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1 - No you don't count animal companion in the budget.
2 - That will be very opinion based, I at least find stuff like skeletons throwing their heads screaming and zombies full of pustules or are weak to "headshots" interesting.
3 - Encounter building in PF2 works, if you make an extreme encounter it will be 50/50 to either side and players WILL DIE and should be reserved as end bosses. If you want normal bosses do severe instead, something like a monster +2 with two lackeys -2 will do wonders per example.
And I would not underestimate the -3 or -4 monsters, in numbers they can be pretty deadly, specially if they are used basic tactics.
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1- To second Kyrone, animal companions don't get counted in XP budget.
2- Define combat changing in your opinion? Is Darkness combat changing? Terrain effects? Movement? Buffs? Some kind of combat where damage isn't the point? Character abilities are extremely wide ranging, and some change combat a lot (especially control and buff spells).
3-The numbers work out that way because the players get 15 action (potentially 15 rolls) against the monsters 3 actions. A +4 boss is an extreme encounter and is expected to have 50/50 odds of just wiping the party.
If you start providing extreme encounters regularly, the PCs will eventually start dying when their luck proves lacking. And given enough encounters it will.
That said, what level are the PCs currently? If you're really aiming for an extreme encounter for 5 that would push most groups to the edge, but not 1 giant monster, you'll want an intelligent group that works together with tactics. By working together, lower level enemies can become force multipliers.
Assuming they are level 2, and you want a lethal extreme challenge, something like the following would work:
Drow Priestess (level 3, 60 xp), 2 Drow Fighters (level 1, 30 xp each), and 2 Drow Rogues (level 2, 40 Xp each), total of 200 xp (160+40 for 5 players).
If they're level 3, then add another Priestess and Fighter to get back to 200 xp.
Its got darkness which changes the entire nature of the fight against PCs without darkvision, providing 50% miss chances all over the place and enabling sneak attacks. Any of the enemies can cast it, which makes it hard to fight it with light cantrips. They have solid spells like Fear and Command which put PCs out of position (command a wizard to come here so he runs into the a bunch of fighter AoOs and perfect flanking for rogues). It has slowing poison (and if you fail 3 times, you're out), solid melee and range capabilities, and they're faster than base line PCs.
Sure, they are player character like enemies, but player characters are strong.
Personally, I would expect most groups encountering walking into that kind of fight to simply lose.
Remove the 2 fighters to drop it to a rough severe encounter for 5 PCs. At that point action economy starts to help the PCs, but it is still a tough fight. Stealth initiative + Darkness + poisoned crossbow volley at effectively blind characters is a nasty start, for example.
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You should read Zapp's threads on pacing, because they say a lot about differing views on encounter design: (GM Advice) Official pacing and Advice on pacing: specific example (Spoilers for Extinction Curse part 1, chapter 3).
A level 6 encounter against a 2nd-level 4-person party is a mirror match. The party and the enemy are theoretically equally strong, so either side has a 50% chance of winning. In practice, a well-honed party that uses teamwork can find the enemies' weakness and take advantage of them faster than a properly-played enemy force can, so my players have won those, but I have been avoiding them in my PF2 campaign so far, because we are still not fully proficient with the Pathfinder 2nd Edition tactics. The PF2 Core Rulebook itself says,
Extreme-threat encounters are so dangerous that they are likely to be an even match for the characters, particularly if the characters are low on resources. This makes them too challenging for most uses. An extreme threat encounter might be appropriate for a fully rested group of characters that can go all-out, for the climactic encounter at the end of an entire campaign, or for a group of veteran players using advanced tactics and teamwork.
On the other hand, I do throw serious-threat 120-xp encounters at them, because they have mastered many PF2 tactics. Those encounters are supposed to exhaust a party so that they quit for the day--I presume that that is what Boumxyz calls a long rest--and find a safe place to camp for the night, because they cannot risk a serious- or extreme-threat with depleted resources. Pathfinder 2nd Edition introduced a set of 10-minute recuperations, such as Treat Wounds to remove damage and Refocus to restore a focus point for a focus spell. This does change the pacing to be different from Pathfinder 1st Edition and Dungeons & Dragons 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Editions. (D&D 4th Edition had once-per-encounter mechanics and D&D 5th Edition has short rests.)
1 - Should I count Animal companions when I budget encounters xps when using the budgetting system.
Animal companions are class features just like weapon proficiency and spellcasting. They count as part of the character, so they do not count as a separate character that expands the party to 5 members. Likewise, a boss with an animal companion just adds the boss's xp to the xp for the encounter. The Animal Companion mechanics are that they are minions that have only two actions per turn and their master has to use an action the command them.
On the other hand, if you give a boss an animal sidekick and don't use the animal companion rules, so that the animal has three actions per turn and does not have to be commanded, then it is a creature on its own and its xp is part of the encounter xp.
2 - I find monsters in the bestiary have very non interesting abilities. They either emulate PCs abilities or they're kind of meh... Nothing is " combat changing ".
What would you call combat changing? To me, sending a flying creature against a non-flying party changes combat. An Arboreal Warden (PF2 Bestiary, page 24) has "HP 75; Weaknesses axe vulnerability, fire 10; Resistances bludgeoning 5, piercing 5; Axe Vulnerability An arboreal warden takes 5 additional damage from axes." That means that the party has to look at the walking tree and think, "We are fighting wood. Maybe we should chop it down with a lumberjack's axe."
Creatures like goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, and orcs are humanoids, so they are not surprising. They fight like humans. But a bloodseeker (PF2 Bestiary, page 42, also known as stirge) is a giant mosquito and fights like a mosquito.
3 - I'm not really interested in putting 1 big monster ( like I did once and they fled which was what I wanted ) because this makes fights boring to them.
Not even a flame drake (PF2 Bestiary, page 131, creature 5)? It flies and breathes fireballs from 180 feet away. That is different from melee combat and the party is challenged to invent anti-flying tactics. How about a basilisk (PF2 Bestiary. page 38, creature 5)? Being halfway turned to stone with risk of permanent pertrification would make combat more tense. Sure, an 11th-level wizard or druid can have the same effect with the Flesh to Stone spell, but a basilisk can be encountered 6 levels sooner.
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Combat Changing abilities I'm looking for :
in 2e some undeads could drain level if they hit. That always brought a OH crap from the player. That`s what I`m looking for.
Perspective is a thing to keep in mind. In PF1, a negative level didn't actually take away a level, it just gave you a -1 penalty to just about everything and reduced your HP by 5. So a monster in PF2 inflicting Sickened 2 is actually imposing a more severe penalty on a character than a negative level in PF1 did (though they might have an easier time getting rid of sickened...Maybe, depending on the level, circumstances, etc.) That inability to eat or drink shutting down your ability to benefit from potions, elixirs, mutagens, etc. is also a real issue the party might have to deal with. Moreover, each-1 matters to a much more significant degree in PF2 than it did in PF1. Conditions in general are much more serious problems to tackle, and often harder to get rid of.
Ability damage/drain fall into the same camp as negative levels: many people didn't fully understand them, they were super fiddly when it came to understanding how to incorporate them, and generally they weren't actually a worse impediment to the party than a lot of the conditions that exist in PF2.
So once you account for the fact that the biggest difference for some of these things is perspective rather than actual mechanical impact, it can help get a better handle of the game and how to make the party feel the tension. Hit them with a monster that can lay on a debuff like that and have the sounds of the combat attract another monster they now have to deal with while that penalty is still imposed on some of the party members. Use enemies that can cast slow and let the players realize how much that lost action is hampering them (especially if they're trying to avoid being petrified by e.g. a basilisk as suggested above).
It's also important to really leverage your monster's abilities. For example, a griffon that uses flying strafe to smack party members with its talons and then perches behind some rocks on a cliffside promontory is going to be a hassle to deal with as it forces the party to burn actions coming after it while functionally "full attacking" in addition to essentially two move actions and flight. Similarly a griffon who pounces in an advantageous position where it can tag another party member with one of its wings (which have reach) and then fly away to a position with cover. Terrain + mobility can change the dynamic of an entire fight in huge ways in PF2, even moreso than was true in PF1. Spreading the damage around a bit isn't as bad a tactic, because it can force the party into using less-effective and more action-economy-intensive 3-action heals instead of the more focused 2-action heals. It's also good to avoid getting stuck in PF1 tactics in PF2; monsters should use their movement and special abilities to force the PCs into dynamic fight that require the players to make hard decisions about the best use of their action economy. You don't want to just jam into the "close distance and full attack" paradigms unless the monster is supposed to do that (usually signaled by high defenses and multi-action abilities).
I'm pretty sure Boumxyz is referring to 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons energy drain, not pathfinder 1st edition energy drain, given his opening post.
In 2nd edition D&D, drain level was terrifying, since it would permanently remove levels without access to Restoration (a 7th level spell) within a certain time limit. Not to mention casting restoration aged both the recipient and the caster, something like 2 years. And you had to cast it once to get each individual level back.
Your experience point total literally dropped to the middle of the previous level with each hit. Two levels on really nasty enemies. And you were now that new lower level, with everything that implies. It snowballed like mad, and even if the party survived the encounter, it was likely you now had a party with wildly different levels.
It had the potential to lead to completely imbalanced parties, especially if your cleric was the one that got drained or died. At which point you needed to level back up the old fashioned way.
For various reasons, those kind of effects, which could permanently lower your level relative to the other players have been removed. Similarly, equipment destroying effects like rust monsters have become extremely rare if not non-existent. Those are only two effects that can really produce that level of dread in players of a single hit I think.
So yeah, for better or for worse, I don't think you'll find monsters that can instill that kind of old school terror in a player. The worst that really happens is you die in PF2.
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I'm pretty sure Boumxyz is referring to 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons energy drain, not pathfinder 1st edition energy drain, given his opening post.
Ah, that's fair. Yeah, you won't find those kinds of mechanics in most modern RPGs, largely because they're just not widely popular anymore. PF2 is in many ways more deadly than other modern RPGs with raise dead being uncommon and a higher level spell than in PF1, as well as other adjustments along those lines, but "I beat you into a lower level" type effects just don't come up much anymore in "mainstream" (such as it is) modern RPGs.
So I’m hearing that the party is taking “long rests” after each fight, and I am hearing that fights aren’t hard enough.
Stop letting them take long rests so often. Have some random encounters ready to go. If they want to camp, make camping dangerous. Make it MORE dangerous than pressing on.
Or, if they are in a dungeon and they want to go to sleep for the day, pull the nearest room's encounter in on them.
The game more or less accounts for the party taking a 10 minute break between most fights, but sleeping/getting back all spells and daily resources? Nah. If a dungeon has around 9 encounters and you're supposed to do that with 1 or maybe 2 days worth of resources, and the party is doing it with 9 days worth of resources, of course it will be very easy.
Alright I did this encounter they were level 1
1 Duergar Task Master
1 Duergar Bombardier
4 Duergar SharpshooterI managed to get 1 pc to 7 hps
Besides that they did expend all their spells and 1 consumable. ( They have a lots of healing )
(2 have medecine, 1 of those having medecine has battle medecine, 1 is a cleric, 1 is a bard ). But then they kept doing 1 fight, long rest.
So my question this should have been difficult. So extreme is 50 - 50 odds ?
By "1 fight, long rest" does that mean that they fought those six opponents one at a time? That would be way too easy on the party.
2 Duergar Sharpshooter, creature 0, 4 times 30 xp = 120 xp
Duergar Bombardier, creature 1, 40 xp
Duergar Taskmaster, creature 2, 60 xp
That totals to 220 xp, which scales down to 176 xp against 5 PCs, an extreme-threat encounter if encountered all at once working as a team.
The Duergar Taskmaster uses her Take Them Down! ability to buff her team, Enlargens herself, and then uses shove with her maul to keep them away from ranged attackers. The Sharpshooters concentrate fire on the most vulnerable-looking party member, taking him or her down in one turn, and then switch to another single party member. It sounds like an extreme threat.
Expending all the party's spells and consumables with a few members barely standing due to injuries is typical of winning an extreme-threat encounter. The purpose of Pathfinder 2nd Edition is not to kill the party. The purpose is to make the players feel like they earned their victory through their awesomeness.
Now they're level 4 5 players, 2 (level 4 ) npcs with them
How do you think they would fare VS
2 Guards ( from DMG Palace guard, changed a bit, added shield removed halberd )
2 Zealots of Asmodeus ( from DMG )
4 Elite Hell hounds
2 Palace Guard, creature 4, from Gamemastery Guide page 206--similar to fighter.
Zealot of Asmodeus, creature 4, from Gamemastery Guide page 212--similar to warpriestHell Hound, with elite template so creature 4, from Bestiary page 205
I presume that the palace guards gained Shield Block along with the shield and gained warhammers to replace the halberds.
That is six 4th-level opponents versus five 4th-level party members. They are outnumbered. The opponents are a 192-xp beyond-extreme challenge to the party, and the party is a 107-xp moderate-serious challenge to the opponents. The party does have an advantage that the three types of opponents are not prepared for teamwork. If the zealots had prepared a Heal or Resist Energy spell to keep the palace guards on their feet or stocked some Alchemist's Fires to throw at enemies adjacent to hell hounds, then they would fill the support niche.
But they can work together as is. Imagine that the six are guarding an antechamber to a temple of Asmodeus. The palace guards are stand by the front door to direct or repel visitors, the zealots and hell hounds guard the back door to the temple proper, and side doors lead off the waiting rooms and store rooms. If the guards get into an argument with unwanted visitors and draw weapons, then the zealots each cast Shield Other on their neighboring hell hound and send them forward to incinerate the intruders. The party will want to kill the hell hounds, which will trigger the zealot's Swear Vengeance (I assume the hell hounds serve Asmodeus) and make them accurate with their arrows and divine lance.
In contrast, the party might be able to bluff their way past the palace guards before combat begins, to hit the zealots before they cast spells. Then the wizard could lay down battlefield control in order to delay the palace guard as the party takes down the vulnerable hell hounds. Excellent tactics would give them a 33% chance of survival.
Combat Changing abilities I'm looking for :
in 2e some undeads could drain level if they hit. That always brought a OH crap from the player. That`s what I`m looking for.
"Oh crap!" is fear and tension, but the only way it changes combat is reducing the base attack bonus, hit points, and some new abilities. Losing abilities mid-combat was really hard to track in the paperwork. Losing levels meant that some PCs became permanently weaker and unbalanced the party. Thus, Paizo removed the loss of actual levels from Pathfinder 1st Edition and replaced it with a penalty. In Pathfinder 2nd Edition all that is left of drain life is the drained condition, which is more like a one-week loss of Constitution.
Thus, it appears that Boumxyz wants dramatic tension rather than tactical combat. That would be excellent for a horror campaign, but such campaigns are outside my experience. My players want tactical combat.
So I’m hearing that the party is taking “long rests” after each fight, and I am hearing that fights aren’t hard enough.
Stop letting them take long rests so often. Have some random encounters ready to go. If they want to camp, make camping dangerous. Make it MORE dangerous than pressing on.
Back in comment #67 of Zapp's (GM Advice) Official pacing, I searched the PF2 Core Rulebook for all mentions of rest. "Rest" can mean a 10-minute break, a full night's rest of 8 hours of sleep, a long-term rest of 24 hours or death, the eternal rest. The phrase "long rest" is not part of the Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules.
I am guessing that you mean a full night's rest of 8 hours of sleep in a secure location.
My Pcs are rebels attempting to raise a revolt against Cheliax Theocratic Rule. There's been no dungeons and dungeons would have served no purposes towards the general story with current state of the world I've set up.
My consequences of them taking too many long rest was the main leader of their revolt which got abducted was executed because they didn't arrive in time.
Also with online session using roll20, I feel like random encounters as you say are much more difficult to come up on the fly as I would want.
( battle map required, which I never used before, and never had to use,
Monsters stats needs to entered etc..)
Random encounters don't have to be random. I remember back in 2012 in my Rise of the Runelords campaign, the 10th-level party was working their way through Fortress of the Stone Giants. The first day, they harassed the army of giants camped around the fortress (yeah, bad tactics to not protect one's army inside the fortress), and then retreated and camped. Giant rangers tracked them and I removed some fixed encounters from their rooms in the fortress and sent them after the party. The party had to teleport away. On the next three days, they harassed the army of giants and then teleported to a city hundreds of miles away and spent each night in a comfortable inn.
I grew bored with that. On the morning of the 5th day, as they awoke for breakfast, some strangers in the common room attacked them. A wizard in the army of giants had scryed them, spotted the inn, and the leader assembled a commando team to teleport to the city to take them out. One was a giant temporarily polymorphed to medium size, one was a spriggan who could shrink to medium on his own, and the other two were naturally medium-sized characters working for the giants (teleporting Large creatures would mean fewer people teleported). The players stopped merely harassing the army and got serious about infiltrating the fortress.
My current campaign, the Ironfang Invasion adventure path adapted to PF2, typically has one fight a day, because the party is hiding a group of refugees in the woods and has to walk 4 hours from their hiding place to have an encounter (they serve the refugees as scouts, so go out scounting before the refugees move). Thus, I have been giving them a lot of severe-threat 120-xp encounters. The tension is that they have to remain hiding, always erasing their trail, because otherwise an entire hobgoblin army will find them and destroy them.
Surely a revolt against Cheliax could have the same tension. The party has conducted some raids against Cheliax assets, so now the Cheliax government must want to hunt them down. Okay, the Chelish caught a main leader of the revolt and killed him, but that has not stopped the revolt. If the party did not adore that leader, then it seems only a minor loss. What if you make it personal? You sent them after a mere severe-threat encounter, so that they return a little tired but still battle-ready, and have an ambush of Chelish soldiers waiting for them at home (opponents more stealthy than palace guards and hell hounds). If they have good relations with the locals, a street urchin could warn them; otherwise, they walk into the ambush. They fight their way out and have to find a new place to rest for the night as Chelish patrols search for them.
Paizo has published two adventure paths about revolts against Cheliax: Council of Thieves (2009) and Hell's Rebels (2015).
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It sounds more like your issue is the frequency of the overnight rest than the challenge of your fights. Any fight is going to be much easier than intended if all the casters can freely use a full day worth of supplies on each encounter. And I don’t think you’re going to be able to balance the razor edge which is required to hit them with something that can endure that full and free use of abilities, but that won’t deal so much damage that a character or two drop each round. Not in the long run at least.
My suggestion would be first talking to your players. First because they may be perfectly willing to modify their behavior once you point out how the system is both balanced and enables a longer day of adventuring. And second because if you suddenly make any of the other changes to enforce that without talking it over they may feel you’re playing dirty and have just randomly decided to change the rule.
Then make in game moves to enforce the new pacing. Maybe there’s a time limit before the bad thing happens they've been hired to avoid. Or maybe their patron hired two teams to get the shiny and is only paying whoever gets it back to him. Or depending on the setup pick and seed camp sites between some of the encounter locations. If they don’t use one they’re harassed with minor encounters all night, which means more fights with progressively fewer resources and then they’re fatigued the next day.
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Maybe instead of trying to do one big encounter, have a couple of encounters chained together.
They are rebel against the theocracy, and use a guerrilla style warfare. Makes the big shots in the theocracy realize that all these attacks are the same group. Make them "ambush" them.
The players attack one encounter, like normal... But when they "retreat", another encounter is flanking them.
OR... the Chelaxians had a scout waiting for them to retreat to follow them to their resting place, attacking them while they rest.
They ARE evil Asmodeus worshipping evil leaders... OF COURSE they can use a troop as "bait".
But yeah... That's a style of game we pretty much all need to gain more experience in running in that system, because most people have only played/run games that have some time constrain or multiple chained encounters that come "naturally" with limited rest opportunities.
Yes, I know that”long rest” is not a pathfinder term. It’s a D&D 4th edition term, but many people use the verbiage in other games as well. As the OP used the term, I opted to move forward with the assumption that a long rest would be akin to resting overnight and doing daily preparations between fights, as opposed to another anachronistic term, “short rest” which would be akin to a 10 minute increments of exploration time spent recouperating instead of advancing.
One big fight a day versus a handful (or more) of encounters is a stylistic choice. I think that PF2 can pull it off just fine. Severe encounters will be your bread and butter in that case, where as Moderate is your bread and butter if you are doing multiple encounters in a day.
Back in the playtest, ...well I’ll put it in spoiler tags on the off chance that somebody wants to avoid reading about those encounters...
The Mirrored Moon was the chapter that focused on how well single, tough fights per day worked. Might be worth reading that chapter of Doomsday Dawn if that is your campaign's style. It leaned into exploration mode and reconning what he party was about to get into, especially so for the climax battle. Further, the actions/decisions/fights leading up to the climax impacted both the narrative and combat aspects of the climax. I felt it was a pretty good adventure, and the players were challenged by it throughout. So... might be worth your time to check it out :)
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Thanks everyone for your insights.
Do you have trick to get players to ask questions during combats ?
let me explain :
I have the feeling ( maybe a wrong assumption ) that using battle maps reduces the number of questions from the player.
I'm much from a theater of the mind approach where my player ( these are not my usual group they're great online player, which I never played with ) used to ask something along the lines of : [...]
You're onto something a bit with the idea that battle maps lead to less questions, but this can be a good thing, depending on the group. For some players, a map gets in the way of their imagination and they're happier without it, but many players get useful visual clues from maps that help them formulate questions and strategies. It might not occur to a player to ask you if there are e.g. street lamps nearby if you didn't tell them there were first, but seeing some trees laid out on the map, or you being prompted to explain something like "while this alleyway map doesn't show it, there's tall metal lamp posts..." can be the jumpstart the players need to really take off.
If the players aren't latching onto ideas, try to seed some for them and kind of lay the ground. It's also worth noting that if the players are relatively new to PF2 as well, it might help them a lot to have the maps available. There are a fair number of mechanics in PF2 that assume the players have access to precise data like their relative position to the enemies, and a lot of mechanics, starting with things as basic as the Step action, lose their luster and mostly become knowledge clutter if a map or accurate positioning tracker of some sort isn't available. If your players are still learning the rules, giving them a battle map to work from might help them get a better grasp of the relevance of their tactical options, which can in turn increase their engagement and confidence. Once they're engaged and grasp how all the basics come together in a clear and concrete way, that confidence can help them springboard into more creative problem-solving.
Not all groups/players are equal in that sort of play. Both in having an inclination for it or enjoying it. You can lead and encourage, you can even offer suggestions, though that last can easily feel like a loss of control to a player. But not everyone will follow through. I think maps are no more or less conducive to this than anything else. A good detailed map can inspire off the cuff activity, as people might see the trash can and think “hey, I can use that.”. A less detailed map can also work because it leaves more to the players mind to fill in. It all comes down to the individuals predisposition towards this kind of play.
You might try switching back and forth between maps and map less combat. Combat without maps tends to work best in tight spaces in my experience. This way your players will get used to filling in more details themselves. I would suggest limiting this to small encounters, and to giving encompassing but vague descriptions.
Such as that the office is full of overturned furniture and debris as if it’s being ransacked, but the dirt and cobwebs show it’s been that way for a while.
Hopefully as they get used to it they’ll start providing more details themselves. It can work even better if you use environments that they are personally somewhat familiar with. Your players may not have much of a preset idea that an alley would have a lamp post, but I’d bet that player who works a a line cook can tell you a dozen different improvised weapons that inn kitchen would have beyond the knives.
Keep in mind that PF style systems like many of its relatives doesn’t really encourage this style of play, characters are fairly self contained. And unless you’ve got a environmental campaign premise like a desert adventure people just don’t think about how to weave the environment into their character and behavior. And also that some people just don’t like or enjoy this sort of thing, which is also ok of course.
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Do you have trick to get players to ask questions during combats ?
...
I`m using player's input to fill up my combat area. Now I feel using battle map removes that. ( At least these players don't ask questions, they just assume what's on the map is what's there).Most of the maps I don't do them, because I just use a map. I keep telling them, maps are just there for the sake of positioning. Please ask any questions. But nothing comes up.
So any trick you have up your sleeves for this ?
I have used Roll20 for only two game sessions, so my players and I are still very much amateurs at battle maps. I used to draw a rough outline with an erasable marker on a playmat before we stopped gathering in one house.
Thus, my players still ask, "You said the ground was rocky. Can I hide behind a big rock?" And I say, "Oops, the map left that area featureless, but here are some rocks," and I drag over some rock tokens.
Likewise, one PC, Sam the goatherder, has a sorcerer dedication and knows the Telekinetic Projectile cantrip. He would ask about rocks and branches on the ground in the forest when we used a playmat and still asks with Roll20. Neither I nor a battle map would draw in individual twigs.
As a player, I can't be bothered to take up table time interacting with the environment when everything I need to defeat the encounter is on my character sheet.
Sure, I could swing off X to do Y for maybe Z bonus...or I could do something useful. The bonus is never worth the actions taken to set it up. And if the bonus is worth it, then every fight devolves into players scrambling around looking for strange environment bonuses instead of just attacking the monster 3 times and killing it.
So, either you don't need to interact with the environment to beat the encounter, so why bother, or you have to interact with the environment to beat the encounter in which case its a puzzle and not a real fight.
Also, I don't care how cool your monk is Bob, I just want you to full attack the monster so we can move on from this fight, we've got a whole stupid dungeon to clear out.
In those two sessions in Roll20, the party has been trying to clear cultists out of a cave. The mouth of the cave has shrieker mushrooms (they scream loudly if anything moves within 10 feet) as an alarm system, so the sentries were further back away from the mushrooms and cannot see outside. I guess that kind of environment counts as a puzzle.
My players took advantage of that. Sam the goatherder is a scoundrel rogue with expert Deception. He made goat sounds outside the cave via Deception checks until a sentry came out to investigate. The shriekers went off as the sentry exitted, so the other sentry did not see or hear the party ambush the first sentry. The party used the puzzle environment for their own tactical advantage.
Also, though a character can attack an opponent three times per turn in PF2, the third attack is usually futile due to the multiple attack penalty (though a ranger with flurry edge and agile weapons can make it work). Thus, most characters use one of the three actions for a non-attack action, such as Step, Raise a Shield, or Demoralize.
That extra action ought to give space for swashbuckling acrobatics that would give a +2 circumstance bonus to an attack. Unfortunately, acrobatics like swinging from a chandelier usually require two actions rather than one, so I haven't figured out how to make them work efficiently.
That extra action ought to give space for swashbuckling acrobatics that would give a +2 circumstance bonus to an attack. Unfortunately, acrobatics like swinging from a chandelier usually require two actions rather than one, so I haven't figured out how to make them work efficiently.I think its a matter of how few types of bonuses there are. You probably wouldn't give a +2 circumstance bonus to hit in 2e, that's massive. Most of the time, gaining a tactical advantage over an enemy is the flatfooted condition on the enemy. Feinting, flanking, and prone all do it, so if you've already used your Stride to a good position to flank, no need to do anything else unless you're the team Intimidate dispenser.
If you want to encourage players to be creative and use the environment you need to give large bonuses.
If you want them to just attack then you don't give large bonuses.
1 action for +2 to one attack is fine, it actually usually isn't worth it. If the player is using two actions and there's a chance of failure you really should be giving them +5, and even then it's probably better to just attack…
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(I slightly edited your post to condense space)
Thanks everyone for your insights.
Do you have trick to get players to ask questions during combats? Let me explain. I have the feeling ( maybe a wrong assumption ) that using battle maps reduces the number of questions from the player. I'm much from a theater of the mind approach where my player ( these are not my usual group they're great online player, which I never played with ) used to ask something along the lines of :
me: Ok you're in a street and these bullies are attacking what do you do ?
player1:Is there a lampost I can use to do a round house kick to the first assailant coming up to me ?
me: Yes please roll acrobatics, depending on result this will give you +x to your attack roll.
*player rolls*player2: Is there any trash can I can use TElekinetic attack on ?
me: Yes ! please roll...I`m using player's input to fill up my combat area. Now I feel using battle map removes that. ( At least these players don't ask questions, they just assume what's on the map is what's there). Most of the maps I don't do them, because I just use a map. I keep telling them, maps are just there for the sake of positioning. Please ask any questions. But nothing comes up.
So any trick you have up your sleeves for this ?
Heck I even tried this approach :
- you can have max 3 hero points
- I give you hero points for cool descriptions, overcoming obstacles.
- If you're saving your ass from death using Hero Point, you lose all of them ( the reason is to avoid them keeping them, I Want them to spend it to have them come up with more cool descriptions, moves to have more)
I think there's a lot of different things happening here at once.
One type of question that a map "answers for you" is the "so where is he in relation to me, can I hit him/outrun him/block his path to the wizard". If you want really tactical combat, where clever positioning plays a big role in the success of the party, then a map is very valuable. Pathfinder 2 does have quite a few game elements in it that are very geared to this sort of play: cover, flanking, reach weapons, attacks of opportunity, weapon ranges. Playing on a map gives players a lot of tactical choices just by choosing their precise positioning, that are very very hard to do in a theater of the mind game. For example, positioning yourself just so that for an enemy to get close to you, he has to walk into a bad position. Or playing a character with a bit higher than normal movement speed so you can use one move action to get away from an enemy and he needs two actions to get to you, so that you can do effective hit and run tactics against a boss that hits harder than you, so you really don't want to go 1:1 trading blows with him. That sort of thing is really hard to do in theater of the mind, and it's a major component of Pathfinder (1 and 2), as well as D&D 3.x and 4. (I don't know about D&D 5). It wasn't nearly as much of a factor in D&D 2 however, which seems to be your previous background. So this could be a bit of a culture shock for you :)
But another thing that maps do is give us a picture to look at of what the area looks like. If the maps shows barrels with fire hazard warnings on them, players will start coming up with ideas about those. If the map has a corpse with a dagger sticking out of its back in the middle of the room, players entering the room are certainly going to ask questions about that. So the things that are on the map are certainly going to factor into players' ideas of what they could do. But there's a paradox there: if the map is showing a lot of detail, that does tend to give players the idea that anything not shown on the map, isn't there. A very concrete picture leads to the idea that the picture is precisely what is actually there.
The opposite, a really abstract hand-drawn sketch on grid paper, can still be enough for the tactical game I described above. It doesn't quite prejudice the players about what kind of not-shown-in-picture things might be there. But that doesn't mean their imaginations are immediately fired up either. But a blank-er canvas does make it easier for you to paint it with your spoken description, since the picture isn't stealing that mental space.
You mentioned that you want players asking you about things that might be in the scene that they can use, like a lamppost to swing from. This is where we move a bit more into improv theater style play, with a bit more co-authorship from the players as they sugggest additions to the scene. The style of that is usually that you can add things that (1) don't contradict what was already said, so if you said the street had no lampposts, the player can't propose lampposts. If you hadn't mentioned lampposts, or just said it was dark, then the player can say "is there a broken streetlamp" or even just plainly assert "I jump down out of the window, swing from a broken lammpost and land feet-first on his head".
What matters is how much co-authorship the players have in the game. Some people play a very single-author style game where the GM is the sole author of the game world. Some people play with the GM more open to proposals. And some play with a very open style where players can just introduce anything they like that isn't contradictory with a previously introduced element of the scene. Now, Pathfinder and D&D typically lean more towards single-author play, but that isn't really required by the rules. It's just a cultural legacy: the multi-author style of play is something that was developed later in the indie game scene and has found its way back to classic dungeon crawler games.
So you would like your players to be more co-authory, or at least propose (not immediately assume) new scene elements to play off. But how do you get them to? I think it will take three things to make happen:
- Telling them that this sort of play is welcome
- When they do it, showing them by rolling with it that it is in fact really welcome
- Having another player show it in practice
The last step I think is what you miss most. I never did this when I began playing, and I learned it mostly from seeing other people do it.
That extra action ought to give space for swashbuckling acrobatics that would give a +2 circumstance bonus to an attack. Unfortunately, acrobatics like swinging from a chandelier usually require two actions rather than one, so I haven't figured out how to make them work efficiently.
I think its a matter of how few types of bonuses there are. You probably wouldn't give a +2 circumstance bonus to hit in 2e, that's massive. Most of the time, gaining a tactical advantage over an enemy is the flatfooted condition on the enemy. Feinting, flanking, and prone all do it, so if you've already used your Stride to a good position to flank, no need to do anything else unless you're the team Intimidate dispenser.
If you want to encourage players to be creative and use the environment you need to give large bonuses.
If you want them to just attack then you don't give large bonuses.
1 action for +2 to one attack is fine, it actually usually isn't worth it. If the player is using two actions and there's a chance of failure you really should be giving them +5, and even then it's probably better to just attack…
Not what I would have intuited from the bonuses the system gives out, but you do charts, so I imagine you're right.
Discussing the math might give Boumxyz perspective for giving circumstance bonuses to his players, so let me cover it.
The impact of a bonus is reflected in how much of a difference it makes. A +1 bonus from a +1 weapon adds up over time. If the character attacks with that weapon six times during combat, then that +1 is multipled by 6. On the other hand, if the +1 is from something that happens once and then does not reoccur, the +1 is multiplied by 1, which is a lot smaller than 6.
Another thing to be considered in PF2 is the critical hit system. If a fighter can hit an opponent on a d20 roll of 10 or higher, a +1 gives an extra critical hit. On the fighter's second attack, with a -5 MAP penalty, a +1 give an extra regular hit. A critical hit does double damage, so to simplify my math I count a critical hit as two hits. The +1 is twice as valuable when it gives an extra critical hit rather than an extra regular hit. Thus, a +2 to the first attack in a turn is actually 33% more valuable than a +1 to the first two attacks.
Value is balanced by cost. Putting a +1 potency rune on armor costs money, two-years wages for a 1st-level character. Raising a Shield for a +2 circumstance bonus to AC costs an action and prevents the character from wielding a two-handed weapon or dual weapons. A rogue's Nimble Dodge gives a +2 circumstance bonus to AC against one attack, so it is less valuable than Raise a Shield's bonus against all attacks for a turn, and it costs a feat and a reaction.
A flank makes an opponent flat-footed, giving it a -2 circumstance penalty to AC against the flanker and enabling a rogue's sneak attack. A -2 circumstance penalty to an opponent has the same effect on the odds of hitting as a +2 circumstance bonus to hitting that opponent. And flat-footed typically lasts through the second attack, too--the exception being flat-footed due to an unnoticed attacker. Therefore, rendering someone flat-footed is superior to the +2 circumstance bonus I mentioned above. So I am surprised by Kasoh saying that the +2 circumstance bonus was too massive and suggesting flat-footed instead.
Imagine that I decide to consistently give characters a +2 circumstance bonus to a followup Strike or Shove action whenever they jump from higher ground at least 5 feet higher to a square adjacent to the target without falling prone. This is not easy: Leap covers only 3 feet vertically, High Jump requires DC 30 for 5 feet and critical success for 10 feet. Instead, they need a feat to make it feasible, such as Powerful Leap, or a barbarian's Raging Athlete, or a monk's Crane Stance. The feat cost is minor for some classes, such as monk, so it is not balanced across all classes. In addition, it depends on the terrain. Without higher ground, this perk can't be used. Third, it applies to only one attack and that attack has to be a Strike or Shove. This is tougher and less frequent and less useful than taking a Step action to get a flank, which is also not balanced since it favors the rogue. Thus, it is workable. However, a +3 circumstance bonus would make it better than flanking, though still tougher, so I don't recommend a +3. A +1 would be an amusing perk, but not enough for characters to adopt it as a tactic.
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Quick question, when you say the party has two on-level NPCs with them... Are these fully statted allies? Because those could be throwing off the encounter balance a lot too. My rule of thumb is that NPCs should always be at least one if not two or three levels lower than the PCs if they accompany them into battle. Your players clearly don't need any help.
When things are stale, I like to mix stuff up with complex multi-layered combats. Rather than one giant nasty encounter, make it potentially one unwillable combat that they can break down into sections with stealth or with environmental factors, whatever. And if they just charge in and don't care? Wipe em out, yay!