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The way i read it, he asked the players to let him know if they were coming or not. They refused. They showed up when he assumed they weren't coming.
That's an inference that you are making, it is not stated that way in the OP's post.
Let's be honest, the GM puts in a lot of time preparing to run the session.
Some do, some don't, let's not glorify and overvalue the act of running game.
To not make small accommodations like letting him know in advance whether you are coming or not should be something players should be happy to do.
1. We don't know how far in advance they were asking the players to commit to attending. 2. The OP stated that this was going on before playing PF2. It was a known condition, and something that was prepared for in other systems. The OP just didn't know how to prepare for it in this system. Any judgement about their notification schedule is coming from your inference about the issue not from the OP's statements.
Even if it's as little advanced notice as before you leave (he says the 2 players quit because it's not worth the trip, implying that it's not a 5 minute distance).
They also said the game is on Roll20 - so "not worth the trip" might be a euphemism.
If you don't think it's reasonable, then you wouldn't be welcome in any of my games either.
Either implies that the players were no longer welcome at the OP's table, nor would they be welcome at yours. The OP didn't kick them out - they quit.
The rudeness of the players is not the topic at hand, because we don't have enough information to know if they acted rudely. We do have information to know that the GM did.
They showed up to a game unannounced. That's enough information for me to call it rude.
Some do, some don't, let's not glorify and overvalue the act of running game.
Actually, let's do that exact thing. GMs shouldn't run games for people who callously take them for granted.
I never said it was? But it IS what you accused the OP of when you said: "the issue was the response of hectoring them over whether or not they would be appearing" and "the issue was that the response to having to slow down was to ask the player to take personal responsibility for it an create a macro to speed play back up. Basically saying: "You slowed down play, you fix it." Which is understandably frustrating for the player."
How are those not critiques of etiquette? Serious question.
They are, but they are critiques of the GM's etiquette based on the information that the GM gave us. I am not making any judgements about the players etiquette because the GM did not give me enough information to do so.
The rudeness of the players is not the topic at hand, because we don't have enough information to know if they acted rudely. We do have information to know that the GM did.
Making inferences so that we can judge the players against our own personal bugbears over etiquette based solely on the limited information provided is presumptuous, and unfair to people who are not in this forum to defend themselves.
I can't really see how I'm making inferences about the players anymore than you are assuming the GM came at their players to ask if they were coming or if they could make a roll20 macro.
I'm beginning to think you and I just have fundamentally different values here, and you don't seem to be particularly interested in considering an alternative perspective or finding a middle ground.
I can't really see how I'm making inferences about the players anymore than you are assuming the GM came at their players to ask if they were coming or if they could make a roll20 macro.
Your comments are about the behavior of the players based on your perception of rudeness that you infer based on the limited information the OP gave you about the players actions. The OP made no value judgements about their ability to be at game consistently, you did. The OP made no value judgement about their notice given, you did.
My comments are restricted solely to the things the GM said that they themselves did.
That's the difference. You are filling in the gaps about the info regarding the players and making judgements about that. I'm leaving the players out of it and sticking to the facts as stated by the OP.
I'm beginning to think you and I just have fundamentally different values here, and you don't seem to be particularly interested in considering an alternative perspective or finding a middle ground.
If I disagree on your approach to jumping to conclusions about the players based on the poorly communicated incomplete information about the players provided by the OP, I must have "fundamentally different values?" Yikes man
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My Jade Regent campaign met Tuesday nights at 6pm at The Family Game Store. Well, more like 6:30pm, but we who arrived on time cheerfully passed the time talking and eating cookies. Two players often missed the game. David was on a flextime schedule and worked until the days' tasks were done. Dan worked evenings and his manager often changed his workdays without much notice. This wasn't their fault.
I adapted. The biggest issue was that David played a powerful two-handed fighter that could devastate high-level enemies and he loved combat. I took to writing extra combat encounters that could be inserted into the story if David showed up and left out if he didn't.
My view was that this campaign was the game store's game, not mine. The owners of the store were friends, so we accommodated each other. Keeping the game open to anyone, including passerbys and players with unreliable schedules, encouraged business.
Besides, adjusting the challenges to a different number of players was a lot easier than adjusting the campaign when my wife's character rewrote the plot (search my Jade Regent thread for the phrase, "Off the Rails!"). And under the circumstance the players forgave when my adjustments were substandard.
I don't hold GMs to my standards, since even back in 2015 I was an experienced Pathfinder GM having run one campaign from 7th level to 20th level. Nevertheless, hyphz's scheduling situation is manageable.
As for hyphz's situation with the PC with many elemental picks, I had a player like that in 2017. He used a homemade spreadsheet for his character sheet and often forgot which page had his weapon stats. I asked for a copy of the spreadsheet and copied it to a regular character sheet so that I could find his information quickly. I am not accustomed to macros, having adopted Roll20 only for the CoVid-19 pandemic, but I don't see why the GM cannot make his own macros.
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Now that the title of this thread changed to "Trouble with Adjusting Encounters and Adding Up Damage Runes," let me give advice on adjusting encounters. However, this advice comes straight from the PF2 Core Rulebook, Game Mastering chapter, Different Party Sizes chapter, page 489. The Paizo developers anticipated the problem of missing or extra players and gave instructions on handling it. Those instructions can work even with little advance notice.
The PF2 Core Rulebook, page 489, lists five ranks of threats in a challenge: trivial, low, moderate, severe, and extreme. Alas, they don't explain what those threat levels mean in terms of the plot. This meaning helps the GM decide whether the threat needs to be adjusted or not.
In a trivial encounter (budget 40 xp or less), the party is at no risk, unless they decide to take a nap in the middle of the encounter. A single enemy soldier of the same level as the party counts as trivial, beause he is outnumbered four to one. Storywise, a trivial encounter is a barking watchdog, or an angry farmer waving a hoe, more about establishing the setting than about combat.
A low encounter (budget 60 xp) brings a bit of risk. Someone in the party could get hurt, i.e., lose enough hit points to weaken him in the next serious combat. This does count as combat rather than story, but it is more a warm-up exercise. Or it could be a story that the enemy is disorganized and unprepared for combat.
A moderate encounter (budget 80 xp) is a real fight. The party has a strong advantage and will win the fight, but they earn the victory.
A severe encounter (budget 120 xp) means the GM is trying to get the players worried. They have to use some decent ability or tactics to win. If the dice hate a player, then a party member could easily drop to Dying 2, leaving the party weaker against the opponents and giving them an urgent first-aid task. And a party does not want to start a severe encounter at only half their full hit points. Since parties seldom know what threat level lies ahead, they prefer to not want to start any encounter at only half hit points.
An extreme encounter means that the enemy is just as powerful as the party. On paper, that appears to be a 50% chance of defeat. In practice, a skilled party can deduce and exploit the weaknesses in the opponent's defenses to win. Even with that advantage, the victory will be costly. This threat level is usually reserved for the final boss of a module.
By building up the threat level, with occassional chances to rest and recuperate, the GM can create dramatic tension along with versimitude.
For example, imagine a 3rd-level party has been hired to clear away a bunch of bandits. The GM created 1st-level bandit thugs (20 xp each), 3rd-level bandit scouts (40 xp each), a 5th-level bandit chief (80 xp), and a 6th-level evil spirit (120 xp). The series of encounters is:
1. Trivial 40-xp encounteer. A bandit scout is watching the road from a tree, ready to run to the bandit ambush group to warn them of an approaching caravan. She tries to hide from the party by remaining motionless. That scout will try to run away and join the bandit ambush group if spotted.
2. Moderate 80-xp or severe 120-xp encounter. An ambush of four bandit thugs awaits. Typically, they are a severe encounter once the scout from encounter (1) reaches them; otherwise, they are moderate.
3. Moderate 80-xp encounter. The party can interrogate prisoners or follow tracks to the bandit camp inside a ancient ruined tomb. Two scouts guard the entryway, since anything less would feel pathetic.
4. Severe 120-xp encounter. Deeper in the party finds six bandit thugs cooking dinner and sorting stolen treasure.
5. Moderate 80-xp encounter. Past that is the bandit chief's quarters. The players might be surprised that the bandit chief is only 80 xp, but a surprise awaits.
6. Severe 120-xp encounter. After the bandit chief is defeated, an evil spirit rises up angry that the party destroyed its servant.
Next, assume that the GM had prepared this bandit encounter for four 3rd-level characters and instead six players show up with their 3rd-level characters. How do we adjust?
Table 10–1: Encounter Budget, on page 489 has a third column called Character Adjustment. That number lets the GM adjust the encounter budget for smaller or larger parties. The Character Adjustment is always 25% of the full encounter budget, so technically, it is unnecessary. I ignore it and use simpler mathematics to adjust the encounter budget for party size, but the concept is the same. With six party members instead of four, the party is 50% stronger. So the challenges have to be 50% stronger. That is all.
The 40 xp budget of a trivial encounter increases to 60 xp, the 60 xp budget of a low encounter increases to 90 xp, the 80 xp budget of a moderate encounter increases to 120 xp, the 120 xp budget of a severe encounter increases to 180 xp, and the 160 xp budget of an extreme encounter increases to 240 xp. Exact values are not required; for example, using a 5th-level creature worth 80 xp as a 90-xp encounter is prefectly fine.
The GM could increase these the bandit encounters to the proper xps by raising the level of the creatures by one level, such as replacing all 1st-level bandit thugs with 2nd-level bandit bruisers. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to accomplish on the fly. Adding more creatures is the easy way.
1. The 40-xp bandit scout remains 40 xp. No reason to complicate this encounter, since it is not challenging anyway.
2. The 80-xp ambush group grows to six bandit thugs instead of four, 50% bigger.
3. The 80-xp guards grow from two to three, 50% bigger.
4. The 120-xp bandit thugs at dinner grow from six to nine, 50% bigger.
5. The 80-xp bandit chief gains a 40-xp bandit scout as a minion, 50% more xp.
6. The 120-xp evil spirit calls forth a 2nd-level skeleton champion (30 xp, from PF2 Bestiary 1, page 298) from an adjacent room to aid its revenge.
However, each player character gains the original xp for the encounter, not the expanded xp. That is the way Table 10-1 works. This method has the advantage that the four regular players receive the same xp they would have if the two extra players had not shown up. Their leveling up occurs right on schedule.
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While I agree the OP dug some of his own holes, I'm going to outright say that I very much disagree that players who are not only inconsistent attendees, but ones who don't give fair warning is, indeed, a player problem. At worst you can argue the GM should have said "look, if you can't know whether you're going to show up until the day of the game on a consistent basis, I think this isn't going to work." Expecting a GM to deal with that is, IMO, unreasonable.
It isn't unreasonable when the GM describing the situation says that it worked just fine for them and their group in other systems.
The point I've made multiple times is that us judging those players is just us being judgmental. The OP didn't complain about their intermittent appearances, they complained that they couldn't adjust encounters to match. The complaint that their attendance was an issue writ large came from us fellow posters and not the OP.
We have very little to go on about why these players attend intermittently, we don't even have anything to indicate that their unannounced attendance when it wasn't planned for was anything other than a one time thing.
So let's refrain from responding to the thing that a.) wasn't an issue for the OP and b.) not defined enough for us to really render judgement on.
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While your point on it having supposedly previously not been a problem is a fair one, I'm afraid I feel quite qualified to say that its a general problem, even if it previously wasn't with this particular group.
This thread is about that particular group. Further the idea that any of us are more qualified than others to speak about a matter of personal opinion regarding etiquette is a more than a little presumptuous.
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I'd agree that it's problematic when you have players who don't communicate their plans very well.
But at the same time, plans change and someone thinking they can't make a game only for their schedule to clear up and so they decide to attend isn't the weirdest thing.
If it's a consistent thing, it can definitely be frustrating and is differently the sort of thing that the GM and players should talk about.
But IMO telling a player they have to play some NPC you made up rather than their actual character when you have a problem with that player comes across as kind of passive aggressive.
Then I'm presumptuous, but I stand by my opinion.
You're of course entitled to your opinion, but the opinion is on a subjective issue - so no ones opinion is more "qualified" than someone else's.