Of Structuring and Encounters: A discussion on APs and how combat encounters in this edition impacts them.


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion

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I want to preface this by saying I am a Paid GM and thus started running everything Pathifnder 2E from its release. I have finished Age Of Ashes, am somewhere midway in Extinction Curse Book 6 and Agents Of Edgewatch Book 2.

I wanted to record a video to list out some key points but since I saw this thread exists and most points have been made I might as well contribute my experience instead of recording a video.

Age Of Ashes was the first entry that I had into running a whole 1-20 campaign and with it I saw a couple of points that the AP writers are missing.

Age Of Ashes:

Book 1 - Hellknight Hill is a perfect starter into the system that immediately goes into a dungeon delve for the entirety of the book itself going from the Citadel, into the vault, into a cave and then back to the Citadel. It was cool to see them going full circle like that to end up under the Citadel itself and combats were fun and challenging and that Barghest fight was a little bit much out of hand but overall the first book was a more than OK entry into the adventure itself giving out ample amount of starting information who the "interested" parties might be into the following unfolding events.
Key Points:
- Massive Dungeon Delving with various encounters that were fun
- Voz Lirayne was a first good big bad eclipsing the real bads which were the Charau-Ka's
- Overall great intro to the system and the AP's storyline.

Book 2 - Cult Of Cinders is the perfect example of how you can go wrong in an AP. The only chapter my players and me enjoyed of this book was the first chapter and the whole set-up of meeting the Ekujae Elves was perfect as well as hearing their story and partaking in the mini-games was SUPER fun. Going into unknown lands and exploring is a great idea in practice.
I played Starfinder before I started with PF2 and in Dawn Of Flame there is a hexploration segment which captures the beauty of Hexploration, to explore the unknown and give the players opportunities to see something amazing and unusual or never seen before. I would've given anything to go back and re-run Cult Of Cinders and just completely remove the hexploration aspect and 2/3 of the comhat encounters throughout and just leave the meaningful ones. Gerhard Pendergast was by far the most interesting NPC they encountered throughout the second book. In its execution it failed due to the fact that there was nothing interesting to explore apart from forest and an occasional temple to go through and the entire book worth of encounters is just obliterating everything save for some sickly kobolds. The final fight against Belmazog was the only interesting segment and saving Kyrion was a nice change of pace but overall I started to burn out at this point as the AP was just combat, after combat and presented nothing interesting and unique.
Key Points:
- Hexploration was executed poorly, instead of exploring or finding ancient ruins or temples that have some meaning, instead its greenery after greenery and occasional temple.
- Massive overflow of combat that quickly got boring.
- Highly unbalanced as when this was written they didn't have the final GMG monster numbers in.
- Overall very deadly and boring

Book 3 - Tomorrow Must Burn was a finally awaited change of pace with the Hag fights, but then it does a 180 degree turn back into its habit of fighting the same dull enemies in massive throes over and over again with little interesting encounter design. I found the slight roleplay present here in Kintargo a welcome change but it is eclipsed by the fact that it's still following the same boring pattern of dungeons and combats with no end. Laslunn fight was also a slight turn off due to how whack her numbers were. The fight itself as a boss encounter was super fun, but a TPK happened in order to conquer it after.
Key Points:
- Boring encounter design with samey enemies over and over
- Little to no roleplay present as it is just combat after combat.
- Massive dungeon with no overall larger flavor.

Book 4 - Fires of the Haunted City was a hopeful change of pace for me and my players since it offered a lot of variety of how to approach things thus making this book fall perfectly within an equal split of roleplay, social mini-game fun and combat and offered some unusual options like helping King Harral instead of killing him outright.
Key Points:
- Some smaller interesting NPC's with their unique side story
- Perfect split between all segments.

Book 5 - Against The Scarlet Triad was the pinnacle of the adventure that me and my players experienced both offering the same split in content as Book 4 but somewhat more varied and had a lot of fun mini-games and situations. There were combats that I cut out such as the 4 Elite Stone golems that the players fight at the start of the AP for total of 3 times throughout the entire AP series. Once in Book 3, once in Book 4 and past this point I had a thought of "Why didn't they bother creating some UNIQUE stone golem guardians instead of just the same ones over and over." As they pass through, the first thing that they experience was an amazing addition into the game The Promise Of Fire was a perfect vision of what they are to experience if at any point they fail. Into Katapesh itself was a plethora of interesting mini-games that finally stemmed away from the, go to dungeon, kill same enemy at least 10 times. Various fun encounters both roleplay and combat to end the unecessary variation of dull enemies.
The final chapter had some minor repeat but it was not as troublesome as the previous books.
Key Points:
- An adventure should play like this with various things happening that are interesting and captivate the attention to the players. The minigames and overall structure of the AP make it fun to go through since the order of things are done just right as a fine change of pace.
- Overall freedom for the players to decide what they want to tackle first.

Book 6 - Broken Promises is the first book to ever introduce a flavorful and real NPC, and by real I mean having moral dilemmas. Mengkare the great Golden Dragon strayed from his path of good turning Promise into a very disgusting settlement where he decides your very fate. An absolutely great finish to the AP but with one very glaring issue. Dahak itself was made into the moss underwhelming final fight that I have ever seen in my TTRPG career. Imagine being a Dragon God, but having the same generic powers that everyone else has. As we started the fight everyone kind of devolved from a serious final epic encounter to a laughing joke as he was absolutely getting destroyed by the PC's. Mengkare's Ritual does help in making this very easy, but the way it was created made the fight super easy if you manage to not kill Mengkare and save Jonivar makes the final chapter über easy. Since the length of end game combat encounters was too long for anyones likng we elected to skip past the in between encounters in Alsetas' Landing saying that the PC's defeat the enemies with great ease.

I want to state that most of the issues I bring up here a either gone or appear slightly in Extinction Curse and Edgewatch but it feels like the AP format could be changed to offer slightly more varied play. I wholehearedly agree with Errant Mercenary's comment and this could bring new light to AP's. Most NPC's feel generic and without personality. Age Of Ashes Big bads have the most meaningless backstory making them literally sound like "Hurr Durr Evil". In Extinction Curse and Agents of Edgewatch having the bads shown in a slightly different light throughout the story which is a really good start but it can always be improved upon.

Errant Mercenary:
Errant Mercenary wrote:

APS AND THE X FACTOR

- Good NPCs
- Themed
- Great locales
- Passable writing (sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible)
- Great skeleton to build on
- Good enough to pick and play after a read

WHAT I WANT THEM TO INVEST MORE INTO
- Making interesting scenarious, where the meat of the product is towards making parts click, and giving the GM the tools to put the players in the spotlight and bring each player something.
- Less passive backstory. Checkovs gun, I want the APs to present a more tangible access to the information given. Of course much is to inspire the GM, but there is TOO MUCH information the players will NEVER KNOW. Always a hot topic discussion with APs.
- Expanded toolbox. The Gazette is great, the items, all that. Build on it, extra variables to pluck from are great.

A GM does not need help sprinkling the goblins from a list accross a massive dungon. This becomes second nature, and with the basic list, context and short description they'll be fine.
What a GM finds difficult is the ambiance, the scenario, the tools to make players come out of that cocoon and provide interesting, meaningful scenarios. (Combat can achieve that, but interesting combat. Not deadly, interesting.)

COMBAT
- Too many combats.
- Too many irrelevant combats.
- Too many unchallenging, resource-taxing, xp-table-fillng combats.

Why and what is happening
I think the XP track in Pathfinder and their adherence in it throughout the APs is causing an oversaturation of meaningless, filler combats. Whilst it is important to give guidelines both for authors and gms, I do not believe this helps story telling or creating an interesting environment. It is a tax.
There is baggage in the system and we have the dungeon syndrome still. Fine. It has uses, good reference for quick monsters. Some tables also play this style.

Suggestion
Pick and Choose table/short description, of the creatures found, quick why and then suggestion encounters.
Keep the 1 or 2 exotic encounter and highlight that one, making it more interesting. The tables that feel they must have those grindy lower level encounters can just pluck from the pick and choose. We dont need the backstory of every single entity, specially when there are few avenues to interact with said backstory.

summary
Better fewer, higher quality, interesting fights, with some modular addons for flexibility.

AMOUNT OF DUNGEON
- Lot of dungeon. Oh gawds some modules are just dungeon. Then the next module is half RP, 1/4 minigame, 1/4 dungeon.
- Dungeons feel shoehorned in, sometimes with little context
- Dungeons are too long and soon loose context and believability

Why and what is happening
APs are just too long, they stretch the story and need filler episodes. That's fine, but it takes over.
Dungeons are what this hobby came from. There is some sacred cows here. Also how some groups prefer to play.
XP needs to be awarded, and monsters are XP. Needing to show the work to get neat numbers in XP imposes strict rules.

Suggestion
- Cut down dungeons to always 1/2 or less of AP.
- Consider shortening APs or providing more toolbox space in them. (3 volume APs are coming, though I think the sweet number is 4)
- Do like PFS and provide level ranges for encounters, with variantions.
- Do provide maps since those are great, perhaps in a more modular way with only beginning/interesting parts/end in a set way, and not tied to particular encounters

MINIGAMES AND SUBSYSTEMS
- Hit or miss with this, but always interesting to see the implementation and drives the theme.

Suggestion
- Shorter dungeons could allow for better implementation and more relevancy.

INCOHERENT STORY
- Sometimes what happened the last volume is thrown out or forgotten

Why and what is happening
- Multiple authors writing almost simultaneously, or back and forths, in short super difficult to write something relying on the previous volume if that is still in production.
- Writing a massive story for a hobby like this is excruciatingly different, they need standarisation and rigidness.

Suggestion
- 2 volumes per Author (or different communication, I dont know the ins so cant really comment much).
- Less dungeon space gives rise to more story planning or alternative scenario exploration and planning.

FORMATTING
- Clearer formatting, more modular, allows for faster on the fly adjustments by the game.
- The more rigid the story is the easier it is to break the flow, like memorising a speech vs knowing the gist of it well and the subject matter real well.

Hopefully Paizo designers read this so we could have more flavorful stories to tell in varied ways...


Errant Mercenary wrote:
2 volumes per Author (or different communication, I dont know the ins so cant really comment much).

I know I read a post by Sean K. Reynolds back in the early 00s where he was explaining why adventures weren't overpriced, and he mentioned that at Wizards, 32 pages of product was about one month of work for the designer (before editing, art, and all the other stuff that's done before we have something actually useful). By that standard, a whole AP is about a year and a half of work, and two parts is about half a year.

I'll add that I don't know if Paizo expects more or less from its designers than Wizards of the early 00s did, but at least it's some form of benchmark.


Sporkedup wrote:

I really wish early books would be much more full of mystery-solving, social encounters, exploration/survival, I dunno. Players seem to want to get to know their characters and their surroundings but it feels like a fight against the AP at that point to allow significant roleplay in early on.

The current pattern of leveling is 4-4-3-3-3-3, right? What if it looked more like 3-4-3-4-3-3 or something? So that book one breathes a bit, and no two books of four full level grinds are back to back?

I so agree with this. That would probably be the easiest thing Paizo could do with their APs. Other things they could do:

1. Abandon XP-based leveling as the default and reduce the number of combat* encounters, perhaps with the inclusion of text to the effect of "If you are using XP-based leveling, you'd need to add some encounters to fill this up. Some ideas would be..." followed by 5-10 one-sentence ideas for things to add in.

2. Abandon the mandate that an AP has to start at level 1 and end at level 20. PF1 APs rarely went all the way to 20, but I think that's because the game didn't really work at high levels. I am told that PF2 does, so they want to support it.

3. Make APs have more than six parts. This would, I think, be the least likely given how Paizo's whole publishing schedule is based around six monthly parts to an AP. But I could see an experiment where they do a three-part "half-path" (like Abomination Vaults) followed by a nine-part expanded AP where each part gets 2-3 levels instead and see how that works out.

4. Make individual AP parts bigger, 128 pages instead of 96. Assuming a similar page count is spent on the Toolbox stuff, that would increase the adventure page count by almost 50%. Of course, it would also make APs more expensive, likely to the tune of $30-$35 per installment. It would also be a higher workload for Paizo, and I get the impression that they're already spread fairly thin.

Of course, this assumes that Paizo wants to reduce the dungeoneering factor in their adventures, which is not a given.

* I use "combat encounter" as shorthand for "a group of creatures stand between the PCs and their goal and have to be dealt with somehow." This does not necessarily mean combat — particularly if you have a flexible GM, some of these can often be solved by talking or something similar, but combat is usually the default.


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I think drastic changes to AP development (as many of these suggestions are) would require a lot of market research which would be a hefty investment. APs are essentially Paizo's flagship products, and which make Paizo stand above the other companies (IMO). Any shakeup will cause customer loss initially, simply because now they'd be offering a different product, a product which precedes even Pathfinder.
No customer wants Paizo to pull a New Coke debacle.
And look at how the PF2 playtest feedback sometimes was polar opposite to the input from the discussions on the boards. Paizo's in a rough spot with everyone pulling them in different directions.

Which is to say, for major changes you want implemented, you're going to need some hard numbers to back it up, and I doubt they're available, and even then there may be reluctance. (New Coke actually had the market research supporting it.)

Don't get me wrong, a lot of these arguments makes sense, except so do the arguments of those who disagree with you. And many who like APs larger structure aren't going to feel so compelled to contribute, even if they do surf the boards. We all have our presuppositions and expectations, and they vary. As do play outcomes. Were I to judge an AP's difficulty by the feedback I hear, I wouldn't have a clue. We've got the gamut from the guy reporting TPKs every other week (not kidding) to the ones saying their parties went through without a loss (or only due to players moving, etc.).*
I think we might get somewhere with asking for a more flexible product. Though heck, I've met several GMs who convert APs to other systems they say with little effort, which seems pretty flexible to me. But maybe Paizo could include simple tools, symbols, guidelines for different styles of campaign, much like they added the benchmark leveling when asked years ago. But the products do, and likely should/must, follow PF2's CRB guidelines. Without changing those, I can't see changing the APs XP/treasure/encounter norms. I prefer combats over arbitrary XP awards (like for climbing a hill or watching an illusion tell a story), yet meaty story rewards require a healthy word count and have an even harder time accounting for all the PC personalities! Combat's simpler in that sense, and quite expected by many tables.

Yet please, could we break the fight/lull/fight/lull cycle (especially where the fight's all fall in the same difficulty range)? Sometimes you gotta fight when your shield's battered, your Rage has expired, and your Focus spell's unavailable. Suck it up, Hero! But neither worry too much because the AP has accounted for your weakened state. :)

*A significant factor I've noted is the presence/absence of a dedicated frontliner like a Champion or shield Fighter. Seems to have big impact.
As does thinking one has to push on when really you need to do Medicine even if it does seem to take an inordinate amount of time.


Also, from a GM utility standpoint, it is easier to add more social encounters to any given AP. You can make whatever NPCs, personalities, and etc. that you need to get it done.

What is more difficult (to me, and perhaps to others) is nice maps and encounter scenarios. APs with large dungeons provide all that and more.

I don't need Paizo's help to give things personality, let the PCs know when to rest, how to resolve a combat peacefully, or just remove extraneous encounters. Cutting is easy.

What I need is maps. Maps and Stat blocks. Maps, stat blocks, and nice artwork. Maps, Stats, Art, and an interesting adventure premise. Which APs provide.

Also, unpopular perhaps inflammatory opinion: Milestone leveling is for lazy GMs. I know. I use it. The reward system gives two things in this game: Treasure and Levels. By handing out levels whenever you want (or as guided) it reduces the reward aspect and it becomes an expectation. They aren't working for it. To get levels all they have to do is survive. And it overvalues treasure as the reward system. (Some players--I'm sure all your wonderful players are different--can be motivated by plot related things, or intangible character rewards like land ownership or political marriages, but those players are rare, in my experience)


MadMars wrote:
Angel Hunter D wrote:
2: Plot matters in an RPG. If it doesn't advance the plot, it shouldn't be an encounter.

I feel like is much more true of a novel than an RPG. I often have encounters, locations, details, items and characters who have absolutely nothing to do with the plot so that the world feels much more real and doesn't revolve around the players. In my group, this seems to be appreciated, at least. It adds a lot of roleplay opportunities, a lot of fun fights, allows for some interesting character development, etc. If everything gets focused on the plot I find the above things actually begin to become less common, because the story and world begins to feel fake. The plot (such as "quest to defeat the Lich or what have you") might be narrative miles away at any given time.

In an AP, you can only do this so much- and I would recommend doing it mostly with non-combat encounters so it doesn't become super tedious, but "irrelevant" things (for me, at least) almost have to be there for the world to not feel off somehow.

I mostly agree with Angel Hunter D, except that I think "theme" is more central than "plot."

Plot: the sequence of causal events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work. Wikipedia: Plot (narrative)
Theme: a central topic that recurs in or pervades a work of art or literature. Wikipedia: Theme (narrative)

Plot is what pulls are reader along in a story. In a roleplaying game, it sets up the events for the players to deal with. Theme is what tells the writer which scenes to put into the story and which scenes to leave out, in order to tell a tight story. In a roleplaying game, it determines what feels relevant or irrelevant. We can have an encounter important to the plot that still feels irrelevant--we want to avoid those.

Iron Gods set in Numeria, a barbarian land sprinkled with alien technology, has several built-in themes: science versus religion, birth of a god, good gods versus bad gods, technology versus the simple life, and encounters with aliens. (It also has a recurring motif of at least one multi-armed alien or construct per module, but I don't think that is a theme.) My players chose Iron Gods as their adventure path because they wanted to play with the technology, so they chose a pro-technology theme. The party represented the people who wanted to develop and share technology in contrast to the evil Technic League that scavenged and hoarded technology.

This is why I let them dig out and repair a small spaceship at the end of the 2nd module, Lords of Rust, despite the module listing that spaceship as "irreparable." It went along with the pro-technology theme. If their theme had been about the godhood of the Iron Gods, then the spaceship would not have fit.

MadMars wrote:
Repeated encounters with spider swarms probably would be a pointless Hell, though.

I once played the Warren of the Death Spider module by Rogue Genius Games. The PCs walk into a village whose main industry is weaving silk from peaceful fist-size spiders that live in the trees. However, horse-sized spiders are now menacing the roads and a group of children harvesting silk have disappeared. Unknown to the villagers, the friendly neighborhood spiders had been attracted by a long-lost temple of a spider god and that temple has just hatched an avatar. The module is full of spiders, and repeated encounters with spider swarms fits the theme.

Errant Mercenary wrote:

Disclaimer.

I havent picked up a whole AP since the Ironfang Invasion. Played Shackles, Carrion Crown, Ironfang, Rise of the Runelords, part of about 5 more, read a lot more. Have an ongoing game, house game.

Ironfang Invasion was a big disappointment for us, a lot of typical Paizo problems but with hints of brilliancy here and there. Since then havent picked up a full one, and none until Age of Ashes have made me consider that perhaps I'd run a full one again. Agents of Edgewatch is shaping up to be promising and I hope the more out of the box continues.

I would ask about the problems with Ironfang Invasion, since I am running it. However, I see plenty of them myself. And one of them is that it does not support themes as well as Iron Gods does.

The 1st module, Trail of the Hunted, does have a strong theme of being hunted, of hiding from a hostile superior force. Harles said in the comment after Errant Mercenary's, "What I prefer are meaty adventures, classic archetypes that let my players feel like heroes, not errand runners for powerful NPCs." Being hunted avoids running errands for powerful NPCs, but it reduces feeling like heroes, too.

Then in the 2nd module, Fangs of War, the party become liberators, cleaning up after an offshoot of the Ironfang Invasion. They are the hunters rather than the hunted, because the main Ironfang Legion force has turned its back on that region. This 180-degree turn breaks several previous potential themes.

In Session Zero, my players created people who could survive well in the forest, since I warned them that they would be hiding refugees in the forest. They chose the theme of protectors of the weak. The beginning event changed. The villagers of Phaendar were not clueless and surprised when the Ironfang Legion invaded their town. Instead, they were prepared yet overwhelmed by a superior military force. Aubrin the Green asked the party to evacuate the eldery and the children while the villagers fought the invaders. The protector theme worked through both modules and it is heroic, too.

Protector does have its twists. I was surprised when in Fangs of War the party did not fight the evil fey who had taken over a fort. Instead, they sweet-talked their way in, rescued the single prisoner there, and left. The evil fey were not threatening anyone that the party was protecting, besides the prisoner. They skipped one quarter of the XP of the module, because it did not fit their theme.


Staffan Johansson wrote:
Sporkedup wrote:

I really wish early books would be much more full of mystery-solving, social encounters, exploration/survival, I dunno. Players seem to want to get to know their characters and their surroundings but it feels like a fight against the AP at that point to allow significant roleplay in early on.

The current pattern of leveling is 4-4-3-3-3-3, right? What if it looked more like 3-4-3-4-3-3 or something? So that book one breathes a bit, and no two books of four full level grinds are back to back?

I so agree with this. That would probably be the easiest thing Paizo could do with their APs. Other things they could do:

1. Abandon XP-based leveling as the default and reduce the number of combat* encounters, perhaps with the inclusion of text to the effect of "If you are using XP-based leveling, you'd need to add some encounters to fill this up. Some ideas would be..." followed by 5-10 one-sentence ideas for things to add in.

2. Abandon the mandate that an AP has to start at level 1 and end at level 20. PF1 APs rarely went all the way to 20, but I think that's because the game didn't really work at high levels. I am told that PF2 does, so they want to support it.

3. Make APs have more than six parts. This would, I think, be the least likely given how Paizo's whole publishing schedule is based around six monthly parts to an AP. But I could see an experiment where they do a three-part "half-path" (like Abomination Vaults) followed by a nine-part expanded AP where each part gets 2-3 levels instead and see how that works out.

4. Make individual AP parts bigger, 128 pages instead of 96. Assuming a similar page count is spent on the Toolbox stuff, that would increase the adventure page count by almost 50%. Of course, it would also make APs more expensive, likely to the tune of $30-$35 per installment. It would also be a higher workload for Paizo, and I get the impression that they're already spread fairly thin.

Of course, this assumes that Paizo wants to reduce...

I think the biggest problem with my suggestion is that few tables love to play at the lowest levels for any longer than they have to. The game starts to really open up at 3 or 4, so dragging your feet at the beginning can really bug some people.

But a slower start would enable more mystery and horror themes to permeate the beginning of the adventure, which I would assume might be a better hook?


Kasoh wrote:
take

Eeeh, I dunno. Like, I get that this is obviously your own experience and preference, but I definitely know plenty of GMs that might have some difficulty making social and engaging encounters that tie into Golarion, the region that the party currently is, and within the context that they find themselves in. Heck! At the same time, I’d even say that if you have the XP budgeting thing pretty figured out, it shouldn’t be too hard to just grab some critters from the bestiary and throw them at your party without a lot of thought. Giving thought to NPCs sounds way more time-consuming if not structureless, personally.

As for stat blocks, usually the ones depicted in the books are for relevant NPCs and monsters — and I don’t think anyone is saying that those shouldn’t be there. Don’t quote me on this because I’m not that sure on the veracity of what I’m going to say right now but, I wouldn’t be surprised if most filler encounters end up being the ones that are just quoted from the bestiary.

And finally, as for maps and art: Hey, I super value those too! And it’s because I value them so much, especially for maps, that this discussion might be a little more relevant than we initially though. There’re often whole sections in a dungeon that are just filler encounters, and for those of us that play and GM on VTT, making away with those sections may not be the easiest thing. Sometimes they’re kind of self-contained and easily removable, but sometimes they, well, are not.

Kasoh wrote:
Also, unpopular perhaps inflammatory opinion: Milestone leveling is for lazy GMs. I know. I use it. The reward system gives two things in this game: Treasure and Levels. By handing out levels whenever you want (or as guided) it reduces the reward aspect and it becomes an expectation. They aren't working for it. To get levels all they have to do is survive. And it overvalues treasure as the reward system. (Some players--I'm sure all your wonderful players are different--can be motivated by plot related things, or intangible character rewards like land ownership or political marriages, but those players are rare, in my experience)

Uhm… I guess you did warn for an inflammatory opinion. This doesn’t have too much to do with the proposed conversation, but I will bite just for the sake of your pov not being addressed.

Well, I disagree with you. Even if the lack of interaction with a subsystem in the game is motivated by any sort of lethargic disinterest, one can see it in many, many different ways other than “Ah, the person is being lazy”. A person might be busy and not find that the subsystem engages in the party dynamics in any interesting way, players might feel it’s to annoying to track XP, players might feel detracted from the narrative and focus too much on the XP, group might find more marking that the party levels up at specific points, etc etc etc. If we really talk about how milestone levelling might reward apathy towards the game, then we have to talk about all the problems that XP levelling can bring into the table. And honestly, and this is purely my own personal take, it’s better to handle something like apathy for the story outside of it than inside it; and if you merely wish to goad your players towards interacting more with the world, I have a hard time seeing how hero points aren’t a potentially better tool for that.
___________________________________________________________________________
Be it as it may, I will ask for the rest of us to consider not detracting too much from the discussion; I’ve been reading some enlightening arguments both in favor and against it and hopefully so has some of the Paizo folk!


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Ascalaphus wrote:
Sporkedup wrote:

I really wish early books would be much more full of mystery-solving, social encounters, exploration/survival, I dunno. Players seem to want to get to know their characters and their surroundings but it feels like a fight against the AP at that point to allow significant roleplay in early on.

The current pattern of leveling is 4-4-3-3-3-3, right? What if it looked more like 3-4-3-4-3-3 or something? So that book one breathes a bit, and no two books of four full level grinds are back to back?

I like this, it stands out as one of the actually practical changes Paizo can make without having to overturn their entire format.

To me, putting pressure to level up quicky on vulnerable 1st-level characters feels counter-intuitive. Especially to level up via combat.

My players were lucky. Page 21 of Trail of the Hunted after the evacuation of Phaendar said,
"Story Award: For every refugee NPC the PCs manage to rescue and bring with them out of Phaendar, including Aubrin, award them 50 XP." That translates to 25 xp under PF2. My players rescued 40 villagers, twice what the module expected, so I reduced the award to 15 each. The moment they escaped Phaendar, they reached 2nd level.

Sporkedup wrote:

I think the biggest problem with my suggestion is that few tables love to play at the lowest levels for any longer than they have to. The game starts to really open up at 3 or 4, so dragging your feet at the beginning can really bug some people.

But a slower start would enable more mystery and horror themes to permeate the beginning of the adventure, which I would assume might be a better hook?

Yeah, horror themes grow more difficult when the PCs are more powerful than regular folk. They become the professional vampire hunters rather than the panicked vampire victims.

The lowest levels have their own fun. Alas, combat is less fun at those levels. Therefore, don't pile lots of combat on those levels. Given them some missions with story awards instead.


Deriven Firelion wrote:


PF2 has been a learning experience. I think Age of Ashes was worse for over-powered encounters that threaten TPKs. I figured that was because it was the first AP and the AP designers didn't quite have a grasp of the lethality of PF2. After years of hearing how underpowered AP encounters were, it is probably surprising for AP designers to hear, "We're getting a lot of TPKs. These APs are too tough." APs used to to be faceroll encounters after the first few levels. Rarely were their tough designed encounters. I used to have to beef every encounter up, boost hit points, and ramp everything up.

I wonder if some of this is player experience too? Many groups were very good at optimizing in PF1 and could thus walk over nearly everything, even if new players would still struggle with it.

Now, with a (relatively) new system, is it more deadly because the adventures are designed that way or because players don't yet have the system mastery advantages they often had in PF1?


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Kasoh wrote:
Also, unpopular perhaps inflammatory opinion: Milestone leveling is for lazy GMs. I know. I use it. The reward system gives two things in this game: Treasure and Levels. By handing out levels whenever you want (or as guided) it reduces the reward aspect and it becomes an expectation. They aren't working for it. To get levels all they have to do is survive. And it overvalues treasure as the reward system. (Some players--I'm sure all your wonderful players are different--can be motivated by plot related things, or intangible character rewards like land ownership or political marriages, but those players are rare, in my experience)

For another take: XP systems reward survival. They reward fighting lots of things, whether there's any need to do so or not. Wander around, fight random encounters and survive and you get rewarded.

Milestone levelling rewards progress. You level by accomplishing goals - whether you sought out every encounter on the way or came up with a clever way to bypass most of it. You achieved your goal, you're rewarded with the level.


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thejeff wrote:

For another take: XP systems reward survival. They reward fighting lots of things, whether there's any need to do so or not. Wander around, fight random encounters and survive and you get rewarded.

Milestone levelling rewards progress. You level by accomplishing goals - whether you sought out every encounter on the way or came up with a clever way to bypass most of it. You achieved your goal, you're rewarded with the level.

It is true that level based systems reward survival in general regardless of progression mechanics.

That's a GM problem with only giving xp for fighting things. The GM should be awarding xp for alternate resolutions as well. Once players see that it can be just as rewarding to not fight, they consider other options, usually based on perceived difficulty. (No xp achieves the same effect by making none of it matter, so long as you get through it, but then there's resentment because you didn't get the loot as well, and now loot is the only lever to pull. Your mileage may vary, of course.)

Encounters are only placed by the GM, so if the group tries to farm xp, they can't.

Milestone leveling doesn't reward anything. It is just given to the party. They earned nothing. They crossed an arbitrary mark set by the GM. Because the PCs don't know the plot they don't know what is significant or not, or have different opinions on what is significant. There's no inherent understanding to what causes the jump in level besides the GM wanted to use higher level foes.

I find the difference is in attitude. With milestone leveling the party says "When is the GM going to level us up?" vs with xp "We are close to leveling." It creates an excitement to find more encounters (combat, social, or otherwise.)

Anyway, I'll try to not let this digression get too far afield. I only mentioned it because I kept seeing Defacto Leveling held up as some great revolution in AP design and I find it lessons the gaming experience.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

So the problem with milestones is it's too arbitrary... but your argument in favor of XP as a system is that the GM can set arbitrary bonuses and limits to keep the party on the pace they want and reward the kind of engagement they want to see?

I'm sorry but that just seems nonsensical to me. You're basically just describing the same thing twice.


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Milestone works well as a failsafe to me, and I find it pretty necessary in PF2 APs. If players do enough to level early, they get to. If they are a little short following a major milestone, especially if it comes with a change in scenery and difficulty, I fudge them up to leveled. I just personally track the XP and don't tell them, so it probably feels minimally different from milestone.


thejeff wrote:
Deriven Firelion wrote:
PF2 has been a learning experience. I think Age of Ashes was worse for over-powered encounters that threaten TPKs. I figured that was because it was the first AP and the AP designers didn't quite have a grasp of the lethality of PF2. After years of hearing how underpowered AP encounters were, it is probably surprising for AP designers to hear, "We're getting a lot of TPKs. These APs are too tough." APs used to to be faceroll encounters after the first few levels. Rarely were their tough designed encounters. I used to have to beef every encounter up, boost hit points, and ramp everything up.

I wonder if some of this is player experience too? Many groups were very good at optimizing in PF1 and could thus walk over nearly everything, even if new players would still struggle with it.

Now, with a (relatively) new system, is it more deadly because the adventures are designed that way or because players don't yet have the system mastery advantages they often had in PF1?

I used to think that. Many PF1 players learned to optimize their characters to almost always succeed at a specialized form of combat. The PF2 design nerfed that. My players built for teamwork in PF1 and PF2. That was not nerfed in PF2. And then they discovered adaptive tactics, a new way of gaining advantage in combat in PF2. The simplest explanation for me was that my players had learned PF2 ways faster than other players.

However, I have purchased Fall of Plaguestone and read the comments of people who played Age of Ashes and Extinction Curse. They appear to have lots of Severe-Threat encounters.

The first encounter in Fall of Plaguestone is a severe threat (120 xp) on the road to town. Afterwards, if they enter the tavern, a barroom brawl breaks out, moderate threat (nonlethal, xp varies). After that, they can start working on a mystery for a 30-xp story award. They might run into another hostile creature (40 xp) before the next 30-xp story award for working on the mystery. That seems like a lot of combat for a mystery story. Of course, because Pathfinder is a tabletop combat-based roleplaying game, the story will shift from mystery to combatting the villain behind the mystery.

And Sporkedup's argument that the level-ups in adventure paths increased from 3-3-3-3-2-2 to 4-4-3-3-3-3 makes a lot of sense. That could be the reason for so many Severe-threat encounters.

The encounter pacing in PF2 differs from the encounter pacing of PF2. PF1 had attrition encounters to weaken the party before they encountered the BBEG (big bad evil guy, the final boss). PF2 offers 10-minute rests to recharge resources with Treat Wounds or Refocus. They are supposed to reach the BBEG at full health. This forum had discussions about this pacing, such as Zapp's March 2020 thread (GM Advice) Official pacing. In that thread or maybe the follow-up Advice on pacing: specific example (Spoilers for Extinction Curse part 1, chapter 3), Zapp asked whether he should increase the difficulty of the Hermitage in The Show Must Go On, because the party kept resting after a character was knocked unconscious in battle. He was still in an attrition mindset.

In general, many GMs new to PF2 didn't immediately see that the 10-minute rest is supposed to be part of the game. I don't know when I realized it, because the 2nd part of Ironfang Invasion, hiding in the forest, offered only one encounter per day. I haven't read Age of Ashes nor Extinction Curse. Do they make clear that the party can retreat to bandage up?

Without the 10-minute rests, the Severe-threat encounters will overcome the parties. They are not weak encounters designed to wear down a party before a critical encounter. They are correctly labeled "Severe."


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Kasoh wrote:
Milestone leveling doesn't reward anything. It is just given to the party. They earned nothing. They crossed an arbitrary mark set by the GM. Because the PCs don't know the plot they don't know what is significant or not, or have different opinions on what is significant. There's no inherent understanding to what causes the jump in level besides the GM wanted to use higher level foes.

By contrast, I think milestone leveling rewards an actual goal-oriented focus, by rewarding accomplishing goals over having encounters.

So far in Extinction Curse, I think the points where you level up via milestone has been pretty clear:

Spoiler:

1 to 2: After you have put on a circus show and searched the surrounding area for dangers, as well as defeating the person responsible for those dangers.
2 to 3: Solving the problems Nemmia caused in Abberton, and learning she was from the nearby Gozreh hermitage and has been trucking with demons.
3 to 4: Clearing out the hermitage and rescuing their former leader Harlock.
4 to 5: Preventing the xulgaths from destroying the Aeon orb in the Erran Tower.
5 to 6: Clearing out the plot assigned to the PCs' circus and putting on a new show in Escadar.
6 to 7: Clearing out the upper levels of Moonstone Hall and discovering the path below.
7 to 8: Clearing out the lower levels of Moonstone Hall and learning about the Aeon orbs and Aeon towers, and how to rejuvenate them.
8 to 9: Apprehending or defeating Mistress Dusklight.

These are all fairly clear goals. They also mean you don't need to explore all nooks and crannies. In the hermitage, you can ignore the ghouls, for example — they add nothing to the plot, except some XP and treasure.

Also, the adventure clearly expects you to be level X at the start of each part. It expects it so clearly that it even says things like "By now the PCs should be level 4. If they're not, add a random encounter or two along the way to give them the needed XP." That's the type of nonsense you don't need to worry about with milestones.

Now, I'll admit that this only works when you have a linear plot — which, fortunately for this purpose, most APs have. If you're running things more as a self-directed sandbox, XP can be really useful, and they also allow for more bite-sized goal rewards that eventually add up. I'm thinking of something like the middle part of 5e's Lost Mines of Phandelver, where you're doing various smaller tasks for the people of Phandelver while trying to figure out where the Big Bad is. But that's generally not how APs work — again, due to the tyranny of page count which strongly discourages putting in a surplus of tasks, which is what would be needed for a good sandbox.


It also has to do with the inherent design expecations of PF2 that, for your average campaign, the bulk of encounters will be moderate and severe, with low completing most of the remainder. Trivial and extreme pretty rarely.

At play, severe feels pretty intense most of the time, so the fact that they should be something like 35-40% of fights seems hefty.


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Sporkedup wrote:
I think the biggest problem with my suggestion is that few tables love to play at the lowest levels for any longer than they have to. The game starts to really open up at 3 or 4, so dragging your feet at the beginning can really bug some people.

First off, having the first AP part "only" cover three levels doesn't necessarily mean that each level takes more time. Time is more a function of encounters than page count.

Also, the way I see it, the main reason playing at level 1 and 2 are a bit of a drag is that you really don't have any longevity of resources. As an example, I'm playing a sorcerer who just hit level 9. I have 3 5th-level and 4 4th-level spells per day available as heavy hitters, for things like Cone of Cold, Hydraulic Torrent, up-cast Waterball, Animal Form, or Elemental Form. But I also have 4 3rd-level slots for Slow or 3rd-level Fear, or 4 1st-level slots for 1st-level Fear or an emergency Heal, and those are often also worthwhile uses of my time and actions, and that gives me 15 slots to play around with (19 including 2nd level, but in my case those are more situational). But at 1st and 2nd level, I only had my 3-4 top-level spells, so once those are done I have to rely on cantrips.

But if you make the 1st-level experience more social and exploration-based, the resources don't matter so much. You probably have an easier time dealing with two or three separate encounter locations with some social/exploration stuff in between than you do a single big encounter location.


Staffan Johansson wrote:
Sporkedup wrote:
I think the biggest problem with my suggestion is that few tables love to play at the lowest levels for any longer than they have to. The game starts to really open up at 3 or 4, so dragging your feet at the beginning can really bug some people.

First off, having the first AP part "only" cover three levels doesn't necessarily mean that each level takes more time. Time is more a function of encounters than page count.

Also, the way I see it, the main reason playing at level 1 and 2 are a bit of a drag is that you really don't have any longevity of resources. As an example, I'm playing a sorcerer who just hit level 9. I have 3 5th-level and 4 4th-level spells per day available as heavy hitters, for things like Cone of Cold, Hydraulic Torrent, up-cast Waterball, Animal Form, or Elemental Form. But I also have 4 3rd-level slots for Slow or 3rd-level Fear, or 4 1st-level slots for 1st-level Fear or an emergency Heal, and those are often also worthwhile uses of my time and actions, and that gives me 15 slots to play around with (19 including 2nd level, but in my case those are more situational). But at 1st and 2nd level, I only had my 3-4 top-level spells, so once those are done I have to rely on cantrips.

But if you make the 1st-level experience more social and exploration-based, the resources don't matter so much. You probably have an easier time dealing with two or three separate encounter locations with some social/exploration stuff in between than you do a single big encounter location.

I think you're right. I'm just brainstorming reasons why they might be frontloading the leveling so heavily.


Levels 1 and 2 are valuable for people who are not super comfortable with the mechanics of their character yet, but if you're reasonably proficient they're the ones you want to get over with ASAP so you have some toys to play with.

Even in home games written by me, I prefer to speed through the low levels if possible. There are some plots you can only really get low level people invested in, but you really only need a couple of them to get them invested in the bigger narrative arc.


Squiggit wrote:

So the problem with milestones is it's too arbitrary... but your argument in favor of XP as a system is that the GM can set arbitrary bonuses and limits to keep the party on the pace they want and reward the kind of engagement they want to see?

I'm sorry but that just seems nonsensical to me. You're basically just describing the same thing twice.

That is what the GM is there to do, after all.

On the GM side, it probably is close to the same thing and in that sense Milestone is easier for the GM. But that's all it is, a way for the GM to do less work at the expense of the player experience.

What I know is that when I'm in any encounter in a game with milestone leveling that isn't a boss, I don't care about it. I just want it to be over--because it doesn't matter. In fact, I grow irritated at any encounter that isn't a boss encounter--because there's no point except that the boss should probably have minions and the PCs are going to win anyway because the game is designed for the PCs to win unless they screw it up really badly.

With xp, you need to do that encounter because you need the xp to level. And if you want to do less encounters then you might get less xp and not level up. And you fight the boss at a lower level and suddenly the decisions up to that point have meaning because they had consequences.

And when I GM, I'm just lazy. Recalculating and balancing the xp totals for the size of my group isn't work I ever feel like doing. And I have people in my group who prefer 'Not tracking made up numbers' and 'Want the incremental progression' so, six of one, half a dozen the other can't please everyone.

I'm not saying Milestone leveling doesn't work. It does. But using it changes the feel of the game in a way I don't like. I do want to try 2e's xp system more to see how the recurring 1000 xp method feels to my players.


PossibleCabbage wrote:

Levels 1 and 2 are valuable for people who are not super comfortable with the mechanics of their character yet, but if you're reasonably proficient they're the ones you want to get over with ASAP so you have some toys to play with.

Even in home games written by me, I prefer to speed through the low levels if possible. There are some plots you can only really get low level people invested in, but you really only need a couple of them to get them invested in the bigger narrative arc.

Sure, but page count in a module doesn't necessarily translate to game time. It's not like we, as players, say "We're going to spend three months on each part of the AP. Look, because part one covers four levels, that means we get past level 1 in just three weeks!"


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Well just wanted to chime in about Milestone Vs XP. Overall as a player I played in about 3 of each quite long campaigns.

Overall I definitely prefer Milestone because you just get to go through the game enjoying it.

Milestone

Pro:
-I love that I dont have to worry about hunting every monster just to level up or end up being underleveled.
-Game is perfectly balanced except loot.
-Storytelling for the most part feels a lot smoother.
-It just speeds up the game in general imo.
-Imo it feels more natural to level up when you do something like clear a keep rather than killing random monsters and leveling up.

Con:
-Sometimes depending on the game it just feels so random.
-Killing monsters can feel "pointless" at the same time you still want to get loot.

XP

Pro
-Some people love seeing that number go up and get excited when they are near a level.
-PF2 imo streamlined it so good with the 100p xp... PF1/5e was a nightmare figuring out how much xp was needed.

Con
-I just hate the whole "we have to explore every room to get as much XP as possible or be underleveled.
-I hate having to ask for XP "How much XP did we get after every encounter". Also I will add tracking XP is quite annoying.
-People level up in middle of dungeons and it is awkward since you feel that you should go back to rest level up. Of course GMs differ.
-Difficulty is hard to balance, if players skip something there is a high chance they will lose.

There are more things to list and I realize there are probably a lot of people that love XP. Some people love to see that number go up and I do understand... since let's face it that is the whole point of most video games but imo TTRPGs are mostly about the journey more than the rewards.

Only time I care about leveling up is in the 1-4 range after level 5 I am pretty happy just playing and enjoying the adventure. Before that I admit quite a few classes are lacking and I REALLY want to level up.


I also hard prefer milestone leveling. Exp as mentioned can make people want to do certain things (clear every room in the dungeon!) with little narrative justification besides the meta reason that the player just wants to get more Exp. It feels very gamey to me, while I prefer the better narrative cohesion of milestone leveling. But this also will depend on your table and group. However, in general I think milestone leveling is quite popular nowadays. Critical Role switched to it for their second campaign. From what I remember, 5e campaign modules use milestone leveling. From reading Pathfinder APs, most mention that players should be at a certain level by X chapter, which gives the GM goal posts for milestone leveling.

I do think if Paizo designed their APs with milestone leveling as the primary method of leveling vs experience, then the AP structure would look different and better IMO. Less need to stuff everything with so many encounters just to make sure players get enough Exp.


I don't think milestone levelling is really a solution to the problem at hand though.
Paizo designed the system and makes the APs. They're aiming at a certain amount of content per level, whether it's fights or social encounters or whatever. They're not likely to drop the encounters if they design by milestone.

Milestones helps smooth things out when there are ways to avoid some of the content or when the group wants to work side adventures in, but they shouldn't be expected to change the basic expectations of how long it takes to level. At least not in official content. If they wanted that, they could have designed the XP system to give out more per encounter or need less to level.


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Kasoh wrote:

Also, from a GM utility standpoint, it is easier to add more social encounters to any given AP. You can make whatever NPCs, personalities, and etc. that you need to get it done.

What is more difficult (to me, and perhaps to others) is nice maps and encounter scenarios. APs with large dungeons provide all that and more.

I don't need Paizo's help to give things personality, let the PCs know when to rest, how to resolve a combat peacefully, or just remove extraneous encounters. Cutting is easy.

Personality, and options for peaceful resolution are the sort of things I most want from an AP. Creating NPCs the players will care about is something only a rare few can do quickly or easily.

And it's also good if the adventure writer has thought about the question of what will happen if the PCs want to rest after an encounter. (Fifteen-minute days and all that...) And if they mark out encounters as being optional, based on the pacing your group enjoys, that seems like it might very useful thing for inexperienced GMs.

Creating level-appropriate encounters seems pretty trivial by comparison, and if I can't be bothered to make my own map I can always use a tool...


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Milestone leveling is important to use in APs, where the characters simply must be of the assigned level to have a chance of progressing the story. Dungeon exploration and sandbox adventures can use XP, but not APs. At least in my ... experience.


Matthew Downie wrote:

Personality, and options for peaceful resolution are the sort of things I most want from an AP. Creating NPCs the players will care about is something only a rare few can do quickly or easily.

And it's also good if the adventure writer has thought about the question of what will happen if the PCs want to rest after an encounter. (Fifteen-minute days and all that...) And if they mark out encounters as being optional, based on the pacing your group enjoys, that seems like it might very useful thing for inexperienced GMs.

Creating level-appropriate encounters seems pretty trivial by comparison, and if I can't be bothered to make my own map I can always use a tool...

Its almost like different people have different needs. I curse the diversity of humankind! /joke.

I can understand an APs desire to be quiet on aspects like 'When to rest' and things like that because every group is different and will travel at their own pace. Things like that are best handled by the person who knows the group best, i.e. the GM.

I've probably become jaded because the more work you put into an NPC, the less interest players have in it. Its the one offs they get attached to, so I've given up on trying to 'create personalities'. Half of my Hell's Rebel's game was turning one appearance NPCs into major players while the ones I had the most information on languished.

Players, amiright?


Matthew Downie wrote:
Kasoh wrote:

Also, from a GM utility standpoint, it is easier to add more social encounters to any given AP. You can make whatever NPCs, personalities, and etc. that you need to get it done.

What is more difficult (to me, and perhaps to others) is nice maps and encounter scenarios. APs with large dungeons provide all that and more.

I don't need Paizo's help to give things personality, let the PCs know when to rest, how to resolve a combat peacefully, or just remove extraneous encounters. Cutting is easy.

Personality, and options for peaceful resolution are the sort of things I most want from an AP. Creating NPCs the players will care about is something only a rare few can do quickly or easily.

And it's also good if the adventure writer has thought about the question of what will happen if the PCs want to rest after an encounter. (Fifteen-minute days and all that...) And if they mark out encounters as being optional, based on the pacing your group enjoys, that seems like it might very useful thing for inexperienced GMs.

Creating level-appropriate encounters seems pretty trivial by comparison, and if I can't be bothered to make my own map I can always use a tool...

I remember my first GM session in 2011 after my wife handed over her Rise of the Runelords campaign to me. We were on page 37 of The Hook Mountain Massacre and the town of Turtleback Ferry had become flooded. The PCs had to rescue some schoolchildren from a flooded school and defeat a gigantic aquatic monster that washed into town. (Okay, I peeked at the module to refresh my memory.)

The module didn't provide a map. It had a picture and mentioned a church, so I drew a map corresponding to those. I added a two-story tavern flooded on the 1st floor with a bunch of drunk people on a balcony cheering the party on as they fought the monster.

And after the flood died down, the people held a celebration for the heroes in the tavern. Many patrons of the tavern had visible sihedron tattoos, which related to a mystery the party had to solve. So the dashing rogue PC accepted the invitation of a buxom dressmaker with a sihedron tattoo on her cleavage, searched her house in the night, and asked her about the tattoo in the morning. Thus, he solved the mystery through social interaction.

I was a newbie GM at the time. For example, the party defeated the monster too easily because I didn't know what "SR 26" meant in its stats (it meant that almost all spells cast by the 8th-level wizard on it ought to have fizzled). But social encounters are mostly storytelling. I had learned to tell stories while raising our daughters. The victory celebration was not in the module, but it seemed an obvious way to get the players in position to follow up on the mystery and to care about Turtleback Ferry more.

My players are the ones who want to skip combat encounters that don't fit their quest, so I don't have to make that decision. I simply feed them relevant information.

Sovereign Court

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Kasoh wrote:
Squiggit wrote:

So the problem with milestones is it's too arbitrary... but your argument in favor of XP as a system is that the GM can set arbitrary bonuses and limits to keep the party on the pace they want and reward the kind of engagement they want to see?

I'm sorry but that just seems nonsensical to me. You're basically just describing the same thing twice.

That is what the GM is there to do, after all.

On the GM side, it probably is close to the same thing and in that sense Milestone is easier for the GM. But that's all it is, a way for the GM to do less work at the expense of the player experience.

What I know is that when I'm in any encounter in a game with milestone leveling that isn't a boss, I don't care about it. I just want it to be over--because it doesn't matter. In fact, I grow irritated at any encounter that isn't a boss encounter--because there's no point except that the boss should probably have minions and the PCs are going to win anyway because the game is designed for the PCs to win unless they screw it up really badly.

I think you're on to something when you feel that the encounter is a waste - but you don't correctly identify what's wrong.

If you're in an encounter and you just don't care because you're going to win and it's not going to matter, then that's probably one of the encounters that could have been cut from the adventure.

Consider the following encounter:
You're in a town that's been taken over by evil slavers who have taken people hostage. You're making your way over to the building where they're holding the hostages. On the way there you're ambushed by an enemy patrol. You fighter them beat them, loot them, heal up, move on. And feel that was a waste of time.

Now alter the encounter a bit:
You run into a group of slavers dragging people from their homes. You fight them, you beat them, set the townsfolk free. After that of course you loot the slavers and heal up and move on. But this encounter was a lot more meaningful than the other one because it accomplished something in the story.


(Read through most of the posts here, but not all.)

I run five PF2 groups. For two of them, the feeling of slog was mixed with the sense that the game was becoming frustrating/too hard. In Age of Ashes, the party went through 3 effective TPKs after having an effective TPK in Book One. I have moved the encounter levels down by 1, and it's been going fine.

I think that there is some conflating the issue of "there are too many fights" with "there are too many difficult fights" that calls for some GM adjustment.

I don't attribute the difficulty to players being bad at tactics necessarily. Tactics definitely help, but sometimes there are subpar party compositions, or a combo of abilities that don't mesh well with countering a given monster.

Whether PF2 was tuned to be "too hard"... well, you can't really make a level of difficulty that works for all tables, and what is more for the universe of diversity that is variable characters in a game as complex as PF2. One shouldn't need feel they have to be slavish to the source material if it's not jelling with a group.


Peenicks wrote:

"age of ashes breakdown"

Spoiler:
I want to preface this by saying I am a Paid GM and thus started running everything Pathifnder 2E from its release. I have finished Age Of Ashes, am somewhere midway in Extinction Curse Book 6 and Agents Of Edgewatch Book 2.

I wanted to record a video to list out some key points but since I saw this thread exists and most points have been made I might as well contribute my experience instead of recording a video.

Age Of Ashes was the first entry that I had into running a whole 1-20 campaign and with it I saw a couple of points that the AP writers are missing.

** spoiler omitted **...

That was a good breakdown, since I havent gone through the whole AP it helps to see the structure. I wish the meta structure was available in the APs themselves. And thanks for the backing, I have thought on these issues quite a bit, though I seldom write down.

And MATHMUSE: we've talked about Irongfang before, you'll find our conversations on that APs forums; I liked your changes to the AP, but you did change so much to the point where the AP has acted like a poles to your tent, or a skeleton, and you've really done a great build on top. I think that this type of GMing specially might better be served with less linear dungeons and a different toolset than what we often get.

On the topic of "Too hard" vs "Too many" I think this is mostly GM territory. You know your party and only you can adjust things on the fly. Hence some tables, modular fights to be inserted, with variables, would be my preference. There could even be more combats this way (some groups grind through these!), and yet save space.


The Rot Grub wrote:
I think that there is some conflating the issue of "there are too many fights" with "there are too many difficult fights" that calls for some GM adjustment.

My issue is specifically with there being too much dungeon with the attendant fights. The difficulty is a secondary issue. The first two parts of Extinction Curse are about 85% dungeon, and a significant portion of the rest is also encounters with unfriendly/hostile folks that might end in combat.

Liberty's Edge

I wonder what percentage of the feats, class features et al. are combat-centered. Surely people will want to get opportunities to use these.


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The Rot Grub wrote:

(Read through most of the posts here, but not all.)

I run five PF2 groups. For two of them, the feeling of slog was mixed with the sense that the game was becoming frustrating/too hard. In Age of Ashes, the party went through 3 effective TPKs after having an effective TPK in Book One. I have moved the encounter levels down by 1, and it's been going fine.

I think that there is some conflating the issue of "there are too many fights" with "there are too many difficult fights" that calls for some GM adjustment.

I don't attribute the difficulty to players being bad at tactics necessarily. Tactics definitely help, but sometimes there are subpar party compositions, or a combo of abilities that don't mesh well with countering a given monster.

Whether PF2 was tuned to be "too hard"... well, you can't really make a level of difficulty that works for all tables, and what is more for the universe of diversity that is variable characters in a game as complex as PF2. One shouldn't need feel they have to be slavish to the source material if it's not jelling with a group.

My groups also had issues with Book 1 of Age of Ashes. I don't think it was the AP or the encounter design, though. Trying not to give spoilers here... but... The first three chapters don't really push the party in any way. You can do the same shenanigans as PF1e and it's just fine. Wanna tank mobs as a Barbarian? Cool, go take hits, s'all good! Wanna all break apart and solo fire? Awesome! Do it! It works! Then... chapter 3 opens with a fight that, if you do not answer it correctly, and down mobs efficiently will kill players. The infamous fight against a certain fellow just a couple fights later is also vicious if you do not play to your strengths (specifically if you don't debuff him at all).

Frankly, the opening book of AoA has some TPK potential because players coming up from PF1e don't do the things necessary to surviving in PF2e. I have a table of all players new to TTRPGs, and they breezed through those fights, specifically by focus firing and thinking about positioning and order of approach or order of attacks. Why have the Monk do Flurry before the Fighter lays down Intimidating Strike? They also seemed more willing to use spells that the older edition's players ignored. A great example is Befuddle. Our older edition upgrading Wizard saw this spell and balked because it only lasted 1 round. The new-to-gaming Wizard said "woah! Clumsy 2 sounds awful. If the Barbarian hits after me, he's gonna crit!" And, once, against the infamous fight named above... it worked out that way.


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I believe Milestone leveling makes it easier for AP designers to design appropriately challenging content for a given section. It also removes the focus on having a particular number of appropriate challenges allowing the AP designers to explore a strong focus on role-playing or using skills to bypass an encounter. I think milestone leveling will eventually lead to more flexible and interesting design in APs because designers don't have to meet XP quotas when designing an adventure.

XP was always an abstract form of an advancement and focused on quantity over quality. Milestone leveling allows AP designers to focus more on quality than quantity.


Deriven Firelion wrote:

I believe Milestone leveling makes it easier for AP designers to design appropriately challenging content for a given section. It also removes the focus on having a particular number of appropriate challenges allowing the AP designers to explore a strong focus on role-playing or using skills to bypass an encounter. I think milestone leveling will eventually lead to more flexible and interesting design in APs because designers don't have to meet XP quotas when designing an adventure.

XP was always an abstract form of an advancement and focused on quantity over quality. Milestone leveling allows AP designers to focus more on quality than quantity.

As it is, the designers kind of have to abide by the XP system because that's the CRB's base system for advancement. Yet APs have long featured the milestone option for GMs to use the suggested level metrics in the beginning and ignore XP. They still can.

I haven't run nor been in an AP where the GM tracks in decades.

Even more, a designer could get around extraneous combats via XP story rewards. Using those, a designer could easily design whatever they wanted.
Example: There was a Paizo AP for 3.X where one module had tons of XP for activating visions that shared much of the backstory and prophecy of the AP's story arc. (Personally I found it too easy for the XP gained to the point I issued a rare complaint to James.) But it was a thing, and lots of storytelling happened and the players and PCs had data to chew on (even if there were few challenges).

So yeah, nothing about the XP vs. milestone situation should have any impact on design because one can dish out XP freely to hit whatever milestones one wishes the party to be at. Go to the party, XP; make an ally, XP; and so forth. Of course Paizo would have to balance it so that all parties w/ different personalities/skills/routes/rolls come out with enough XP. That's likely harder, yet doable since it needn't be exact, only more than enough to level. Or the bulk of the XP could be linked with the must-do achievements all parties need to do to progress.

Therefore to me the combat focus seems intentional.
And the several groups I know are okay with that.
I'd think Paizo would have some pretty good data on this, though I don't know.


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Castilliano wrote:
So yeah, nothing about the XP vs. milestone situation should have any impact on design because one can dish out XP freely to hit whatever milestones one wishes the party to be at. Go to the party, XP; make an ally, XP; and so forth. Of course Paizo would have to balance it so that all parties w/ different personalities/skills/routes/rolls come out with enough XP. That's likely harder, yet doable since it needn't be exact, only more than enough to level. Or the...

I do recall that when discussion of "The Dragon's Demand" was happening, people were vocally upset that there was large, seemingly arbitrary story xp rewards designed to get the party to level 7 in the module. (So the climatic encounter could be against a larger dragon).

Now that was a few years ago and maybe people have lightened up, but I look around the internet and I doubt it.

Sovereign Court

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I think if you do use XP, then getting lots of it for free through "visions" does diminish the parts where you get much smaller chunks through hard (fighting) work. Then maybe going wholesale into milestone leveling makes more sense, if that's really what you're trying to achieve.

An alternative approach if you do want to stick to XP is to go through the adventure, look at each encounter and decide "is this awesome" and "is this necessary". An encounter can be one but not the other.

Any encounter that's awesome gets to stay. Any encounter that's necessary (does something for the story, drops a key clue, it wouldn't make sense that this location doesn't have a guardian etc.) gets to stay but you change it.

Any encounters that apparently aren't really good enough as-is also get changed or thrown out. Changes can include things like moving a monster from one encounter into another (but beware of keeping only hard encounters).

After removing stuff, add new encounters but not in the same places; we're trying to thin out some of these overstuffed dungeons. Rather, add some sidequests. Sidequests can be entirely unrelated to the main story, and that lets you use a type of monster or challenge that you don't really get enough of in the main quest. Or they can be designed to support the main quest.

In Iron Gods for example, one of the underlying assumptions about the AP is that the players care enough to oppose the bad guys. In the first book you're helping out a town, but the later books kinda forget about the town. In my version, the people in the town went out of their way to get the heroes to make the town their base of operations, including giving them a nice house and lucrative side quests. As a result, my players consider the town their home and take threats to it personally. Makes hooking them into the next adventure much easier.


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Ascalaphus wrote:
In Iron Gods for example, one of the underlying assumptions about the AP is that the players care enough to oppose the bad guys. In the first book you're helping out a town, but the later books kinda forget about the town. In my version, the people in the town went out of their way to get the heroes to make the town their base of operations, including giving them a nice house and lucrative side quests. As a result, my players consider the town their home and take threats to it personally. Makes hooking them into the next adventure much easier.

Oh yeah, tying PCs into a community and not just having them murderhobo their way around the world is so satisfying, both for the PCs and for the GM. To be honest, I think this was the thing that made Mutant: Year Zero really click: the PCs are strongly connected to their little commune, and as part of character creation they also design a bunch of contacts in the community that really help bring things to life.

Think of it like a TV show: In Buffy, for example, you don't just have the Scooby Gang, but also assorted supporting cast all over the school. It makes the whole thing feel more real.

This is something I'd love to see in a future sourcebook, akin to PF1's Ultimate Campaign — more focus on downtime stuff. In the core rules, downtime seems more like a placeholder, getting a single page of rules (plus assorted activities here and there that are designated as downtime). But it seems one could do so much more with it.


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My wife said that she prefers the weekly progress reports that experience points provide rather than the less frequent big jumps given by milestone leveling.

And the smaller granularity of xp lets me crunch the numbers better. Let's crunch some numbers.

Suppose my game sessions take place once a week and I want to finish a six-module adventure path in two years. Going from level 1 to 20 takes 19 groups of 1,000 xp, which we can call 19,000 xp. Two years is 104 weeks, but we will want a few weeks for holidays and for roleplaying at 20th level itself, so reduce that to 95 weeks. (19,000 xp)/(95 weeks) = 200 xp/week. This also means that the PCs level up once every five weeks.

If I give 250 xp in story awards per level, then that leaves 750 xp per level from combat and hazards. That is 150 xp per week from combat and hazards. That could be a 160-xp extreme threat combat that requires the entire game session, or two 80-xp moderate threats, or an 80-xp moderate threat plus a 60-xp low threat. Sometimes my combats are split across two game sessions, which makes the math trickier. Regardless, that is heavy combat for a 4-hour game session.

My players had a 34-xp trivial combat at the end of this Friday's game session. According to the time stamps on the Roll 20 dice rolls, it took one hour. I lack the time stamps for other combats. Does combat earn 40 xp per game session hour or are larger combats more efficient? My games might be slow because we have 7 players and I throw in additional enemies to balance the party size (the 34-xp trivial treat was really three creature 5 against a 7-member 7th-level party, 60 xp).

If combat proceeds at 40 xp per game session hour, then to earn 150 xp from combat in one game session, the we need 3 hours and 45 minutes of combat per game session. If my party is slow and typically combat proceeds at 60 xp per game session hour, then we need 2 hours and 30 minutes of combat per game session.

Combat has the advantage that players feel that they earned the xp. Negotiating peace with hostiles, deceiving them, or sneaking past them also feels earned. Story awards need a half-hour of narrative build-up to feel earned. Such awards also need verisimilitude. Fortunately, the narrative build-up can consist of combat.

Consider my current game. I am adapting a hobgoblin army from Assault on Longshadow to PF2 with the party encountering it a level too early. I replaced one CR 6 Hobgoblin Troop with fifteen Hobgoblin Troops creature 5, so that the army looks like an army. (Right now, 12 Hobgoblin Troops remain, since the party failed a Stealth roll against an owl animal companion and the army set a three-troop patrol out to see what the owl spotted.) This army also has a story award.

Assault on Longshadow, page 18 wrote:
Story Award: If the PCs recover the intelligence on the Ironfang Legion’s Longshadow invasion, award them 6,400 XP. If they free Nibbitz and gain the gnome as an ally, award them 2,400 XP.

In PF1 the gap between 7th level and 8th level is 16,000 xp, so I divide the printed story awards by 16 to convert them to PF2: 400 xp for the intelligence and 150 xp for the commander's enslaved secretary Nibbitz. That story award feels excessive to me, maybe because it was intended as 8th-level xp, where I would have divided by 24 instead (367 xp).

I asked two of my players about the potential 550 xp story award and my wife said that sounded excessive. We ended up discussing the strategic situation facing the party, and she remarked that they don't know the significant of the army they faced. I laughed and said the story award is for intelligence that explains that. She responded, "We got to have that!" Okay, the narrative value is established. But my wife still wants the story award cut down to 333 xp.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I really enjoy using milestone leveling when I am running an AP and using XP when I am GMing a more sandboxy game. I think it is great to have useful options based upon the game I am running.


Kasoh wrote:
Castilliano wrote:
So yeah, nothing about the XP vs. milestone situation should have any impact on design because one can dish out XP freely to hit whatever milestones one wishes the party to be at. Go to the party, XP; make an ally, XP; and so forth. Of course Paizo would have to balance it so that all parties w/ different personalities/skills/routes/rolls come out with enough XP. That's likely harder, yet doable since it needn't be exact, only more than enough to level. Or the...

I do recall that when discussion of "The Dragon's Demand" was happening, people were vocally upset that there was large, seemingly arbitrary story xp rewards designed to get the party to level 7 in the module. (So the climatic encounter could be against a larger dragon).

Now that was a few years ago and maybe people have lightened up, but I look around the internet and I doubt it.

Yea, Dragon's Demand is where I got the "climbing a hill for XP" example from, and it was heavily mocked online. Yes, it was an obstacle, but so easy and in such a non-threatening spot that one could imagine all the locals have that XP as some rite of passage that's oddly fulfilling for its ease.

The module was an odd duck, but told the GM as much, accelerating both XP & magic to get to a Huge Dragon in the space of one module while developing the NPCs & villains to Paizo standards. Funny thing is while it gave a fast track for PC XP w/ suggested levels, by the end the party would barely make 7th...and were expected NOT to reach 7th if they were a larger group or skipped a boss or two. So it had a "nope, not milestone", aspect to it.
I don't recall how my GM progressed us, probably milestone since we didn't track XP ourselves. When I ran it I used milestone, giving the players the caveat not to skip. And since it was tongue-in-cheek (with them being the Scooby gang; yes, the module's easy) I'd tell them when their PCs felt these strange sensations (XP increase). Veterans, they were baffled by some of the silly sources of XP, as if I'd added them to match the tone when they'd already been included.
Paizo kind of said DD broke the norms, but maybe they could've been more explicit that hey, here's an example of how one might use an inordinate amount of story rewards to accelerate PC progression. It may feel odd, and we only recommend it for specific campaign needs.

And yes, Ascalaphus, the visions being worth so much XP was silly.
You could ferry NPCs out to that spot and level them up nearly to the PCs level because there was so much XP! And there was nothing in-game to prevent this (once the very lethal monsters worth less XP were cleared out that is). Paizo should likely have spread out the sources a bit, maybe even with a large burst for finding the lost city to begin with (which seems more relevant than being the member of audience).
That was back when XP could be converted into magic items...so um...


Mathmuse wrote:
I asked two of my players about the potential 550 xp story award and my wife said that sounded excessive. We ended up discussing the strategic situation facing the party, and she remarked that they don't know the significant of the army they faced. I laughed and said the story award is for intelligence that explains that. She responded, "We got to have that!" Okay, the narrative value is established. But my wife still wants the story award cut down to 333 xp.

Players cutting on XP gain, does it even exist? Should I ask Santa Claus to get some?


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SuperBidi wrote:
Mathmuse wrote:
I asked two of my players about the potential 550 xp story award and my wife said that sounded excessive. We ended up discussing the strategic situation facing the party, and she remarked that they don't know the significant of the army they faced. I laughed and said the story award is for intelligence that explains that. She responded, "We got to have that!" Okay, the narrative value is established. But my wife still wants the story award cut down to 333 xp.
Players cutting on XP gain, does it even exist? Should I ask Santa Claus to get some?

They also give stolen loot back to the survivors of the bandit raid. Without survivors or heirs, they give loot away to the needy.


Out of curiosity how come the group didn't do 2 3 person games rather than 1 7 player game? I admit I haven't ever played a long campaign with 6+ players so I have no idea what it is like. It would be interesting to calculate how long between each characters turn. If I had 7 friends/family that wanted to play once a week I admit I would be happy :)

I have played table top RPGs with 3, 4, 5 and 6 players. 6 players in PFS because... well there isn't enough GMs basically.

3 player game: It is quite fun, only issue is it is way too hard to cover all the basis in a group like this.

4 players: I feel is the "sweet spot". Where every player doesn't get "bored" in between turns.

5 players: It isn't horrible but it starts to feel like too many people.

6 players (PFS): Main issue I have is that it takes like 10-20+ minutes before it is my turn. This can be a little rough. Also for social encounters it is REALLY hard to put my input in sometimes. Maybe you are just much better at handling multiple players since they are a usual group.

Milestone is definitely a different experience. I 100% see why your wife might like XP. PF2 I feel does XP better than 5e/PF1 since you just go up to 1000. It is odd when you are playing a session then all of the the GM says "you leveled up". I see why someone might not feel they "deserved it" especially if you are all just having fun since you know times flies!

It is hard for me as a player to enjoy XP as much because it just changes the game to where you have some players always "chasing XP". After every battle you have to ask "how much" xp and everyone looks how close they are too a level. Truthfully it really isn't a big deal because I have had plenty of fun in both.

The really problem is players can end up super under leveled. I have played lots of video and dying because you are under leveled feels like it would be a bad feeling in a TTRPG. Admittingly I have played 3 years of 5e/PF/PF2 and 0 characters have been killed, seems like most GMs don't want to kill a player unless they do something really stupid.


Do most people actually give out XP each session? (Or even after each fight?_ Is that immediate feedback part of why you like it? Or does it just feed into problems like the "We got that much of a story award? Makes no sense."

We still play using XP, but we ignore it most of the time. Every once in a while, the GM tells us we've got enough to level up.

Even back in the AD&D days when everyone leveled at different rates (or into 3.x, where there ways to spend xp, so you could be at different amounts), we'd generally get a lump sum after every few sessions, rather than detailed accounting of how much for each fight or other encounter.


Mathmuse, you reminded me of something about XP, that it can be useful for parties of different sizes so that smaller ones tend to be a bit higher in level while larger ones tend to be lower in level. (That is, when the encounters aren't adjusted to match.)
This can be an easier way to run irregular groups (alongside the greater or lesser wealth per PC) without having to make many adjustments.

---
Also just recognized that original DnD, as much as it seemed extremely focused on XP progression via combat, was sort of milestone because monsters were worth relatively little compared to treasure & story completion awards.
It was a long slog to kill enough Orcs (100+?) to hit level 2, but if you got to their treasure room or thwarted their invasion plans, Woohoo!
Definitely put the leveling in the hands of the DM and encouraged shooting for the endgame.
I wonder what such a "combat isn't worth so much" paradigm would look like with PF2 (keeping similar 3.X/PF progression speed). Never mind, that resemble milestone...

---
My next campaign, I'm tempted to try telling the players potential milestones. "Stop the ritual, gain a level." Phrased in-game as much as possible.


Castilliano wrote:

Mathmuse, you reminded me of something about XP, that it can be useful for parties of different sizes so that smaller ones tend to be a bit higher in level while larger ones tend to be lower in level. (That is, when the encounters aren't adjusted to match.)

This can be an easier way to run irregular groups (alongside the greater or lesser wealth per PC) without having to make many adjustments.

---
Also just recognized that original DnD, as much as it seemed extremely focused on XP progression via combat, was sort of milestone because monsters were worth relatively little compared to treasure & story completion awards.
It was a long slog to kill enough Orcs (100+?) to hit level 2, but if you got to their treasure room or thwarted their invasion plans, Woohoo!
Definitely put the leveling in the hands of the DM and encouraged shooting for the endgame.
I wonder what such a "combat isn't worth so much" paradigm would look like with PF2 (keeping similar 3.X/PF progression speed). Never mind, that resemble milestone...

---
My next campaign, I'm tempted to try telling the players potential milestones. "Stop the ritual, gain a level." Phrased in-game as much as possible.

Yeah, it would look like milestones. Unless you went back to doing it by treasure, which I wouldn't like. Never much interested in loot as the main motivation. I'd rather shift to game that relied less on loot than more.


Mathmuse wrote:
SuperBidi wrote:
Mathmuse wrote:
I asked two of my players about the potential 550 xp story award and my wife said that sounded excessive. We ended up discussing the strategic situation facing the party, and she remarked that they don't know the significant of the army they faced. I laughed and said the story award is for intelligence that explains that. She responded, "We got to have that!" Okay, the narrative value is established. But my wife still wants the story award cut down to 333 xp.
Players cutting on XP gain, does it even exist? Should I ask Santa Claus to get some?
They also give stolen loot back to the survivors of the bandit raid. Without survivors or heirs, they give loot away to the needy.

You think I'd fall for that!

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