"Hazards are pieces to use wisely to enhance the story you are telling, just like combat encounters" is my takeaway from this thread.
Indeed, if you wish to include them ask yourself what this particular instance is enhancing. And if you're not sure, then maybe don't include it.
I think it might also be worth adding:
Remember that the severity rating of hazards is about their raw numbers, not the impact they will have on the party. A simple hazard is about a quarter of the total challenge that an equal level creature is supposed to be.
You are conflating combat encounters and encounters.
You use encounter design to add all hazards to a dungeon.
I'm sorry, but this feels like an attempt to lean on semantic ambiguity behind the word "encounter" to try to hide the fact that you did in fact get it wrong the first time and did mean encounter mode. I never made any mention of hazard level as a relevant factor in this discussion, that is an insertion on your part that is tangential at best to the topic of simple hazards. Why would you even bring this up to begin with? Why is this relevant to the topic of solo simple hazards?
We obviously have different definitions of "functional". When you say the trap rules are not functional, I ask if the rules set lets me use it as is. It does.
Yes, and as per the rules, the trap achieves nothing:
Often, a simple hazard that merely damages its target is little more than a speed bump that slows down the game without much added value, so think about the purpose of your hazard carefully, both in the story and in the game world, especially when it’s a hazard that a creature intentionally built or placed in that location.
You can debate this as much as you want; the rules themselves explicitly point out that simple damage hazards are likely to achieve nothing on their own. If you want to pontificate on the definition of "functional" and twist it so that it ceases to have any useful function to this discussion, that's a discussion you can have by yourself, as I see no value in that kind of debate.
I'm not blaming you for anything. I'm pointing out that the pressure the clock puts on the player is a table by table variance and thus not something Paizo needs to address in the rules.
So for starters, this is a lie:
Right, so this is play group issue then rather than a rules issue. If my play group is feeling the pressure from that clock and yours isn't, that's not a 'Paizo needs simpler timekeeping and more lasting impairments' problem, that's a 'Teridax's group's GM needs to add some threat with more oomph to make them move forward' issue.
This is you rather explicitly trying to lay the blame at my feet for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on. Secondly, the point you are making has already been addressed, like so:
Moreover, the rules have plenty of variants and optional systems for GMs to play with and plug into their game, so that even an optional mechanic like time pressure could very well be implemented using actual rules. That there is no fleshed-out system for this at all is something that could be improved upon, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.
Just becomes something is optional does not mean it can't be supported with rules; there is no point in pretending otherwise when PF2e has plenty of optional variants and subsystems.
My example was the group feeling tension to decide between waiting an hour between 7pm and 8pm clock time to clear Wounded or going right now. It works on my own terms. If you change my example to claim my group can wait 11 hours and do 66 heals, no that doesn't work. But then again, that's not my terms.
Your own terms set the stage late in the evening during a day of dungeon crawling; because there are 24 hours in the day and six 10-minute periods per hour, it therefore stands to reason that an average adventuring party starting their crawl at a typical hour up until that time would have already had more than ample time to take as many breaks as they needed. If your party operates on their own night owl schedule where for whichever reason they only decided to start at 7 PM and have only one hour to complete the dungeon, you should have specified those extremely atypical conditions. As it stands, though, it is obvious that there is way more time in the adventuring day than is needed for plenty of breaks, all else held equal.
You're describing the "9am to 8pm rest" example again - an example that you simply made up.
On the contrary, it is an example you made up -- I merely stated that a typical adventuring party would be likely to start their adventuring day at 9 AM, leaving them plenty of time to rest and keep adventuring all the way through to 8 PM. It is you who are drawing the straw man where the party is doing nothing but rest for 11 hours. I fail to see how the speed bumps you mention would even begin to create tension or force difficult choices when the amount of time in a day makes it quite clear: the party absolutely doesn't have to go into battle wounded, they can just patch up. Perhaps your party just likes to hurry things along, but otherwise, the GM would need to come up with their own way of creating time pressure in order for the party to have a reason not to take all the time they want patching up in-between every speed bump you throw their way.
You are conflating combat encounters and encounters.
You use encounter design to add all hazards to a dungeon.
I'm sorry, but this feels like an attempt to lean on semantic ambiguity behind the word "encounter" to try to hide the fact that you did in fact get it wrong the first time and did mean encounter mode. I never made any mention of hazard level as a relevant factor in this discussion, that is an insertion on your part that is tangential at best to the topic of simple hazards. Why would you even bring this up to begin with? Why is this relevant to the topic of solo simple hazards?
Because your fundamental claim that combat encounters “run fine right out of the box” is predicated on those combat encounters being built effectively according to the rules. A single level -1 enemy, by itself, with no other way to effect the adventure or dungeon narratively or mechanically , is twice as meaningless plot point as level +4 simple hazard the party might set off.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Because your fundamental claim that combat encounters “run fine right out of the box” is predicated on those combat encounters being built effectively according to the rules. A single level -1 enemy, by itself, with no other way to effect the adventure or dungeon narratively or mechanically , is twice as meaningless plot point as level +4 simple hazard the party might set off.
In a shocking turn of events, throwing a single trivial enemy at the party generates a trivial-level encounter, as explicitly outlined in the rules for building encounters. Who would have guessed?
And before you start, I know what game you're trying to play: you're trying to claim that this is the same as running a solo simple hazard... except once more, you're conflating two different things here by pretending that simple hazards are the same as low-level monsters, when simple hazards can be of any level and are capable of being meaningful in and of themselves... so long as they don't just deal damage. It is this specific quirk, which GM Core itself highlights, that I think is worth addressing, because even throwing a very high-level simple damage hazard at the party doesn't really change this, and can end up turning into just another speed bump. Once more, simple damage hazards need some kind of special treatment to properly work as solo threats, irrespective of level.
Past RPG trap stuff...
One Paizo Dungeon Magazine scenario had a dungeon that was packed with traps, just a trapfest of trappiness. By the time the PCs open the final tomb (or whatnot), an elite squad of veteran gnolls has arrived, trapping the party inside. Did the PCs trigger or destroy all the traps? That'd be a shame because the gnolls are (supposed to be) the much stronger force. Much better if the party has bypassed them because the PCs kinda need those traps to defend their new bastion. (I believe the scenario explicitly says the party should feature a Rogue/trap-handler.)
Though I haven't seen it played, I like how PCs play the defenders-with-traps role. Where do you fight? Do you repair some traps?
Going back to AD&D, there's notoriety for killer traps because the terror of them sears into one's mind (or their callousness). To be fair though, the worst were in the treasure vaults or Lovecraftian zones where players should feel perpetually at risk. Or the Tomb of Horrors which had been built for tournament play, not Gygax's campaign. If the dungeon seemed static, you were at most risk. In places with dynamic monsters (even wandering and reactive ones), traps suited those monsters and their tactics.
Which is to say that the 1st ed/pseudo-AD&D starter modules B1 & B2 already applied much of this thread's thinking 40+ years ago. B1 has the party investigate a magical place of wonder with much trickery, like magic pools w/ different effects. B2, with its hordes of humanoids, has traps that serve a purpose for those that dwell there and reflect their tactics, including one that dumps treasure on pursuers to delay them as a boss escapes and a confounding effect in the minotaur's maze that makes one mistake which direction they've turned so you can't trust your map, others tied to guarding or protecting treasure (from their own people as much as looters).
Anyway, just reminiscing how narrative-based traps do have a history, even without lasting impairment.
I'm all for using traps as narrative tools, including solo damage traps, but one thing I'm very happy to leave in the realm of OSR is instant death/character loss traps. Tomb of Horrors is probably the most egregious example of this, and while the traps can be comical in how easily they can kill a party member or render them unplayable, it was also an exercise in antagonistic GMing that explicitly set out to brick people's characters. The fact that this was such an influential module meant that for generations after, that kind of GM-versus-player mentality became so prevalent that it still defines OSR, and still leads to RPG horror stories at tables that absolutely did not sign up for that sort of play. It's one of the reasons why I'd rather avoid using extremely high-level simple damage hazards, because killing a character even by accident due to only a couple of failed rolls I think is not the kind of thing PF2e is about as a general rule of thumb.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The trap needs to accomplish something. Someone, not the GM, put it there for it to do something. If it doesn't actually prevent people from going further then there's no point for people in world to use them.
That means most traps need to kill, contain or otherwise dissuade people from passing.
There's plenty of ways a solo monster can be a threat on it's own. Are people fine with the same not being true for traps?
For a bit of a side issue mentioned here. There is almost always some form of time crunch, unless you just ignore it.
First you character ages, why are you heading back to town when you stub your toe or wait around for 6-8 hours healing unless you think it's life or death. I do my best not to play my characters like they are Michael from Click.
Second how often are you just a short walk from the comforts of a well stocked town that can fix all your problems? As adventurers your likely off a ways into less charted places and if you spend days going back and forth to a place then someone else could take advantage of that.
You might choose to not play the game in a living breathing world, but I find that much less interesting.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm all for using traps as narrative tools, including solo damage traps, but one thing I'm very happy to leave in the realm of OSR is instant death/character loss traps. Tomb of Horrors is probably the most egregious example of this, and while the traps can be comical in how easily they can kill a party member or render them unplayable, it was also an exercise in antagonistic GMing that explicitly set out to brick people's characters. The fact that this was such an influential module meant that for generations after, that kind of GM-versus-player mentality became so prevalent that it still defines OSR, and still leads to RPG horror stories at tables that absolutely did not sign up for that sort of play. It's one of the reasons why I'd rather avoid using extremely high-level simple damage hazards, because killing a character even by accident due to only a couple of failed rolls I think is not the kind of thing PF2e is about as a general rule of thumb.
You have to remember that Tomb of Horrors was original when it first came out. It was well-designed and interesting as a challenge initially. Of course you would burn out if it became the standard. It wouldn't be so unique either. It was a unique and interesting experience back in the day with great treasure at the end.
Ravenloft also had some brutal traps. It was another memorable module from back in the day that was a player killer.
They were so fun and challenging when they first came out. You wanted to find a way to eventually beat them. It felt great when you did.
I'm all for using traps as narrative tools, including solo damage traps, but one thing I'm very happy to leave in the realm of OSR is instant death/character loss traps. Tomb of Horrors is probably the most egregious example of this, and while the traps can be comical in how easily they can kill a party member or render them unplayable, it was also an exercise in antagonistic GMing that explicitly set out to brick people's characters. The fact that this was such an influential module meant that for generations after, that kind of GM-versus-player mentality became so prevalent that it still defines OSR, and still leads to RPG horror stories at tables that absolutely did not sign up for that sort of play. It's one of the reasons why I'd rather avoid using extremely high-level simple damage hazards, because killing a character even by accident due to only a couple of failed rolls I think is not the kind of thing PF2e is about as a general rule of thumb.You have to remember that Tomb of Horrors was original when it first came out. It was well-designed and interesting as a challenge initially. Of course you would burn out if it became the standard. It wouldn't be so unique either. It was a unique and interesting experience back in the day with great treasure at the end.
Ravenloft also had some brutal traps. It was another memorable module from back in the day that was a player killer.
They were so fun and challenging when they first came out. You wanted to find a way to eventually beat them. It felt great when you did.
Good points. And different expectations. Lots of necessary caution back in the day, as important as teamwork is in PF2.
DnD was war or horror depending on if it was dynamic or static. Both with expected casualties. Static dungeons were deadly puzzles to unwind (and often hidden in the bowels of dynamic dungeons which were slugfests). If you review Gygax's PCs' spell lists they prepped lots of summoning, protection, and escape spells (i.e. using highest level slots for teleports, plural).
I'd say Ravenloft was far more influential and embraced, yet worse on one's soul. You might think you're the protagonists in a heroic fantasy, but you're the victim in a dynamic horror story. Even the tavern wasn't safe. That's where my "PC with the weapon that will save us" lost several levels from a drive-by attack from Strahd himself. (Yes, you could lose levels permanently back then, with single blows and no save.) And it's a richly developed setting with lots of NPC interaction, so you aren't playing a pregen-throwaway like you might in Tomb of Horrors. Maybe it had been built for twice as many PCs like many old modules were. Dunno, but one shouldn't trust any Hickman modules I've learned, yet such was the deadliness of their home game.
Earlier I'd almost mentioned a trap of theirs: the party's confronted with a conundrum to solve, either answer of which turns the first PC to gold, or two if side-by-side...at low level. And no, you don't win the gold. Only solution is to turn back, I guess by realizing your greed was leading you astray? Of course a sacrificed critter or Augury spell would've taught one to turn back too. Not sure how many weeks in-game the players were expected to take! (And yes, bringing foods and supplies like for an expedition was a thing.)
Laurel Hamilton, author of the Anita Blake series, had a beloved PC survive Tomb of Horrors because the PC was famously paranoid. Their braver allies perished. Has anybody made it through who hasn't read it? Not even sure any who have read it have made it, even being able to avoid the famous insta-killers.
One of the first dungeons I played involved our party getting PPKed repeatedly with us making waves of fresh meat, like a mini-war vs. a cluster of gnomes. Had a blast as their numbers dwindled. Played a funny escape scene too.
Anyway, boy did I stray. :-)
Cheers.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Because your fundamental claim that combat encounters “run fine right out of the box” is predicated on those combat encounters being built effectively according to the rules. A single level -1 enemy, by itself, with no other way to effect the adventure or dungeon narratively or mechanically , is twice as meaningless plot point as level +4 simple hazard the party might set off.In a shocking turn of events, throwing a single trivial enemy at the party generates a trivial-level encounter, as explicitly outlined in the rules for building encounters. Who would have guessed?
And before you start, I know what game you're trying to play: you're trying to claim that this is the same as running a solo simple hazard... except once more, you're conflating two different things here by pretending that simple hazards are the same as low-level monsters, when simple hazards can be of any level and are capable of being meaningful in and of themselves... so long as they don't just deal damage. It is this specific quirk, which GM Core itself highlights, that I think is worth addressing, because even throwing a very high-level simple damage hazard at the party doesn't really change this, and can end up turning into just another speed bump. Once more, simple damage hazards need some kind of special treatment to properly work as solo threats, irrespective of level.
I think a major difference in our philosophical approach to the role of a simple hazard is that I think combat encounters have every bit of potential to be meaningless time wasters too, that can have no lasting repercussions for having fought creatures than bypassing them, the exact same as hazards generally. In fact, a series of difficult simple traps that just do damage can be a much quicker way of the party getting a set amount of XP and have to spend an arbitrary amount of time healing afterwards. Boring combat encounters are just as meaningless as boring hazard encounters.
Now, I enjoy a level of difficulty where a character can flat out die from the occasional single bad roll, whether that comes from a combat encounter or a higher level hazard, and PCs always assuming solo hazards they encounter can just be eaten by a tank is a lot like a party assuming that they can just trust that any enemy they encounter is something they will be able to beat without spending any serious resources on. That is a style of play I don’t like and discourage at my tables by having both hazards and creatures that are capable of wiping a party that doesn’t take them seriously.
And yes, for me that includes a whole range of traps that do different things, and I am absolutely not arguing “only simple damage traps!” I am just saying simple damage traps have multiple valuable uses in adventure/encounter design, even the solo simple damage hazard that isn’t likely to instantly kill a character. Just like some trivial combat encounters can be a part of good dungeon/encounter design, but can also lead to boring game play sometimes.
The crux of my entire argument: Taking away the existence of damage only simple hazards would make for less interesting adventure and dungeon design.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think a major difference in our philosophical approach to the role of a simple hazard is that I think combat encounters have every bit of potential to be meaningless time wasters too, that can have no lasting repercussions for having fought creatures than bypassing them, the exact same as hazards generally.
So here's the thing: I agree fully. I have been agreeing with this so often that I wonder why this is still being questioned. Random monsters, just like random traps, will contribute no real narrative value, and so will be narratively meaningless. My proposal here is not some magic bullet that would inject even the most basic bear trap with rich narrative function; that's very much not the purpose. If you're going to be designing a dungeon, you're going to want your traps, as well as your monsters, to make sense within that dungeon and the narrative overall. If you're really good, you'll likely want to pair these two together so that the hazards mesh thematically and mechanically with the monsters too. Hazards need a good reason to be there.
... which is also why I'm criticizing hazards now. The problem right now is that many simple hazards would be narratively perfect as solo threats in a dungeon, whether it's the pressure-activated dart launcher in the temple of the artifact or the bear trap in the hunter's den, but because the party can just heal up damage without much of a cost, those traps can't actually serve their intended purpose. What would normally be flavorful, scene-setting hazards with clear parallels to famous fictional stories instead become mere speed bumps. In the worst cases, traps placed to create tension instead become comical, like the party just keeps stepping on rakes. In a game where time pressure had some mechanical presence, that'd perhaps be fine if the party genuinely didn't have time to heal after every failed hazard, but failing that, the impact of these traps ought to be done different out of combat relative to in-combat.
Which, finally, brings us to this:
The crux of my entire argument: Taking away the existence of damage only simple hazards would make for less interesting adventure and dungeon design.
This is telling, because it shows you're ultimately arguing out of fear. Rest assured, I'm not here to take away your simple damage traps; I quite like them myself in encounters. When you find the hunter in their den and fight them, just taking damage when you step on a bear trap is absolutely fine. This is why I'm proposing to add more hazards that impose lasting effects when used as solo threats (and, at this stage, perhaps even have some simple template for translating damage into a lasting consequence). You'd at worst not lose anything, and at best would benefit from a greater range of hazards that are more functional out of the box. Everybody wins.
For such a simple template to convert damage traps into something relevant on a longer timescale, my first thought goes to "Reduce the damage dealt significantly (by 75% or so), but make it reduce your max HP by the same amount until the next daily preparations".
That's definitely a valid approach, yes! I'd personally like many of these debuffs to take the form of conditions rather than always HP reduction (which would effectively be the drained condition), so that it's not always about replicating HP attrition, but drained would still very much be a valid condition here in that respect still.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Having traps that inflict drained would definitely be a way to achieve the general goal of attrition that isn't easily removable (like HP only is).
Additionally, you could also inflict:
Clumsy
Enfeebled
Fatigued
Sickened
Stupefied
With some sort of special ruling in place that these conditions can only be recovered from like Drained (with a night's rest) or magic or other ability.*
*Rereading condition rules, they don't always tick down once per turn though that is common. The when and how of conditions decreasing is generally noted in the thing that causes it.
So you could absolutely just start including traps that inflict a myriad of conditions, though I would be careful about letting them scale beyond -2 to -3 tops.
I'm not personally a huge fan, because this would just see my players leave the dungeon and come back the next day with some sort of trick to bypass the traps. Like having a bag of weasels and some cheap items inside of it (getting the bag would be hard, but once you have it....).
Of course, this can be avoided by adding time pressure. Though if you add time pressure, you can also set the limit so that HP damage alone is enough when they can't stop to fully heal after every trap.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
So to clarify your position, the argument of this thread is that dungeon designers should avoid having arbitrary simple hazards that only do damage that are not interestingly or effectively connected into the narrative of the adventure or dungeon, (which so far is the guidance provided by the game), and instead of those random simple damage hazards, the game would be better with random condition inflicting simple hazards…if you are going to include random simple hazards that are not meaningfully connected to the narrative of the adventure or the flow of encounter design. I think additionally you are asking for the publishing of more impairment-based simple hazards that are easy to throw into different environments to accomplish that goal.
I think there could have been much less confrontational ways of essentially just asking for more of a specific kind of simple hazard But maybe the confrontational rhetoric helped you dial in this position? I would still strongly argue that the more important skill to develop and way to spend your time as a GM is to focus more on the integration of hazards narratively into your dungeon/adventure design, so that the hazards tell important stories about the environment and ecology of the dungeon. This probably includes being aware of whether your players are ever seeking out this information or not, and whether these features are fun to keep including or not, in the same way some GMs add addition story xp to dungeons and cut a lot of low and trivial combat encounters from their adventures because their tables don’t enjoy that.
I especially feel like it is probably better for most GMs to cut independent simple hazards rather than replace them with lasting impairment hazards if they feel like the end result of these hazards are just slowing the game down, because most players who will stop and take the time to heal up to full HP out of fear that the next encounter will be too difficult any other way are not going to be happy going into that encounter with penalties that absolutely make the next encounter more difficult than just being down a quantity of HP, and consumables that remove those conditions are often only slightly more expensive than consumables that heal a sufficient enough amount of HP to continue effectively and thus this is really just a test of how well the party prepared in advance to face the challenges ahead. I think there might be a misplaced assumption that the game doesn’t expect PCs to be prepared to counter counter conditions like it does expect them to be able to heal either quickly or slowly based upon time considerations, and it is true that it takes a little bit of leveling to figure out the condition removal, whereas the HP healing is something parties have to figure out more quickly, but over use of throwing conditions on your party is only going to make that kind of preparation more mandatory and the end result is much more likely to be one trap catching the party off guard and the rest ending up just being “spend resource, move on” again, rather than a big paradigm shift in how players feel about hazards.
Regardless, I think Paizo will get to the more impairment hazards, eventually and slowly, but I bet there are a lot of community based resources already out there (3rd party or just independent folks putting their ideas on the internet) that offer examples to work with.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Having traps that inflict drained would definitely be a way to achieve the general goal of attrition that isn't easily removable (like HP only is).
Additionally, you could also inflict:
Clumsy
Enfeebled
Fatigued
Sickened
StupefiedWith some sort of special ruling in place that these conditions can only be recovered from like Drained (with a night's rest) or magic or other ability.*
*Rereading condition rules, they don't always tick down once per turn though that is common. The when and how of conditions decreasing is generally noted in the thing that causes it.
So you could absolutely just start including traps that inflict a myriad of conditions, though I would be careful about letting them scale beyond -2 to -3 tops.
I'm not personally a huge fan, because this would just see my players leave the dungeon and come back the next day with some sort of trick to bypass the traps. Like having a bag of weasels and some cheap items inside of it (getting the bag would be hard, but once you have it....).
Of course, this can be avoided by adding time pressure. Though if you add time pressure, you can also set the limit so that HP damage alone is enough when they can't stop to fully heal after every trap.
Just pointing that we already have such simple traps they aren't many (because AoN doesn't include traps from adventures) but they already exists.
This list becomes way more extensive if we don't restrict only to traps.
If we add Snares to the list we also have some more options.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So to clarify your position, the argument of this thread is that dungeon designers should avoid having arbitrary simple hazards that only do damage that are not interestingly or effectively connected into the narrative of the adventure or dungeon, (which so far is the guidance provided by the game), and instead of those random simple damage hazards, the game would be better with random condition inflicting simple hazards…if you are going to include random simple hazards that are not meaningfully connected to the narrative of the adventure or the flow of encounter design. I think additionally you are asking for the publishing of more impairment-based simple hazards that are easy to throw into different environments to accomplish that goal.
So, for starters, this is not my position, and I fail to see how such an overlong run-on sentence would have successfully achieved any purpose of clarification to begin with. My position is that the baseline design philosophy for simple hazards in PF2e should have made longer-lasting conditions the default, with simple damage hazards existing specifically as an enhancement to encounters. I certainly endorse the notion that traps, like monsters, should be used meaningfully, and I believe my stance is in service to this by proposing to reduce the instances where a GM might pull a trap they find appropriate for a dungeon, add it, and end achieving nothing due to the trap only dealing damage and the party healing through that damage.
I think there could have been much less confrontational ways of essentially just asking for more of a specific kind of simple hazard But maybe the confrontational rhetoric helped you dial in this position? I would still strongly argue that the more important skill to develop and way to spend your time as a GM is to focus more on the integration of hazards narratively into your dungeon/adventure design, so that the hazards tell important stories about the environment and ecology of the dungeon.
I am interested in finding out more about why you believe my OP to be confrontational. Who was it confronting? And, for that matter, why are you assuming I lack the skill as a GM to integrate hazards narratively here? Why even insert this lecture and frame it in opposition to feedback? Surely that kind of behavior is far more confrontational than simply stating an opinion on a game design element?
Dropping in anything w/o narrative purpose is simply hack writing. Mind you, there's a market for that or it wouldn't be so prevalent, but yeah, I'd expect Paizo (maybe 3PP PF2 products in general) to rise above that. There's a literal Hackmaster game out there for such tomfoolery.
And if improvising I'd say it could be forgiven. One of the classic mystery writers (Chandler?) advised if you get writer's block just have two goons burst in. I believe that the author would then work out the reason afterward. Could do the same here. Heck, Tolkien did not know Strider would be Aragorn when introduced (I believe even conceived him as a hobbit at first). But their finished products did loop it all into the narrative, a seasoned creator can't stop with just tossing in danger & mystery, whether a trap, two goons, or an NPC (GM-PC?).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This was an actually played event I'm describing. The wounding happened around 7pm clock time. We had to make a decision then, and that decision had consequences and felt meaningful. Damage created a meaningful plot decision. I am really not seeing a cogent argument out of the claim that the party's ability to start adventuring at 9am clock time somehow makes the 7pm decision not tense, not interesting, or not relevant to the plot. It's not like we could use any of that past time to clear the recent wounded condition.
And what I am describing is based on my own play experience, where the party rarely if ever found themselves needing to go that far into the evening, because they had more than ample opportunity to go through the dungeon, run the encounters, and solve the puzzles long before then. It's not just that what you're describing could easily be made up, it's continually lacking in crucial context: why was it so important that it was 7 PM for this party? Why was it so vital to not have time tick over to 8 PM? Because it you'd implemented some real time pressure that created that meaningful choice, great, but that's not something intrinsic to the game, and if you hadn't, the way your party behaved does not stem from factors that can be easily reproduced. It's just a very flimsy example, is the point.
Heck, given that wounded is a condition and you're arguing for more condition traps, and I described how this condition ratcheted up the tension and made our decision meaningful, isn't this the sort of thing you want more of?
You mean, the condition that can be erased with Treat Wounds, just like HP, the think I explicitly outlined as the thing this games makes very easy to erase? No, I don't think so.
IF the GM doesn't think about how to use them. "Think about their purpose" is also an explicit part of the rules.
The GM's ability to think does not preclude those simple hazards from being no more than speed bumps as solo threats. The guideline for how to use them is not itself a hard-set rule, and merely serves to underline that the design of simple damage traps does not lend itself to them being easy to use as a GM. Moreover, that GM Core highlights the problem with a guideline does not mean the problem does not exist; these hazards would be easier to use if they were not speed bumps by inherent design.
Look if you want to add more condition traps, that's your prerogative. Please post some of your ideas, I'm sure the community would love to have more 3rd party hazard content. But discussing what GMC says, IMO it is saying they can be speed bumps if the GM doesn't think about their purpose. The obvious advice being: 'GMs, think about their purpose when you add them in.' Is your hope with persistent condition traps to give junior GMs a tool that requires less thinking? I.e. something that junior GM can just grab and drop in, and be assured that Paizo has baked in the next-scene-relevance for them?
Yes, actually. Not to the extent that the GM should pretend to be some random dungeon generator and throw traps and monsters without any regards for pacing or narrative, but certainly to the extent that a GM should not need to have a high level of system mastery nor extensive knowledge of the full list of hazards to be able to competently craft a map that includes simple hazards and puts those hazards to effective use. I will remind you that ease of use is one of PF2e's design goals: the system is specifically designed to be easy for GMs to pick up and run out of the box without having to make adjustments or tiptoe around a bunch of pitfalls. Currently, simple damage traps being easily trivialized with out-of-combat healing is one of those pitfalls, one that would be eased if more condition-based simple hazards were around and presented as the default for out-of-combat use.
Dropping in anything w/o narrative purpose is simply hack writing. Mind you, there's a market for that or it wouldn't be so prevalent, but yeah, I'd expect Paizo (maybe 3PP PF2 products in general) to rise above that. There's a literal Hackmaster game out there for such tomfoolery.
I'm not a super-big fan of this binary thinking where GMs are either supremely competent beings who have the entire system's rules, elements, and design philosophy etched unerringly into their brain, or talentless hacks. It is entirely possible to have less experienced GMs who have seen traps used to great effect in other games or just fiction, attempt to include those traps in a way that makes narrative sense for their dungeon, and end up not achieving their intended goal due to how PF2e effectively does away with HP attrition (and this fact is not made all that obvious to newer GMs either). Really, there's been a fair amount of pointlessly judgmental comments, black-and-white thinking, and imaginary GM-bashing in this thread, and very little empathy towards players who really are trying to create an interesting narrative and who struggle to implement it in a way that works smoothly with 2e's mechanics.
I will also say that there's a lot of bluster around narrative, when narrative was never questioned in the OP; that is an invention by certain people here who have tried to mischaracterize GMs using these traps as somehow not using them to proper narrative effect. It is also a completely false notion: again, one can easily bring up the classic Indiana Jones example of the temple with pit traps and dart launchers, the hunter's den full of bear traps and other simple, damaging hunting hazards, or the wacky Home Alone scenario where a house is similarly turned into a bunch of traps, most of them simple, damaging hazards. All of these are examples of narratives where the exploration phase is littered with simple, damaging traps, all of which are coherent with the fiction, and all of these examples simply don't work mechanically in-game, because all of these simple hazards can have their effects erased in 10 minutes. I'm actually quite surprised to see nobody even try to imagine the kind of scenario that could be emulated with simple damaging hazards and that this game would struggle to implement successfully, as I don't think it takes a great stretch of the imagination at all.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A trap heavy dungeon is very viable in PF2. The campaign I am converting is heavy with them. Here are some useful tricks to it that actually come from the fiction centered on them:
1. Fiction is lousy with artificial time constraints and the desire to keep the story moving along quickly. Problematically from a fiction perspective, this generally means that the hero’s will pretty much auto succeed everything or only fail traps in a way that move the story forward, not the life or death traps. It is almost always complex traps that have room for not just being auto successes or death. This allows the chasing villains (almost always present) to be much more present a threat for the protagonists than you can generally pull off in a TTRPG unless the dungeon is more about fighting waves of incoming enemies than solving puzzles and traps.
Even in home alone, the invading robbers face time and attention constraints, and thus defeating them can just mean slowing them down and getting neighbors to notice. Thus the impending “chasing villains” don’t even have to be combat encounters but infiltration, social, or chase/environmental encounters.
This is a better way to design a hazard dungeon than impairment traps, because significant impairment makes all the future encounters more difficult and players know better than to try to face more difficult boss encounters with impairments that will make difficult encounters impossible. This generally means the “resource attrition” model of hazard dungeons has always been about the resources of time, daily resources (really a time constraint), and wealth (also fundamentally a time constraint in PF2 but not played that way often in practice).
With endless time, the most difficult environments can be carefully and meticulously deconstructed, and that is how these kinds of things happen in the real world. Coming up with varied and deep ways of having flexible time constraints is hard, and something that PF2 adventure writers do a lot of, but err towards too much time/secretly unlimited, because different party compositions are going to tackle them differently.
2. Traps in fiction primarily deal death. The heroes are protected by plot armor, not by their understanding of the threat and ability to plan a path through and execute that plan. The best way to handle this in an adventure designed to be a hazard-based adventure is to have characters that can die easily without players getting upset, or to have NPCs that have to be brought through the dungeon that can spread around the consequences for failure without creating success or game over endings. Or to have hazards destroy or complicate the rewards you would have otherwise earned.
Basically, if your adventure can’t have multiple tiers of success possible, because it is more pass/fail, then you have to deal with mitigating the reality that failure isn’t really an option without ending the adventure. I don’t think impairment traps are inherently better for this than damage traps because mechanically both really end up in the same place: the players don’t want to proceed until the complication they present are mitigated, and malaise generally make the whole rest of an adventure even more difficult than proceeding with less HP.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A trap heavy dungeon is very viable in PF2. The campaign I am converting is heavy with them. Here are some useful tricks to it that actually come from the fiction centered on them:
The ensuing wall of text is a lot of words to say that simple damage hazards are not fit for purpose, and that you had to bend over backwards and even avoid using hazards at all in order to deliver a narrative that would otherwise be well-served by simple traps and hazards. This in itself highlights that there is an issue, even if you are spending a lot of effort trying to cover it up.
Basically, if your adventure can’t have multiple tiers of success possible, because it is more pass/fail, then you have to deal with mitigating the reality that failure isn’t really an option without ending the adventure. I don’t think impairment traps are inherently better for this than damage traps because mechanically both really end up in the same place: the players don’t want to proceed until the complication they present are mitigated, and malaise generally make the whole rest of an adventure even more difficult than proceeding with less HP.
As has already been pointed out several times, taking 10 minutes to patch up very different from heading back to camp and calling it a day: the former is a fairly short activity that, even under time constraints, you can still do. The latter, by contrast, is likely to incur consequences even at tables that don't implement super-tight time constraints during dungeon crawls, especially if the party retreats every time they trigger a single hazard. Healing after five traps versus calling it a day after five traps is the difference between completing that part of the dungeon in an hour versus nearly a week. To even pretend that the two are equivalent, and that any given party would just retreat at the slightest inflicted condition, is to argue purely on the expectation that we are all so detached from any notion of in-game time or practicality on these forums that we would believe in this kind of false equivalence.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
A smart party doesn’t have to retreat after getting stuck with a condition any more than they have to spend 10 minutes to heal back missing HP if time constraints would otherwise allow. In both cases the prepared party is prepared to go on without any significant set back, and the underprepared party is at greater risk of facing a TPK from an upcoming difficult encounter.
“Teaching” inexperienced GMs to throw impaired parties at difficult encounters by suggesting those random simple hazards need to have lasting mechanical consequences to be meaningful, is only making things more difficult for less experienced and prepared players.
Btw Hackmaster isn't synonymous with 'hack writing' or overly random dungeon contents at all. It's a perfectly legitimate system with plenty of serious and well thought-out content.
Yes, that's an unfortunate overlap of hack's different definitions (which maybe was on me for not distinguishing after I put them adjacent). The game refers to hack n' slash, not hack quality.
To clarify further, I never proposed a binary (hack vs. excellence) and even gave examples of genre-defining authors whose works have endured decades who sometimes winged it, "hacked" before revising. They'd toss in random elements or speedbumps that they later wove into the larger tapestry.
As for why people keep bringing up narrative it's because it gives a simple damage trap purpose beyond its damage and because other traps (and monsters and most everything a GM introduces) need a purpose too or are just as shallow (or annoying, irrelevant, etc.) as the simple damage trap. Having a lingering mechanical effect alters the ongoing math problem, it doesn't improve a trap on its own. Toss some corpses in a trap, maybe with writing in blood as they bled out or starved, that adds more than any -1.
Speaking of -1, that probably should be extent of it if you want your players to continue. And you can toss in a lot of them if they're the same type, usually Status. "Sure I was fatigued, light-headed, my arms quivered, fear gripped me, and my guts quivered with bile, but I persevered damn it!" (All a broader effect more than a severe one.)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A smart party doesn’t have to retreat after getting stuck with a condition any more than they have to spend 10 minutes to heal back missing HP if time constraints would otherwise allow. In both cases the prepared party is prepared to go on without any significant set back, and the underprepared party is at greater risk of facing a TPK from an upcoming difficult encounter.
“Teaching” inexperienced GMs to throw impaired parties at difficult encounters by suggesting those random simple hazards need to have lasting mechanical consequences to be meaningful, is only making things more difficult for less experienced and prepared players.
IMO, this is kind of the heart of the discussion.
It's the party's power level vs the encounter. But the party's current power level is dependent on things like their HP and even conditions (both positive and negative).
So while forcing a party into combat with less than full HP or with negative conditions may be more "realistic" it still has to be factored into the actual combat that happens.
I can't disagree that traps are a genre staple, and that in order for those traps to be meaningful you can't let the party completely recover from them before a combat happens. But the challenge of that combat needs to account for impaired PCs. And honestly, that's why Paizo I think doesn't do it often, because there's too many variables as opposed to assuming the party is at full health and without ailments.
So while forcing a party into combat with less than full HP or with negative conditions may be more "realistic" it still has to be factored into the actual combat that happens.
Exactly. As I mentioned: in PF2, attrition isn't a thing.
If you want to houserule attrition back in to the game, you can do that. But be aware that if you send the party into the boss fight after they slog their way through the boss's trapped lair and the party has custom conditions lowering their max HP down to about half and for the rest of the day are clumsy 2 and have a -10 penalty to their speeds, then that level+2 boss that they could handle under the standard rules is going to be much, much harder for them to deal with.
If you are going to houserule in attrition, then you also need to houserule in some combat difficulty adjustments too.
So while forcing a party into combat with less than full HP or with negative conditions may be more "realistic" it still has to be factored into the actual combat that happens.Exactly. As I mentioned: in PF2, attrition isn't a thing.
If you want to houserule attrition back in to the game, you can do that. But be aware that if you send the party into the boss fight after they slog their way through the boss's trapped lair and the party has custom conditions lowering their max HP down to about half and for the rest of the day are clumsy 2 and have a -10 penalty to their speeds, then that level+2 boss that they could handle under the standard rules is going to be much, much harder for them to deal with.
If you are going to houserule in attrition, then you also need to houserule in some combat difficulty adjustments too.
Yep. When I (and others) mentioned that he called it a myth, but Paizo products reflect it's true. This falls in the territory as chained encounters with its long forum threads. Sure, you can (and IMO should for dynamism) use them, but you have to factor that into one's difficulty calculations. Same w/ attrition.
And it is doable in a published adventure. I remember one where you can challenge the boss to single combat. If you do, he's weaker (because he didn't need his minions in order to be a threat to the whole party). That option took work/page count, but made for a cool, thematic option. Not sure a simple method though; the thread on chaining fights reached iffy solutions.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A smart party doesn’t have to retreat after getting stuck with a condition any more than they have to spend 10 minutes to heal back missing HP if time constraints would otherwise allow. In both cases the prepared party is prepared to go on without any significant set back, and the underprepared party is at greater risk of facing a TPK from an upcoming difficult encounter.
Interesting, does this mean your party goes back to camp every time they stub their toe? Does your party truly retreat and avoid engaging in any further encounters the moment a party member receives a lasting condition from a monster? Because to me that sounds very much like an outlier rather than the norm. As much as many tables in my experience are fine with the party taking 10 minutes to heal, literally none have taken days, weeks, or months clearing out individual dungeon floors by calling it a day in-between every challenge, and instead they've powered on through conditions unless those were serious enough to need immediate prioritizing. Those who did try to win by attrition in this way were shut down almost immediately by other GMs and myself, who enacted consequences for dawdling across several days even when there were normally no major time constraints otherwise. If you think this war-of-attrition strategy suits your "smart party", by all means go ahead, but please don't pretend this is the standard, and don't pretend you attach any importance to good narrative or pacing when you claim this.
“Teaching” inexperienced GMs to throw impaired parties at difficult encounters by suggesting those random simple hazards need to have lasting mechanical consequences to be meaningful, is only making things more difficult for less experienced and prepared players.
Interesting assumptions you're making. Who said the encounters had to be difficult? Why couldn't they just be moderate, with conditions from hazards making them more difficult? Does the notion of variable difficulty upset you somehow or strike you as extraneous to PF2e? Because I can tell you, it very much isn't.
To clarify further, I never proposed a binary (hack vs. excellence) and even gave examples of genre-defining authors whose works have endured decades who sometimes winged it, "hacked" before revising. They'd toss in random elements or speedbumps that they later wove into the larger tapestry.
"Anyone who pulled a trap from a list instead of hand-crafting the entire dungeon with meticulous narrative precision is a hack" strikes me as pretty binary thinking. I would also not try to be clever by playing on semantic ambiguity here, it only injects confusion into discussion.
As for why people keep bringing up narrative it's because it gives a simple damage trap purpose beyond its damage and because other traps (and monsters and most everything a GM introduces) need a purpose too or are just as shallow (or annoying, irrelevant, etc.) as the simple damage trap. Having a lingering mechanical effect alters the ongoing math problem, it doesn't improve a trap on its own. Toss some corpses in a trap, maybe with writing in blood as they bled out or starved, that adds more than any -1.
Emphasis added in bold. It once again bears repeating that I never claimed that my changes aimed to improve the narrative function of random traps. That is very much not the problem my proposal tries to solve, and attacking the very concept because it doesn't address something that is entirely tangential to the actual topic at hand, i.e. the gameplay impact of solo simple damage hazards, strikes me as a rather bad-faith way of engaging with a conversation, particularly after it's been brought to your attention time and again that the concern you are raising is extraneous to the subject matter.
I can't disagree that traps are a genre staple, and that in order for those traps to be meaningful you can't let the party completely recover from them before a combat happens. But the challenge of that combat needs to account for impaired PCs. And honestly, that's why Paizo I think doesn't do it often, because there's too many variables as opposed to assuming the party is at full health and without ailments.
I don't think this is at all true. Again, the notion that the party needs to be at full HP to win encounters is a myth, one Paizo staff themselves have discredited, and many monsters themselves apply persistent conditions or ailments that may set the party back across multiple encounters, even for days or weeks to come. Paizo absolutely plays with this already, so what I'm suggesting isn't some brand-new concept within the game either.
Exactly. As I mentioned: in PF2, attrition isn't a thing.
Hi, the following says hello:
So really, the fact that not just you, but several people are pretending that the very notion of attrition doesn't exist in PF2e suggests a few more people need to actually play a spot of PF2e to refresh their memory. The fact that you would never have encountered any such effects in your entire playtime surprises me greatly.
A smart party doesn’t have to retreat after getting stuck with a condition any more than they have to spend 10 minutes to heal back missing HP if time constraints would otherwise allow. In both cases the prepared party is prepared to go on without any significant set back, and the underprepared party is at greater risk of facing a TPK from an upcoming difficult encounter.Interesting, does this mean your party goes back to camp every time they stub their toe? Does your party truly retreat and avoid engaging in any further encounters the moment a party member receives a lasting condition from a monster? Because to me that sounds very much like an outlier rather than the norm. As much as many tables in my experience are fine with the party taking 10 minutes to heal, literally none have taken days, weeks, or months clearing out individual dungeon floors by calling it a day in-between every challenge, and instead they've powered on through conditions unless those were serious enough to need immediate prioritizing. Those who did try to win by attrition in this way were shut down almost immediately by other GMs and myself, who enacted consequences for dawdling across several days even when there were normally no major time constraints otherwise. If you think this war-of-attrition strategy suits your "smart party", by all means go ahead, but please don't pretend this is the standard, and don't pretend you attach any importance to good narrative or pacing when you claim this.
A smart party doesn’t have to retreat after getting stuck with a condition any more than they have to spend 10 minutes to heal back missing HP if time constraints would otherwise allow. In both cases the prepared party is prepared to go on without any significant set back, and the underprepared party is at greater risk of facing a TPK from an upcoming difficult encounter.
To make condition setting traps that can't easily just be countered by consumables parties are very capable of having on hand before entering a dungeon, the level of the trap would have to be significantly higher level than the party because counteracting works on a success against effects a rank higher than the counteracting ability. A rank 2 dispel magic is going to work against level 5 and 6 traps, meaning that it takes a level +3 or +4 trap to be all that difficult to counter with the right spell/consumable. And if the traps are giving special custom conditions that don't have counters, I think you will find players getting pretty upset that you are essentially making up a way to shut down their ability to play the game as it is expected to be played.
Now not every table will play to have condition countering ready to go, especially not at first, but if the GM is adding random condition giving traps to the adventure, then it will become as obvious to prepare for such situations as it is to be prepared to have both immediate healing options and slower exploration activity healing options available to PCs now.
I feel like your suggestion is very likely to just turn into "this might work once or twice and then players will just change their style of play to accommodate it."
A smart party doesn’t have to retreat after getting stuck with a condition any more than they have to spend 10 minutes to heal back missing HP if time constraints would otherwise allow. In both cases the prepared party is prepared to go on without any significant set back, and the underprepared party is at greater risk of facing a TPK from an upcoming difficult encounter.To make condition setting traps that can't easily just be countered by consumables parties are very capable of having on hand before entering a dungeon, the level of the trap would have to be significantly higher level than the party because counteracting works on a success against effects a rank higher than the counteracting ability.
You forget that counteracting is also depending on the rank of the spell or the level of the item doing the counteracting. If you want to bring very expensive consumables or use lots of high-rank spell slots to counteract these conditions, which would only require a trap at party level or PL+1 to no longer be counteracted on a failure, then be my guest. This has, by the way, already been mentioned in this discussion. I wouldn't really call this being prepared, either: having some condition removal is a good idea as it already stands, but directing the majority of your high-ranking slots and consumables towards counteracting hazards that may leave you, say, enfeebled 1 or drained 1 strikes me as somewhat of an overreaction.
I feel like your suggestion is very likely to just turn into "this might work once or twice and then players will just change their style of play to accommodate it."
From the instances where I've included hazards that do apply persistent conditions, you're absolutely right... except the change in playstyle was beneficial. Instead of not really caring about what they were doing during exploration because most traps didn't matter, party members started having a member Search. When a trap was found, the instinct was no longer to just trigger it, heal, and move on when there were no enemies around, but to try to disable it. Players were engaging with these hazards much more, and so in a way that gave those hazards weight and integrated them far better into gameplay. Perhaps change in the way your players play is something you fear, but I'd say it definitely enhanced the experience at my table.
I can't disagree that traps are a genre staple, and that in order for those traps to be meaningful you can't let the party completely recover from them before a combat happens. But the challenge of that combat needs to account for impaired PCs. And honestly, that's why Paizo I think doesn't do it often, because there's too many variables as opposed to assuming the party is at full health and without ailments.
I don't think this is at all true. Again, the notion that the party needs to be at full HP to win encounters is a myth, one Paizo staff themselves have discredited, and many monsters themselves apply persistent conditions or ailments that may set the party back across multiple encounters, even for days or weeks to come. Paizo absolutely plays with this already, so what I'm suggesting isn't some brand-new concept within the game either.
They don't need to be at full HP to win a fight, but you DO have to account for "attrition" when designing encounters. If the party is still at 85% HP and no long term conditions/ailments there's probably no real adjustments that need to be made, but the further the party slides down the HP scale or has penalties the more adjustments you need to make to have a consistent challenge.
If the party has low enough HP or enough penalties, what might have otherwise been a moderate encounter, could end up being a severe or extreme encounter in terms of how it plays out.
And of course Paizo plays with it a bit, but I'm also expecting that in those encounters they're already accounting for "well we expect the party to be a 60% health, the have unfavorable terrain, and they're all drained 1" so while we want this to be a boss fight (severe encounter) we're going to build it like this..."
It's absolutely something you can and should do IMO. But it's also not going to explicitly stated like that in written adventures.
To be honest, I don't see how you can disagree with what I'm saying in the slightest. Because all I'm saying is when designing encounters (and adjusting on the fly) you have to account for the party's current conditions (and you'll write an AP or scenario for their expected condition).
I'm not saying you shouldn't or can't use long term debuffs or attrition, I'm saying if you don't account for that when planning an encounter (or adjusting because things never go exactly to plan) then you're not a good GM.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The groups I tend to play with value consumables more than yours, I think that is just table variance. I actually find new players value them too unless they never find any that are useful to situations the party finds themselves in, because proactively trying to buy them is a daunting task now with how many there are.
I feel like your suggestion is very likely to just turn into "this might work once or twice and then players will just change their style of play to accommodate it."From the instances where I've included hazards that do apply persistent conditions, you're absolutely right... except the change in playstyle was beneficial. Instead of not really caring about what they were doing during exploration because most traps didn't matter, party members started having a member Search. When a trap was found, the instinct was no longer to just trigger it, heal, and move on when there were no enemies around, but to try to disable it. Players were engaging with these hazards much more, and so in a way that gave those hazards weight and integrated them far better into gameplay. Perhaps change in the way your players play is something you fear, but I'd say it definitely enhanced the experience at my table.
Here is where you have absolutely lost me though. Your party explores dungeons without anyone searching? Searching finds secret doors, and treasures in a room. If there is no artificial time constraints, I have never seen a party not want to search every room as closely and effectively as they are able. The idea I need to incentivize that would never cross my mind. I guess your parties (ppreviously) never found any secret doors or treasure and thus didn't know that they were walking right by important things in the dungeon? I guess that also helps explain why they feel that they are barely getting enough treasure to buy consumables.
“Teaching” inexperienced GMs to throw impaired parties at difficult encounters by suggesting those random simple hazards need to have lasting mechanical consequences to be meaningful, is only making things more difficult for less experienced and prepared players.
Interesting assumptions you're making. Who said the encounters had to be difficult? Why couldn't they just be moderate, with conditions from hazards making them more difficult? Does the notion of variable difficulty upset you somehow or strike you as extraneous to PF2e? Because I can tell you, it very much isn't.
Conditions rarely last "Until your next encounter." Most dungeons have a boss somewhere in them. A party might decide to blow a bunch of daily resources after getting a serious affliction that can't be immediately cured to recon a dungeon, but they are not going to press ahead into rooms they think might be "the big fight" when they have a seriously debilitating condition.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
They don't need to be at full HP to win a fight, but you DO have to account for "attrition" when designing encounters. If the party is still at 85% HP and no long term conditions/ailments there's probably no real adjustments that need to be made, but the further the party slides down the HP scale or has penalties the more adjustments you need to make to have a consistent challenge.
I mean yes, this is obvious, but I'm still not really sure what this has to do with the discussion, given that a party really low on HP is going to be pressured to heal. If a party is at full HP but also clumsy 4, enfeebled 4, stupefied 4, and so on then I agree, that would be a serious detriment that would need to be factored in (and also avoided), but I don't think anyone's proposing to make the conditions on hazards debilitating to that extent. A hazard leaving you enfeebled 1 or giving you a low weakness for your level to a damage type that an upcoming encounter will be able to apply isn't exactly something worth going to camp and wait out by itself, at least not in my opinion or experience, and that level of "this upcoming encounter might become a touch more complicated" is really as far as I'd like to go by default. You could obviously play with this and implement some really nasty synergies between those kinds of hazards and upcoming encounters, but that's at your own discretion.
I'm not saying you shouldn't or can't use long term debuffs or attrition, I'm saying if you don't account for that when planning an encounter (or adjusting because things never go exactly to plan) then you're not a good GM.
Right, but then who is opposing this statement of yours? Because I'm certainly not, I completely agree with you. I just don't see the point of attacking the competence of hypothetical GMs here when the very premise of what I'm proposing entails using solo simple hazards as tools for making the difficulty of future encounters more variable based on how well the party handles the hazards. If an encounter is meant to be more challenging against a party that ate a hazard, it stands to reason that this upper bound of power should still not result in a TPK, and the baseline encounter by itself should therefore be easier to account for the variability. If you want to throw nothing but extreme encounters at your party while also inflicting long-lasting and serious conditions on them, that's your mistake to make, and something you can do even now.
Perhaps change in the way your players play is something you fear, but I'd say it definitely enhanced the experience at my table.
In thinking about it more, it is clear that your table is experiencing a problem mine isn't, so there was no need to create a change in the way players approach traps. Even when my players encounter damage only traps, they care enough about the presence of them to ask "why is this here?" from an in game perspective that the idea of just walking through it and ignoring it was never a situation I was going to experience.
I guess you found a way to deal with your party having an attitude about traps that you didn't like and your idea fixed that, but it doesn't take changing the whole game to accomplish that, it takes having one or two traps that matter to your players to accomplish that change moving forward.
Pardon me if anyone else has already said this (I got a little worn out by the back-and-forth so wound up skipping most of the more recent posts), but I did manage to think of an out-of-combat use case for simple, damaging traps: escalation of danger.
It's true that a hazard that doesn't do enough to take somebody out is basically just a time sink, while traps that kill you instantly are kind of unfair and annoying in a game where building a character can take hours. But there's, like, a spectrum between the two, right? So, you could have a series of simple hazards that steadily increase in damage as the party gets closer to their goal. The first one might be a case of "yeah, whatever, lay on hands, let's keep moving," but the second might do more than that, and the third even more, until failing to navigate the hazard(s) could very well result in death. I feel like steadily ramping up the danger like this could help add tension and encourage the party to explore and problem-solve more thoughtfully.
This, of course, doesn't negate the fact that old-school sensibilities don't mesh well with PF2's design, but it was interesting to come up with a use case for a flawed subsystem regardless.
They don't need to be at full HP to win a fight, but you DO have to account for "attrition" when designing encounters. If the party is still at 85% HP and no long term conditions/ailments there's probably no real adjustments that need to be made, but the further the party slides down the HP scale or has penalties the more adjustments you need to make to have a consistent challenge.I mean yes, this is obvious, but I'm still not really sure what this has to do with the discussion, given that a party really low on HP is going to be pressured to heal. If a party is at full HP but also clumsy 4, enfeebled 4, stupefied 4, and so on then I agree, that would be a serious detriment that would need to be factored in (and also avoided), but I don't think anyone's proposing to make the conditions on hazards debilitating to that extent. A hazard leaving you enfeebled 1 or giving you a low weakness for your level to a damage type that an upcoming encounter will be able to apply isn't exactly something worth going to camp and wait out by itself, at least not in my opinion or experience, and that level of "this upcoming encounter might become a touch more complicated" is really as far as I'd like to go by default. You could obviously play with this and implement some really nasty synergies between those kinds of hazards and upcoming encounters, but that's at your own discretion.
I'm not saying you shouldn't or can't use long term debuffs or attrition, I'm saying if you don't account for that when planning an encounter (or adjusting because things never go exactly to plan) then you're not a good GM.Right, but then who is opposing this statement of yours? Because I'm certainly not, I completely agree with you. I just don't see the point of attacking the competence of hypothetical GMs here when the very premise of what I'm proposing entails using solo simple hazards as tools for making the difficulty of future encounters more variable based on how well the party...
The way your post read that I was responding to, it came across as "Don't account for the party's condition".
I can't disagree that traps are a genre staple, and that in order for those traps to be meaningful you can't let the party completely recover from them before a combat happens. But the challenge of that combat needs to account for impaired PCs. And honestly, that's why Paizo I think doesn't do it often, because there's too many variables as opposed to assuming the party is at full health and without ailments.
I don't think this is at all true. Again, the notion that the party needs to be at full HP to win encounters is a myth, one Paizo staff themselves have discredited, and many monsters themselves apply persistent conditions or ailments that may set the party back across multiple encounters, even for days or weeks to come. Paizo absolutely plays with this already, so what I'm suggesting isn't some brand-new concept within the game either.
That was literally what preceded this conversation.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So clearly our play experiences are different; our party adventures into the (in-game) evening, this creates more risk, and this makes simple traps more effective plot devices.
How does taking more time to complete the same amount of adventuring create more risk? What even is the element of risk here? You're still not really elaborating on where the time pressure here is coming from, which is a touch fishy. This isn't a table difference issue, this is an issue you repeatedly failing to validate the basic premise of your argument. If your table creates some kind of time pressure that makes every 10-minute activity count from start to finish, that's great, but also not a universal, much less the default.
OTOH, arguing that it would be a nice add on Paizos' part to publish additional persistent condition traps, for those campaigns that do have plenty of healing time, yeah that resonates. Advocate away.
I find this rather interesting, because this is exactly what I have been doing, and yet here you are, still insisting that I'm trying to take away your toys, as if I ever had the power to do so to begin with. Given that we're in agreement over adding new hazards and optional templates instead of taking away what exists, why continue to argue?
A GMC statement does not have to be mechanical to be important.
That's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that the statement in question is in no way prescriptive, and is framed in such a way as to leave room for ambiguity. Unlike the rules, it is very much not there to tell the GM what to do, and leaves the GM free to make their own decisions that may involve making exceptions to those guidelines. It is also separate from simple hazards themselves, meaning that a GM looking at simple damage hazards may find themselves unaware of the guideline advising against using those as solo threats. Given how even nested traits can give GMs and players alike a headache, asking the GM to have this one guideline engraved in memory among hundreds more when it is in no way directly linked to the mechanical elements of hazards does not strike me as a reasonable expectation, even if it reads all nice and holy on paper.
I'd only quibble that that "effective use" is not limited to "affects the next combat." Traps can play many more roles in a scenario than just making the next combat harder. To go back to unicore's example, if the characters get from the trap that there are trapping monsters ahead, and that's what the GM wanted them to get from it, then the trap has been effective.
No objections from me there, having a "speed bump" damage trap signal the presence of trapper enemies is a valid narrative use for one trap, and a good example of why a GM would make an exception to those guidelines. I would not use more than one such solo trap for that purpose, though, as that would be likely to bore the players without adding any further value beyond the first trap.
I will quibble further, however, and point out that this is not a benefit intrinsic to simple damage traps: if that trap applied a condition or some lasting debuff instead, it would achieve that signalling function just as well. A world in which the default for simple hazards was some kind of enduring detriment is therefore one that would continue to offer this kind of narrative signalling.
In thinking about it more, it is clear that your table is experiencing a problem mine isn't, so there was no need to create a change in the way players approach traps. Even when my players encounter damage only traps, they care enough about the presence of them to ask "why is this here?" from an in game perspective that the idea of just walking through it and ignoring it was never a situation I was going to experience.
It is interesting that you'd frame an earnest attempt to introduce an additional element of interesting gameplay at a table as a problem, and revealing in ways you may not necessarily be aware of. My party's behavior wasn't problematic to start with, and it is pointlessly disparaging to assume this; the simple fact of the matter is that introducing the very kind of traps I mentioned made the party react to the likelihood of further traps, and thereby feel more rewarded for finding and disabling them just as they felt the pressure for triggering them. None of this would have arisen from simple damage traps whose effects would've just been healed away.
Having to act like your table is just better than mine for the sake of the argument strikes me as a touch small, not to mention besides the point, when the example I bring up highlights both how simple damage hazards fail to provide the enhancement that benefited my table, and how more simple hazards with lasting consequences can offer those benefits, including the "why is this here?" example you keep bringing up. That is not an intrinsic property of simple hazards that do nothing but deal damage, so it makes little sense to present it as a benefit my proposal wouldn't offer as well.
It's true that a hazard that doesn't do enough to take somebody out is basically just a time sink, while traps that kill you instantly are kind of unfair and annoying in a game where building a character can take hours. But there's, like, a spectrum between the two, right? So, you could have a series of simple hazards that steadily increase in damage as the party gets closer to their goal. The first one might be a case of "yeah, whatever, lay on hands, let's keep moving," but the second might do more than that, and the third even more, until failing to navigate the hazard(s) could very well result in death. I feel like steadily ramping up the danger like this could help add tension and encourage the party to explore and problem-solve more thoughtfully.
I think unfortunately the problem is that damage is fairly binary in these instances: if the damage isn't enough to kill you outright, you can just heal it away, even if it brings you down to 1 HP. Heavier instances of damage can take multiple rounds of healing, so if you're implementing time pressure that's something it can play into, but in absence of immediate time pressure the party is at their leisure to heal away any damage outside of encounters, whether it's damage from said encounters or from traps.
That was literally what preceded this conversation.
Yes, and I suggest you read what I have said, carefully this time. "Paizo doesn't expect you to be at full HP for every encounter" is not the same statement as "Paizo's encounter design literally doesn't care how badly hurt you are", in the same way that stating that red not being my literal favorite color does not mean I hate the color red. It is obvious that being more wounded or debilitated will make encounters harder, but there is a modicum of nuance to be had in this conversation where we can admit a world in which some party members suffer from a few light to moderate conditions that would make easy to moderate encounters more challenging as a result, yet not lethal either.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Using the Stamina rules puts resource attrition back to the game, which would make the isolated simple traps more relevant than they are now.
I don't really think so.
A 10 minute rest restore all stamina. So if an isolated traps deal less than about 1/2 your total, you only lost stamina and just take a rest. Not much different than using medicine after a trap.
If the trap deals more than 1/2 your total, you will have lost actual HP. Now...depending on how your party rolls (and I don't mean dice but how they approach a dungeon) if your healer isn't the one taking the damage they can patch everyone up while the others take a breather.
I honestly see this variant as likely to reduce downtime between encounters, because now 1/2 your "HP" can be restored by taking a breather, and you only need spells or medicine to restore half the amount you previously did.
The stamina rules actually imply that too
Stamina's Impact
The main gameplay consequence of using these stamina rules is that a quick 10- or 20-minute rest can restore most groups to full or nearly full health via Taking a Breather and Treating Wounds as necessary, allowing more encounters with shorter breaks in between. Additionally, charismatic or otherwise diplomatic characters gain fun and useful ways to bolster their allies.Because spells that heal Hit Points don’t restore Stamina Points, it’s a little harder to heal up completely in the middle of a fight. This can mean that fights become deadly after characters have been beaten down, possibly causing retreats to be more frequent, but the retreats themselves are shorter. The focus of the game can stay consistently within encounters, with less managing of time and resources outside of battle.
So that's like the opposite of what the OP wants.
Castiliano wrote:
To clarify further, I never proposed a binary (hack vs. excellence) and even gave examples of genre-defining authors whose works have endured decades who sometimes winged it, "hacked" before revising. They'd toss in random elements or speedbumps that they later wove into the larger tapestry.
Teridax responded:
"Anyone who pulled a trap from a list instead of hand-crafting the entire dungeon with meticulous narrative precision is a hack" strikes me as pretty binary thinking. I would also not try to be clever by playing on semantic ambiguity here, it only injects confusion into discussion.
End Teridax
What lens are you reading through that sees a comment explicitly about not drawing a binary between hack and excellence (because even noteworthy authors blend the two) and then warps and magnifies it into "lists suck! Only meticulous precision allowed!"? You are literally quoting nobody and then attacking that strawman. Between that example and your aggressive responses to others I wonder if you're discussing in good faith or merely want to fight, even when some are discussing nuance and application more than correction.
Trap lists are AWESOME! Like monsters, many pregen traps (& snares too) have flavor that resonates with a GM's goals/narrative/etc., maybe even inspires. Many others can be given that flavor with dungeon dressing or tweaking. The resonance with the story/atmosphere/etc. makes them memorable, whether or not their effect has a lasting impact. Again, just like monsters.
And here's a simple word swap that might illuminate: "Simple combats ought to be about lasting impairments rather than damage"
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So that's like the opposite of what the OP wants.
It's not really the opposite of what I want; the aim here really isn't to make the party spend more time healing out of combat (in fact, that's the opposite of what I want too!). HP isn't even really that big a concern of mine; I was thinking more of having hazards apply detriments that would play with future encounters, like stupefied 1 against enemies with Will saves or some vulnerability to fire damage when the next enemy in the encounter is a fire elemental. The hazards don't have to be paired, so you could just apply conditions that thankfully are almost always relevant, but the idea very much is to have out-of-combat gameplay interact more with in-combat gameplay in this respect.
What lens are you reading through that sees a comment explicitly about not drawing a binary between hack and excellence (because even noteworthy authors blend the two) and then warps and magnifies it into "lists suck! Only meticulous precision allowed!"? You are literally quoting nobody and then attacking that strawman. Between that example and your aggressive responses to others I wonder if you're discussing in good faith or merely want to fight, even when some are discussing nuance and application more than correction.
This one:
Dropping in anything w/o narrative purpose is simply hack writing. Mind you, there's a market for that or it wouldn't be so prevalent, but yeah, I'd expect Paizo (maybe 3PP PF2 products in general) to rise above that. There's a literal Hackmaster game out there for such tomfoolery.
Notice how my response quite clearly refers back to your prior comment, which you have since been forced to backpedal on following callouts from multiple users, rather than your subsequent attempt at backpedaling in the quote. I'm not even the only person to have called you out on this either, so attacking my good faith here comes across here more as deflection than anything else.
And here's a simple word swap that might illuminate: "Simple combats ought to be about lasting impairments rather than damage"
So, you may not be aware of this (or perhaps you are, as it's been pointed out to you several times now), but you have this tendency to treat words sometimes as if they have no inherent meaning. You sometimes use words in completely inappropriate contexts and in what appears to be deliberate attempts to not acknowledge their meaning and implication, such as conflating "Hackmaster" with hack writing as per the above quote. This is another such instance, where you're pretending that encounters and simple hazards are the same, and using "simple" here with regards to combat in a manner that is utterly devoid of meaning. Swapping those words does not preserve the meaning, because combat encounters balanced to the party's level have inherent gameplay value in PF2e that simple hazards do not.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
In thinking about it more, it is clear that your table is experiencing a problem mine isn't, so there was no need to create a change in the way players approach traps. Even when my players encounter damage only traps, they care enough about the presence of them to ask "why is this here?" from an in game perspective that the idea of just walking through it and ignoring it was never a situation I was going to experience.It is interesting that you'd frame an earnest attempt to introduce an additional element of interesting gameplay at a table as a problem, and revealing in ways you may not necessarily be aware of. My party's behavior wasn't problematic to start with, and it is pointlessly disparaging to assume this; the simple fact of the matter is that introducing the very kind of traps I mentioned made the party react to the likelihood of further traps, and thereby feel more rewarded for finding and disabling them just as they felt the pressure for triggering them. None of this would have arisen from simple damage traps whose effects would've just been healed away.
Having to act like your table is just better than mine for the sake of the argument strikes me as a touch small, not to mention besides the point, when the example I bring up highlights both how simple damage hazards fail to provide the enhancement that benefited my table, and how more simple hazards with lasting consequences can offer those benefits, including the "why is this here?" example you keep bringing up. That is not an intrinsic property of simple hazards that do nothing but deal damage, so it makes little sense to present it as a benefit my proposal wouldn't offer as well.
You are reading way too much hostility into my responses for it to be productive for me to continue discussing this with you much longer. Do you disagree with my position that everything you want to do in adventure design is already possible and easy to do with the rules as is, and is the way that Paizo adventures are already designed?
You have this concern that inexperienced GMs are going to throw a simple random hazard into an adventure, that isn't connected to the narrative of the adventure in anyway, and if it only does damage, the party is going to skip right past it and never care about hazards again, and that is going to be detrimental to their enjoyment of the game. I do not believe that is a very realistic outcome to that situation, especially as the GM can just do something different next time. The occasional nothing hazard, just like the occasional incredibly easy encounter is going to happen occasionally just by pure luck anyway. A natural 20 on a save vs a level +4 trap that does something seriously powerful is going to have the same result and the player might not even realize how lucky they got.
If the inexperienced GM walks away from trying to throw in a random simple damage hazard to a dungeon deciding "huh, single simple hazards are not worth throwing randomly in dungeons" and then never does that again, that is probably a better outcome for them and their table than the GM thinking the problem with the simple random hazard is that it wasn't harmful enough to the party, and then trying to make those simple hazards into something more than they need to be.
I think that is fundamentally where our difference of opinion resides.
I think the GM who really wants to design a full dungeon of hazards and environmental encounters come to life needs a lot better advice and resources than just more traps that inflict lasting conditions.
You are reading way too much hostility into my responses for it to be productive for me to continue discussing this with you much longer. Do you disagree with my position that everything you want to do in adventure design is already possible and easy to do with the rules as is, and is the way that Paizo adventures are already designed?
Yes, I do, as the rules as written feature a great deal many simple damage hazards and often not as many simple hazards that have more lasting effects. Also, I am only reading hostility in your responses because I'm, well, reading your responses, which are hostile and supercilious. Your entire angle throughout this conversation has been to undermine the topic of discussion and frame me as unreasonable for even making the observations I made, as you have done many times before in prior conversations, so if you wish to show yourself out of this thread, please be my guest.
You have this concern that inexperienced GMs are going to throw a simple random hazard into an adventure, that isn't connected to the narrative of the adventure in anyway, and if it only does damage, the party is going to skip right past it and never care about hazards again, and that is going to be detrimental to their enjoyment of the game. I do not believe that is a very realistic outcome to that situation, especially as the GM can just do something different next time.
This is a straw man, and I pointed already to the example of a GM who crafts a dungeon that uses these traps in a way that is narratively fitting, only to have those traps (and the dungeon) fall flat due to their gameplay. You are free to imagine things as you want them to be, but if you cannot possibly imagine in any way how the existing implementation of simple damage hazards can lead to less than ideal gameplay, I don't think that's really anyone else's problem. That you would repeatedly ignore the examples I have given you and insist on arguing on straw man assumptions of lack of GMing skill is hostile behavior, by the way, and a clear example of how you have not been engaging with this conversation in good faith.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Is it ok that monster encounters built for your level are a threat while a trap built for your level isn't? I think that's the primary concern. It doesn't matter that they can be used better, it's that they have to be used better to have impact.
Saying you don't have a problem because your group uses them better and knows how to solve them beforehand doesn't really matter. Traps out of the box work in most other systems, so why don't they have something that just works here?