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Hi all,
I am a GM looking at my large back catalog of print adventures from PF1, to use as material some of my friends' initial forays into PF2. (I am saving The Fall of Plaguestone and Age of Ashes for the groups I form once I actually recruit for them.)
I'm looking for a quick way to balance encounters from PF1 adventures in PF2. I understand that we should substitute monsters from the PF2 bestiary, but what about overall encounter balance?
So, while I was looking at the CRB's guidelines for creating encounters on page 489, I honed in on the phrase: "Extreme-threat encounters are so dangerous that they are likely to be an even match for the characters..."
Thinking back to PF1, Player Characters (PCs) were considered to be of a Challenge Rating equal to their character level. For example, a 2nd-level fighter PC was considered to be a Challenge Rating of 2 if it were encountered as an opponent, if it had an amount of gear appropriate to a PC. (If it had NPC-appropriate gear, it would be one CR lower, or CR 1.)
In both PF1 and PF2, the encounter-building tables assume a party with four PCs. And so an enemy encounter that was roughly equal in power to the party would be 4 higher than the average party level. (This would place it one CR above "Epic on this chart.)
The chart in the PF2 CRB on page 489 assumes a party of four characters, and so an Extreme-threat encounter has an XP budget of 160 XP.
So this is the conversion I have come up with:
* Look at the Challenge Rating from the PF1 module/adventure path. Convert it to PF2 using this chart:
CR is APL -1: 30 XP
CR is APL: 40 XP ("trivial")
CR is APL +1: 60 XP ("low")
CR is APL +2: 80 XP ("moderate")
CR is APL +3: 120 XP ("severe")
CR is APL +4: 160 XP ("extreme")
(Note that, happily, this means you can substitute a PF2 monster with a Level equal to a PF1 monster's CR... you can substitute four CR 1 ghouls from PF1 with four Level 1 ghouls from PF2.)
(Note also that PF2 modules rely more on "moderate" encounters as the baseline: The Fall of Plaguestonehas a generous number of "severe" encounters. This is probably due to a PF2 party's greater ability to replenish its resources using Treat Wounds and Refocus. The prudent GM should keep this in mind.)
What do people think of this? I will be converting some PF1 encounters soon using this chart. If you have any practical experience with this conversion method, please share!
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Yes, this is correct. The encounter building rules haven't really changed at all in PF2, though as you note some nuance about how the game flows is a bit different, so CR X = Level X will always* come out to the same thing according to the rules.
*With the exception that very low level creatures no longer contribute at all instead of just relatively little - PF1 adventures sometimes threw groups of APL-6 monsters at the party, and these will do effectively nothing against a PF2 party (not that they were necessarily especially effective against a PF1 party either), so they aren't even included in the table.