Venture-Lieutenant, Virginia—Richmond
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PF2 has better balance than PF1, so I reckon we'll see more PF2 Scenarios at higher level than PF1 ever had. Although they did raise prices on high-level scenarios, so maybe they're more difficult to produce or maybe Paizo expects inelastic demand from its playerbase.
As for 9-12 scenarios, I don't thing we'll see any until Summer 2022 at the earliest. The first 3-6 scenario wasn't published until 2019-11-27, after eight 1-4 tier scenarios. The first 5-8 scenario was published 2020-05-28, after six 3-6 tier scenarios were done. And the first 7-10 will be published 2021-06-30, after eleven(!) 5-8 will have been published.
I wouldn't expect to see 9-12 scenarios until they publish around six or eight tier 7-10 scenarios, which they are unlikely to do in a hurry. They will always want to support low-level play so as to bring in new people. Plus the more tiers they have, the fewer of each they can publish on a twice-a-month schedule.
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Yes six scenarios at least, from tier N-1 are always needed before the next tier comes out. (Since I don't think they'd release a scenario that required people to have Adventure/One Shot/Adventure Path credit on a character). The first 7-10 was a little delayed relative to that metric, but that also means there's a strong base for future 7-10s. (Ie next season they could have replace a couple 5-8s with 7-10s without unbalancing the pyramid.)
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It really alters the character building process to know that you’re never going to reach level 10 (or greater) feats or stat bumps, and effectively cuts the career of a character (and the game) in half vs. non-society play.
That's not exactly true. We are just seeing the first two 7-10s released this spring. So, it stands to reason we'll see the first 9-12s sometime next season, likely in the latter half.
You have to remember that they have limited resources and have to release material that is going to appeal to the widest possible audience. At this point, most of the high-level characters belong to the hard-core players who play everything and often soon after it is released. However, that is a smaller portion of the community than the more casual players who either play less frequently, or play many different characters thus dividing XP over a wider selection of PCs. It just makes good business sense to hold off on producing higher level content until they are comfortable with the size of the customer pool. It does mean some of us have to wait to play our -2001 again because it has leveled out of what's available. It also ensures that we are all going to go crazy for the first few 7-10s when they are released.
Designer
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I think that a good thing to look at as a reference is Starfinder. We are at the end of Season 3 (which is closer to 3/12 years' worth of scenarioes) and just now seeing an 11-14. It would stand to reason that we would be looking somewhere near the end of Season 3, beginning of Season 4 of PF2 before we see the same.
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Further, scenario writers need experience GMing, Playing, and Writing at a given tier level before they can write well balanced scenarios.
This means that they need time to build a pool of writers who can produce at a given tier, before they can release a scenario at that tier.
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Further, scenario writers need experience GMing, Playing, and Writing at a given tier level before they can write well balanced scenarios.
This means that they need time to build a pool of writers who can produce at a given tier, before they can release a scenario at that tier.
Or they can just do what Paizo has been doing up to now.
Write adventures that are not remotely well balanced. That are, in fact, sometimes absurdly unbalanced :-(
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Personally, I think balance is a myth. Its a magical stag everyone is always pursuing, but never catching. There are simply too many variables in TTRPGs for authors/developers to hit the "sweet spot" of challenges in anything approaching consistency. Adventuring is a dangerous profession. If it wasn't everyone would do it. Put on your "big boy" pants and get busy. Sometimes, you will crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Other times, you will have to run away with you tail tucked between your legs. Most of the time, you will struggle, but win out in the end. That's <fantasy> life
Explore! Report! Cooperate!
Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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I don't think society adventures have been THAT unbalanced outside of early scenario "let's buff single enemy" adjustment shenanigans, their main issue is more of that party composition can be completely random so party full of wizards vs melee will have hard time and not taking it easy on tier 1-2 :p
Like thing with all society scenarios have is that they ALL want to have that difficult severe level encounter. Which feels kinda tiring when every single scenario has at least one difficult combat one way or another, in normal ap they save most difficult encounters at end of chapter so you would go multiple sessions without every single combat being life or death difficult :p
(I do admit though, some scenarios have custom enemies that have no strong weaknesses, unlike most bestiary monsters. So when enemy has high ac and all high or moderate saves, its kinda hard to do anything to them even if encounter difficulty claims its "moderate")
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Personally, I think balance is a myth. Its a magical stag everyone is always pursuing, but never catching.
Perfect balance is most definitely NOT attainable. Agreed
But reasonable balance in PF2 IS obtainable. In fact, Paizo often achieves this which makes its failures more noticeable. I define "reasonable balance" as something like "most reasonably (NOT perfectly, reasonably) built groups will be able to survive all the encounters barring quite bad tactics or quite bad luck and will overcome the encounters most of the time".
. Put on your "big boy" pants and get busy.
badwrongfun much? You might like constant character deaths in your games interspersed with the occassional TPK but others don't.
In Abomination Vaults my character died 3 times in a single 4 hour session. The group were all experienced players, the characters were all reasonably built albeit not optimized to the last degree for combat (my Champion actually had put some points into charisma as opposed to maxing out Constitution. And he wasn't a dwarf which was clearly an unforgiveable mistake.)
One of those times was when my 1st level character went up against a Vampiric Touch spell. It is not that surprising that a 6d6 attack with the Death trait killed a level 1 character. In fact, even against a front liner it is the EXPECTED result without spending a Hero point and about 30 odd % likely WITH spending a Hero Point. I claim putting that in was unbalanced
The other 2 times were TPKs (literally) where we were saved by GM handwaving.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Oregon—Portland
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I don't think that's the most helpfully presented response. To turn into something more productive, I think that if you were still level 1 and getting hit with Vampiric Touch, that this isn't actually something you should lay at the feet of the AP authors.
Yeah, I think the encounter in question is a moderate 3. So if someone is level 1 at that point, that's now an extreme encounter and things could go badly.
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Venture-Agent, Online—VTT
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There actually is a case where the spell can come up earlier than the encounter I was thinking was the first instance, and which is a good entry in the list of ill-conceived low level solo boss encounters.
Thats why I had deleted my post. In addition to deciding it probably wouldn't help to turn the conversation heat down after all, I realized that I had a fact mixed up.
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reasonable
Reasonable is a subjective evaluation and probably not a metric high on the list of development factors when creating content.
without spending a Hero point
Maybe that is exactly why the author did what they did. The addition of Hero Points makes PF2E much different than PF1E. It means they can make some challenges stronger without worrying about negative Con being an absolute limiting factor.
When PCs can burst for 40+ damage at first level vs targets that don't have the benefit of Hero Points, I don't see why the enemies cannot do the same thing in return. Assuming the GM is providing an adequate amount of Hero Points and the players are responsible with them and employ sensible tactics, TPKs should be extremely rare. But, its not my place to judge anyone else's campaign. IMO, it is rarely the fault of the author/developer. YMMV
badwrongfun much?
Sometimes, its bad luck. Sometimes even the best players make less than ideal decisions. Sometimes the answer is, "get better." You can call it whatever you want.
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When PCs can burst for 40+ damage at first level. . . I don't see why the enemies cannot do the same thing in return.
I wouldn't mind some education on how to achieve this phenomenon reliably.
A fighter could do 56 on a critical hit at maximum of 2d12+4 damage (and sure, a 1st level fighter could roll 3 20s in a row against an AC 19 with 6 straight 12s for 168 damage in a single turn), but that's not exactly the bar one would be designing against. If a 1st level opponent was regularly doing 40+ damage on a hit, it would be insta-killing (2 x maximum HP) a lot of characters.
EDIT: More of an aside, NPC opponents always meet the PCs at full power. They don't have to fight their way to the PCs, they don't have to worry about resource management, they don't have to worry about WBL, they don't have to worry about saving coin for antidotes, scrolls of just in case spells, or worry about what spells to memorize for the day. They always appear fully prepared to do battle at the top of their game.
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Maybe that is exactly why the author did what they did. The addition of Hero Points makes PF2E much different than PF1E.
AFTER spending a hero point my character still had about a 30% chance of dying from that attack. Which, to me, is unreasonable and unbalanced
badwrongfun much?
Sometimes, its bad luck. Sometimes even the best players make less than ideal decisions. Sometimes the answer is, "get better." You can call it whatever you want.
As I suspect you already know, my badwrongfun comment was in response to your
Put on your "big boy" pants
Which certainly seems to me to be deliberately insulting anybody who doesn't agree with you. Ie, calling our way of playing badwrongfun
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Why did your GM decide to ruin the module?
I don't know if you meant to type ruin or run
Assuming you meant ruin, the GM is a very good GM who is pretty much running things as written while erring slightly on the side of leniency. So, if you define "ruin" as "running as written" then he is guilty.
Assuming you meant run, because the module actually has a good story, lots of interesting NPCs, great art, he's already run almost everything. If it wasn't as overtuned as it is then it would be an excellent example of a dungeon crawl.
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It's an AP. They aren't supposed to be run as written. They are supposed to be a framework to fit to your players.
PFS scenarios *will be* run as written, that is why they take so much more experience to write for.
Sorry, but I totally do NOT buy that defence.
Obviously, the GM should glance at things to make sure that his group can handle things. Perhaps their group is extraordinary in some way. But that does not (or, more accurately, should not) mean that they have to vet the entire AP by checking the math, especially for a group that isn't far off the "norm" in terms of capability.
People buy APs to reduce the amount of work they have to do as a GM. Pushing the responsibility of checking and changing everything onto the GM is a gross abdication of responsibility
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Sorry, but I totally do NOT buy that defence.
It's less a defense and more an effort to guide this back on topic, I suspect (and I would agree it's not a defense). AP design is not PFS's purview so I'd go post in the relevant product pages and forums about those issues so the authors and designers see them. There are PFS scenarios that are tuned to be less forgiving, but citing a rough encounter in Abomination Vaults isn't making a point relevant to this thread.
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Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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It's an AP. They aren't supposed to be run as written. They are supposed to be a framework to fit to your players.
PFS scenarios *will be* run as written, that is why they take so much more experience to write for.
Actually the fact that they're no tactics in PFS scenarios makes it easier to fudge as a GM.
Also, I've had open ended Pathfinder Society scenarios go so severely off the rails that the players nearly short circuited the safety features in place to keep them from dying.* It's why I have a love hate relationship with them. They're fun because players will do the unimaginable and weirdest of things. I hate them because oooo god I have to adjudicate the weirdest of things.
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Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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As someone who runs APs as written pretty successfully, I take offense at statement I'm not allowed to run them how I want to run them ;D
Anyway, I think example Paul is frustrated with is example of why I really don't like putting level 3 monsters vs level 1 party or using elite adjustment during that level x'D I can't be sure though, but I'm fairly confident in guess that all of his near deaths were from level 3 stuff, since for rest of them that would be just bad luck rather than imbalance.
Like with level 4 enemies at level 1, you likely kill characters with massive damage. With level 3 players will likely prevail but one of them still has relatively good chance to die because its level 1
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Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Boston Metro
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You say that snarkily but the vast majority of scenarios I've run don't have monster tactics or at least not anything that would entirely prevent a GMing from nuking players haphazardly. Seriously, go read the brand new scenarios and tell me where the tactics are. I'll wait here patiently while you are unable to find them. I don't think there ever was supposed to be monster tactics in the scenario as I remember it being part of the lead up to Society 2E.Actually the fact that they're no tactics in PFS scenarios . . .I must be running different scenarios.
As someone who runs APs as written pretty successfully, I take offense at statement I'm not allowed to run them how I want to run them ;D
Anyway, I think example Paul is frustrated with is example of why I really don't like putting level 3 monsters vs level 1 party or using elite adjustment during that level x'D I can't be sure though, but I'm fairly confident in guess that all of his near deaths were from level 3 stuff, since for rest of them that would be just bad luck rather than imbalance.
Like with level 4 enemies at level 1, you likely kill characters with massive damage. With level 3 players will likely prevail but one of them still has relatively good chance to die because its level 1
No. The issue is that the module makes it quite clear the part is supposed to be level 2 at that point. What Paul did was basically why as a GM you have to be careful running sandboxes. Because the first thing as a GM I thought was was players triggering high level encounters by sheer dumb accident at level 1. So as a GM you have gently railroad the players or else your going to get them killed.
That's the primary reason why I also don't like the inconsistency of tactics in PFS scenarios. In one instance someone hated a scenario because of a monster's ability despite the scenario not actually saying the monster uses said ability. A good GM is going to ignore that ability as its not fun where as an inexperienced GM is just going to use it and maybe result in a psuedo TPK.
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Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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I mean, the vampiric touch they were referring to was likely the
Like it isn't super hard encounter, but I can see how it could turn deadly on level 1 with bad dice rolls.
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It seems pretty obvious at this point that you havent actually read the scenario.
You mean Adventure Path, not scenario (though you probably do mean little-s scenario), because all this arguing about how deadly Abomination Vaults is is occurring in a thread about getting higher tier PFS scenarios.
Please start a new thread to debate whether Abomination Vaults is too deadly or not.
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Venture-Agent, Finland—Tampere
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Like it isn't super hard encounter, but I can see how it could turn deadly on level 1 with bad dice rolls.** spoiler omitted **
Ah, I had missed that death trait comes with "insta death at 0 hp", that definitely makes it deadlier for level 1 especially with elite adjustment increasing dc. I was myself thinking of "you have fairly good chance of crit failing that and dying from massive damage"
I'm genuinely wondering if writers realized how deadly giving 3rd level spell that trait is O_o; (or giving that particular level 3 spell to variant of level 2 creature ^^; )