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In a number of discussions, an issue that keeps popping up is the role of adventure design and the expectations placed on GMs for setting up and pacing encounters in dungeons.
Is PF2 as a system inherently biased towards Martial characters? Are GMs supposed to give PCs enough time between Encounters for all characters to be at full health and full focus points? How many encounters is a caster’s spell slot load out supposed to last them? Should encounter difficulty generally default to a level where a party should be able to readily win as long as their hit points are full and their focus points are restored, regardless of whether the PCs are prepared to fight the specific enemies faced? Or should there be an expectation that encounters probably require some level of preparation, either to learn about their enemies before engaging them, bring resources (like consumables) that will help the party win, and have potential “silver bullet” spells that would greatly decrease the difficulty of the encounter?
I am going to start off by saying that my personal, strongest wish for any RPG I play or run, is for there not be any one set of “rules” to use to answer all these questions. Variety in encounter design and adventure writing is a good thing that makes the game dynamic and fun to play. I don’t think I want to play a RPG where the players would think “well, we’ve fought exactly 4 encounters, that means this room where we finished our 4th encounter must then be a safe place for us to rest the night and it would be unconscionable that either the adventure or the GM would potentially hit us with another encounter, or expect us to fall back and return later to a potentially changed dungeon if we do want to rest now.” But I think there are some hard coded expectations that are leading to certain meta-analyses of classes and power tiers that are only really true within the confines of those expectations and lead to hurt feelings when GMs or adventure writers deviate from them, or if a player joins a table where that is what everyone else is already expecting...but they are not.
I think it is very common for players to expect combat encounters to be isolated events, contained to the terrain features present at the onset of an encounter, against a number of enemies known from the beginning of the encounter, or minimally revealed in the very first round of combat. Within this mindset, the difficulty of the encounter against these set enemies in this defined space should generally stay in the low to severe threat range and the party should have at least 10 minutes between encounters.
When these expectations hold true for 90+% of the way a GM runs encounters, I think all of the meta analysis about Martials being able to adventure all day and casters having to be able to rely heavily on focus spells, cantrips and reusuable resources becomes 100% true. Especially if the enemies faced don’t tend to have resistances, abilities or tactics that allow them to prepared to fight against a blitz of fast moving PCs focus firing on one enemy and either dropping that enemy in the first round, or (if it is a solo creature) debuffing it by minimally knocking it down and probably frightening it as well. When all of the above expectations are true, I think there is a “one true strategy” that emerges in PF2 that is better than any other and that is the one shaping the “fighters are the new god class” of PF2 and casters can only really keep up in parties if they have un-ending resources (whether that is relying mostly on focus spells or having a mass pile of scrolls to make sure they are casting spell slot spells at least 2 or 3 times every encounter).
As a GM, I find these kind of encounters incredibly boring to run over and over again though, and they tend to be over in 3 rounds tops. PF2 is an incredibly well designed system, especially from the GM perspective, so it doesn’t take much work to throw 10 or more of these encounters together in a hurry so I do get how and why we get so many of them. In fact, I think a game without any of these short encounters would probably skew towards making players feel like the GM is out to get them and they can never have an easy victory, but if they become the only encounters that players think they ever need to prepare for, I think it can really stagnate the game and discourage creative strategizing and lead players to “automating” their characters to the point where they get themselves into a lot of trouble the 10% of the time where the encounter expectations change drastically.
As a GM, whether I am home brewing or running pre-written material, I very frequently aim to have no more than 30% of encounters run this way, or if I have a bunch of encounters strung together that do feel like they want to be run this way, I throw out the scripts of monsters and NPC fighting to the death in their isolated dungeon rooms turned tombs, and will have enemies try to run and escape, alert allies, and collapse these encounters on top of each other, so that the party either needs to start throwing down heavier resources, fall back, or face Extreme+ encounters. These are the effects I have seen by doing so (in no particular order):
1. Durational spells have a lot more value when encounters run 7+ rounds than when they run 3-. If one of the enemies moves to the back of the room, opens the door to a hallway behind them and shouts out “we’re under attack,” it has bought the party a few extra actions in the first or second round of combat that can be spent buffing, healing, positioning, or otherwise preparing for the next encounter that is going to start pouring into the room over the next round or 2. It greatly diversifies the type of resources that are useful to the party and gives 1 minute duration items, spells, and abilities a chance to be utilized to their fullest.
2. It tends to make the battlefield a lot more dynamic. The battle lines move, lines of sight change and have to be reconsidered, Area of effect abilities and battle field control options intrinsically get more valuable because there become predictable points on the battlefield where multiple enemies are likely to be moving and having to congregate before they can engage with the party.
3. It gives the party the opportunity to make total victory, where they stop any enemy from escaping, a potential goal that gives an immediate reward, but is not required if the fight proves difficult/the dice don’t cooperate. It can also incentivize taking prisoners/granting mercy if the GM wants that to be a feature of their game, where enemies trade information for their lives. This spills over into point 4.
4. In addition to the battlefield being more dynamic, it lets npc and creatures be more dynamic too, as they can have changing motives. Unless the enemy has telepathy, it also requires that they communicate (potentially in a language the party can understand) about what they are trying to do, which gives them a chance to have some personality, but it also can serve as a way for GMs to feed more information to the players about the kinds of enemies or threats ahead in a dungeon. Fleeing creatures will run one way but not another, they will shout out “get the boss” and then hint where that boss is. There are just lots of opportunities for there to be more going on that a race to kill the opposition as quickly as possible if the world of the encounter is bigger than a single room.
It does take work to learn how to do this without completely overwhelming your PCs. But look at movies and books, Stories where everyone is always trying to kill everything else immediately, without ever offering deals to stop fights or trade information is boring and almost unheard of in the fiction that informs this game. Players learn to be ruthless and expect always the worst out of their enemies when their enemies are always ruthless and out to kill them. There is nothing inherently wrong with that for the way people choose to play their games, unless it is leading to repetition that is getting dull and flattens the world into a combat simulator for players that are wanting to role play. And the thing is, this really is on the GM to arbitrate and not the adventure writer, because it has to be something that dynamically responds to the way the players interact with the encounter. Trying to script 10 different scenarios is too much to put on pre-written adventure writers. They can drop short hints about the relationships of the creatures in a dungeon and the ecology of the dungeon, but they overwhelmingly already do that. Maybe the one big step moving forward could be to just stop adding the line “so and so fights to the death” and instead it can be understood that you can use that as a default assumption if you want, unless something else is specified, or you should feel free to give goblin warrior #7 whatever secret dream you wish when you see the opportunity for her to fulfill that dream.
I think community spaces like this are much better places to develop GM skills and ideas for our individual tables than we can reasonably expect to be fit into rules books or setting books, or even adventures. Getting dynamic feedback on what you have tried, how it went, and what you would have liked to have happened differently is all much easier in a community of folks who are also playing the game, than in expecting the developers to have answers for you at your table.
So what do you think? What approaches have you tried to make make encounters feel dynamic and fun at your table? What encounters have gotten the best feedback from your players and how have you modified encounters to make sure that everyone at the table feels like a valuable and contributing member of the team?
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Very succinct! XD
I always strive to have encounters not just be "an empty room with a monster."
At the very least I make the environment seem appropriate. A populated dungeon will have furniture, food sources, and things the players could potentially make use of. A tomb or vault will have traps and undead or guardian creatures, but also alcoves and sarcophaguses and treasure piles for cover. Perhaps there is a towering monument that can be pushed over offensively or defensively.
I almost always add cover, concealment, hazards, elevated terrain, or something else just to make it more dynamic and interesting.
I also strive to describe the encounter using as many of the five senses as I can, as I find this often prompts player creativity. The dampness of the walls, the putrid smell of fungi and the lingering sour taste it leaves on the tongue, the warm light emanating from the next room, and the sound of bubbling liquid from behind the creaky door.
You don't need consumables for this type of battle. Duration spells can help.
If you have an experienced group, then they know to conserve power for problems. You lean how far you can push them before they break.
I regularly throw several areas at the PCs at once. Due to experience they rarely have trouble handling it without consumables.
I've always played casters as there to apply magic when it is needed. Not before it is needed, but if they see things turning the wrong way.
I know some players love to cast something from a slot all the time whether it is necessary or not, just to feel like they are using their powers. I've always been quite happy to sit back and use cantrips casting a slot only when I need to do it.
If you have competently built martials with enough combat healing, you shouldn't need to apply a limited magical solution too often.
The reason classes have to be built well is not for experienced players. An experienced optimizer if playing with a player who doesn't care about optimization could make an Investigator seem like a great class within the group dynamic.
It's once you have a group of optimizers or near optimizers who sift all the books to make a class really shine that you start to see the problems between classes. Why some are higher performers and others have issues. It is also dependent on level as at low level everyone can be taken out quite easily and certain classes can do just fine for quite a while before you suddenly see the issues as the better and better designed classes with better feat selections really start to show their quality.
I'm not sure how many people play the monster sitting in a room waiting. Dynamic battles are more a matter of how well your group coordinates than individual class abilities or getting to full health. Uncoordinated parties where each person is acting as an individual running ahead, not positioning well, not backing each other up, they often end up dead in dynamic battles. Groups that work together can handle huge battles quite easily and you have to really throw a lot at them to challenge them while not killing them by making something far too overpowered that even they can't handle it.
I mean, for the sake of my post, and the discussion about not treating encounters as isolated dungeon rooms, it doesn't really matter if the party is choosing to use consumables or not. They could choose to run from a string of encounters that is too much for them, or they could use consumables, or they could have been stock piling all their top spell slots so they can fire off spell slot after spell slot in these kinds of encounters. I have seen players do all of these things and have fun doing so.
I am running a party through Abomination vaults that loves how many rooms there are with creatures that they really don't want to fight, and don't need to fight until they explore a couple of other places first or do some research back in Otari, so they run a lot and have plans in place to get out of sticky situations.
Then I have a party in a homebrew game that would quickly use found consumables if they offered an advantage and they would easily be able to fight 2x as long and a level or 2 ahead of their current numbers for the long encounters. We'd have fights go 13 or more rounds pretty often so there was minimal risk of using a potion and then the fight being over the next round, which I think is a problem with the 3 round isolated encounter for sure.
The bottom line is that there are many different ways of playing the game that are possible, so if you players are running into frustrations with certain ways they want to play, the GM has many very easy tools at hand to make sure everyone can have fun.
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This post was made from the wizard thread. My point is the quality of a class should not be dependent on how the GM runs the game. Each class should stand on its own merits regardless of how the GM runs the game including how many consumables or magic items they put in or how much information they have prior to entering the area.
If a class needs a GM to set up the situation for them to excel, that class does not stand on its own merits.
This is especially true if said class only reaches a somewhat equal position if the GM takes extra effort to set them up for success. That means the GM has to spend extra time making up for a class having lesser abilities that require special GM attention to allow them to contribute equally.
To me that is a sure sign of an inherent flaw in the class design, not a problem with how the GM runs the game.
As a GM I move to fix the class design flaw because I don't want to have to set up a class for success which makes the player feel as though they made inferior class build choices, when such choices are often out of their hands and based on initial class design choices they have no control over.
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Parties that rely heavily on rapid attacking, focus spells and between combat treating wounds are also banking on GMs setting them up for success. It is all about expectations and communicating them clearly. A player who always assumes the party will get 10 minutes to rest after an encounter can get very frustrated when they are playing an AP with a longer dungeon crawl and the GM rolls whether to have random encounters stumble on them every 5 or so minutes(an experience I have had as a player getting through Extinction Curse).
The assumption that a dungeon is fairly static and unchanging is probably fair and easier for newer GMs and is even a decent base line for adventure writing, for the sake of not overwhelming GMs with too many pieces, but it gets boring and leads to repetitive combat routines. It can also result in players refusing ever to be prepared for situations where they are starting off encounters with low HP, no focus spells and run down spell slots. Again, that isn’t inherently bad, it just means player tactics always adjust around how GMs run encounters. A party low on resources deciding to rest where they are when they have run low on all resources is basically a party begging for a GM to take it easy on them, but they will only ever realize that if the GM doesn’t let them just rest because they are low on resources. I find it is easier and less frustrating to players to have encounters collapse quickly rather than with minute or 5 minute breaks. Again, I don’t always do anything the same way every time, but I will usually use sensory clues about sounds of conversation, smells of cooking food, moment in windows, etc, when I am trying to foreshadow how bad an idea a 10 minute break might be, so at least it doesn’t come out of nowhere.
I have played in 1e campaigns where GMs would scry and fry the party with the big bad caster if the party was not super on top of counter measures, and with GMs who wouldn’t let players have access to the fly spell because they didn’t really want any problem solving magic in their games at all. GMs have always, in every version of D&D I have ever played, had to set expectations for how much magic was going to play a role in the campaign and communicate that clearly to the players or else the players get frustrated.
If dungeon areas tend to resolve as 1 or 2 severe/extreme plus encounters instead of 4 to 6 low, moderate and severe encounters, with only a couple of minutes between those encounters, consumable resources become almost essential. I agree durational spells help a lot and mitigate the problem of such encounters, but only if you have the slots to cast them and haven’t polymorphed into a non-casting form when the second wave arrives. Wizards can have enough slots not to need scrolls, even in these kinds of encounters but scrolls are not as expensive as many players think they are and they add amazing flexibility to all casters, especially for handling things when situations go bad. So do high level healing potions, mutagens, bombs, emergency speed boosting options/alternate travel means, and many other consumable options. If as a GM you don’t put your players in emergency resource situations very often, they will certainly choose not to use those resources.
Learning how to tighten the straps on the gauntlet dungeon takes time and practice. Many “killer GMs” get their reputation from erring towards too tight. I’ve played with a lot of them. It’s fun. They push hard and you want back up/escape plans. It can also kill campaigns because narrative cohesion can really break down after any TPK. As a GM, I always end up feeling like I have to play softer ball with the parties that think they either have to win or all go down fighting, than I do with parties that are willing to cut their losses when it is clear that they are losing. If I don’t, momentum on the campaign often crashes. That is a really important thing to keep in mind when you dial up the difficulty with collapsing encounters. One of the ways I accomplish it without having the players feel like I am taking it easy on them is to have the winning side decide to start consolidating their spoils instead of trying to fight for total victory unless the party pushes them into the TPK. Hydras dragging their prey into the river, nagas taking some loot from a fallen foe before retreating to a fortified base, Vrock’s throwing unconscious PCs into lava, laughing maniacally and then flying away rented traitorous captains sailing away with stashed loot all create very memorable repeat adversaries that will get players and their characters to want to regroup, find some new allies, and then hunt down before they can let the campaign go, while the TPK usually just results in the whole table feeling like they all have to collectively come up with a new way to buy into the old campaign together, or just want to quit and start something else.
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I figured I would hop in to provide some momentum for this thread. It's no fun to write a big thread and have so few respond.
I'm not a new GM. I don't use moderate or severe to rate my encounters normally. I didn't use the CR system in PF1 either. I eyeball it and calculate the math a bit. My players are experienced. They can punch way above the recommended weight. I throw a ton at them and keep the combats very dynamic. I want them to feel realistic and alive.
I like a mix of encounters that have a certain feel to them. I would rate them more by my end goal:
1. Fight to the death: I want the PCs to feel they are squaring off against a highly formidable villain and I want them to believe they can lose. I will set this encounter up to specifically deal with the standard tactics the PCs use, so they have to really press to win. You want them to have to adjust and make a real effort to win. Mistakes can be very costly and the fighting is hard and fast, kill or be killed, the main enemy is showing no mercy.
If this encounter doesn't drop a few PCs in the course of the encounter, I have either failed to design it well or the rolls are very lucky in the PCs favor.
2. Chained Encounters: I like these to feel like a raid. Whether a castle or an orc camp or an undead infested vampire den. I want this to feel like a non-stop, no time to heal, no time to refocus, fight your way through and win.
PCs should know to conserve resources and fight in an intelligent, coordinated manner to ensure victory or they may be overwhelmed.
Usually a mix of mooks and mini-bossed with maybe a single somewhat tough BBEG at the end.
Players should feel spent and pushed by the end of these encounters.
3. Generic Exploration Encounter: Some monster in the wild or room in a dungeon. Players generally dictate how this is engaged, usually to their advantage unless it is an ambush creature.
You use these to kind of give a feel that an area is dangerous and filled with interesting creatures. It provides a feel of a living, breathing world. That should be the main goal of this style of encounter.
Players are very likely to win this encounter. Minimal resources spent. You can do these all day.
4. Walk Over Encounter: These are encounters against weaker mooks the players should dominate. Give them a chance to flex their power, feel strong, and unleash their abiliites.
I work these in about as often as the fight to the death encounters. You don't want too many to the death encounters or walk overs or the game becomes stale.
But you do at times want to let the players feel powerful on occasion, so tossing these in can be a fun break from the slog of hard to average encounters.
I tend to use Chained or Exploration encounters the most. I like main end encounters to be fight to the death. I want the players to feel like they earned victory when wrapping up a section of an adventure.
That's how I tend to think about encounter design with a strong focus on providing the feel of being in a story or show with a progressive plot and worthwhile enemies.
I do keep track of class performance so I can make adjustments for player contribution. I hate when players feel overshadowed due to class choices. Bad luck you can't control and that will happen here and there too. Bad performance due to class design you have some control over as a DM and I recommend shoring up class design issues you see in play.
I also recommend DMs take down some metrics for performance. I primarily focus on damage as the majority of players will rate their characters by their ability to inflict damage. Since support characters vary and are generally the sole support character in a group, it's hard to rate them comparatively. You definitely don't want the character doing the most damage to also be the best support character, so glad that doesn't happen in PF2 like it did in PF1 with the wizard.