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I'm posting abbreviated character details. Let me know if you need more information. (Encounter set-up will follow shortly.)
Excellent.
A brief glance at the numbers, I am not seeing anything completely out of the ordinary.
The Gnome Sorcerer's AC is a bit sketchy, but that isn't uncommon for a Sorcerer. As long as their positioning is good they should be fine.
So yes. The play-by-play from both players and enemies will be useful.
Noticing cleric wis is at 16 and champion strenght at 16 but again, not out of norms.
I mean this could also be a statistical freak show in which case your option is to tweak dice but... that's not satisfying.
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I'm posting abbreviated character details. Let me know if you need more information. (Encounter set-up will follow shortly.)
Excellent.
A brief glance at the numbers, I am not seeing anything completely out of the ordinary.
The Gnome Sorcerer's AC is a bit sketchy, but that isn't uncommon for a Sorcerer. As long as their positioning is good they should be fine.
So yes. The play-by-play from both players and enemies will be useful.
The cleric also seems spread a little thin. 14 strength and 16 Wis leaves then behind the curve on both methods of offense, and their AC should be a point higher with the right armor.
Champion should also have heavy armor by second level, and 16 strength isn't doing any favors.
So they are behind the curve out the gate, though not drastically so.
Looks like the sorcerer is missing one ability boost (but that's not going to be the make/break). Both offensive cantrips target reflex which can be a little tough for varying strategy if that's the opponents strong save. The battlefield control aspect of scatter scree can be useful if used well, but might not be as easy to use for two target damage as the much-loved electric arc.
The cleric feels like they might be trying to be all things and spread a little too thin -- looks like they're trying to be a battle cleric, but they have the lowest AC of the frontliners and a relatively low to-hit. They're buff spells look good though and if they use them effectively, I wouldn't complain. They could be a good demoralizer, maybe. Not sure they would feel effective when out of buffing spells though.
Rogue & Champion looks fine, all comes down to tactic there. I think it looks like the champion has a +1 magic weapon for their shield spikes, while the rogue doesn't have a fundamental rune yet?
On the whole looks ok, I don't see obvious 'can't stack' abilities.
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What was the enemy that they faced, or at least what level was it?They were facing two CR 3 creatures. I'll be posting the full details in spoiler quotes in a subsequent post soon, since the encounter came from a published adventure.
Hm... Two level 3 creatures is a severe encounter for a level 2 party. I could definitely see that fight going badly if mismanaged at all, or just with bad die luck. Especially at low levels, a couple bad rolls can turn a severe encounter into a death spiral pretty fast.
Were the party underlevelled compared to where the adventure expected them to be?
Do you use XP levelling or milestone levelling?
EDIT: Was the party at full health/resources going into the fight?
What was the enemy that they faced, or at least what level was it?They were facing two CR 3 creatures. I'll be posting the full details in spoiler quotes in a subsequent post soon, since the encounter came from a published adventure.Hm... Two level 3 creatures is a severe encounter for a level 2 party. I could definitely see that fight going badly if mismanaged at all, or just with bad die luck. Especially at low levels, a couple bad rolls can turn a severe encounter into a death spiral pretty fast.
Especially with a low AC cleric that looks like they're built to be a battle cleric. If your in-combat heals goes down first/early, its a problem
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EDIT: Was the party at full health/resources going into the fight?
OP listed the full health, at least one hero point, one focus point for all characters. Spells looked fairly depleted though.
Despite numerous suggestions from me to have the rune transferred to the rapier, he hasn't done it.
So he has the rune, just doesn't use it.
lol.
Though I know the feeling and player mentality. In a game I am playing in we have 6 +1 weapons that don't match what our characters use. We have gone through at least one battle using our default weapons still. Though we are taking a few days of downtime now to get a few of them switched over. But not all of them.
And at least Command doesn't have Incapacitation trait. It actually is a better disarm effect than Disarm is. And sometimes a better action reducer than Slow.
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I'm not seeing any glaring mistakes, so I'd chalk that up to bad luck (or good luck for the monsters, I guess).
That particular encounter is quite difficult, they didn't roll well and they made mistakes - such as ending turns next to the enemy, not focusing their damage and not retreating from a difficult encounter while on low resources. Their damage output in general also looks to be on the lower side with that setup, which didn't help, but its nothing too out of the ordinary.
Overall, I'd recommend trying something a little easier for a while (the weak template helps with that) and staying away from severe encounters for now. No shame in that.
Tactically is sounds OK from the GM side. Though I probably would have had one of the vermleks cast fear in that second round rather than full attacking -- yes its likely less effective than the attack (especially with all the crits you were rolling), but it doesn't feel like softballing while likely giving the party a bit of a chance to recover. Concentrating fire on a single PC with an above level threat is likely to drop people fast, maybe not as fast as happened there with double crits.
Also did you roll the vermlek's initiative separately or on the same initiative? (I can easily believe both still went first when rolled separately) I strongly believe that 'group initiative' is a mistake in PF2 (aside from maybe pairing up large groups of level -2s or similar) and something GMs need to avoid -- parties need a chance to react/adjust after seeing how powerful an opponent is.
Easiest fix is running everyone a level ahead. That seems to be about what the difference is- a point of AC, a point of spell DC, an accuracy rune... It'll take it from "TPK every three sessions" to "almost dying every three sessions" without the players needing to totally buckle down and change their style.
Another option that I think can work in a case like this -- have the second vermlek waste an action or two after dropping the champion -- its hungry and proud. Maybe it hisses/mantles to scare the other vermlek off 'its kill' maybe it does an intimidate action on the party (or the other vermlek), etc.
I don't think it would feel like you're going easy, but is a way to show some of their flavor of the enemies -- demons don't often work together perfectly.
As a GM letting your creatures make mistakes, while still in character, can go a long way in adapting to 'unfair' dice rolls and keep the session tense, but fun.
When your only defensive character goes down at the start of round 1, that is bad news for the party.
Now, about that...
Champion had their shield raised. It is possible to get a crit and a hit against a champion with their shield up, but not common. But to drop the Champion as a result seems off.
What about Shield Block?
A steel shield has hardness 5. Champion is listed as having 34 HP. Crit on 1d8+4 is max 24 damage. Hit is max 12. Subtract 5 from the shield block and the Champion would be taking 31 HP and have 3 left. Worst case.
With a wooden shield only having hardness 3 that would still leave the Champion at 1 HP.
Looks like the champion ate two crits and a hit in the first round.
The cleric did a two action heal on the champion, rolled 1, so restored her to 9 hp.
Yeah, sucks when that happens. It is too bad that hero points can't be used on healing rolls.
The party is officially out of magical healing.
Not quite. I didn't see mention of Rejuvenating Flames being used. That does do some healing as well as some damage. Not much of either though.
Yah at level 2 that'll drop you.
Cleric casting magic weapon on their own weapon is a mistake but a common one.
Overall with the amount of Crits I'm seeing sounds like a "GM has the luck of the devil" kind of encounter.
You can retreat from those and come back at level 5+ but at the lowest levels they can spell the end of your party.
I think the cleric cast magic weapon on the champion's shield boss, so a good choice.
Looks like the champion ate two crits and a hit in the first round.
Ah. I see the bite crit listed there too. Didn't notice that one.
But two crits and a hit out of three attacks against a champion with raised shield is rather uncommon.
+12 attack vs AC 21. They need a 9 to hit, and crit only on 19,20. For the two first attacks. For the second sword attack they need a 14 to hit and only crit on a 20.
So: 19+, 14+, 19+ => 10%, 35%, 10% = .1 * .35 * .1 = .0035 or 0.35% chance of happening.
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One minor tactical improvement would be to have the Cleric not revive a character while they are immediately adjacent to an enemy that gets to go before the downed character does.
The Cleric should delay their turn until after the adjacent creature's turn - then jump in and heal the Champion. Then the Champion can use their actions to do things like Lay on Hands, stand up, grab their equipment, or move.
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OP has a bright future in professional gambling
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One minor tactical improvement would be to have the Cleric not revive a character while they are immediately adjacent to an enemy that gets to go before the downed character does.
The Cleric should delay their turn until after the adjacent creature's turn - then jump in and heal the Champion. Then the Champion can use their actions to do things like Lay on Hands, stand up, grab their equipment, or move.
Doesn't initiative of a downed character move to just before the creature that downed them specifically for this?
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Rule 1 in PF2: You will get hit and bleed, i.e. you can't tank properly, at least you can't tank as you might think you can using play experience from other games or editions or books or movies. You might chose to play a class that is harder to take down, aka Champion or Fighter or Monk, and that has means to mitigate damage, however you still can't tank in the classical understanding of tanking. At least not against multiple enemies and/or against creatures of higher CR. Our fully healed level 4 Sword and Board Fighter tried to against a notorious CR+3 enemy in AoA but got as soundly shut down in 1 round as the Champion in the given example. All it took to get on a downward spiral were some above average (or lucky) early rolls from the GM.
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The only other thought that I have is that you are unconsciously metagaming.
Enemies don't automatically know about the party composition and abilities. So they shouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Gnome Sorcerer and a Gnome Monk immediately. Same with a Lizardfolk Cleric with light armor and a glaive and a Lizardfolk Fighter with light armor and a glaive. Or Half-elf Champion with a shield and Half-elf Fighter with a shield. And the difference in tactics that would be optimal between those different characters is noticeable.
Stride up to a Sorcerer and grapple -> good.
Stride up to a Monk and grapple -> not so good.
Run past the Champion and attack the Cleric with glaive -> good.
Run past a Fighter to attack a Fighter with glaive -> here, eat two AoOs.
But from the description it doesn't look like you are actually doing this. At least not in this particular encounter. Still something to keep in mind. Especially when dealing with enemies that out-level the players. Playing them in a perfect tactically optimal way is harsh.
Doesn't initiative of a downed character move to just before the creature that downed them specifically for this?One minor tactical improvement would be to have the Cleric not revive a character while they are immediately adjacent to an enemy that gets to go before the downed character does.
The Cleric should delay their turn until after the adjacent creature's turn - then jump in and heal the Champion. Then the Champion can use their actions to do things like Lay on Hands, stand up, grab their equipment, or move.
Yes. But it sounds like he was downed by one enemy, then healed up, then attacked by the other enemy.
Though with both of the enemies having the same relative position I'm not sure what the specific details of that would be.
With pf2e at least there are two approaches to the issue. Either you look at it as:
A player issue, meaning the players collectively failed to build a party that could handle the baseline difficulty of the system (everything up through extreme), or that they are simply too poor at playing the game to pilot a party that should be fine.
Or as a gm issue, where you failed to identify that the players had failed to build such a party or failed to account for their game skill level being poor and adjust the difficulty down in response.
As a player, I don't see the issue with punishing poor builds and poor play with death. Sometimes the dice just kill you, but more often than not you've either earned it or you're paying for another party member who will hopefully learn from their poor decisions.
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I tend to like an "easier" game for APs/Adventures than the official balance point -- but rather than the weak template that's been suggested a lot, I tend to like the 5 players/no adjustment to the scenario version. Maybe its laziness as a GM, but being able to run-as written, and just play with either 4 or 5 players (ie not having to adjust for the normal/random absences) has been ideal for the long running campaigns. And it means the campaigns tend to make it to the end. (My AoA group did tpk in the penultimate fight). My EC group is nearing the end of book 5 an while we've had a good number of dying 3's we've had no character deaths).
Though at least 3/4 of my PF2 experience as a player and GM has been PFS2 rather than APs, so that's the baseline I'm more used to evaluating the balance of encounters; and outside of one or two early season 1 scenarios, I feel they've been very solid on encounter design and CP scaling.
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Doesn't initiative of a downed character move to just before the creature that downed them specifically for this?One minor tactical improvement would be to have the Cleric not revive a character while they are immediately adjacent to an enemy that gets to go before the downed character does.
The Cleric should delay their turn until after the adjacent creature's turn - then jump in and heal the Champion. Then the Champion can use their actions to do things like Lay on Hands, stand up, grab their equipment, or move.
I thought that too, and almost posted a similar response. Then I realized breithauptclan had the right of it.
Note that adjusting the initiative as you describe makes no difference if there are other enemies that can threaten the revived patient after the healing and before the patient's next turn.
Adjusting initiative only buys them a turn before the one that dropped them, not against other potential threats.
Yeah, then all I can say is to stop using your dad's loaded dice.
Alternatively, do you have any other players who are more experienced with PF2? First, if the veterans are still running into major problems, then that would be an indicator that something is amiss on your side of the screen. If nothing else, the Play-by-Post forums are always short GMs.
Also, maybe have a mixed group - some veterans and some newcomers. See how that goes.
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That encounter is just really deadly. lieutenant level melee enemies that start in close to flank is one of the enemy types that are harder than the encounter guidelines suggest. With the fear effect on top of that, those monsters have a very high chance of critting. If the players are coming in uninformed and unequipped to take advantage of the weaknesses of those enemies, the encounter looks like it's bordering on Extreme instead of Severe. The high damage, high hit rate, high variance in damage attacks are going to randomly take out players if the dice swing the way of the monsters, which is what happened.
In that situation, I would have been prepared to fudge the dice if I thought the encounter was important to the story and the enemies were likely to come up again, so I didn't want to alter the stat block. Otherwise, altering the stat block or replacing the encounter seems appropriate.
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Ugh, I knew exactly what encounter it would be as soon as you said two 3rd level creatures. I hate that fight. Nothing signifies you're walking into a severe battle. It didn't TPK my group but it knocked all but one out, and that one led the monsters away from the party and then an NPC bailed them out. I think it played a role in ruining one of my groups as well. EC has a difficulty problem that is exacerbated by an identity crisis. Players build circus performers and then get thrown into a meat grinder. If you've got new players, I highly recommend using weak adjustments, or level the party ahead of schedule, or something.
I'm playing Abomination Vaults and it is much more reasonable, IMO. I have an experienced group of players and they still had a few hairy encounters, but it feels much more reasonable.
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Ugh, I knew exactly what encounter it would be as soon as you said two 3rd level creatures. I hate that fight. Nothing signifies you're walking into a severe battle. It didn't TPK my group but it knocked all but one out, and that one led the monsters away from the party and then an NPC bailed them out. I think it played a role in ruining one of my groups as well. EC has a difficulty problem that is exacerbated by an identity crisis. Players build circus performers and then get thrown into a meat grinder. If you've got new players, I highly recommend using weak adjustments, or level the party ahead of schedule, or something.
I'm playing Abomination Vaults and it is much more reasonable, IMO. I have an experienced group of players and they still had a few hairy encounters, but it feels much more reasonable.
I've run AV for another group, and while we didn't have any TPKs, that group thought it was too difficult for their preferences.
This group was turned off by the concept of a "dungeon crawl." They voted to play EC, even after I told them it would border on being more difficult than other Adventure Paths.
EC. winds up turning into dungeon crawls quite a bit, too. Hence the identity crisis.
It sounds like you just need to ratchet down the difficulty and not tell your players you're doing it. Either put them one level above the curve or be extremely liberal with the weak template.
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It sounds like you just need to ratchet down the difficulty and not tell your players you're doing it.Don't lie to your players about this kind of thing. Its quite disrespectful. If that means that they don't like the difficulty of the game and want to play something else, its probably best to respect that.
I don't think that tracks. If the issue is the difficulty, PF2 made it really easy to lower the difficulty. The problem is players and GMs are really adverse to knowingly making things easier. And maybe there's a game the players would like more with those adjustments, but the GM isn't responsible for learning a new game for them.
I also don't see a meaningful difference between changing the difficulty level from what is written to changing plot details or removing triggering content, and neither of those are things the GM needs to inform players of. Just do what you need to do to make the game fun. Or just don't play at all, I guess?