|
You ask about balance, not story pacing; and about what the "average" party can handle. But what do you mean by balance? And why do you need to know about the average party? Consider:...Why then do companies care about the average customer, surly people are as diverse as there is sand in the Sahara desert and it surly is impossible to fathom what they will do? Or do they need to know about average age, sex and income in order to set meaningful marketing strategies and price levels for their products?
Actually, companies don't really want to know about the average customer anymore these days. The average customer is a last resort; you can get much better result if you're able to isolate more specific customer groups and tailor your product/marketing to each of them. If Coca-Cola only cared about the average customer they'd blend their vats of cola and fanta together. But it wouldn't sell nearly as well as two products tailored to separate tastes.
And while I surely agree about infinite table diversity to statistics this is a non-argument. As long as there are at least 2 things that share a common theme or attribute there is and will be a mean, an average to everyone and everything, always. And even if there is no average which comes to mind naturally then one will need to be defined: Classical set-up, 4 characters, all human, (sword and board) fighter, (universalist) wizard, (cloistered) cleric, (dual-wield, dex-based) rogue. There you go.
We don't care about outliers like powergaming or storytelling groups, nor do we care about group composition or number of players, all we do care about is the overall Gaussian distribution and the median in regards to how many back to back type x encounters can be expected to be handled by any (average) group with or without 10min of rest after each encounter.
Hard to determine? Perhaps. But this is why we would happily and gladly take Paizos best guess as additional piece of advice and not require the full scientific proof.
If you exclude all powergamers, storytellers, groups with less than four players, groups with more than four players, and groups with a different set of classes, the "average" group will resemble only a tiny minority of all actual play groups, so what then is the usability of the guidelines?
|
|
Even if they would never quantify any guidelines. I think it would be very enlightening to hear from the designers (in a blog post?) and how they run their own games. It would be great to hear from James J, Jason B, Mark S, etc just to hear how they pace their games under this new system, and how they deal with rests of all varieties. They are the experts, while most of us are just learning.
I suspect they do what they tell others: pace your home game according to the needs of that group. Don't worry about whether you're going faster or slower than people who aren't there.
|
|
As Zapp said multiple times in this thread, the answer to these questions is the same as when we are considering how much XP worth of monsters makes up a moderate encounter, or how much gold pieces an item that can cast a level 2 spell once per day should be worth. We have precise balance rules for a lot of other things in the game, and they are presumably based on an average party, or else on some other assumptions. Just apply those same assumptions on my previous questions and we should be able to get some more or less precise answer.
You ask about balance, not story pacing; and about what the "average" party can handle. But what do you mean by balance? And why do you need to know about the average party? Consider:
My idea is that it works like this: think of all those precisely defined things as parameters to the game. How much wealth you earn at a level, what items cost at a level, what items of a level do, what the DCs are at a given level, how strong monsters of a level should be - they're all parameters that you could change.
Your goal in setting all of these parameters is to create a game that is the most fun for your particular group. Not for an average group, for your group.
Now, configuring any system with hundreds of interdependent parameters is extremely hard. So what you typically do, is that you start freezing some of these parameters. And that's what they did, with fixed DCs for level-based tasks, wealth by level and all that. Reducing the whole thing to a far smaller set of parameters, that are easier to understand.
Specifically, reducing the whole thing from a humongous set of numerical parameters that look pretty meaningless to most of us, to a small set of much easier to understand ones:
* Do I use Easy, Moderate or Severe encounters?
* Do I use single boss monsters, boss+lieutenant, or mook squad encounters (all worth the same XP budget as set by my choice of Easy/Moderate/Severe)?
* How rapidly do I fire them at the players?
That's reducing a fun-optimization problem from hundreds of parameters to a handful. What precise choice of these parameters optimizes fun for your local group however, is impossible to say for sure. The closest we can get is "a few easy, a bunch of moderate, a few severe".
How rapidly? Well that depends on the feeling you want to create. You can have an adventure about excavating an Osirian tomb where you unseal room after room, and the players have nice control over how long they rest in between. But you can also have an adventure about being chased by a hobgoblin army, and then the players don't have that much choice in how fast encounters come. Both are entirely legitimate adventures so you can't really have one single rule.
So Paizo seems basically to be leaving it in the GM's hands, but simplifying it from an incomprehensible numerical problem into a far simpler qualitative one ("do you want moderate or severe?"). But the final calibration is one that you have to fine-tune yourself by learning what kind of difficulty your group enjoys.
If you exclude all powergamers, storytellers, groups with less than four players, groups with more than four players, and groups with a different set of classes, the "average" group will resemble only a tiny minority of all actual play groups, so what then is the usability of the guidelines?
I think you misunderstood my considerations about Gaussian distribution. Those groups are not excluded in any statistics evaluation but they are likely to be outliers on said bell curve. Powergamers may be able to do 10 low-thread fights in a row (or more), storytellers might already be on their toes if they have to do 2, nowbody knows but fortunately it also is not relevant. Same for fewer player or different classes. Fewer players will have a lower XP budget against them anyway and if you want to go on an adventure with a 4-fighter party so be it, just don't be surprised when you can not manage as many encounters in a row as the "average" group or be even more surprised because you can.
The thing is, when being GM and designing any adventure one fun part is the story and another fun part of it is to provide a suitable challenge for the players. And as such I usually go out of my way when creating any combination of riddles, traps, challenges and encounters that the players should be able to manage in one go and not in piecemeal scraps of 15 minute adventuring days. I usually do this to avoid overly weird and just too convenient situations, e.g. having to have a safe room in the 7th layer of hell (I do this when the overall story requires is, but I tend to try to avoid it).
And when doing so it is really great to have some guidelines to start with and which do not only stem from game experience with one particular party, because I might run the same scenario with different players or groups. Which is not to say that I will enforce any resting rules or try to hurry the players through the adventure or will not modify the adventure to suit the current party.
That means that if I run this adventure with a party that is on the powergaming side and I know that the "average" party should be able to manage 4 low-level encounters, then I will think of where to best place a 5th or even add a moderate encounter. If the same adventure would be played with less rules-centric players I will gladly remove one or more encounters or even replace some with diplomatic encounters. However in both cases my aim will always be that the party can complete this particular chapter in one ingame go. This is why it would really be helpful to know how to determine the default challenge level for an average group.
Even if they would never quantify any guidelines. I think it would be very enlightening to hear from the designers (in a blog post?) and how they run their own games. It would be great to hear from James J, Jason B, Mark S, etc just to hear how they pace their games under this new system, and how they deal with rests of all varieties. They are the experts, while most of us are just learning.
I know a couple of them have their own games they run in podcast format. Knights of the everflame for one. Seeing how they pace encounters in play should work well to understand their opinion on pacing.
Those groups are not excluded in any statistics evaluation but they are likely to be outliers on said bell curve. Powergamers may be able to do 10 low-thread fights in a row (or more), storytellers might already be on their toes if they have to do 2, nowbody knows but fortunately it also is not relevant. Same for fewer player or different classes. Fewer players will have a lower XP budget against them anyway and if you want to go on an adventure with a 4-fighter party so be it, just don't be surprised when you can not manage as many encounters in a row as the "average" group or be even more surprised because you can.
Your description there seems to illustrate fairly plainly that there is a wide spread of play styles - and you only address three different types of players (Powergamers, Storytellers, and The Fightin' Fusiliers.)
To create a statistical mean party, you would have to first determine how many distinctly different play styles there are, stress test the existing encounter budget rules with multiple parties derived from that now more complete list to see which group can handle what to determine an accurate statistical mean party layout to build encounters around. You then have to create rules for adjusting that mean in meaningful ways so that you can provide guidance to the segment of the GM populace that is clamoring for this level of granularity. The next step is to institute these rules into your existing design strata because this all started because a segment of that segment of the GM populace wanted this guidance specifically for the purpose of running AP's.
That's what you're asking for, rather than simply evaluating your players at your table and adjusting your GM style to match them. And in the end Paizo could spend considerable effort and time doing all of that work to give you the guidance you request only to have that guidance fail to be useful at your table because a new player upsets the balance.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
It might be easier to imagine all the resources as one big pool, and each of the different types of rest will restore a certain amount (minus any oddities that need urban/high-NPC-caster/ritual support).
At-will, once/minute tier:
A shallow layer where Cantrips, Rage, Compositions, Intimidate, and good ol' Strikes can do the grunt work, though odds are only a token encounter wouldn't make it to the next layer down. Cheap & plentiful consumables could go here, i.e. arrows or potions/elixirs well below one's level.
Lull tier:
Hit points make up most of this the largest pool (IMO) and much can generally be recovered after 10-minutes. Shield repair (if skilled), Shield spell reboot, Focus Points, the Wounded condition, and a few other things are here too. Several lulls can recover most (not all) of a party's resources (again IMO).
Hourly tier:
Abilities like Barbarian's Dragon Breath (at full capacity) or Guidance, if used much by the party, but also basic Medicine (w/o feats) which is quite important to note for the lowest levels.
Daily tier:
Where once/day abilities, spell slots, and such are. At higher levels, this pool gets larger, but PCs also have to deal with Restoration/once/day, Drain, Doomed, and such.
Emergency level:
Emergency consumables, retreats back to civilization, need for ritual components, and other trauma. Multi-day recovery/Restorations too.
As it stands now, an Extreme Encounter should (through sheer power) burn all the way down to the daily/emergency tier in one battle. On the other end, Minor should likely only tap into at-will and lull tiers, though if the lull level gets drained enough by a series of these then you're digging into the daily resources (mainly in-combat spell slots).
Which is a good thing (IMO) since battles should have some consequence.
Most encounters should be moderate+ so there's at least the chance of some attrition of the daily pool, yet w/ little risk of hitting the emergency level (which closes up shop). Unless of course you want them to have those daily resources for a big spike later.
(Reminds me of an ancient red dragon that had many fire giant "guards", a.k.a. cannon fodder, more to show he had servants and give notice of the party's arrival than to have any effect on the party' resources.)
Approximations for the size of each tier will vary by group, level, and even playstyle. Wealthy parties may have lots of useful consumables that they use freely while parties w/o full-casters might have few daily abilities to spend (but with warrior h.p. for a larger lull-tier pool).
Low level groups will have fewer daily resources (since so few spell slots) yet also need more hour+10-long breaks to attempt Medicine twice and/or on many people; or Craft to try multiple times to repair their shield. So the pace should start with less pressure (or easier encounters) since they don't rebound so fast.
As Skill Feats progress, some of the one hour stuff goes down, even to a round or so for Repair and with Medicine working on everybody simultaneously. So higher level parties can adapt to time pressures much better, perhaps using their more ample daily resources to maintain a harder pace (so better to keep those Heroism spells running!)
Cheers.
ETA: I should've entered time as a resource in itself, especially re: pacing. Party's with fewer of their own resources need more time. Harder fights = require more resources = need more time (often).
|
|
If you exclude all powergamers, storytellers, groups with less than four players, groups with more than four players, and groups with a different set of classes, the "average" group will resemble only a tiny minority of all actual play groups, so what then is the usability of the guidelines?I think you misunderstood my considerations about Gaussian distribution. Those groups are not excluded in any statistics evaluation but they are likely to be outliers on said bell curve. Powergamers may be able to do 10 low-thread fights in a row (or more), storytellers might already be on their toes if they have to do 2, nowbody knows but fortunately it also is not relevant. Same for fewer player or different classes. Fewer players will have a lower XP budget against them anyway and if you want to go on an adventure with a 4-fighter party so be it, just don't be surprised when you can not manage as many encounters in a row as the "average" group or be even more surprised because you can.
I don't think the Gaussian distribution applies really, since that's a continuous distribution over a real-valued variable, while Pathfinder is still firmly in the realm of discrete (if not always strictly natural) numbers. There's a joke about deceptive averages. Bill Gates walks into a bar and says "we're all reach, look at the average personal net worth of people in here!". Averages don't deal well with outliers, but they also don't deal well with multimodal data. If 40% of your population plays powerful characters, 40% plays weak characters, and only 20% plays average-strength characters, then a difficulty model based on the average character is wrong 80% of the time. And given the number of choices players have to make their characters diverge from the norm, I think non-average parties are far, far more common than average parties. So a system without GM tuning of difficulty is going to work poorly.
The thing is, when being GM and designing any adventure one fun part is the story and another fun part of it is to provide a suitable challenge for the players. And as such I usually go out of my way when creating any combination of riddles, traps, challenges and encounters that the players should be able to manage in one go and not in piecemeal scraps of 15 minute adventuring days. I usually do this to avoid overly weird and just too convenient situations, e.g. having to have a safe room in the 7th layer of hell (I do this when the overall story requires is, but I tend to try to avoid it).
I agree with all of this.
Well I don't insist that it always should be done in exactly one day. I think it's good to vary your pacing; some days are hectic and some aren't. As a given adventure progresses, they'll probably get a bit more hectic. I don't see 15m workdays happening a lot. I've practically only seen them when the PCs are cracking a really tough but very static dungeon, for example a tomb where every 30ft or so a new guardian would step out when you entered the area, and the guardians were all nasty. After a while the party also realized they rejuvenated after a certain amount of days, so there was some pressure to push through it to the end before the original guardians would reform again.
And when doing so it is really great to have some guidelines to start with and which do not only stem from game experience with one particular party, because I might run the same scenario with different players or groups. Which is not to say that I will enforce any resting rules or try to hurry the players through the adventure or will not modify the adventure to suit the current party.
Well you do have these guidelines. Moderate encounters are moderate difficulty, Severe are harder etcetera. Those descriptive names are pretty accurate as long as you keep those encounters separated. If the PCs go into every encounter with full HP, focus recharged and shields whole, then the encounters are about as hard as the book calls them. So if you want to write an easy to balance adventure, insist that all encounters are done in the same day, but that you can rest quite long in between them.
Consider: during a Moderate encounter you'll probably use a few but not many daily resources, like spells from spell slots. The rest is done with cantrips/strikes. That's slower than spending spells, so you lose some hit points. Sometimes the encounter goes smoothly and you don't take a lot of hits, sometimes it goes roughly and you lose a lot of hit points. But if you get enough lulls to heal up full, it doesn't change the difficulty of the next encounter very much. So that makes it easy for the writer to balance the next encounter, because it isn't influenced by the random luck of the previous encounter.
It becomes harder to balance the difficulty of a day's work if the time between encounters goes down, or if the amount of encounters per day goes down.
1) If the lull between encounters is too short, then characters can't recover completely from the first encounter. This means that the second encounter is less certain - some parties will come in almost fresh, others bloody. After the second encounter, the difference between the lucky and unlucky group has probably become even bigger.
2) If the players have a lot of freedom in how many encounters they undertake per day, then you might get one group that does only one per day, while another group feels compelled by the story to "push on and save people" and undertakes encounters until they really need to rest. The first group can use a lot of daily resources in a single encounter that you'd usually spread out over multiple ones. (There isn't anything quite so extravagant as magus nova in PF2, but you catch my drift.) The second group however is trying to conserve resources so each encounter is harder for them than for the first group.
So I guess the outcome of my analysis is: if you want to make an adventure that's generally balanced for most parties, you want to maintain independence between encounters by having a long enough break, but also put in a story reason why you do need to do multiple of them a day.
I think that Paizo has, through a bit of stage magic, done pretty much that: the AP story usually makes you feel like you're in a hurry, but behind the scenes, there isn't actually any independent countdown clock. Stuff happens "just as the PCs get there".
For naive players, this works out wonderfully. They arrive just barely in time! Amazing!
For experienced players, this can work out perfectly fine too. They realize the time pressure is a bit malleable but they enjoy trying to do as much every day as they can.
For cynical players who try to get the easiest path possible and exploit the kindness of the writer... well, maybe they have fun with that. And otherwise they reap what they sow.
---
So this is about the "generally balanced adventure". As you see, to achieve general balance, you have to restrict yourself a lot. To make the system more predictable you kinda commit yourself to breaks between encounters long enough to have 1-3 tries with Treat Wounds per person.
I personally prefer a more tailored approach, where you can put encounters closer together to create tension, or spread them out to give the party the feel that they're in the driver's seat and making strategic choices. And vary between those approaches. But those things only really work if you're willing to tailor more to the particular party.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'll be honest, I think that the game was designed in such a way that the answer is indefinite- out of combat healing is practically infinite assuming the party can spend multiple ten minute increments in place, which they usually can because the exploration system defines 10 minute increments as the default unit of time in exploration mode.
10 minutes spent searching this room, 10 minutes searching the next room, 10 minutes investigating something, etc. Might as well be the Champion taking a half hour to cast lay on hands three times using their focus points.
Focus Points could also mean that some spell casting classes have access to powerful abilities, like say, Hellfire Plume on an ongoing basis, even if their spell slots were shuttered. Other abilities can extend this, familiar focus point recharge, gnome focus point recharge.
Regular spell slots seem more definite, but different classes have them in different amounts, and spell battery exists to extend that further, as does, lets say, the Wizard's bond mechanics.
Did the spell casters invest in Wands, or especially in Staves? Depending on the amount of downtime they've been given, and the distribution of magic items it'll vary drastically. None of which would effect an all martial party at all.
So the TLDR: the game isn't designed in such a way as to produce a consistent set of guidelines for attrition because unlike 5e, attrition is not the main mechanic of difficulty, swingy fights with powerful monsters are, and attrition ought to just be eyeballed.
| 8 people marked this as a favorite. |
honestly I think guidlines weren't included for this for GMs as pacing is often something the players control rather than the GM. Afterall players usually have the option to retreat even if they rarely use that option
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Pathfinder Second Edition is a game where player skill, group composition, enemy composition, the round to round decisions during combat and how you prepare and transition between encounters has a huge impact on the outcome of encounters.
You could have two different groups go through the same adventure playing the exact same characters and end with dramatically different results.
Organized Play Developer
|
| 12 people marked this as a favorite. |
Pathfinder Second Edition is a game where player skill, group composition, enemy composition, the round to round decisions during combat and how you prepare and transition between encounters has a huge impact on the outcome of encounters.
You could have two different groups go through the same adventure playing the exact same characters and end with dramatically different results.
This is incredibly true. A complaint that came up a few times for some of our initial adventures was how high the difficulty was; my main concern until the game hit the wild was that tactics and smart play would trivialize too many encounters because in my experience up to that point a group of players could chain strategize their way through multiple back-to-back Severe encounters (and this was at a point in time where the monsters were stronger and the PCs had fewer options).
The idea that there's an "average party" doesn't really pan out terribly well in practice, and that's something we have real data on. The introductory PFS adventure was a pregen special that only allows our iconic pregens, and we've seen huge variance in the experiences people had, with everything from "this was too easy, crank it up" to "what were you idiots thinking releasing an introductory adventure this hard?" For the groups I playtested it with, it was basically exactly what I was aiming for: challenging, but handily overcome using tools like Recall Knowledge and party coordination. But we realized that we probably needed to dial the difficulty back for the wider audience and adjusted accordingly in later adventures. There's still different things that come into play; in an adventure I wrote, there's a barbazu devil that quite a few groups have noted as being punishingly powerful. Some groups have retreated, rested, and returned, others simply decided the devil wasn't worth the effort, and some ROFL-stomped the barbazu on the first try. The correct route forward and the way the encounters were handled was different for all of these groups, but the common thread is that the players, not the GM, decided what the pace was, what risks they were willing to take, and what they wanted to do as a result.
Player agency is an important part of the game. Depending on the group, it can be equally rewarding to say "You know, we're starting to run low on resources and supplies, but people need us so we're going to press on" or "we're of no use to anyone dead, let's bar the doors and rest up". It's important to let the players set the pace to a pretty significant degree; this is a game where the PCs are the protagonists of an heroic adventure story and the reward for them is in seeing how the decisions they make affect the world around them. I've played in and GM'd for groups who relish the thrill of tackling difficult adventures and seeing how far they can challenge themselves; more than once I've seen a group take on multiple Severe encounters without even a 10 minute break in between and then capstone the run with an Extreme encounter. I also know that a lot of groups would get wrecked and have a miserable time trying to do the same thing.
At the end of the day, there's really only one pacing mechanism that consistently matters, and it may sound trite but it's the truth: make sure your players are having fun. If they're not enjoying themselves and seem to be stymied, relax a bit and drop the encounter difficulties down a notch or introduce more opportunities for them to rest. If they're getting bored because it feels too easy, kick it up a notch and dial up the difficulty (unless you're in PFS, in which case run the adventure as written, lol!) This is a game, and there is no metric more important than that the people playing it have a good time. Even in organized play we're looking at the feedback from all of those tables for every adventure and slowly dialing up and down as the audience demands; with an audience this large that often means we need to put out adventures that some people will think are too much and other people will love, and other adventures that some groups are a little bored with but which other groups adore.
If you want a good baseline for your adventure design, listen to your players and make the kinds of adventures they enjoy. Odds are good that a lot of other people will enjoy the same things.
Sayre's good stuffPathfinder Second Edition is a game where player skill, group composition, enemy composition, the round to round decisions during combat and how you prepare and transition between encounters has a huge impact on the outcome of encounters.
You could have two different groups go through the same adventure playing the exact same characters and end with dramatically different results.
That's the sort of insight that should've been in the GMG.
I do find it funny that your suggestions don't work in the venue (PFS) that you oversee, and where the players have minimal effect on the world. I like it when there's post-scenario feedback that determines a story arc BTW! (Even if I play months too late...)
So on one hand we have people playing for mindless escapism and on the other we have those playing for mindful challenge. Personally I loved the difficulty of the playtest and looked forward to that level in PF2. I also had two players who struggled under the stress, even as most of them thrived. The GMG could've pointed to the difference of "time as a resource" between the two styles, especially with Treat Wounds as it is now. That's all that would've been needed. "Here's the baseline for resource refreshment to consider when plotting out combat arcs, and here's how to adjust it (or even make your players aware of it so they don't push too hard)."
And in PFS2, "hard modes" are the way to go, even if they don't reward any extra (other than in the play itself of course) and even if they're a typical challenge for some of us. Self-imposed rushing feels like intentionally handicapping oneself. So please rush me instead. :)
|
|
If they're getting bored because it feels too easy, kick it up a notch and dial up the difficulty (unless you're in PFS, in which case run the adventure as written, lol!)
This gave me a crazy idea that might be worth thinking about: optional hard mode by adding some virtual challenge points.
Suppose you have a group that's on the powerful side and they want more challenge. It would be fairly easy for this group to say "let's just add 2 challenge points and run the adventure at that difficulty setting".
Obviously you shouldn't be able to do this to earn higher-tier rewards (so that there are no perverse incentives/pressures on uncertain players to agree), and it needs to be agreed by all players.
You probably wouldn't want to use this to flip to high tier. But if you're a strong party and the difference between your current challenge point total and the amount needed to go up a tier is large, you could agree to just add a few.
Obviously this isn't allowed by current PFS2 rules. But I think it could be worth exploring, as a way to enable hard-er mode for many scenarios with little effort.
I wonder if the difficulty could be set simply by altering the timeline.
"You have two days to clear the rats out of this warehouse."
vs. "6 hours" vs. "half an hour". Makes a large difference IMO, yet doesn't change the heart of the story nor involve calculations at the table for the GM.
Or maybe there could be a "medal" (worth nothing except a pat on the back) on the chronicle sheets for those who managed a swifter pace.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
What would have been great was a baseline for reinforcements, so that any adventure writer that didn't feel this baseline was appropriate for a certain scenario would feel compelled to replace it (or at the very least actively removing it), instead of just letting the silence remain silent.
That example you added may have indeed be great for you, but what is great at your table might not be what is great at another’s. Multiple people have presumed that leaving pacing open for interpretation at all tables was the core reason for not making pacing a defined mechanic. Not only were quotes from PF1 era design that support this theory presented, one of the devs spoke to that being absolutely the case for PF2 and gave experiential accounts of how those decisions were made and examples of why a one size fits all approach doesn’t work.
That would seem to be enough to satisfy your original query.
|
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
With respect, noone has explained how the game can on one hand be incredibly detailed to control the difficulty level, and on the other hand be left wide open.
I have tried to do that several times now, but perhaps I need to be more brief.
The game freezes hundreds of parameters so that the GM only has a few, easy to understand ones left to work with: encounter difficulty and encounter pacing.
Figuring out all the details that you list is hard, it takes a lot of math and a lot of playtesting. We pay game designers to do that for us.
So why not go the last bit and also define what correct encounter difficulty and pacing is? You could level up by doing one trivial encounter (40XP) per day for 25 days, or by doing three severe encounters (120XP) per day, for three days in a row. Is either one wrong or right?
The RAW answer is: whatever your group enjoys. Seriously, that's the official guidance, to run the game that your group enjoys. Read The First Rule and notice the last sentence: "The true goal of Pathfinder is for everyone to enjoy themselves." It doesn't get any more RAW than the first rule.
If your group enjoys a hard game, give them one. If they like an easy one, give them that. There is no Platonic archetype of the ideal normal difficulty game that people are deviating from because they have aberrant tastes. It's all subjective and the only way to do it right is to do it in the way that you enjoy.
What is the value/beauty/point of making everything so damn "balanced" if a party can still meta the game difficulty completely, just by resting.
What is the purpose of not supporting the GM who doesn't want to come across as a dick by imposing a cost to resting by offering even the faintest guideline for what that cost might be?
The reason you get stuck on this is because you start out by assuming there must be one standard difficulty that people try to "meta". But that assumption is wrong. The difficulty should be whatever the group enjoys most.
Compare it to a computer game that has different difficulty settings. If you like to play at the low difficulty because you just kinda want to enjoy the scenery and relax after a long workday, is there something wrong with that? No, you paid for the game, so your enjoyment is what makes it right.
---
Now, I do think the book could use more advice on how to use pacing to create the game that you want:
How does it feel? Compare to movie pacing - some movies are slow-moving, some might have just one "encounter", others are a non-stop rollercoaster. All of them can score high ratings. But scoring high ratings doesn't mean these movies are the same. Pacing can be used to tell different stories.
Who's in the driving seat? Some adventures may have the pacing mostly set by the PCs, while in others the PCs are surprised by events. Compare the PCs investigating a dungeon, deciding when to unseal a new chamber; the PCs investigating another dungeon SWAT-style trying to maintain momentum because they don't want enemies to sound the alarm and coordinate their resistance; and the PCs being put in charge of defending a castle against a besieging army that tries various assaults and covert operations to get in. All of these are classic adventure tropes. How long the PCs can decide/hope to rest varies a lot in each of them.
How can you use varying pace to set the tone in your adventure? You could for example start the adventure with a couple of easy days - travel a bit in the wilderness, have some "random encounters". Get attacked at night once, which gives a signal that the players can decide to rest, and that reduces encounters, but it's not guaranteed to avoid all encounters, so you should not blow through all of your resources in the "actively sought out" encounters. Then you get to the castle and you case the joint, notice the guard rotation and pick your moment to eliminate some sentries and you can rest after encounters. But then you get to the dungeons below the castle and you hear chanting as if some kind of ritual is building up to a climax, and you know you're on a clock now. So you do multiple encounters in a row to try to get to the ritual chamber and prevent the evil princess from sacrificing the baby gold dragon. Notice how the encounter pacing changes during the adventure. While traveling the wilderness, there's no real time pressure. If you take a day longer to reach the castle, nothing changes. While in the castle, there's some pressure; if you wait very long after eliminating sentries then the next guard rotation shows up. But you can rest for up to an hour or so. Once you go down to the dungeons and hear the chanting, the clock really starts ticking. You have maybe 10 minutes in total to go through two easy encounters and reach the ritual chamber for your final combat - no resting in between.
How hard is it? The above example doesn't say much about difficulty, except that the chained combats near the end were easy. That's because I know there's no resting in between, so the individual encounters need to be easier. How easy though? That's something you have to learn for your group; how strong are they, how effective are they working together, and what kind of pressure and difficulty do they enjoy?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
...
Thanks for you patience and elaborate answer @Ascalaphus, however I don't think we will ever settle on an agreement for this fundamental issue. While all the guys that want some more concrete guidelines on pacing understand or I hope at least try to understand the intention behind the "free flowing system" that the designers envision we simply are having a hard time accepting it for various reasons.
Though comparisions are always somewhat lacking I would nonetheless like you to consider chess. Has chess a "normal" difficulty? Certainly not. However would you not agree that there is a huge difference in difficulty (and of course also in game experience) if you have 14 days for each move when playing by mail or if you have 5 minutes for a complete game? Tournament play usually is 2h, which I would therefore consider the next best thing regarding "normal" difficulty.
And for PF2 there needs to be a least some resemblence of tournament rules because PFS play, or do all their adventures end up in TPK's or walk-throughs simply by chance? So why then is it so hard to provide some basic guidelines on pacing, especially for inexperienced GM's?
Also please keep in mind that the GM is an integral part of rule one. And if my players are "ruining" my fun by resting for the night after every single combat because "player agenda > all" and "story only progresses when players actively push for it", then I can tell you that I will probably not be having much fun either.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Curiously, a similar discussion started in the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Facebook Group. I cut out the spoilers.
Hey everybody!
I'm a new Pathfinder 2e GM, never played the original Pathfinder but I have played some D&D.
How many daily encounters are players in Pathfinder 2e supposed to have compared to D&D?
The reason I ask, is that I'm running Age of Ashes book 1. Mild spoilers for it follow.
My 4 players ran through the entire first floor of <spoiler redacted> without a single long rest (total of 2 sessions).
I will say that they avoided the fight with the <spoiler redacted> successfully, and the fight with the<spoiler redacted>. But otherwise ran into them all, which has got to be at least 8 combat encounters. Is this normal, or did I run or balance something wrong?
And Michael Sayre spoke up there, too.
Just let your players set the pace. Tactics and group composition have a huge impact on how long a party can go without resting, so if your players are wanting to press on, let them. Same if they want to rest.
If the fights are feeling too easy for the players, you might want to reevaluate the tactics you're using on your side of the screen, but as long as everyone is having a good time, there's no right or wrong rhythm to the encounter pacing.
I answered, too, but I was more abstract. It's my nature as a math muse.
|
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
...Thanks for you patience and elaborate answer @Ascalaphus, however I don't think we will ever settle on an agreement for this fundamental issue. While all the guys that want some more concrete guidelines on pacing understand or I hope at least try to understand the intention behind the "free flowing system" that the designers envision we simply are having a hard time accepting it for various reasons.
I've really enjoyed this discussion, there are some really insightful posts in it and it's helped me refine my own thinking a lot. Encounter difficulty and pacing is more of an art than a science, but people go to art class for a reason. You can't teach artistic vision but you can teach someone how to draw, about color theory and perspective and how to analyze proportions and so forth. I think the GMG should have included a chapter on pacing techniques, more than a benchmark table of standard pacing.
Though comparisions are always somewhat lacking I would nonetheless like you to consider chess. Has chess a "normal" difficulty? Certainly not. However would you not agree that there is a huge difference in difficulty (and of course also in game experience) if you have 14 days for each move when playing by mail or if you have 5 minutes for a complete game? Tournament play usually is 2h, which I would therefore consider the next best thing regarding "normal" difficulty.
And for PF2 there needs to be a least some resemblence of tournament rules because PFS play, or do all their adventures end up in TPK's or walk-throughs simply by chance? So why then is it so hard to provide some basic guidelines on pacing, especially for inexperienced GM's?
I agree that more guidance would be good, although I disagree on the use of a single standard. I think you need to look more at recipes, like a recipe for a hexcrawl is going to be different than that for a simple five room dungeon is going to be different from a complicated heist into a compound with layered defenses and response teams.
But the basic guidance does in fact exist: it's the descriptions of encounter difficulty on pages 488-489. Isolated encounters pretty much have the difficulty described there. A group playing a Moderate encounter smart should usually be able to do more on that day before needing a long rest. (As we discussed, the word "rest" there is ambiguous and probably means "rest for the night" not "some amount of 10 treat wounds breaks".) So if you keep encounters far enough apart, then Trivial/Easy/Moderate/Severe/Extreme is pretty spot on.
So the attitude that "players are slouching" if they take a lot of Treat Wounds breaks between encounters is IMO wrong. The easiest way for the GM to design encounters is to assume that players go into each one at full health, focus and shields. So why would players enabling that be bad?
Now, I don't think all encounters should be highly isolated from each other. I think some of them should be, and some shouldn't be. Because variation in pacing makes a story much more exciting. But chaining encounters together does increase the variability. If they happened to do well in the first encounter, the second shouldn't be so hard. But if they did poorly in the first, then they may need to spend more daily resources (healing) in the second. So by chaining encounters, you make your adventure less stable. That's quite separate from any kind of benchmark on how hard or fast the game should be - just simple probabilities.
So, chaining encounters is sometimes good but it's harder for the GM. Two moderate encounters in a row is harder than two of them wide apart. How much harder? That depends on the party.
Also please keep in mind that the GM is an integral part of rule one. And if my players are "ruining" my fun by resting for the night after every single combat because "player agenda > all" and "story only progresses when players actively push for it", then I can tell you that I will probably not be having much fun either.
This sounds like a blend of IC and OOC communication problems. If you feel that your players are abusing metagame knowledge that the plot will wait for them, then that's something to have an OOC discussion about. While I think it's good that the plot does wait a bit on the players, there also needs to be buy-in into the story from the players so that they don't wait around too long. Basically, the players pretend the plot is urgent, but not to the point of self-destruction.
Suppose it takes 20 encounters to get to the heart of the dungeon, and in the middle is a princess who's been asleep for almost a 100 years. Soon she will wake up and bake the gold dragon eggs into an omelette for breakfast. But the players can't possibly do 20 encounters in one day. After doing as many as they can in a day, they have to go home and rest up. While playing it, the players should feel as if every day counts. They can't just take the rest of the day off after doing one encounter, because then they'll be too late. But does that mean the adventure has to specify a certain number of days, and if the players get there too late it's over, and if they're early, the princess is still asleep and they can just decapitate her? Either one wouldn't be nearly as satisfying as grabbing the eggs and doing a chase scene out of the dungeon pursued by a killer princess in a nightgown. So the plot IS going to wait for the players.
But what if the players know it'll wait? Then it depends a bit on their attitude - most of the people I play with would be able to separate that knowledge in their mind. While they know in the back of their mind that the plot will wait, they play their character as if the character doesn't know that. In that sense, it's not so different from separating what your character knows about monsters and what you know about monsters. You know that the adventure is reasonable and fair, your character doesn't. Now if you get players who don't do that, then it's perhaps time for an OOC talk about how you want to play the game together, and that this attitude isn't fun.
So to summarize that: I don't think you should solve an OOC problem with encounter design guidelines.
---
Now compare that to something that was said earlier:
Now there's the argument "if you can have 10 minutes you can likely have an hour". And logically, I can't argue.
This is kind of the reverse problem; here apparently the adventure doesn't have urgency built into the story, but Zapp feels that if players are resting for too long in between encounters, that this is "slacking" and undermines the intended difficulty of the adventure.
But if you can't logically say why it's wrong to rest for an hour (because there's no IC reason for it), then why is it wrong? I mean, this isn't a gym class where you get a grade for effort. If the adventure gives you room for lots of resting, what's wrong with doing that? If the GM wanted more of a high pressure feeling, the adventure should have been designed differently.
---
You asked about "if there's no official guidance then how does PFS2 do it?"
If you look through scenarios, you see that it's pretty varied. Chained encounters are pretty rare. Amount of encounters per day varies enormously. But overall, it doesn't seem like they count on the PF1/D&D 3.x model of adventure design that wanted to challenge you by attrition over multiple encounters. In between encounters you can get back a lot of resources. Rather, the idea is that each encounter is a separate fun set piece fight, and how well you do in it gets you some points towards score at the end of the scenario.
Guidelines & advice, rather than a baseline to strive for, that's what I think the GMG needed.
Does your party rely a lot on Focus Spells? Then lulls become a bigger factor. The Wild Shape Druid will want those.
Chained encounters? Strains the Barbarian w/ Rage too.
Many spell slots? Then overnight rests matter more and 1/day wilderness portions might get nova'ed.
Fewer spell slots? Then they'll need Medicine time, maybe access to more consumables on a larger timescale.
There aren't that many timescales to address, so it would've been nice to the newer GMs to include some advice on each and the types of pressures involved with each. Even a simple line about starting w/ lots of opportunities for lulls or even overnight rests until you and your players get a hang of difficulty levels (and game mechanics!) would've been a marked improvement.
I know more than a few RPGers who've come to a new game pushing too hard right out of the gate. "I thought CR 1 was for each 1st level PC." Thankfully we were mostly Elves against that Ghoul pack!
I know more than a few RPGers who've come to a new game pushing too hard right out of the gate. "I thought CR 1 was for each 1st level PC." Thankfully we were mostly Elves against that Ghoul pack!
Our group including GM wondered if 10min breaks where the norm now for the first couple of levels and opinions went wild in between "but focus spells and 10min abilities are clearly OP then" and "definitely no, they are considered and expected by the new game mechanics!".
I know more than a few RPGers who've come to a new game pushing too hard right out of the gate. "I thought CR 1 was for each 1st level PC." Thankfully we were mostly Elves against that Ghoul pack!Our group including GM wondered if 10min breaks where the norm now for the first couple of levels and opinions went wild in between "but focus spells and 10min abilities are clearly OP then" and "definitely no, they are considered and expected by the new game mechanics!".
Focus Spells are maybe the main one I'm wondering about re: published adventure balance & default danger level. It seems the APs & module have been quite generous w/ lulls (and hard enough the party should take them even if it's hard to recognize that.)
But what about PFS?
I really don't want to develop a Wild Shape Druid if half the time+ they can't fight in Wild Shape. Nor do I want to splurge on Medicine feats if break times are always ample. And the power levels of Champions or Monks w/ Wholeness of Body swings a lot depending on lulls.
Hopefully the adventures have a variety in the pacing so the pendulum doesn't swing too far each scenario.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This blog also adds to this discussion I think, though it doesn't really answer the question and has stuff about different systems as well. But it was interesting for me to see how resting and pacing was done in the past.
https://theangrygm.com/hitting-the-rest-button/
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
With respect, noone has explained how the game can on one hand be incredibly detailed to control the difficulty level, and on the other hand be left wide open.
With respect, multiple people have
What would be the purpose of spending time, and printed space on a piece of guidance that 95% of GM's will outright ignore because it was written just to appease the few who wanted guidance and direction on every single nuance of how to run a game? Further, what would be the purpose of creating that guidance content when the guidance that you should let your players dictate these things has already been given multiple times?
|
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
This blog also adds to this discussion I think, though it doesn't really answer the question and has stuff about different systems as well. But it was interesting for me to see how resting and pacing was done in the past.
https://theangrygm.com/hitting-the-rest-button/
Yeah, that covers systems with some quite different underlying assumptions.
Actually I think it sharpens my impression that PF2 really makes a fundamental shift in "difficulty design", away from a per-day attrition model and to a per-combat attrition model.
3.X and PF1 had the concept of an adventuring day, with daily resources, that you'd burn through in a series of encounters so that by the end of the day you'd be feeling rather haggard.
Except that for many groups, this didn't really play out all that well. Because it requires you to adhere to a "4 encounters per day" rhythm, or something close to it. If you have only one combat in a day, it's not going to really use the attrition component. You could make it 4x more dangerous but that'd just result in a TPK.
I think groups that did less than 4 combats in a day were pretty common; for example all those gaming groups that meet on weekday evenings for about 3 hours of gaming and want a fun encounter in the night, but also want to have some plot development. So multiple days of in-game time might go by in a session but only one combat.
The multiple combats attrition over a day model was rather rigid and didn't scale well to groups with different needs.
PFS1 also shows this; it was very hard to write high-level scenarios with a full set of four fights, that would still run in the intended 4 hours. I think if you filter out notoriously long-running scenarios, then you'll see a definite trends in higher-level scenarios towards fewer encounters than lower-level scenarios. But if you get fewer encounters then a lot of assumptions about CR go out of the window, people can afford to nova more freely etcetera.
So PF2 moved much more in the direction of "attrition per fight". If you win the fight, you can recover a great deal, using Treat Wounds/Refocus/Repair shields.
This makes the game system much more suitable for different play styles. If your group wants to have one nice fight per game session, that's easy to balance now. If you want to grind through many fights in a dungeon, that's also easy to balance.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
There's far too much generic theoretically good-sounding advice here, so I am going to use a specific example.
Since that's a spoiler for an active AP, I'm starting a separate thread:
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42zck?Advice-on-pacing-specific-example (SPOILER)
There is no need to start a separate thread. Even in the explicit example you suggested, the answer remains that the pacingis up to [u]you.[/u]
You asked for specific examples of Paizo developers giving guidance on what you consider to be a pacing problem and two separate devs said the same thing. That there is no such thing as uniform or baseline party, and that you should set the pacing of the adventure around what your players prefer. No guideline from Paizo will satisfy what should be a matter of you observing whether your players are enjoying themselves or not.
Strictly interpreting each instance of an encounter and applying it to a rubric that defines a baseline course of actions and response is built in a defined way that applies across the board to all attempt to play that adventure in perpetuity is not how adventure design has ever worked. That's a choose your own adventure.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Distilling the answers provided: GMing is more of an art than a science. Coming to terms with that will improve your game.
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
To my knowledge no dev or other official has responded to my threads.
ummm if you scroll up you should see a post by Michael Sayre, one of Paizo's organized play developers.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
ummm if you scroll up you should see a post by Michael Sayre, one of Paizo's organized play developers.To my knowledge no dev or other official has responded to my threads.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Stop trying to moderate the forums, Dirtypool. It isn't up to you to decide who gets to start new threads.
This is a “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” moment. If you are going to tell me that I’m not a moderator and have no control over threads, then I fully expect you to never try to moderate the discussion in one of your threads ever again.
To my knowledge no dev or other official has responded to my threads.
(Hint: You cherrypicking quotes designed to dismiss the issue and shut down discussion does not count.)
Michael Sayre did. Scroll up.