber alchemist took Dexterity as his first boost, so he could have an 18 in both Dex and Int). We’re using Skill Points because one of my players is vocal about liking that sort of thing and not liking 5e for getting set proficiencies at 1st level (more or less). If you only save and spend your skill points on increasing your highest skills, it has the same effect as the standard progression, so it seemed like a harmless change. I think one player has taken advantage of it so far. Most of them seem to be saving. We’ll see what happens as the number of skill points they get as they level increases. The rest of my house rules don’t really affect character advancement directly. The documents are all up on Dropbox if you’re interested. Otherwise, if not, you can skip the summary of them below. I run a homebrew setting with custom ancestries (no core ancestries, no Lost Omens content at all). The setting got its start in another system, and I’ve since converted it to 5e and now to PF2. I do something a bit different than PF2 by also distinguishing homeland, so you can potentially play an ancestry from a different homeland if you want. I have a pretty extensive exploration procedure. It draws on ideas from OSE, the Alexandrian, and Hexploration. The Alexandrian was probably the biggest influence. I wrote about that on reddit back around the time PF2 was released. I did end up incorporating the idea of group activities from Hexploration since using the standard ones ended up never gelling all that well with my group. I’m otherwise not particularly fond of Hexploration. We ran Kingmaker in PF1, and I find that I do not like player-known hexes or being able to exhaust them through exploration. I also do some old-school stuff like use morale and reaction checks. I also changed the progression rate to take longer to level as you go up. Morale in particular helps make fights a bit less dangerous for PCs because they really just need to break the morale of their foes to start deescalating. The progression rate change was made to help get players past the first few levels quickly but also to slow things down such that getting to really high levels is impractical. I think the additional uses of hero points are my favorite change. Giving the players a way to spend their hero points to help each other out has gotten them to spend theirs much more freely. There were sessions prior to the change where people would just sit on stockpiles of hero points (just in case?). That’s not been a problem since the change. They help each other out, and sometimes they troll each other (like when the fighter did 1 damage, and then someone turned it into a crit). Edit: Oh, and champions are more like surgebinders from the Stormlight Archive, so there is a WIP conversion of the champion.
Does the rule variant suggest to subtract the monster level from ac/DC? If you subtract the pc's level, balance should be unaffected, while keeping the numbers on their sheets nice and low... No, you just subtract it from anything that uses proficiency. Proficiency without Level is trying to do something different from the core rules, so it doesn’t try to keep the same balance. Consequently, the creature XP table in the CRB no longer works for encounter building, so they provide a replacement one. You’re on your own for hazards, but that’s easy enough to derive from the replacement table. Proficiency without Level purports to offer a “grittier game”. That can mean a lot of things, but what I’ve found is it lets me design dungeons and populate them with more of an eye towards what makes sense in the world versus what needs to be there to provide appropriate challenges to the PCs. The main exploration party has entered a small megadungeon. I’ve taken a cue from old-school games and planned my floors with increasing difficulties as the PCs go deeper, so the first floor is tuned for a level 1 party, the second for a level 2 party, and so on. On the first floor, that party (3rd level at the time) encountered a giant tarantula. Additionally, there were some hazards. If they’d encountered the tarantula at 1st level, then it would have been between a moderate and severe encounter. Because they were third level, it was about a moderate encounter (including the hazards). If we were using the core rules, I’d have needed something around a level+2 for the same fight, which would have been trivial for a level 3 party by the time they found it. Admittedly, I could just use the core rules and scale the fights, but that would feel pretty bad from a sense of verisimilitude. Especially in an exploration-based game, the world needs to exist to be discovered rather than just as a set of challenges for the PCs to overcome as they proceed through their quest. I like that Proficiency without Level gives me more tools to run that style of game.
I’m running a sandbox hexcrawl using Proficiency without Level along with a few other variants (Gradual Boosts and Skill Points). We have a rotating cast of characters, so there are multiple parties, but the highest leveled PCs are 4th level. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is my players no longer mess up leveling up, forgetting to increases all of their modifiers correctly due to proficiency. That was one of the things that initially prompted me to propose the switch, but I think it’s been good for me as a GM (having access to a wider range of creatures without needing to modify them for a given level). I’ve pinged my players to get their thoughts on how it feels to level up. I have a feeling gradual boosts probably outweigh anything other than gaining HP just from a mechanical change. Otherwise, I expect they probably care more about their abilities than their raw performance, but my players have never really care a lot about that. I have noticed there are a few things that seem to assume the original progression. As I find them, I house rule them to fit better with Proficiency without Level by seeing how they compare to the original simple DCs or level by DCs tables in the CRB. For example, a couple of my players took Assurance, and I changed it to give a flat progression because (T: 13, E: 16, M: 19, L: 22) it’s just awful otherwise. I also went with a different simple DC progression. The one they recommend feels to punishing and out of step with the DCs by level table they included. I am using 10/14/18/22/26 instead of 10/15/20/25/30. With my changes to Assurance, this means gaining proficiency in a skill lets you succeed automatically at the old rank (like it would normally when including level in proficiency). Another thing I’ve noticed (mostly in creature creation) is just subtracting level from the guidelines in the GMG sometimes yields unintuitive results. I’ve tried re-deriving the underlying pattern by interpolating between 1st and 20th levels, but that doesn’t always work right for ones past 20th.
I started off running APs almost exclusive in PF1. As our attention shifted to other systems, I started developing a homebrew setting, and that’s what I’m running now in my PF2 sandbox hexcrawl. Ignoring the world building stuff, which has involved all new ancestries and a revised champion class, I think I actually spend less time prepping for homebrew stuff than I did pre-written APs and modules. The two killers for me were the time it takes to read over everything and (more importantly) the time it takes to convert the pre-written stuff into a format that’s actually usable at the table. As far as my setting goes, I did spend a lot of time creating custom stuff to better fit it into PF2. Some of that was due to the setting’s origination in another (less crunchy) system, but some of it was just fundamental things I wanted to change and would have regardless (eliminating humanocentricity and revising champions). Something I like about creating my own setting is I just know it, so I never have to worry remembering correctly something I’d read in a supplement.
I noticed the description of the GM Guide mentioned 'hexploration' which I've found fun in the past. Is this basically a guide to setting up hex/squire crawl type game? What did you guys think of it? Was that section helpful or mostly just full of things most GM's would do anyway? Thanks for any input, it is one of the things I am more interested in but don't have a store to skim through to make a purchase decision and I didn't see that section talked about much in the forums. It’s a fine system for adding hexcrawling to an adventure, but it’s not really enough on its own to run a full hexcrawl campaign. The intent is sandbox elements are used to allow the players to choose how they go about things, but that’s still within the framework of an adventure with a story. I’ve written some stuff on using the hexcrawl procedure from the Alexandrian to run a sandbox hexcrawl in PF2. If you’re looking to do something like that instead, it might be helpful.
Building to a benchmark is almost certainly how the monsters in the Bestiary and other books were created. Having that same information available to GMs is incredibly helpful. It lets them design whatever they want, and all they have to do is reconcile the numbers.
I really like the VP mechanic. I’ve already got ideas for new ways to us it in my game, which is surely the sign of a cool, new mechanic. We’re also going to be giving a few variants a try this weekend (point buy, skill points, and proficiency without level). I won’t have a good opinion on them until we do, but I’m hoping they all work out. I’m particularly excited about the extra flexibility proficiency without level gives me for encounter building, assuming it works as advertised. The monster building rules are also pretty solid. Since the preview, I’ve already created a number of new ones for my game. I jumped ahead to the subsystems and variants stuff, so I’m circling back to the earlier chapters now and working through them.
I like how the new chase rules are party focused rather then individual character focused like in PF1. The Victory Point stuff in general is pretty nice. I’m looking at adding a VP-based system for clearing hexes (and fortifying their camp) in my sandbox hexcrawl. I’m a little surprised that they didn’t include one in the hexploration subsystem, though I think hexploration targeting a mode of play with different needs. I also think VP would also be perfect for Leadership, which is handled as written through GM fiat (more or less).
Thanks for the clarification! :D The point-buy method in PF1 let you adjust the number of ability points depending on the type of campaign. Would it cause issues to allow more flexible ability points at 1st level? It doesn’t seem like it would. It looks like starting with 20 would turn a 16 into a 17 in the maximally split up array and 25 would turn a 16 into an 18, and it shouldn’t allow you to get a 20 or 22 sooner (nor more than two 22s at 20).
My impression of the VP-based subsystems in the GMG (including the research one discussed here) is PCs have pretty wide latitude regarding which skills they can use. If one of the PCs wants to use an unusual skill that makes sense for the situation, they should be able to do it at a (probably) hard DC. Given that, my approach when designing or improvising such a challenge would be to set a baseline based on what makes sense for the activity. If (when) the PCs do something unusual, I can use that to help me come up with an appropriate DC.
They changed how your ABCs interact with it. In PF1, you got your racial modifier on top of your purchased scores. In PF2, they’re effectively just an offset on the cost in ability points. If my ancestry gives me +2 Strength, that’s just two more points to spend rather than a modifier I add to e.g., bump a 16 to an 18. That helps balance boosts, so you don’t have to pick certain ancestry or background options to build the character you want. My only issue, having looked at the effect it would have on my PCs, is characters built this way have lower stats across the board. Point-buy characters never catch up, which makes me wonder about the impact on balance.
I’ll just zap the weasels with my wand! Why is everyone on fire now? XD
Finally got my copy! Yay! I’ve read through the variants chapter. I think I’m going to see what my players think of the ability and skill points ones. Those are things they’ve liked in the past or we’ve done before (I used a similar point-buy house rule back in PF1 to replace ability score increases). I feel less excited about the other variant rules, but that’s okay. I poked around the subsystems. The world building stuff looks great at first glance. I can see the leadership subsystem being useful for e.g., classifying enemy gangs and factions my PCs are encountering. Hexploration isn’t what I want in an exploration subsystem, but that’s not surprising, and there are a few things I’m definitely going to take for my exploration procedure. I’m looking forward to spending some time with the rest of the book. :D
What are your thoughts on the matter? Can I view it as both? I want to view it as both. Pathfinder 2e reminds me of an Apocalypse Engine game, particularly the moves snowball (“if you do it, you do it; to do it, you have to do it”). I look at it as against the spirit of the game to call for (or allow) a random check and make a ruling. Just saying “I want to make a check” doesn’t really parse. You need to use an action or activity that then has you make that check. At the same time, I see no reason why you can’t do things in the game that don’t involve mechanics but could still potentially set you up in the fiction with an advantage.
I’ve been trying to be more liberal distributing them. Of course, I give everyone at the start as written. During the session, I give out more when someone does something awesome (usually indicated by their being excited at what just happened) and sometimes for the MVP in a scene or encounter. Generally, everyone ends up getting at least some. To encourage players to use them more, I’ve added two additional uses:
The first one is meant to address an issue that has cropped up where the PCs were blatantly not prepared for a situation. I’ve offered to let them retcon it, but my players have never taken the offer. My hope is they’ll be more willing if it’s sanctioned (with a hero point cost). The second one was inspired by a recent article on the Alexandrian. I particularly liked the part on off-turn engagement, so I added another use for hero points to give players something to do when it’s not their turn.
The biggest difference for me is I have all my books on an iPad Mini. For my recent PF2 campaign, I actually went back to physical notes. I like having everything out and being able to arrange and see multiple things at once. I also like being behind the screen. It’s like my own little GMing space. Between sessions, I managed most of my campaign digitally. I use Scrivener for planning and holding notes, but I actually lay them out in Affinity Publisher and print them for my campaign binder at the table. I also use Campaign Cartographer to make maps. They’re not great, but they’re getting better, and I like them more than my hand-drawn maps.
I’m running a sandbox hexcrawl, and I make heavy use of wandering monster and random encounter tables. For wilderness exploration, random encounter tables are content generators (I wrote a ton about what I do here). In dungeons, I use them along with adversary rosters to make my dungeons more dynamic. I think a key to using wandering monster tables effectively is not just to have a fight as soon as you roll a random monster. Use it to change the dungeon to reflect that monster’s presence. There have been a couple of posts mentioning things with high numbers of monsters (elven wolves, six shocker lizards, etc). I’d look at that and decide that part of the dungeon had come to be inhabited by them, and having to find a way around or through them would become part of the gameplay of exploring the dungeon. Normally, though, I don’t roll a quantity and decide something that makes sense for what’s been happening at the table. For example, my PCs were exploring an enormous dungeon (based on this map from Dyson’s Dodecahedron). They came around to the southwestern side with the door. I described it to them, and they started trying to bash their way through it, and then they set it on fire. Okay…. While they are taking their exploration turns, I was rolling for wandering monsters. When I did succeed, I rolled giant gecko on my table, and described to them how their activities were drawing the attention of the local gecko population. I also roll for disposition, so it wasn’t hostile, but the monk decided to wrestle it anyway.
I’ve done it both ways and run other systems with all DCs in the open. I intended to do that in PF2, but after running a one-shot before converting over, I decided to embrace secret rolls. The way things played out in the one-shot, it seemed like knowing the DCs revealed more information than it does in other systems, or my players were having an off-day and just not keeping what they knew (or assumed) separate from what their PCs knew. The way I handle secret rolls is to ask the modifier before rolling. It doesn’t happen that much, so it hasn’t been burdensome yet (but that will probably change once they’re hexcrawling in earnest, and I need the navigator to Sense Direction). I provide false information on a critical failure for Recall Knowledge, but I’m not too concerned about that’s having a harmful effect on the game because I use the three clue rule.
It’s also up on Hero Lab Online. The PDFs here are listed as in my downloads but are not actually available in my downloads yet. Update: Someone on reddit pointed out that it shows up under “Paizo Inc.: Rulebooks”. I see the CRB now! :D
It’s hard to say without extensive experience running it, but my initial impression is that it will likely be a better game for my group than PF1 or 5e are.
That’s the maximum number of increments. The maximum penalty is still -10.
Is that really a problem though? Negative con always felt like more than enough. Once you hit a certain level, I'd expect PCs to be dying every few sessions, then being resurrected/replaced. You don’t have to be cheesing dying for −Con to cause problems. Here’s a situation I had happen when I ran Kingmaker: At the end of “Stolen Lands”, I effectively two-shot a PC with the Stag Lord. The Stag Lord had gotten the drop on the PC and used Deadly Aim along with sneak attack. The aggregate damage was enough to almost but not quite kill the PC. Since the PC was still up, the Stag Lord attacked again. Even without sneak attack, that one attack was enough to drop the PC and take him below −Con. If that one hit had done a little more damage, the PC would have probably survived. It’s unintuitive that there are breakpoints where doing more damage on average actually makes an attack less lethal because it knocks PCs down in one hit instead of leaving them vulnerable to a follow-up attack.
I definitely do not want to return to days of rolling ability scores, that often resulted in bitterness when one of the guys rolled up an "elven hero" and the rest were playing farmboys with pitchforks.My players would likely rise in revolt if there is not an option for getting exactly that result, because making characters of that sort of different level of capacity work well together is a large part of the fun for us. I am very tempted to try this with my group. I’d devised a way of randomizing boosts that gives results pretty similar to doing your ABCs manually, but this has a nice, old-school feel to it.
For those GMs that do tell players DCs, so you also tell players enemy AC? I do not, but of course my players usually figure out the AC after a round or two of combat. I reveal both. They’ll figure them out anyway, though I started doing it after reading this article. I must admit my players do seem to enjoy their rolls a little more, but I digress. I have two approaches for handling hidden information: Knowing that there is a DC communicates information. In this situation, I provide a fake DC. Obviously, there are limits. I don’t have them make saving throws every ten feet to mask the existence of traps, but if they are actively searching for traps, then I’ll give them a DC that makes sense for the area regardless of whether there actually are traps. Knowing that you failed communicates information. When that happens, the players need to establish some other way that their characters know they failed before they can act on the information they gleaned from that failure. The second situation comes up frequently in my game when my players fail a navigation check to avoid getting lost. In the hexcrawl procedure I use, getting lost applies a hidden veer, so they never know which direction they are going until they can do something in-character that establishes they’re lost. For the illusion trap described above, unless they are intentionally trying to overshoot the gap, I’d give them the DC it would take to cross the pit they see, since the DC is for the distance to be crossed and not the distance traveled. As soon as someone fell in, I’d expect the next person to want to jump further, and that’s fine. I’d give that PC the DC of however far they wanted to jump.
I’ll be running a homebrew setting where barbarian, monk, and druid are uncommon. While the setting touches on the roles all classes play, these three are more heavily prescribed. For example, among the setting’s core races, there are no barbarian tribes, but their militaries do train them as berserkers. Consequently, if you want to be a barbarian, that will factor into your background, and you’ll need to use that to establish narrative permission to be a barbarian. I plan to keep spell rarity as it was from the playtest, though I will be making raise dead and the resurrection ritual rare. There is no afterlife in my setting, so bringing someone (more or less) back to life requires magic that has been lost for a long time. The cosmology is a bit different from Golarion, so I’ll make changes as needed to support that.
I was big on it for a while, but then I ran a game (Open Legend) that used it for every roll. It got fatiguing to adjudicate every failure that way. I find myself now leaning more heavily on structural solutions like the Three Clue Rule and saving it for when it’s really needed.
I’m going to need to do this for my setting too, but I’m not too concerned. PF2 looks like it will be pretty modular. Even having to recreate all of my setting’s races as new ancestries (since no core races are part of the setting) doesn’t seem like it will be too bad. In some ways, it should be easier than other systems because customization is done primarily through feats rather than an ad hoc system of traits.
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