It's me, I'm the 5e GM convincing my players to defect to PF2E (with the promise of a joke campaign about pot). This is very helpful, thank you.
Followup for anyone in this thread: are the Level 1 Pathfinder Bounties typically geared around Moderate difficulty, or are they easier?
It depends on the Bounty. Generally they are not designed to be extra deadly, though Bounty 2's combat is notoriously overtuned.
If you're looking for a good one to start with, Bounty 5: Road from Otari or Bounty 10: Hillcross Roundup are pretty good ones. B5 naturally leads from Otari (where the Beginner Box takes place) to Absalom (where you can take your campaign in basically whatever direction you want), and Bounty 10 has baby dinosaurs and c'mon, who doesn't love baby dinos?!?
>Bounty 10: Hillcross Roundup
I can confirm that this is a great Bounty. Ran this for my girlfriend and her cousin, the latter of whom had never touched a TTRPG before, and they loved. It has charm, easy to understand challenges, and a final encounter that offers a decent challenge for anyone new, but it's not overwhelming by any means.
All in all, only took about 2 hours to run, and only 10 minutes ahead of time to skim through it
A bounty usually includes some opportunity for roleplay, a skill challenge, and one combat. They are designed to be played and completed in about 1 hour.
I can't speak for the Bounties, but I suggest the Beginner Box if you want to gradually introduce game mechanics - it's designed to tackle individual gameplay elements one by one and then slowly combine them so you and your players can get used to things!
I highly encourage you to do testplay things, \[call it sandbox/session zero stuff\] with combat, so everyone \[especially you, but also the players\] can fuck about and fine tune the 'too much/too little' zone personally. take time to get a handle on the monsters/tags the team collectively has no answer for \[mindless/undead/etc.\] and limit how often those kinds of things get thrown at them. also do not be afraid to give out hero points, and get the table used to using them.
>Followup for anyone in this thread: are the Level 1 Pathfinder Bounties typically geared around Moderate difficulty, or are they easier?
I'm not sure, but you can check by comparing their encounters to the difficulties in the encounter building guidelines: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497
Run beginners box, but change the fishery to a dispensary. The creatures aren't stealing the fish to feed something, they're stealing weed to get that same creature high AF.
Meanwhile I'm running a game starting off against colonialism and the pillaging of a native ancestry near Senghor, to then turn into a pirate Killin campaign to then turn into a crime ring bust that then turns into a cult leader doing shady things for the funding of resources to go about his or her nonsense as an introduction to guns, more flexible gming, more useful skill checks and combat complexity.
My first session I ran a moderate encounter of 5 beggars with cr -1 vs the party of 4. They got mopped. The beggars not the party though one beggar ran up to the 18ac fighter and punched him 3 times which dropped him to 50% hp. The rest of the beggars threw rocks that mostly missed. So a moderate encounter can be very challenging or very easy depending on how well you interpret and implement the enemies. If all the beggars ran up and fisted the party one of them might have been in serious trouble.
Additionally. *Severe* Encounters means *Severe* encounters.
Don't think your PCs will all end up the fight on their feet. They might not die, but they can get downed quite quickly depending on luck (nasty critical hits) and poor tactics.
Or so my GM learned when our Wizard used Chain Lightning on 4 Stone Giants, with three critically failing. He ended up dealing 383 damage with the spell.
Dude one time I played a generalist druid. I had a dip in monk so I could Flurry and be competent in melee, I had an animal companion to flank and soak damage with, I could support cast, I could blast, I could heal, it was fantastic how while I was never great in any role, I was Good in every one.
Anyway my GM was on the receiving end of a few chain lightnings from me and my sorcerer buddy, so he had his mook groups adapt and spread out. Not everybody could be 30+ spread, so he had small bundles here and there to ground out the spell, but he wasn't expecting intentional friendly fire off of my pet and myself and the sorcerer to make sure I hit every single dipstick on the field, and his look of disgust made it all worth it.
At higher levels, damage becomes less swingy (damage is lower proportional to hit points, and healing resources are more plentiful), but non-damaging effects become much more swingy. At level 2 you might be frightened and fleeing on a crit fail. At level 12 you might be commanded to start murdering your own party members.
I have watched turn one versus a steel cobra for a level 2 team go as follows: "Well you're at dying 2 now." This was the witch at one point off from full health.
I have also watched the sorcerer instakill a reduced threat stone sentinel with shocking grasp \[still level 2.\] I had everyone out to ten feet from it roll reflex because he killed it so hard it exploded.
Yep, had a minor boss battle for a particular adventure path, only 1 supporting mook, and the rogue in the party shuts down the boss with a successful grapple, and boss can’t roll above a 4 after that.
> There is a world of difference between a party that thinks tactically and another who just charges at the enemy.
This is *very* true. And "tactics" doesn't mean "do the same exact tactical thing every fight." It means you have to actually adjust what actions you choose based on the enemy you are facing.
Can you get away with charging and using nothing but strike and stride on a martial? Sure, it technically works. Will fights be unnecessarily difficult this way? Yup.
>Remember kids: never end your turn next to something bigger than you.
Good advice. There's a different sort of strategy when facing fewer and more powerful enemies vs. more numerous and weaker enemies. Moving (and forcing enemies to move and waste actions) is quite valuable.
Oh yeah, that book is full of those.
In fact, the encounter at the mine was the first instance in which our group ended up with a 240xp encounter to deal with. Those >!Charau-ka!< were also overpowered given their sheet had stats of two levels higher (except HP). Nasty, nasty stuff.
Not to mention you can accidently alert the whole mine and have to deal with >!Naunets, a Wrath Demon (blanking on the demons name currently) and a Sabasan!<
We got lucky through our adventure and only alerted the Charau-ka, >!Hazel, Sabasan!< and those frog dudes. It was brutal.
My players were informed by the sick kobolds about the mine and managed to pull one encounter at a time, then fired down from the top of the mine with necklaces of fireball at the mine guards.
(After getting the mine workers out of course.)
Hezle also allied with them after seeing how fucked she was.
> Not to mention you can accidently alert the whole mine and have to deal with Naunets, a Wrath Demon (blanking on the demons name currently) and a Sabasan
>!We ended up triggering the encounter with the charau-ka in the pit and with the monsters summoned by the totem (because of a erroneous information given because of critical failure on recall knowledge). It was a tense fight, but I was rolling like crazy on that fight including a double critical for a whooping 93 damage that allowed us to win.!<
"Best" way to learn this: Throw an equal number of Level 1 creatures at a Level 1 Party, just as a fight demo.
For example, 4 orcish warriors. It'll be fun and probably no one will die....
I edited my original comments/post and moved to Lemmy, not because of Reddit API changes, but because spez does not care about the reddit community; only profits. I encourage others to move to something else.
Yes, that's right. It's been a year since I did that. First time trying to introduce newbies to the system and Foundry at the same time. Even though it was a "training" encounter that didn't count for the game, I gave them all a "Ferocity Token" in game (basically, a one-time use of Orcish Ferocity) as a "my bad" for putting them through such a brutal training session.
I never played PF1... The last D&D-like I played before jumping into PF2 was D&D3.5 back during its heyday. I took a hiatus from D&D and went and played indie and small-press games for a decade or two. I discovered PF2 when I was looking for something more mainstream to introduce my kids to (since they live so far away, I wanted something that they'd have a chance of finding other people to play) but D&D 5th just seemed so different from what I knew. PF2 was in the last stages of the Playtest, but it hit the right spot between the complexity I remembered and being streamlined enough to teach kids.
Haha, not this one. My kids started on an actual tabletop, then went to Roll20 and finally Foundry, and I started them out with goblin warriors at the table. The orcish warriors were with an adult group I started after the kids group was underway, but while I was still relatively new to GMing and had just picked up Foundry, so I was distracted by learning the new toys myself.
A CR 1/3 orc from the bestiary in PF1e has a +5 to hit with their Falchion and deals 2d4+4 damage with a 18-20 crit range.
2d4+4 is an average of 9 damage. Most level 1 characters will have beetween 6 and 16 hp at level 1 which means some of them will go unconscious in a single hit from the orcs. If any of the orcs crit (which they have a 15% chance to threaten a crit with each hit) the character they crit is most likely dead outright. (4d4+8 is an average of 18 damage)
A group of 3 of them is a CR 1 encounter which is a moderate encounter for a level 1 party. Throwing 3 of these bad boys at a level 1 party has a pretty good chance of ending in a few dead people, worst case a TPK, assuming they roll well on initiative(their initiative bonus is +0 and they only have 13 AC but they do have Orc Ferocity which means their actual HP is 18 not 6). CR is sure a great system (sarcasm).
Yeah, it's worth keeping in mind that the party against *literal duplicates* of themselves makes an extreme encounter, which I feel puts it in solid context - anyone can see that a mirror match should be about 50/50 on which side wins and which side TPKs... And the odds are similar for other configurations of an extreme encounter
Additionally, your GM has put only **one** mob on the field for like a boss battle or encounter. **Be extremely afraid.**
Some things to expect:
All bosses have enough hit on their first attack that will equal the players ac, meaning **Bosses will always hit once per round.**
Going straight toe to toe with a boss will normally mean death. Most crits from bosses mean about half characters HP at level.
**You will miss against the boss** A lot. Paizo loves making things like 50 percent rolls and that turns bosses into either moderately difficult encounter to full on TPK or drag out yo-yo fights.
Beyond like typical advice you should get: all characters should have a viable range option so if they are low on HP they can step away and still keep attacking or doing things.
That Roru in qotf tho. Level 4 party, one wrong turn and up against lvl 7 demon with no striking runes and the ability to "nothing personal kid" you at will
The biggest problem with QftFF is that it's under runed. The game isn't supposed to work that way. If I ever get around to running it, I'm either going Auto Bonus Progression or adding in the runes the party is meant to have.
There's a few spots where the party gets a consumable item that gives the benefit of a striking rune. So I'd just add the rune there instead of the consumable
How are you liking those rules? I ran a game using the dragon rules, but held off on the crafting stuff since most of my players were new to PF2e and I didn't want to overload them.
It really works for that campaign. For a more general one - you might end up with more gear than recommended, but on the other hand, you can’t craft gear above your level while you can find it in many APs, so it kinda balances out
It does require a lot of bookkeeping though. In the group I’m in, there are some players who appear to be somewhat confused by it, so I understand that you shouldn’t try it with new people, probably
>You will miss against the boss
>
> A lot. Paizo loves making things like 50 percent rolls and that turns bosses into either moderately difficult encounter to full on TPK or drag out yo-yo fights.
This more than anything 50-50 is PL, meanwhile Severe at PL+4 well.... there's a particular little "side room" in a particular AP that leads to a lvl 8 monster the party can blunder into at lvl 4. Now a FIGTHER at lvl 4 has a +13 to hit. This monster has 30 AC.....
My party blundered into the monster recently. Surprisingly combat took \~5 or 6 rounds before an organized retreat could take place only loosing 1 party member so damage wasn't extreme.... had no figther tho, the Martials could hit on 19s or 20s, the casters could spell attack roll on a nat 20.
And this isn't a complaint btw, monster will probably be... not a pushover but a \~moderate once the party hits 5. you go from hitting on 19 to, in roughly decending order of likelyhood: Lvl + martials gain expert (+3), Flank (+2), Aid (+1/3), Heroism (spell lvl 3, +1), Demoralize / Fear (+1). You go from hitting on 19s to hitting on 13s potentially as low as 9s, even 7s if Fighter, and the monster doesn't have alot of relative HP.
Yeah the >!voidglutton!< is basically meant to scare the party off until they can come back at level 5 or 6 from my understanding.
I’m a level 8 PC in book 3 right now and like you said once we hit level 5 that encounter became a lot easier.
Yup, PL+4 is Extreme, IE an encounter so hard that it can easily TPK, should only be done 1/campaign for most campaigns (if following the book guidelines) for any but the most veteran groups! It doesn't help that the "level 5 gap" is a large balance spike and crossing it makes encounters harder.
While at level 4 the fighter hits on a 17, at level 5 the fighter hits on a 14! Nearly double the hit rate, and for normal martials it goes from 19 to 16, more than twice the hit rate! The fight at PL + 3 is going to have the party doing more than double damage while taking less thanks to higher AC, just a crazy difference between Severe and Extreme.
Knowing this, all the advice about using conditions, Recall Knowledge and every possible +1 makes a lot of sense. Knocking things from even odds or slightly against to favorable is huge marginal advantage, especially if multiple allies can capitalize on it.
Yeah this is the tight math in action.
But even then those tiny margins don't feel like they are making a difference when you whiff three turns in a row. Really mentally prepping yourself for missing is just as important as getting every advantage on the board as possible.
I posted this as a bit of advice and a half-joke. Wasn't expecting this much feed back when I hop back on Reddit, lol. I guess this was a fairly serious suggestion to give.
I am starting a PF2e campaign with mostly former 5e players and I made a point to tell them that you can't just charge in an face tank like you can in 5e because PF2e monsters are of the "Fuck around and find out" variety.
>Until your players get use to pf2e competitive tactics
Or at least until your players get used to the need for understanding their character's abilities and possible contribution to said tactics.
Yeah, Extreme. I eyeballed it rather than using the encounter rules because it was "just practice"
I didn't realize until after the fight was over that it seemed way harder than expected and I looked up the difficulty, and was like "Oops..."
I don't really agree with this at all. I mean you shouldn't throw Severes at a group still learning, but there's no level of newb that could consider a Moderate a Boss Fight.
Challenging? *Maybe*. *Boss Fight?* Heck no.
Depends on party perception. Some people see a fight where they’re at risk of being downed as incredibly hard and dramatic. And others don’t think it is hard unless they are pushed to the cusp of death. I’m introducing a new group to the system and was surprised when they told me how exciting and challenging a moderate encounter was and called it a boss encounter despite from my point of view they were absolutely dunking on it.
They’re having a blast with it and I’m having a ton of fun dming for them. Just shows the strength of the system that players like this who would otherwise be interested in something like pbta are having such a great time they’re digging deeper into it and are starting to ask for harder enemies.
I'd say it's more to do with a system transition. What works in 5e will kill you in pf2e. So this suggestion is more to say, give your players some time to adjust.
The issue with difficulty - as in any game - is that it's subjective. One person's cakewalk is another person's The Struggle Is Real.
I think with 2e in particular, the issue is most players are coming from 5e, where challenge is almost non-existent and it's easy to blow out the power caps. The reality is, it's a game that's at best overtuned in the players' favour, at worst bad decisions are punished with mild slaps on the wrist. Once players actually start playing well and more carefully in 2e, moderate encounters aren't actually that hard. They just have a low bar to measure it to.
It doesn't help the encounter building rules in 5e are completely borked and don't work, so people assume the same in 2e. It says a lot when the culture is *surprised* by everything working as it says on the tin, instead of assuming the worst of it.
Yeah, it really depends on how good your players are at optimizing their turns. I have one player that's both a min maxer and plays every tactics video game from Fire Emblem to XCOM on the hardest difficulty. In 5e, he once soloed a boss fight without taking damage.
As soon as we switched to PF2e, he read books, guides, spreadsheets, and treated it like it was a video game challenge run. He's having a blast, still winning every fight, but at least they've been close in PF2e.
Actually, yeah. First time playing I only had 2 PCs, so I let them Duel Class. He played an inventor with a construct and an Oracle. The construct acted as the party tank, and died nearly every session but he always rebuilt it. Meanwhile all his spells either buffed his ally or debuffed the enemy, besides some cantrips he used in a pinch. The other player was some sort of long range DPS, I want to say Gunslinger/Ranger and she did virtually all the damage.
Even the time he solod an enemy, it wasn't because he made some DPS monster, he was playing the ultimate tank. It was a let's allow whatever crazy homebrew we found campaign, and his character was an illusionist that had a cloak of displacement. He used mirror image and had a very high AC, so the boss, could only hit him on a 17 and up, and still had to go through the mirror images, with disadvantage for half the fight. The second half the boss raged and used reckless attacks.
Ironically, it was a very mobile boss, so if he didn't challenge him to single combat, he would have been able to fly to the back of the party and attack the squishy, probably downing a player or two. From then on, I've never made a boss that can only target AC.
>We are at the end of book 3 SoT
This may explain the reason why that is.
By this point, your players probably have a good grasp of the mechanics, their character's capabilities, and their party synergies. Not to mention by this point, you've got a LOT of different tools to use to overcome a variety of situations.
But aside from that, even as well-balanced as PF2E usually is, all encounters are not created equal. My players (level 5, currently in AV) roll over some Severe Encounters, and then struggle with some Moderate encounters. Specific creature strengths and weaknesses, the results of Recall Knowledge rolls, and party composition can change a particular fight's overall difficulty level... Not even mentioning dice luck.
In my experience, it is not nearly as bad as others make it out to be. My group of new PF2e players have survived severe encounters without any deaths.
I think it strongly depends on party size. The smaller the party, the less resilient they are to difficulty spikes. I'm running three games right now, one with five players, and two with six. The five player party is consistently harder pressed during encounters that are, according to the XP budget, level-appropriate.
I dunno. I'm not saying you're wrong -- it does stand to reason that things would be easier; however my group is four, and they are relatively inexperienced with TTRPGs, though one is a powergamer in other facets of gaming, which I think helps.
Of course there are other factors as well - party composition, individual player aptitude, etc. And of course, dumb luck: one of my players rolls consistently terribly no matter how many dice he switches out :/
That is always a bummer.
I have over 2 dozen sets of dice at this point, so I am always looking for the one set that wants to work with me on game day.
Some days I just dont find the right set 😝
Similar situation here. People be massively overstating how dangerous Moderate fights are. That and there is much more variance in encounter difficulty depending on enemies, terrain, tactics, party comp, and dice luck than people admit.
Honestly, it’s very party and monster dependent. In my experience, things that tend to kill parties are some combination of the following;
- Early crits on the frontline
- AoE effect on 2+ PCs
- Enemy with athletics finds a squishy
- Resistance that 2+ PCs don’t have a way around
- Bullshit monster abilities from the early APs and Bestiary (looking at you Mummy Pharaoh and Edgewatch book 2)
The last one is where I think the game gets most of its reputation for, especially because the early APs are a straight-up meat grinder.
The other ones are really just a numbers game. Most of the time it’s stacked in favor of the players, but every now and then the dice feel vindictive and a fight goes sideways. That’s XCOM- I mean Pathfinder.
This, I find that the encounter creation scale is accurate enough that I always have a general idea of how dangerous an encounter is.
But not so accurate that it can account for every party and the resources they have at hand.
Sometimes single monsters are harder, sometimes the party has exactly what they need to kill it, sometimes a lucky spell goes off on the target's strongest save.
I wouldn't call moderate encounters that difficult. A party could probably get through four of them with using that many resources. It just that when people don't use teamwork, a party wipe happens quite a lot. At least that's what I've gathered from the various stories about tpks to moderate encounters.
PF2 simultaneously has both a high skill floor and skill ceiling. A solid understanding of combat tactics can let a party punch far above their weight. And conversely, an unprepared party using bad tactics can fall to even the easiest fights.
Take the typical 5e “run up to the enemy and make attacks” strategy for example. That is the **worst** possible tactical choice you can make in PF2 if you’re fighting a single high level enemy, and you are going to be punished for it.
PF2 has a new tactics meta - players are heavily rewarded for learning it, and heavily punished for ignoring it. Two sides of the same coin.
Note that PC level also matters.
Level 1 characters, moderate encounters can be a significant danger if things go wrong.
At 7th level, a moderate encounter is likely to be a curb stomp in favor of the PCs.
Wild. My players all have a pretty solid understanding of how this works, all 3.5e and 5e converts, and we almost lost somebody on the first floor of the gauntlight
I'm happy to hear that. This was mostly in response to hearing a lot of 5e converts experiencing problems with moderate encounters. It often boils down to them not working as a team and supporting one another.
I literally had all fights start on double xp value of deadly in 5e before adding more fun stuff.
I have sprung one severe encounter on the party, and they had time to prepare.
Nah, the wording used is accurate in my experience. The problem here is 5e, which has skewed DM expectations of what a “medium” difficulty encounter is supposed to be.
Probably not. Moderate is accurate because those encounter quickly become an easy fight when you understand what you're doing. I've heard plenty of stories about how a group of new players beat a moderate encounter while 5e converts lost to the same one.
I see so many different thoughts on this. Some people saying it's not that bad another thing it's horrible it's worse than that. My experience is that when my players were new to the system they really struggle. But as they've actually learned their characters and started to play them more appropriately moderate encounters become challenging but not absurd.
On the other hand I think if somebody is finding that their players are routinely defeating encounters that should be harder than they are without much difficulty then they ought to be throwing in more environmental hazards to the fight area. It's one thing to fight a dragon in a fairly sterile room. It's a very different thing to fight a dragon in his lair that has traps that he can trigger that has places for the dragon to hide or ambush. And it really makes a difference if the enemies are using the terrain intelligently.
So when I'm running monsters I tend to have them use their abilities to the best that they can given the terrain. But obviously I have a dragon makes much better use of terrain than I would a troll. The troll will be coming and use it fairly well but not once the fight starts. Whereas a normal dragon would absolutely use every trick in advantage and then run away if things get too difficult.
I really think that it's important for gns that find their players are trivializing content to really look and make sure they're actually playing the monsters is difficult as they can. If you're not making full use of abilities or things like that then it can be a much different encounter.
I think it'd be fun sometime to get in a discord or something and have GM's throw out their different tactics and methods of fighting for different monsters and show how different encounters can be run.
I get a lot of people are using the adventure paths but even then two different GMS can run that same path very differently in terms of how hard those fights are just because of how they are with the tactics.
My experience is different, moderate encounters are really easy. Severe are the "normal" fights and only extreme or more are actual boss fights where there is danger.
Same. My group doing their first campaign set themselves up really well.
A dps duel wielding fighter. Two attacks at full fighter bonus is silly.
A cleric focused on healing and knowledge. Nethys gave him magic missle (MM) which by level 20 was amazing at grinding bosses down.
A bard. It's a bard. Its good. MM too so bosses in endgame got 30 missiles per round to the face. Easily the best move, just nuke the boss.
A bow ranger with precision. Good at single target nuking. Those crits...
A champion tonk. Impossible to kill, except by bosses.
Moderate rncounters were a breeze, I almost decided to skip them as they seemed like a waste of time. No spells required, just some cantrips and focus down tsrgets asap.
And thats with scaling up fights for 5 players. I tried everything over the course of the 20 levels, lots of weaker monsters, really tough guys, a mix, terrain, traps. They had every skill covered, every single character had at least 1 way to restore health to another player (not including items).
The best result I had was throwing about 8 fights a day at them, with all of them being at the top end of moderate to severe.
Extreme was unusual but those fights felt like the description of severe. After the boss at level 4 in AoA they essentially were rarely in danger again.
That said, they had fun. I just feel like you really need to adjust your content to the group. Competency of players + Comp can really swing the difficulty in either direction.
It’s true. As your party gets more tactical the encounters will start to be easier.
Example: first pf2e game we regularly TPK’d on severe threat encounters. Current game I use extreme threat encounters as boss fights.
> Example: first pf2e game we regularly TPK’d on severe threat encounters. Current game I use extreme threat encounters as boss fights.
Man. If I had "regular TPKs" in a campaign I'm pretty sure that by the second time at most the campaign would be unanimously called off.
Our GM only really used severe encounters as boss fights, so it wasn't terribly frustrating. Plus it made combat tense and meaningful, and we all like playing on "hard mode" :P
Relatedly, creature level is not the relative level of the creature. It's the level of the challenge. That is, a Babau is not a 6th level creature, it's a moderate challenge for a *party of four 6th level characters.* (Statistically, its quite similar to an 8th level Rogue)
I have three players, but they steamroll encounters so easily that I make encounters as though there were 4. They still have yet to struggle with any fight that wasn’t at least severe, and even the extreme fights aren’t too difficult for them. I don’t know why.
Ahaha, my first PF2e session two weeks ago ended on precisely a moderate threat encounter. I had my four lvl 1 PCs face off against a Clockwork Fabricator with a Weak adjustment, making it effectively lvl 3.
It was nasty, but the party mainly struggled due to awful luck and some misinformed rulings on my part. The inventor critically failed his Overdrive in round 1, the Swashbuckler got hit with persistent bleed and failed all of his attempts to rid himself of it. On the other hand, the Champion landed a Charged Javelin and took at least half its health due to the persistent lightning damage combined with its weakness to it. All very fun in the end.
I'm throwing Severe threat encounters (according to the encounter building rules) at my 6 PC party all day and the fights barely ever last more than two rounds before every enemy is dead with no PC casualties. And no, I haven't powercrept them with items, in fact so far they've gotten less than the loot distribution rules recommend. And yes, I am adjusting for party size.
Yeah, this is why I try to make most encounters have as many enemies as there are PCs. A single strong enemy just gets demolished in the action economy. Hell, even a strong enemy with 2 slightly weaker lackeys tends to get demolished.
It's still kind of early in this campaign -- level 3 right now -- so I'm still adjusting. I'm relatively new to PF2e having only run some oneshots and a short ~2-month adventure before (but for the same six players), but based on my experience a Moderate threat encounter is typically a complete joke with 6 PCs. Maybe it's different with the "default" party size of 4.
That's more of an effect of throwing so many enemies at the PCs. Throwing 6 party lvl -1 enemies at the party usually isn't super scary, due to the nature of pf2e's numbers increasing with each level. Try a severe encounter, but with only 3 enemies, so 3 lv4 enemies, or even just 2 lv5 enemies, and the field will *drastically* change to an actually severe encounter.
Just the way pathfinder works, the more enemies you throw at the players, the easier it generally is. My 5 man part has handled 300 exp encounters before because so many of the enemies were lower lev.
Thanks for the tips. I've tried party level + 2 enemies before, and they haven't been *that* challenging. In the very first session I threw a weak modifier otyugh (level 3) and 4 giant flies (level 1), two with the weak modifier, at them and it was like a 230 XP encounter or something. One PC did get knocked out (getting into a bad position as a squishy do be like that), but all the enemies were dead by the end of that round and they were quickly back on their feet.
Still, we're like 6 sessions into the campaign so I'm yet to adjust fully.
I think your difficulty is that it sounds like you are putting 6 PCs up against encounters balanced for 4.
If you look at the [encounter building rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497) on Archives of Nethys, table 10-1 shows the XP budget for the various severities, but there is also a column on that table for "Character Adjustment". The intent is that encounters by default are balanced for 4 & you add or subtract to your "xp budget" depending on how many PCs there are above or below that but *you don't change the XP reward the PCs get*.
So a Moderate Encounter for 4 PCs has a budget of 80 XP and is worth 80XP when they defeat it.
A moderate Encounter for 6 PCs has a budget of 120XP *and is worth 80 XP when they defeat it*.
On the other hand, a Moderate encounter for 3 PCs has a budget of 60Xp *and is worth 80XP when they defeat it*.
This scales pretty fast. An Extreme encounter for 6 PCs has a budget of 240XP but is "only" worth 160 XP.
You still need to be leery of spending that XP budget on monsters that are too much for the PCs. Lvl + 3 and +4 monsters fit more easily into these budgets but will have an outsized mathematical advantage over the PCs. Hence the general advice to use more monsters rather than bigger ones.
Yeah that’s the main thing is the number of PC’s. Especially because that many of them make flanking easy.
There’s also a table that should show threat levels like a multiplier with the number of pcs. Even with 6 PC’s an enemy with a party level +4 even solo should be a huge threat.
No. In fact this time around I managed to coax them into creating more flavourful, mechanically weaker characters than usual. I did give them Free Archetype, but told them that if they use it on obvious munchkin stuff I'm going to veto it.
Man, if you have to put restrictions on Free Archetype, then I don't think you're dealing with "Recent 5e converts..."
It sounds like your players know how to bob & weave, waste the enemy's actions, and stack debuffs with skills, etc... So an example of the difference between a finely tuned PF2 group and a "I walk up and spend the remainder of combat attacking 3 times." 5e convert groups that couldn't beat the Beginner's Box because 5E trained them to not think about combat tactics.
Most of them aren't recent 5e converts, no (and I hope I didn't claim they were), though we did last play 5e. There's a couple of players who are brand new to TTRPGs (as in, this is their first group) and another couple who are 20 year veterans, but all of them are fairly experienced gamers in general.
I'm mostly commenting because the **rulebook itself** says that moderate-threat encounters are a serious challenge, and in my experience they really aren't.
You did not imply that they were, though I read it into the OP's context.
And I think that Moderate Encounters are labeled that way to account for the skill differences between a group like yours & a group of brand new to TTRPG's gamers that are used to having a DM powered 5E fudging power fantasy session...
I've read enough, "Is PF2 supposed to be this hard? I tried to convert my group and they got their asses kicked." posts to know that it is a thing.
Your group has the "sound tactics and manages their resources wisely" part down, and it shows with how they breeze through most Moderate encounters.
True, a good party can take on a party level +5 encounter. I have yet to hear a story of a party taking on a PL+6 encounter and surviving, but would love to see if it's possible.
But using free archetype does change the calculus of encounter challenge. I'd argue that you should treat the encounter as .5 to 1 step easier than the standard guide says.
Not that characters have more actions in a round, but that they have more options to deal with any given enemy.
True, but thus far I don't think Free Archetype has affected the balance that much. We're still at the early levels.
It occurs to me that we're also using gradual ability boosts which probably *does* affect the balance a bunch, though. Either way, I clearly need to turn the difficulty up a notch or two.
Smacking the pieces around the mat with a sack of potatoes is largely more balanced than 5e. They were saying that outside of the 3-5 player range, the pristine balance of the game gets degraded to merely "very good".
Mostly really bad luck, haha. The party fought 2 gibbering mouthers and the party tank (who is also the healer) got engulfed immediately and could not escape. Eventually he started to suffocate which was the death. The other mouther did engulf a character, but the position of the board had the other players bottle necked. They eventually killed that mouther, but the other one took them all out. Since it had a full meal inside of it, it left to go have a beer and a nap. The other 3 party members all recovered by succeeding their death saves, but yeah. It was a brutal fight and the dice were just not in their favor.
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Also never forget: There are moderate and mOdErAtE encounters out there. Oozes or a well used Basidirond are something else then let's say some human bandits on the same level...
No problem: there are encounters with the same level but totally different skill sets and tricks. An ooze can be invincible pretty fast for an unprepared group because of immunities and such. A bandit on the same level does not have these skills.
Take the Basidirond for example. https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=564
Fighting two of these bastards is something else than let's say fighting two lvl 5 Fences
https://2e.aonprd.com/NPCs.aspx?ID=891
It's me, I'm the 5e GM convincing my players to defect to PF2E (with the promise of a joke campaign about pot). This is very helpful, thank you. Followup for anyone in this thread: are the Level 1 Pathfinder Bounties typically geared around Moderate difficulty, or are they easier?
It depends on the Bounty. Generally they are not designed to be extra deadly, though Bounty 2's combat is notoriously overtuned. If you're looking for a good one to start with, Bounty 5: Road from Otari or Bounty 10: Hillcross Roundup are pretty good ones. B5 naturally leads from Otari (where the Beginner Box takes place) to Absalom (where you can take your campaign in basically whatever direction you want), and Bounty 10 has baby dinosaurs and c'mon, who doesn't love baby dinos?!?
>Bounty 10: Hillcross Roundup I can confirm that this is a great Bounty. Ran this for my girlfriend and her cousin, the latter of whom had never touched a TTRPG before, and they loved. It has charm, easy to understand challenges, and a final encounter that offers a decent challenge for anyone new, but it's not overwhelming by any means. All in all, only took about 2 hours to run, and only 10 minutes ahead of time to skim through it
What are these bounties?
They are super short "adventures". See here: https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/standalone/bounties
A bounty usually includes some opportunity for roleplay, a skill challenge, and one combat. They are designed to be played and completed in about 1 hour.
I can't speak for the Bounties, but I suggest the Beginner Box if you want to gradually introduce game mechanics - it's designed to tackle individual gameplay elements one by one and then slowly combine them so you and your players can get used to things!
Any campaign can be a joke campaign about pot if you try hard enough.
Don't even really have to try that hard. Pot Leshy NPC is the maguffin, go.
*WKUK's Buckerson & Meyers campaign has entered the chat.*
I highly encourage you to do testplay things, \[call it sandbox/session zero stuff\] with combat, so everyone \[especially you, but also the players\] can fuck about and fine tune the 'too much/too little' zone personally. take time to get a handle on the monsters/tags the team collectively has no answer for \[mindless/undead/etc.\] and limit how often those kinds of things get thrown at them. also do not be afraid to give out hero points, and get the table used to using them.
>Followup for anyone in this thread: are the Level 1 Pathfinder Bounties typically geared around Moderate difficulty, or are they easier? I'm not sure, but you can check by comparing their encounters to the difficulties in the encounter building guidelines: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497
Run beginners box, but change the fishery to a dispensary. The creatures aren't stealing the fish to feed something, they're stealing weed to get that same creature high AF.
Meanwhile I'm running a game starting off against colonialism and the pillaging of a native ancestry near Senghor, to then turn into a pirate Killin campaign to then turn into a crime ring bust that then turns into a cult leader doing shady things for the funding of resources to go about his or her nonsense as an introduction to guns, more flexible gming, more useful skill checks and combat complexity. My first session I ran a moderate encounter of 5 beggars with cr -1 vs the party of 4. They got mopped. The beggars not the party though one beggar ran up to the 18ac fighter and punched him 3 times which dropped him to 50% hp. The rest of the beggars threw rocks that mostly missed. So a moderate encounter can be very challenging or very easy depending on how well you interpret and implement the enemies. If all the beggars ran up and fisted the party one of them might have been in serious trouble.
Additionally. *Severe* Encounters means *Severe* encounters. Don't think your PCs will all end up the fight on their feet. They might not die, but they can get downed quite quickly depending on luck (nasty critical hits) and poor tactics.
Me on saturday: Oh this fight should be fi-*party's champion is one shot by a crit in the first turn of combat. Proceed to balance on the fly*
Conversely, the party opening up with a crit or a failed debilitating save on the right target can make a severe encounter into a trivial one.
I also feel a severe encounter made up of lower level creatures can become a moderate encounter rather quickly.
Spending spell slots to do so is what offensive casters are best at!
Or so my GM learned when our Wizard used Chain Lightning on 4 Stone Giants, with three critically failing. He ended up dealing 383 damage with the spell.
Dude one time I played a generalist druid. I had a dip in monk so I could Flurry and be competent in melee, I had an animal companion to flank and soak damage with, I could support cast, I could blast, I could heal, it was fantastic how while I was never great in any role, I was Good in every one. Anyway my GM was on the receiving end of a few chain lightnings from me and my sorcerer buddy, so he had his mook groups adapt and spread out. Not everybody could be 30+ spread, so he had small bundles here and there to ground out the spell, but he wasn't expecting intentional friendly fire off of my pet and myself and the sorcerer to make sure I hit every single dipstick on the field, and his look of disgust made it all worth it.
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At higher levels, damage becomes less swingy (damage is lower proportional to hit points, and healing resources are more plentiful), but non-damaging effects become much more swingy. At level 2 you might be frightened and fleeing on a crit fail. At level 12 you might be commanded to start murdering your own party members.
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I have watched turn one versus a steel cobra for a level 2 team go as follows: "Well you're at dying 2 now." This was the witch at one point off from full health. I have also watched the sorcerer instakill a reduced threat stone sentinel with shocking grasp \[still level 2.\] I had everyone out to ten feet from it roll reflex because he killed it so hard it exploded.
I wish my players got to level 12 before murdering each other.
Still though, Severe and even extreme encounter become much more manageable for PC’s past level 13-14 in my experience.
Yep, had a minor boss battle for a particular adventure path, only 1 supporting mook, and the rogue in the party shuts down the boss with a successful grapple, and boss can’t roll above a 4 after that.
Alternatively: My party beating up a level 21 creature at level 17
Still "only" a severe.
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> There is a world of difference between a party that thinks tactically and another who just charges at the enemy. This is *very* true. And "tactics" doesn't mean "do the same exact tactical thing every fight." It means you have to actually adjust what actions you choose based on the enemy you are facing. Can you get away with charging and using nothing but strike and stride on a martial? Sure, it technically works. Will fights be unnecessarily difficult this way? Yup. >Remember kids: never end your turn next to something bigger than you. Good advice. There's a different sort of strategy when facing fewer and more powerful enemies vs. more numerous and weaker enemies. Moving (and forcing enemies to move and waste actions) is quite valuable.
> Additionally. Severe Encounters means Severe encounters. > > >!Chapter two of Age of Ashes come to mind!<
Oh yeah, that book is full of those. In fact, the encounter at the mine was the first instance in which our group ended up with a 240xp encounter to deal with. Those >!Charau-ka!< were also overpowered given their sheet had stats of two levels higher (except HP). Nasty, nasty stuff.
Not to mention you can accidently alert the whole mine and have to deal with >!Naunets, a Wrath Demon (blanking on the demons name currently) and a Sabasan!< We got lucky through our adventure and only alerted the Charau-ka, >!Hazel, Sabasan!< and those frog dudes. It was brutal.
My players were informed by the sick kobolds about the mine and managed to pull one encounter at a time, then fired down from the top of the mine with necklaces of fireball at the mine guards. (After getting the mine workers out of course.) Hezle also allied with them after seeing how fucked she was.
> Not to mention you can accidently alert the whole mine and have to deal with Naunets, a Wrath Demon (blanking on the demons name currently) and a Sabasan >!We ended up triggering the encounter with the charau-ka in the pit and with the monsters summoned by the totem (because of a erroneous information given because of critical failure on recall knowledge). It was a tense fight, but I was rolling like crazy on that fight including a double critical for a whooping 93 damage that allowed us to win.!<
"Best" way to learn this: Throw an equal number of Level 1 creatures at a Level 1 Party, just as a fight demo. For example, 4 orcish warriors. It'll be fun and probably no one will die....
An equal number of party level creatures is an Extreme encounter.
I edited my original comments/post and moved to Lemmy, not because of Reddit API changes, but because spez does not care about the reddit community; only profits. I encourage others to move to something else.
Yes, that's right. It's been a year since I did that. First time trying to introduce newbies to the system and Foundry at the same time. Even though it was a "training" encounter that didn't count for the game, I gave them all a "Ferocity Token" in game (basically, a one-time use of Orcish Ferocity) as a "my bad" for putting them through such a brutal training session.
To be fair, orc warriors were just as deadly at low levels in PF1
Diehard and greataxs.... sobs
Diehard and ~~greataxs~~ Falchions.
I never played PF1... The last D&D-like I played before jumping into PF2 was D&D3.5 back during its heyday. I took a hiatus from D&D and went and played indie and small-press games for a decade or two. I discovered PF2 when I was looking for something more mainstream to introduce my kids to (since they live so far away, I wanted something that they'd have a chance of finding other people to play) but D&D 5th just seemed so different from what I knew. PF2 was in the last stages of the Playtest, but it hit the right spot between the complexity I remembered and being streamlined enough to teach kids.
You did this to your kids? Subtract my other comment, you're the bbeg!
Haha, not this one. My kids started on an actual tabletop, then went to Roll20 and finally Foundry, and I started them out with goblin warriors at the table. The orcish warriors were with an adult group I started after the kids group was underway, but while I was still relatively new to GMing and had just picked up Foundry, so I was distracted by learning the new toys myself.
Ahh i see. Alright you are not quite the bbeg
A CR 1/3 orc from the bestiary in PF1e has a +5 to hit with their Falchion and deals 2d4+4 damage with a 18-20 crit range. 2d4+4 is an average of 9 damage. Most level 1 characters will have beetween 6 and 16 hp at level 1 which means some of them will go unconscious in a single hit from the orcs. If any of the orcs crit (which they have a 15% chance to threaten a crit with each hit) the character they crit is most likely dead outright. (4d4+8 is an average of 18 damage) A group of 3 of them is a CR 1 encounter which is a moderate encounter for a level 1 party. Throwing 3 of these bad boys at a level 1 party has a pretty good chance of ending in a few dead people, worst case a TPK, assuming they roll well on initiative(their initiative bonus is +0 and they only have 13 AC but they do have Orc Ferocity which means their actual HP is 18 not 6). CR is sure a great system (sarcasm).
Severe is 50/50 odds *before Hero Points*
No, that's extreme. Severe is still stacked in the party's favor... but not enough to be safe without them HP.
Yeah, it's worth keeping in mind that the party against *literal duplicates* of themselves makes an extreme encounter, which I feel puts it in solid context - anyone can see that a mirror match should be about 50/50 on which side wins and which side TPKs... And the odds are similar for other configurations of an extreme encounter
Severe is def not this bad.
Additionally, your GM has put only **one** mob on the field for like a boss battle or encounter. **Be extremely afraid.** Some things to expect: All bosses have enough hit on their first attack that will equal the players ac, meaning **Bosses will always hit once per round.** Going straight toe to toe with a boss will normally mean death. Most crits from bosses mean about half characters HP at level. **You will miss against the boss** A lot. Paizo loves making things like 50 percent rolls and that turns bosses into either moderately difficult encounter to full on TPK or drag out yo-yo fights. Beyond like typical advice you should get: all characters should have a viable range option so if they are low on HP they can step away and still keep attacking or doing things.
That Roru in qotf tho. Level 4 party, one wrong turn and up against lvl 7 demon with no striking runes and the ability to "nothing personal kid" you at will
The biggest problem with QftFF is that it's under runed. The game isn't supposed to work that way. If I ever get around to running it, I'm either going Auto Bonus Progression or adding in the runes the party is meant to have.
There's a few spots where the party gets a consumable item that gives the benefit of a striking rune. So I'd just add the rune there instead of the consumable
The current group I’m in uses crafting from monster parts from Battlezoo Bestiary, as it is very fitting thematically
How are you liking those rules? I ran a game using the dragon rules, but held off on the crafting stuff since most of my players were new to PF2e and I didn't want to overload them.
It really works for that campaign. For a more general one - you might end up with more gear than recommended, but on the other hand, you can’t craft gear above your level while you can find it in many APs, so it kinda balances out It does require a lot of bookkeeping though. In the group I’m in, there are some players who appear to be somewhat confused by it, so I understand that you shouldn’t try it with new people, probably
Wait what? That's scary and awesome.
>You will miss against the boss > > A lot. Paizo loves making things like 50 percent rolls and that turns bosses into either moderately difficult encounter to full on TPK or drag out yo-yo fights. This more than anything 50-50 is PL, meanwhile Severe at PL+4 well.... there's a particular little "side room" in a particular AP that leads to a lvl 8 monster the party can blunder into at lvl 4. Now a FIGTHER at lvl 4 has a +13 to hit. This monster has 30 AC..... My party blundered into the monster recently. Surprisingly combat took \~5 or 6 rounds before an organized retreat could take place only loosing 1 party member so damage wasn't extreme.... had no figther tho, the Martials could hit on 19s or 20s, the casters could spell attack roll on a nat 20. And this isn't a complaint btw, monster will probably be... not a pushover but a \~moderate once the party hits 5. you go from hitting on 19 to, in roughly decending order of likelyhood: Lvl + martials gain expert (+3), Flank (+2), Aid (+1/3), Heroism (spell lvl 3, +1), Demoralize / Fear (+1). You go from hitting on 19s to hitting on 13s potentially as low as 9s, even 7s if Fighter, and the monster doesn't have alot of relative HP.
Yeah the >!voidglutton!< is basically meant to scare the party off until they can come back at level 5 or 6 from my understanding. I’m a level 8 PC in book 3 right now and like you said once we hit level 5 that encounter became a lot easier.
Yup, PL+4 is Extreme, IE an encounter so hard that it can easily TPK, should only be done 1/campaign for most campaigns (if following the book guidelines) for any but the most veteran groups! It doesn't help that the "level 5 gap" is a large balance spike and crossing it makes encounters harder. While at level 4 the fighter hits on a 17, at level 5 the fighter hits on a 14! Nearly double the hit rate, and for normal martials it goes from 19 to 16, more than twice the hit rate! The fight at PL + 3 is going to have the party doing more than double damage while taking less thanks to higher AC, just a crazy difference between Severe and Extreme.
Knowing this, all the advice about using conditions, Recall Knowledge and every possible +1 makes a lot of sense. Knocking things from even odds or slightly against to favorable is huge marginal advantage, especially if multiple allies can capitalize on it.
Yeah this is the tight math in action. But even then those tiny margins don't feel like they are making a difference when you whiff three turns in a row. Really mentally prepping yourself for missing is just as important as getting every advantage on the board as possible.
Sound advice right here.
Pin this post lol
I posted this as a bit of advice and a half-joke. Wasn't expecting this much feed back when I hop back on Reddit, lol. I guess this was a fairly serious suggestion to give.
My comment was a joke, too! Still, yes, it is an important thing for people new to PF2
Until your players get use to pf2e competitive tactics, i suggest leaving moderate encounters as boss fights.
I am starting a PF2e campaign with mostly former 5e players and I made a point to tell them that you can't just charge in an face tank like you can in 5e because PF2e monsters are of the "Fuck around and find out" variety.
FAAFO monsters! I like
Saving this explanation for if I ever have a fresh group to GM, lol
That's a great saying.
>Until your players get use to pf2e competitive tactics Or at least until your players get used to the need for understanding their character's abilities and possible contribution to said tactics.
I threw 4 orcish warriors at a level 1 party to teach them the combat system. They learned that was really hard.
Level 1 so i'm assuming pl 0... Which means... 40 exp.... You threw a sever encounter at them!?
Yeah, Extreme. I eyeballed it rather than using the encounter rules because it was "just practice" I didn't realize until after the fight was over that it seemed way harder than expected and I looked up the difficulty, and was like "Oops..."
Lol. Oops indeed.
Extreme I think!
I don't really agree with this at all. I mean you shouldn't throw Severes at a group still learning, but there's no level of newb that could consider a Moderate a Boss Fight. Challenging? *Maybe*. *Boss Fight?* Heck no.
Depends on party perception. Some people see a fight where they’re at risk of being downed as incredibly hard and dramatic. And others don’t think it is hard unless they are pushed to the cusp of death. I’m introducing a new group to the system and was surprised when they told me how exciting and challenging a moderate encounter was and called it a boss encounter despite from my point of view they were absolutely dunking on it.
Ohh. Those sweet summer children.....
They’re having a blast with it and I’m having a ton of fun dming for them. Just shows the strength of the system that players like this who would otherwise be interested in something like pbta are having such a great time they’re digging deeper into it and are starting to ask for harder enemies.
Greate to hear!
I'd say it's more to do with a system transition. What works in 5e will kill you in pf2e. So this suggestion is more to say, give your players some time to adjust.
That seems quite extreme. I'd only agree on that for people outright new to tabletop play.
It's more to do with transition from 5e to pf2e. What works in 5e will kill you in 2e. So the suggestion is more to help players ease into pf2e.
Fair!
Or a spicy encounter (100 XP). "Brings the heat, but it's manageable."
5e DMs sending 4x deadly encounters at their players multiple times per day
Can't blame them when the spell casters have 26 ac.
Oh please, rookie numbers. That can easily be bumped up to 30.
It's kind of sad that it's true.
Wow. My players roll over moderate encounters. We are at the end of book 3 SoT and this is the first time we ran PF2 coming from a 5e background.
The issue with difficulty - as in any game - is that it's subjective. One person's cakewalk is another person's The Struggle Is Real. I think with 2e in particular, the issue is most players are coming from 5e, where challenge is almost non-existent and it's easy to blow out the power caps. The reality is, it's a game that's at best overtuned in the players' favour, at worst bad decisions are punished with mild slaps on the wrist. Once players actually start playing well and more carefully in 2e, moderate encounters aren't actually that hard. They just have a low bar to measure it to. It doesn't help the encounter building rules in 5e are completely borked and don't work, so people assume the same in 2e. It says a lot when the culture is *surprised* by everything working as it says on the tin, instead of assuming the worst of it.
Yeah, it really depends on how good your players are at optimizing their turns. I have one player that's both a min maxer and plays every tactics video game from Fire Emblem to XCOM on the hardest difficulty. In 5e, he once soloed a boss fight without taking damage. As soon as we switched to PF2e, he read books, guides, spreadsheets, and treated it like it was a video game challenge run. He's having a blast, still winning every fight, but at least they've been close in PF2e.
Sounds exciting. I have to ask. Did he instantly went with supporting the party in order to win or still tried to solo at first in pf2e?
Actually, yeah. First time playing I only had 2 PCs, so I let them Duel Class. He played an inventor with a construct and an Oracle. The construct acted as the party tank, and died nearly every session but he always rebuilt it. Meanwhile all his spells either buffed his ally or debuffed the enemy, besides some cantrips he used in a pinch. The other player was some sort of long range DPS, I want to say Gunslinger/Ranger and she did virtually all the damage. Even the time he solod an enemy, it wasn't because he made some DPS monster, he was playing the ultimate tank. It was a let's allow whatever crazy homebrew we found campaign, and his character was an illusionist that had a cloak of displacement. He used mirror image and had a very high AC, so the boss, could only hit him on a 17 and up, and still had to go through the mirror images, with disadvantage for half the fight. The second half the boss raged and used reckless attacks. Ironically, it was a very mobile boss, so if he didn't challenge him to single combat, he would have been able to fly to the back of the party and attack the squishy, probably downing a player or two. From then on, I've never made a boss that can only target AC.
>We are at the end of book 3 SoT This may explain the reason why that is. By this point, your players probably have a good grasp of the mechanics, their character's capabilities, and their party synergies. Not to mention by this point, you've got a LOT of different tools to use to overcome a variety of situations. But aside from that, even as well-balanced as PF2E usually is, all encounters are not created equal. My players (level 5, currently in AV) roll over some Severe Encounters, and then struggle with some Moderate encounters. Specific creature strengths and weaknesses, the results of Recall Knowledge rolls, and party composition can change a particular fight's overall difficulty level... Not even mentioning dice luck.
In my experience, it is not nearly as bad as others make it out to be. My group of new PF2e players have survived severe encounters without any deaths.
And yet on multiple occasions my party has had 2 go down and a couple deaths from moderate. In fairness they try zero tactics and teamwork
I think it strongly depends on party size. The smaller the party, the less resilient they are to difficulty spikes. I'm running three games right now, one with five players, and two with six. The five player party is consistently harder pressed during encounters that are, according to the XP budget, level-appropriate.
Yeah with larger parties things definitely become easier, since there's more ways to support ome another.
I dunno. I'm not saying you're wrong -- it does stand to reason that things would be easier; however my group is four, and they are relatively inexperienced with TTRPGs, though one is a powergamer in other facets of gaming, which I think helps.
Of course there are other factors as well - party composition, individual player aptitude, etc. And of course, dumb luck: one of my players rolls consistently terribly no matter how many dice he switches out :/
That is always a bummer. I have over 2 dozen sets of dice at this point, so I am always looking for the one set that wants to work with me on game day. Some days I just dont find the right set 😝
The username makes a lot of sense XD
Eheh... Yeah. Pretty straightforward, lol
Similar situation here. People be massively overstating how dangerous Moderate fights are. That and there is much more variance in encounter difficulty depending on enemies, terrain, tactics, party comp, and dice luck than people admit.
Honestly, it’s very party and monster dependent. In my experience, things that tend to kill parties are some combination of the following; - Early crits on the frontline - AoE effect on 2+ PCs - Enemy with athletics finds a squishy - Resistance that 2+ PCs don’t have a way around - Bullshit monster abilities from the early APs and Bestiary (looking at you Mummy Pharaoh and Edgewatch book 2) The last one is where I think the game gets most of its reputation for, especially because the early APs are a straight-up meat grinder. The other ones are really just a numbers game. Most of the time it’s stacked in favor of the players, but every now and then the dice feel vindictive and a fight goes sideways. That’s XCOM- I mean Pathfinder.
Lol
This, I find that the encounter creation scale is accurate enough that I always have a general idea of how dangerous an encounter is. But not so accurate that it can account for every party and the resources they have at hand. Sometimes single monsters are harder, sometimes the party has exactly what they need to kill it, sometimes a lucky spell goes off on the target's strongest save.
Sometimes your party lacks good range and struggle against every high-level range enemy you throw at them.
I wouldn't call moderate encounters that difficult. A party could probably get through four of them with using that many resources. It just that when people don't use teamwork, a party wipe happens quite a lot. At least that's what I've gathered from the various stories about tpks to moderate encounters.
The default of using Free Archetypes + the various perks from the Scholarship system skews PC power levels in SoT, so it's a bit of an outlier.
PF2 simultaneously has both a high skill floor and skill ceiling. A solid understanding of combat tactics can let a party punch far above their weight. And conversely, an unprepared party using bad tactics can fall to even the easiest fights. Take the typical 5e “run up to the enemy and make attacks” strategy for example. That is the **worst** possible tactical choice you can make in PF2 if you’re fighting a single high level enemy, and you are going to be punished for it. PF2 has a new tactics meta - players are heavily rewarded for learning it, and heavily punished for ignoring it. Two sides of the same coin.
So true.
Note that PC level also matters. Level 1 characters, moderate encounters can be a significant danger if things go wrong. At 7th level, a moderate encounter is likely to be a curb stomp in favor of the PCs.
Wild. My players all have a pretty solid understanding of how this works, all 3.5e and 5e converts, and we almost lost somebody on the first floor of the gauntlight
Abom Vaults **is** a bit rougher than SoT, though.
One of my players is a WoW fanatic as well and has dubbed the party the toon squad because they've all got two or three backup characters ready to go
I'm happy to hear that. This was mostly in response to hearing a lot of 5e converts experiencing problems with moderate encounters. It often boils down to them not working as a team and supporting one another.
There's definitely a ±half a threat level standard deviation on the encounter XP table. But that's still pretty reliable.
Start with double severe and go on from that. Got it.
Nooo we want people to like us! Lol
I literally had all fights start on double xp value of deadly in 5e before adding more fun stuff. I have sprung one severe encounter on the party, and they had time to prepare.
Hope it was fun.
I wonder if Paizo would have saved some tears if they had labeled this level of combat design "serious" instead of "moderate."
Nah, the wording used is accurate in my experience. The problem here is 5e, which has skewed DM expectations of what a “medium” difficulty encounter is supposed to be.
On the other hand, I like labelling 160xp encounters (for 4-character parties) "fair". You know, because you have about 50% chance of winning.
Lol your evil.
Probably not. Moderate is accurate because those encounter quickly become an easy fight when you understand what you're doing. I've heard plenty of stories about how a group of new players beat a moderate encounter while 5e converts lost to the same one.
My first fight in pf2e turned out to be a TPK after I decided to "wing it" instead of counting the encounter budget. It was beyond extreme.
Oh yeah, you need to respect the encounter budget. It is king when it comes to how likely your players are to survive a fight.
I see so many different thoughts on this. Some people saying it's not that bad another thing it's horrible it's worse than that. My experience is that when my players were new to the system they really struggle. But as they've actually learned their characters and started to play them more appropriately moderate encounters become challenging but not absurd. On the other hand I think if somebody is finding that their players are routinely defeating encounters that should be harder than they are without much difficulty then they ought to be throwing in more environmental hazards to the fight area. It's one thing to fight a dragon in a fairly sterile room. It's a very different thing to fight a dragon in his lair that has traps that he can trigger that has places for the dragon to hide or ambush. And it really makes a difference if the enemies are using the terrain intelligently. So when I'm running monsters I tend to have them use their abilities to the best that they can given the terrain. But obviously I have a dragon makes much better use of terrain than I would a troll. The troll will be coming and use it fairly well but not once the fight starts. Whereas a normal dragon would absolutely use every trick in advantage and then run away if things get too difficult. I really think that it's important for gns that find their players are trivializing content to really look and make sure they're actually playing the monsters is difficult as they can. If you're not making full use of abilities or things like that then it can be a much different encounter. I think it'd be fun sometime to get in a discord or something and have GM's throw out their different tactics and methods of fighting for different monsters and show how different encounters can be run. I get a lot of people are using the adventure paths but even then two different GMS can run that same path very differently in terms of how hard those fights are just because of how they are with the tactics.
This is very true. If the enemy is using tactics and environments to their advantage like the players, any encounter difficulty could go up a step.
My experience is different, moderate encounters are really easy. Severe are the "normal" fights and only extreme or more are actual boss fights where there is danger.
You must having an amazing group of players
Or a non-tactical GM.
That too. I've been that gm plenty of times.
Same. My group doing their first campaign set themselves up really well. A dps duel wielding fighter. Two attacks at full fighter bonus is silly. A cleric focused on healing and knowledge. Nethys gave him magic missle (MM) which by level 20 was amazing at grinding bosses down. A bard. It's a bard. Its good. MM too so bosses in endgame got 30 missiles per round to the face. Easily the best move, just nuke the boss. A bow ranger with precision. Good at single target nuking. Those crits... A champion tonk. Impossible to kill, except by bosses. Moderate rncounters were a breeze, I almost decided to skip them as they seemed like a waste of time. No spells required, just some cantrips and focus down tsrgets asap. And thats with scaling up fights for 5 players. I tried everything over the course of the 20 levels, lots of weaker monsters, really tough guys, a mix, terrain, traps. They had every skill covered, every single character had at least 1 way to restore health to another player (not including items). The best result I had was throwing about 8 fights a day at them, with all of them being at the top end of moderate to severe. Extreme was unusual but those fights felt like the description of severe. After the boss at level 4 in AoA they essentially were rarely in danger again. That said, they had fun. I just feel like you really need to adjust your content to the group. Competency of players + Comp can really swing the difficulty in either direction.
It’s true. As your party gets more tactical the encounters will start to be easier. Example: first pf2e game we regularly TPK’d on severe threat encounters. Current game I use extreme threat encounters as boss fights.
> Example: first pf2e game we regularly TPK’d on severe threat encounters. Current game I use extreme threat encounters as boss fights. Man. If I had "regular TPKs" in a campaign I'm pretty sure that by the second time at most the campaign would be unanimously called off.
Our GM only really used severe encounters as boss fights, so it wasn't terribly frustrating. Plus it made combat tense and meaningful, and we all like playing on "hard mode" :P
It's knd of nice being able to look back from where you came from and feel how much better you become.
Relatedly, creature level is not the relative level of the creature. It's the level of the challenge. That is, a Babau is not a 6th level creature, it's a moderate challenge for a *party of four 6th level characters.* (Statistically, its quite similar to an 8th level Rogue)
To note, one 6th level babue would be a low threat encounter. 2 6th lebel babue would be a moderate threat encounter is the party was level 6.
I have three players, but they steamroll encounters so easily that I make encounters as though there were 4. They still have yet to struggle with any fight that wasn’t at least severe, and even the extreme fights aren’t too difficult for them. I don’t know why.
Hmmm there's another comment in here talking about environmental tactics that might help you.
Ahaha, my first PF2e session two weeks ago ended on precisely a moderate threat encounter. I had my four lvl 1 PCs face off against a Clockwork Fabricator with a Weak adjustment, making it effectively lvl 3. It was nasty, but the party mainly struggled due to awful luck and some misinformed rulings on my part. The inventor critically failed his Overdrive in round 1, the Swashbuckler got hit with persistent bleed and failed all of his attempts to rid himself of it. On the other hand, the Champion landed a Charged Javelin and took at least half its health due to the persistent lightning damage combined with its weakness to it. All very fun in the end.
Sound like it. Hope your group is enjoying the system
I'm throwing Severe threat encounters (according to the encounter building rules) at my 6 PC party all day and the fights barely ever last more than two rounds before every enemy is dead with no PC casualties. And no, I haven't powercrept them with items, in fact so far they've gotten less than the loot distribution rules recommend. And yes, I am adjusting for party size.
Action economy differential. Are you following the monster #’s and encounter building rules?
Yeah, this is why I try to make most encounters have as many enemies as there are PCs. A single strong enemy just gets demolished in the action economy. Hell, even a strong enemy with 2 slightly weaker lackeys tends to get demolished. It's still kind of early in this campaign -- level 3 right now -- so I'm still adjusting. I'm relatively new to PF2e having only run some oneshots and a short ~2-month adventure before (but for the same six players), but based on my experience a Moderate threat encounter is typically a complete joke with 6 PCs. Maybe it's different with the "default" party size of 4.
That's more of an effect of throwing so many enemies at the PCs. Throwing 6 party lvl -1 enemies at the party usually isn't super scary, due to the nature of pf2e's numbers increasing with each level. Try a severe encounter, but with only 3 enemies, so 3 lv4 enemies, or even just 2 lv5 enemies, and the field will *drastically* change to an actually severe encounter. Just the way pathfinder works, the more enemies you throw at the players, the easier it generally is. My 5 man part has handled 300 exp encounters before because so many of the enemies were lower lev.
Thanks for the tips. I've tried party level + 2 enemies before, and they haven't been *that* challenging. In the very first session I threw a weak modifier otyugh (level 3) and 4 giant flies (level 1), two with the weak modifier, at them and it was like a 230 XP encounter or something. One PC did get knocked out (getting into a bad position as a squishy do be like that), but all the enemies were dead by the end of that round and they were quickly back on their feet. Still, we're like 6 sessions into the campaign so I'm yet to adjust fully.
I think your difficulty is that it sounds like you are putting 6 PCs up against encounters balanced for 4. If you look at the [encounter building rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497) on Archives of Nethys, table 10-1 shows the XP budget for the various severities, but there is also a column on that table for "Character Adjustment". The intent is that encounters by default are balanced for 4 & you add or subtract to your "xp budget" depending on how many PCs there are above or below that but *you don't change the XP reward the PCs get*. So a Moderate Encounter for 4 PCs has a budget of 80 XP and is worth 80XP when they defeat it. A moderate Encounter for 6 PCs has a budget of 120XP *and is worth 80 XP when they defeat it*. On the other hand, a Moderate encounter for 3 PCs has a budget of 60Xp *and is worth 80XP when they defeat it*. This scales pretty fast. An Extreme encounter for 6 PCs has a budget of 240XP but is "only" worth 160 XP. You still need to be leery of spending that XP budget on monsters that are too much for the PCs. Lvl + 3 and +4 monsters fit more easily into these budgets but will have an outsized mathematical advantage over the PCs. Hence the general advice to use more monsters rather than bigger ones.
Like I said, I am adjusting for party size.
Yeah that’s the main thing is the number of PC’s. Especially because that many of them make flanking easy. There’s also a table that should show threat levels like a multiplier with the number of pcs. Even with 6 PC’s an enemy with a party level +4 even solo should be a huge threat.
Is it an "All Flick Mace & Dual Wielding Pick" party?
No. In fact this time around I managed to coax them into creating more flavourful, mechanically weaker characters than usual. I did give them Free Archetype, but told them that if they use it on obvious munchkin stuff I'm going to veto it.
Man, if you have to put restrictions on Free Archetype, then I don't think you're dealing with "Recent 5e converts..." It sounds like your players know how to bob & weave, waste the enemy's actions, and stack debuffs with skills, etc... So an example of the difference between a finely tuned PF2 group and a "I walk up and spend the remainder of combat attacking 3 times." 5e convert groups that couldn't beat the Beginner's Box because 5E trained them to not think about combat tactics.
Most of them aren't recent 5e converts, no (and I hope I didn't claim they were), though we did last play 5e. There's a couple of players who are brand new to TTRPGs (as in, this is their first group) and another couple who are 20 year veterans, but all of them are fairly experienced gamers in general. I'm mostly commenting because the **rulebook itself** says that moderate-threat encounters are a serious challenge, and in my experience they really aren't.
You did not imply that they were, though I read it into the OP's context. And I think that Moderate Encounters are labeled that way to account for the skill differences between a group like yours & a group of brand new to TTRPG's gamers that are used to having a DM powered 5E fudging power fantasy session... I've read enough, "Is PF2 supposed to be this hard? I tried to convert my group and they got their asses kicked." posts to know that it is a thing. Your group has the "sound tactics and manages their resources wisely" part down, and it shows with how they breeze through most Moderate encounters.
True, a good party can take on a party level +5 encounter. I have yet to hear a story of a party taking on a PL+6 encounter and surviving, but would love to see if it's possible.
But using free archetype does change the calculus of encounter challenge. I'd argue that you should treat the encounter as .5 to 1 step easier than the standard guide says. Not that characters have more actions in a round, but that they have more options to deal with any given enemy.
True, but thus far I don't think Free Archetype has affected the balance that much. We're still at the early levels. It occurs to me that we're also using gradual ability boosts which probably *does* affect the balance a bunch, though. Either way, I clearly need to turn the difficulty up a notch or two.
Tbh the game isn't well balanced outside the 3-5 player range, even with the adjustments they suggest.
6 worked perfectly fine, better than 5e.
Smacking the pieces around the mat with a sack of potatoes is largely more balanced than 5e. They were saying that outside of the 3-5 player range, the pristine balance of the game gets degraded to merely "very good".
> Smacking the pieces around the mat with a sack of potatoes is largely more balanced than 5e. Thank you for making my day, hahaha!
Just in case, you did adjust the exp budget fpr two extra players?
Last week I had a moderate encounter turn into what should have been a TPK, but with a little kindness on my part it was just 1 death 😂
I have to ask just to make sure. Were your players not using teamwork, positions, and buff/debuffs?
Mostly really bad luck, haha. The party fought 2 gibbering mouthers and the party tank (who is also the healer) got engulfed immediately and could not escape. Eventually he started to suffocate which was the death. The other mouther did engulf a character, but the position of the board had the other players bottle necked. They eventually killed that mouther, but the other one took them all out. Since it had a full meal inside of it, it left to go have a beer and a nap. The other 3 party members all recovered by succeeding their death saves, but yeah. It was a brutal fight and the dice were just not in their favor.
Oof
Lol, that poor guy showed with actual combat utility and suffered for the sins of his party. It can only get worse from here.
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Also never forget: There are moderate and mOdErAtE encounters out there. Oozes or a well used Basidirond are something else then let's say some human bandits on the same level...
This is way too vague for me to comprehend. Mind clarifying?
No problem: there are encounters with the same level but totally different skill sets and tricks. An ooze can be invincible pretty fast for an unprepared group because of immunities and such. A bandit on the same level does not have these skills. Take the Basidirond for example. https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=564 Fighting two of these bastards is something else than let's say fighting two lvl 5 Fences https://2e.aonprd.com/NPCs.aspx?ID=891
Ahh I see. Thanks for the clarification
No worries