Talking is fine, advertising in an underhanded way/spamming is not.
If you read my posts does it really sound like i'm trying to push to 5e or to buy a product? Its 20ish posts about bossmechanis and occasional reference to pdf (because I want ppl to read it to understand what i'm coming from when i'm talking about a book i want to see for pf2e).
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To be blunt, from what I gathered, you saw some PF2 discussions or perhaps had a game that didn't quite click and you made a blanket statement without looking too much deeper into the system about it. You may not have intended this to be an advertisement, but it does read like one in retrospect.
"There's this product that 5e has that just came out that could spice up your games."
I don't think you intended it to be that way, but an uncharitable read could go that way - mostly with it being a new product and being your sole example. There's also a bit of what is coming off as an unfamiliarity with PF2 - or least a number of PF2 opinions coming second-hand. If you have played some PF2, I'm not sure of your GM's comfort level with the system if they couldn't provide you with some fun and dynamic encounters. If you've run it, I certainly hope that the links and books you've been pointed to are helpful in running your encounters with more oomph.
EDIT: Also, man, this being your first thread on the forums doesn't help the "not advertising" thing.
Sorry about that, I just didn't have a another example of a similar product. But I see your point(s). And thanks for the advice Ruzza I will dive deeper :)
If you're interested in a slower-form game, shoot me a message. I'm unfortuantely in a difficult time zone, but I run Play-By-Post games on a Discord server. I also talk a lot about encounter and adventure design over on Twitch, but I don't want to self-promote here.
I also wanted to say that I was wrong about Kingmaker final boss. I made a mistake and assumed ...
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I also wanted to say that I was wrong about Kingmaker final boss. I made a mistake and assumed queen Nyrissa (big book...) was the boss not the Lantern King. Lantern King was a better boss encounter with a cool social then combat encounter w cool battle map and detailed description on how to run him and his abilities. My bad. I later even found some notes on how to run Nyrissa in combat as well just in a different place in the book.
You might want to use spoilers for those who have not played the AP.
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I am always happy to share stories about making fun encounters and hearing about what inspires other GMs to come up with interesting ideas.
Tone on message boards is difficult and many people (myself included) sometimes react strongly to messages that feel like they are prescriptively saying "Paizo must do xyz!" especially when the conversation continues as the complaint is something more like "I have been running (or thinking about running) X, and there was some expectation that I have, or was hoping to see, that feels unfufilled." Sometimes it just takes those larger statements of frustration to get at the more specific issue though, so I try to remember to be patient and really talk through general statements to try to find specific issues.
Last night, I turned a regular encounter towards the end of the first book of Fists of the Ruby Phoenix into a full blown Extreme+ encounter. I took an encounter written to be 2 level 14 creatures and made it 4 of them against a party of 4 level 13 players. This isn't an example of a solo fight, but many of the topics of this thread are relevant because action economy was the serious balancing issue i needed to pay attention to: the enemy was all level +1 to the party, and even worse, this was the 3rd encounter of the day for the players, but the first for the enemy.
I balanced it, and made a thrilling 9 round event of the fight by making sure that the party was not the initial target of the enemies, and that the encounter space was over 75 squares by 100 squares. This let the action economy issues take care of themselves, because the 4 enemies were spreading themselves out to accomplish their goal of hurting a lot of people who had gathered around the end of a series of competitions, the bystanders were mostly decently leveled competition in this event, and the party had spent a lot of role playing time getting to know these characters (far beyond the scope of the original book), so they were invested in trying to help keep them alive, but also contend with powerful adversaries. Just by having such a dynamic encounter space, I had opportunities to provide magical support to the party, healing, the occasional (often shortly lived) flanking support, and way to control the pace of the encounter, without really having to make special rules about anything. Because the party had interacted with almost all of the NPCs previously, they had the opportunity and knowledge to ask for support from specific people they had made friends with, and even be disappointed when some allies turned out not to be heroic types that they had boasted of earlier.
What I love about PF2, is that modifying this encounter from a 2 on 4 situation to a 4 on 4+ the surrounding social environment was incredibly easy to arbitrate on the fly, and grab reasonable numbers for when the players of the enemy went off script. The party wizard's focus on counterspelling almost completely shut down a higher level caster enemy who was trying to use some lower level AoE effects to cause as much damage as possible to bystanders. It really turned in a memorable moment that felt like a satisfying end to a part of a competition that the players had spent many sessions engaged in. If I were designing a similar encounter to be a boss fight against a solo enemy, I think the absolutely most important element to prevent the encounter from being a race to slaughter is to just make sure that both sides have objectives that require that they spend actions moving around and changing the dynamics of the encounter every round. Or at least, give the higher level creature such an obvious territorial advantage (in addition to be a solo monster) that a frontal assault is broadcast as a fool's quest. AoA had some trouble by disguising the difficulty of solo monsters in their encounter spaces, and putting those encounters where retreat became quickly impossible.
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I think it's telling that the book the OP got excited about was a kickstarter book. Paizo is a publisher, its business is to figure out what books are going to sell, put those books together, and get them to the people who want to buy them. The number one thing that dooms publishing is "incredible amounts of unsold inventory" so "estimating demand" is pretty important, a thing that Kickstarter projects do automatically. But Paizo mostly uses things like "subscriptions to the various lines" and "orders from FLGSs" to estimate demand, but internally they have the expertise to figure out what's going to sell and what's not going to sell as well. Paizo isn't adverse to using Kickstarter, but this is generally for products unlike ones they've made in the past (like the 5e version of Abomination vaults, the Kingmaker remaster, or Pathfinder video games) whereas "a book of tools for GMs" is not unlike something they've made before in any way.
So suffice to say if they wanted it, which is to say they thought that people would want it, they would make it. But the secret of the TTRPG publishing industry is that GM-facing books just don't sell as well as Player-facing books. Heck, "let other people else publish adventures for us" is where the OGL came from in the first place.
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Where are people getting the idea that this was spam? I read OP not saying "I have a product to sell you" but "Do you see this product for 5e? I want one for 2e."
Knowing how Pathfinder folks get when the name 5e are mentioned, I understand why the pushback, but Where Evil Lives is just being used as an example because there's a preview of it. If OP were going to sell you specifically on action oriented design, that would probably actually be "Flee Mortals!", the book of which Where Evil Lives is an lair manual for the bosses.
It's a really cool product from what I've seen (ie the preview) and I can readily see why someone might wish for there to be a version of that in 2e, just because it looks really neat.
We really don't have to be so defensive that we attack people for being excited about wanting cool things (and the tone of OP from what I've seen is much more "I want this thing" not "I want to make this thing if I can sell it") and tell them that the cool things they want are only for incompetent GMs.
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If a 3rd party publisher wants to print something for Pathfinder 2nd edition, they are able to. But it's weird to expect Paizo to do the work of every single 3rd party publisher in existence instead.
If there's a 3rd party book for PF2 that sounds neat, I would look at it. I'm not going to spend much attention looking at books for games I don't play though.
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Where are people getting the idea that this was spam? I read OP not saying "I have a product to sell you" but "Do you see this product for 5e? I want one for 2e."
The OP edited their post which was a bit more in that direction.
Something I have noticed is that there is plenty of user-created material out there for players to learn the system or to gain some pointers on mechanics and play, but content for GMs tends to be a bit more sparse.
That is to say, if someone wants to create "content" for Pathfinder, like a guide or a tutorial video, they tend to aim towards the player experience rather than the GM experience. And in many respects, I understand that: running games, designing adventures, and creating stories is a lot more of an "art than a science." Not to say that being a GM is a more creative experience, but that it can be very hard to lay down hard and fast rules for a role in the game that dictates the rules.
Now, where there is plenty of information for GMs out there about setting the mood, creating stories, or adjudicating rules at the table, very rarely have I found anything talking specifically with PF2 mechanics in mind. Do people feel like that's something they'd like to see? Like a "here's how to run an engaging encounter for PF2 and why you can do it this way" sort of guide/video? I personally stream content like this, but I'm not a big name or edit my videos to make focused points. It's just something I discuss with chat while I write or convert adventures.
In my experience the people who had the most trouble were coming from a PF1e or 5e background and focusing more on their specialist build rather than dynamic gameplay.
Even this I think is kind of overstated. Like nine times out of ten if you're playing something like a Barbarian you're going to hit something with your big stick because why wouldn't you and that's going to carry you through the vast majority of the game's content.
Sometimes you'll throw in the occasional trip instead.
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Where are people getting the idea that this was spam? I read OP not saying "I have a product to sell you" but "Do you see this product for 5e? I want one for 2e."
Knowing how Pathfinder folks get when the name 5e are mentioned, I understand why the pushback, but Where Evil Lives is just being used as an example because there's a preview of it. If OP were going to sell you specifically on action oriented design, that would probably actually be "Flee Mortals!", the book of which Where Evil Lives is an lair manual for the bosses.
It's a really cool product from what I've seen (ie the preview) and I can readily see why someone might wish for there to be a version of that in 2e, just because it looks really neat.
We really don't have to be so defensive that we attack people for being excited about wanting cool things (and the tone of OP from what I've seen is much more "I want this thing" not "I want to make this thing if I can sell it") and tell them that the cool things they want are only for incompetent GMs.
For me, it's about the way the OP reacted to people telling them (not defensively IMO and not attacking them either) that PF2 did not need what they were posting about because it was already there.
AFAICT we're not, as a whole, attacking people for being excited about wanting cool things.
I dunno. I don't necessarily like hard coded legendary/lair actions.
But in my own campaign one made set piece battles within the pf2e rules and they were amazing.
You want to push your players make a really powerful encounter and turn it into a puzzle rather than something they can brute force
I do think that Paizo's newer approach to bestiaries provides a whole lot of material for making excellent, memorable encounters and creatures. If you are looking for this kind of "expand a monster with new abilities that make sense and create depth to it for your home game," I think you really need to pick up Dark Archive and the Book of Undead (not to mention lore books like legends). They are filled with ways of bringing specific creatures to life in your campaign, and give lots of alternative abilities you can stick on creatures.
Puzzle encounters are fine as long as the players have all the pieces otherwise they are an exercise in frustration.I dunno. I don't necessarily like hard coded legendary/lair actions.
But in my own campaign one made set piece battles within the pf2e rules and they were amazing.
You want to push your players make a really powerful encounter and turn it into a puzzle rather than something they can brute force
You don't have to make it rocket science
I had an extreme encounter. Large mech was being powered by energy cells that were not hidden, but they still needed to think.. Hey... What happens if we destroy these things
Wich would slow the mech
Re: Plaguestone
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Puzzle encounters are fine as long as the players have all the pieces otherwise they are an exercise in frustration.I dunno. I don't necessarily like hard coded legendary/lair actions.
But in my own campaign one made set piece battles within the pf2e rules and they were amazing.
You want to push your players make a really powerful encounter and turn it into a puzzle rather than something they can brute force
You don't have to make it rocket science
I had an extreme encounter. Large mech was being powered by energy cells that were not hidden, but they still needed to think.. Hey... What happens if we destroy these things
Wich would slow the mech
I can totally see that not being the obvious path in a game without called shots or rules on taegeting and destroying objects.
If you're going to drop clues, be sure to have three times as many as you think you'll need, because players are bound to miss a few.
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Yeah, it's fine if you have an overpowered enemy with obvious power cell looking things, but unless your players have entered the fight with the information that to win they need to destroy the power cells then it's really just a frustrating encounter with background setting.
As a general rule, I don't like puzzle encounters. Or rather you can have a puzzle where the answer is obvious, but making that answer happen can be the challenge that requires more thinking. Like sure, I can see the power cells and I know that will disable the giant killing machine.
But how do I get there across this river, with obvious traps, pits, swarms, and lots of enemies.
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This is what I like about PF2's design though. You don't have to force the interesting/memorable encounters. If you just let the dice be the dice, and you have some simple personalities/goals for villains and monsters, then every encounter has its opportunity to become memorable. And it means you can let the party steam roll the occasional difficult encounter where the dice go their way, and not feel like you've let everyone down by not preparing something more, because that moderate encounter that just got out of hand with a critically failed will save can suddenly become something new and more interesting.
I used to do so much work setting up encounters in previous systems, trying to create a bunch of rules to make some environment come alive, but I don't really have to do any of that in PF2. Occasionally, my PCs come up with an out of the box plan that doesn't really fit within the rules as written, but the math is so well defined that I can adjust on the fly when they decide they want to create a distraction and then try to push a tree over on a enemy camp fire/HQs, or they roll hot on a counterspell attempt that stops a "cut scene" from happening, and we just roll with the plan having gone sideways. These things are difficult enough to make reliable that the GM doesn't have be the donkey-downer about it, they can just let the players roll and the action to continue. It has lead to a lot of fun times: Enemies running away and stealing the party's boat, only for the party to jump from shore to boat and then fight on a boat sailing down a rapidly moving river, Drawing attention to themselves in the big fighting tournament because they were able to counterspell a spell which would have killed the tournament organizer, getting a bunch of cactus deputies to fight some automatons and an issue while the party of desperados escaped out the back, accidentally setting off a trap with a scouting prying eye that drew the front guards from their post to the room where the trap went off, but also notifying the main boss that something was up, leading to a 20 round encounter fought across 3 battle maps.
Yes this kind of stuff was possible before PF2, but encounters are so simple to set up and change on the fly, that if you just have a sense of what is going on around the encounter you are currently running, then you have done all the prep work you need to bring the whole dungeon to life .
Sometimes the players write the puzzles for themselves.
The endpaper maps in the six modules of the Ironfang Invasion adventure path center on the Marideth River in Nirmathas. A prominent waterfall is visible about 20 miles downstream of the city of Longshadow, so I had the players discover that waterfall in scouting. Then in reading the 3rd module, Assault on Longshadow, I discovered that Longshadow had a major river shipping industry. To where? The waterfall prevented shipping downstream to the other cities in Nirmathas and other countries. I asked for advice in the Ironfang Invasion subforum, River Shipping from Longshadow, and decided that Longshadow had built a canal to bypass the waterfall.
For more story, I declared that the Ironfang Legion had released bullettes to destroy the canal, so the party fought those creatures and then helped repair the canal. Next, it was time to send the flatboats containing the iron ingots from Longshadow's smelting industry downriver via the canal. However, since Phaendar downstream was under control of the Ironfang Legion, the Longshadow mayor asked the party to protect the flatboats. This whole side quest grew out of a small mistake in coordinating the maps and the industries of Nirmathas.
And then my players turned it into a puzzle challenge. They realized that if they could free their former neighbors in Phaendar who were kept as captive labor by the Ironfang Legion, then they could board them onto the passing flatboats to escape. They used a Dig-Widget to secretly dig a tunnel under Phaendar to the captives' quarters. They carefully scouted the town invisibly to measure the exact location of the quarters, and made Crafting and Stealth checks to spend days digging the tunnel without being observed. They coordinated with Longshadow to have the flatboats released before dawn so that they would be passing Phaendar when all the captives were waking up at dawn for breakfast, a meal the captives cooked themselves. The tunnel opened into the basement of the breakfast house, so the captives would enter as usual for their meal but then be directed to the escape tunnel.
Heist capers are hard to write in advance for Pathfinder, so I loved that my players added a caper to the campaign. The Ironfang guards noticed halfway through that the captives were disappearing at breakfast, and other Ironfang soldiers were watching the river for the flatboats (they wanted the iron to make weapons), so the party started some fights as a distraction and ended up killing most of the Ironfang soldiers and leaders in Phaendar. Thus, they failed at stealth. But they succeeded completely at the rescue and at protecting the flatboats.
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Why are there no real boss mechanics?
This could be an interesting scenario.
Mechanic (Boston accent): "Dat'll be $233.50 for the cah-buratah, and $45 for the windshield wipe-ahs."
Party: "That's highway robbery. We're not paying that!"
Boss Mechanic's eyes glow red as he changes into a demon from the lower planes.
Roll initiative!