Shards of Glass scaling issue

[The.Vortex]

The first encounter in Shards of Glass scales up the area damage from 1d4 to 2d6 fpr 5 players. Since there are two of those exploding plants, that increases the area damage (which will most likely hit everyone with its insane radius of 60 feet) from 2d4 to 4d6. How is that OK for a level 1 adventure? A high roll on damage will take out multiple characters at once. The rest will scramble to save them, letting the single true enemy live long enough to to his display again, for another burst of 4d6 - very high TPK potential!

Also: The amount of Survey Points needed has no scaling at all. Which feels weird since more players equal more rolls. The same issue for Event 2. It has a success condition of 4 successes. That can easily be changed to "a number of ideas equal to the number of players", but the adventure as written has a fixed number there.

While we are talking about survey pointa: The description before Event 1 mentions that the amount of points achieved will be important for Event 2 - but Event 2 makes no mention of those points at all.

[Dennis Muldoon]

It's a playtest. The PF2 playtest had some really deadly stuff too. Maybe they're intentionally poking at limits?

[Driftbourne]

Dennis Muldoon wrote:

It's a playtest. The PF2 playtest had some really deadly stuff too. Maybe they're intentionally poking at limits?

Some people had complained that Paizo was charging $ for the playtest adventures, in response the developers or someone at Paizo said (paraphrasing here because I don't have time to find the comment) that The SF2e playtest doesn't need to stress test the core system like PF2e did, so were fully developed as a regular adventure, and would still playable after the playtest. The way I see it this is mostly a class playtest, and they needed to make some adventures to playtest with.

I think the 2d6 might be a typo and should have been 1d6

Assuming all of the party is in the area of effect of 1 plant and takes max damage,
1d4 with 4 PCs has total party damage of 16
1d6 with 5 PCs has total party damage of 30
2d6 with 5 PCs has total party damage of 60

The.Vortex wrote:

Since there are two of those exploding plants, that increases the area damage (which will most likely hit everyone with its insane radius of 60 feet) from 2d4 to 4d6.

I do think 2d6 seems too high, but I think the 60 foot radius is fine

When we encountered the skorresh we started near the A4 on the map and the skorresh were on top of the steps. This put half the party out of the area of effect of any plant. The 2 plants are far enough apart that there is only a small overlap zone which isn't near A4. The 2nd plant is in the opposite corner of the map and was too far away for the skorresh to trigger it.

Since the skorresh are likely to flee, if you don't pursue them the party should stay out of the overlap zone.

If the skorresh started near A3 or A5 then both plants would be triggered and the overlap zone has a higher chance of a PC being in it.

Overall all I really like this encounter the map layout makes it easy to adjust just by where the fight happens. I love that skorresh can be defeated or lose actions with skill checks.