The PF2e playtest and accuracy changes


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion

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Ascalaphus wrote:
The system is intended for you to learn, not to be born with the knowledge.

The question being, do you learn the "right" things?

For example (and while keeping the title of this thread in mind) our Wizard relatively quickly learned to avoid spell attack rolls even after picking up True Strike, simply based on the rather bad base accuracy coupled with a lot of sub-par rolls (and re-rolls) during the characters early days while primarily trying to land Produce Flame and Acid Arrow.

Which lead to a quite bizare situation when we unexpectedly encountered a creature at much higher level where Ray of Frost would have really been a game changer he simply had not used nor memorized it for like 5 levels and the encounter thus nearly ended a TPK.

And even if we move away from spell attacks, many important challenges that you do stumble across during the course of an official AP seem to require a specialist and/or the perfect setup (e.g. correct spell for this situation) and a roll of around 11+. Which means that even if you do have the specialist or happen to have the required "tools" at hand chances for failure are still quite high.

Sovereign Court

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Ubertron_X wrote:
Ascalaphus wrote:
The system is intended for you to learn, not to be born with the knowledge.

The question being, do you learn the "right" things?

For example (and while keeping the title of this thread in mind) our Wizard relatively quickly learned to avoid spell attack rolls even after picking up True Strike, simply based on the rather bad base accuracy coupled with a lot of sub-par rolls (and re-rolls) during the characters early days while primarily trying to land Produce Flame and Acid Arrow.

Which lead to a quite bizare situation when we unexpectedly encountered a creature at much higher level where Ray of Frost would have really been a game changer he simply had not used nor memorized it for like 5 levels and the encounter thus nearly ended a TPK.

That's a legit issue. Learning things in a random environment with a small sample size - well that's not an ideal learning setup. I think for me personally, what made a big difference in "learning" what works is that I played PFS right from the start. The setup between PFS and especially early-books Age of Ashes (and Plaguestone) is significantly different;

- PFS uses more minions. This is necessary because when you just bump solo bosses for 6-player parties, you very quickly get into untouchable killer boss land. A couple of damning product reviews later, and the message gets through.

- Early AoA has a lot of Severe+ encounters anyway, PFS takes it a bit easier.

- PFS by nature brings you into contact with many more players. If you "learned the wrong thing" and other people learned the right thing, you can witness them doing it and it working and you get a chance to revise your ideas.

Ubertron_X wrote:
And even if we move away from spell attacks, many important challenges that you do stumble across during the course of an official AP seem to require a specialist and/or the perfect setup (e.g. correct spell for this situation) and a roll of around 11+. Which means that even if you do have the specialist or happen to have the required "tools" at hand chances for failure are still quite high.

I've become strongly convinced that APs don't get nearly enough playtesting, especially not playtesting with people from different groups. It's easy for you to think "surely everyone has Ray of Frost" because it just happens to be popular in your local meta.

Also, what APs are particularly bad at is indicating the expected pacing. The way they're written, it's almost a "not one step back" mentality where you do ridiculous amounts of encounters per day and failure or tactical retreat is not an option. Paizo expects each group to "make the book their own" but sadly, a lot of people don't know that because it never really says that anywhere. A new GM trying out Pathfinder (or 2E conversion) for the first time who wants to do it "the standard way" thinks that what's in the book is literally what's intended.

Recent discussions (which you were in too!) showed us much more of what's really going on. The big split between the people saying "the APs are fine because they're just a toolbox that I use how I like" vs. the people saying "the APs are not fine, they don't work out of the box and nowhere did it tell me I wasn't just supposed to use them out of the box".

Knowing that I'd take a much more editorial position as a GM, cutting some of the overwrought encounters down to size, and certainly putting the PCs more in the driving seat of the pacing. Run into a golem? Run away and come back with the one spell that works against it next day.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I think it is really interesting that the Abomination vault calls out that you might want to consider a slow XP progression for that AP, and that there are lots more encounters than are necessary to reach the leveling up requirements. I haven't looked over the book at all yet, but it also mentions that it calls out specific milestones to leveling up for milestone leveling, and that it discourages just having the party level up when they reach the next chapter, like in many past APs.

I know that people have different feelings about the number of encounters in APs, but it is important to recognize that a lot of those slower, lower difficulty encounters are there to help the players level their tactics up, not just to award XP to the characters. I totally get the impulse to move the story along as quickly as possible, but especially with newer players, that can be pretty risky if it means giving them more powers to choose from before they have figured out how they want to use the powers they have.

Sovereign Court

I think making chapter ends be the milestones when you level up is a natural thing to do - beat a notable (sub)boss, go up a a level.

I mean, what are the alternatives?

Level up just before you go fight a boss? You could, but I dunno if it's truly satisfying. You'll be rolling higher numbers, but the boss is also gonna have higher target numbers so you might end up feeling like you're never really getting any better. I'd rather beat the boss, go up a level, then fight some monsters I've fought before but now I notice it's easier.

Level up in the middle of the dungeon just like that (maybe this particular encounter gave enough XP)? Doing level-ups mid-session is more doable in 2E because the upgrade math is straightforward, but it's still a session tempo killer.

Level up at the end of an adventuring day? Sure, makes more sense and you can combine it neatly with the end of a game session. And to really tie a bow on it you can have the adventuring day end with a nice final fight scene. Except then you're pretty much back to putting a milestone at the end of a chapter.

---

Regarding cutting the low difficulty encounters: I think here we're running into a perverse outcome of the writing process. Writers need to put in a lot of XP per page. One of the most efficient ways to do that is to use Bestiary monsters or re-use monsters we've used before. But that doesn't really make for really fresh unique encounters. Most of the precious word count is going to be spent on bossfights and hard fights. So the least interesting encounters also happen to be the easier ones, and that puts them first on the chopping block for a GM who thinks the adventure has too many fights.


Yet by the very same token, repetitive fights against familiar enemies are a boon for building player knowledge. GMs tend towards the higher side of insight into the game system, hence feeling able to run it, but APs also target new players, and new players will generally need to get the hang of things. What may seem uninteresting to veterans could be foundational to a newbie, and that includes 5 similar fights to feel out which tactics work.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Bestiary monsters can still make for incredibly interesting fights, but I think you are right that it takes word count to make the environment around a fight interesting. I think GMs should just be aware that “moving the plot along faster” can come with the consequence of not giving PCs enough time to get to know their character. I found that the homebrew I have run using XP in a sand box has even moved along a little fast and not given PCs enough time to use their abilities. The slow progression chart for abomination vaults sounds interesting to me.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

And about milestone leveling: having the end of a chapter be a milestone makes sense, but having it work out that you can get from level to level just jumping from chapter end to chapter end can put the party level ahead of their experience with their characters. It sounds like abomination vaults is adding extra milestones within chapters and just requiring x number of milestones, not assigning specific milestones to specific levels.


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Ascalaphus wrote:

[snip]
---

Regarding cutting the low difficulty encounters: I think here we're running into a perverse outcome of the writing process. Writers need to put in a lot of XP per page. One of the most efficient ways to do that is to use Bestiary monsters or re-use monsters we've used before. But that doesn't really make for really fresh unique encounters. Most of the precious word count is going to be spent on bossfights and hard fights. So the least interesting encounters also happen to be the easier ones, and that puts them first on the chopping block for a GM who thinks the adventure has too many fights.

Getting a bit off-topic, but I agree with the analysis 100%. I've been wishing they would cut one of the 2 6-page articles after the adventure to give 6 pages back to the adventure. With 2e APs generally going to 20, and wanting to have encounters at 20, the XP per page is higher than 1e APs if you keep the same number of pages. Pulling back 6 more pages of adventure content, is roughly 1 page per level in a book, which feels like enough words to add more interesting battlefield details/tactics/mix of opponents to the easier fights to make them interesting. (Of course if authors just take the extra pages to further enhances boss fights/etc, then it doesn't change the equation much -- or if they double increase the descriptive text, etc)

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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The reason milestoneing at the end of a chapter doesn't work in Abomination Vaults is that we set up each chapter to represent a dungeon level, and designed each dungeon level to sync to a character level. Milestones in that case work fine if the dungeon is linear to the extent you have to do all of one level before going to the next one, but we didn't want to restrict things that way. There are multiple ways to go between levels, and milestoning it so that you level up soon as you set foot on a lower level means you could probably just sneak through and hit level 3 without a single fight, for example, if you took the exact right route at the right time.

Instead, for Abomination Vaults, we strongly recommend you use XP to track leveling, since the dungeon is more of a sandbox style dungeon than a linear one. For GMs who prefer milestones, we give suggestions in the adventures when to level up based on accomplisments in the story rather than progression through the book/through the encounter areas.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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NielsenE wrote:
Getting a bit off-topic, but I agree with the analysis 100%. I've been wishing they would cut one of the 2 6-page articles after the adventure to give 6 pages back to the adventure. With 2e APs generally going to 20, and wanting to have encounters at 20, the XP per page is higher than 1e APs if you keep the same number of pages. Pulling back 6 more pages of adventure content, is roughly 1 page per level in a book, which feels like enough words to add more interesting battlefield details/tactics/mix of opponents to the easier fights to make them interesting. (Of course if authors just take the extra pages to further enhances boss fights/etc, then it doesn't change the equation much -- or if they double increase the descriptive text, etc)

The reason we don't do this more often is that you can't split development on an adventure, and about 50 pages of adventure pushes the limit for how much a developer can actually do in a month. In order to have longer adventures, we'd have to start work on our adventure paths even earlier (since I'm not interested in saying "If you are an Adventure Path developer, you have to work 60 hours a week instead of 40). Which we could, in theory, do, but that's hard to claw that time away while a developer is already working on the current project.

It's a matter of science—of time and space—that sets an adventure path installment's length at about 50 or so than anything else.

As an example, I did this exact thing during Return of the Runelords; I needed those adventures to be longer than the norm because that was the only way we could fit enough content in to ensure that the adventures would reach 20th level. But in order to do that, I had to jump in and start working on Return of the Runelords MONTHS early, and even then by the end, we were up against very tight deadlines. The only way we managed this and still stayed on a monthly release schedule was that other developers (Ron and Crystal at the time) were handling the Adventure Path line, and me stepping in to do Return of the Runelords was adding an additional developer to the task (at the expense of my other job as creative director). So while I worked on Return, Ron and Crystal were able to focus their work on other Adventure Paths simultaneously.

While I'm always eager to hear feedback on our stuff, we've been doing Pathfinder Adventure Paths for nearly 15 years now and we've learned a lot about best practices and what the overall reader preferences are. Significant changes to that formula, which already works, are not things we generally consider.


Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Thanks for the context. Working within those confines one alternative approach is to move more of xp budget from encounters to story awards/non-combat challenges, rather than the 'low-word count' encounters that often have been repeated mooks in relatively non-dynamic battlefields. -- Even if its not adding a new challenge (that costs pages), but increasing what was a low award to a moderate, etc. Enough of those over the course of a book can save 2-3 encounters that didn't have the luxury of being as developed as we players/GMs might like.

The other approach I'd like to see is treating more of the low-word-count encounters as 'patrols' or 'waves' as appropriate for the situation, adding them in (or starting with them and having the boss/mini-boss/more fully developed set piece encounter pile in at a 'fair/safe' cadence. You can re-use the more detailed encounter area as a result, and get some of the 'dynamic' of a responsive opponent -- something that is often seen as 'experienced GMs naturally add that in, less experienced gms run the APs more statically.'

Hmm, oooh that could be a fun blog series for y'all 'Bringing an AP to Life' -- not targeting a specific AP, but talking about, in general, places for newer GMs to focus on when 'making the AP their own'. There's probably a couple of pages of text that would be worth sharing with new to AP GMs, without making it boilerplate that needs to get printed in every 1st volume.

Liberty's Edge

New PF2 players who play casters in a party of other new players will likely miss the importance of using Skills and spells to lower saves. As well as the importance of always having something useful to do with your 3rd action.

These are the kind of elements that PF2 system mastery relies on. And they can definitely make a difference between repeated failure and success IMO.

Sovereign Court

NielsenE wrote:
Thanks for the context. Working within those confines one alternative approach is to move more of xp budget from encounters to story awards/non-combat challenges, rather than the 'low-word count' encounters that often have been repeated mooks in relatively non-dynamic battlefields. -- Even if its not adding a new challenge (that costs pages), but increasing what was a low award to a moderate, etc. Enough of those over the course of a book can save 2-3 encounters that didn't have the luxury of being as developed as we players/GMs might like.

In another of these threads it was pointed out that giving too much story XP for too simple challenges, didn't go down well.

But the GMG gives a good beginning framework for "build your own minigame" and of course now those are getting a lot more field-testing now that they're in the wild. PFS, as well, allows a lot of experimentation.

I can imagine that after a while, designing XP-worthy skill challenges that fit in a word count will become a technique that's easy enough to use a lot more.

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