Adventure Path hazard encounters are usually badly designed, and I would love for this to change.

[benwilsher18]

After playing through several Adventure Paths and GMing some too, I think I (and the players I play with) have enough experience now to be able to say this with a degree of certainty; Paizo's Adventure Path writers are not consistently able to make encounters involving hazards actually engaging.

Without going into spoiler territory, my experience ranges from older APs released before the remaster right up to several adventures released in the last 15 months. Universally, in every AP I have played there have been multiple encounters with hazards that were at best underwhelming, and at worst just a tedious slog that everyone just agreed to handwave and move past.

To be clear, this isn't every single encounter with hazards in every AP - just the ones where the hazard is the only threat, and there are no enemies to fight alongside it. In encounters where a hazard is just one of several threats, no matter how badly designed the hazard itself is you can usually still have fun with the encounter overall - because combat is fun, and everyone gets to take part.

It is definitely when hazards are the only reason initiative is being rolled at all that the ensuing encounters often elicit groans of frustration or just outright boredom at the table. These encounters generally have multiple problems from the list below, and unfortunately sometimes ALL of them:

*1. The hazard (or multiple identical hazards) were the only challenge in the encounter and they were usually immobile, meaning that often they would be triggered, and everyone would run out of range/out of the room/behind full cover immediately as soon as they got their actions and any threat to the party would just immediately be over.

*2. The hazard(s) did not pose any kind of meaningful threat to the party or their goals even when players were getting unlucky, and there was no time pressure or roleplay to resolve them quickly. Resolving the turns of hazards just feels like a waste of time when a critical hit or critically failed save essentially meant nothing and the group could just shrug it off, and slogging away for 7 rounds because of bad luck did not reach a meaningfully different result than getting lucky or co-ordinating well and resolving it in 3 rounds.

*3. The encounters are usually not dynamic at all. Everyone moves, stands next to the hazard or outside of the threat area, and repeats the same actions every round until enough skill checks are eventually passed, and the hazard repeats the same activity (or does nothing sometimes) for the entire encounter after the initial opening reaction.

*4. Spotting some hazards before blundering into them is often a 20% chance or less for the best Searcher in the party, so even having the whole group on Search makes it unlikely to avoid being surprised by them. This is just frustrating, and makes players in this role feel like their characters are incompetent.

*5. The skills required to meet the easiest DCs to disable the hazards often don't sync up with the recommended skills in the Adventure Path Guide, catching the party out when they have no Experts or better at the required skills. Sometimes this makes a hazard as written actually impossible to deal with, requiring the GM to step in and make changes or improvise solutions.

*6. In mid-level and high-level APs, sometimes the hazards have absurdly high disable DCs and require multiple successes to clear the encounter, making them just take forever to finish even when the players are making optimal decisions. There's nothing quite as tedious as 2 players doing nothing while the other 2 roll Aid checks and Disable checks repeatedly for 45 minutes, because the best player in the party has a skill bonus 14 lower than the DC and they need to succeed 8-12 times to solve the encounter.

Now to give credit to the writers, it's not like they get it wrong every time. But that just makes it stand out even more when they get it wrong later in the same book - sometimes several times.

I'm interested to hear if anybody else has similar feedback and experiences with these sorts of encounters. I really hope that going forward into the Adventure Paths of 2026 and beyond, these boring encounters can be spruced up a bit and made more exciting and less frustrating, as they are definitely a consistent black mark against what have otherwise been some very fun adventures.

[Mathmuse]

Reading benwilsher18's six points, I realized that I had houseruled most of them away. My hazards still suffer from Point #1: if a hazard is the only threat, then the worst case of taking full damage from the hazard is simply resolved by Treat Wounds afterwards. Because of that, I typically use hazards only for flavor: a treasure vault will have traps and sometimes the outdoors has environmental hazards ("Don't climb the cliff there. You would trigger a rockfall.").

When I converted the Ironfang Invasion adventure path to Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules, I replaced its PF1 hazards with PF2 hazards. Enemy-occupied Fort Nunder had an armory at the end of a heavily trapped twisty corridor, but ordinarily the party would deal with the enemy before trying for the armory. I replaced the CR 6 Lunging Strikes Trap with a Hundred Arrows trap, hazard 6. I cannot find this trap in the Archives of Nethys, so I guess I designed it myself.

HUNDRED ARROWS TRAP hazard 6
MECHANICAL TRAP
Complexity Simple
Stealth DC 25 (trained)
Description A hidden panel (also a pressure plate) pops up in the last one third of area K9 and a hundred arrows shoot the length of the hallway NW from there. Anyone on the hidden panel is safe.
Disable Thievery DC 24 (trained) to disable the trap at the hidden panel or Thievery DC 30 (expert) Find hidden off switch before the pressure plates.
AC 21; Fort +12, Ref +8
Hardness 12, HP 48 (BT 24); Immunities critical hits, object immunities, precision damage
Many Arrows [reaction] (attack); Trigger Pressure is applied to any floor tile in area K9. Effect Arrows +19 Damage 4d8+14 piercing; no multiple attack penalty.
Reset The trap can fire twice without reset. After 2nd firing, the wood golem in area K11 comes out, opens the hidden panel safely, and reloads it in 100 rounds (1 minute 40 seconds) with arrows from its endless quiver. The golem will attack if it finds any intruders unaccompanied by Chernasardo Rangers.

Note that this hazard summons a guardian--the wooden golem further down the corridor around a corner. This would have created time pressure (Point #2) with the party forced into a fight while still injured from the hazard. Except that one of the party members was a Chernasardo Ranger in training and wearing the right uniform.

The trap-finder rogue Sam in the party did spot the pressure plates, but failed the Thievery check to deactivate the pressure plate or find the hidden off switch. So Sam used a pole to trigger the pressure plates from an adjacent square, with others behind him. They learned the hard way that the arrows went down that entire straight section of hallway. The trap rolled a critical hit on Sam, who dropped unconscious. That did give the trap a moment of seriousness.

Further ahead, a side corridor had a key on the wall behind a hidden pit trap. Sam spotted that trap, too. While the party was discussing how to disable the pit trap, the champion Tikti simply climbed along the wall to bypass the trap and fetch the key. She was a monkey goblin with a Climb Speed.

That's my first houserule about traps: if the players invent a plausible alternative method of disabling the trap, then I allow it. The DC might be higher than the default DC, but it will probably play into the PCs' skills better. This fixes Point #3 because of the dynamic discussion to invent a way to disable the trap and Point #5 about having the wrong skills. This method, however, does require experienced GM skills to invent the DC and other conditions on the fly.

One complaint in Point #6 is requiring multiple checks to succeed. No, I always rely on single checks. Pathfinder is built around the difficulty classes being linear, so that a -1 mean 5% worse chance. Requiring two success changes that linearity to quadratic, three success change that to cubic, etc. So a -1 would mean a 10% or 20% worse chance. It creates a threshold in which a +10 could have a high chance of failure and a +12 could have a high chance of success. I simply dislike that math, so I use single checks. If I don't want repeats to make the check easy, then the single check can be conducted only once.

[Ascalaphus]

Regarding points #1-3;

I agree in principle that this is bad, but I think in practice it can be not so bad but it really depends on how long it all takes. If a trap takes longer to resolve than it's interesting, it starts to drag. But if it's somewhat interesting and doesn't take long to resolve, then it's fine.

I guess that biases me a bit in the direction of simple hazards over complex ones. Or treating complex ones as simple ones as soon as the party finds a solution, like "let's step back out of the area and wait it out".

For example: yesterday the party walked into a room with some dead centipedes curled like kittens around balls of wire. Looks suspicious. One PC fired a kinetic blast at one of them to see what would happen. Trap goes off and starts hurting everyone in 30 feet. The party quickly steps back out of range. At that point I just stopped initiative because the trap was "solved". Because it didn't take long to resolve, the "interesting" still ended up as a net positive and it helped set the tone a bit for the area the party was exploring.

I've experienced something similar with skill challenges like chases, where really the depth of player tactical choices isn't all that deep. If you make people think for a long time about the 100% optimal choices of who makes a skill check next, then it really drags. If you just push push push people to quickly roll something because you're in a hurry, then the entire chase only takes like 10m to resolve at the table but it's entertaining.

From a writer perspective that does mean that "shallow" skill challenges and encounters don't provide a lot of game minutes of entertainment compared to the word count needed to put them in the adventure. Well, duh.

The most efficient word count to game minutes of entertainment is always going to be: some scene setup to create interesting stakes and motivation for the encounter, combined with a "use 3 of this monster from that page of that bestiary". That outsources a lot of the word cost to another book and lets you spend all your budget on making the encounter have more interesting reasons.

[yellowpete]

#2 is just an issue with all encounters in this system as long as they're not embedded in a time-sensitive context, not just hazards. Problem with APs is, the writer doesn't know whether you're going to have e.g. a water/wood kineticist in the party to keep everyone topped off rapidly, or whether the best you've got is someone making a Trained medicine check per person every hour. Since this introduces an atypically large difficulty gap compared to other aspects of the system (relative class power etc, which is much closer together) they typically don't include fixed time limits, timed events, and such.

As for the rest, I agree that hazards are often exceptionally one-dimensional in how you can interact with them mechanically, making them problematic as a single-issue encounter.

[Teridax]

I've had very similar experiences, particularly with lack of time pressure making it fairly trivial to step out of hazards and wait for them to stop. Part of the issue with complex hazards in my opinion, aside from what feels like legacy design affecting how they can be handled, is that they're often expected to be standalone encounters, which means they need to single-handedly bring a degree of engaging and dynamic gameplay that you normally get from a cohort of different monsters, all while being static and repetitive by design. I don't really know of any quick and easy solutions to the problem, but in my opinion complex hazards ought to tie in closer to dungeon design where they make the dungeon harder in general by adding some general complication, such that the only way to make bits of the dungeon easier to navigate is to disable the hazard and solve the puzzle it represents. Haunts in particular really should have some effect on the environment around them even when not triggered.

[Easl]

I see 1, 3, and somewhat 6 in our games (somewhat 6 = not necessarily the "absurdly high" issue, but yes the "2 party members stand around doing nothing while the members with the skill do the checks" issue). I am mostly okay with all of these issues...so long as completing the hazard is not critical to the plot. When a party's most rational course of action is to 'go around,' doing so shouldn't plot-punish them.

I will add a #7, which is "is an annoying puzzle that requires a linear playthrough". Whether your players like puzzles and riddles and such is going to vary by table, and I get that some folk really like it. But personally I and my players find most of them more annoying than fun. In "roll vs. role" playing I like role for many things, but in this area I prefer roll, as it seems unfair to make party success depend on player ability to figure out some puzzle. The worst offenders are puzzles that are solved by going through some earlier specific encounter; unless designed very well, these have the effect of railroading the party into a linear plot and doing exactly what the GM or AP wanted them to do if they want to succeed later on. Metaplot has it's place, but in general, I would try to avoid "must have completed encounter A the exact way I envisioned/the book states you should've, in order to succeed at encounter B" plot devices.

For all of the above, IMO most hazards should be stand-alone, be solvable by multiple different skill checks rather than player knowledge, and if there is a puzzle aspect to it, sufficient 'clues' should be within the encounter itself so that reasonable character actions such as searching etc. can uncover them.

[gesalt]

#4 always felt like niche protection for legendary perception classes given the proficiency gate on detecting hazards in the first place. Rogues with +1 wis at base have something like a 50/50 chance to detect on-level hazards before the +1/+2 from trap finder. This tracks pretty well with a +3 wis character having the baseline 60% success rate you see across most of pf2e.

#5 just means you should ignore those guides and instead make sure the party has minimum 15 different skills progressing to legendary. Sure, it can suck in the early levels before you get at least two expert skills on everyone, but that's the low level life. Granted, I've never found those guides' build recommendations worthwhile in the first place so I'm not surprised they weren't good for this.

#6 is indeed very tedious, especially tied back to #1-#3. Can't say I've ever seen that wide a gap between DC and modifier though.

[Mathmuse]

yellowpete wrote:

#2 is just an issue with all encounters in this system as long as they're not embedded in a time-sensitive context, not just hazards. Problem with APs is, the writer doesn't know whether you're going to have e.g. a water/wood kineticist in the party to keep everyone topped off rapidly, or whether the best you've got is someone making a Trained medicine check per person every hour. Since this introduces an atypically large difficulty gap compared to other aspects of the system (relative class power etc, which is much closer together) they typically don't include fixed time limits, timed events, and such.

I developed a habit that a fight in a dungeon could be heard from adjacent rooms, so the PCs were under time pressure to defeat the enemy in that room before reinforcements from another room arrived. My party can handle back-to-back Moderate-Threat encounters, but two Moderate-Threat encounters at the same time are an Extreme-Threat encounter.

The Centipede Carcasses Trap that Ascalaphus mentioned was in a 15-room dungeon and my 7-member party had only one bard as a healer. Furthermore, because of the party size, I doubled the number of animal-intelligence enemies. This crowded the dungeon so that reinforcements from adjacent rooms were inevitable, unless the party had cleared the adjacent rooms already. To ensure that they had enough healing, I added a healer NPC to the party (Spoilery Details), a phoenix-bloodline sorcerer with rejuventating flames and medical training. Even with the healing NPC, they retreated twice to the first room for extended healing.

They encountered the Centipede Carcasses Trap by going down a third exit from the first room after their second retreat, so they were at full hit points. They sneaked into the room, examined the traps without touching them, and set them off from outside the room with Ray of Frost and Needle Darts. The quick pings of high-velocity shrapnel did not alert the animals in adjacent rooms. The party never rolled initiative for that encounter. So the trap served as flavor rather than risk.

[exequiel759]

Yeah, traps are underwhelming in PF2e. Besides what everyone already said, it doesn't help that some traps have a cooldown once they activate so even if the PCs were to fail to spot it at worst they would need to rest 10 mins to heal the damage dealt to them.

I also recall APs allowing Athletics as a possible check to disable a trap which is...logical to some extent but at the same makes Thievery kinda useless.

[Perpdepog]

Ascalaphus wrote:

Regarding points #1-3;

I agree in principle that this is bad, but I think in practice it can be not so bad but it really depends on how long it all takes. If a trap takes longer to resolve than it's interesting, it starts to drag. But if it's somewhat interesting and doesn't take long to resolve, then it's fine.

I guess that biases me a bit in the direction of simple hazards over complex ones. Or treating complex ones as simple ones as soon as the party finds a solution, like "let's step back out of the area and wait it out".

For example: yesterday the party walked into a room with some dead centipedes curled like kittens around balls of wire. Looks suspicious. One PC fired a kinetic blast at one of them to see what would happen. Trap goes off and starts hurting everyone in 30 feet. The party quickly steps back out of range. At that point I just stopped initiative because the trap was "solved". Because it didn't take long to resolve, the "interesting" still ended up as a net positive and it helped set the tone a bit for the area the party was exploring.

I've experienced something similar with skill challenges like chases, where really the depth of player tactical choices isn't all that deep. If you make people think for a long time about the 100% optimal choices of who makes a skill check next, then it really drags. If you just push push push people to quickly roll something because you're in a hurry, then the entire chase only takes like 10m to resolve at the table but it's entertaining.

This is how I try to run hazards as well. I'm not always successful at it, there is a particular hazard in Night of the Gray Death that really ground our game to halt because I wasn't sure how to run it, but these days I try to lean more to treating hazards sans monsters as simple over complex, or maybe play it all out in narrative with the party telling me what they want to do.

I haven't really experimented with time pressure; maybe I should. That might make them a bit more exciting. On the other hand, I've found that my party tend to feel kinda good when they "solve" a hazard and bypass it, too. It makes them feel clever and like their characters are competent, which is also nice to have happen in your games sometimes.

It's tricky because I think your standard hazard/trap room is innately ill-suited to PF2E. In fiction traps primarily exist to raise stakes; the main character is running from a boulder, or falling into a pit, and it's exciting seeing them get out of it because you know they'll get out of it and want to see what it may cost them. That doesn't really work as well in tabletop games because, well sometimes the dice can screw you. That means that you can fail a trap due to a bad roll and potentially lose a character, which really doesn't feel good, especially in games that have such deep and time-consuming customization as PF2E does.
Conversely, making traps deal some damage to the party, as many do, isn't especially satisfying either. PF2E approaches combats as puzzles and expects the party to be reasonably full health when approaching them, meaning it's easier to heal up out of combat. That solves the problem of a character dying in an anticlimactic and unsatisfying way, but trivializes most hazards, making you wonder why you'd bother.
Normally the solution to this issue would be to have your hazards work like Teridax said, making the dungeon harder to complete either by making the challenges harder, or by impairing the party so that they are incentivized to look for and solve the hazards rather than tripping them. Resource attricion seems to be what many games settle on hazards being. I'm not sure that really works either though, mostly because many afflictions are built in such a way that they'll last for one combat rather than for a long period of time, like in the prior edition.

[benwilsher18]

gesalt wrote:

#4 always felt like niche protection for legendary perception classes given the proficiency gate on detecting hazards in the first place. Rogues with +1 wis at base have something like a 50/50 chance to detect on-level hazards before the +1/+2 from trap finder. This tracks pretty well with a +3 wis character having the baseline 60% success rate you see across most of pf2e.

The issue is that complex hazards that are an encounter on their own rather than just a side-event in a combat encounter are generally not on-level, they are instead higher level. On top of that, complex hazards typically use the Extreme Stealth DC.

Take the very first hazard encounter in Abomination Vaults for example, which typically is encountered by a level 1 party. Your rogue example is with their +6 bonus is about the highest Perception you can expect at this level, and they would need to roll a 15 or higher to detect it as the DC is 21 - a far lower success rate than 50%.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Hazards.aspx?ID=567

I think failing to spot these sorts of things before they trigger is the norm, not the exception, even with a specialist in the group - and I think that sucks.

[Finoan]

To me it feels like OP has mostly identified the problem correctly. There are some additional constraints that the AP writers are working under as well.

* APs are written once for any possible party composition. Skills used for hazards cannot be tailored to expect characters of a particular type. It is possible for a party to have no characters trained in any given skill.

* There are multiple styles of players - anything from powergamers to casual gamers to heavy roleplayers. Every challenge of any type needs to be able to be handled by all of these types of players.

To summarize, APs have to be written for every table, not just yours.

So, with the problem defined, does anyone have any suggestions?

What recommendations and guidelines would you give to an AP writer so that they can create hazards that every table is going to find to be engaging, fair, challenging, and meaningful to the plot?

[Unicore]

The thing I care most about with hazards not attached to other encounters or challenges is that they narratively accomplish something at least interesting, and hopefully also connected to the larger plot of the adventure. I also will quickly collapse encounters together as a GM when that makes sense, so often a solo trap or hazard becomes a collapsing wave encounter in my campaigns, so when my players find a solo one it often raises tension if it goes off, whether there were any enemies to hear it or not, because the party doesn’t know if there is someone near by planning something nasty now.

I really had fun with the “solo” traps, haunts and hazards in Abomination vaults, for example, because they told a lot of important stories and often would bring nearby scary monsters into play.

As a player, trap finder is one of my favorite feats in the whole game and our parties often try to get it on 2 or more PCs, as we have used trapped rooms against our enemies many times.

[ScooterScoots]

My biggest annoyance is minimum proficiency levels. Sometimes a character who is literally maxing out the skill won’t reach the required proficiency level for an above level trap, which is utterly degenerate design. I don’t think there’s *any* real argument in support of that bullshit.

Even when the traps theoretically could be detected/disarmed by the party if they had a different skill composition for their level, it’s still really dumb. We had a tool for making characters less specialized in that skill less good at disarming/noticing the trap. It was called “not having as much of a bonus to the roll”, and it worked great.

[Squiggit]

To be honest I think hazards are only part of it. Hazards are uniquely problematic because of how much they centralize mechanics (a hazard tends to stand alone a lot) but like-

In general I feel like PF2 APs do a shockingly poor job of thinking through their combats. So many fights lack any dynamic components and tend to be wildly all over the place balance wise.

I was recently chugging through an AP that kept insisting on using encounters with one or two level -1 enemies against a full party of people. So I'd send everyone to a battle mat, they'd all roll initiative, kill the enemy in a single hit before it could take a turn, and then move on. There wasn't even like a narrative pretense or mechanical gimmick to it the creature could only strike for like 1d4-1 damage and had no bearing on the plot.

I've been playing APs since PF1 and across like a dozen of them I think there are maybe like... four or five good encounters across all of them.

For how combat centric the game is there's a shocking lack of thought or effort put into fight design.

Ascalaphus wrote:

I guess that biases me a bit in the direction of simple hazards over complex ones. Or treating complex ones as simple ones as soon as the party finds a solution, like "let's step back out of the area and wait it out".

i think simple hazards make the problem even worse, because a lot of simple hazards are just one shot maybe a party member takes a huge amount of damage and then it's over. The time decreases, but the interestingness craters even more.

For me the best hazards are complex hazards with some interesting gimmick or important narrative feature to them. Since you can kind of play around hazards since they're stationary you want them to be something that entices the group in some way. Simple hazards tend to be the worst at this because it's just like... you open the door and the trap rolls high and now you're at low HP or maybe dying (... hell, one of the early PF2 playtest adventures had a trap that could massive damage someone to death if you found it early).

Finoan wrote:

* APs are written once for any possible party composition. Skills used for hazards cannot be tailored to expect characters of a particular type. It is possible for a party to have no characters trained in any given skill.

This flies in the face of the fact that hazards often have proficiency gating that sometimes means certain parties cannot solve the problem. You can run into a trap that nobody is allowed to detect because nobody decided to play one of the small handful of classes with high proficiency. So that's just not true.

Besides, the solution to that is to make the hazards more dynamic and have more ways to overcome them.

[Unicore]

No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank, at least for traditional dungeon crawling adventures go. The dwarves didn’t need Bilbo Baggins for his back stabbing ability or single target damage potential.

GMs shouldn’t be gleefully sadistic about denying players knowledge about future information about potential threats and encounters, especially starting from session 0, but if there are going to be haunts in a spooky ghost campaign and no one advances religion past trained, that again is a player side choice to make the campaign more challenging than it needed to be. Players don’t have to beat every encounter on their first try to have a a fun and successful campaign.

[Bust-R-Up]

Even if you do spot a hazard, solving or not solving it tends to be equally meaningless. If you fail to solve it, you rest, make a few rolls, and move on. If you do solve it, you spend some time, make a few rolls, and move on. Official material doesn't suggest a living dungeon or any actionable time pressure, so you never come out of a stand-alone hazard down any resources.

So long as healing and recovering focus points cost nothing but time, these types of traps cannot be interesting unless they actually take down a PC and keep the party from healing them for long enough that you have a casualty. Even that would often feel more cheap than engaging.

Traps would be more interesting if they could pick off hirelings and limit how much loot you can recover, if HP and focus points weren't so easily recovered, or if APs were designed with collapsing encounters and time tracks where x minutes spent resting causes some meaningful change in the dungeon that makes continuing more difficult.

[Ascalaphus]

Looks like I touched a nerve when talking about "fast" and "simple" use of hazards, but maybe worth going a bit deeper in on;

Squiggit wrote:

I was recently chugging through an AP that kept insisting on using encounters with one or two level -1 enemies against a full party of people.

So I'd say this is really similar to a not-dangerous-enough trap. It might cause a bit of damage but the outcome is never in any doubt, and if it's isolated enough from other encounters it doesn't make any dent difficulty-wise.

But does that mean such encounters shouldn't exist at all? I don't think so - they CAN be useful writing. For example, you can foreshadow what kind of enemies will show up later in the dungeon by showing a few weaker versions of it. Or you can show their style of combat (sneaky) by showing that they put some traps in the entrance tunnels to their lair.

Also, some easy encounters in between the harder ones help counter the feeling that "PF2 is an unmitigated grind where the PCs are always getting crit straight from full HP to Dying 2" that we've also seen enough complaints about.

---

I think every encounter should serve a purpose. And not all AP encounters really serve a strong purpose, so I do skip some of them. "In this room there's more of those monsters you fought before in that room and that room, so I'm just going to skip this fight" is something I've said many times.

But the purpose doesn't have to be that the encounter itself is a serious challenge. Foreshadowing is a big one. A low stakes encounter to blow off some steam can also be nice.

The hazards I've enjoyed the most are the far-fetched traps that gremlins and goblins set where describing how it even functions and what it does is the best part. That the mechanics are pretty commonplace, that the party can easily step out, isn't such a problem for me. We were entertained for a moment and we didn't commit to too much busywork.

It's kinda the difference between a movie where someone gets hit with a bucket of paint placed on a half-open door, and an Indiana Jones boulder trap scene. Both are hazards, but they're used differently. But both are valid and entertaining.

[Witch of Miracles]

I've had issues with hazards and haunts since I started running the system (and my first foray into that was Malevolence, so I've had more than a few of said issues). The OP has the right of it.

The biggest issue in my experience is that most solo hazard encounters don't seem to consider that the party can just... avoid them. There's usually no reason to interact with them unless you're forced to, and you're rarely forced to, so you don't. The party is informed it's there (or isn't and someone triggers it), and then they just walk around it or something. It's silly.

And like the OP says, even if you don't avoid them they often have no long-term cost. (Malevolence at least does do something about this, to its credit.) They feel like bug bites in too many cases instead of an actual scare, for all the reasons the OP describes.

Hazards as part of another encounter are a different story, obviously. But hazards just in an otherwise empty hallway or room, or along your travel route, just are not the stuff unless they're really really really scary.

[Tridus]

ScooterScoots wrote:

My biggest annoyance is minimum proficiency levels. Sometimes a character who is literally maxing out the skill won’t reach the required proficiency level for an above level trap, which is utterly degenerate design. I don’t think there’s *any* real argument in support of that bullshit.

Yeah, this. "No one in the party is allowed to even notice that hazards exist so you're just going to bumble into all of them" isn't even remotely fun.

Unicore wrote:

No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank, at least for traditional dungeon crawling adventures go. The dwarves didn’t need Bilbo Baggins for his back stabbing ability or single target damage potential.

Players already chafe at the notion that they need to have specific roles and find ways around it, and PF2 tends to enable that to one degree or another. Especially when the thing to find it isn't at all related to the thing related to deal with it and isn't something you can readily train. Like, to say "you need a healer" doesn't mean "you need a Cleric", and there are a ton of ways to do this. But there are very few ways to actually train Perception and they're pretty costly, so you're largely just stuck on that one.

Haunts come to mind on this: AV has a haunt for a level 3 party that requires Expert perception to find, so pretty much every non-Bard spellcaster is already locked out. You can disarm it with Trained Intimidate or Religion though, which those same people that can't find it have a decent chance of having.

It creates this ridiculous situation where a huge swath of classes in the game can deal with this but only after they blindly stumble into it... even if they're actually BETTER at Perception than someone else. Like a Cleric can't find this but due to their high WIS probably has a better Perception modifier than someone that can.

"You're the best person in the party at noticing things but you're not allowed to notice any trap in the game from level 3 on" is unintuitive and feels ridiculous. Especially if it happens to a whole party... and no one is picking a class to play for the entire game on the basis of "well this one has enough perception proficiency that I at least have a chance to see hazards." Hell: new players have absolutely zero chance to even know about that.

[Tridus]

Witch of Miracles wrote:

Hazards as part of another encounter are a different story, obviously. But hazards just in an otherwise empty hallway or room, or along your travel route, just are not the stuff unless they're really really really scary.

Yeah, agreed. Simple hazards that are part of another encounter really mix things up and are downright scary. A bunch of simple arrow launchers is a big deal when you're already fighting and have to watch where you step, but it's basically irrelevant on its own.

This isn't just a hazard problem, though it's usually a hazard problem. Some APs will have you do checks and if you fail you get an encounter or something goes wrong, but it can only happen once per day so it's no real threat. You deal with that, then it can't happen again so you just heal up and move on.

But it happens by far the most often with hazards. Complex hazards either need to be dangerous enough to actually be a threat outright, integrated into another situation, or something that the PCs have an active motivation to engage with. Otherwise they can just deal with it at their leisure and that isn't terribly interesting.

[Bust-R-Up]

Unicore wrote:

No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank, at least for traditional dungeon crawling adventures go. The dwarves didn’t need Bilbo Baggins for his back stabbing ability or single target damage potential.

GMs shouldn’t be gleefully sadistic about denying players knowledge about future information about potential threats and encounters, especially starting from session 0, but if there are going to be haunts in a spooky ghost campaign and no one advances religion past trained, that again is a player side choice to make the campaign more challenging than it needed to be. Players don’t have to beat every encounter on their first try to have a a fun and successful campaign.

Why are we gating the ability to notice things by class at all? Is this really a niche that needed protecting?

[ScooterScoots]

Once again we had a perfectly good tool for incentivizing having someone with high perception in the party: They roll better. You don’t need to do this artificial cutoff thing.

[Ascalaphus]

I think this proficiency gating is a thing they were really high on in the beginning of PF2, and unfortunately didn't get rid of in the remaster. I don't see it used as abundantly as in the beginning but it's still there now and then.

Hazard creation guidelines do suggest not requiring a skill proficiency gate to disable it until at least 2 levels after people first get the chance to pick it up, so that they can still try if they picked it up as their second expert/master skill. But that's of course a bit shaky if you run into an above-level hazard or if a writer doesn't read the guidelines carefully.

I've also had to explain to people a bunch of times that you don't need to be Trained in a skill to Recall Knowledge and that the proficiencies listed in skill descriptions for Trained/Expert/Master/Legendary tasks are just indicators that code for certain DCs, not hard requirements. As if there was any realistic chance of players not finding out that "expert DC" isn't code for DC 20. Which typically isn't even a DC a level 2-3 expert character succeeds at all that reliable anyway.

I really dislike proficiency gates. The best gate is just "that's hard, unless you're seriously proficient, you're going to struggle with the DC".

[Unicore]

I think proficiency gating for tasks exists primarily for the rogue and investigator to have a unique niche, and I am ok with that. A lot of traps and haunts are designed with the expectation they go off. Finding the hazard is already a kind of win because it means they can be evaded. With potentially 4 PC rolling, a DC 20 is actually not that hard of a DC to reach. Again, PCs picking other exploration activities than search is a meaningful choice on PF2 and a big part of why Trap Finder is such a good feat.

Without proficiency gating, every PC pretty much should always be searching in exploration mode. With proficiency gating, there is a reason why that is not just always the best exploration activity.

And as far as stand a lone traps not being meaningful, I don’t really understand why players get to always assume that setting off a trap can’t possibly mean that there is now trouble that is aware of them. If always stoping to rest until healed after every trap is an automatic choice of the players, then something else about the running of the dungeon is broken. This is not something that can easily be written into every single hazard based encounter for every adventure because it is all situational in regards to how the PCs have approached. It is a skill to cultivate as a GM, and it is a skill worth learning. A lot of times advice about their is included in APs and it is unfortunate that advice isn’t getting read. It is really important as a GM to go back and read the text the beginning of a dungeon and to have read through the surrounding rooms before a session begins, or it is really hard to bring a dungeon to life.

[pauljathome]

Unicore wrote:

I think proficiency gating for tasks exists primarily for the rogue and investigator to have a unique niche, and I am ok with that.

I was going to answer precisely this but then I realized that Trap Finder only increases your effective proficiency for DISABLING a trap, not (despite the name) for actually finding it.

So (unless there is another feat that I'm not thinking of) rogues and investigators are only better than most martials at finding traps at some levels and mostly tied with them.

[Tridus]

Ascalaphus wrote:

I think this proficiency gating is a thing they were really high on in the beginning of PF2, and unfortunately didn't get rid of in the remaster. I don't see it used as abundantly as in the beginning but it's still there now and then.

There's cases where it does make sense. You see it mostly with skill feats being gated behind proficiency, but saying "performing emergency surgery to remove demon fungus tendrils from someone's brain requires Master Medicine", I'm pretty okay with that. It's well beyond what basic training could reasonably teach you to do, and it's a skill that anyone could choose to progress if they wanted to.

Perception is a bad one because most classes can do little to nothing about it. Like as soon as a trap requires Master Perception, you've blocked every caster in the game except Bard from finding it... even if they're the ones with the skills to actually deal with it. So a Cleric can't find Haunts even if they're one of the best people on Golarian at dealing with them by being Legendary in the respective skills and thus should logically know what they're looking for... while some random thief who doesn't know what a Haunt is can spot them no problem? Ditto with a Wizard who invests a lot at Thievery and is super good with traps except they aren't allowed to find them while an Investigator who doesn't know anything about traps somehow can?

It just doesn't make sense narratively. It doesn't feel great mechanically either because the options for what to do about it are few and expensive (like Master Spotter in an archetype so multiple feats, or using your Canny Acumen on that and it not coming online until extremely late and thus also not having it for a bad save).

Like, the classes with legendary Perception already have an advantage at this: the bonus from legendary Perception. This isn't something that needs to be further gated. I don't enforce that in my games and if someone was looking for a haunt specifically I'd let them use an appropriate skill (like Religion or Occultism) instead because in that context it makes sense.

[Squiggit]

Unicore wrote:

No one in the party have perception on a fast proficiency track is a choice about as sensible as having no healer or no tank

Anyone can be a healer with a little bit of feat investment in PF2. Having fast proficiency track is a choice of playing one of a very few specific number of classes with very specific mechanics and themes.

If having someone with high proficiency is intended to be an adventuring requirement, Canny Acumen needs to give master perception and legendary at 13.

Telling someone that a party must have a gunslinger or rogue or whatever because someone at Paizo decided to hard gate this one specific type of check is a clown show.

[Unicore]

It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures. Without proficiency gating it takes a while for a rogue’s perception to be better than a wisdom caster. Clerics don’t need to be the trap finders.

The thing about dealing with haunts is that most of them can be dealt with while they are going off. If you catch them before they start you often don’t learn very much about what they are or why they are there.

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

Proficiency gates were a cool idea that have some notable flaws in their execution, and I feel like one of those flaws is that theres not a lot of consistency in what makes those gates feel real. In many cases it seems like the gate is there because the design guidelines suggested it, not because the specific thematics of an element (whether a hazard or other) actually suggest it. Like, ine of the highest level core hazards has almost no chance of missing the hazard because its job is to be a big obvious bomb threat. It doesnt need a level 20 DC with legendary proficiency just because its a top level threat.

Likewise I agree that proficiency gating in something you cant train for sucks. If included at all, it should progress slower than any other gating. Gating seems like it would work best in terms of rewarding you for your training by opening up what you can do, rather than punishing you for not predicting something you couldnt have known you'd need--esp of that something belongs only to a couple classes or doesnt come until a higher level than you are.

Or perhaps. If a disable is going to require a high proficiency, make it only one convenient way to disable the hazard while another narratively appropriate method is available but requires backtracking or finding the bypass. (Unfortunately this doesnt work for detecting hazards still).

[Squiggit]

Unicore wrote:

It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures.

Old D&D had lots of bad rules, yeah. This isn't one that needs to exist anymore.

[Deriven Firelion]

People don't like losing characters to hazards. I think they are mostly put in to include some skill challenges. They made a module named Tomb of Horrors years ago with hazards that were truly dangerous. It was fun for some and a nightmare character killer for others. Hazards are not something people want to do much more than they do. I don't see it changing. If your group would prefer hazards with more danger and meaning, then make it happen. Most groups are happy with the way hazards are right now and barely care if they even put them in a dungeon or module.

[ScooterScoots]

pauljathome wrote:

Unicore wrote:

I think proficiency gating for tasks exists primarily for the rogue and investigator to have a unique niche, and I am ok with that.

I was going to answer precisely this but then I realized that Trap Finder only increases your effective proficiency for DISABLING a trap, not (despite the name) for actually finding it.

So (unless there is another feat that I'm not thinking of) rogues and investigators are only better than most martials at finding traps at some levels and mostly tied with them.

It also only works for thievery, if you’ve got a haunt disabled with religion you’re SOL. Even if you’re a cleric with max wisdom and religion.

[Tridus]

Unicore wrote:

It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures. Without proficiency gating it takes a while for a rogue’s perception to be better than a wisdom caster.

And if no one wants to play a Rogue you... just don't find traps, I guess?

I mean, that's what we did in PF1 if no one wanted to play a class with Trap Finding: we're either using some other trick like summons to try to set traps off ahead of us, or we're just brute forcing all of them because the game wants to impose a class that people don't want to play and people said no. It put the GM in a very awkward position with some of the nastier traps because if a character gets killed by something that they were simply not allowed to find until after they were dead, it leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

It wasn't good game design then to try to force certain classes into every party, and its not good game design now. Especially since PF2 is a lot more flexible in terms of who can be built to do what. This is some vestigal stuff that feels archaic.

Quote:

Clerics don’t need to be the trap finders.

Why not? If someone wants to build to be good at that, why shouldn't they be allowed to do that?

This is like saying Rogues shouldn't be allowed to take Battle Medicine because they don't need to be the healers.

Quote:

The thing about dealing with haunts is that most of them can be dealt with while they are going off. If you catch them before they start you often don’t learn very much about what they are or why they are there.

If finding them doesn't actually matter, then there's no reason to gatekeep who can do it, is there?

[Perpdepog]

Are there any haunts that are perception-gated? That feels real weird just, conceptually.

I can understand a trap being gated behind perception proficiency, even if I'm also not a fan. Traps are meant to be hidden; an obvious trap isn't much of a trap.

Haunts, in contrast, are practically the opposite. Haunts come from spirits or some other presence who is upset and making that upset manifest for some reason. They want to announce themselves. Making it hard to spot a haunt feels like it's going against the spirit, her-der, of the hazard, IMO.

[gesalt]

Unicore wrote:

It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures. Without proficiency gating it takes a while for a rogue’s perception to be better than a wisdom caster. Clerics don’t need to be the trap finders.

And rogues don't need to be better than clerics or animists at detecting haunts, but that ship has sailed. Perception scaling should never have been class based in the first place.

Perpdepog wrote:

Are there any haunts that are perception-gated? That feels real weird just, conceptually.

Not sure if rhetorical or not, but yes, many are gated.

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

Tridus wrote:

to impose a class that people don't want to play and people said no.

My groups have tended to love rogues, but this only further highlights the problem as very few people who have ever wanted to play rogues specifically wanted to pick up the trapfinding abilities (in editions where they may be optional) and didn't dedicate much time or thought toward that role vs. the role of sneak attacker.

[Tridus]

Perpdepog wrote:

Are there any haunts that are perception-gated? That feels real weird just, conceptually.

Yep. One in Chapter 3 (so typically PC level 3) of Abomination Vaults requires Expert Perception. It can be deactivated with Intimidation or Religion.

A pretty wide swath of classes don't have Expert Perception at this point.

Quote:

Haunts, in contrast, are practically the opposite. Haunts come from spirits or some other presence who is upset and making that upset manifest for some reason. They want to announce themselves. Making it hard to spot a haunt feels like it's going against the spirit, her-der, of the hazard, IMO.

Yeah. It just means they don't have any chance to find it before it activates, which is how it announces itself. Whereas the Fighter who knows literally nothing about Haunts can notice that the thing is haunted before that, somehow.

I'm really not a fan.

[Trip.H]

Due to RP / story reasons, I have had my PCs keep going while Drained, and that genuinely adds some tension /drama to the proceedings.
But, that's typically imposed by monsters, and not hazards, lol.

I think adding a new meta trait for debuffs could actually help a lot here.

If there's a [grievous] tag that can get added to a hazards, I think the "back off and sleep, or press on with a penalty" is actually a good ideal to aim for that works within pf2's system. Not many other A or B player choices that are compatible when daily resource spells are a thing.

I think if all kinds of debuffs and conditions could be made -1 p day sticky in the same way as Drained, that would instantly make hazards a lot more interesting.
(and yeah, any GM could add this tag as homebrew, after also tweaking /reworking the hazard where each fail/hit adding a growing +1 enfeebled, etc, is the main dish danger)

Foes putting a trap near the front means that the party who walks into it either needs to back of and rest, giving the foes a day or more of prep time knowing you're there, or to actually let the penalty stick while the party fights through it.

This version even allows for pre-buff, de-buff removal; in case the party wants to burn a resource to suppress the penalty before a boss door.

[grievous] wrote:

A hazard or effect with the grievous trait creates lasting maladies that are particularly hard to mend.

If the effect is grievous, treatments and remedies that would normally remove an effect outright instead only suppress it for 10 minutes. Any roll based removal attempt capable of succeeding normally, will instead automatically suppress the grievous effect.

If a grievous effect does not specify a separate duration, these conditions lessen their detriments by an increment of 1 after a full rest, and are removed when this would reduce it to zero.

[ScooterScoots]

Perpdepog wrote:

Are there any haunts that are perception-gated? That feels real weird just, conceptually.

I can understand a trap being gated behind perception proficiency, even if I'm also not a fan. Traps are meant to be hidden; an obvious trap isn't much of a trap.

Haunts, in contrast, are practically the opposite. Haunts come from spirits or some other presence who is upset and making that upset manifest for some reason. They want to announce themselves. Making it hard to spot a haunt feels like it's going against the spirit, her-der, of the hazard, IMO.

Honestly not sure, but above level haunts can have proficiency requirements to disable above what is possible for a character maxing out the relevant skill.

[Squiggit]

Perpdepog wrote:

I can understand a trap being gated behind perception proficiency, even if I'm also not a fan. Traps are meant to be hidden; an obvious trap isn't much of a trap.

I mean isn't hiding the trap what the dc is for?

Perception gating doesn't mean it's hard to detect the trap, it means you are literally not allowed and utterly incapable of detecting the trap if you decided to play a fighter with a gun instead of a gunslinger even if you beat the dc by 10 or 20 or 50.

Diagetically you can only really describe it as some sort of divine intervention, not the trap being designed more sneakily.

[Teridax]

I feel hazards aren't really such a big part of the game that every party makes sure they get a legendary Perception class just to pass the detection gates. It doesn't seem to make weaker classes like the Gunslinger or Investigator that much more desirable, nor is it really a major reason why strong classes like the Rogue are strong in my opinion. I don't get the feeling removing that gating would meaningfully affect party choices when determining their compositions most of the time.

[Mathmuse]

Unicore wrote:

I think proficiency gating for tasks exists primarily for the rogue and investigator to have a unique niche, and I am ok with that. A lot of traps and haunts are designed with the expectation they go off. Finding the hazard is already a kind of win because it means they can be evaded. With potentially 4 PC rolling, a DC 20 is actually not that hard of a DC to reach. Again, PCs picking other exploration activities than search is a meaningful choice on PF2 and a big part of why Trap Finder is such a good feat.

Without proficiency gating, every PC pretty much should always be searching in exploration mode. With proficiency gating, there is a reason why that is not just always the best exploration activity.

I asked my wife about hazards. She said that they gave the rogue something to do. She had played the trap-finder rogue whom was downed by the Hundred Arrows Trap.

Checking the classes, the ones that start trained in Perception are: Alchemist (expert at 9th), Animist (expert at 9th), Champion (expert at 11th), Cleric (expert at 5th), Druid (expert at 11th), Exemplar (expert at 9th, master at 17th), Guardian (expert at 7th), Inventor (expert at 13th), Kineticist (expert at 9th), Magus (expert at 9th), Monk (expert at 5th), Oracle (expert at 11th), Psychic (expert at 11th and the developers called the increase "Extrasensory Perception <grin>), Sorcerer (expert at 11th), Summoner (expert at 3rd), Witch (expert at 11th), and Wizard (expert at 11th). The ones that start expert in Perception are: Barbarian (master at 17th), Bard (master at 11th), Commander (master at 13th), Fighter (master at 7th), Gunslinger (master at 7th, legendary at 19th), Investigator (master at 7th, legendary at 13th), Ranger (master at 7th, legendary at 15th), Rogue (master at 7th, legendary at 13th), Swashbuckler (master at 11th), and Thaumaturge (master at 9th).

Teridax wrote:

I feel hazards aren't really such a big part of the game that every party makes sure they get a legendary Perception class just to pass the detection gates. It doesn't seem to make weaker classes like the Gunslinger or Investigator that much more desirable, nor is it really a major reason why strong classes like the Rogue are strong in my opinion. I don't get the feeling removing that gating would meaningfully affect party choices when determining their compositions most of the time.

The trend that I notice is that classes that recieve a lot of skills also get expert perception. That feels like that if perception were a skill in PF2, then these people would have used their skill increase on it. An exception is Fighter, a class that recieves training in Acrobatics or Athletics and 3+INT skill, but still gains expert perception. Their promotion to master perception is called Battlefield Surveyor, so the fighter's preception is flavored as battlefield awareness. The Commander class, another expert in perception, says, "You use your keen perception, trained across multiple battlefields, to watch for ambushes and plan tactics that are useful for your current environment." But the similar Monk and Magus classes start with only trained perception, until 5th level and 9th level respectively.

Gunslinger is another anomaly. I recall that in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign, the gunslinger Boffin used a character trait (sort of a mini-feat) to gain Disable Device as a class skill and served the rogue lock-picking role in that campaign. Maybe gunslingers are thematically similar to rogues.

As for the hazards' proficiency gates, let me sample the simple hazards in GM Core:
Hidden Pit 0 Stealth DC 18 (no minimum),
Snowfall 0 Stealth DC 16 (trained),
Hampering Web 1 Stealth DC 18 (expert),
Poisoned Lock 1 Stealth DC 17 (trained),
Slamming Door 1 Stealth DC 17 (trained),
Poisonous Mold 2 Stealth DC 21 (trained),
Spear Launcher 2 Stealth DC 20 (trained),
Electric Latch Rune 3 Stealth DC 20 (trained),
Scythe Blades 4 Stealth DC 23 (trained),
Titanic Flytrap 4 Stealth DC 25 (trained),
Fireball Rune 5 Stealth DC 24 (expert),
Spectral Reflection 5 Stealth DC 26 (expert),
Ghostly Choir 6 Stealth DC 20 (expert),
Hallucination Powder Trap 6 Stealth DC 24 (expert),
Pharaoh's Ward 7 Stealth DC 25 (expert),
Bottomless Pit 9 Stealth DC 30 or detect magic (no minimum),
Bloodthirsty Urge 10 Stealth DC 31 (trained),
Hammer of Forbiddance 11 Stealth DC 30 (expert),
Polymorph Trap 12 Stealth DC 34 (trained),
Planar Rift 13 Stealth DC 35 (trained),
Vorpal Executioner 19 Stealth DC 43 (expert),
Armageddon Orb 23 Stealth DC 10 or detect magic (no minimum).

Out of the 22 hazards, only 8 require expert perception, including Vorpal Executioner at 19th level well after everyone is expert. The difference between trained and no minimum is, "If the hazard doesn’t list a minimum proficiency rank, [the GM should] roll a secret Perception check against the hazard’s Stealth DC for each PC. For hazards with a minimum proficiency rank, roll only if someone is actively searching (using the Search activity while exploring or the Seek action in an encounter), and only if they have the listed proficiency rank or higher." Requiring characters to be actively Seeking is a big obstacle for a hazard where no-one expects a hazard.

No proficiency gates required master in the above list. Let me check the complex traps, too.
Summoning Rune 1 Stealth +7 (trained)
Drowning Pit 3 Stealth +10 (trained); DC 22 (expert) to notice the water spouts once the pit opens
Quicksand 3 Stealth +12 (trained),
Spinning Blade Pillar 4 Stealth +11 (trained) or DC 26 (expert) to notice the control panel
Wheel of Misery 6 Stealth +16 (expert) to detect the magical sensor; noticing the wheel has a DC of 0
Eternal Flame 7 Stealth +18 (expert),
Confounding Betrayal 8 Stealth +21 (expert),
Poisoned Dart Gallery 8 Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (master) to notice the control panel
Flensing Blades 12 Stealth +25 (expert),
Dance of Death 16 Stealth +32 (master).

That lists two hazards spotted only by master proficiency, though I am confused how, "Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (master)," is supposed to work. For hazards like Spinning Blade Pillar and Wheel of Misery the hazard is obvious, but the deactivation switch requires Seeking.

[Perpdepog]

gesalt wrote:

Unicore wrote:

It is about as classical a fantasy trope as there can be that you bring a rogue to a dungeon to find traps and secret treasures. Without proficiency gating it takes a while for a rogue’s perception to be better than a wisdom caster. Clerics don’t need to be the trap finders.

And rogues don't need to be better than clerics or animists at detecting haunts, but that ship has sailed. Perception scaling should never have been class based in the first place.

Perpdepog wrote:

Are there any haunts that are perception-gated? That feels real weird just, conceptually.

Not sure if rhetorical or not, but yes, many are gated.

It wasn't rhetorical. I was genuinely asking, thanks.

[Deriven Firelion]

Squiggit wrote:

Perpdepog wrote:

I can understand a trap being gated behind perception proficiency, even if I'm also not a fan. Traps are meant to be hidden; an obvious trap isn't much of a trap.

I mean isn't hiding the trap what the dc is for?

Perception gating doesn't mean it's hard to detect the trap, it means you are literally not allowed and utterly incapable of detecting the trap if you decided to play a fighter with a gun instead of a gunslinger even if you beat the dc by 10 or 20 or 50.

Diagetically you can only really describe it as some sort of divine intervention, not the trap being designed more sneakily.

I think they want to make Legendary perception mean something.

But if a fighter or other class, you can take rogue archetype, pick up Trapfinder, then get a Master perception with a Canny Acumen, and you can search for Legendary perception traps. It's one of the many reasons the rogue archetype is the best archetype in the game for its many useful purposes.

[pauljathome]

Deriven Firelion wrote:

But if a fighter or other class, you can take rogue archetype, pick up Trapfinder, then get a Master perception with a Canny Acumen, and you can search for Legendary perception traps. It's one of the many reasons the rogue archetype is the best archetype in the game for its many useful purposes.

How does a character with Master Perception find legendary gated perception traps? Trap Finder lets them DISARM them, NOT find them

[Deriven Firelion]

pauljathome wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

But if a fighter or other class, you can take rogue archetype, pick up Trapfinder, then get a Master perception with a Canny Acumen, and you can search for Legendary perception traps. It's one of the many reasons the rogue archetype is the best archetype in the game for its many useful purposes.

How does a character with Master Perception find legendary gated perception traps? Trap Finder lets them DISARM them, NOT find them

My bad. I guess you're screwed if you don't have a Legendary perception character with you. Paizo should probably fix that as forcing a group to have a Legendary perception character is not great given there are only three that have it and not everyone wants to play those classes every time.

[Unicore]

I mean any party can deal with traps by having someone stumble into them and just focus on being able to make saves or risk summons or pets instead of PCs. The party never needs to find every hazard. There are just a couple of classes that are really good at it.

The only haunt my parties have ever encountered that they couldn’t handle at the level we encountered it was a certain vision of Dahahk, that is there to make the coming and going back and forth between two places very difficult for several levels. I think the party tolerance for how difficult and dangerous hazards should be is something that can vary immensely between tables. But I feel like it should get covered in session 0 pretty often under a general conversation about character death and how players feel about the lethality of adventures. If the party doesn’t seem keen on “our characters might die randomly due to just bad luck,” then it is probably a good idea to either dial hazards down a level or two, remove many of them, or be heavy handed with foreshadowing their existence.

[ScooterScoots]

The party won’t find every hazard even with legendary perception characters. The problem is that as is many won’t even get the chance. They can’t even roll lucky, they just don’t get to.

[Ascalaphus]

Trip.H wrote:

Due to RP / story reasons, I have had my PCs keep going while Drained, and that genuinely adds some tension /drama to the proceedings.

But, that's typically imposed by monsters, and not hazards, lol.

(...)

Yeah like you said, Drained does that, Doomed does as well, but many conditions are about encounter-sized, like Sickened. Or HP damage really.

Something I've seen a few times in PFS scenarios is a "if you fail this part of the skill challenge, you're Sickened and you can't try to reduce it until the next combat has started". Although a bit artificial, it did work reasonably well.