Spoilers: Does this AP seem super deadly to anyone else?

[VampByDay]

At level one, Bolan has a zero-resource cost attack that does 2d10 damage. That is enough to one-shot tpk the party.

At level 2, the party faces multiple creatures with aoe DC 21 save attacks that deal 3d6 damage, that’s 6d6 damage on a crit fail which is likely due to how high the saves are, and again, they can spam these abilities because of no resource cost.

Every single attack Kanepo does has the potential to do 4d6+1 damage.

Creatures just straight up immune to reactive strike?

Was this built as an 11-20 and then someone just went through and ‘reduced the numbers.’ By the book without realizing that lower level players have fewer resources to heal and stuff?

[mikeawmids]

Spoilers for Glass Cannon Podcast, season 2 (Gatewalkers);

:

One PC (the catfolk Lucky) was killed by Bolan very early in the campaign. Troy ain't pulling no punches. They are fast approaching the Kanepo fight, so we'll see how that shakes out in the next few weeks.

A few times now, the players (mostly Joe) have asked: "Is this encounter really written for lvl 2 characters?!"

[xcmt]

Yes. I'm running this for a pretty casual group, including some people who are new to Pathfinder with this AP, and it's been kind of a slog having to pull a lot of punches to prevent TPKs. Bolan's 2d10 stuff is very obviously imbalanced (creature design guidelines have this closer to 5th level enemy territory), but also there are a bunch of extended dungeon crawls that really aren't appropriate for 1st and 2nd level parties. If primary spellcasters have so few spells that even a sloth could count their slots on one hand, maybe don't make a 6+ encounter sequence culminating in a tough boss fight.

I had to go very far out of my way just yesterday to not kill some PCs with the jungle drake, who is rolling +17 against PCs whose ACs are in the 19-21 range. That's an average 36 damage crit on a bite attack, nevermind the claws immediately afterwards or the venom ticking down. Level 3 is IMO too soon for a level+3 enemy.

Now I have to prep to run them through a 4-encounter chain gauntlet that will dump them into Book 2 and immediately into more combat, with bonus level-up transition without a resting opportunity.

[Osranger]

I gave the party a short pre-AP adventure fighting bandits and a rogue Gatewalker on the way to Seven Arches so they started the campaign at level 2. Changed very little about the entire sequence up to Bolan. I just an extra mook monster where they were needed and Bolan’s Trick Trap Treehouse still gave them a hard time.

They also just might not have a way to turn off the augur regeneration at Kaneepo’s treehouse unless they brought a holy cleric or were psychic and pooled together their money to buy a silver weapon for the fey dungeon.

Later on, the deadliness went down, but I also nerfed the jungle Drake fight and it still almost killed a PC immediately before they get sent into more fights.

[Trip.H]

Let's be honest here, it's the base math of pf2e that makes L1-3 super / stupidly deadly, and many would say this is a problem with enough teeth to hurt table fun.

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As a player, I most remember that the shadow dogs having a reaction attack right at the start of the adventure was absurdly dangerous/deadly, and we had a PC or 2 drop dying there.

I also remember seeing how many damage dice were rolled for some exploding trap and thinking "that... had a real chance to instant-kill the PC. They actually rolled really lucky there."

I do remember Kanepo hitting like a truck, but thankfully we blasted them down pretty quick.

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As far as what to do about the low level damage math being so bad/extreme... that's a big question.

Recycling my best prev answer, I think giving all PCs +10 flat HP would be enough buffer to prevent some of those cheap deaths/one-shots, while also becoming steadily less and less relevant of a "power boost" due to the HP scaling up with levels.

Any other "fix" I've mulled over risks introducing complexity that'll be more of a hassle than a help.

For actually doing that in a Foundry game, the easiest way I remember was to find and edit each PC's ancestry, seeing where it grants the HP, and doing a +10 to that number.