Boring encounter designs in the APs?

[Peg'giz]

Hi there,
I'm currently running the AotS AP with my group and we are in book 4. While the first book was great and the third was good, the others lack a lot of good encounter design.

Beside the usual "one encounter a day" problem, we now also have a big emphasis on melee encounter while the setting is more geared toward ranged combat.

--- MILD SPOILERS AHEAD ---

Let's take the last chapter of the 4th book. The players (Level 8) have to fight through five encounters (CR 8/9/10/10/11) in rapid succession (if they take a 10 min break they get a disadvantage in the CR11 fight). The first fights four happen in small "arenas" (6x7 squares) without any special environment features or mechanics. Additional to that the players have to activate two "items" in each fight, which are placed around the middle of the "map".
The last, final fight, then take place in a larger space (~20x20 squares), but also no special mechanics here, no cover, just a plain room with some simple benches.
And to make it worse the enemy they are facing (only one!) is CR11, attacks with +28 and deals an average of 31 pts. of damage (or 23 pts. in a 30ft. line). And since it's a large melee enemy it will probably end in a simple "tank & spank".

This is also against a Level 8 party, who already spent a lot of their resources in the fights before.

I really don't know what to think of this "design", but for me such encounters really suck. They are not interesting or tactical challenging… just plain and boring.

[Metaphysician]

Without knowing context, do the PCs have some kind of forewarning that this final battle is going to happen, and the kind of context in which it will happen? It could be the intent is that they prepare beforehand to better deal with a foreseeable grind against swarms of melee-oriented enemies in close quarters.

Relatedly: grenades. Do the first set of encounters force the players via magic/plot fiat to *be in* the room, or can they toss area attacks into the room to soften the occupants up first? Tight quarters may force a lot of melee, but it also means the enemy is predictably within a confined target area. It also means that, if the enemies are melee-oriented, you can sit at the entryway of the room, have a melee tank block the door, and have the rest of the party shoot over/around them.

[Peg'giz]

They have a little time to prepare, but they have no clue about the amount of fights or the enemies ahead (beside that they are swarm creatures).

For the areas, it's a tunnel, where they have to do something at a specific point where then the enemies attack.

For the final battle, they don't have any prep-time/location benefit, since the BBEG is close to the mcguffin they are in this location for.

The "Tank" has an KAC 28 (Level 8 Soldier) and the BBEG has +28 on hit. The Tank has ~ 160 SP/HP, so 5 hits and he is dead (if he is at full HP/SP).
And "Blocking the door and firing over the tank" is not really something I call "tactical" it's basically a tank&spank ("we have to do enough dmg before our tank runs out of hp…"), not really a awesome Final Battle or?

[Cellion]

Spoilers for AoTS Book4:

The Dissolver's attack bonus is unusually high - about 5 points higher than the Alien Archive creature creation rules would indicate is appropriate for a combatant NPC of its CR. This is probably contributing to the feel-bad nature of sitting in melee with it.

But by far the worst part of this encounter is that the fight doesn't matter. If the PCs all fall to 0HP vs. the boss, the NPC finishes her ritual and the boss gets defeated regardless. Very much not a fan of this.

Regardless of my fight-specific comment above, I agree with your basic premise. There's definitely far too many encounters in Starfinder APs that simply pit the party against a hard hitting monster in an empty room. A monster whose sole goal is destroying the party and whose tactics block is either empty or contains the words "fights to the death". As you point out, this reduces the encounter to doing enough damage while the melee focused enemy and party member trade hits.

There are also plenty of encounters with cool tactical nuance and interesting terrain. The Dawn of Flame AP has had quite a few good ones so far.

[Metaphysician]

It sounds like the writers took the concept of "Entering a swarm hive" in the most boring manner, then. Pity. Also, yeah, it sounds like the boss monster is mechanically broken. If its attack bonus is that high, then it really should have some kind of *major* weakness to balance it out. Multiple or obvious vulnerabilities, poor mobility, glass cannon armor, *something*.

Though, this does give me a thought. One way to make boss fights against single powerful foes more interesting? Give them stages, JRPG style. So, if you are building a single CR 12 boss fight, don't actually build a single CR 12 monster. Rather, build three CR 9 monsters, each being one phase of the *same* monster. Once the first version runs out of HP, the opponent shifts to the next phase and starts fighting in a different manner. Mechanically, its a fight with three foes consecutively, but in flavor, its one single opponent with a lot of staying power and multiple different techniques of battle.

So, in the case of a single giant bug monster, it might go like this:

1. Phase One "Confident and Indestructible". The critter is massively armored with giant claws, and slowly moves around striking down foes. High AC and a single powerful melee attack, but low movement and no particular exotic abilities or defenses.

2. Phase Two "Taking the Fight Seriously". The carapace has been cracked and the claws blunted, and the monster now considers you a serious threat. The creatures AC and melee attacks are now more average for its level, but it now has some exotic defenses ( maybe magic resistance ), and multiple attack options like a ranged attack. The critter fights tactically.

3. Phase Three "Bloodied and Frenzied". The creature is covered in more ichor than armor, and intelligence gives way to madness. The monster has the highest movement of all the modes, and a fairly potent multi-attack, but is also vulnerable, having lower AC, susceptibilities, etc. It is not trying to win so much as to simply kill all around it, because death is imminent.

[Peg'giz]

I like the "phase" idea, even if it's a compute game concept. :)

Short experience from the encounters: My players (3 - Soldier, Solarian, Mystic) totally stomped them. How? Slow & kite...

[Hawk Kriegsman]

Peg'giz wrote:

Short experience from the encounters: My players (3 - Soldier, Solarian, Mystic) totally stomped them.

I actually think this is more the problem with encounters more than anything. My players routinely defeat encounters with ease and rarely take hit point damage. Combats rarely take more than 5 rounds.

In Pathfinder 1 a fight between an enemy with the same CR as the players was a tough fight more often than not. In Starfinder it just is not that difficult. The math way favors the players.

Take a CR 10 combat array.

165 HP, 25 KAC, 23 EAC, +22 To Hit 4d6 +10 kinetic ranged or 2d10 +18 melee.

Now my players.

1: Technomancer 134 SP+HP, 24 KAC, 23 EAC, +11 To Hit 2d6 +5 ranged
2: Operative 134 HP+SP, 26 KAC, 25 EAC, +13 To Hit 3D10 +10 ranged
3: Mechanic 144 HP+SP, 25 KAC, 24 EAC, +11 To Hit 3d6 +10 ranged
4: Soldier 196 HP+SP, 24 KAC, 23 EAC +16 to Hit 2d10 +15 melee

There is not a chance the CR 10 combat array wins.

Neither side uses any spells or special abilities. Assuming a battlefield like above.

Lets say he hits the soldier 100% of the time ranged and does average damage (29 points)or hits 100% of the time melee and does average damage (24 points).

It will take him 8 or 9 rounds to drop the soldier. In that time the Solider on average will hit him 5 times and deal an average damage of 130 points of damage.

The other 3 players literally could have a sandwich and a cup of coffee before even engaging and finish off the CR 10 combat array foe.

This fight is not even close.

Adding in spells and special abilities makes it even more lopsided as the technomancher uses explosive blast for 9d6 (average 31 or 15 on a save) and the mystic uses mind thrust IV for 10d10 (average 55 or 27 on a save). This fight is over in 5 rounds.

Yes you can mix things up, add terrain detail make the encounter range longer to nerf the melee soldier some, but it doesn't matter.

The PCs simply have too many SP and HP for the foes to go through.

The only way I have found to threaten my player is in wave after wave of enemies with no time to rest.

[Pantshandshake]

It should be noted that an encounter where CR equals the APL is designated as 'Average' in difficulty for Starfinder.

I presume that calculation assumes the entire party is not optimized for combat, which, let's face it, is probably not the case.

All things considered, creating a harder encounter is really going to be personalized based on party composition, player ability, etc.

[Hawk Kriegsman]

Pantshandshake wrote:

It should be noted that an encounter where CR equals the APL is designated as 'Average' in difficulty for Starfinder.

I presume that calculation assumes the entire party is not optimized for combat, which, let's face it, is probably not the case.

All things considered, creating a harder encounter is really going to be personalized based on party composition, player ability, etc.

I would contend that this is not even average.

My player's character are not really optimized for combat aside from maxing having a high dex for all, a max int for the techno and max wisdom for the mystic.

I agree with personalizing encounters to make them more challenging.

[Pantshandshake]

Hawk Kriegsman wrote:

I would contend that this is not even average.

My player's character are not really optimized for combat aside from maxing having a high dex for all, a max int for the techno and max wisdom for the mystic.

I agree with personalizing encounters to make them more challenging.

Well, an average encounter shouldn't be challenging. An average encounter should basically be a speed bump unless there's a hilarious string of bad luck for the players.

Stat wise, that's pretty optimized for combat. I'd also be willing to bet that the majority of feats taken by your players are combat feats. I don't necessarily mean feats from the combat list, but anything that increases the effectiveness of a given character in combat.

MY GM had a long period, maybe 6 or 7 sessions, where he gradually ramped up combat difficulty until he found the sweet spot he was looking for. I truly don't know the CR/math that got us to that point, but when he means to throw a very hard fight our way, he's pretty dialed in now.

[Hawk Kriegsman]

Pantshandshake wrote:

Well, an average encounter shouldn't be challenging. An average encounter should basically be a speed bump unless there's a hilarious string of bad luck for the players.

Stat wise, that's pretty optimized for combat. I'd also be willing to bet that the majority of feats taken by your players are combat feats. I don't necessarily mean feats from the combat list, but anything that increases the effectiveness of a given character in combat.

MY GM had a long period, maybe 6 or 7 sessions, where he gradually ramped up combat difficulty until he found the sweet spot he was looking for. I truly don't know the CR/math that got us to that point, but when he means to throw a very hard fight our way, he's pretty dialed in now.

Ok now this makes some sense. I have been overvaluing the CR of creatures.

So for my APL 10 party I need to throw 2 or 3 CR10 combatants at them.

They do all have improved initiative. The soldier definitely optimized for combat, the operative could be considered also, the mystic and technomancer not optimized.

[Pantshandshake]

Hawk Kriegsman wrote:

Ok now this makes some sense. I have been overvaluing the CR of creatures.

So for my APL 10 party I need to throw 2 or 3 CR10 combatants at them.

They do all have improved initiative. The soldier definitely optimized for combat, the operative could be considered also, the mystic and technomancer not optimized.

I mean, there's a ton of ways to make an encounter more difficult without really messing with CR. For example, I play a soldier that's primarily ranged. My GM really enjoys making me use my shoddy Perception skills to find the enemy. Our primary melee is a Solarian. If our GM wants to challenge him a bit more, he throws some fire resistant/immune enemies at us. That sort of thing.

I feel like we could go back and forth for a while as to our personal ideas about what optimizing entails. The basic gist is, you know what your players are set up to do, what they can handle, etc. You don't need to make a hard counter to it, I wouldn't suggest that everything is mindless now because of Mind Thrust, but throwing things with Evasion to mitigate explosive blast, or things with high spell resist and will saves to reduce Mind Thrust's effectiveness would be good starts.

[Hawk Kriegsman]

My encounter design has been flawed by the premise that a CR = APL was a challenging encounter. That is another concept from Pathfinder that I need to shed. I know have a better idea of what to do. Thanks for the insights.

[Cellion]

CR = APL was not a challenging encounter in Pathfinder 1E either, unless your party was particularly new or intentionally made weak characters.

[Hawk Kriegsman]

Cellion wrote:

CR = APL was not a challenging encounter in Pathfinder 1E either, unless your party was particularly new or intentionally made weak characters.

Well crap, there it is in 1E rules. CR = APL = average. No wonder the players have kicked my behind for the last 11 years.

I have been carrying this over from 3.5. Oh the horror and embarrassment.

Well its payback time.

[Pantshandshake]

Hawk Kriegsman wrote:

Well crap, there it is in 1E rules. CR = APL = average. No wonder the players have kicked my behind for the last 11 years.

I have been carrying this over from 3.5. Oh the horror and embarrassment.

Well its payback time.

Hawk... Get 'em.

[Kate Baker]

Thanks for the feedback on the adventure! I was trying for a sense of unrelenting waves of battles from the invasion, but I can see where that easily slides to boring.

I ran an abbreviated version of this book at a convention, and I just picked two of the tunnel battles and finished with the final battle, which seemed to be work well. That might be a good approach if your players aren't going to enjoy it as written.

[Metaphysician]

I think the problem is the word "Average". An "Average" difficulty encounter is *not* intended to be in the middle of the threat range, with about half of encounters easier and half of encounters harder. That would be an encounter of Mean difficulty.

The "Average" encounter is instead more like a Mode: its the *most common* type of encounter, a typical one. It is the easiest kind of routine encounter, and this is totally intentional. Difficulty is not symmetric in Starfinder, because the left side of the bell curve is filled with challenges and encounters that *shouldn't* be rolled out, because they are not dramatically meaningful.

Basically, the actual Mean encounter difficulty in a Starfinder adventure should probably somewhere around APL +1 or +2. After all, while you will almost certainly have tons of APL +2 and +3 encounters, and maybe even the odd APL +4 final boss fight? You will have very few APL -1 encounters ( generally only in situations where endurance matters ), and no APL -2 or lower at all. . . because you aren't actually supposed to even roll such an "encounter" in the first place.

[Peg'giz]

Hey Kate,
I totally see what the intention behind it was and I went a similar direction and skipped one of the fights. Additionally I added some storytelling fights while the player run from one tunnel to the next. I also moved the second CR10 fight into the main hall. This gave the player a little more room to move and also gave them something else to consider (defending the monks from this monster).

I think a "grunt rule" would also be helpful in such scenarios (enemies which deal small damage and die if they get one hit).
The tunnels would be awesome for some "swarm breakthrough" during a fight (e.g. in the third combat round four Dredger break through the walls and appear at position A & B).

[Hawk Kriegsman]

Pantshandshake wrote:

Hawk... Get 'em.

Thanks much!

[Metaphysician]

In most systems I like grunt rules, but I feel like in Starfinder, you'd be better off treating mass armies of weak opponents as either a swarm or an environmental hazard. Swarm if they are well organized and individually at least slightly threatening ( ie, they are only a few CRs away from being meaningful ), environmental hazard if they are not.

As an example of the latter. . . lets say you have a team of level 10 PCs, facing against a small army. Said army has various actually threatening opponents ( officers, vehicles, whatever ), but also like a hundred CR 1 grunts. Rather than swarm-ing them up, treat it thusly:

"At the start of each turn, each PC makes a DC X Reflex save. If you fail, role 1d4 to see whether you suffer some damage, attack penalty, AC penalty, or movement penalty from the grunts."

"You can, as an action, attack the army of grunts. Single target attack does half damage, multi-target normal, area attack double. Hits automatically, save fails automatically. After X damage is done to the grunts, reduce the Reflex save. After Y damage is done, their morale is broken and nobody needs to make saves anymore."

[Hawk Kriegsman]

Metaphysician wrote:

As an example of the latter. . . lets say you have a team of level 10 PCs, facing against a small army. Said army has various actually threatening opponents ( officers, vehicles, whatever ), but also like a hundred CR 1 grunts. Rather than swarm-ing them up, treat it thusly:

"At the start of each turn, each PC makes a DC X Reflex save. If you fail, role 1d4 to see whether you suffer some damage, attack penalty, AC penalty, or movement penalty from the grunts."

"You can, as an action, attack the army of grunts. Single target attack does half damage, multi-target normal, area attack double. Hits automatically, save fails automatically. After X damage is done to the grunts, reduce the Reflex save. After Y damage is done, their morale is broken and nobody needs to make saves anymore."

I like this a lot. I have run my players against 200+ grunts. It was a harrowing experience and the enjoyed it thoroughly. It took a long time to play out though. At one point to PCs were able to rest for 60 rounds to regain stamina. I think it took two sessions to resolve.

Another thing I use is to treat low-level sentries and guards as a trap verses an encounter.

Just have your sneaky person sneak up to them, and make a disarm trap attempt and then as GM describe thematically.

The players really love being told they sneak up behind the guard and slit his throat verses getting into a 2 round combat.

[Pantshandshake]

Metaphysician wrote:

"You can, as an action, attack the army of grunts. Single target attack does half damage, multi-target normal, area attack double. Hits automatically, save fails automatically. After X damage is done to the grunts, reduce the Reflex save. After Y damage is done, their morale is broken and nobody needs to make saves anymore."

Can you toss out some examples of a 'multi-target' versus an area attack? Or are you just talking about... like a Line or Blast vs an Explode?

[Metaphysician]

Pantshandshake wrote:

Metaphysician wrote:

"You can, as an action, attack the army of grunts. Single target attack does half damage, multi-target normal, area attack double. Hits automatically, save fails automatically. After X damage is done to the grunts, reduce the Reflex save. After Y damage is done, their morale is broken and nobody needs to make saves anymore."

Can you toss out some examples of a 'multi-target' versus an area attack? Or are you just talking about... like a Line or Blast vs an Explode?

I was just off-handing this, but what I was thinking was along the lines of things like autofire, where you can attack multiple targets, but you don't get to just freely attack everyone within a given zone. Better than a single stab or laser bolt, not as good as an actual explosion. If its too fiddly, I might just go "Most attacks do half damage, area attacks do double damage, and any weird middle case does normal damage".

[Lightning Raven]

It reminded me of the tight combat of Dead Suns and this was even worse in Book 2, because the monsters ignored the difficult terrain while the party didn't, they were all melee or stealthy assassins (one had a +20 to stealth, it was a flying starfish) and all battles just devolved into getting an AoO to the face or risking an AoO triggered by a Ranged attack. Our group expectation on this was much more having cool shootouts that allowed tactics, like the first encounter in Book 1, but the designs mostly just were basic Pathfinder with more guns and ranged attacks than normally. We were disappointed.