| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
A recent discussion in the thread Need help with spell casters raised the question of what makes Pathfinder combat meaningful. I feel that that topic deserves its own thread.
The actual problem might not even be the class balancing, but the encounter design our GM prefers. Our GM does not like meaningless combat. Which means fights need to be dangerous to a certain extend. Also book keeping lots of enemies is not really fun for the GM. It drags the length of combat. So in practice this often means we have 3 to 4 combats per adventuring day. Almost every combat is atleast a severe difficulty encounter with a few enemies of party level or fewer enemies above party level. Enemies of party level -1 we see rarely. Party level -2 enemies I have never seen in any serious encounter.If GM is repeatedly applying Severe Encounters...
Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters have a good chance to defeat. These encounters are appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Use severe encounters carefully—there's a good chance a character could die, and a small chance the whole group could. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open....then what you describe is the system working as intended.
Perhaps your best argumentation is asking them: Q) Does avoiding "meaningless combat" mean every fight must be a "final boss"?
Seisuke stated that their GM believes that combat has to be dangerous to be meaningful, so the GM skips Trivial-, Low-, and Moderate-Threat combats.
I myself base the severity of combat on the setting. If the party is entering an enemy castle by climbing a wall and fighting the guards on watch atop the wall, then the guards are probably Low Threat because they were just keeping watch. When the party descends to the courtyard, all the soldiers in the castle have reacted and regrouped. so the party will face a Severe-Threat or Extreme-Threat challenge. I explained my philosophy in Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters, comment #2.
Raiztt raised the question of meaningful combat in that Encounter Balance thread at comment #58:
So, this is a sprawling discussion of math and balance, but I notice that something very important to encounter design is absent:
Is the encounter fun or engaging?
As a DM of almost 20 years, I can say that after you've figured out your math you've still got several important things to consider:
1.) Enemy motivation/goals - Alternate Lose Conditions
2.) Player motivations/goals - Alternate Win Conditions
3.) Unusual or impactful terrain
4.) Interactables
5.) Diverse enemy types/abilitiesWithout one or more of these elements, no matter how perfectly tuned your encounter is, it will be boring.
Numbers 1 and 2 are especially important. When I'm creating an encounter, I make sure that the encounter matters beyond whether or not the PCs live or die. If you're going to be running a long campaign, you need to have ways for your PCs to 'lose' that does not involve a TPK and the campaign ending.
I piggyback the importance of the combat encounter on the party's mission. I remember a time in the module Forest of Spirits when the party was supposed to go deep underground below the House of Withered Blossoms to investigate a mystery. The house itself was occupied by hostiles, but the party sent their stealthy characters inside and eavesdropped to learn that the hostiles had nothing to do with the mystery. So they skipped the house itself and went directly underground. Combat in the aboveground house would have been a waste of time and resources in my players' opinion.
Another time in Spoken on the Song Wind, second module in Strength of Thousands, they decided to conduct a sting operation to capture some robbers stealing musical instruments from street buskers. They teamed up with some buskers, advertised a performance by the buskers, and blended into the crowd. They jumped the robbers, captured two immediately, and sent their familiars to follow the others to their hideout. The plot as written in the module simply had them Gathering Information to locate the hideout, but my players' idea was more fun. This was an easy combat, because they caught only the two weakest robbers and others would rather escape than fight, but it was very meaningful. Further details are available at Virgil Tibbs, Playtest Runesmith, comment #8.
By Raiztt's five points, the robbers' motive was to grab loot and escape. Some failed at that and some thought they succeeded. The player characters' motives were to identify and capture the robbers, and they were on the path to success. The escapes were only a temporary setback because they had planned for their stealthy familiars to follow. The unusual terrain was a marketplace full of people, so no Fireballs. The robbers interacted with the loot, which was a cheap drum off to the side disguised as an expensive drum via Item Facade. This encounter had some fairly ordinary robbers, but due to the playtest I added a playtest necromancer at the hideout as an ally of the robbers.
On the other hand, the battle at the hideout was a Severe-Threat encounter. The module set it up as three separate encounters: Low Threat against the two missing robbers, Low Threat against the third robber, and Moderate Threat against the fourth robber, but I grouped the last two together and added the necromancer. It came out as only Severe Threat because the party had seven members and the playtest runesmith. I figured the battle would be more meaningful with the robbers fighting side by side.
When is a combat meaningful to your characters?
Depends on the character, player and situation. Sometimes being a badass is fun, sometimes failing a side objective is engaging, sometimes struggling and overcome something is satisfying. Sometimes it's the die rolls, sometimes it's the banter and sometimes it's the consequences of your actions.
Running an AP is often less enjoyable unless the GM alters combats because having a good variety of challenges that include things your good against and some your not is needed. Every combat being similar, IE only small numbers of +1 or +2 enemies per encounter, fails to give variety that spreads the challenge around. Having secondary or environmental concerns also add healthy complications to encounters.
Getting to know what the characters can do and who your players are to provide entertaining combats is part of a GMs challenge.
Currently for me both my ranger and summoner feel good when they can use their abilities. My ranger mostly just sneaks about and turrets, so getting stealth and hitting two bow shots while my dino gets two hits in is the highlight of my turns. While my summoner prevented a down from a crit and managed to do some nice aoe damage so felt nice and useful.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Putting meaningfulness aside, I'm more concerned with whether or not the combat is interesting, both as a player and as a gm, regardless of system.
I've long since found that, without a lot going against the party, moderates and below are simply unengaging from a combat execution perspective. They can be handled entirely on autopilot without a single daily resource being spent. That isn't to say that they can't be interesting or meaningful on a narrative level, but in that case there's no need to bother with the combat engine either.
Speaking purely as a player, the advice I see some people give about throwing in lows and such to make the players feel good is positively insulting. The ttrpg equivalent of "this meeting could have been an email."
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Putting meaningfulness aside, I'm more concerned with whether or not the combat is interesting, both as a player and as a gm, regardless of system.
I've long since found that, without a lot going against the party, moderates and below are simply unengaging from a combat execution perspective. They can be handled entirely on autopilot without a single daily resource being spent. That isn't to say that they can't be interesting or meaningful on a narrative level, but in that case there's no need to bother with the combat engine either.
My wife says that Moderate-Threat encounters are her opportunity to experiment with new tactics. The Severe-Threat encounters are challenging and require proven good tactics, but she discovers the good tactics for her current character at their current level by experimenting.
Speaking purely as a player, the advice I see some people give about throwing in lows and such to make the players feel good is positively insulting. The ttrpg equivalent of "this meeting could have been an email."
Sometimes, I throw a formerly difficult monster, which had been Level+2 on the first encounter, at the party after they have leveled up so that the monster is Level-1. This is to show them how much they have improved.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Running an AP is often less enjoyable unless the GM alters combats because having a good variety of challenges that include things your good against and some your not is needed. Every combat being similar, IE only small numbers of +1 or +2 enemies per encounter, fails to give variety that spreads the challenge around. Having secondary or environmental concerns also add healthy complications to encounters.
Getting to know what the characters can do and who your players are to provide entertaining combats is part of a GMs challenge.
I have to routinely alter adventure paths because I run oversized parties of seven PCs. Against multiple enemies, I can simply add more enemies, but a combat against a single boss requires leveling up the boss or adding minions or having merely a Moderate-Threat encounter with the boss. Spoken in the Song Wind had two plot lines with separate final bosses. I swapped the order of the adventure, so they hit the 9th-level boss at 6th level and the 8th-level boss at 7th level. The challenge of the 8th-level rogue boss changed. Instead of stationary combat, he ran and hid in the forest. They had to spread out to find him, leaving them in a tactically more awkward situation where he could gain sneak attacks from hiding.
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Putting meaningfulness aside, I'm more concerned with whether or not the combat is interesting, both as a player and as a gm, regardless of system.
I've long since found that, without a lot going against the party, moderates and below are simply unengaging from a combat execution perspective. They can be handled entirely on autopilot without a single daily resource being spent. That isn't to say that they can't be interesting or meaningful on a narrative level, but in that case there's no need to bother with the combat engine either.
Speaking purely as a player, the advice I see some people give about throwing in lows and such to make the players feel good is positively insulting. The ttrpg equivalent of "this meeting could have been an email."
I think it's a useful point to look at for this discussion. "Meaningful" and "interesting" aren't exactly the same thing. "Interesting" could also be replaced by "fun" maybe. Why is a combat fun? It could be fun because it's meaningful, but it could also be fun because it's got just the right amount of difficulty for you to feel challenged.
I think a combat can be "moderate" or "low" and still be interesting, and the combat engine actually being a decent engine for the situation, but then it has to be something different than just "here's a small featureless room, now everyone tries to kill each other".
For example, maybe the real goal of the combat is to free some prisoners, which are tied up on a high ledge. The enemies aren't that impressive to the PCs, could just be a low threat if the PCs are fighting them directly. But there's a lot of climbing and difficult terrain in between and there's extreme time pressure because the monsters can execute helpless prisoners. So players may need to come up with "inefficient" approaches like spending spell slots to translocate there, or come up with clever plans for sneaking up or luring out the enemy by sending only one PC out to look like easy prey.
---
Now, this is unusual. Most Low difficulty fights aren't set up so interestingly. But to compare; "this meeting could have been an email" because there weren't interesting points on the agenda, vs. because the people at the meeting weren't powerful VIPs. You can absolutely have a very good meeting with low-ranking people who are well-informed and came prepared with good talking points. Meanwhile, some meetings with VIPs who didn't really have anything particular to say can just be a ceremony that you have to do because they're important but it also feels like a waste of time.
Personally I actually feel quite aggravated about encounters that are quite hard but don't really do much in the story. There was just a really hard monster here just because. It wasn't a significant individual, they just needed another encounter to reach a total XP budget and this was the monster of the right creature type closest to the target level that they hasn't used yet.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Combats are meaningful if they drive the story and/or provide a challenge.
1. You can have a bunch of weak combatants letting the players flex if the job is to intimidate a bunch of low challenge enemies to make the PCs look tough and send a message to the bad guys or to carve a path into enemy headquarters that eats some resources as they make their way to the BBEG.
2. Hunting down some huge monster that is a challenge, but isn't necessarily integral to the story. More of a side quest tossed in to break up the monotony.
For the challenge, I try to get a real good feel for the PCs capabilities then ramp the challenge to the point of pushing them to the brink of death. I want the PCs to feel like they could have died. If my PCs are saying things like, "I thought were going to die" or "I didn't think we would make it", but they still win then the goal is accomplished.
What I don't bother with is encounters with no meaningful reason to exist. I'm not a big fan of sandboxes. I much prefer story driven games with combats deriving from the story. Sandbox encounters I often handwave is I know they will be no real challenge and have no meaningful story addition.
I like to collapse lots of encounters in quick succession so as to strain party resources and really make them feel pressed like a real battle would. Very little downtime. Hit the enemy hard and fast or get hit hard and fast. I can't see why enemies would let a party prepare to destroy them or recover resources rather than press them.
I like to give the enemy the necessary resources to mount a challenge. If intelligent enemies, then adding caster and healing support like a PC party would have. If a huge monster, then boosts it CR or hit points to withstand concentrated attack long enough to be a threat.
You want the fight in the mind's eye to mirror a fantasy novel or game or action movie where the PCs win, but also know the stakes are high and the danger is real.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think the notion of meaningful combat here isn't unitary: a combat encounter can be meaningfully enjoyable and tactically engaging, but meaningless to the narrative of an adventure, just as a narratively meaningful battle can feel meaningless on a gameplay level if the encounter is trivial or excessively samey. One of the major issues underpinning the other thread was that Seisuke's GM appeared to be treating Pathfinder's encounters like a single-speed system, when in practice combat offers many ways of being fine-tuned to the party's tastes: contrary to general expectations, making those encounters easier could likely have made them more meaningful by virtue of making them less frustrating, but even within that same difficulty range, changing enemy distributions and levels would also have made combat more diverse, and given that player's character a bigger chance to shine.
For me, there are many ways in which an encounter can be made more meaningful, whether by making it more mechanically interesting or tying it more to the narrative: ideally, a meaningful encounter should introduce something that invites the party to play a bit differently during combat, whether it be an enemy's special ability, inter-enemy synergy, or an environmental feature, as well as introduce an element to the narrative that gets the party to think about how the encounter fits into the story: even a bog-standard encounter against some low-level skeletons can be meaningful if this is the party's first time dealing with the skeletons' resistances that adventure, and if the skeletons serve as foreshadowing that the party's going to be dealing with more necromancy later on. So long as the encounter adds something to the session, it has some degree of meaning, and the more it can be tied to the story and made interesting for the party to fight, the better.
|
I don't think doing low threat encounters one after another is a lot of fun, but dominating enemies without having to get out the biggest spells can be rewarding from time to time.
Combats that required all the tactics, ressources and tricks and still were very close tend to be remembered the longest, but they are also exhausting both in-character and as a player.
Being integrated into a/the story is a defintive plus, of course!
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
As you've already touched upon, combat is the means for an entirely different end.
It's about having fun, but to be more specific, combat is storytelling. This is why genuine risk of PC death can sustain the tension and stakes for many people. Part of that fun is the *lack* of agency in the RNG dice-rolls. Dice are a chaos element that disrupts expectations, so the story "writes itself" against the will of the participants, GM included.
The biggest tension that takes away from combat being a fun storytelling tool is that of time and pacing. Slowing things down to roll initiative and conduct combat is appropriate when there is real danger or narrative stakes like hostages, etc, but this also means that it is "overkill" to actually engage in combat vs weaker foes, or petty scuffles much of the time.
This is where playing via Foundry is not a pure plus anymore, as while it can make things faster for the GM in normal combats, it also raises the setup floor required to make an encounter happen.
A VTT like Foundry most especially makes improvised pseudo combat a harder thing to pull off, as the GM scrambles for a map, tokens etc.
I have never seen nor heard of a GM who has set up a "theater of the mind" Foundry ~map where you can still use its automation for actions and rolls, but specifically does not use a battle map.
_____________________
To bring it back around to the topic:
Combat is meaningful when it makes a difference to the story being told. If in hindsight there was no change, no new, then the combat might as well have not existed.
This change can be something mechanistic like a PC being killed, but I'd argue most of the time that's not where the meaning comes from. It's far more likely that combat is progressing a story, and not just the central plot thread of an AP.
A PC getting tired and frustrated, then crossing a personal moral line, is an example of meaning created by combat. Even something as simple as trying out a new planned tactic in combat adds meaning; either a success or fail both "add new text" to that player/PCs own story.
This is also why I get so bothered by crappy AP writing that forgets this. If you're there to get a McGuffin, writers must not have that be the sole "new," because that's the one bit of progress or "story" that's locked in as certain, it's very hard to write those checklist tasks in a way that gives them meaning. I'm still salty about the Vesicant Egg being so irrelevant that it may not even meet the threshold to be a McGuffin.
The PCs are expected to win, so it's the context of fights, all those uncertain variables, that creates the most meaning.
If the AP writes that some petty criminals instantly jump to "kill them all" murder-on-sight, that changes the meaning. If the AP expects the party to then kill all the petty criminals and loot the place for themselves, that is imposing story onto the players that they may find distasteful.
The writers of SoT often fail to understand that combat is a delivery vehicle for meaning, and that if the writer fails to select /create a meaning, something unintended is still going to be delivered.
We just had yet another "I cannot believe they wrote this" plot development in SoT, but I'll refrain from cluttering this thread. Might sit on the itch enough to get me to post in another thread about it. Makes me wonder how many folks actually played SoT up to L14 before glazing it.
Stolen Fate and Gatewalkers both did a much, much better job.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Combat also doesn't have to mean getting the other team all down to 0 hp. From recent PFS examples:
I get lucky with a crit and one-shot the boss of a group of thugs in the first round of combat after saying stylish*, thugs all give up.
Encounter with a un underground room full of cultists with a narrow entrance, and I have Igneogenesis and immediately wall them in, cultists all give up.
Room with a few sleeping guards, and I'm a sneaky character with manacles; I cuff them to their beds and skip the combat part entirely.
Easy combats are perfect opportunities for a little improv.
* I pointed with a finger gun, said "Bang", and cast Needle Darts, and down they went. :3
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think easy combats can be fun, in the same way that a candy bar can be fun without being memorable or meaningful. Meaningfulness is one way a combat can be fun but not the only one.
For example, you run into some goods working for the BBEG and they bluster for a bit and insult your party. And then you decide you've had enough and show them how painfully outclassed they are. This can be a really satisfying little fight without being truly challenging.
I do think the amount of set-up to make a combat makes a big difference. If a combat is over faster than it took to roll initiative, if some players didn't even get a turn, that tends to be lackluster. This does vary a lot by method of play, as Trip.H points out. If the GM can quickly sketch out a battle mat and get everyone in initiative that lowers the barrier for a fight to have the potential to be fun. Some of that is easier on VTT and some of it is harder.
---
On the other hand, "does the party survive the high level monster" is a meaningful stake, but it does get old. What I'm thinking about is also, that it enables lazy encounter design. Stakes like that start out very basic: the encounter is challenging because the monster has high numbers.
Encounters with different stakes often already hint at a less-lazy design. "Can we save the hostages" or "can we stop the countdown while attacked by waves of enemies" suggests a lot more about layout of the battlefield, positions of enemies and overall that the players have to split their efforts between fighting and doing other things.
You can use interesting terrain with a boss monster too, but you're not automatically forced to think about it.
---
Especially as a spellcaster, high-level enemies are often frustrating. Using your best spells early and seeing them bounce off a critical save is not great. Spending multiple rounds figuring out what save to target before committing to a big spell is also painful. Yeah, missing as a martial is also frustrating, but it's more frustrating when you're spending a limited resource.
High level enemies can be fair and balanced fights. The action economy of the party means they get many shots, some of which get through, and this eventually wins them the fight. But I don't find that very fun. I'd rather have the same XP budget of more mid-level enemies that we have less action advantage against, but more of our spells get through.
Now, interesting encounter design and stakes are a different way of adding challenge. Spending the XP budget of a Moderate fight on enemies, you could set up a fight in flat simple terrain, or in a complicated situation where the players also have to deal with the terrain and spend actions untying hostages and so forth. That does make it harder than typical for a Moderate fight. BUT, it makes it harder without inflating enemy numbers. So we have challenge and interest with less of the frustration of "the GM always picks high level monsters and they always crit on saves against my spells".
I believe, as it was raised in the other thread, that the GM is confusing "meaningful" with "difficult."
This was a common attitude during D&D 3.x/PF1e because of the way character optimization often made APL +3 combats "challenging" (what would be considered moderate encounters in PF2e) and APL +2 or lower combats "easy." However, PF2e's rating of encounters is much more accurate; even Paizo initially skewed encounter difficulty too high in Age of Ashes (from the feedback on the AP) before getting a better feel for the system.
Combat is meaningful when it makes a difference to the story being told. If in hindsight there was no change, no new, then the combat might as well have not existed.
I also believe that combat is for generating story, but sometimes the piece of the story is very small. I am currently running Hurricane's Howl. The module began well with the party traveling to the ruins of Bloodsalt for archaeology. It had two encounters on the road through the jungle to Bloodsalt. The story of the encounter against animals was only, "The jungle is dangerous." The story of the encounter with a small bandit gang is that the bandits were fleeing because a bigger bandit gang, the Knights of Abendego, wanted to absorb them. That was a moment of foreshadowing. My party laughed at them (the double-sized party reduced an intended Severe 8 down to Low 8) and gave them a map to Whitebridge Station where maybe they could find semi-honest work with the Aspis Consortium.
In addition, this journey was also the party's first time camping out at night and setting up watch, so I gave them a night encounter, too. It was only Trivial Threat, but the two PCs on watch had to deal with it alone for a round and protect the champion's mount from being eaten.
Putting meaningfulness aside, I'm more concerned with whether or not the combat is interesting, both as a player and as a gm, regardless of system.
="Deriven Firelion"] Combats are meaningful if they drive the story and/or provide a challenge.
Sometimes a combat is meaningful as a challenge rather than as part of the plot. This still builds story, but the story is about how the PCs handled the challenge. The way a PC fights can reveal their personality. The encounter during night watch had nothing to do with the plot of Hurricane's Howl, but it did relate to the overall Strength of Thousands story of the PCs graduating from students to researchers at the Magaambya Academy and learning practical field work.
And if an encounter would amuse my players, I will try to fit it into the story in some way.
|
This is something I've really struggled with in my campaigns. I was certainly just going "Oh here's some guys, beat them up", and it gets stale.
I actually took a lot of inspiration from Balder's Gate 3, which I think tackles this problem quite well, especially given 5e's more limited ruleset when it comes to monster design. While it still undeniably has filler fights, the game takes pains to vary combat as much as it can by introducing varied combat environments. It's pretty rare to have a large square room with no difficult terrain, traps, verticality, etc.
So to me, a "meaningful" combat encounter has come to mean one that introduces something new or interesting for the players (and me, the GM) to interact with. This can be interesting terrain, a monster with a unique ability, or a different objective to the combat outside of just killing the enemies.
For example, a recent combat encounter I had involved an almost "king-of-the-hill" aspect, as the enemies and the PCs battled to control a harpoon cannon on a docked boat. It really let the athletics-focused barbarian shine, as shove became instantly more valuable.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I believe, as it was raised in the other thread, that the GM is confusing "meaningful" with "difficult."
TBH I think this is reinforced somewhat by how the game is presented. When's the last time an AP had a combat that wasn't just fighting a group of enemies in a box? Tougher is basically the only knob some GMs might realize exists.
For being such a combat focused game it's weird to me how little PF2 considers environmental design or alternative objectives or monster gimmicks when presenting combat design.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Some of the most interesting and meaningful combats I have run did two main things. And this is in agreement with a lot of the posts so far.
1 The story did not stop just because initiative was rolled.
2 Combat included goals of interest for the players. Things they wanted to or needed to achieve that they had a stake in.
I think challenging combat can be fun, but its not necessary for the combat to be interesting or meaningful.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I believe, as it was raised in the other thread, that the GM is confusing "meaningful" with "difficult."TBH I think this is reinforced somewhat by how the game is presented. When's the last time an AP had a combat that wasn't just fighting a group of enemies in a box? Tougher is basically the only knob some GMs might realize exists.
For being such a combat focused game it's weird to me how little PF2 considers environmental design or alternative objectives or monster gimmicks when presenting combat design.
There's an idea that I've been wanting to try out for this.
Make flash cards with the specific rules for environmental things, specially the ones that you don't use all that often because they're hard to remember. Like hazardous terrain for example.
When preparing an encounter, draw 1-3 cards and commit to designing the encounter to include your draw from the random terrain deck. Then when actually running the encounter, put the reminder card on the table so everyone can easily reference the rules.
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
One thing to keep in mind that there is another entity at the table that gets to influence how interesting a combat is. The GM does NOT have anything like total control and neither do the players.
The dice also get a say in things.
We've all been in a moderate encounter that became exceedingly hard (sometimes actually threatening characters or a TPK, or even achieving that) when there was some combination of the players dice going very, very cold and the GMs dice running very, very hot.
And conversely we've all been in the Severe or Extreme encounter that became much easier or even trivial when the dice decided that they wanted to stress the R in RNG.
So as a GM I don't try TOO hard to find the right balance. As long as I'm sort of kind of close the dice will often make things exciting, if things are too hard the dice can save me (one of my super powers is to have my dice as a GM turn utterly, utterly cold at exactly the right time to stop a TPK. Even when physical dice are rolled openly at the table).
Its one of the reasons why a series of Moderate encounters often work
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I believe, as it was raised in the other thread, that the GM is confusing "meaningful" with "difficult."TBH I think this is reinforced somewhat by how the game is presented. When's the last time an AP had a combat that wasn't just fighting a group of enemies in a box? Tougher is basically the only knob some GMs might realize exists.
For being such a combat focused game it's weird to me how little PF2 considers environmental design or alternative objectives or monster gimmicks when presenting combat design.
Well, my party is currently outdoors in Hurricane's Howl, so technically they are not in a box. However, the map the module provided for the most recent battle was a 175-foot by 120-foot rectangle of grass with two trees, one big rock, and an extinguished campfire. It might as well have been a box. The starlit-span magus Zandre prefers to shoot from hiding, but the only cover he had was the rock. I regretted that I had not provided a map with better terrain.
For example, for the encounter before that, I had uploaded a map of a full 12-tent camp with supplies, campfires, and lookout sites from the Internet. And before that, I uploaded a map of an 80-foot wide river because I had put bandits and their captives on a boat on the Terwa River rather than on foot as the module had. The players got ahead of the bandits via Umbral Journey/Shadow Walk, scryed their approach with Scrying Ripples, and ambushed them from shore.
A meaningful character story in that battle is the tengu bard JInx Fuun, who grew up on an oceangoing ship, flew over to the boat and took control of the rudder. She was a better sailor than the bandits.
An upcoming map called "Crossing the River" put an angry elite behemoth hippopotamus in a 20-foot-wide creek that they called the Terwa River. Yeah, the so-called river was only 5 feet wider than the hippopotamus. I moved that hippopotamus to the boat encounter where it caught up late in the battle. The party calmed it down after it ate a bandit. The champion had been shoving bandits off the boat.
|
|
One thing to keep in mind that there is another entity at the table that gets to influence how interesting a combat is. The GM does NOT have anything like total control and neither do the players.
The dice also get a say in things.
We've all been in a moderate encounter that became exceedingly hard (sometimes actually threatening characters or a TPK, or even achieving that) when there was some combination of the players dice going very, very cold and the GMs dice running very, very hot.
And conversely we've all been in the Severe or Extreme encounter that became much easier or even trivial when the dice decided that they wanted to stress the R in RNG.
So as a GM I don't try TOO hard to find the right balance. As long as I'm sort of kind of close the dice will often make things exciting, if things are too hard the dice can save me (one of my super powers is to have my dice as a GM turn utterly, utterly cold at exactly the right time to stop a TPK. Even when physical dice are rolled openly at the table).
Its one of the reasons why a series of Moderate encounters often work
This is a good point. I've seen enough Moderate encounters that turned out routine and easy, but also enough of them that were a lot harder than expected.
There's a notorious situation in a level 5 PFS scenario where the party of pregens runs into a black pudding (level 7 creature) which on the face of it is just a moderate encounter. And yet many reviews listed it as an absolutely unreasonable killer encounter. There's some reasons for that;
- The rogue, barbarian and fighter pregens all prefer slashing and piercing weapons, and don't have backup bludgeoning weapons, except their fists. Although the rogue is a thief rogue, at the time of publication they didn't add their dex to unarmed strike damage yet.
- This was an introductory scenario, so a lot of people are still figuring out how PF2 even works.
Which, you know, is not too different from a not super experienced group of players in an AP.
On the other hand, savvy players might say "feh, Moderate isn't so hard" and react appropriately;
- The wizard has enough fireballs at hand
- The wizard has a +1 striking staff that the martials can borrow
- The ooze doesn't have high AC and can be taken down by just going all-out with bare fists and pretending MAP doesn't exist
- With some luck you might also just pick up a backup weapon with what little spare cash you do have
- Falling back 1-2 rooms to a narrower spot helps against oozes that get split off spawning within actual attack reach of the party
The point to all of this is that Moderate encounters aren't objectively hard or easy. There's a lot that isn't captured in the monster numbers;
- dice luck
- player skill
- attrition due to resources spent on previous encounters
- terrain (for example, an underwater fight can be a lot harder)
- distance (when you need to spend a lot of actions getting to enemies while they do stuff at range)
- story related "busywork" (untying hostages, crowds that need calming, other things that demand you to spend actions on other things than fighting enemies)
Some of this is planned extra difficulty, but usually not officially priced into the "Moderate" label.
I think we should try doing a lot more with these things because they're ways to make combats different and interesting, and also to make them challenging, but without having to use high level monsters with high DCs all the effin' time.
|
|
Here's another weird idea about attrition. PF2 of course mostly runs on an idea of each encounter being balanced standalone. Which overall is great because you can run a "you travel for a week and then have an exciting fight and travel for another week" adventure and get to the encounter difficulty you want quite easily. You don't need to have four encounters per day to make the last one exciting.
But attrition CAN be interesting, but we don't always want to have to have lots and lots of encounters to get there.
Skill challenges seem like a decent way to streamline this. If we're for example doing a castle infiltration where you might need to quietly deal with some guards, quickly hustle from here to there, maybe take a few hits from a trap as you quickly move past. Those are all opportunities to use attrition as stakes.
So every time you do poorly at some obstacles and accrue a bunch of awareness points, everyone just takes some damage, or gets sickened or frightened, or has to spend some spell slots or focus. And then eventually you get to a fight, and you're probably not going into that fight in pristine health and resources. But you were also able to do this skill challenge in say, half an hour and fit in some story into it, and then get to the fight. For me this sounds really good for weekday night gaming sessions where we want every session to move the story forward, but also want a fun fight.
Compared to a lot of scenarios where skill challenges seem a bit forced because really failing them just isn't an option, I think skill challenges where the penalty for failures is taking some attrition before your next fight is really convenient. And not going into a fight pristine can be a good way to make those stand out more too.