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So I've been told by multiple GMs and read many reddit posts that state that - "Pathfinder monsters in dungeons will never open the doors of the room they're in even if they hear a Fireball or Lighting go off or metal swords hitting metal armor or the screams of their dying comrades outside their room."
Apparently every single monster in every dungeon treats such occurrences as "simple infighting to be ignored". Like, they all think that way...?
So my questions to the designers is why did you design Pathfinder 2e monsters to be deaf? (Reminds me of that one scene from the movie Top Secret).
It kind of feels video game-like. Was that a design choice?
Or, are all these GMs just wrong?
I'm genuinely curious.
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PF2 is meant to provide reliably-balanced combat encounters, which is harder to do when every monster on a dungeon floor comes running when a fight breaks out.
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So I've been told by multiple GMs and read many reddit posts that state that - "Pathfinder monsters in dungeons will never open the doors of the room they're in even if they hear a Fireball or Lighting go off or metal swords hitting metal armor or the screams of their dying comrades outside their room."
Apparently every single monster in every dungeon treats such occurrences as "simple infighting to be ignored". Like, they all think that way...?
So my questions to the designers is why did you design Pathfinder 2e monsters to be deaf? (Reminds me of that one scene from the movie Top Secret).
It kind of feels video game-like. Was that a design choice?
Or, are all these GMs just wrong?
I'm genuinely curious.
They're wrong. There are some things in published adventures giving some justification for that kind of outcome. It isn't uncommon at all. But that's mainly just a tool to deal with published adventures having very limited page space for drawing maps, and making things very geographically compressed (a problem that you don't have when making adventures only for playing, not for printing).
There are also published adventures that do have something written in about "creatures from A6 will respond to this happening in A8" or the like, occasionally. Paizo has used that less often, but it definitely exists, generally with a note about what that can do to the encounter difficulty.
Setting things up with encounters that will join together is always an option when designing an area as a GM. And there has never been anything remotely resembling a rule that monsters won't open doors, no matter what happens. The closest thing to that is the system telling you that if encounters will happen together, you should look at them as one big encounter for determining the balance of it, when you're designing adventures. (That advice is actually a bit overly conservative, since a stretched out encounter is a lower difficulty than if all of the creatures in it arrived together, but tuning that is harder to make into a consistent formula, because it hits very differently with different parties, who remove enemies from the encounter at different rates.)
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Yeah, the big thing is encounter balance. If every enemy in the next 5 rooms comes running immediately when a fight breaks out, you are going to TPK your party in short order.
How realistic vs video game you are happy with is up to you and your table.
Another alternative to explain things other than 'every enemy is deaf':
A fight generally lasts about 4 rounds. That is about 30 seconds. While the enemies may hear that and react to it, their reaction time and arrival time also needs to be realistic. We can also assume that enemies - even monsters - are not sitting around idle, fully armed and armored, and patiently waiting for the sound of battle to break out so that they can immediately attack.
So one or two curious enemies may show up in a couple of minutes after the fight.
An organized response force is going to take between 5 and 10 minutes to arrive.
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One element I've seen relied on perhaps a bit more regularly than is believable is "if they hear a ruckus they assume their allies can handle it and/or are just roughhousing and dont bother getting up"
And other times the description relies on the idea that the inhabitants don't care that much about their allies and won't go out of their way if they hear them being slain unless its specifically somebody they like. Especially if yheres more than one faction in the dungeon.
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I see this more as a tradeoff of realism vs both practicality and fun.
In your typical action movie, do you see people go to the bathroom at realistic frequency? No, not a lot. Any time they do, something "happens" (a conversation with someone, or a murder attempt). People going to the bathroom and nothing out of the ordinary happening is not interesting, so it's left out of the movie.
Dungeon maps also make choices like that. There's not a lot of dungeon maps with toilets on them. Or broom closets.
On the other hand, if you want a fight that's an enjoyable difficulty, you maybe don't want to have the monsters from the other encounter joining in (that'd be unenjoyably hard).
You can do a couple of things as a writer:
- come up with a reason why they don't, such as "there's a lot of noise so they don't hear it"
- put in a lot of empty rooms in between rooms with monsters
- make each fight a lot easier, because you often trigger multiple fights together
All of those are fine, but they're also a hassle. You get tired of having to come up with excuses why monsters don't hear anything. You want the dungeon map to fit on the gaming table. You don't want to use only weak enemies.
So you can also just say "well eff it, let's just be a bit less realistic so we don't have to work so hard to have some fun".
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If it's just a typical dungeon, and there's no clear explanation provided for why encounters don't merge at the first sound of a fight, I just tell the players that the map is abstracted to save page space. That is to say, the rooms and open spaces are much farther apart than they appear, with winding tunnels and the like in between.
If it's just a typical dungeon, and there's no clear explanation provided for why encounters don't merge at the first sound of a fight, I just tell the players that the map is abstracted to save page space. That is to say, the rooms and open spaces are much farther apart than they appear, with winding tunnels and the like in between. [/QUOTE
Hmm. That's an interesting solution to all these maps designed around flip mats or to fit on a battlemat. I do find the proximity ludicrous at times, and often dangerous. Had one scenario where a difficult encounter was one corner away from the tough finale, so if a PC dipped 10-15' into the side corridor to get out of the killing ground (reasonable giving all the AoEs), they'd be within line of sight of the boss. Awkward. Thankfully that didn't happen and nobody thought to poke their head around before healing up (which is something my PCs have a habit of doing from playing in dynamic dungeons!).
Jacobs has said Paizo's dungeons (et al) are presented as a snapshot of a specific time. If you want a more dynamic dungeon, nothing prevents that except encounter imbalance & your will. So yeah, a lot of monsters play as if deaf if you want to run a module straightforward, color-by-numbers, yet you can run a more responsive dungeon. That's hard to balance in a published work with the spectrum of PC strategies available.
One of my favorite sites was in the finale to the first AP (PF1) where a majority of the creatures can respond to a fight with the first (of 3) bosses. The AP neither forces nor deters that, so a GM can play to suit the table's vibe, though the AP does kinda assume it might take more than one PC incursion. And all those injured that flee that first round, say after the boss falls, they can go to the second boss who's suitably distant, has ample space to fit many allies, and best of all, has more than enough healing. The party can also investigate a different direction, to where the creatures are more isolated and act as distinct encounters; those were not meant to participate. And the third boss, the Runelord & pals, were completely isolated from the others because that encounter's already at max difficulty (at least in the updated version).
I ran it as a dynamic dungeon, but there's no way a writer could orchestrate that in print within their page count; wave after wave, dozens of enemies.Funnily enough, in PF1 it was often to the party's interest to ignite multiple encounters. That way you had your umpteen buffs still going. Do anybody's high-level PCs in PF2 try this or are Focus Points/Medicine/etc. too valuable or encounters too effective/ineffective to do this?
As a GM I collapse encounters all the time, there is definitely nothing mechanically stopping me from doing so—as in I am not house ruling anything when I do so.
When I design my own dungeons, I do tend to favor having a lot more lower level, moderate or low difficulty encounters in close proximity so I don’t have to over think how to keep things fun but not overwhelming but I am also not afraid to to bring a boss in where that makes sense and kick an encounter’s difficulty up past severe in total xp. There are lots of GM tricks that can let you get more elaborate with your storytelling and still work logically. In fiction our villains are always demonstrating arrogance, vanity, sloth, lack of care for subordinates, ulterior motives that the protagonist doesn’t yet understand.
Have a really powerful boss open a door and just stand and watch his minions die before giving the party a round or two to recover, delivering a monologue and you have created a memorable moment that will feel very adventurous, for example. Or if you combine encounters and it is clearly too much for the PCs, have a minion steal something important in the room and start trying to run with it. Bittsy has always wanted that swirling crystal ball that master just leaves hidden under a silk sheet in the corner. Bittsy doesn’t know or maybe care that master is afraid of it because it is trapped or connected to something terrible somewhere later in the adventure! Now the boss can be distracted for a turn or two and the players can run, try to recover a little, or choose to focus on the boss and let the minion and the treasure item or mcguffin get stolen to be found later.
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I think there are several reasons why encounters don't merge, some already mentioned above;
1) monsters assume the guys down the hall can handle it.
2) the monster is not intelligent and isn't going to venture out of its den to help another creature outside of its "territory"
3) the monsters don't like or really care for the guys down the hall and if they die, all the better!
4) the monsters have specific orders from their superior to hold the room they are in. Think like an attack on a castle. The guys at the gate don't abandon it when the walls are attacked. That's the job of the guys on the wall. If you leave your post unattended then you may be the reason everyone dies.
5) the monsters are busy doing an experiment or ritual or something to that effect. They will fight if interrupted, but the other groups' job is to deal with the threat so they can stick with the plan.
All of these are perfectly reasonable explanations for why monsters will stay in their rooms instead of venturing out and none have to do with the monster not hearing what is happening.
One last note: I find that many adventures actually do include information about how the monsters react if the alarm is raised or something to that effect.
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As a GM I collapse encounters all the time, there is definitely nothing mechanically stopping me from doing so—as in I am not house ruling anything when I do so.
When I design my own dungeons, I do tend to favor having a lot more lower level, moderate or low difficulty encounters in close proximity so I don’t have to over think how to keep things fun but not overwhelming but I am also not afraid to to bring a boss in where that makes sense and kick an encounter’s difficulty up past severe in total xp. There are lots of GM tricks that can let you get more elaborate with your storytelling and still work logically. In fiction our villains are always demonstrating arrogance, vanity, sloth, lack of care for subordinates, ulterior motives that the protagonist doesn’t yet understand.
Have a really powerful boss open a door and just stand and watch his minions die before giving the party a round or two to recover, delivering a monologue and you have created a memorable moment that will feel very adventurous, for example. Or if you combine encounters and it is clearly too much for the PCs, have a minion steal something important in the room and start trying to run with it. Bittsy has always wanted that swirling crystal ball that master just leaves hidden under a silk sheet in the corner. Bittsy doesn’t know or maybe care that master is afraid of it because it is trapped or connected to something terrible somewhere later in the adventure! Now the boss can be distracted for a turn or two and the players can run, try to recover a little, or choose to focus on the boss and let the minion and the treasure item or mcguffin get stolen to be found later.
I'm also a big fan of chained encounters as a format of high-difficulty encounter for a few reasons:
One is the simple matter that you want to vary encounter compositions a lot in an adventure. (You don't want Severe or Extreme to be synonymous with "Boss", but also want it to include small groups of tough enemies, very large groups of weaker ones, etc). Different PC tools are better at dealing with different encounter compositions, and you don't want to create a situation where some never see their use cases.
A part of hiw this affects the value of different tools is that this kind of fight tends to make for a longer encounter. I wouldn't want that for every encounter, but having it happen sometimes really lets items and spells and the like with a duration really pay off fully.
The really big thing, though, is that something set up to be a chained encounter cam be broken up or interrupted. If the players use tools like magically silencing the initial skirmish, grabbing enemies that might run for help, blocking the path for reinforcements to arrive, etc, they can heavily impact how severe the encounter is. Parts of it may be bypassed entirely. That's good agency.
Also, that kind of format has made encounters with a total XP value well over the Extreme guideline work out great as major battles, occasionally. (Doing that constantly would be way too much, but it's great to have as an option to use occasionally.)
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In Hurricane's Howl the Prison of the Vacant Eye is a former monastery for cyclopses converted into a human prison. The text says, "Doors are stone slabs 15 feet high and 10 feet wide unless otherwise noted. The doors are good at blocking noise, which was a boon to meditation when the site was used for contemplation and introspection, but also advantageous when used to isolate or torture dissidents. ... Doors pivot on clever, if ancient, hinges that swing back to a closed position when left alone." Thus, that dungeon provided an excuse why the enemies would not hear the battle in an adjacent room.
Nevertheless, I had one enemy sent into an adjacent room by their leader to fetch reenforcements. My party is oversized and can handle twice as many enemies than a typical party can handle. That encounter was during a playtest, so I chronicled it at Kittyhawk, Playtest Daredevil, comment #51. And that chronicle reminded me that my players do roleplay stealth to avoid combining encounters:
The party found themselves on a hallway with the stairs and two doors that bent into a large room. They could hear voices from the large room. They opened one door and found a prison cell. They talked to the prisoners and learned the general layout and occupants of the upper level. A second prisoner cell was on the opposite, mostly-mirror-image east side of the level, so the two most stealthy party members, Roshan and Cara, slipped past the two Abendego Jailers and another Trainee Trio in the large room to discover that the other cell was empty. Before returning, they investigated another room and deduced it was the bedroom of the Abendego Priest of Norgorber, which meant that the priest was in the altar room, and peeked in the last room that contained sleeping Abebdego Brutes.
And they use other methods:
Meanwhile, the wizard Idris conjured Sliding Blocks and arranged blocks so that the doors to the head warden's room and the altar room were blocked and the stairway was impeded.
Enemies in adjacent rooms not hearing the battle is a convention for convenience. I have many such conventions that I told my players; for example, I say that an enemy knocked out or dying but stablized by successful recovery checks will stay unconscious for at least ten minutes merely so that the party does not have to worry about downed foes getting up to rejoin the battle. I seldom bother with the adjacent-room-cannot-hear convention because my players can handle that tactical situation and enjoy a bit more challenge.
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So I've been told by multiple GMs and read many reddit posts that state that - "Pathfinder monsters in dungeons will never open the doors of the room they're in even if they hear a Fireball or Lighting go off or metal swords hitting metal armor or the screams of their dying comrades outside their room."
Apparently every single monster in every dungeon treats such occurrences as "simple infighting to be ignored". Like, they all think that way...?
So my questions to the designers is why did you design Pathfinder 2e monsters to be deaf? (Reminds me of that one scene from the movie Top Secret).
It kind of feels video game-like. Was that a design choice?
Or, are all these GMs just wrong?
I'm genuinely curious.
This is a GM dependent issue, though you can argue that in officially written APs and modules that this is kind of true, in the sense that if you did have an "alarm" go off as soon as the adventurers show themselves that generally the number of enemies present (and their level) would me a TPK for the PCs.
However, it doesn't need to be that way. It's just harder to write and balance. You can have enemies that show up in waves.
You start the encounter with X enemies of party level -2.
3 rounds later Y enemies show up of party level -1.
5 rounds later Z enemies show up of party level.
Finally in 2 more rounds the BBEG of the encounter shows up.
Because there is no rest or break in-between and because of limited use of focus spell or time limited abilities, this is harder to balance.
The number of enemies (and even the levels) would need to be more delicately adjusted.
It's easier for the myriad writers that are (who probably have a wide range of experience in balancing something like this) to set up an assumption that the party is always at full health with full focus points and is relatively unhindered/unburdened by previous combats.
Because when you move away from that assumption...s@!* gets real hard to balance for every group. Which is where a GM needs to step in and make adjustment.
But not every GM is comfortable or good at making those adjustments.
Nor at making battles with waves of enemies.
So, it's just kind of a necessary game conceit unless you just constantly want to kill the party or have all the fights be cakewalks.
Personally, if I have the time, I will kind of do this by having a mass number of like party level -2 rush in to fight the PCs with other high level enemies remaining in place to do "important stuff" or having reasons they remain in place. They let the peons deal with "minor" intruders.
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However, it doesn't need to be that way. It's just harder to write and balance. You can have enemies that show up in waves.
This thread is growing into a full discussion of encounter design. I had started a thread about that, Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters, about 3 years ago, but only thread necromancers dig that deep to read old threads.
Having two encounters back to back with no rest between throws off standard XP Budget rules. In an encounter, a party uses actions with no resource cost, such as Strikes; actions with renewable resource costs, such as focus spells; and actions whose daily resources cannot be renewed that day, such as uses of Battle Medicine. The standard assumption in encounter design is that between encounters the party will have at least ten minutes for Treat Wounds and Refocus to renew their renewable resources.
If two Moderate-Threat encounters occur with only 1 minute between them, then the party will be short on renewable resources for the 2nd encounter. Some parties might have lots only a few hit points and still have focus points left after the 1st encounter, so to them the 2nd encounter is just another Moderate-Threat encounter but they will need a longer renewal time after it to get back to full readiness. Other parties will be have lost half their hit points, perhaps with one party member especially low on HP, and have no focus spells left, so they will have to dig into their daily resources, such as Heal spells. They will still win, but expending daily resources will leave them less able to handle for a Severe-Threat encounter later.
If the two Moderate-Threat encounters overlap, then the threat increases drastically. If the two encounters fully combine in the 1st or 2nd round of combat, then the party will take twice as much damage per round, the enemies will take longer to defeat, and battlefield control becomes more difficult. The threat level becomes Extreme. Likewise, combining two Low-Threat encounters makes a Severe-Threat encounter.
Inbetween is harder to judge. Re-enforcements from the next room showing up in the 3rd round falls into this category. The 1st encounter is partially defeated, so those enemies are dealing less damage as some lie bleeding on the floor. But the 2nd encounter is fresh. For a quick estimate, add half the XP Budget of the 1st encounter to the full XP Budget of the 2nd encounter to judge the threat level. Two 80-xp Moderate Threats would be (1/2)(80 xp) + 80 xp = 120 xp, a Severe Threat. (No, the PCs do not receive more XP due to the extra challenge of an overlap. This is not fair, but XP is an inexact reward.) Having Severe-Threat re-enforcements show up in the middle of a Moderate-Threat encounter would be (1/2)(80 xp) + 120 xp = 160 xp, an Extreme Threat.
A new threat arriving is easier to control by a party ready for battlefield control. A wall spell across the door can interrupt their arrival and delay them until the 1st encounter is finished. That would cost a spell. Or a heavy-armored tank could stand in the doorway to block their progress, but that tank will pay for the effort by taking lots of damage.
You start the encounter with X enemies of party level -2.
3 rounds later Y enemies show up of party level -1.
5 rounds later Z enemies show up of party level.
Finally in 2 more rounds the BBEG of the encounter shows up.
My players often scout the enemy and approach from an unexpected direction, so they encounter the groups of enemies out of order. Both they and I prefer that, because it puts the players in control for a better story. For that matter, the Hurricane's Howl module wrote that the 11th-level party would encounter the Big Bad Evil Guy, 13th-level Ajbal Kimon, and his 11th-level compatriot (80 xp + 40 xp means Severe Threat) in the final room of the Smuggler Caves. But the gazeteer page on Ajbal Kimon shows that he is not the kind of person to sit out the battles, so I am sending him out early, while the party is still rallying the townsfolk against him, along with a bunch of his 8th-level Abendego Brutes. This might result in the BBEG dying early, if he does not succeed at escaping, but it will be more dramatic and he does have two 13th-level lieutenants to replace him in a final battle. The enemies not have to grow tougher with each successive encounter.
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You're 100% right Mathmuse, there's a lot to consider when changing the encounter dynamic and it can vary heavily on the specific party/table.
I was trying to give a very rough example of what you might do in one case, but it is by no means the complete solution or only solution.
Creative Director
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The encounter math in Pathfinder is very tight, but a GM who keeps an eye on it and is able to improvise and adjust the ebb and flow of the game can and should make dungeon environments feel more reactive depending on PC actions. In published adventures, we can't and don't assume GM or player skill, and compounding encounters like that can rapidly get out of hand and too difficult to run as a GM or too hard to win as a group of PCs. Also, we don't make assumptions about directions PCs take through dungeons, so including what-ifs for various rooms' reactions depending on the direction the PCs come from is a waste of wordcount that's better used toward setting up the baseline.
And that's what it it is. Any dungeon is a baseline—the way things are before the chaos and unfactored variants that a group of PCs are shows up. How the dungeon reacts to that is as a result as much (if not more so) the GM's responsibility.
That said, we often do include information about how creatures react to raised alarms and nearby combats. It doesn't happen for EVERY dungeon or for EVERY room, though.
And THAT said... it's worth always remembering that Pathfinder IS a game. It's closer to a video game than real life, for sure. It's meant to be fun, not frustrating. Each GM and each group will have different tolerances for agroing entire dungeons, but that's not the baseline expected experience of a dungeon exploration combat simulation character growth game like Pathfinder, and really hasn't been from the start.
If it's something that breaks verisimilitude at your table to not have nearby rooms react, then the GM needs to make that correction if the adventure's setup doesn't spell it out (and again, sometimes they do). As long as everyone's having fun, that's the point.
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Yeah, if I build a dungeon myself, I will absolutely include a boatload of party level -2 enemies, so I can have A LOT of NPCs reacting to the chaos of the PCs popping in and starting combat. But definitely gets hard to balance, and I want to include some higher level enemies as part of the dungeon too. I also try not to make dungeons too big, because I don't really like PCs to ever rest mid-dungeon.
A dungeon that is big enough to rest in isn't mechanically a dungeon to me, it's "themed geographic area of exploration" where a dungeon for me is meant to be a "climatic group of encounters". A floor of a mega-dungeon could be representative of a dungeon as I prefer to define it.
Battles that are physically spread out, but set up so that they happen in quick succession are still a dungeon.
To me a dungeon is kind of a one-shot group of encounters. And by one-shot, I mean that if you leave and come back the next day it's not going to have idly and done nothing, it will change. It may be empty. It may have doubled up on enemies. They might have moved the mcguffin you're looking for.
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Was reading a bit from Kobold Press on making maps, and yeah they talking about the conflict of fitting interesting encounter rooms on a page while having them far apart to not bleed into one another, and yeah sometimes the map has to be something of an abstraction to make the game a fun game.
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"It's a game" is a good answer, really. I've run into the reverse case: trying to get into a dungeon and enemies keep calling reinforcements to the entrance. It's realistic for them to do that. It was not fun at all.
It took us literally 3 game sessions of battles to whittle their forces down enough that we could actually get past that door, and then we didn't get very far for another week. Tons of attack/reinforcements show up/retreat.
It felt like an absolute slog and it sucked. Once we did get past, we had cleared out so many enemies from the place just to get past the door that the inside felt half empty.
The typical PF2 answer of "you can do this fight without chaining more fights" is a game focused answer to the problem because doing the encounters that way tends to be more fun for the players. It's sacrificing realism to make the game work better.
If you want more patrols/reinforcements/etc, you need to scale the typical encounter down so that what joins in doesn't result in every fight becoming an extreme encounter, because that's the most common outcome of two typical AP encounters being combined. And aside from the TPK risk, "every encounter is extreme" is really not fun for typical player groups (if yours differs on that, then go nuts).
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One of my favourite encounters I've run was an example of enemies not being deaf, but it took a few necessities to make it work.
I was running an adventure where some cultists had taken over the local church. The PCs enter the church for some information connected to whats been happening in town, and when they get too nosy, the cultists try to silence them.
The fight starts in the central, open chamber of the church, against four rank-and-file cultists who had been hanging out. Sounds of fighting immediately alert the two rooms adjacent, so at the start of round 2 another batch of cultists emerge from the north room. At the same time, the cultists are low enough level (possibly as low as -3 or -4) individually that the first four were half slain and thr last down to their last HP, so the second batch don't actually make the fight bigger so much as longer.
The room to the south contains not the high priest of the cult, but his second in command bc the high priest is tending to an emergency elsewhere. This priest was busy and when he hears fighting first takes a round to prepare himself and pre-buff before seeing what the ruckus is. He emerges with one extra rank-and-file cultist on the second round, by which point there were still a handful of cultists lingering from the first batch.
Lastly, the cult had summoned a monstrous temple guardian which could teleport within the confines of the temple and see any room at will. I dont remember if it joins the fray on the round after (when it sees the priest threatened) or enters the same turn as the priest, but its use of Dimension Door left it with 1 action, so it effectively doesn't get a full turn on entry anyway as it drops from hidinv into the middle of the party.
In either case, this was a huge (but not too slow or sloggy) chained encounter in a place small enough that once everyone had died, exploring the rest of the church didn't feel like wandering a barren dungeon. It likely helps that the party had come to the church for answers, so they still needed to find those answers once they'd killed all the people they expected to question, and found some of those answers piled up in a back room with another hazard tied to the mystery
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Goofy antagonistic title. No one's "designed to be deaf" (except for characters that explicitly are) but in a game that somewhat values careful and coherent encounter design, discrete fights are designed to be just that, discrete.
At the same time no one's stopping you from running the game that way if you want. It's just might not be a very good experience because having everything in a dungeon dogpile on the party all at once is going to make things a slog (or a death sentence)... unless the encounters are designed with the idea of them getting chained together in mind, then there's no problem (except that might also be offensive to the sensibilities somehow idk).
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I enjoy chained encounters on both sides of the screen, as long as they're balanced, just like any encounter. Or maybe I should say I enjoy a stretched out encounter, where the timeline of the fight is balanced as one encounter, just over a longer period one might be able to chop up via stealth, tactics, or battlefield control.
Having minions arrive incrementally helps vs. AoE attacks and longer combat touches on the edges of those 1-minute duration effects. This also adds realism like of course the mastermind was surrounded by protection...just not really because they weren't on the battlefield together. Yet also really because they made a difference one must account for, both as GM & player.
I'm reminded of a classic module where Gygax had placed some significant enemies in what seemed to me poor places. Why aren't these melee-brutes in the thick of combat for this climax? Well, once the battle began I understood. The PCs enveloped the temple in AoEs, duh. The brutes were the reserve force; able to contribute less in their positions at range, but consistently while being tough enough to make single PCs wary of chasing each individual down. These out-of-position brutes were the real protectors, the second wave as it were (with a third wave of the top clerics who also could harass at distance, maybe even heal themselves during the second phase if needed). Quite a strategic set up, as the battle naturally unfolded given RPG norms, yet also implemented by the NPCs in response to an alarm that stealthy PCs might actually avoid.
(It's occurring to me now that a lot of the guard encounters of that compound involve trolls, as in regenerating guards that recover easily if the PCs simply probe and flee. Hmm.)
But yeah, chaining encounters that were meant to be full threats on their own requires nuance and timing, tuning to the particular PCs and context of how the battle's developing. It's unrealistic to expect Paizo to write that ahead of time even for themselves much less a world of players.
ETA: Sometimes I'd chain encounters on purpose, like if I had an excellent one-minute buff (or several) then I'd burst open the next door while other PCs wrapped up the combat. With PF2 I don't, buffs aren't so compulsory or game-changing as in PF1, but maybe at higher levels I'll revert to intentionally chaining battles.
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Magic weapon is an example of an early huge game buff that can get a lot more out of squeezing in two or three fights than casting in the first round of a 3 round fight and then the party rests for 10 minutes
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I remember playing in a Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition campaign in which our party would run from room to room to defeat as many enemies as possible before our buff spells ran out. After the spells expired we would return to search and loot the rooms we cleared. That was a different game system with no benefit to taking a short break for healing. This was 20 years ago, before I started running campaigns myself.
In Vault of the Onyx Citadel in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign, the party acquired a map of the Onyx Citadel and learned exactly which room they had to go to. They entered invisibly through a 3rd-floor window and then proceeded hastily from room to room heading directly to their goal. They did not dare stop because they knew reinforcements from the 1st and 2nd floors would show up as soon as they learned of a fight on the 3rd floor. The party did stop when they entered the final chain of rooms and locked the single entry door behind them. A high-level villain Dimension Doored in, but they were high level, too, and defeated him.
In Kindled Magic, 1st module of Strength of Thousands, the wizard Idris prepared buff spells with one-hour duration before a long exploration of the Infested Caverns. At 4th level he had only 6 spell slots and he wanted to make the most of them. The party took so much damage in those caverns that they retreated back to the entrance three times for Treat Wounds and Refocus, but the one-hour spells endured even over those rest breaks.
My players understand pacing. Therefore, I can throw different paces of encounters at them and they will adapt. Some dungeons will have rooms that do not listen to each other. Other dungeons will have alerts and organized responses. In Ironfang Invasion they had fights against armies so large and spread out that the party defeated the front of the army before the rear could rush forward to reach them. The variety makes the campaigns more fun.
In Vault of the Onyx Citadel in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign, the party acquired a map of the Onyx Citadel and learned exactly which room they had to go to. They entered invisibly through a 3rd-floor window and then proceeded hastily from room to room heading directly to their goal. They did not dare stop because they knew reinforcements from the 1st and 2nd floors would show up as soon as they learned of a fight on the 3rd floor. The party did stop when they entered the final chain of rooms and locked the single entry door behind them. A high-level villain Dimension Doored in, but they were high level, too, and defeated him.
How was the party able to keep tabs on each other while operating invisibly? You'd think they'd be bumping into each other and making noise and the like, unless they all also had something like see the unseen active.
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In Vault of the Onyx Citadel in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign, the party acquired a map of the Onyx Citadel and learned exactly which room they had to go to. They entered invisibly through a 3rd-floor window and then proceeded hastily from room to room heading directly to their goal. They did not dare stop because they knew reinforcements from the 1st and 2nd floors would show up as soon as they learned of a fight on the 3rd floor. The party did stop when they entered the final chain of rooms and locked the single entry door behind them. A high-level villain Dimension Doored in, but they were high level, too, and defeated him.How was the party able to keep tabs on each other while operating invisibly? You'd think they'd be bumping into each other and making noise and the like, unless they all also had something like see the unseen active.
By the power of holding hands!
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In Vault of the Onyx Citadel in my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign, the party acquired a map of the Onyx Citadel and learned exactly which room they had to go to. They entered invisibly through a 3rd-floor window and then proceeded hastily from room to room heading directly to their goal. They did not dare stop because they knew reinforcements from the 1st and 2nd floors would show up as soon as they learned of a fight on the 3rd floor. The party did stop when they entered the final chain of rooms and locked the single entry door behind them. A high-level villain Dimension Doored in, but they were high level, too, and defeated him.How was the party able to keep tabs on each other while operating invisibly? You'd think they'd be bumping into each other and making noise and the like, unless they all also had something like see the unseen active.
Shared Invisibility IMO.
How was the party able to keep tabs on each other while operating invisibly? You'd think they'd be bumping into each other and making noise and the like, unless they all also had something like see the unseen active.
The Onyx Citadel is on an island with a well-defended bridge. The party came in on a boat manned by friendly locals. They turned invisible on the boat most in an Invisibilty Sphere but the elf ranger had his own Cloak of Elvenkind and I think another had turned into a hard-to-notice small bird. They flew to the Onyx Citadel by many different means, too. Since they flew, everyone except the cluster in the Invisibility Sphere was spread out and did not bump into each other.
They had decided in advance which 3rd-floor window they would enter by, so they had the same goal. The rogues planned to open it with their skills. However, the Ironfang Legion soldiers opened the windows themselves because they had two ballistas in that room and were taking shots at the boat.
Several of those soldiers ended up defenestrated. That did give away to the soldiers on the ground that something was happening in that 3rd-floor room, but the party figured they had time before those people could get inside and climb the stairs.
It's merely a way of saying that the encounters are mechanically balanced to be done one at a time. As GM I certainly will have monsters go help each other, but I need to be aware of the impact on the encounter design metrics. Running stuff with the party one level higher allows for a lot more flexibility around this sort of thing and a more realistic feel to the environment.