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The problem is also likely that Abomination Vaults was pre-Remaster, so Chilling Darkness wasn't as wide-ranging of a threat then.
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Incapacitation is very much a trait that helps PCs as much as it “hurts” them. When facing hordes of pre remaster ghouls, for example, the party will really notice when the fear of having to not ever roll a natural one goes away and a suddenly difficult enemy becomes something they don’t have to worry about nearly as much. The same with enemies that can dominate or control PCs or any of the ones that turn the party to stone.
If the PCs never get to experience that switch, they might not be likely to notice how much incapacitation helps them, but, directly from the developer’s mouth, we know incapacitation was designed to help PCs navigate the very intentional enemy progression chart of facing a solo enemy early on being a real challenge and potentially facing that enemy again later on as a minion for something else.
Am I missing something about ghouls or incapacitation? I'd thought it's when you're higher level and incapacitation applies that you're afraid of a natural 1. Before then, any failure is a huge threat.
And 1st level PCs shouldn't be facing hordes of ghouls anyway. 3 would already be a severe threat.The thing I really dislike about incapacitation, at least in cases like ghouls where it's not just a one shot like a spell, is that it throws off balance by making the effective difference between PL-1 and PL creatures much larger than expected.
I think you're both in agreement, but maybe misunderstood each other.
When you lower level or same level as enemy with an incapacitation, then nothing is different from normal. That effect can be very deadly.
But a PC that gets above that level can now be immune to the worst effects of that incapacitation ability, because a critical failure becomes just a regular failure and a failure becomes a success (and a success becomes a crit success).
It cuts both ways though, as incapacitation effects can't be used as effectively by the PCs against bosses, which prevents things like Dominate ending an encounter from one unlucky roll. Ultimately that's what incapacitation is meant to do, is to stop a "more powerful enemy" from being taken out of a fight from a single bad roll. As most incapacitation effects will remove a creature from combat on a critical fail, or even failure.
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To be fair, it's also to prevent some things like lower-level enemies continually spamming a certain tactic until it works. Ghouls are one really basic example, but I remember some incredibly low-level clerics with Hold Person in Hell's Rebels, specifically so that they could toss out the coup-de-grace tactic on the off chance you failed against the insanely high number of them.
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Still, I think incapacitate is a bad solution to the ghoul problem, since it's too big a change for a 1 level shift in level. At first level regular ghouls were terrifying. At second, they were a joke. And I don't think they're correctly balanced for either.
Is incapacitation perfect? No, but it does accomplish what it's intended to do.
The ghoul example that's been discussed and the Dominate boss ender example I gave are the same example, just from the perspective of being on the receiving end vs giving end.
We could probably come up with something more elegant if we spent more time on how to refine the idea, but as it sits it's a simple rule that accomplishes its goal.
Perhaps if you wanted a more nuanced version you could say that Nat 1 no longer reduce your success/fail tier by 1 (instead of Incapacitation automatically bumping the result by 1 tier) and for every level the caster of the Incapacitation effect is below the target reduces the save DC by 4.
In this way, a nat 1 doesn't critically fail you automatically. But if you roll a 1 or a 2 you still might be 10 below the DC to crit fail. Couple that with lowering the DC by a number based on the level difference and there's still room for Incapacitation fail.
Currently, since crit fails are generally unlikely, but fails aren't uncommon but Incapacitation would upgrade that to success. Instead with a DC change you widen the widow for time where a creature/effect is still a threat.
However such a rule is more complicated to employ.
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I've seen several attempted mitigations of incap, most of which involve giving bonuses equal to n*(level difference between target and effect) instead of a straight success upgrade. I don't really like any of them, but it's understandable why they exist.
I personally hate incap because it feels bad to be metagaming encounter budgets as a player, and effective use of incap basically requires it. The good incap spells are among the strongest and most effective in the game. AoE incap from a slot one or two ranks below your max will utterly decimate trash fights, even. (E.G., at level 13, Synaptic Pulse at Rank 5 still works on PL-3/4 enemies, which can often comprise the bulk of any encounter with 5 or more enemies. A rank 6 slot at that level would work on almost any encounter with four or more enemies, since even the severe encounter budget is 4 PL-1 enemies.)
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Incapacitation is very much a trait that helps PCs as much as it “hurts” them. When facing hordes of pre remaster ghouls, for example, the party will really notice when the fear of having to not ever roll a natural one goes away and a suddenly difficult enemy becomes something they don’t have to worry about nearly as much. The same with enemies that can dominate or control PCs or any of the ones that turn the party to stone.
If the PCs never get to experience that switch, they might not be likely to notice how much incapacitation helps them, but, directly from the developer’s mouth, we know incapacitation was designed to help PCs navigate the very intentional enemy progression chart of facing a solo enemy early on being a real challenge and potentially facing that enemy again later on as a minion for something else.
Yes. I found this to be true. Incap is one of those foundational balance elements of PF2 that cannot be removed without breaking the game.
It not just negatively impacts PC casters, but negatively impacts PCs badly too. It breaks all kinds of abilities making them far more lethal and imbalances spells substantially making heightening unnecessary allowing so many castings of something like dominate, it's almost guaranteed to work against even powerful creatures.
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Best for the game? What exactly does that mean? You are using concepts I'm not sure how you decide that for the "game."It genuinely comes down to design "universals" like "players hate getting KOed by b@#!@#@!" as the shared starting point, then working to pin down what "b$@@@$@$" means, subdividing it until you can get to fundamental points of agreement / disagreement.
This is why my starting point is "no mistake" full-->downs. If the player doesn't make an error, a "punishment" like one-shotting them is easy to see as "BS."
... Remove save or die spells. Now save or suck spells are vastly reduced. Focus everything on damage with short-term bonuses and penalties.
You seem to catastrophize a lot, there is no reason that a reduction of save-or-die magics would lead to an over-focus on damage. It's kinda closer to the opposite. When a spell doesn't have a "the target is out of the fight" crit fail, and that save-or-die nonsense is removed, it leaves more "power budget" to make the spell more useful in the general case of other outcomes.
Incap as a concept is a way to artificially "reduce" the power of many of these spells specifically to make them worse in the player's hands, but not their foes.
The more pf2 I play, the less I think incap "worked" as a design concept. It's the definition of an artificial barrier. Higher level foes already have the save advantage.
I don't know what your process is in these games, but my process is to take the new game and play it as it is out of the box. Then modify to suit my and my groups tastes.And this is what most people are doing here. Your issue is that "most people" have less bias to favor 30+ year old "bad" math. It really doesn't take a degree in game design to understand that the HP growth is FUBAR.
I'm telling you how it works while you are arguing how you think it should work. It doesn't work like that.No, and this is why you find this conversation...
I told you how it works and explained to you why. You continue to claim otherwise and I have seen how it works empirically.
The math you're using to analyze is limited focusing on this single point of failure when there are layered points of balance and failure in the system.
You want to pin it all on this one hit point issue at low level, a few levels that you get passed fairly quickly. You turned it into this issue that has you cursing at people and acting as though your statements infallible.
When the reality is many of us don't consider what you consider much of a problem.
I would consider the low level caster issues a much bigger problem for driving players off than this hit point issue you have turned into this problem of dire proportions. I'll tell you that playing a low level caster even if you boost their hit points still feels quite terrible when you're doing 2d4 or 2d6 damage for two actions spent when some melee monster is hitting for 1d8 to 1d12 plus 4 or more with special abilities with more hit points than you, more cool abilities than you, and a general early play experience.
I'd consider it more important to provide 6hp casters with a better starting experience if I wanted to sell the game better.
I think martials and 8hp casters have a very good starting experience in PF2 and that's a bigger difference than your focus on this hit point issue.
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To be fair, it's also to prevent some things like lower-level enemies continually spamming a certain tactic until it works. Ghouls are one really basic example, but I remember some incredibly low-level clerics with Hold Person in Hell's Rebels, specifically so that they could toss out the coup-de-grace tactic on the off chance you failed against the insanely high number of them.Ghouls are the classic example for this, mostly because they got multiple attacks per round any of which could paralyze.
Still, I think incapacitate is a bad solution to the ghoul problem, since it's too big a change for a 1 level shift in level. At first level regular ghouls were terrifying. At second, they were a joke. And I don't think they're correctly balanced for either.
Though the new version is cool, I do miss the paralyzation. Might have worked better if they stunned you or something, without incapacitation.
Incap breaks way more than ghouls. Dominate spells, charm spells, stun spells, all the abilities that simulate these abilities. Banishment would be so much more powerful and spammable without incap. Sleep abilities. The list is long.
When I tried modifying or removing incap, it was an absolutely terrible experience for players when they started getting hit by incap abilities from multiple CR equal to -4 mooks causing multiple saves with random bad dice rolls causing failure and severe consequences.
I gave up trying to fix it. It's not worth the headache. Most of the stuff incap is attached to it needs to be attached to and it limits how much you can use these powerful incap abilities on enemies and PCs. It's a necessary limit that reduces dice variability for very powerful abilities that can take out enemies or PCs equally if incap is removed.
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Maybe if wizards and wizards alone got a feat to treat their spells 1 rank higher when determining incapacitate then wizards will have something for themselves that sets them apart.
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Part of it power in these games also is driven by how much you can effect. Let's say Mathmuse is designing a severe encounter with multiple creatures. At level 1 to even level 10, this can be a much rougher encounter than a single boss due to action economy parity. Low level PCs have a limited ability to affect multiple targets which makes these fights much, much tougher. Once you get to higher level the encounter design is similar based on recommended encounter design, but you can affect multiple creatures much easier whether it's damage or effects. A caster goes from casting a single target fear to a single target slow at level 5 to a multitarget slow at level 11 to easily casting a multitarget slow nearly every battle at level 15 plus. It's the same with damage spells.
If you're designing an encounter using the encounter design rules, the number of creatures the PCs can easily deal with changes drastically while the encounter math is still telling you that's a PL+2 severe encounter.
Do I think the designers don't know this? I have a hard time believing that as most of them are experienced and intelligent game designers.
I am confused about the phrase "PL+2 severe encounter." One PL+2 creature is a Moderate-Threat encounter, and two PL+2 creatures are an Extreme-Threat encounter. Maybe Deriven Firelion meant PL+3, but he was talking about multiple creatures in the encounter.
Anyways, encounters with multiple creatures are standard for me. I tend to have 7 players in my latest campaigns and I seldom have fewer than 5 players, so I frequently re-balance the module's encounters by adding more creatures. On the other hand, since the encounter has more PCs, too, it does not require area-of-effect or multi-target spells. Though low-level spellcasters are fond of the two-target Electric Arc cantrip.
My Ironfang Invasion party fought patrols, garrisons, and armies, so they became specialists in...
This should be an easy idea for you to see.
When you're level 1 or 2 doing 2d6 burning hands in a 15 foot cone, you're not going to be able to take out many targets unless they line up very, very well.
When you're level 11 and dropping a chain lightening that can hit targets up to 500 feet away, you can level an army.
This means the same number of creatures that may form up a severe PL+2 threat will be very hard for a low level party with limited ability to harm multiple creatures while a higher level party with spells for the same action cost are able to affect numerous targets will have an easier time beating the same threat.
Do the encounter guidelines explain this? You know them better than I do because I have dealt with and understand this idea as I have seen it occur over the years across every iteration of this game including PF2.
Once your casters can level groups of creatures and even your martials can access AOE striking, you can destroy larger groups far easier while the recommended encounter guidelines are still telling you. "This many creatures of this CR are this threat" regardless of level.
You as a DM know that isn't the case because once your 7 person group can drop multiple chain lightnings or fireballs or eclipse bursts at range to soften a group, that group is going to be far easier to beat than it was for lower level characters.
For you to get the equivalent challenge at lower level to higher level, you would either have to remove the power higher level characters have to hit multiple targets or increase the power lower level characters have to hit multiple targets.
With bosses, once you can make Trip easy with say a barbarian built for it with an athletics item, the feat that gives a +2 circumstance bonus, high strength, and higher skill against a reflex save, then it becomes vastly easier for that barbarian to control a single boss, especially if your caster drops a level 3 slow on the boss.
Do you want to give these abilities like this at level 1 so the level 1 to 4 PCs are winning as easily as the higher level PCs with their stacks of feats and options?
That's what you would have to do to make the threats the same.
Or does the encounter design explain that the PCs will have tons of capabilities that allow them to hit multiple targets for massive damage or control a boss with ease by tripping them with a much higher probability due to all the stacking bonuses that increase probability in the PCs favor?
For example, when my group is fighting a boss, some CR+4 enemy at high level we have a caster spamming slow, a trip martial, and usually try to stick a debuff on the boss. We can do this almost endlessly against this boss to keep them controlled and turn this CR+4 encounter into a cakewalk. Whereas this same CR+4 encounter might rip apart level 1 or 2 characters, might even be a problem for a level 7 to 10 party. It is an absolutely cakewalk for a level 20 character.
This is a clear indicator to me as a DM and a player that the way power progression is done is by shifting the probability for success in the PCs favor as they level creating the feeling of power progression as they are more easily able to defeat the same threat encounters. That is what I see from the math and the way abilities are built.
1. You can take on stronger stuff easier as you level.
2. You can take on larger numbers of enemies as you level easier.
3. This combines to make the same threat level encounters easier to handle as you level.
4. This is how PF2 designers (and these games period) have chosen to model progression from new hero to fantasy superhero.
Is this not what you are experiencing with the math of encounter design in your group? When your players are level 20 are they really having trouble with Severe encounters compared to level 1 to 4 or even 5 to 8 or 11 to 13? I'm seeing the gradual improvement of probabilities leading to handling the same threat level encounters more easily even if the fight takes a bit longer since rounds to complete combat also seems to rise as you gain levels due to the large hit point pools.
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Maybe if wizards and wizards alone got a feat to treat their spells 1 rank higher when determining incapacitate then wizards will have something for themselves that sets them apart.
Maybe for one spell, I don't know.
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Maybe if wizards and wizards alone got a feat to treat their spells 1 rank higher when determining incapacitate then wizards will have something for themselves that sets them apart.
The thing is, prepared casters are already the best users of incapacitation spells. They lose the least versatility for knowing them, since there's no cost in repertoire space, and they can be rewarded heavily for preparing even a single top-rank-1/top-rank-2 incap spell. Those are genuine silver bullets against certain kinds of fights.
EDIT: I wanna be extra clear—this is kind of a shift in some of my thoughts since the last big wizard thread. Previously, I would've said the game barely has any silver bullets on the arcane list. But I do genuinely think those top-rank-1/top-rank-2 incap spells can count. It just took me a while to get there because it's not really so much about the kind of enemies you're facing as it is the kind of encounter you're facing.
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Maybe if wizards and wizards alone got a feat to treat their spells 1 rank higher when determining incapacitate then wizards will have something for themselves that sets them apart.The thing is, prepared casters are already the best users of incapacitation spells. They lose the least versatility for knowing them, since there's no cost in repertoire space, and they can be rewarded heavily for preparing even a single top-rank-1/top-rank-2 incap spell. Those are genuine silver bullets against certain kinds of fights.
EDIT: I wanna be extra clear—this is kind of a shift in some of my thoughts since the last big wizard thread. Previously, I would've said the game barely has any silver bullets on the arcane list. But I do genuinely think those top-rank-1/top-rank-2 incap spells can count. It just took me a while to get there because it's not really so much about the kind of enemies you're facing as it is the kind of encounter you're facing.
I don't consider this true. I think sorcerers are the best users of incap spells. They get enough spells that picking up an incap spell for occasional use and making it a signature spell so they can heighten it as needed allows them to learn a spell at a lower level and keep it there, then height it when needed. Whereas a prepared caster has to use the spell in maxed level prepared slot, then hope they run into the enemy that is the right level.
For example, I always take banishment with my spontaneous casters. I always make it a signature spell. That incap spell is super useful. I also take dominate or charm fairly often and make it a signature spell. Makes it very useful when needed.
Even with incap spells, there are only a few high value incap spells. Sorcs who can make them sig spells can do this with ease, especially arcane or occult sorcs who can slot an incap spell quickly. Arcane from their Arcane Evolution and Occult from Occult evolution which allows you to pick up a mental spell at the highest level if needed with a minute of prep. So you can slot spells like dominate or charm with the only requirement learning the uncommon dominate. A lot of incap spells are mental.
My experience is spontaneous with signature spells and a large repertoire like a sorc or oracle are best at using incap spells. Prepared casters are second best. Spontaneous casters with a smaller repertoire like a bard are third.