Why are hazards so damn powerful?!


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion

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Rysky wrote:
Quote:
But even setting aside the potential for death. Again, what about "You opened a door now you're bleeding out haha" is fun or good gameplay?
It teaches you to be cautious and that traps are scary in this edition. Otherwise traps are non-issue.

There's a difference between "being cautious" and "stupidly broken traps." You can make checks to find traps, make attempts to disarm discovered traps, and roll exceedingly well, but still have the odds so not in your favor that unless you sit there for 20 minutes staring at it you won't see it, or trigger the trap, or waste 20 minutes trying to disable it and have an unlimited supply of Thief's Tools as the rest of your party is dead (assuming you don't die in the meanwhile), and still be seriously injured or killed on-the-spot with RNG-favoring akin to throwing a Great Wyrm at level 3 PCs.

A player not checking the door for a trap or attempting to disarm or disable the trap is a failure of being cautious, and it should be punished. A player who adequately attempts to find or disarm/disable the trap but can't do so because the DCs are ridiculously high, or are expected to possess something that they might not have reasonably come across is a stupidly broken trap, something akin to what you'd find in the grand classic Tomb of Horrors, the place where every single stupidly broken trap conceived lies in wait.


Taja the Barbarian wrote:
Aratorin, average damage is 17 for that trap: 13 would be if you rolled d4s.

You are correct. My mistake.

Silver Crusade

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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Rysky wrote:
Quote:
But even setting aside the potential for death. Again, what about "You opened a door now you're bleeding out haha" is fun or good gameplay?
It teaches you to be cautious and that traps are scary in this edition. Otherwise traps are non-issue.

There's a difference between "being cautious" and "stupidly broken traps." You can make checks to find traps, make attempts to disarm discovered traps, and roll exceedingly well, but still have the odds so not in your favor that unless you sit there for 20 minutes staring at it you won't see it, or trigger the trap, or waste 20 minutes trying to disable it and have an unlimited supply of Thief's Tools as the rest of your party is dead (assuming you don't die in the meanwhile), and still be seriously injured or killed on-the-spot with RNG-favoring akin to throwing a Great Wyrm at level 3 PCs.

A player not checking the door for a trap or attempting to disarm or disable the trap is a failure of being cautious, and it should be punished. A player who adequately attempts to find or disarm/disable the trap but can't do so because the DCs are ridiculously high, or are expected to possess something that they might not have reasonably come across is a stupidly broken trap, something akin to what you'd find in the grand classic Tomb of Horrors, the place where every single stupidly broken trap conceived lies in wait.

Except the trap in question isn’t “stupidly broken”, it’s one you’re not supposed to encounter that early.

It doesn’t disappear or get easier if you come back later (aside from the POV of you being higher level), it’s not placed there arbitrarily or to be spiteful.

Has the trap in question killed a lot of characters thus far, or has it just served as a wake up call to not take potentially dangerous areas lightly?


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Rysky wrote:
Taking this dismissive stance, what’s the point of combat then?

Expected response, but I think that's too reductive. Combat is an entire subsection of the game itself. Huge chunks of the game are built around a robust combat system emphasizing player agency and tactics.

That doesn't exist in this scenario. You roll a perception check and if that isn't high enough you take damage when you try to proceed. If it is high enough, you then roll a thievery check. Either way that's the end of the encounter.

That said... if you're asking if a combat encounter can also be boring and feel like a pointless waste of time, yeah. You can definitely design bad fights too and I think if you run into an encounter in an adventure that isn't any fun and doesn't feel like it adds any value to the story, it'd be reasonable to be critical of that too.


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So question: if a level 1 character walked into an encounter built for a level 3 character, they'd have a bad time. If it has a level 4-5 enemy in it, a really bad time.

Why is this a problem when the encounter is a hazard instead of a creature?

Silver Crusade

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Squiggit wrote:
Rysky wrote:
Taking this dismissive stance, what’s the point of combat then?

Expected response, but I think that's too reductive. Combat is an entire subsection of the game itself. Huge chunks of the game are built around a robust combat system emphasizing player agency and tactics.

That doesn't exist in this scenario. You roll a perception check and if that isn't high enough you take damage when you try to proceed. If it is high enough, you then roll a thievery check. Either way that's the end of the encounter.

That said... if you're asking if a combat encounter can also be boring and feel like a pointless waste of time, yeah. You can definitely design bad fights too and I think if you run into an encounter in an adventure that isn't any fun and doesn't feel like it adds any value to the story, it'd be reasonable to be critical of that too.

It is reductive, but going off what I was getting from my reading of your posts on this.

“Combat is an entire subsection of the game itself” isn’t really a counter here. Traps and other hazards (and dungeons that house them) have always been in the game, I won’t say how long but I’d take a bet going back to DnD1 even.

So the added complaint is the encounter is over fast. So?

A “beefgate” as this is (aka something to deter players from heading where they’re not really supposed to go yet) isn’t bad design.


I have to say, from my experience too, traps become more interactive, complex, and interesting as the game progresses. This trap in question is a one-and-done event, but that is largely not the standard as APs progress, as far as I can tell?


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Rysky wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Rysky wrote:
Quote:
But even setting aside the potential for death. Again, what about "You opened a door now you're bleeding out haha" is fun or good gameplay?
It teaches you to be cautious and that traps are scary in this edition. Otherwise traps are non-issue.

There's a difference between "being cautious" and "stupidly broken traps." You can make checks to find traps, make attempts to disarm discovered traps, and roll exceedingly well, but still have the odds so not in your favor that unless you sit there for 20 minutes staring at it you won't see it, or trigger the trap, or waste 20 minutes trying to disable it and have an unlimited supply of Thief's Tools as the rest of your party is dead (assuming you don't die in the meanwhile), and still be seriously injured or killed on-the-spot with RNG-favoring akin to throwing a Great Wyrm at level 3 PCs.

A player not checking the door for a trap or attempting to disarm or disable the trap is a failure of being cautious, and it should be punished. A player who adequately attempts to find or disarm/disable the trap but can't do so because the DCs are ridiculously high, or are expected to possess something that they might not have reasonably come across is a stupidly broken trap, something akin to what you'd find in the grand classic Tomb of Horrors, the place where every single stupidly broken trap conceived lies in wait.

Except the trap in question isn’t “stupidly broken”, it’s one you’re not supposed to encounter that early.

It doesn’t disappear or get easier if you come back later (aside from the POV of you being higher level), it’s not placed there arbitrarily or to be spiteful.

Has the trap in question killed a lot of characters thus far, or has it just served as a wake up call to not take potentially dangerous areas lightly?

If we aren't supposed to encounter it earlier than we are supposed to, then how and why is it even possible to do so when the only difference between us encountering the hazard first compared to the encounter (or other rooms) that gives us the macguffin we need to overcome it is a simple fork in the road? Or a simple logical deduction of trying to gather information on someone who may have left clues behind, like in the first book? To teach players a lesson of "Hey, you chose the wrong path with no indicators as to which one you're supposed to take, so you die"? That's Tomb of Horrors level of ignorance in design. That place has a bunch of different rooms that require you to basically be precognitive in order to overcome them. It's like playing Battle Toads and expecting to beat that game the very first time you play it. It's just not gonna happen.

Our GM making an on-the-fly timed trap of a ceiling collapsing with players scrambling to solve the puzzle before they got crushed was a hell of a lot more exciting and intense than "You got crit 3 times for over 50 points of damage each, you're Dying 2, Doomed 1, and nobody knows what's going on because of scenario shenanigans, you die next round no matter what because now the trap goes and nobody knows nothing so they can't act to intervene, build up your new character now," Just for walking into a room with a giant, seemingly decorative tree statue with no indications that it's animated because of an obscenely high DC 35 Stealth check that even Master Perceivers of the highest Wisdom could only hope to notice 25% of the time.

And let me explain the differences between what makes either of those fun. In the first one, part of the trap went off and people had to make a decision based on the first part. No big deal, apparently, people thought we could just patch ourselves up for a few minutes and move on. However, the trap progressed into something more, providing a source of build-up and pressure while also previously getting some insight as to what the trap contained in terms of clues and information. We had no clue what to precisely expect with this information as it was vague, and since the party was somewhat split, we were down potential resources. Things looked grim, true, but as time went on and we were figuring it out, the pressure was building and building, and even as we managed to configure the gimmick and worked with it, the worry was still present as we were in a race of unknown time. The ceiling was coming down, but how fast? We didn't know, and in a pressurized situation you don't know how long you have until it happens; mere approximations. The real answer? 29 seconds of real time. That's how long we had until we were crushed, before we were able to figure out the puzzle and proceed victorious, able to solve the puzzle with our wit and with taking some risks in what needed to be done in hopes of ensuring our chances. And everyone who could contribute, did.

Compared to the second one, which just had something that the players would have no idea what was going on, had very little information present to them other than a giant stone tree with some hammocks meant to be slept in (misinformation for us, actually, making the hazard much more difficult if we followed that premise), with the only way to defeat said hazard was by going down a different path and acquiring something to disable the hazard, whereas even attempting to interact with said stone tree resulted in basically instant death over half the time. There is no build up (because all you see is a stone tree), there isn't much tension to be had (because there are no risks or rewards other than the interaction itself, because the hazard is almost guaranteed to whisk the PCs away anyway), and there isn't much payoff to be had here either other than "We stopped a tree" because the other route (which we apparently found out after we managed to escape) didn't have a nasty one-shotting hazard in it and could have still progressed the story in a meaningful way. There is no success or triumph because the PCs do not (and could not have) possess(ed) the tool(s) needed to overcome the Hazard, and if they attempt to invest some sort of idea it is met with damn-near certain death. There is only defeat and retreat because the players aren't equipped enough to deal with the trap and never will be because they simply made the "wrong" choice at the fork in the road. Imagine if someone put your life in-between two of their hands and told you to pick one, and if that one contained your life you could have it back, and if it didn't, your life would be forever gone. That's basically how the dungeon felt like to me, and it's basically exactly how Tomb of Horrors works.

The atmosphere and enjoyment between those two traps are polar opposites to me. I had a lot of fun with that first trap, making me want to deal with more Hazards, and that second trap just made me absolutely hate Hazards as a concept that I never want to deal with them again in any game whatsoever.


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Cyouni wrote:

So question: if a level 1 character walked into an encounter built for a level 3 character, they'd have a bad time. If it has a level 4-5 enemy in it, a really bad time.

Why is this a problem when the encounter is a hazard instead of a creature?

The problem is that the Hazard's numbers are even more specialized and skewed than a creature's. The fact that a Level 3 trap has the stats of a specialized Level 5 creature, combined with the tight math of this edition, should tell you just how powerful a Hazard's attributes really are compared to an on-level (or lower level) PC.

Additionally, Creatures can have weaknesses to certain types of damage, or suffer badly on a saving throw, or have weak Athletics/Acrobatics (making Grappling and Restraining an effective tactic), or just not be very durable.

Hazards have much less weaknesses than creatures do. Hazards are only susceptible to macguffins (AKA plot devices), Thievery, and things specifically spelled out in their stat block. They also possess universal damage reduction in the form of Hardness that nothing can overcome, and some of them can't even be destroyed or defeated.

There's also proficiency gating. I can be a Trained schmuck, but I can still swing at an enemy with Master Armor Class. Whereas if I'm merely Trained in Thievery, I can't even try to disable a trap.

Silver Crusade

Quote:
If we aren't supposed to encounter it earlier than we are supposed to, then how and why is it even possible to do so when the only difference between us encountering the hazard first compared to the encounter (or other rooms) that gives us the macguffin we need to overcome it is a simple fork in the road?

Because only putting at level encounters always gets boring?

Removing the hazard when you get high enough level would just be bad GMing/design

Regarding your rant that came after about 2 other Hazards, “you’re not supposed to go this way” style encounters aren’t bad design, and certainly aren’t “Tomb of Horrors” which is becoming a buzz phrase in here with no substance.

Silver Crusade

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Cyouni wrote:

So question: if a level 1 character walked into an encounter built for a level 3 character, they'd have a bad time. If it has a level 4-5 enemy in it, a really bad time.

Why is this a problem when the encounter is a hazard instead of a creature?

The problem is that the Hazard's numbers are even more specialized and skewed than a creature's. The fact that a Level 3 trap has the stats of a specialized Level 5 creature, combined with the tight math of this edition, should tell you just how powerful a Hazard's attributes really are compared to an on-level (or lower level) PC.

Additionally, Creatures can have weaknesses to certain types of damage, or suffer badly on a saving throw, or have weak Athletics/Acrobatics (making Grappling and Restraining an effective tactic), or just not be very durable.

Hazards have much less weaknesses than creatures do. Hazards are only susceptible to macguffins (AKA plot devices), Thievery, and things specifically spelled out in their stat block. They also possess universal damage reduction in the form of Hardness that nothing can overcome, and some of them can't even be destroyed or defeated.

There's also proficiency gating. I can be a Trained schmuck, but I can still swing at an enemy with Master Armor Class. Whereas if I'm merely Trained in Thievery, I can't even try to disable a trap.

Hazards can also be 1 shot, unlike creatures, meaning it’s possible to end the encounter without a scratch or use of resources.

Which was the point of contention of your’s that Cyouni was addressing, “Why have a hard encounter” [paraphrasing]


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I think it's important to note that it is possible for both the general set-up of hazards in PF2 to be "not broken" and for a specific hazard (or even multiple specific hazards) that have shown up in adventure paths so far to be poorly executed.

Hazards improve the game by adding the narrative element of another kind of obstacle to overcome, and by creating an impact to exploration activity choice (someone, or multiple people if the party wants even better odds at finding hazards, is making a meaningful choice between Searching or some other activity such as Scouting) - and are not even kind of like the "rocks fall, everyone dies" meme because that meme is describing a vindictive GM taking away any impact of player decisions, overriding all dice rolls, and declaring an arbitrary outcome, where PF2 hazard rules tend to result in at least 3 dice rolls or opportunities to sway the outcome.

Even some of the worst-executed hazards in the APs thus far aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. For example:

Spoiler:
The vision of Dahak hazard from AoA that certainly can appear to be not a hazard and also not something the party could see coming before facing it... but a particularly good roll to Identify Magic while examining the gate that leads to it can give a vague hint.

Similarly, the appearance (and heat) of the tunnel could clue the players in to a cautious approach, which if not the entire party enters the tunnel would mean some time to figure things out before bad things start happening - though that is a point of which I will say "bad writer, no cookie" because the text preceding the hazard stat block and the hazard stat block are in disagreement. The former saying "manifests once all of the CPs have stepped through he portal, or on the round the first PC attempts to exit the far end" and the stat block just says "Manifest [reaction] Trigger A creature is within the way station.

Then comes the fact that the vision, unlike most hazards, rolls initiative rather than does it's harmful thing and then rolls initiative so a party might have opportunity to figure out what to do about what could seem more like an elemental or fiery ghost than a magical hazard.

And the description, which hopefully the GM will use, even includes a (very vague) hint that this isn't a creature to be fought but some other sort of encounter.

Lastly I'll say that this hazard is one that is able to be given the "fall back and figure it out" treatment... but the party I ran through this portion of the AP not only didn't fall back, even as they lost a character to the constant heavy damage, but they also didn't understand what they could do besides keep attacking even after being told it was a hazard - because the PF2 paradigm of being able to use Thievery or dispel magic didn't mesh with the players' prior experiences or occur to their intuition of what might have a chance to do something.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
thenobledrake wrote:

I think it's important to note that it is possible for both the general set-up of hazards in PF2 to be "not broken" and for a specific hazard (or even multiple specific hazards) that have shown up in adventure paths so far to be poorly executed.

Hazards improve the game by adding the narrative element of another kind of obstacle to overcome, and by creating an impact to exploration activity choice (someone, or multiple people if the party wants even better odds at finding hazards, is making a meaningful choice between Searching or some other activity such as Scouting) - and are not even kind of like the "rocks fall, everyone dies" meme because that meme is describing a vindictive GM taking away any impact of player decisions, overriding all dice rolls, and declaring an arbitrary outcome, where PF2 hazard rules tend to result in at least 3 dice rolls or opportunities to sway the outcome.

Even some of the worst-executed hazards in the APs thus far aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. For example:
** spoiler omitted **...

Did you tell your players they could utilize those options, or just that it was a hazard?


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Rysky wrote:
Quote:
If we aren't supposed to encounter it earlier than we are supposed to, then how and why is it even possible to do so when the only difference between us encountering the hazard first compared to the encounter (or other rooms) that gives us the macguffin we need to overcome it is a simple fork in the road?

Because only putting at level encounters always gets boring?

Removing the hazard when you get high enough level would just be bad GMing/design

Regarding your rant that came after about 2 other Hazards, “you’re not supposed to go this way” style encounters aren’t bad design, and certainly aren’t “Tomb of Horrors” which is becoming a buzz phrase in here with no substance.

Not necessarily. There's a lot more variables in play when it comes to creatures in comparison to Hazards, and a lot of these things are the very flaws you point out that makes Hazards "not that deadly whatsoever". Additionally, the point is that if a Hazard is present, I should be able to solve or disable it, not realize the fact it's currently unsolvable while knee deep in the ethereal plane with little to no chance of escape. In the first trap example, it was possible for us to solve it and make progression based on that solution, and what made it fun wasn't because it was a hazard that could kill us, but the fact that we had only so much time before what we did didn't matter. But in that time, we had a chance, and that chance was based purely on what we as characters and players could do, not on arbitration. It might have been on arbitration if a subset of characters were or were not in there, but I'm sure the GM could've adjusted the hazard accordingly.

Here, not only is it not required, but it could have been skipped entirely if we simply chose the other path. Yes, it was a result of our choice, but there was really no nuance to this hazard outright murdering us other than it just "being there," and quite frankly it's as arbitrary as a coin flip since neither direction had any sort of draw to it compared to the other. And it's not like we didn't try to ascertain a sense of better direction, either; we attempted to find tracks, and came up empty (for obvious reasons, since the roll was pretty good). We attempted to detect magic (doesn't work in a magical dimension). We even attempted scent (other than the obvious, nothing was drawn to our attention). In short, 50% of players could have easily went in there and got insta-gibbed just based on basic probability, which is just bad design.

Yes, preventative encounters aren't always bad design, but they are usually telegraphed (AKA railroading) and there are much better ways to accomplish this that doesn't end up derailing the entire campaign by requiring resurrections or changing the story entirely with new characters that aren't anywhere near as engaging as the previous ones.


Captain Morgan wrote:
Did you tell your players they could utilize those options, or just that it was a hazard?

While they were playing through the encounter what I did to clue them in was remind them that they could use Recall Knowledge actions to gain information and explicitly stated "this is a hazard, not a creature."

It was in the post-play discussion that I told them about using thievery or dispel magic and they explained why those options didn't seem plausible to them.


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Rysky wrote:
”oh you checked for traps in this square but not that one so you didn’t see it” is Bad GMing.

No s*$% sherlock. But two things:

1) the room description was such that it was patently obvious that a trap existed (freshly charred corpses and burnt walls). It was supposed to make the players slow down and think

2) Because the book was badly edited the room description (see 1) was not in the right place.

So it wasn't actually the GM's fault (and fortunately no one died).

But now may I direct your attention to the situation reports of level 1 players deciding to skip ahead a bit and encounters a hazard meant for level 3 characters?

The one that the level 1 players don't expect to even exist because the clues are in the section that they skipped?


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Draco18s, that's a fair criticism, but it's a criticism of Age of Ashes, not of hazards in general.

My experience with hazards in general has been pretty good - they do a good job of scaring my players without being so deadly as to actually kill them.

THAT said, Age of Ashes does have a couple hit-or-miss hazards. In particular,

Spoiler:
the lathe trap in book 3 I ended up having to adjust. Mostly because it makes no sense at all that the trap perfectly aims its attacks at the creatures in the room. Based on how that encounter played out, there was only one person in the room when the trap activated... which would have resulted in that person somehow taking every single attack from the trap, which... if you read the description of the trap makes no sense. And is very very lethal. So that trap I did edit a bit on the fly.


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I like that the hazards are really dangerous, because if not they are only a bump on the road. I like that there is value in someone speciliced in trap searching/disabling, it´s another part of the adventure that is not combat and a lot of players like. If your party doesn´t have an specilist in traps, you should feel the risks, like if your party doesn´t have a Face or magical user, etc.

If your table doesn´t like the dangerous hazards, talk to the GM to dial it down. It´s like when a table doesn´t like long combats and like more social encounters, talk to the GM and he will do his magic.

Now, I LOVE the hazards that apply long conditions to the party:

AoA 1:
My party did trigger the mushrom hazard, 3 of them got spores so they got a sickned and stupified until they could remove them. That afected the combats ahed, and they are going to remember that hazard for a long time. That was a "good" hazard.


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thenobledrake wrote:

Even some of the worst-executed hazards in the APs thus far aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. For example:

** spoiler omitted **...

I partly disagree, however I guess this also comes down to party composition.

Spoiler:
After both our wizard and my cleric rolled very high on our respective recall knowledge rolls and our ranger rolled very high on his perception roll after entering the room we noticed that it is a hazard early on. However despite that valuable and early knowledge we seemed to have no way to disable it as we have no rogue and our ranger was trained in thievery only. Our wizard even had dispel magic memorized but due to the hazards level would have needed a natural 20 to succeed his counteract check. After our fighter found the hazards AC to be very high we quickly called it a day and made a dash for the opposite portal by the 3rd round especially as my cleric was not able to counter the trap using religion twice, which by the way seemed the only plausible way to counter or overcome it. We were lucky though as despite the very high DC nobody crit failed their saving throws for the two rounds we actually "fought" the hazard (low roll of 16 for AoE in the first round but a high roll of 28 for AoE in the second, which could have been devastaing on a crit fail), so our wizard barly made it out with 4HP left. If we would have been forced to stay any longer, e.g. in order to try to rescue a teammate downed by a unlucky saving throw, we probably would have faced at least a partial TPK. Being able to just bypass the trap made us wonder "what the hell was that" both ingame and outgame.


Ubertron_X wrote:
thenobledrake wrote:

Even some of the worst-executed hazards in the APs thus far aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. For example:

** spoiler omitted **...

I partly disagree, however I guess this also comes down to party composition.

** spoiler omitted **

Spoiler:

The Wizard would need a 15 in check to dispel if it was using a 3rd spell slot Dispel and assuming at least 18 intelligence for it, because in a success it dispel magic one level higher than the spell and that Hazard was considered 4th lvl for counteract purposes.

Liberty's Edge

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As others note, the Hazard in AoA 1 is level 4. Of course 1st level PCs running into it is awful, it's intended to be a nearly player-killing threat to them.

Going in against a level 4 monster would be just as bad, if not worse. A minotaur, for a level 4 monster example, does 2d8+10 on their first attack with a crit on a 13+, then 1d12+8 on subsequent attacks. If they get even two attacks that hit (and with 70 HP, they will), even assuming no crits, that's as much damage as the trap gets on a crit (a crit on the trap is 34 damage, the Minotaur's charge plus one greataxe attack is 33.5, assuming no crits).

Now, you can argue that adventure is badly designed if you have traps that lethal PCs can run into that early, but even if I agreed with that (and I don't, the adventure makes it pretty clear that's not what's supposed to happen), that would be a critique of AoA's adventure design rather than the Hazard rules. Which is a very different thing and would belong in a different forum.

As for the stuff in AoA 3, well, let's examine that.

Spoiler:
The lathe is DC 29 to spot as a trap. This means that, at 9th level, a Rogue or Ranger with Wis 16 and no Perception item will still spot it on an 11 (they have Perception +18 at 9th). The Disable DC is a bit higher, but assuming anyone is actually focused in Thievery, very doable, and hard to critically fail. There's good odds that a party can avoid it entirely. Like, almost 50% odds. It should thus, logically, probably be better than a creature not similarly available.

The lathe makes a total of 10 attacks over 4 rounds at +26 dealing 2d12+12 +1d8 Bleed. A Gug, at the same level, can do 4 attacks per turn all at +23 for 2d8+13, and still have an action left over (for, say, Rend) and has 15 foot Reach and AoO (with 2d12+13 damage) to boot, as well as a full 175 HP and the same AC as the lathe.

The lathe's offense is no-question better the first round (I mean, it hits on a 2 rather than a 4 and does slightly more damage), maybe even the second. But not by that much...and you had an almost 50% chance to avoid it entirely.

The Tree is a little weirder, and probably worse, but also vastly easier to shut down. It's DC 32 to spot as a problem, which is harder, though hardly insurmountable, but DC 25 Athletics checks are pretty trivial at this level (I'd expect a Fighter to have a +21 bonus), and even DC 29 Thievery means you, statistically, probably shouldn't have to deal with it for more than two or three rounds if someone actually works on disarming it. That person will get hit with a couple of AoO, but only gets disrupted on a crit, which aren't by any means automatic.

So, comparing the lathe and tree to a monster of equal level, I again come to the conclusion that, frankly, the monster is probably just as bad for the PCs. Unless the PCs have enough offense to take it out super quickly. Of course, if they have that, they could probably do the same to the lathe, and the tree is actually super easy to take out in a few different ways.

Now, all that is looking at the actual stats. Reading your story, I'm pretty sure your GM was actively breaking the rules in a couple of ways in regards to the tree. Probably not intentionally, mind you, but still. Or, I suppose, you were just ridiculously unlucky on the dice rolls (plausible, but can happen with any foe).

Spoiler:
I mean, it has AoO, but not anything that lets it use that on actions other than those that normally provoke AoO, nor does you being grabbed prevent you from doing things about it (in particular, you can make a DC 25 Atheltics check to free yourself and permanently disable that branch, of which there are only 6), though the damage does suck. And the Doomed condition only happens the round after you are successfully grappled (so not if you, say, break free and don't get caught again), and only on a Crit Failure on a DC 31 Will Save. That's by no means impossible at 9th level, but it's not super likely either, pretty much everyone should have a minimum Will Save of +15 by that point, and often much higher...getting a 21 should be expected.

Shadow Lodge

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Aswaarg wrote:

I like that the hazards are really dangerous, because if not they are only a bump on the road. I like that there is value in someone speciliced in trap searching/disabling, it´s another part of the adventure that is not combat and a lot of players like. If your party doesn´t have an specilist in traps, you should feel the risks, like if your party doesn´t have a Face or magical user, etc.

If your table doesn´t like the dangerous hazards, talk to the GM to dial it down. It´s like when a table doesn´t like long combats and like more social encounters, talk to the GM and he will do his magic.

Now, I LOVE the hazards that apply long conditions to the party:

** spoiler omitted **

For the most part, they are very annoying 'bumps in the road':

Player1: 'I open the door'
GM: 'Okay, you trigger a trap you were unlikely to ever notice (even with a specialist), get crit by it (because I rolled a double digit number), and are now at "dying 2"'
Player2: 'Okay, I guess we stabilize PC1 and sit around for at least half an hour healing him/her back up before proceeding with the adventure (or much longer if no one has the Continual Recovery feat).'
Player 1: 'One day, we will sing songs of my glorious battle against the spike trap of room 7A...'


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Kyrone wrote:
** spoiler omitted **

Yes, we had this all figured, however there are only so much spells you can have memorized in your 2 top slots at level 5...

Silver Crusade

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Additionally, the point is that if a Hazard is present, I should be able to solve or disable it

And I disagree.

Silver Crusade

Draco18s wrote:
Rysky wrote:
”oh you checked for traps in this square but not that one so you didn’t see it” is Bad GMing.

No s~+! sherlock. But two things:

1) the room description was such that it was patently obvious that a trap existed (freshly charred corpses and burnt walls). It was supposed to make the players slow down and think

2) Because the book was badly edited the room description (see 1) was not in the right place.

So it wasn't actually the GM's fault (and fortunately no one died).

But now may I direct your attention to the situation reports of level 1 players deciding to skip ahead a bit and encounters a hazard meant for level 3 characters?

The one that the level 1 players don't expect to even exist because the clues are in the section that they skipped?

Bad adventure and GMing (since they’re running the hazard as presented, “you have to specifically search square x on the ceiling”.

Which doesn’t really have anything to do with the AoA example since you’re going somewhere you’re not supposed to be, breaking and entering (which draws the attention of the local NPCs who come to investigate) and going into the staff only room. The door is trapped, it’s not “you searched the door but it was actually the door frame that was trapped so that’s why you didn’t find it”.

It’s incredibly tough, but it’s not intentionally made to screw people over like the example you gave.


As a GM if I know there is a Trap/Hazard/Monster that will likely kill/TPK the party if they go a certin way and it seems like the palyers are about to go that way I will subtilely direct them away or even outright warn them that they have a bad feeling about this. If they don't get the hint it's on their heads. My players after having this happen once or twice have become very adept at reading my clues and know if they do certin things it will get deadly. I will never spring something like this on the party unless they have been warned somehow and then haven't heeded said warning. I love traps and hazards when used correctly. Just cause an adventure says this is what's in a specific place and this is the #'s for it dosen't mean as a GM I can't tweek things to make things more fun for my players. I think the whole reason ppl are getting upset here is they are encountering traps they ether shouldn't be (IE skipping ahead) or they are unprepared for that encounter (IE no high per or thevery character or mage able to dispel ect). I like that every trap in PF2 has multple ways of dealing with it though some are easier and less dangerous this makes them more fun in my books. Again if there is an encounter creature/trap/hazard whatever that my players have little to no chance of defeating I will warn them and if they don't listen then it's on them.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

Not necessarily. There's a lot more variables in play when it comes to creatures in comparison to Hazards, and a lot of these things are the very flaws you point out that makes Hazards "not that deadly whatsoever". Additionally, the point is that if a Hazard is present, I should be able to solve or disable it, not realize the fact it's currently unsolvable while knee deep in the ethereal plane with little to no chance of escape. In the first trap example, it was possible for us to solve it and make progression based on that solution, and what made it fun wasn't because it was a hazard that could kill us, but the fact that we had only so much time before what we did didn't matter. But in that time, we had a chance, and that chance was based purely on what we as characters and players could do, not on arbitration. It might have been on arbitration if a subset of characters were or were not in there, but I'm sure the GM could've adjusted the hazard accordingly.

Here, not only is it not required, but it could have been skipped entirely if we simply chose the other path. Yes, it was a result of our choice, but there was really no nuance to this hazard outright murdering us other than it just "being there," and quite frankly it's as arbitrary as a coin flip since neither direction had...

Putting hazards that a dedicated specialist cannot overcome, that the party isn’t jumping ahead to face, SHOULD be of a DC that is not exceedingly difficult to find, but by level 10 that is already going be tough for nonspecialized characters to accomplish. By level 10, if you assume having a cleric with a wisdom of 20 or a rogue or ranger with a wisdom of 14 or 16 is having a specialized character for detecting traps, you are probably walking around effectively 3 or more levels behind a specialist when you factor in the potential for item bonuses and feats. At the very least you need to be thinking about how you could be using spells to scout ahead...or you can accept that hazards as encounters are a party weakness and, just like having a party with no potential for AofE or Energy attacks, there are occasionally going to be some very dangerous encounters because your party decided not to be prepared for them.

PF2 encounter difficulty is generally ramped up to a level where there is a legitimate potential for lethality if players have bad luck or make bad decisions. Building a heavily combat focused party can appear to mitigate that in combat encounters, but often comes with a tangible cost. Wizards and Rogues in particular have a lot of options that get overlooked because their value is outside of combat, but non combat encounters should be capable of being as campaign defining as combat ones.

Or if you want Combat only rollplaying, make sure your GM knows that and everyone at the table is on board. But that thankfully isn’t the expected default of all Paizo APs or else the company would never have gotten so far.

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Can I just say it that its confusing when players complain about mechanics they haven't had access to read so someone else has to point them out "Well yeah, that monster/trap was three levels higher than party"?

Anyway, I think hazards should be dangerous and not just "annoying", but I find the whole idea that hazards are easily bypassable even if they crit party to ko'd reductive :p Like in my experience, when that happens, party becomes cautious or starts using more clever tactics. And even then, there is story and design purpose for "non combat" dangerous situations


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Rysky wrote:

Bad adventure and GMing (since they’re running the hazard as presented, “you have to specifically search square x on the ceiling”.

Which doesn’t really have anything to do with the AoA example since you’re going somewhere you’re not supposed to be

Thanks for those words you shoved in my mouth. They're great.

1) I never claimed exact equivalence. I said, and I quote:

Quote:
What I'm hearing from people who've had these traps sprung on them is very reminiscent of the above.

That is, "I remember a situation similar to this from ten years ago."

2) You hyperboled the search condition from "anywhere on the ceiling" to "square X on the ceiling."

3) Ignored the bit about bad adventure design.

The trick was that the players are meant to go "there's a trap here" spend a few minutes looking for a trap and not find an obvious trap. Remember also that traps don't necessarily reset themselves, so its possible that the trap was a one-and-done and someone already one-and-doned it.

Except that the adventure mislabled the description block as the description for the next room (or similar, all I recall is that after triggering the trap the GM read aloud, got as far as something along the lines of "Some charred corpses fill this hallway--" and then said "Oh, I get it now," flipped a page back and forth, "They put that in a bad place").

You know, like turning left down a corridor instead of right and run into an animated tree that murders the barbarian before anyone can act and the mcguffin that turns it off you get by turning right instead of left at the junction...

Silver Crusade

1) I didn’t claim you did?

2) yes that was hyperbole, the actual search “conditions” were no less silly, the adventure/GM requiring players to specifics they’re searching the ceiling when they search a room is bad.

3) the example you provided is bad adventure design, having the effects of the trap shown on some poor sods is a good visual, requiring you to specify a specific area of the room you’re searching to find the hazard is bad design and a jerk move, Hanlon’s Razor there.

The example from AoA is not, the characters have to go out of there way to get in there and ignore the actual adventure and requests currently going on. The Hazard is hard to fine but it’s not absurd in its placement nor do you have to be unnecessarily specific in your search for it. It’s just hard.

4) I’m not really seeing how the two examples are comparable, one was an editing foul up, the other is two paths are presented and one is trapped. That’s not bad design.


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Deadmanwalking wrote:

As others note, the Hazard in AoA 1 is level 4. Of course 1st level PCs running into it is awful, it's intended to be a nearly player-killing threat to them.

Going in against a level 4 monster would be just as bad, if not worse. A minotaur, for a level 4 monster example, does 2d8+10 on their first attack with a crit on a 13+, then 1d12+8 on subsequent attacks. If they get even two attacks that hit (and with 70 HP, they will), even assuming no crits, that's as much damage as the trap gets on a crit (a crit on the trap is 34 damage, the Minotaur's charge plus one greataxe attack is 33.5, assuming no crits).

Now, you can argue that adventure is badly designed if you have traps that lethal PCs can run into that early, but even if I agreed with that (and I don't, the adventure makes it pretty clear that's not what's supposed to happen), that would be a critique of AoA's adventure design rather than the Hazard rules. Which is a very different thing and would belong in a different forum.

As for the stuff in AoA 3, well, let's examine that.

** spoiler omitted **...

There's big differences between a 1st level party defeating a Minotaur and a lower level trap specialist dealing with a higher level hazard. For starters, action economy. While it's true that a 4 person party will be hard-pressed to affect a Minotaur, they may have multiple specialists for dealing with said Minotaur based on group composition. The fact that 4 players can potentially affect a minotaur shifts the action economy more in favor of the players than of the Minotaur. Conversely, the single trap specialist, (which is what most groups call for,) will be the only one capable of dealing with the Hazard. A 1:1 ratio for action economy with Initiative being much more important in this situation than the other one means a Minotaur can be considerably less deadly. Sure, the PCs might not be able to run, but they have a better fighting chance based on the basic laws of math.

As I've also said above, proficiency gating. A trained schmuck can still throw a swing against the Minotaur. Sure, the odds of said schmuck hitting the Minotaur is slim, but they can still certainly try, and they might still do so using a weakness it may possess. And if they fail? There's others in the party who can still do so, meaning the odds of something sticking is quadratically increased based on the number of potential participants. Whereas if a specialist isn't able to disarm a Hazard, that's it. That specialist is now useless in that encounter and the PCs are forced to retreat to plan a separate tactic, assuming the PCs can do so without recourse.

Even despite that, there are universal tactics and abilities that players can use to make fighting a Minotaur easier that do not work on Hazards. You can flank or feint a Minotaur, making it easier to hit. You can Demoralize it, likewise making it easier to hit, as well as affect with spells or combat maneuvers. Is doing these things not in your favor? Of course. But it's still possible, and there are tools through using tactics that help push the odds more in your favor if you (successfully) use them. And the thing is that if you do so and fail? It's not the end of the world. It just means you won't have the increased odds to affect the creature this turn.

With a Hazard? You can't flank/feint it, it's an object. You can't intimidate it, it's an object. You also can't cast spells that affect creatures on it, it's an object, and most spells which can target creatures can't target objects. It might be much easier to hit regardless of these things, but chances are it has a ridiculous amount of hardness to deter going the route of simply breaking the Hazard down until it stops working.

To be fair, while I did say that lower level PCs coming across a trap they aren't meant to face isn't great design in general, I will point out that I already stated that even if we, as appropriate level PCs, came in to that trap, it was still a very painful/deadly one that we most likely wouldn't have noticed until it was too late, meaning it is still a very deadly hazard.


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Rysky wrote:
The example from AoA is not, the characters have to go out of there way to get in there and ignore the actual adventure and requests currently going on.

When our party went to deal with the henchman and managed to apprehend them, we decided to beeline it back (because we thought this was a priority at the time), which we learned upon our return that the BBEG fled town, leaving us with the authority to search their quarters for any clues as to where they went and to bring them to justice. And having a PC who was a part of the Breachhill guard was able to persuade them in letting us in to investigate. Which is how we came across the trap so early.

Liberty's Edge

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Rysky wrote:
The example from AoA is not, the characters have to go out of there way to get in there and ignore the actual adventure and requests currently going on.
When our party went to deal with the henchman and managed to apprehend them,

then you should have been level 2?


Shisumo wrote:
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Rysky wrote:
The example from AoA is not, the characters have to go out of there way to get in there and ignore the actual adventure and requests currently going on.
When our party went to deal with the henchman and managed to apprehend them,
then you should have been level 2?

Some groups went straight for the guy and ignored the wings of the castle--that's not hugely unusual. I was glad I didn't have that problem at the table, because even as it is, it took some additional pushing to get them to explore the crypts and stuff at my table.

In general though, I don't see this conversation really going anywhere. People with bad experiences of traps in this game think traps are too strong. People with normal experiences of traps in this game think they're fine.

It's up to the GM to provide some purpose for the traps there, and make it a roleplay opportunity beyond just a "gotcha" thunk. If there is no value to the hazard beyond "it's there," I can understand the annoyance. But if the GM uses it to highlight the dangers of entering a lair, or to show the trickery of a villainous character that to date seemed like a non-combatant, or to give the rogue an opportunity to shine and save their group some sadness... then I think it's valuable.


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Rysky wrote:
4) I’m not really seeing how the two examples are comparable, one was an editing foul up, the other is two paths are presented and one is trapped. That’s not bad design.

One was an editing foul up, the other is two paths where the designers forgot to put a sign saying "go this way first."

Its not supposed to be a choice. The adventure was clearly written for the PCs to go one way and then return two levels later.

I'd call that an editing foul up.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I think a lot of the specific discussion about the role of particular hazards and how they are set up in a specific AP should be moved to the AP discussion.

If the idea that it is possible for PCs to stumble into areas of the world beyond their abilities to handle is a problem for your table, talk to the GM about it. Maybe the GM had ideas about using a lethal trap to make it more clear that you were in way over your head, but for the dead PC, that felt incredibly unfair. How disruptive it is to have the GM retcon the death to an almost dead situation/vs have the player make a new character (perhaps one better at handling environmental hazards, or even the previous character's twin if the player really loved the build are all fine options for keeping the game moving.

It is pretty important for story development for players to be aware there are aspects of the coming adventure that will require them to prepare and develop their skills before facing. Complaining about the potential for the characters to stumble into those areas is asking for pretty fundamental shifts to the design of PF2, which is game built upon relatively quick vertical advancement of characters. It is possible for GMs to erect video game-like walls preventing you from going where you shouldn't, but that is not going to go over well if it is the built in default of future APs, which means that it really falls of the GM to feel out their players and get a sense of what makes the game feel fun and adventurous for their table, and that can take several levels of play to dial in.


Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
There's big differences between a 1st level party defeating a Minotaur and a lower level trap specialist dealing with a higher level hazard.

Question, what was the class and wisdom of your trapfinder? You mentioned they had a +5; that seems a bit low even for 1st level. I’d expect +7 or +8, with +11 for this particular trap not being impossible (though very unlikely).

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Rysky wrote:
The example from AoA is not, the characters have to go out of there way to get in there and ignore the actual adventure and requests currently going on.
When our party went to deal with the henchman and managed to apprehend them, we decided to beeline it back (because we thought this was a priority at the time), which we learned upon our return that the BBEG fled town, leaving us with the authority to search their quarters for any clues as to where they went and to bring them to justice. And having a PC who was a part of the Breachhill guard was able to persuade them in letting us in to investigate. Which is how we came across the trap so early.

You can infer from a quick mention in Part 4 that said BBEG shouldn't have left yet. Now, the book should probably have been a lot clearer about that and made sure to note that if the PCs visit their home before Part 3, they're present to keep the trap disabled and point the PCs towards the accomplice instead, but it's pretty clear it was never intended for the PCs to encounter this trap at level 1

Liberty's Edge

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Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
There's big differences between a 1st level party defeating a Minotaur and a lower level trap specialist dealing with a higher level hazard. For starters, action economy. While it's true that a 4 person party will be hard-pressed to affect a Minotaur, they may have multiple specialists for dealing with said Minotaur based on group composition. The fact that 4 players can potentially affect a minotaur shifts the action economy more in favor of the players than of the Minotaur. Conversely, the single trap specialist, (which is what most groups call for,) will be the only one capable of dealing with the Hazard. A 1:1 ratio for action economy with Initiative being much more important in this situation than the other one means a Minotaur can be considerably less deadly. Sure, the PCs might not be able to run, but they have a better fighting chance based on the basic laws of math.

The trap in question gets a single attack. Ever. The PCs likely take less damage dealing with it than they do fighting a minotaur even if they utterly fail to notice or disable it. Which was my point. The fail case is no worse than the likely success case of a minotaur (ie: they kill the minotaur before it gets more than two rounds of attacks...I'd call that a win, but the minotaur will do more damage than the trap).

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
As I've also said above, proficiency gating. A trained schmuck can still throw a swing against the Minotaur. Sure, the odds of said schmuck hitting the Minotaur is slim, but they can still certainly try, and they might still do so using a weakness it may possess. And if they fail? There's others in the party who can still do so, meaning the odds of something sticking is quadratically increased based on the number of potential participants. Whereas if a specialist isn't able to disarm a Hazard, that's it. That specialist is now useless in that encounter and the PCs are forced to retreat to plan a separate tactic, assuming the PCs can do so without recourse.

Uh...you're acting like the Hazard keeps making attacks. It doesn't. It attacks once and then it's done. If the specialist fails to deal with it, one PC takes maybe 34 damage, and then the encounter is over and you deal with the fallout.

Yes, that's more likely than four people losing a fight with a minotaur...but it's not more likely than the minotaur dealing 34 damage.

Some Hazards, such as the one in AoA 3, work more like creatures having ongoing attack routines and such, but those are generally still attackable, disarmable, or both even while their effects are ongoing, so they're not singular chances to 'fail' like this either.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
Even despite that, there are universal tactics and abilities that players can use to make fighting a Minotaur easier that do not work on Hazards. You can flank or feint a Minotaur, making it easier to hit. You can Demoralize it, likewise making it easier to hit, as well as affect with spells or combat maneuvers. Is doing these things not in your favor? Of course. But it's still possible, and there are tools through using tactics that help push the odds more in your favor if you (successfully) use them. And the thing is that if you do so and fail? It's not the end of the world. It just means you won't have the increased odds to affect the creature this turn.

Sure, but again, even a best case scenario of beating the minotaur quickly, it probably still does more damage than that trap. So...how is fighting it better for the party? It's debatably more interesting, but not easier. Meaning the trap is not overpowered for its level.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
With a Hazard? You can't flank/feint it, it's an object. You can't intimidate it, it's an object. You also can't cast spells that affect creatures on it, it's an object, and most spells which can target creatures can't target objects. It might be much easier to hit regardless of these things, but chances are it has a ridiculous amount of hardness to deter going the route of simply breaking the Hazard down until it stops working.

Sure, but there tend to be other options for dealing with such Hazards. In the case of the lathe, leaving the room literally just solves the problem. In the case of the tree, a total of 6 easy Athletics checks or one trickier Thievery check 'kills' the Hazard. Neither of those is impossible, or even that difficult. Its AoO make the Thievery a trifle trickier, but by no means impossible.

And you can still use tactics such as Aid, or buffs of all sorts, to aid in dealing with it.

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
To be fair, while I did say that lower level PCs coming across a trap they aren't meant to face isn't great design in general, I will point out that I already stated that even if we, as appropriate level PCs, came in to that trap, it was still a very painful/deadly one that we most likely wouldn't have noticed until it was too late, meaning it is still a very deadly hazard.

Again, comparing it to the minotaur, no it wasn't. A level 4 Hazard should be as bad to deal with as a minotaur, that's just how levels work. This one is undertuned if anything because, frankly, I think I'd much rather deal with it than the Minotaur. Like, by a lot. The lathe likewise seems to me undertuned compared to a gug.

The tree trap, contrariwise, seems maybe a little overtuned given the inability to avoid provoking AoO when trying to disarm it, but not vastly so.

So that's two undertuned and one overtuned. That's about typical for encounters in general, IMO.


All y'all are talking about trap specialists, in my experience the best trap specialist is a healthy barbarian to just walk up and take it!

Spoiler:
I'm half kidding.


Barbs would fine! They get expert to perception and have the points to spend on wis if they choose. Around level 7 they fall behind, but at 1st they’re not bad.

Liberty's Edge

Unicore wrote:


As a GM, the responsibility largely rests on you to make sure that you don't give your party no reason to ever make perception checks for 90% of the campaign and then give the party no clues or notice that there are very lethal traps ahead in a situation where that changes.

In exploration mode, assuming a normal sized party, I'm not sure why at least one PC isn't using the Search exploration activity under normal circumstances. That's basically all there is to "remembering" to check for traps in 2E. It's hardly an old school gotcha set-up, it's literally a programmed activity.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

As a player only most of the way done with book 1 of AoA, I'd really rather not have this conversation continue to involve the specifics of traps in that AP happening without spoiler tags, but this is a general conversation that I would like to be able to keep participating in, because the fact that hazards are "so damn powerful," is a major feature of PF2.

When my party has run into traps, they have been a sledge hammer, but at lower levels, most of these traps have been one time damage that made us have to make a choice about whether to proceed after only being able to heal back part of the damage, or waste valuable time trying to heal up to full. Additionally, it made us appreciate the specific environment of the dungeon we were in as something more than just a static back drop for our combat encounters. That feels like a very worthwhile purpose to me.

If the traps were coming completely out of nowhere, I might feel frustrated, but every time we have encountered one, it was clear that someone was trying to protect something valuable near by. It made us pay much closer attention to our setting and search specific areas much more thoroughly.


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AnimatedPaper wrote:
Barbs would fine! They get expert to perception and have the points to spend on wis if they choose. Around level 7 they fall behind, but at 1st they’re not bad.

Even better if that barbarian take Pathfinder Agent Dedication and Careful Explorer [or even better rogue and trap finder] so they don't have to search to find traps. ;)

Liberty's Edge

Draco18s wrote:
Our party's standard operating procedure by the time we finished the campaign was probably two pages long. We move 5 feet a round, search the walls, ceiling, and floor, every object, every object part of that object,

In Pathfinder 2E that is almost literally just a more drawn out way of saying "Everyone chooses the Search exploration activity." Though I suppose 300 or even 150 feet per minute in the slower version is a considerably faster rate of movement than the 50 feet per minute you describe.


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Luke Styer wrote:
Draco18s wrote:
Our party's standard operating procedure by the time we finished the campaign was probably two pages long. We move 5 feet a round, search the walls, ceiling, and floor, every object, every object part of that object,
In Pathfinder 2E that is almost literally just a more drawn out way of saying "Everyone chooses the Search exploration activity." Though I suppose 300 or even 150 feet per minute in the slower version is a considerably faster rate of movement than the 50 feet per minute you describe.

It was mostly because the Worlds Largest Dungeon had 47 authors each of whom did something clever without asking the other 46 and rather than have to explicitly call out "we're doing 'that thing'" every room we just kept a list.

And the list was mostly a joke, but it was an attempt to expedite the authors having written b!#!$!%& and we didn't want to deal with the b#+&++&~. But the list got longer because there was always some new form of b&!~+&#+.

The GM did his best to mitigate the 47 unique clever people trying to pull one over, but sometimes it wasn't as simple as "ah ha, you didn't search the TUMBLERS IN THE LOCK" but more like "you find a room full of thousands of flying keys find the one that matches the lock you need to open."

And no, I did not rip that from Harry Potter. That was actually a room. A room we never saw because the key you're supposed to find goes to a lock that doesn't exist because someone deleted that room from the map (but we did find a use for the scroll of Ice Galleon and yes, we dropped it on someone). I don't remember all the things, just that it got silly. The fireball-trap-on-the-ceiling was just a notable example that stuck with me all these years.

Liberty's Edge

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Draco18s wrote:
And the list was mostly a joke, but it was an attempt to expedite the authors having written b@*%#@$! and we didn't want to deal with the b&$%~+%~. But the list got longer because there was always some new form of b*@*&$*%.

I get that, but the Search exploration activity seems to obviate that sort of nonsense, both the requirement of pixel poking you're describing, and leaving it ambiguous whether PCs are searching.

A fair number of comments in this thread talk about whether a PC would think to search "there," or be in the habit of searching for traps at all. That concern doesn't seem to even remotely match the design philosophy of 2E and its defined exploration activities.

In any area where a PC group is likely to be operating in exploration mode, a scenario designer shouldn't have to worry at all about whether anyone is searching for traps. I guess if literally no one in the party picks Search, that's an issue, but that seems like more of a rules-familiarity problem than an adventure design problem.


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Luke Styer wrote:
In any area where a PC group is likely to be operating in exploration mode, a scenario designer shouldn't have to worry at all about whether anyone is searching for traps. I guess if literally no one in the party picks Search, that's an issue, but that seems like more of a rules-familiarity problem than an adventure design problem.

I mean, well, they could all be Avoiding Notice respectively Following the Expert, which is a problem insofar as you can not expect to find traps and go unnoticed at the same time.

So when taking a trip into the enemy castle you can decide either to fall prone to the trap in the corridor or to get noticed by the guard standing around the next corner...


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Ubertron_X wrote:
Luke Styer wrote:
In any area where a PC group is likely to be operating in exploration mode, a scenario designer shouldn't have to worry at all about whether anyone is searching for traps. I guess if literally no one in the party picks Search, that's an issue, but that seems like more of a rules-familiarity problem than an adventure design problem.

I mean, well, they could all be Avoiding Notice respectively Following the Expert, which is a problem insofar as you can not expect to find traps and go unnoticed at the same time.

So when taking a trip into the enemy castle you can decide either to fall prone to the trap in the corridor or to get noticed by the guard standing around the next corner...

Unless you have a rogue who has trap finding, or anyone with the pathfinder archetype. This seems like deliberate niche protection. There is a reason Thorin knew that he needed a burglar.

Liberty's Edge

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Ubertron_X wrote:
I mean, well, they could all be Avoiding Notice respectively Following the Expert, which is a problem insofar as you can not expect to find traps and go unnoticed at the same time.

If you're a Rogue, you most certainly can expect to find traps and go unnoticed at the same time. Right from first level a Rogue has the option to take Trap Finder, in which case she, at least, can search even while using Avoid Notice.

That said, in the absence of a Rogue who took Trap Finder, if the party consciously chooses to run around an unfamiliar area with no one looking out for hazards, that's a calculated risk and may sometimes lead to trouble, but I don't think an adventure designer needs to assume that PC groups are making that choice.

Note, too, that the party literally can't Follow the Expert until at least one member of the party has Expert proficiency in Stealth, which I'm fairly certain is 2nd level for a Rogue and 3rd level for anyone else. By 4th level any non-Rogue has the option through either the Rogue multiclass dedication and Trap Finder, or the Pathfinder Agent dedication and Careful Explorer, to search for traps while using another exploration activity.

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