Auto Pass an Encounter?

[Oli Ironbar]

Any groups ever agree to just hand waive a whole fight? Whole dungeon even?

At what point of having an Effective Party Level advantage would you consider just describing how you beat down a common enemy instead of rolling?

[Sysryke]

I've only ever played in store or home games created by the GM. At least as far as I know, every encounter has been built to be somewhere within appropriate levels to the group I was playing with. If a fight was meant to be easy, I think the GM would still have us roll, just so we could see/feel our characters be powerful every once in awhile. This is rare in my personal experience though.

I'd imagine this situation only really occurs in Society or adventure path play. I would assume there it is possible to come to an encounter or entire arc for which the group is well over-leveled.

The only experience I have like this comes from the Marvel Universe RPG. My group was playing some powerful mutant special forces operatives in a dystopian future of our world. We were allowed to describe how we plowed through mobs and armies of mook robots before getting down to the meat of the opposing army's commanders. That system is much more description/story roleplay based anyway though. You don't roll dice, you assign stones (points) of energy into actions you describe that go against unknown preset challenge numbers of enemies or obstacles. Creative and/or relevant descriptions and character powers/modifiers add bonuses, similar to situational modifiers on skill checks in Pathfinder.

[TxSam88]

I'm not sure when this situation would occur. even with homebrew, the encounters presented to the party should be the appropriate CL for the APL.

the closest I have come to this is every once in a while, a party will have EXACTLY the right tool to negate an encounter with a single dice roll or less.

[Oli Ironbar]

TxSam88 wrote:

I'm not sure when this situation would occur. even with homebrew, the encounters presented to the party should be the appropriate CL for the APL.

Yeah, our player who has mastered the prepared caster has negated a number of encounters entirely or otherwise just tips the odds so far in our favor that our martials (who already punch above the APL) just have to clean up consistently.

Do your GM's just increase the CR above standard for the APL?

[Tim Emrick]

Most of my experience with this has been with Society play, and mostly it's done in the interest of time. For example, if the party has taken out all the significant opposition during a fight, but some minions who pose no real threat remain, the GM might handwave the mopping up in order to avoid boredom and to have more time for more interesting content later on.

I can think of one PFS scenario where I handwaved an investigation where the party had to make multiple Diplomacy checks to gather information. (It was an early season adventure, so such challenges tended to be klunky, with everything locked behind Diplomacy checks to gather information.) I knew that one PC was highly invested in Diplomacy, and would have made every single check on a roll of 1. So I simply provided the information and gave the party some time to discuss it and their next steps before we moved on to a more interesting scene.

[TxSam88]

Oli Ironbar wrote:

TxSam88 wrote:

I'm not sure when this situation would occur. even with homebrew, the encounters presented to the party should be the appropriate CL for the APL.

Yeah, our player who has mastered the prepared caster has negated a number of encounters entirely or otherwise just tips the odds so far in our favor that our martials (who already punch above the APL) just have to clean up consistently.

Do your GM's just increase the CR above standard for the APL?

Oh, long ago we decided to always max hit points on the bad guys, and then upped the CR of the encounter. at low levels not so much, but as the party gets closer to 20th level, we up the CR more and more (usually about CR+5 at 20th level).

remember the CL vs APL system was meant for 4 inexperienced players at 15 point builds, with non-optimized characters in a non-optimized party.

if you change any one of these, you need to up the CR.

[Azothath]

In PFS GMs have to run adventures as written.
There is Campaign/Adventure Mode to get credit for home play that follows most of the PFS Rules buuttt there's usually a baked in penalty.

In PFS1 it is rare that you have to skip an encounter. Sometimes extra/optional encounters are in the scenario. The campaign is intentionally on the easier side for PR purposes and Prestige lets players hit about 120% WBL. Ofcourse some scenarios run long, particularly Specials. The usual situation with a martially effective group that hustles is finishing early which means the GM gets a longer lunch break or can wander about the convention.
Sometimes players want to roleplay and that takes time. You don't want to penalize roleplay in a TTRPG! However, there are time constraints and you want to make sure players aren't dawdling.
Once in awhile the mechanics in scenarios are unclear or overly complicated, time wasteful, and pointless. Puzzles can get that way as they break the 3rd wall testing the players directly (there should be PC rolls to solve the puzzle). In that case something's got to give.

Sanction Content in APs. *facepalm* I'm glad the Campaign/Adventure Rules are there so players have the option to get the content and story. It's usually just 50-66% of the AP and the martial part at that. The XP falls short forcing players to fill in with scenarios. It's an expedient compromise.

I'd agree that 80%+ success rate means the challenge is really a roleplay moment or a dramatic exposition and dialogue.

[ShroudedInLight]

I recently hand waived a fight, the party was facing an enemy with lots of HP, regeneration and powerful defensive buffs (the penalty for fighting underwater is wild). The party is very debuff focused and after they crippled the thing (blinded, nauseated, confused, and exhausted) I asked them if they were cool with fast forwarding through the encounter. We only get about 2.5 hours of play a week and it was nearly time for the LGS to close.

So yeah, once a fight is essentially over I’m perfectly happy with calling it completed even if enemies are still standing. I also don’t mind when the party circumvents a fight entirely through clever roleplay or convoluted schemes

[Oli Ironbar]

ShroudedInLight wrote:

or convoluted schemes

This.

[thorin001]

Very rarely will I just handwave a whole fight. Even vastly underpowered foes still get put on the board. Sometimes you have to give the players something to roflstomp to let them feel powerful. This works especially well with things they used to struggle with.
Or the point of the encounter is to drain resources, not to seriously threaten the PCs. To skip these encounters is to make the boss fight easier.

But I will call an obviously lost fight early (unless the players are having too much fun playing with their food). Usually I will say "burn X levels of spells." The spells can come from SLAs, hard cast, or items. I will entertain other ability uses counting as spell levels. The players can divide the load as they see fit.