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My only concern is that in my excitement as a new GM, I purchased a lot of PF1 books and APs... it does make it hard to jump to a new edition without bringing some of that along with me. I REALLY want a guide for converting from PF1 monster stats to PF2 monster stats. Something official, maybe an online tool, or re-releases of the APs in PDF form with nothing but the stack blocks changed at a discount. Nothing would get me on PF2 faster than some help making the transition.
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I don't know if such a conversion guide will happen. PF2 isn't really legacy compatible, even though it tries to tell the same stories in the same world.
What will happen is a Bestiary. See the current Playtestiary. It will contain some of the monsters that were present in PF1. So for those you mostly can use the new statblock for the same monster. This will not cover all the monsters/NPC's/hazards and whatnot from PF1, but it will be a start.
The devs also hinted on a guideline for creating your own monsters, though I don't know if that is supposed to be in the final PF2 Bestiary.
I know how you feel though. I like PF1, but it got cumbersome in the recent years, with the system growing in all kind of directions, options galore.
I am a charter subscriber of the Pathfinder APs, and I do want to use at least some of those adventures, modules and such with Pathfinder 2. Without some way to port or re-create PF1 monsters in the new edition, all that paper ... it's not getting useless, far from it, but it loses a bit of value for me.
Yeah, character stats and their equipment would help a lot in identifying problems.
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I don't really think that the players are cheating if that's what you guys are implying by asking him for the character sheets. I'm running RotRL as well as an experienced 1e GM. All APs are really really easy for min maxed characters. I've been adding mooks and adding advanced templates but at that point it starts teetering on the edge of a full TPK. That's my main problem with 1e. A combat is either really easy or it threatens to TPK the party. It's very hard to find that perfect inbetween without just cheating and fudging dice (I don't because personally as a player I hate when a GM fudges dice.) The reason APs are easy is because they have to be playable for non-optimized characters. It's just a problem with the power disparity that some characters can have in 1e.
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This is a serious problem with PF1e, many of us would agree. I'm a very experienced GM. I've been running games since 1978. I had 5 stars in PFS before I ran Eyes of the Ten, which means I'd run at least 150 games before that. And, yet, my experience in Eyes of the Ten was very much like the OPs. I felt like I wasn't challenging them, at all, the whole way through. A ROFLStomp can be fun, like a silly joke, but 20 hours of silly joke, or ROFLstomp, just gets boring. When the story make clear that there are supposed to be serious challenges, not hilarious enemy dispatch moments, it can get rather frustrating. I don't think the players minded as much, but by the end I was freaking happy it was over.
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An inexperienced GM with experienced players able to hyper-optimise is a recipe for issues. You might have players who have made illegal characters, but unless you know the rules deeply that'll be hard to spot.
I had a couple of powerful PCs to manage in my RotRL campaign, but i was able to tune the encounters to retain the appropriate CR. Which is where PF2 looks like it will be a major improvement:
The ability for a GM to quickly adjust monsters and challenges is really not there with PF1 - it was spreadsheet work to rebuild the encounters. One of the things I'm very keen on in PF 2 is the simplified monster rules. Although we haven't seen the monster creation rules yet (?) so until that it's too soon to give two thumbs up. So it's one thumb up for now.
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And we get to the problem I have with P2 and similar games - forcing everyone to stay within narrowly defined boundaries is less fun for me and mine than a freer system that can accommodate a wider variety of playstyles. Especially when said systems promoted as able to support settings it is entirely incapable of doing.
Sometimes the freedom of systems like 3.x result in some people being better at it than others. The response I prefer, which is how everyone I know personally handles it, is for the better optimizers to not make characters that are significantly better than everyone else, and for players to not make things their GM can't handle. GMs need to improve their skills to make things fun for the players. We are groups of friends, and compromise and self-improvement are necessary to keep things running smoothly.
The fact that organized play cannot do this and has to rely on hard rules and specific game design to force everyone into a narrow band of ability are strikes against it in our books.
That summarizes my feelings aswell. Thank you.
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First off, I want to give a bit of backstory about my current PF1 game and then talk about what I like about PF2 Playtest in comparison. I really want the game developers to consider my struggle with PF1 when thinking about PF2. Additionally, I'm happy for any advice (form anyone) as well.
WARNING! SMALL RISE OF THE RUNELORDS SPOILERS!
I'm a relatively new to tabletop games and being a GM as I have only been playing for 1 year. I run a game at work currently. I am running the (classic) Rise of the Runelords AP and have just reached chapter 4. My friends are currently having fun (and I'm glad they are, I really do), but to be honest, I'm not anymore and have considered giving up GM
Ah, that brings back memories. In 2010-2011 my wife was running Rise of the Runelords, the D&D 3.5 version adapted to Pathfinder rules, but she had to quit in the middle of the 3rd module, Hook Mountain Massacre, due to migraine headaches. Rather than letting the campaign die, [url="http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2lzzs?What-to-do-with-a-Gnome-Ranger-Monk#22"]I retired my character"] and took over as GM. This was the first time I had GMed more than a single game session.
First thing I did was let her create a custom player character, a lyrakien bard always on call to Desna, who could pop in and out of the game haphazardly, based on my wife's health that day.
Let's look at the issues from a Pathfinder 2nd Edition design perspective and them I will return to them from a PF1 GM perspective.
(1) Min-Maxing characters has made encounters trivial.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition reduces the options for min-maxing. Now everything is maxed at +1/level, and opportunities to go above that are rare. And the monsters are equally maxed, so the encounters won't be trivial.
Some people are complaining about this in the playtest. From what I have gleaned from the forums, the monsters were maxed under earlier rules that allowed stronger characters, so individually they are more powerful than PCs of their level. Oops. It takes good tactics to defeat average encounters.
(2) Minion hell.
In Pathfinder 2nd Edition the easily-abused feat Leadership was dropped. And animal companions and summons take one of their master's actions to command and have only two actions of their own. Thus, instead of a character and a minion taking two full turns per round, in PF2 they effectively take 4 actions per round, which is one and one third turns. This corrects the overpoweredness of summoning extra minions and reduces the time for minion combat, a double win. I like this design.
(3) Crafting
I have not paid much attention to the PF2 crafting rules, but my first impression is that crafting magic items is easier because it takes only one feat, Magical Crafting, rather than two or three feats. However, magical crafting in PF1 required knowing spells or taking a -5 penalty, while crafting in PF2 requires finding or buying a formula first. Restricting exploitable magic items will be possible by restricting access to formulas.
(4) Healing and 15 minute adventures.
Healing in Pathfinder 2nd Edition will be restricted by resonance, which decreases the duration of the 15-minute workday down to 10 minutes, unless the party has a cleric, who heals better than ever.
Now for the GM advice for Pathfinder 1st Edition.
(1) Min-Maxing characters.
In my Jade Regent campaign, my player David had an optimized two-handed weapon fighter who could kill a level-appropriate oni in one round. He played Pathfinder to relax after a hard day's work. All he wanted to do was kill monsters. Thus, I gave him monsters to kill. Along with the political quests of defeating the oni who secretly controlled the Minkaian government, I added roving bands of savage oni that were slaughtering peasant villages. The party had monsters to fight and David was happy. David's fighter was not much use on the political stuff, but that kept the other players happy.
Challenge means different things to different players. Some do want risk that forces them to learn and use good tactics. Others simply want a victory against an opponent that looks worthy.
The enchanter sorcerer in my party charmed and interrogated a captured giant and learned that the raiders can from the Fortress of the Stone Giants. The party wizard was optimized as a scholoar of ancient Thassilonian lore, so he knew the location of the Black Tower and could teleport directly to the valley with the fortress. The party totally missed the Ogre Cattle Rustlers and the Storval Stairs.
The party tried raiding the fringes of the army and had success with ambushing hunting parties send out to provision the army. They also found the river tunnel via a note from their hireling Xanesha. But the army had its own trackers and found the party's camp. Hence, the wizard took to teleporting them back to Magnimar at the end of their 15-minute workday.
This is where reactive gamemastering came into play. The stone giant wizard Mokmurian is a wizard. He scryed the party and assembled a commando party to ambush them in Maginimar. The size of the party was limited by the Teleport scroll he had on hand (I gave Mokmurian a collection of scrolls. They made a nice treasure trove for the wizard after the defeat of Mokmurian). He included the lamia matriarch sorceress Xanesha, because he needed someone to read the scroll; a true neutral stone giant mercenary fighter, to occupy the party paladin and nullify his Smite Evil; a spriggan monk specializing in grappling, to take down the wizard; the kobold barbarian Enga from room B7; and the three hounds of Tindalos from room C8, who could teleport on their own. The stone giant mercenary was temporarily transformed into a dwarf because Xanesha, formerly Mistress Wanton in The Skinsaw Murders, knew her way around Maginimar but not directly to the inn, so the enemies would have to walk through town.
That was the challenge to the party. They were attacked on their home ground rather than initiating combat themselves. And since Mokmurian kept himself safe, he could do it again and again, though he might have to cast the teleport himself the next time. I turned the players' own tactics against them. I had declared the underground below the fortess scry-resistant, but the players had not protected themselves from scrying. (They could have set up camp inside Thistletop, which was also scry-resistant.)
By the way, Xanesha was a double agent working for both the party and Mokmurian, so she would have ensured that the party lived if the dice rolls went bad. She wanted the party to take out Mokmurian so that she would look better to Karzong in comparison. But she had also provided Mokmurian with the information on the abilities of each party member.
Thus, the party went under the fortress directly against Mokmurian until they reached him. No more 15-minute workday. Okay, the Thassilonian scholar wizard was distracted by the Library of Thassilon for a while, but since his knowledge had provided the password to bypass the Shining Child, the party indulged him.
My point can be summarized as if the party is overpowered and sloppy, exploit that sloppiness to throw a challenge against them where they aren't overpowered.
Invent new challenges that strain the party. The more plausible the challenges, the more the party will feel they need to generalize rather than overspecialize. That cuts down on the min-maxing. By the time I ran Iron Gods in 2016, I was anticipating their overspecialization two modules in advance and throwing in teaching challenges that would warn them of their weaknesses before they encountered a written villain who could seriously exploit those weaknesses.
(2) Minion hell.
There is an ultimate debuff to Leadership available under Pathfinder 1st Edition rules. Leadership cohorts are NPCs, so the GM controls them. I let the players control their cohorts, it is more fun for both of us, but I retain veto power over the minion being too self-sacrificingly heroic.
The slowdown from crowded battles bothers both GMs and players. Eventually, bored players will decide to stop summoning crowds.
(3) Crafting
My players love crafting. They did lots of mundane crafting with adamantine and mithral and technological crafting with laser pistols and nuclear reactors in Iron Gods.
Crafting gives away control. The GM saying, "Sorry, the magic shop does not stock a +6 Headband of Vast Intelligence," which is one of the most powerful items for a wizard, will no longer be an obstacle, because the wizard learned Craft Wondrous Items and made it himself.
On the other hand, that wizard learned Craft Wondrous Items rather than Dazing Spell. Selecting magic-item creation feats is a trade-off. I prefer that the players have their magic items rather than overpowering their characters in a more annoying manner. Sharing crafting skills--you make the wands and I'll make the wondrous items--is teamwork. I like seeing teamwork.
(4) Healing and 15 minute adventures.
I don't believe in making challenges more difficult by wearing down characters in advance. My players don't believe in it, either. We have an informal agreement that if they try to gather information by reasonable means, such as scouting, bribes, or asking routine questions to friendly local residents, then they will receive useful information. This means that my players often find ways to bypass the encounters that are obstacles rather than necessary for their goals.
Thus, the player characters hit the important encounters when fresh, after some excitement in climbing a wall or disguisng themselves as peasants. I often make the important challenge more difficult to compensate for this. In the long run, they earn the same experience points.
Ironically, I think purpose of the wear-down-the-PCs strategy is to increase the chance that the PCs survive the final battle. It means that the final boss can be weaker and less dangerous. My players prefer the risk of a stronger and more tactical final boss.
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Well, one thing i find amusing to be honest, is that your complains and reasons to like PF2, are mine to never sit to play it.
Guess that goes to show how they simply arent the same system at all.
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Well, one thing i find amusing to be honest, is that your complains and reasons to like PF2, are mine to never sit to play it.
Guess that goes to show how they simply arent the same system at all.
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to interpret this post.
For starters, who are you addressing?
The OP.
Well he listed reasons he think PF2 is great, i believe those to be the opposite.
1) Min-max is part of the fun of PF1 to me. Granted i use mostly to make my absurd builds viable than to make a war tank, but still, it is min/maxing. Not that i think PF2 will manage to keep up with this math of theirs, assuming it makes to the official release, after many years of content.
2) I also favor leadership. Which i use to get NPCs i like from the story as followers and people that i can keep around and lvl with me. Granted again some use to make wizard crafters that they keep home, but hardly this is a flaw with the feat as far as im concerned. Hell right now we are playing one such game, where i might once again use it to get a crappy NPC that i just saved to follow me from now on heh. Without this feat, this wouldnt happen.
3) Crafting is so-so. I can understand why a new GM would be surprised by it, but honestly, many of the good items shouldnt be hard to find and are staples, so all it does is double the WBL of the party if they have time. Dont care much for it personally.
4) Healing wands were used in most of my PF games. Without healing wands i honestly dont think most tables i played in would even work, nobody wanted to be a healer, so quite literally it is the wands that kept the party going. I quite like said wands. They allow for the entire party to share the cost of healing at the same time they dont force anyone to spend their resources on something they dont want. Two birds with one stone. Wonder how paizo will find an answer to this in PF2.
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I've been running Curse of The Crimson Throne for a while now and I do identify myself in your post, OP. I find it hard to challenge my players after the 9th level (they're 13 now, starting book 5).
Of course, I do not want at any way to TPK them, but it does require a lot of prep time to make encounters balanced and interesting for them. The group is pretty much min/maxed. I had to improve myself as a GM to keep the challenge up, learn how exp really worked (the math behind it, to keep the encounters balanced as intended) and so on, but, at the moment, I fail to make a sense or urgency that doesn't seem fake to them. They tend to not take risks and since teleportation is a reality, it's hard to avoid the 15 minute adventure day. They won't take unnecessary risks and how could I blame them?
Like I said, I had to improve myself and it was worth it, I learned A LOT - but most of my free time now is to prepare the next session for them. We play weekly, for around 4 to 5 hours each saturday. It takes at least that amount of time of my week to prepare myself in advance and even GMing for almost two years now, we still have to look for rules online every now and then. Time that most of weeks I don't have, because I study and I have a full-time job. One of my players decide to transform himself in an Air Elemental and use whirlwind - it took more than 30 minutes trying to figure it how exactly it worked, since I was unfamiliar with it. Not really fun, to be honest.
I recently finished Princes of Apocalypse (5e module) as a player and even high level combats wouldn't take as long as it takes in PF1E now. I've got the same problem as everyone else with 5e: lack of significant choices.
That's why I'm excited about 2E, to be the middle-term of PF1E and D&D5e. To provide more customization while cutting-off the annoying feat taxes and streamlined rules. It's not perfect, but I'm optimistic. I know Paizo is trying their best. I love Pathfinder, love Golarion and I love Paizo as well. I love how deep and complex the system is, but it has been too much for me. I see why people avoid GMing or even playing it. It just takes too much time to learn, teach and fails to bring more people to the hobby and play 'on the fly'. There's an abysm between those who dominate the system and the newbies.
I know that I can post on forums and ask for advice. I've done that before. But how many people would just give up and play something else? Why would they stick with us? How many people can even spare time to read here and learn more each day? It's a hobby. After a long week, some of us just want to hear a good story, roll some dices and have fun.
Imagine if I tell someone that they're required to read a 500 pages book to make a character and play what they've seen in "Stranger Things"? They'd call me crazy. I think I might be as well.
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This thread is horrifying. The response to "I had these issues in PF1, but the PF2 changes are great for my needs!" is "You only had problems because you're doing things wrong, give us more information so we can fix you." Even if those issues are perfectly fixable, which some of them are emphatically not, inexperienced players having such trouble with them that they consider quitting is an issue with the game. If you can't live without a system that lets you optimize until the game groans under the weight of it, that's your taste, but disrespecting the opinions of people who don't want to deal with the issues that brings is not acceptable.
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Thanks for the feedback everyone! As a GM for Rise of the Runelords who had a great and challenging run despite some really strong PCs, I can understand where sutusa is coming from; I definitely buffed certain opposition, especially in the tactics department, to get there, and my group, like sutusa's, didn't even have some of the builds that are really strong against this particular AP (enchantment sorcerer or heavens oracle come to mind due to all the giants). Figuring out how to adjust the game's baseline to handle typical optimization is certainly something I (and others in this thread based on the responses) have learned how to do, but it's a fairly significant barrier to anyone who hasn't, and it took experience for me to build up these skills.
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As an experienced GM, I can attest that this will always be a thing in PF1e to at least some extent.
I'm running Hell's Rebels right now, and I've massively powered up some encounters. The most recent session, my 11th level PCs faced a 15th level ranger with four 11th level fighter allies and an ice devil to back him up. That's almost a CR17 encounter, and it only threatened the party because the ranger got a lucky crit with a nine lives stealer against the party member with the lowest Fort save. Even down a character because of that, they blendered the rest of the encounter; they are about to face a CR15 encounter immediately after this with no chance to heal, and I don't think it will be a challenge.
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing if PF2e provides a more balanced system with less chances for an experienced player to simply break it over their knees.
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This is a problem of Society play rather than game mechanics, no?
If you as a GM are not allowed to adjust a game to fit the players, it's not so much a weakness of the mechanics but of the trying to force a flexible system into an inflexible environment, isn't it?
NN959 has given a lot of answers that I would agree with re: the conditions of PFS, and why PFS is often how people play Pathfinder.
I would like to throw another thing in here, though, and say that it's more than just PFS. Lots of folks are busy and don't have time to do a whole lot of prep, either creating their own adventures, or modifying other ones. So, prewritten scenarios, modules, and adventure paths become vital tools to enable gaming. I know I myself would never have been able to GM nearly as much as I have without prewritten materials, even though I really do love creating my own games.
However, when the prewritten scenarios need to be modified so that they work well with your group of players, then their advantage decreases. It becomes more work to run them, which will inevitably slow you down. Yeah, some GMs are really good at doing it on the fly, but not everybody.
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My personal experience with RotRL is that it starts out pretty easy and then in the last 3rd or so it gets pretty hard. Other APs we have done has a smoother difficulty curve, which in part I can attribute to "designers having more experience with the system." Designing high level challenges in PF1 is particularly tough.
But due to there being 10 years worth of supplements there's a huge gulf between "fully optimized characters using every book under the sun" and whatever the low end is, which isn't particularly avoidable when a game puts out supplements regularly over 10 years. Just having fewer rules interactions is going to help a lot here.
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Another suggestion, from a player who has lost his character more than once to a GM who did this, learn to use Tactics for your intelligent monsters. Many GM's I play under simply have the bad guys charge right into the fight with the adventurers, which can result in what you are talking about.
1. If the players do not exhibit an ability towards area attacks, intelligent bad guys should stick close together to support each other. Extra bad guys can make attacks to reduce the always hit fighters chance to hit. Getting flank can also help your bad guys to not miss.
2. Limit the summoners ability by the int of whatever they summon. If the creature is not very smart then have them end up using their own action (or movement) to give detailed instructions. Remember, if your summoner can't speak the language of what they summon, then only basic commands should be given.
3. Do not fall into the problem of silo'd encounters. If it makes sense, have a group of bad guys send of one of their own to warn the other bad guys you are coming. Don't have bad guys fight to the death if they are intelligent. You might have them surrender to a character who they feel is honorable and who will keep them from getting killed. Fighting isn't everything. Intelligent bad guys can use their minds to mess up your characters. If someone gets away to warn the other bad guys, then they can co-ordinate to increase the challenge level of the next fight.
4. Have your bad guys focus fire/attacks on WEAK members of the party. Have them take out the healer, if they know he's a healer, first. Take your your summoner or wizard second. Don't forget, when a summoner goes down, their summoners vanish. Do not fight one monster per one character, have all the monsters try to take down ONE character.
5. Have your bad guys take advantage of cover and use ranged weapons, if they can. A small wall can give them cover yet not give the characters cover for archery fire.
6. Once other groups have been warned you are coming, start using tactics against the good guys. Have someone with stealth hide near the entrance of the room so that when the good guys move in to attack the bad guys can attack from the rear. Be aware of your map. If you have two groups co-ordinating, then have one group suck the adventurers in while the second group circles to attack from behind.
7. As gm, you can give Followers whatever personality you want. The follower was hired to do something, so they should still do it. However they will not necessarily do more and, if not treated well, may want to leave. They can have whatever annoying personality trait that you want. The follower is NOT a second player character. If you feel that the player is taking advantage of the situation, then just take control of the follower as an NPC. The personality of the Follower a character has is just as important as the personality of the barkeep in town or the lord of a town.
8. Add in side adventures that address weaknesses of the party. By side adventure I mean a completely unrelated adventure that sucks the party in, but doesn't take long to complete. For example, your fighter character always hits for massive amounts of damage. Have a side adventure where he runs into someone with Sunder who attacks his weapon instead of him. The shadowstep character is impossible to spot, a side encounter with an area attack (like negative channel) will quickly make them remember they can be hurt. Side adventures that feed into the characters class/personality is best, because it gives the players a chance to play those aspects of their characters.
9. Always remember that extra things you do will cause players to advance faster, you will need to adjust the CR level of your encounters to give them a challenge. Always add some extra level/s for summoned creatures.
10. Take advantage of player greed and encumbrance rules. The occasional "throne artpiece" that weighs 500lbs, but is worth a lot of money can cause some interesting reactions.
Boojum the brown bunny
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Your welcome, and side adventures are pretty cool when properly used. There are players who so optimize their characters for the adventure path they are going on that they completely ignore anything that doesn't help them in that adventure path. This allows their characters to monster that one adventure, but they would do less will in a different adventure.
For example, an adventure path titled "Lord of undeath" would have players optimizing for undead while "Lair of the giant king" would have them prepping for size large creatures with reach.
The secret to slipping in side adventures without complaint is to associate it with something to do with the characters. Look to the characters traits, languages, and backgrounds for ideas. It needs to be enough of a hook to get them off of the main adventure path for a little bit.
Modify your side adventure so that characters feel like their off path skills are useful. Did one of the players take gnomish? Include something they can practice the language on. An invite to a party is an EXCELLENT way to get people onto a side path, particularly to celebrate something they did.
Character weaknesses are kind of hard to quantify, so you have to go looking for them. An unhitable fighter might have a crappy will save, so a charm would be useful. An unspottable stealth character might be weak on area of effect, particularly entangles so they can't get into position. A Dedicated Healer might not be able to harm undead, so a lot of undead might give everyone a problem or two.
A man who uses precision pokey weapons will be weak against creatures with DR/Piercing. A man who uses smashy weapons vs DR/blunt. A ghostly figure takes less damage from almost everything. A cavalier I had got blindness from a failed save.. just think of the fun THAT was until the other characters helped him out.
Finally, don't make it obvious that this is what you are doing.. so don't just pile it on. A side encounter might include something that only the fighter has trouble with... allowing the other characters to shine as they rescue him. You are not trying to stop the characters on their main path, just giving them something to spice up the adventure with. Kind of like the Monster of the Week episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Boojum
Most people criticizing the restrictive GM agency are people who have been playing 20+ years. Well, PFS isn't going to survive on the backs of career GMs.
Wow, I guess I am a career GM. I retired in 2016 and running a Pathfinder game has become my main hobby in retirement. As for 20+ years of playing, hmm. My first Dungeons & Dragons game was in 1979 as a high school junior, but the entire party died in the first room, so that barely counts. My first steady game began in 1980. Yep, 38 years as a player, 7 years as a GM.
Even my daughters have more than 20 years as players. We started them in D&D games before they reached school age.
The real benefit of a tight-math paradigm is that the scenario writing is easier, or rather the experience is more consistent.
I thought of a module that was a counterexample, and then I realized that that module was Sins of the Saviors, the 5th module in Rise of the Runelords, so I ought to warn sutusa.
The consistency is a problem in this particular module, because of the level-up in the middle.
The Paizo adventure paths are written for an unoptimized team. In a campaign for the Serpent's Skull adventure path run at The Family Game Store in Maryland the players decided to handicap themselves by not optimizing their characters any more than necessary. For example, my wife build a halfling melee sorceress of aberrant bloodline. She wore a chain shirt and fought with touch spells, so she had arcane spell failure at low levels (Pathfinder 2nd Edition removes arcane spell failure for armor, so expect more melee casters there). My elder daugher made a gnome barbarian who specialized in survival rather than combat. She said that the wilderness-survival rage powers, such as Raging Climber and Guarded Stance, were out of necessity because no-one played a cleric and they had no magical healing, so she had to avoid combat if possible. I took over that gnome barbarian when my daughter moved to Washington (state not city). The party succeeded with unoptimized characters for at least 13 levels. My wife and I did not see the end, because we moved away to upstate New York before the finish.
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As an experienced GM, I can attest that this will always be a thing in PF1e to at least some extent.
I'm running Hell's Rebels right now, and I've massively powered up some encounters. The most recent session, my 11th level PCs faced a 15th level ranger with four 11th level fighter allies and an ice devil to back him up. That's almost a CR17 encounter, and it only threatened the party because the ranger got a lucky crit with a nine lives stealer against the party member with the lowest Fort save. Even down a character because of that, they blendered the rest of the encounter; they are about to face a CR15 encounter immediately after this with no chance to heal, and I don't think it will be a challenge.
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing if PF2e provides a more balanced system with less chances for an experienced player to simply break it over their knees.
@MaxAstro
Yeah, I’m learning that powering-up encounters is simply a normal thing I have to do in PF1. I'll need to work on my creativity though. My first instinct is to simply fudge numbers, increase HP, add more enemies. I have trouble pairing unique monsters from the bestiary that complement the normal encounters in the AP and not let them feel they are out of place.
I like natural consequences for boosting encounters. If the players attack a scouting party of an army, then the scouts sound a war horn. The PCs hear responding horns from the east, and then reinforcements show up one round after the PCs kill the scouts. The party, exhausted from the battle with the scouts and lacking time to pull out their wands of Cure Light Wounds, now has to fight a larger group of infantry.
If the party is particularly foolish, they will hear a horn from the east, and the south, and the north. That is my warning that more reinforcements then they can defeat will soon arrive. They need to escape. (I am the GM and my resources are unlimited. Unless the party carefully scouted the army beforehand, I can change its size at will. I do give warnings, to encourage good strategy.)
This can be a problem for min-maxers. They might have sacrificed all their good abilities for running away or hiding to gain more combat abilities, instead. I call this overspecialization. Then I have to give them a humiliating way to escape, such as a peasant hiding them in her manure wagon, to teach them to prepare for encounters that combat will not win. Or they die.
If the players believe in a 15-minute workday, then the bad guys investigate the deaths, compare notes, and plan counter-strategies. "The guards in the east tower were slaughtered during the night. Sword cuts and magical burns." "Cancel all leave and double the guard at all towers. Make sure one scout with fireball evasion is in each tower."
Then the battle also becomes a battle of wits between the party and their adversaries. My players became good at cleaning up clues with Prestidigitation to foil counter-strategies.
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As an experienced GM with great game knowledge PFe1 is very hard to run. There are plenty of ways too improve it, n but it is a huge overhead to enjoying.
PFe2 has made a lot of changes to address this. However, I think it had also sacrificed a lot of player fun. I think a lot of the negative reviews are coming from the players rather than the GMs. It is great to have a game that is easy to run, but it is hard to run a game without players.
So I think there is a decent amount of work to be done to put back characters customisation and abilities and systems that feel enjoyable.
Thank you all for your responses. Last night I was frustrated in the middle of my planning, I just ranted somewhat and went to bed. I feel better today overall about continuing to GM. hah. I couldn't really reply to everyone, but I wanted to comment back to many of you. Thank you.
@Franz Lunzer
That is a shame to hear, but I hope that there is a change of heart and they re-release the APs (just PDF, no printing) with the update stat-blocks. I'd happily pay to get a stat-block update for the older APs that I still wouldn't mind running....<snip>
I really don't think that is going to happen, sadly. Reworking older AP's is most likely a project that costs more than the sales would bring in.
IIRC even the Paizo devs don't have a conversion guide, so reworking an AP-book is taking some time, and then the layout-team has to do it's magic again because something just doesn't fit with the new statblock, and so on.(Think about how many AP's got a hardcover treatment : 2. And those were special occasions and took quite some time.)
And: For the most people, it's just "more natural" to play old AP's in the old system.
If you really want to play it in the new system, most of the common monsters will eventually be in a Bestiary (very many of the monsters that weren't in the AP-Volumes to begin with). (The Bestiary will be available for free online, as it is for PF1 right now. That was announced just some hours ago: "The AON will not be hosting a Pathfinder Playtest reference document, as those rules are transitory, but we are planning to launch the reference document for Pathfinder Second Edition with them next year.")
Monsters and NPC's that had their statblocks in the AP-Books you'll have to figure out yourself (which is fun for some GM's).
Yeah, I’m learning that powering-up encounters is simply a normal thing I have to do in PF1. I'll need to work on my creativity though. My first instinct is to simply fudge numbers, increase HP, add more enemies. I have trouble pairing unique monsters from the bestiary that complement the normal encounters in the AP and not let them feel they are out of place.
One thing that has been a huge, huge resource for me: If you go to PFD20SRD and check the Bestiary section, there is a section labelled "NPCs" that contains a staggering number of NPC stat blocks prebuilt at a wide range of levels. Humanoid opponents tend to be the easiest to mix into an encounter (maybe the monster hired some mercenaries?), but they normally take forever to build.
With that list on the SRD, you can just scroll to the CR you are looking for, pick out an appropriately classed NPC, and if needed reskin it to fit (maybe change the race, or the weapon selection, or the favored enemy choice for rangers - whatever makes it work for what you need). That CR17 encounter I mentioned, other than the ice devil, consisted entirely of NPCs from that list.
How does one tell, after the fact (i.e. when finding bodies after the fight is over and the winners have left the area) that burns are "magical"?
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How does one tell, after the fact (i.e. when finding bodies after the fight is over and the winners have left the area) that burns are "magical"?
I would say by making some lore rolls. Arcane and Healing are the two that stand out the most.
For example, a fire inspector, after a fire, can tell you if an accelerant was used, or if it was an electrical short, or a bunch of things based upon the patterns of the fire... particularly at the source of the fire.
So an expert would likely be able to tell if a fire was started by an alchemist, a magician, or a torch.
Boojum
Fair enough. Would some grunt sent to find out what happened to the guys in the guard tower think of that? :-)