
SuperBidi |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level
You need to wait for level 2 to get your Full Plate or even sometimes your weapon (some firearms are really expensive). That's peasant's concerns.
You are literally expert in no skill. The main difference in competence between 2 level one characters are their attributes value as none of them is actually specialized in anything.Any classic fantasy enemy is a deadly threat (ogre, ankheg, whatever). The safest way to gain experience is to face a ton of low level enemies. That doesn't feel heroic at all.
You lack feats so most of your actions are pretty generic.
Feelings being what they are we have all the right in the world to disagree. But I do think the feeling of playing a peasant with a greatsword is there.
I've played games where you start at a "pretty good power level" and it's not at all the same feeling: You start with all your equipment, you have most of your powers, you don't wait for higher levels for your build to go online, etc...

![]() |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

Arcaian wrote:One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power levelYou need to wait for level 2 to get your Full Plate or even sometimes your weapon (some firearms are really expensive). That's peasant's concerns.
You are literally expert in no skill. The main difference in competence between 2 level one characters are their attributes value as none of them is actually specialized in anything.
Any classic fantasy enemy is a deadly threat (ogre, ankheg, whatever). The safest way to gain experience is to face a ton of low level enemies. That doesn't feel heroic at all.
You lack feats so most of your actions are pretty generic.Feelings being what they are we have all the right in the world to disagree. But I do think the feeling of playing a peasant with a greatsword is there.
I've played games where you start at a "pretty good power level" and it's not at all the same feeling: You start with all your equipment, you have most of your powers, you don't wait for higher levels for your build to go online, etc...
Being able to go into battle equipped with heavy armour, large professional weapons (including backup weapons), perhaps with some minor magical items like a healing potion, is "peasant's concerns"? You aren't an expert in combat at level 1 (unless you are, like a Fighter or Gunslinger), but you're a well-trained combatant, not someone inexperienced in the field. Being Trained in something means you'll reliably be able to do things that are expected of competent people, not "peasant thrown into the deep end"; you can swim flowing water easily, but rapid flowing rivers might be a struggle, you can climb well but might struggle when only small handholds are available, you can navigate a difficult path through a forest but might struggle with something intentionally confusing like a hedge maze, you can track a normal creature through the plains but maybe not a nimble panther through the jungle (all examples from the book, not my personal opinion). Even then, if you're talented in the area, you'll have a ~40% success chance at those difficult things - with someone Aiding you, you're just barely missing being at a 50:50 shot of tracking a panther through a jungle! It's not super blue-collar fantasy at level 1. Sure, classic fantasy enemies are deadly threats - but that's true beyond the first 2 levels where this HP thing is a problem, even a small dragon is a major threat to a 5th level character. Fantasy enemies tend to have all variety of threat levels, it's not hard to find one that threatens a character - and it's not like all of them are a deadly threat at level 1. Kobolds, goblins, etc are all classic fantasy enemies and they're not deadly (individually) to you.
If we're comparing this to other fiction, there are other stories where there's high lethality, a single mistake leaves you dead, and the protagonist(s) must be highly cautious if they're to survive. These stories are typically grimdark, or horror-adjacent, or maybe set during an apocalypse, and are almost always stories where the protagonists aren't expecting to be able to do massive changes, they're just trying to do what they can. They're almost always stories of low narrative agency for the characters. Those do not seem to be the same sorts of stories being told as in low-level PF2. My experience of low-level PF2 includes some horror-adjacent content, yeah - but it's not very much. There are mostly-cute stories of settling into a supportive university, there are explorations of forests with kobolds and traps, there are dungeons filled with mitflits and spooky-but-not-incredibly-strong creatures, hunting wild animals and fights against other humans who aren't individually stronger than you, etc. In all of them, you're expected to have high narrative agency, and you never feel like you're being beaten down by an unfair world that you're desperately trying to survive in. I do not think low-level PF2 is meant to feel like the existing fiction in which this lethality is found, I think it's meant to feel like a normal part of the heroic fantasy that the rest of the levels more accurately reflect.

SuperBidi |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

...
Farmhand states: "With a strong back and an understanding of seasonal cycles, you tilled the land and tended crops. Your farm could have been razed by invaders, you could have lost the family tying you to the land, or you might have simply tired of the drudgery, but at some point you became an adventurer."
Considering that level 1 is the beginning of your adventuring career, it's very much written that peasant with a greatsword is a proper description for a level 1 character.
Most of the common backgrounds consider that you got a simple life and decided to go adventuring after that (which doesn't mean that it has to be the case for all characters, you can be a gladiator or a bounty hunter, just that it's a common occurrence).
And if you look at level 1 humanoids, a lot of them are just commoners: Barkeep, Acolyte, Local Herbalist, etc...
Level 1 is not the level supposed to represent a "well-trained combatant with field experience". Also, I'm not stating that the low hit points at level 1 is "good", just that in my opinion it embodies the "peasant with a greatsword" fantasy well, fantasy that is very much written in the book. So I understand it.
I have no point of view on the original question besides the fact that it is way above my league.

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Being able to go into battle equipped with heavy armour, large professional weapons (including backup weapons), perhaps with some minor magical items like a healing potion, is "peasant's concerns"? You aren't an expert in combat at level 1 (unless you are, like a Fighter or Gunslinger), but you're a well-trained combatant, not someone inexperienced in the field.
That's why you're evenly matched against such known threats as innkeepers, gravekeepers, herbalists, dancers, and agriculturalists. Your training is really serving you well to be merely on par with such heroes of the realm. Level one is many things, but "well-trained combatant" it is not.

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

The point of criticism is that the maths of the game in the first few levels teaches very different lessons to the maths of the game after those levels, and I think that it is clear to see that: a): the community online went through a phase of treating those early level lessons like they were true the whole game, and took years to get past it, b): new players often encounter issues at early levels where they either learn these not-always-true lessons themselves or are taught them as a solution to their problems at early levels by others, and c): many of the most common reasons for new players bouncing off the game are connected to these difficulties at lower levels.
A) That was mainly due to poorly balanced APs being the only published options for ages and GMs, much like the designers at Paizo, building as if we were still dealing with PF1 and not PF2.
B) We've had just as many stories of new players with zero TTRPG expectations jumping in and adapting faster than PF1 vets. So please square that with this idea that new players have trouble picking up PF2 narrative you're weaving.
C) You've yet to prove this hypothesis that new players find PF2 too hard and thus fail to connect with the system. At best, you'll have anecdotes from Reddit, Twitter, and other such places from a fraction of the entire player base. You'd need access to Paizo's player feedback to prove the point you're arguing.
None of that requires new releases to be marketed at new players to fix - the maths could be changed so it takes ~3 hits from a boss mob to take you down at all levels, instead of ~2 at level 1, and ~4 at level 20. That way people would learn the same lesson across the whole game, and it'd be less frustrating when you go from full hp to 0 hp without having the chance to take any action against it. Sure, you could carefully design all low-level prepublished content to avoid these weak points of lower level play that lead to frustrating situations, but you could also just change the maths. Presuming that people frustrated with this would leave the game anyway doesn't have any firm grounding, I think - if the game was constantly at risk of my PC dying before I took action in any given boss fight I probably would enjoy the game much less, I just know that it stops being like that quickly where a new player might not.
Given that experienced players rarely have issues at low levels and experienced GMs understand what a fair challenge looks like at those levels, it would seem that the only players who need teaching are very new players. So it would make sense to make products catered to them rather than changing an early game that many existing players enjoy.
One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level - hell, you start out the game able to wrestle a camel into submission with about a 50% success rate, that's not the right vibes for a weak peasant thrown into the deep end (unless the story is very specifically trying to tell that by putting you up against higher level creatures). This description feels like it lines up more with the 0th level variant, where I do think it should feel like you're in over your head. I do feel like this is just a weirdness of the maths at low levels, and I don't think the game is better for having it present.
Your level one character is on par with, in terms of combat effectiveness, innkeepers, gardeners, farmers, dancers, etc. It hardly seems as if you're meant to be anything much above a fit commoner with a bit of extra gear and a dream. The backgrounds also reflect this less-than-advanced start.

Trip.H |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

[How many PL+2 Strike crits can example PC survive chart]
I really hate to ask, but if you assembled this in an easily mutable spreadsheet, I'm super curious to see how this changes if all PCs start with a flat increase of +10 or +20 HP.
I'm pretty confident it'll make a real difference at low level, without really putting the game into "easy mode" later on. Because the PC HP and foe dmg are both climbing alongside each other, the PC starting w/ more HP shouldn't be all that noticeable outside the early game.
For the few that *want* their low-level PCs to get one-shot, yeah, it would change that math quite a bit.

Trip.H |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

I super agree on letting niche games be niche.
My reason for calling this out as "a problem" is because of that observation of GMs working to erase that lethality via all means available to them, including incredibly obvious foe lobotomies.
(Again, the only time I've seen *any* PC death was from a GM who specifically didn't want to cheat, and even then there were 8+ aborted PC deaths via intervention, w/ 5 deaths that were allowed to happen (because they felt fair)).
That 5 "valid" vs 8 "prevented" is a pretty dang poor ratio.
.
I also think it's relevant to bring up the "should a GM attack a downed PC" debate, as the notion of a foe going for the kill is something that *should* be a rather niche discussion topic in a healthy system.
In pf2, a whole lot of PCs seem to drop dying, but PC death is suspiciously rare.
If it's such a taboo to attack a PC that's in the dying state, that really does indicate there's been an establishment of a "community easy mode" that we are not really looking deeper into.
Same goes for the GM attacking a PC's familiar. That also seems incredibly taboo / stigmatized, and no surprise, I'm pointing the finger to the "too fragile" state of familiar HP pools as *a* (not the only) systemic cause of that norm.
.
Basically, if you look around while holding the question "would expected full-->downs math affect this conversation?" you'll quickly start spotting a whole lot of norms that are (imo) negatively impacted by PCs being "too fragile".
.
To rephrase: the "objective" observation, we can (hopefully) all agree on, is that GMs typically "nerf" combat to be less lethal, instead of "buffing" combat to be more lethal.
If the GMs are tweaking things in just one direction, that is the key hint that the system may be "too lethal" and that changes would make for a positive improvement to the system.
(and if there's an observation that indicates GM-danger-intervention declines as levels go up, that'd be even more evidence to this idea)

SuperBidi |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

My reason for calling this out as "a problem" is because of that observation of GMs working to erase that lethality via all means available to them, including incredibly obvious foe lobotomies.
You should really question your confirmation bia because your whole post is conspiracy theory 101.
I've played roughly 300 sessions (2/3rd played, 1/3rd GMed), got 1 character killed and killed 5 as a GM. If you consider 3 to 5 sessions per level, it means getting killed once every 20 levels roughly. That's not what I'd call "lethal".

Bluemagetim |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

Bluemagetim wrote:[How many PL+2 Strike crits can example PC survive chart]I really hate to ask, but if you assembled this in an easily mutable spreadsheet, I'm super curious to see how this changes if all PCs start with a flat increase of +10 or +20 HP.
I'm pretty confident it'll make a real difference at low level, without really putting the game into "easy mode" later on. Because the PC HP and foe dmg are both climbing alongside each other, the PC starting w/ more HP shouldn't be all that noticeable outside the early game.
For the few that *want* their low-level PCs to get one-shot, yeah, it would change that math quite a bit.
THis is with a 10 HP bonus at level 1. Wizard stays in one shot land and fighter comes out above it. Ill post +20 next
Wiz - Fighter - Barb - level
0.96 - 1.30 - 1.61 - 01
1.00 - 1.50 - 1.86 - 02
1.06 - 1.78 - 2.19 - 03
1.11 - 1.94 - 2.39 - 04
1.15 - 2.20 - 2.68 - 05
1.18 - 2.32 - 2.82 - 06
1.21 - 2.42 - 2.94 - 07
1.23 - 2.50 - 3.04 - 08
1.25 - 2.57 - 3.13 - 09
1.25 - 2.75 - 3.15 - 10
1.26 - 2.82 - 3.22 - 11
1.28 - 2.87 - 3.28 - 12
1.29 - 2.92 - 3.33 - 13
1.33 - 3.04 - 3.47 - 14
1.38 - 3.16 - 3.79 - 15
1.42 - 3.27 - 3.92 - 16
1.40 - 3.25 - 4.11 - 17
1.41 - 3.27 - 4.14 - 18
#DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - 19
#DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - 20

Bluemagetim |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

At 20 HP it starts to get wierd for the wiz. THey have more survability at level 1 than they do at 2 and 3. This also pushes the barb to 2 crits at level 1.
Here are some more words
And more
and more
to make the chart move down from the portrait.
Wiz - Fighter - Barb - level
1.39 - 1.74 - 2.04 - 01
1.36 - 1.86 - 2.21 - 02
1.38 - 2.09 - 2.50 - 03
1.39 - 2.22 - 2.67 - 04
1.40 - 2.45 - 2.93 - 05
1.41 - 2.55 - 3.05 - 06
1.42 - 2.63 - 3.15 - 07
1.42 - 2.69 - 3.23 - 08
1.43 - 2.75 - 3.30 - 09
1.41 - 2.92 - 3.31 - 10
1.42 - 2.97 - 3.37 - 11
1.42 - 3.01 - 3.42 - 12
1.42 - 3.05 - 3.47 - 13
1.47 - 3.17 - 3.60 - 14
1.51 - 3.29 - 3.92 - 15
1.54 - 3.39 - 4.05 - 16
1.52 - 3.37 - 4.23 - 17
1.52 - 3.39 - 4.25 - 18
#DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - 19
#DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - #DIV/0! - 20

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

I super agree on letting niche games be niche.
My reason for calling this out as "a problem" is because of that observation of GMs working to erase that lethality via all means available to them, including incredibly obvious foe lobotomies.
(Again, the only time I've seen *any* PC death was from a GM who specifically didn't want to cheat, and even then there were 8+ aborted PC deaths via intervention, w/ 5 deaths that were allowed to happen (because they felt fair)).
That 5 "valid" vs 8 "prevented" is a pretty dang poor ratio.
You seem to play with groups that are extremely averse to PC death, and it's colouring your perception. I would expect the degree to which GMs pull their punches will vary greatly from group to group and even campaign to campaign.
I also think it's relevant to bring up the "should a GM attack a downed PC" debate, as the notion of a foe going for the kill is something that *should* be a rather niche discussion topic in a healthy system.
In pf2, a whole lot of PCs seem to drop dying, but PC death is suspiciously rare.
That again will depend on the table, but also on the encounter. Some enemies will kill downed foes, and others won't.
What you see online is often the outliers. People are making noise about something they find upsetting or worthy of comment. This tells us nothing about how common such an event is.

Bluemagetim |
3 people marked this as a favorite. |

Trip.H why not try a short game where the party has some kind of divine buff at the start as a plot reason for the extra HP.
Something like praying at the temple to their deity grants them +10 or 20 temp HP for the day.
See the difference in how the players actually play the game when they have the temp HP up and what happens to their behavior when they lost it for the day but still have encounters to go.

Mathmuse |
3 people marked this as a favorite. |

thenobledrake wrote:There's still a massive and very important difference between the awareness you're talking about coming from "I have read the material" rather than from "I have read the material, and also figured out where said material was actually leading me astray".That comes with experience. You don't get good at GMing a few weeks into running a system, you might not even be good a few years into it, like any skill, it takes thousands of hours to learn how to GM and some of those lessons transfer easily between systems and others take time to come to grips with.
I began as a forever GM in 2011 and have run four adventure paths to completion. I view myself as an experienced GM. But my estimate is that I have spent only 1,800 hours running roleplaying games.
And the skill I had to hone the most was improvisation when the PCs did something sensible but unexpected, because that is their style. I also gained skill at redesigning the adventure path's encounters to double the difficulty because their teamwork made them twice as strong as an ordinary party. My skill at judging the balance of encounters mostly comes from my mathematical interest in game design.
Quote:The whole point of the authors even bothering to write guidance on how to build encounters is so that people can just read that and have things work out as intended.Except that even if we threw out all outliers, started at level 5, and built perfectly using the GMG guidelines, you can still build moderate encounters that can TPK an inexperienced group of players. The idea that making the first few levels easier will fix this is complete nonsense.
We know. Back on May 10 in Trip.H had posted a so-called Moderate Threat 12 encounter from the module Secrets of the Temple-City that the GM had to nerf in mid-combat to avoid a TPK, and we wrote many comments discussing it. This Moderate Threat encounter had caught the party unarmored in their sleep because they lacked the experience to set up a watch or an Alarm spell on a presumed safe inn room.
Likewise, a new kind of attack, such as the party's first major flying creature, their first incorporeal creature, or their first dragon, could catch them unprepared for the proper counterattack.
Experience helps preparation greatly. When the champion in my Strength of Thousands campaign gained Blessing of the Devoted (called Divine Ally before Remaster) at 3rd level, the new player asked the experienced players which weapon property out of fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing he should grant his weapon. In unison, they answered, "Ghost touch!" By 7th level, ghost touch had been vital twice and the alternatives would have been nearly useless.
Trip.H wrote:My reason for calling this out as "a problem" is because of that observation of GMs working to erase that lethality via all means available to them, including incredibly obvious foe lobotomies.You should really question your confirmation bias because your whole post is conspiracy theory 101.
I've played roughly 300 sessions (2/3rd played, 1/3rd GMed), got 1 character killed and killed 5 as a GM. If you consider 3 to 5 sessions per level, it means getting killed once every 20 levels roughly. That's not what I'd call "lethal".
I created a thread Pathfinder versus the Illusion of Difficulty that discusses the nerfing of enemies mid-combat; thus, turning true difficulty into an illusion. It was based on a Rules Lawyer video Why there’s a DM shortage in D&D about DMs frustrated that they cannot predict the actual difficulty of an encounter in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and frequently had underplay the enemies. The consensus in my thread was that the much more accurate predictions of difficulty in Pathfinder 2nd Edition prevent the Illusion of Difficulty. Pathfinder players generally expect character death to be a possibility, but they hate random death from D&D's save-or-die spells.
A major frustration of single-die-roll deaths such as D&D Power Word: Kill or a first-turn critical hit by a high-damage creature in 1st-level Pathfinder is that the character does not get to down heroically fighting. They simply die.

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

I began as a forever GM in 2011 and have run four adventure paths to completion. I view myself as an experienced GM. But my estimate is that I have spent only 1,800 hours running roleplaying games.
And the skill I had to hone the most was improvisation when the PCs did something sensible but unexpected, because that is their style. I also gained skill at redesigning the adventure path's encounters to double the difficulty because their teamwork made them twice as strong as an ordinary party. My skill at judging the balance of encounters mostly comes from my mathematical interest in game design.
That's not surprising. Given your math background, I imagine the encounter building and game math came easily to you while the social aspects may have been why you sought to play the game in the first place. You seem the sort to want to stretch areas of weakness, and a math-based game is the prime place to do that.
We know. Back on May 10 in Trip.H had posted a so-called Moderate Threat 12 encounter from the module Secrets of the Temple-City that the GM had to nerf in mid-combat to avoid a TPK, and we wrote many comments discussing it. This Moderate Threat encounter had caught the party unarmored in their sleep because they lacked the experience to set up a watch or an Alarm spell on a presumed safe inn room.
Likewise, a new kind of attack, such as the party's first major flying creature, their first incorporeal creature, or their first dragon, could catch them unprepared for the proper counterattack.
Experience helps preparation greatly. When the champion in my Strength of Thousands campaign gained Blessing of the Devoted (called Divine Ally before Remaster) at 3rd level, the new player asked the experienced players which weapon property out of fearsome, ghost touch, returning, shifting, or vitalizing he should grant his weapon. In unison, they answered, "Ghost touch!" By 7th level, ghost touch had been vital twice and the alternatives would have been nearly useless.
*Nods in agreement*

Witch of Miracles |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Arcaian wrote:The point of criticism is that the maths of the game in the first few levels teaches very different lessons to the maths of the game after those levels, and I think that it is clear to see that: a): the community online went through a phase of treating those early level lessons like they were true the whole game, and took years to get past it, b): new players often encounter issues at early levels where they either learn these not-always-true lessons themselves or are taught them as a solution to their problems at early levels by others, and c): many of the most common reasons for new players bouncing off the game are connected to these difficulties at lower levels.A) That was mainly due to poorly balanced APs being the only published options for ages and GMs, much like the designers at Paizo, building as if we were still dealing with PF1 and not PF2.
I want to nitpick this.
Easy low-level encounters teach wrong lessons just as readily as hard ones. Indeed, watching my players go through Book 1 of Season of Ghosts, our premaster oracle looked borderline useless in combat a lot of the time. Most of her larger contributions were invisible or difficult to parse, and it was clear that a lot of her damage from cantrips or focus spells was getting overkilled by the exemplar's flowing spirit strike or fracture mountains, starlit span magus's spellstrikes, or rogue crits. Her best contributions were some amped guidance casts, a particularly critical fear cast, and one good inner radiance torrent.
I wouldn't say she had a great moment that made the casting feel truly strong until just this session, when a Pl-2 enemy failed and a PL-1 enemy critically failed against calm and it swung an encounter very hard into the party's favor.

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

I want to nitpick this.
Easy low-level encounters teach wrong lessons just as readily as hard ones. Indeed, watching my players go through Book 1 of Season of Ghosts, our premaster oracle looked borderline useless in combat a lot of the time. Most of her larger contributions were invisible or difficult to parse, and it was clear that a lot of her damage from cantrips or focus spells was getting overkilled by the exemplar's flowing spirit strike or fracture mountains, starlit span magus's spellstrikes, or rogue crits. Her best contributions were some amped guidance casts, a particularly critical fear cast, and one good inner radiance torrent.
I wouldn't say she had a great moment that made the casting feel truly strong until just this session, when a Pl-2 enemy failed and a PL-1 enemy critically failed against calm and it swung an encounter very hard into the party's favor.
That's a fair point and one I've been making myself in an effort to push back against the idea that the early levels, as they are, have inherent issues.

Mathmuse |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

Mathmuse wrote:That's not surprising. Given your math background, I imagine the encounter building and game math came easily to you while the social aspects may have been why you sought to play the game in the first place. You seem the sort to want to stretch areas of weakness, and a math-based game is the prime place to do that.I began as a forever GM in 2011 and have run four adventure paths to completion. I view myself as an experienced GM. But my estimate is that I have spent only 1,800 hours running roleplaying games.
And the skill I had to hone the most was improvisation when the PCs did something sensible but unexpected, because that is their style. I also gained skill at redesigning the adventure path's encounters to double the difficulty because their teamwork made them twice as strong as an ordinary party. My skill at judging the balance of encounters mostly comes from my mathematical interest in game design.
The social aspect was probably not what anyone expects, except for people who have read the end of my very first thread in this forum: What to do with a Gnome Ranger Monk? comment #22. I was socially awkward in my teens and 20s, but in 2011 I was 49 years old and had acquired many social skills as a husband, father, church volunteer, and gray-haired experienced hand in my office.
My wife was running Rise of the Runelords and she had to quit during the 3rd module, Hook Mountain Massacre, due to health problems. I offered to retire my gnome ranger monk in the game and take over as GM until her health improved. The campaign finished long before her improvement many years later and I had become the default GM in the family. I have the temperament for GMing.

Trip.H |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Real quick I do feel the need to correct this a bit. The main reason we didn't think about setting up a watch or anything like that was because the party *did* have info, which itself made a murder attempt outside the realm of thought.
We were invited into the city by those in power, and therefore "knew" they would not attack us, at least not before we did something to change their mind.
We were even told about the anti-govt faction, and warned they would try to court us to join them. This also "de-confirmed" there being a chance of attack from them.
Again, this was a diplomacy arc in the magic school AP.
Furthermore, from what Mathmuse/you've shared on how it's written, it really looks like the AP itself presumes that the party is not going to be staring at the door to their hotel room instead of sleeping.
Basically, I want to assure yall that the players of that campaign have all previously learned the hard way to keep a watch.
Even then, we did not expect the writing of the AP to be so inconceivably stupid, that the city's ruler decided to murder the entire delegation for no reason.
This is so insane of an act for a ruler to commit, that I don't even have an RL historical example to compare against. The closest thing I can fumble for is it's like "GoT/aSoIaF's red wedding, but during peace time."
Anyone attempting to, ya know, role play the narrative would know that to be a declaration of war heinous enough to create a century of bad blood, yet the writing doesn't even think this ATTEMPTED MURDER OF TEACHERS AND DIPLOMATS is something worth fussing about. Literally every NPC magambyaan stayed, it was, and still is, pants-on-head lunacy that the author expects players to go along with that.
I was genuinely checking to see if the NPCs had gotten mind-controlled or something during the attack, it took a while for it to sink in that the writer just thought we would ignore it "because video game".
It's genuinely insane, and breaks the previous "wt actual f" record of the pre-scripted murder hoboing of book 2 by a mile.
.
It's not right to say or imply that players "were supposed to know" to set up a watch when events take place in context of a narrative.
So yeah, it rustles my jimmies a bit to have my GM / party members catching blame in what is the single worst nugget of ttrpg design/writing I've yet encountered.
Literally, as written, setting up a watch and hearing them coming already breaks the on-page encounter, and the GM has to improvise how the assassins even approached the scenario / poof inside the room.
(Because the writer themself is the one assuming, and they are assuming that the assassins make it inside w/o detection)

Bluemagetim |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Mathmuse wrote:** spoiler omitted **...
If the set up for the encounter was lulling players into believing they would be safe sleeping there, and the encounter forced assassins in their room while they are sleeping it is not actually an encounter.
Just tell the players you go to sleep that night and then wake up in front of Pharasma's court.
Trip.H |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Tyvm for the charts, that +20 outcome is way closer to exactly dead-on than I was hoping for.
The frailest squishy of Wiz just barely slipping down .03 for a bit before resuming that "barely growing" pace is as close as it gets in terms of consistency across the levels when doing such a simple fix, imo. Trying to get that tuned even better is where you'd start needing some level-scaling formulas.
Even the Barb going from just barely being able to eat a +2 crit, to being able to just barely eat a 2nd at L1 is actually a great outcome imo.
If any class *should* be taught they are the one who can eat a crit, it's the Barb.
So the notion that it's kinda dicey eat a single crit at low level with the raw math is imo improved by the +20 change letting that be a safe bet at L1.
.
To be honest, I still kinda feel that the huge HP gulf between Wiz & Barb is a bit "yikes" and a balance issue/challenge
(if you're designing a monster, how do you set it's damage to be dangerous to a Barb, without reducing a Wiz to giblets?), but I'm super happy with that +20 outcome being a very noticeable boost at low level that *really* helps remove the full-->down issue, and does so without messing with any other numbers.
No need to apply templates to foes, manually edit their dmg, etc.
Just a one-time HP boost. Could not be any easier to implement at a table.
If I ever do sit in the GM chair, my current ruleset's definitely going to include that +20HP. Alongside what imo are the no-brainer variant rules: Automatic Rune Progression & Gradual Ability Boost.

Bluemagetim |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

Bluemagetim wrote:Tyvm for the charts, that +20 outcome is way closer to exactly dead-on than I was hoping for.
The frailest squishy of Wiz just barely slipping down .03 for a bit before resuming that "barely growing" pace is as close as it gets in terms of consistency imo.
To be honest, I still kinda feel that the huge HP gulf between Wiz & Barb is still "yikes" / a balance problem (if you're designing a monster, how do you set it's damage to be dangerous to a Barb, without reducing a Wiz to giblets?), but I'm super happy with that +20 outcome being a very noticeable boost at low level that *really* helps remove the one-shot issue, and does so without messing with any other numbers.
No need to apply templates to foes, manually edit their dmg, etc.
Just a one-time HP boost.If I ever do sit in the GM chair, my current ruleset's definitely going to include that +20. Alongside what imo are the no-brainer variant rules: Automatic Rune Progression & Gradual Ability Boost.
You know, go for it. I don't there is anything wrong with setting up the experience you want.
I think though it will make classes that focus on defense/in-battle recovery less valuable at those lower levels. defensive characters will make fights take longer unnecessarily since the more offensive characters would get to unload damage without worrying about dying before getting it in.
Trip.H |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

You know, go for it. I don't there is anything wrong with setting up the experience you want.
I think though it will make classes that focus on defense/in-battle recovery less valuable at those lower levels. defensive characters will make fights take longer unnecessarily since the more offensive characters would get to unload damage without worrying about dying before getting it in.
That's a totally valid worry, and might be the outcome for a vet table playing L1 with that new change. They've already been conditioned into rocket tag, and thus would likely keep doing that by default.
.
That said, part of the logic is that games where you get one-shot result in players investing in becoming even more of a glass cannon. Very common for them to respond by investing just enough into def to be able to survive a single hit, then maxing offense.
There's also the "induced power gaming" response as a coping mechanism to the one-shots, which has some considerable weight behind it in a ttrpg like pf2. Archetype balance is all over the place, and basically every PC can break combat balance over their knee with consumables.
A party of system-fresh newbies with the +20 would have *less* pressure to go all-in on offense & power like that. Being able to reliably survive a turn *should* net-total reduce the party's dps due to more investment into other actions (speculation).
There could still be a need "to fix the fix," though I'd definitely want to watch the outcome for a bit before mutating the homebrew into a "mirrored" HP boost to give the enemies a chance to take another hit.
(and to be clear, all my tables have some power~adjacent players that can sometimes just nuke the bejeezus out of foes, so there likely is already a bit of a need at many tables to give those foes a bit more HP, lol)

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Putting a warning here for the discourse in this thread! Not at all because of the sentiment of the overall thread but rather for the degradation used in multiple responses that were removed. Also, please do not mark people as Spam when you just don't like what they're saying. That's very bad form.
What should off-topic and inflammatory posts be marked as?
Edit: Also, and I'm not blaming you Maya,this delete everything with no individual explanation method of moderation is a poor choice for a forum. It ruins the flow of conversations, doesn't give feedback as to what's near the line and what's over it, and is generally worse than moderation on most subReddits run by volunteers. The better method is to edit out the part of each post you take issue with and add an explanation as to why that section was edited. This has been the forum moderation best practice for decades now.

Unicore |
4 people marked this as a favorite. |

I prefer a game that tends to have the highest chance of random death occur early, like at level 1, rather than wait until really high levels to suddenly start offering such threats. Players tend not to have invested too much in their characters growth and development at level 1. I find the occasional (like 1 in 20 - 50 sessions) early character death tends to bring the party together more than it causes frustration, and introducing a new character early on in the story tends to be easier than doing it at higher levels where everything from treasure and contacts the dead character had become tricky to navigate (how much of the dead character's treasure does the party keep? what if the PC that died was the one carrying the party's bag of holding or had a bunch of consumables on them when they died, or they were the one that had a relationship built with an important NPC?).
It is when too many characters die farther along the story or in a place where it is really hard to introduce the super random weird characters my players like to make that the story tends to go flat and everyone decides they want to abandon the campaign.

Claxon |
3 people marked this as a favorite. |

I prefer a game that tends to have the highest chance of random death occur early, like at level 1, rather than wait until really high levels to suddenly start offering such threats.
I tend to prefer a game where random deaths aren't a thing at all.
I want my character deaths to be a result of bad decisions between myself and my party.
You can play a lot of what if games at high level.
At low levels you're options are limited, and if a fight starts 30ft apart and an enemies goes first and crits you....there's nothing you could have even done. You existed and then were dying.
Not saying this should be the actual goal, but let's pretend that the number of hits a character can take from an on level enemy is 5. Theoretically something like that should give you an opportunity after 2 to 3 hits to go "Hey, this is going poorly I need to change my strategy".
I would say from my perspective, a character needs to take at least one hit in combat before they should need to think "Hey, I should use a different strategy here" and they should still have at least one more turn to implement doing something different. At least for a moderate encounter.
Severe encounters might require a mindset that you need to be strategizing before combat even starts and have a high level of teamwork.

Errenor |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Unicore wrote:I prefer a game that tends to have the highest chance of random death occur early, like at level 1, rather than wait until really high levels to suddenly start offering such threats.I tend to prefer a game where random deaths aren't a thing at all.
I want my character deaths to be a result of bad decisions between myself and my party.
Hmmm. Is a death in a battle against difficult creature using suboptimal preparation and tactics random or not? Not meaning taking unneeded risks or being totally unprepared, just a normal more or less planned difficult encounter.
I thought when people say 'not random' death it means deaths in battle with final bosses or conscious plot choices of players, something extremely plot important. (I'm not an ardent adherent of this approach, too organized for an adventure game with dice)
RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

At low levels you're options are limited, and if a fight starts 30ft apart and an enemies goes first and crits you....there's nothing you could have even done. You existed and then were dying.
If a fight starts 30 feet apart and you don't want to engage, just back off. Let them come out and fight you, and if they won't, because perhaps they're guarding something, wait until they go back to low alert and use dirty tricks to get the upper hand. The idea that PF2 combat needs to be two sides engaged in puzzle-like combat using only the abilities on their sheets is silly.
Not saying this should be the actual goal, but let's pretend that the number of hits a character can take from an on level enemy is 5. Theoretically something like that should give you an opportunity after 2 to 3 hits to go "Hey, this is going poorly I need to change my strategy".
You should be thinking of that before you enter the fight. What are they wearing? Are they ready with weapons in hand? What kinds of weapons? Do they look like anything you've fought before? What does the room look like? If you only start to make a plan after getting bloodied you deserve what happens to you.
I would say from my perspective, a character needs to take at least one hit in combat before they should need to think "Hey, I should use a different strategy here" and they should still have at least one more turn to implement doing something different. At least for a moderate encounter.
Try that approach in an OSR game or a game built around any shot that passes armour being deadly. You'll quickly learn that you should try to win every fight before the enemy knows there's even going to be a fight.

Claxon |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Hmmm. Is a death in a battle against difficult creature using suboptimal preparation and tactics random or not? Not meaning taking unneeded risks or being totally unprepared, just a normal more or less planned difficult encounter.
I thought when people say 'not random' death it means deaths in battle with final bosses or conscious plot choices of players.
To me a "random death" is one where there is nothing/little a player could do to control it. So the random crit putting you a dying 2 at level 1 that results in death...that's a random death.
I go a bit further and say that for a moderate encounter (IMO) there should be some number of hits you can take before going "we need a better plan" and working on an alternative strategy.
At higher difficulty encounters, you can reduce the amount of leeway before the player realize they need another strategy. And if you wanted a truly challenging experience with Extreme encounters you would set the expectation that players need to have a high amount of teamwork and have multiple strategies based on the type of enemies (ranged/ melee /spellcasters) and terrain.

thenobledrake |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It is when too many characters die farther along the story or in a place where it is really hard to introduce the super random weird characters my players like to make that the story tends to go flat and everyone decides they want to abandon the campaign.
And even when it's not a problem for the story to introduce a new character of the appropriate level, the player may look at the prospect of making all those build choices all at once and feel like they'd rather just not.
Especially because diving into a character build you haven't already gotten used to at a higher level means you're more likely to make mistakes or forget features and that means you're more likely to end up with another dead character while you're still working on figuring out how best to play this one.
I know I have had that happen, and seen it happen for others through the years, where it's not "I don't want to continue this campaign" but "I don't want to make another character" that is the obstacle to a player proceeding forward. Which thankfully modern game systems have helped out by removing the old penalties like hard limits on how many times you can be raised or reducing your level as a result of dying so all it takes is saying yes to access to resurrect to keep someone able to play (though that still has the death-spiral causing 1 week debuff that can stick a campaign in the position of being "we don't have a week, so death spiral time it is" or "we take a week and that doesn't affect anything significantly so it's basically just like if there wasn't a debuff to wait out in the first place").
My own thoughts on the likelihood of death in a game are basically that it should have an inverse relationship to the degree of time and effort it takes for a player to make another character.
Hmmm. Is a death in a battle against difficult creature using suboptimal preparation and tactics random or not?
It depends on whether or not you had the opportunity to know what to prepare for or not.
Many campaigns operate under the assumption that players functionally can't know what to expect, especially at tables run by GMs with a worry about "meta-gaming" because they can turn even the most obvious kind of information into something a character has to pass a check to actually know even if it's just "there's probably spiders in The Spider Wood, and since we're traveling through The Spider Wood, we should prepare for spiders" in nature. So even level of preparedness can come down to random chance intersection of what you are prepared for and what the GM picked.
So it takes a lot of accurate hinting and meaningful options to respond to that hinting to even arrive at an encounter that isn't "the players were unaware this was to be their opponent." in nature, and that's the thing that is basically mandatory in order for a death to not be "random."

SuperBidi |
4 people marked this as a favorite. |

To me a "random death" is one where there is nothing/little a player could do to control it. So the random crit putting you a dying 2 at level 1 that results in death...that's a random death.
I really wonder what's the actual occurrence of this so called "random crit [...] that results in death". I've seen it once and in my opinion it had more to do with a broken monster (extreme damage, extreme attack bonus and persistent damage) and setup (the monster literally appeared next to us with all its actions) than something that should happen normally. All the other deaths I have experienced have been the conclusion of a large number of hits, even at low level.
PF2 is not a deadly game. Even if going down to a crit at low level happens it very rarely ends up with a death or TPK, at least not without a lot of bad luck (on top of the crit) or bad decisions.

Claxon |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Claxon wrote:At low levels you're options are limited, and if a fight starts 30ft apart and an enemies goes first and crits you....there's nothing you could have even done. You existed and then were dying.If a fight starts 30 feet apart and you don't want to engage, just back off. Let them come out and fight you, and if they won't, because perhaps they're guarding something, wait until they go back to low alert and use dirty tricks to get the upper hand. The idea that PF2 combat needs to be two sides engaged in puzzle-like combat using only the abilities on their sheets is silly.
Quote:Not saying this should be the actual goal, but let's pretend that the number of hits a character can take from an on level enemy is 5. Theoretically something like that should give you an opportunity after 2 to 3 hits to go "Hey, this is going poorly I need to change my strategy".You should be thinking of that before you enter the fight. What are they wearing? Are they ready with weapons in hand? What kinds of weapons? Do they look like anything you've fought before? What does the room look like? If you only start to make a plan after getting bloodied you deserve what happens to you.
Quote:I would say from my perspective, a character needs to take at least one hit in combat before they should need to think "Hey, I should use a different strategy here" and they should still have at least one more turn to implement doing something different. At least for a moderate encounter.Try that approach in an OSR game or a game built around any shot that passes armour being deadly. You'll quickly learn that you should try to win every fight before the enemy knows there's even going to be a fight.
I don't feel any of that should be a requirement.
Those things are necessary for a challenging experience, but it shouldn't be necessary for the default experience, in my opinion.

Mathmuse |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |

Claxon wrote:I tend to prefer a game where random deaths aren't a thing at all.
I want my character deaths to be a result of bad decisions between myself and my party.
Hmmm. Is a death in a battle against difficult creature using suboptimal preparation and tactics random or not? Not meaning taking unneeded risks or being totally unprepared, just a normal more or less planned difficult encounter.
I thought when people say 'not random' death it means deaths in battle with final bosses or conscious plot choices of players, something extremely plot important. (I'm not an ardent adherent of this approach, too organized for an adventure game with dice)
As a GM, I adjust the difficulty of planned encounters around how well the party has been already handling encounters. If they are suboptimal, then I make the encounters easier. If they are super-optimal, then I make the encounters harder. Thus, a death in a suboptimal party against a difficult challenge would not be random. Instead, it would be my mistake in planning incorrectly.
I have two examples. Currently in Strength of Thousands my players do not want to optimize their characters for combat. They want to roleplay as students at the Magaambya academy, more concerned about classes than about monsters. This leads to a little amusing roleplaying mischief in that the players designed a combat style that works but looks spontaneous, such as the wizard preparing useful illusion spells because he planned to use them for theater class.
To justify some adventures, I assigned the PCs for their service project in the current semester to aid the Nantambu Chime-Ringers (the local police force), so they do prepare for catching criminals on a moment's notice. I am currently planning a non-module encounter in which some drunken sailors are recklessly racing down the canals of Nantambu and the PCs have to stop them. They just reached 7th level and two learned the Fly spell, so this should be workable. It is a challenge, but no-one should get hurt. (Note to Trip.H: the Chime Ringers were nearly useless in the module as written, but they became a reasonable police force after my revision.)
On the optimal side, a 15th-level encounter in Prisoners of the Blight, 5th module of Ironfang Invasion, was against a CR 15 lesser bandersnatch (the usual PF1 Bandersnatch is CR 17). But I was porting the adventure path to PF2, and the PF2 bestiary already had a bandersnatch. Alas, it was a 19th-level Primal Bandersnatch. The 17th-level regular Bandersnatch was not published until the Monster Core. The 7-member party was 16th level due to player-requested side quests, so in theory they could handle a 19th-level creature as a Low Threat, but in practice a Level+3 high-damage creature would knock some PCs to dying. I asked my players in advance whether they were willing to handle a 19th-level creature. They said yes. Two PCs dropped to dying 1 in that battle, but the party had contingency plans for that and used Friendfetch to pull them out of danger.

Agonarchy |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

There's no need to denigrate the play preferences of others. It's fine to just say "I would not enjoy that". We all have different preferences for how a game runs. For some, anything where you don't have four characters ready to go because instant death awaits anyone who doesn't have a ten foot pole to check every single tile on the floor feels lacking, but they don't need to declare all easier games to be of a negative quality.

Mathmuse |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Claxon wrote:At low levels you're options are limited, and if a fight starts 30ft apart and an enemies goes first and crits you....there's nothing you could have even done. You existed and then were dying.If a fight starts 30 feet apart and you don't want to engage, just back off. Let them come out and fight you, and if they won't, because perhaps they're guarding something, wait until they go back to low alert and use dirty tricks to get the upper hand. The idea that PF2 combat needs to be two sides engaged in puzzle-like combat using only the abilities on their sheets is silly.
Claxon did specifically say that the critted PC had not had their turn yet, so that character could not just back off before dying.
Backing off is a good but underused tactic. My players excel at it: whenever a frontline martial character has too few hit points after a few hits to remain standing after another hit, they tell the party they are backing off and a relatively tough non-martial character such as an alchemist or kineticist takes their place as a defender of the vulnerable people in back. The party carefully distributes the damage among them all so that everyone remains standing, even if a few martial characters have to switch to ranged weapons while cowering in the back. However, this tactic requires that moment when the martial character realizes that they cannot take another hit. Going down in a single critical hit requires the emergency healing tactic instead.
Claxon wrote:Not saying this should be the actual goal, but let's pretend that the number of hits a character can take from an on level enemy is 5. Theoretically something like that should give you an opportunity after 2 to 3 hits to go "Hey, this is going poorly I need to change my strategy".You should be thinking of that before you enter the fight. What are they wearing? Are they ready with weapons in hand? What kinds of weapons? Do they look like anything you've fought before? What does the room look like? If you only start to make a plan after getting bloodied you deserve what happens to you.
Scouting to determine what the enemy is like before engaging in battle is a strategy to learn. The style of kicking in the next door and being surprised by the monster there was so common in early Dungeons & Dragons that it has been parodied in the rules of the Munchkin card game.
I would say from my perspective, a character needs to take at least one hit in combat before they should need to think "Hey, I should use a different strategy here" and they should still have at least one more turn to implement doing something different. At least for a moderate encounter.
Usually the ability to take 3 hits gives enough time to rethink tactics. 5 hits is excessive.
Try that approach in an OSR game or a game built around any shot that passes armour being deadly. You'll quickly learn that you should try to win every fight before the enemy knows there's even going to be a fight.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition is not an Old School Revival game. And Old School games had a lot of kicking in the door.

RPG-Geek |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

Claxon did specifically say that the critted PC had not had their turn yet, so that character could not just back off before dying.
That's bad luck; it happens. Hopefully, the party can get the down member out of there, and if not, hopefully they can revive you when they come back for revenge.
Backing off is a good but underused tactic. My players excel at it: whenever a frontline martial character has too few hit points after a few hits to remain standing after another hit, they tell the party they are backing off and a relatively tough non-martial character such as an alchemist or kineticist takes their place as a defender of the vulnerable people in back. The party carefully distributes the damage among them all so that everyone remains standing, even if a few martial characters have to switch to ranged weapons while cowering in the back. However, this tactic requires that moment when the martial character realizes that they cannot take another hit. Going down in a single critical hit requires the emergency healing tactic instead.
I prefer to combine your strategy with more military style tactics. Make the fight unfair, if it's not unfair back off before it even gets to crossing blades. If you have to fight a battle you didn't choose, either hit them hard and fast or immediately make the call to retreat.
Scouting to determine what the enemy is like before engaging in battle is a strategy to learn. The style of kicking in the next door and being surprised by the monster there was so common in early Dungeons & Dragons that it has been parodied in the rules of the Munchkin card game.
I'm surprised it isn't common among all parties by now. They even make spells that all but do the scouting for you.
Usually the ability to take 3 hits gives enough time to rethink tactics. 5 hits is excessive.
I've played too many systems where one hit is enough to be willing to take hits to figure out how tough the enemy is.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition is not an Old School Revival game. And Old School games had a lot of kicking in the door.
You'll still do better in PF2 if you treat the game as if it's OSR levels of deadly. Just remember that your characters have no idea this is a fantasy game of carefully crafted encounters. To them, every fight is one where they may not get to go home afterwards.
EDIT: You can still have a lighter tone while playing smart. You don't need to act like a unit of special forces members to play your character to their strength and us their abilities to get the drop on enemies.