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Ever since the disaster that was several overpowered encounters in Gatewalkers, every AP since then has been a literal cake walk for our players.
Our Discord plays the latest APs and honestly the last time a PC died was during Blood Lords and that was from a critical failed Medicine check.
We just finished Book 1 of Shades of Blood in 7 sessions. The encounters were a YAWN fest and the GM told us that no encounter was over Moderate difficulty and most were Trivial.
Seriously I have to know, Paizo why have you made all your APs super easy?
Creative Director
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Part of this is perhaps because your players are getting better at the game—but another part is that we've taken the feedback that the adventures were "too tough" to heart and have skewed things back a bit... especially for 1st level portions of adventures where things can be extra tricky.
The goal of most of our published adventures is not to present things tailored toward new players nor toward very experienced players, but at an average experience somewhere in the middle. This way, any one GM can more easily adjust the adventure to be tougher or easer as needed to make for a more entertaining and enjoyable experience for their players.
It's also worth noting that our adventures assume a group of 4 players. If you have more than 4 players (or to be precise, more than 4 PCs), then things are also going to be easier than expected.
That said, a quick look at Book 1 of Shades of Blood reveals to me that most of the encounters are Low or Moderate. I didn't see any Trivial ones, and did see 3 Severe ones, so it might be your GM has already done some work at adjusting the adventure as presented and maybe went a bit too far in adjusting things toward the easy side? So... simply from a what I'm seeing in print side of things, Not sure what to say there... unless I did miss some Trivial ones in my quick flip-through of the pages.
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My group likes to joke that we were born in the crucible of early 2e adventure paths. Extinction's Curse, Agents of Edgewatch, and Age of Ashes forced us to get really good at the game or really good at rolling up new characters. While it was pretty challenging, it was also really rewarding at the same time. From an objective point of view its probably better for the new player experience (especially at early levels) to not get so deadly.
That being said, while we haven't played Shades of Blood we have played through the first book of Curtain Call and the first two books of Seasons of Ghosts (amazing AP btw best I have ever played in). The combat has been noticeably easier across both stories but more reasonably so in SoG. With us now approaching the end of the 2nd book having gone down maybe once or twice to bad rolls but otherwise having a decent time.
Curtain Call however is a different story. I'm not sure if its just us getting a lot better as a group or the change in how the adventure path was balanced. But we have basically caked walked through every encounter in the first book without breaking a sweat. While this has lead to us certainly feeling like legendary heroes with stories worth telling, it also makes me feel less invested as a whole in the combat sections of the game. The GM even made some of the final dungeon harder (which consisted of mostly low-moderate) and made the boss a Severe encounter.
I think Prey for Death is largely an example of difficulty done right with some combats being complex puzzles where players need to approach them strategically and cautiously and others that they can batman and take care of without a second thought. An excellent example of what high level difficulty can look like.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I would really like to see higher difficulty in the 11-20 APs. I think that it adds a meaningful element to the story that is lost when omitted.
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Curtain Call however is a different story. I'm not sure if its just us getting a lot better as a group or the change in how the adventure path was balanced. But we have basically caked walked through every encounter in the first book without breaking a sweat. While this has lead to us certainly feeling like legendary heroes with stories worth telling, it also makes me feel less invested as a whole in the combat sections of the game. The GM even made some of the final dungeon harder (which consisted of mostly low-moderate) and made the boss a Severe encounter.
I find that high level PF2 is easier than low level PF2 at the same encounter difficulty. By high level players have a lot of tools, resources, and options. Enemies can get really strong abilities, but players have a lot of resources to deal with them. A severe encounter in Ruby Phoenix can be hurty, but the players are almost certainly going to win and its rare for someone to actually die. And Ruby Phoenix was still relatively early since it came out right after Abomination Vaults, which is pretty well known for its difficulty. So I don't think they were tuning it down drastically. I also found the same thing in Extinction Curse.
A severe encounter at level 1 has a very real risk of killing a PC, if not more. Hell, book 1 chapter 1 of Extinction Curse has an encounter where there's a not-insignificant chance of literally one-shot killing a PC via massive damage (even a hearty PC like a Champion).
I find this holds true in general across PF2, so Curtain Call has the "more recent APs are easier" change on top of "high level APs give the players a lot more tools" factor. If you're using Free Archetype it's even more true since FA's benefits grow as you gain more levels: it's giving more benefit at level 16 than it is at level 2.
Thanks for the response James.
It seems there are 3 Severe encounters but we skipped 1. Of those 2 we rolled them with our party of 5. We are playing in Foundry so it seems it's calculating the CR from our party of 5 so I will ask the GM to adjust.
From a design perspective, isn't it easier for a GM to just delete a monster than tinker with making an encounter harder by adding monsters? You can't take them away once they're on the map but "backup" can arrive.
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Thanks for the response James.
It seems there are 3 Severe encounters but we skipped 1. Of those 2 we rolled them with our party of 5. We are playing in Foundry so it seems it's calculating the CR from our party of 5 so I will ask the GM to adjust.
From a design perspective, isn't it easier for a GM to just delete a monster than tinker with making an encounter harder by adding monsters? You can't take them away once they're on the map but "backup" can arrive.
If you're playing in a 5-person party, then there should be adjustments made to the encounters to account for that as you say - the rules are here on the Archives of Nethys. For instance, in a Moderate encounter, going from a 4-player to a 5-player party means you should add 20 XP of extra enemies to maintain the same difficulty - maybe a level-2 creature. The guidelines also aren't perfect - if you add a 5th PC who is particularly good at amplifying the power of existing PCs (for example, a bard) that is a larger boost in power than if you add someone who doesn't benefit (or benefit from) the other character's actions as much.
An entire AP book being mostly moderates with a few Severe encounters is a little bit on the easy end for how I personally run the game at most of my tables, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea for a good amount of the published content to be like this for a few reasons:
- Straightforwardly, inexperienced players are going to make mistakes, and it's a lot better an experience for people coming in fresh to the game to mess up and make a moderate encounter into a severe one than it is to mess up and make severe encounter into an extreme one
- While the experience of walking all over the encounters in an AP is not normally the most fun, the single bad experience of a TPK can ruin an AP for many tables. It's generally easier to recognise that the game is feeling like it is lacking tension and then work to fix that than it is to fix the negative experience of a TPK, because one is slow and gradual and the other is very sudden.
- While the difficulty levels in PF2 are overall good estimates to the difficulty of the encounter, the way the GM runs the enemies can still pretty substantially change the experience of difficulty. Do all the enemies focus-fire on one PC at a time to ensure the party is losing action economy the same way the enemies are? Do the enemies kill dying creatures after they've seen healing? Do enemies with big scary one-target abilities go after the person they most want to see suffer, or do they go after the most tactically advantageous target? How tactical are the enemies - do they weaponise Delaying and Readying to ensure they're working together as best as possible? How much do any of these vary based off of the nature of the enemy - are demons bloodthristy, devils tactical, and wild animals straightforward? Or is everyone equally tactical all the time? Some of these don't even necessarily make the fight harder - e.g. targeting downed PCs might reduce the chance of other PCs dying - but they do add to the stakes one might be missing from an otherwise-simple Moderate encounter. The authors of the AP cannot know how a GM is running all of these, and so cannot make decisions based off of this - whereas I know that I tend to softball on targeting single PCs, only use the best tactics when I want to emphasize the narrative of their enemies being organised, and try not to kill any PCs if I can avoid it. This means I tend to bump the difficulty of the fights in APs up a little bit, because I know that I'm not adding as much tension through my GMing style (which I do not wish to change - I think it's not very fun to be dying/dead for half a session). When writing an AP, the authors don't know where people stand on this one, and are trying to avoid the singularly bad experience of something like a TPK. I can't imagine the reputation of PF2 APs still have as being brutal helps them want to push the difficulty too high either, to be honest.
That last point can be addressed to some degree by including tactics and the like in the AP itself - but the issue there is that GMs do miss them quite regularly. Maybe there's a better way of presenting them, but quite a few of the most infamous death-traps in early PF2 APs actually had some sort of tactics recommendation to avoid the worst possible outcomes, which were neglected by many GMs who missed/forgot that part of the text.
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It seems there are 3 Severe encounters but we skipped 1. Of those 2 we rolled them with our party of 5. We are playing in Foundry so it seems it's calculating the CR from our party of 5 so I will ask the GM to adjust.
As was mentioned: you need to adjust for 5 players anyway. If adjustments aren't already being made, then things will be considerably easier.
From a design perspective, isn't it easier for a GM to just delete a monster than tinker with making an encounter harder by adding monsters? You can't take them away once they're on the map but "backup" can arrive.
Not really, for two reasons:
1. Adjusting up can be done by adding minions (which scales up as much as you want and lets people with area effects do cool stuff), the elite template, and such. It's pretty easy to add more. Adjusting down is significantly harder because you may not have enemies to remove without drastically swinging the encounter, and you can't do it at all in a single enemy "boss" encounter: the weak template is all you've got without rewriting the encounter.2. The result of encounters being too easy is "players beat stuff easily, the GM realizes there's a problem, and can start buffing encounters." The default state is forgiving, so a newer GM who doesn't realize there is a problem is going to still have a playable game. An unoptimized party will have some issues but generally be okay.
If the default state is too hard, a new GM won't realize there is a problem until the players complain or a TPK happens. An unoptimized party will be at much higher risk of a TPK. People learning the game finding it super difficult tend to not like that (as shown by the reaction to early AP difficulty and how most video games want to ramp up difficulty over time).
This I disagree with. As an older gamer, as are two of the players in this AP, as well has another group I GM - TPKs happen.
You laugh it off and roll new characters. The most memorable gaming moments from the older players I've played with are the TPKs or PC deaths, followed by those epic wins while on single digit HP and no spells. Roflstomping encounters is not even on the list.
Somewhere along the way the TTRPG community lost that thirst for a challenge. The current crop would rather quit an AP when faced with a TPK then try again. Which speaks volumes...
Different playstyles for different tables. But fundamentally, the problem with TPKs in APs is that after doing a year of games and several books of a story, suddenly having every character invested in it die and now coming in with new ones that don't have any of that destroys all the story that had been built up over time. It's downright silly in a high level one: "sure we are these great heroes that did all this super hard stuff to get to the end, but now suddenly a new group of level 19 heroes just spring up out of nowhere to continue it." That's not epic: it's goofy.
There's formats of play that are more suited to that kind of game, like Westmarches or scenario play where the narratives are more self-contained and you're telling lots of smaller stories. Losing a character in PFS is much less of a problem than losing one in the back half of an AP is since the next game probably isn't connected to the last one and sending different agents makes sense anyway. (The main problem in this case is if you had another game at a con to play and just lost the only character high enough level to do it, since there's no pregens past level 5.)
These days, a system with heavy weight character creation like PF2 is itself not really well suited to the "disposable character" style of play, IMO. There's systems built around the idea that every combat is a mortal risk and you just aren't expected to play the same character for years. They tend to make it much faster to create new characters and "death is around every corner" is baked in right from the start (healing and recovery are also usually far less common, and resurrection magic won't be a thing).
These days, players that want that style of game just gravitate to systems that aim to deliver that experience.
My most memorable campaign as a player was Curse of the Crimson Throne, and it was because of the absolutely epic story we wove with a party that really had interesting internal dynamics, a great story from the AP, and a GM that absolutely ran with it and tied our backstories to it in amazing ways. Absolutely none of that would have been improved by a bunch of characters dying in book 5 and new ones who didn't get to experience any of that showed up. Part of what made it work so well was the band of misfits who got stuck with each other and became brothers (and sister) in arms even if two of them really struggled to understand each other for the entire campaign.
"And then they all died, and a new party showed up to complete the book" just doesn't compare. That's got nothing to do with players not wanting a challenge. It has to do with players wanting to finish telling the story they want to tell.
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As someone who has adjusted a few hundred statblocks for six players in the last year in preparation for running Abomination Vaults, Fists of the Ruby Phoenix and a Return of the Runelords 2E conversion (tragically now down to five players due to total existence failure of a good friend. But I did make five player versions as well while I was at it), I can definitely say that it is much easier to add one or two mooks than adjust statblocks up or down more than a level. Adjusting statblocks up/down one level is easy, because Archive of Nethys offers that function with one button click.
Adjusting down two, three or four levels means going through the tables in the GM Core and searching manually for the correct values. Which still can be done pretty quickly (four to five minutes per statblock, more or less), but it's a bit more work. I had to do that for solo monster encounters where I wanted to add a young creature of the same type quite a lot for Fists of the Ruby Phoenix. Sadly the PF2Dashboard does it wrong, since it just applies the weak template consecutively for each level, which produces wrong results, if one does look at tables in GM Core. Each level adds or removes about 1.5 on the current DC value of the opponent, rounded up, not 2.0.
But if you just want to add some other monsters, there are literally hundreds of them around in the Bestiaries and Monster Core, just look for one or two which are thematically appropiate. As a bonus, use ones which were a problem for your players a few levels back and they will feel that their characters have progressed.
Adding Elite templates on everything will just make players more frustrated, because they will begin not hitting as much as before. There's also the danger that the GM may make a single creature severe encounter into an extreme one and that is, uh, bad.
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Magnus you're not using Foundry right? I seem to remember you using another VTT. Foundry has something that helps *immensely* with making sure your critters are correctly built with the "See Simple Scale Statistics" module that calls out where in the Extreme, High, Moderate, Low, Terrible scale it falls for any given attribute.
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If you use FoundryVTT (and v12, since last i check this specific functionality is not v13 compatible yet) with the PF2e Workbench module, you can enable a setting to adjust an NPC's number for a different level automatically. Combine it with the module Cori mentions (See Simple Scale Statistics) to double check if the new number is in the same "column" as the value on the older level.
What my players look for in an adventure path is a theme, setting, and plot that lets them have fun in roleplaying. Some of my players like to roleplay social interaction, but others don't care for that. Some like problem solving. Nevertheless, combat is the common denominator for something challenging.
But I can adjust combat myself. I could bump a creature up a level, drop them down a level, remove one foe, or add more. The adventure path has labels such as MODERATE 5 to let me know the default at a glance. Because I typically run large parties, I consider whether to leave it easy and unchanged for story purposes or increase the challenge for the excitement.
A new GM might not have mastered adjusting combat difficulty. Thus, I like that the default is easy combat for new GMs with new players.
Theme and setting are harder to change. So those need to be good from the start, which makes that them most important part of an adventure path. I am getting better at adjusting theme. The theme of Strength of Thousands is that adventurers enrolled at the Magaambya Academy grow in status as they tackle the dangers around campus and on field expeditions. My players wanted to emphasize that they are students, so the reasons why they encounter adventures between their classes became more central to the campaign. I have had to generate over a dozen additional NPCs to balance the new theme. I usually leave the combat encounters unchanged, because the students are not supposed to have dangerous combat at a respectable school, but I add more field trips with teacher-anticipated dangers to make up the diluted XP; for example, River into Darkness Revisited.
Plot is often derailed. I have learned improvisation for that.
Magnus you're not using Foundry right? I seem to remember you using another VTT. Foundry has something that helps *immensely* with making sure your critters are correctly built with the "See Simple Scale Statistics" module that calls out where in the Extreme, High, Moderate, Low, Terrible scale it falls for any given attribute.
If you use FoundryVTT (and v12, since last i check this specific functionality is not v13 compatible yet) with the PF2e Workbench module, you can enable a setting to adjust an NPC's number for a different level automatically. Combine it with the module Cori mentions (See Simple Scale Statistics) to double check if the new number is in the same "column" as the value on the older level.
Nah, I use Roll20 and I got too much time and money in AP modules invested there to change to Foundry at this time (not to mention having to learn how to use Foundry, which made me bounce off the one time I tried to get into it a few years back and *then* having to convince my players to change and learn how to use it). It's no biggie, I enjoy adjusting stat blocks manually from time to time. But thanks to you both for pointing out the Foundry functionality.
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Kinda glad if optimization become more optional than mandatory.
for Easy vs Hard, a few things/variations to think about:
- Level of optimization and synergy or lack thereof.
- Number of PCs (already mentioned).
- Relation to the Random Numbers God.