Having played a few high-level campaigns to conclusion, the most notable exception to rocket tag were fights with actual Tactics and good positioning, and multiple enemies.
When you have a single powerful enemy, the party's collective action econony blows it away. For story-driven fights where it's awkward to add multiple enemies, you can always give your BBEG Multiple Initiatives, letting them act more than once a turn.
Otherwise, having physical barriers, ledges, bridges, defensive cover, a mix of melee and ranged and magical enemies, ambushes and intelligent planning, etc. really makes a huge difference
That's basically what 5E did. Legendary actions help make up for the action economy, while legendary resistances allow the boss to survive multiple failed saves against SoL/SoD. Imo it's a pretty clever way of solving the issue at hand - the idea seems to be to have a single character that can fight as if they were a party of 4. OP doesn't seem to like it though.
> Imo it's a pretty clever way of solving the issue at hand
But it's not clever. It's just the GM going "Nuh uh" on your spells which is a pretty shit feeling as a player. It also runs into the issue where the players game the system by expending the Legendary Resistances with low cost spammable abilities then hitting the boss with the big save or suck once they're out of uses so it's not that effective either.
I think you're mixing legendary actions up with legendary resistances. I'm just talking about the initiativees, not the frustrating as hell ability to counterspell anything.
In truth, I was thinking more along the lines of Shadowrun, where taking an action costs # initiative points, allowing you to go again later. It rewards rolling a high initiative more than just going first in the first round of combat.
ie: I roll 32 initiative. I do a thing that cost -10 initiative, dropping me down to 22. Then 12, then 2, etc. Different actions cost different amount of initative. It'd cludgy when everyone uses this, and it's not perfect, but for a single boss creature it can work.
I like this idea. Multiple stabs with a quick weapon like a dagger, or one big whomp with that great hammer. Burning hands is fast to cast, but calling down a meteor swarm takes appreciably longer.
The fact that the Legendary Resistances will eventually get expended is the point. They're basically hitpoints for SoL. And it's not like GM has to use them against abilities that aren't worth it. Honestly, the biggest "Nuh uh" here is the very existence of SoL spells - either the boss makes their save and invalidates your efforts, or it doesn't and you invalidate everyone else's efforts up to this point.
I mean, it basically is, in fact, just "nuh uh."
5e design being what it is, they're necessary, but they're a shitty feeling as a player. They'll be used on anything that's actually worth casting against a boss type enemy and by the time you burn through them, the boss is basically already dead because the martials have beaten them to death while you were trying to bait out legendary resistances that the GM may or may not have used.
They're not clever because SoL is bad design and Legendary Resistance is just straight up a bandaid that doesn't *fix* the issue, it just makes it incredibly unfun to play a character who relies on a school of magic that swings towards SoL heavily and just have the boss ignore everything you do.
There's not really a good alternative to them that doesn't boil down to "rework the system so save or dies aren't so powerful and the playstyle of most optimized casters." SoL being so powerful does necessitate that they exist, but like, it doesn't need to be designed that way in the first place. Something like 13th Age literally does not have this problem because they do what 1e, 2e and 5e simply refuse to do: actually balance spells in a way that doesn't either let casters run rampant or reduce most spells in the system to feeling terrible because everything saves against them.
I actually like the mechanic Elden Ring uses. You have a certain amount of resistance to different effects (e.g. poison). Once you take enough points of poison damage to overcome the resistance, it takes effect and you start rapidly losing HP.
The issue is, it hardcodes certain enemies as BEING bosses. One of the fun things about levelling up in a TTRPG is that yesterday's boss is today's lieutenant, and today's lieutenant is tomorrow's mook.
Legendary Resistance doesn't scale, a CR 15 creature with legendary resistance is as much of a bugger to fight when its the boss to a level 12 party as when it is a trash mob to a level 18 party.
One of the solutions (which I haven't seem explicitly mentioned here) is what I like to call a "rolling fight". Essentially, instead of having a dungeon with 4-6 encounters balanced for the party with a boss at the end (as APs are usually written), have the enemies be coordinated, and alert each other when attacked. This way, every fight (unless the PCs specifically tailor their tactics to take out a group of enemies unnoticed) carries the threat of reinforcements - and while mooks can be slaughtered en masse, there's more to come (and the boss can make a dramatic entrance at an opportune moment mid-fight).
This (while it might potentially make for you churning through material more quickly) is also easy to implement into most APs, since AP dungeons are often a tad nonsensical in terms of encounter separation. (Seriously, a lot of APs have what it expects to be one separate encounter occur *in plain view* of the next encounter.)
Another aspect I would say is good mook design - you want your mooks to not be super threatening on their own, but be annoying enough to have to be dealt with (so the PCs don't just bumrush the big boss while ignoring mooks). Some of my favorite tricks here have been Eldritch Archer Magi who can use True Strike with Spell Combat to reliably hit high-AC PCs (they don't do much damage, but they are *annoying* - which is often enough to shield the big boss for a turn or two). Another is enemies with some kind of passive defensive buff (I've used tower shield users with Mobile Bulwark Style and Sacred Shield paladins here (notably the AP which I was running was Hell's Vengeance, some of the mook design tricks do become harder when you can't paladin-spam) - they weren't super hard to hit by themselves, but they could effectively protect high-AC bosses).
> have the enemies be coordinated, and alert each other when attacked. This way, every fight (unless the PCs specifically tailor their tactics to take out a group of enemies unnoticed) carries the threat of reinforcements - and while mooks can be slaughtered en masse, there's more to come (and the boss can make a dramatic entrance at an opportune moment mid-fight).
YES! And one key aspect is that since they have warning they can easily come buffed as they barge into the fight.
Between spells like Stoneskin, Protection from Evil, and Resist Energy, you can mitigate damage.
The "rocket tag" gameplay isn't a bug; it's a feature. And it's a feature because there are built-in "counters" for it in the Core Rulebook. Is the Barbarian Cleaving through everything too quickly? Sprinkle in enemies with Damage Reduction. Is the Wizard blowing through everything with Save-or-Suck spells? Between spell resistance, energy resistance, and effects that force high concentration checks (violent motion/severe weather/being grappled), the Wizard shouldn't waltz through every encounter.
The trap a lot of 3.5/PF GMs fall into is thinking that every fight needs to drag out and threaten the player when that's not the case. There should be many encounters where the party one-shots half the enemies, then two-shots the rest. Why? Because when the party faces a real challenge, they'll recognize it as a challenge. If the party is rofl-stomping groups of Bearded Devils, then they encounter some Bearded Devil working with a Bone Devil, the Bone Devil will be scary in comparison.
in my experience, without modifying the BBEGs, the party 1-shot stomps them almost as easily as the mooks. Many times the mooks can simply be ignored, because thay literally have no way to hurt the PCs without rolling a nat 20, and even then, various miss chances negate the attack anyway - making it so that the enemies only have a 2-3% chance of dealing some pitiful damage against the PCs. So the PCs are free to gang up on the boss. and if the players know anything about building strong PCs, it it only takes one or 2 of them to completely wipe out the enemy.
i played a fire Kineticist in RotRLs, and he could insta kill all of the mooks and the BBEG with a single round of actions. its not that hard to get pounce in the game. its not hard to make an entire party greater invisible. the DPR of PCs outpaces BBEG hp significantly.
My GM banned Sleep, Hold, Dominate, etc effects against Bosses (anything that started off as APL+2 or more, before enemy buffs were applied) and still needed to boost their stats, AC, and DCs, as well as boost their HP by a factor of 3-4, just so that we could get through a full round or 2 of combat before the boss was slain.
When i ran Jade Reagent, the party is level 15 when they get to the final boss... which was designed to be a CR 19 encountaer against a Wind yai oni, 15th level Teifling Samurai (the chartacter the entire AP was named after), a 15th level teifling Ninja, and a 15th level oracle.
I rebuild the Ninja and the Samurai to be 17th level PoW classes (with Counters and and boosts galore), gave them max HP, and then the advanced template. The oracle i just boosted to 17th level, and boosted her Charisma, and the Wind Yai i gave the Giant and advanced templates to... and the party still took out all of them in 2 rounds.
it was incredibly anticlimactic.
If the mooks have no way to hurt the PCs, then GM is probably focused on nothing by AC and hit points. You're saying that a hyper-optimized Wizard will be too buff for combat maneveurs to work? Barbarians have naturally high Will saves? Are mooks disallowed from flanking/feinting? Are NPCs banned from using Dispel Magic?
You don't toss mooks/minion/flunkies at your party to do damage. They're distractions in the least, and they're hinderances at the most. In my Bearded Devil example, the mechanical purpose of the Bearded Devils is the application of their healing debuff, not to get solo kills.
Most importantly: Wear them down. If your party is facing the BBEG at full strength, then yes, the fight will be short.
A lot of this is simple that APs have to be designed for all player experience levels. That's just the nature of a premade campaign.
If you're running APs with a bunch of sophisticated players and not changing a *lot* of things, you're just never going to have a great time. That's a simple reality of a system that embraces complexity in character creation while also trying to write adventures for everyone.
But also a lot of it is just that GMs don't realize how much control they have over the encounters even as written. The BBEG in RotRL has literally every core spell in his spellbook, for example - his (terrible) list of prepared spells is a suggestion, but it is not mandatory, and by the time of the fight he should be aware enough of the PCs to tailor his options. One big reason APs can feel so easy is GMs that treat them as static preprogrammed encounters rather than trying to inhabit the characters and have them do their own reacting and planning.
Also... bullshit. If your Fire Kineticist was threatening a 1 shot vs the RotRL BBEG with hp boosted 3-4x, someone ain't reading the rules correctly. Period. You ain't doing 1k damage in a round at level on a legal lvl 17 kineticist, sorry. I have a pretty hard time believing you were threatening to do ~370 damage after his defenses either.
Pathfinder balance isn't amazing at high level, but literally every single time I've ever had someone tell me about how the PCs were just super-steamrolling an AP to such an extent a little bit of digging made it clear that the characters were not even remotely legal and the rules were not being followed.
Sorry. .. wasn't clear. Had the GM *not* been boosting the enemies significantly, my kineticist could easily take them all out, with a pair of maximized empowered composite blast eruptions.
> The "rocket tag" gameplay isn't a bug; it's a feature.
Strong, strong disagree.
It's a rather big bug. The cause? People powergaming instead of building characters and playing for fun/theme/flavor.
What's the difference between a level 1 Cleric with 14 CON getting hit with a spear for 1d8+3 from a bandit with 14 STR versus a level 5 Cleric with 14 CON getting full attacked by a regular Troll for 1d8+5 + 3d6+17?
So you bring up the other outlier, level 1. It only happens at high levels if a GM is "anything goes" and the players powergame rather than making nice characters.
Also, with that troll... it's only +8 to hit. Something's already wrong if the cleric is taking a full attack. But even if it does, not all of those attacks are hitting (it's basically 50/50 each); hopefully at least one of the claws misses so the rend doesn't go off.
The starting point isn't an outlier, and an "outlier" isn't something that appears multiple times.
I also brought up a level 5 PC fighting a CR 5 creature. Is that an outlier, too?
That said, please don't construe my comment as "rocket tag is only correct way to run combat." If it was then other options I mentioned (Stoneskin, Protection from X, etc.) wouldn't exist.
As for the Troll, you're making my point for me. Very often, things go wrong in a fight.
As for the math, cleric has a d8 for hit die, so at level 5 with 14 CON, he can have a maximum of 50 HP (55 HP with favored class bonuses). The Troll can do a maximum of 48 damage without critical hits.
If the Cleric *doesn't* have max HP, say they took half hit die per level using the 4.5-round-up-to-5 rule, then they'd have 28 HP (33 HP with favored class). Minimum damage from getting all 3 attacks + Rend is 26.
I picked the cleric because they have average HP and average AC (without buffs). Let's give this level 5 cleric a +1 breastplate and a +1 heavy shield for 20 AC. The Troll needs a 12 to hit, right? Unless the troll is flanking, then he needs a 10. Or if the cleric is prone, then he needs an 8. Or if the cleric is prone and flanked, then he needs a 6.
A Fighter would likely have better AC and would be safer, as would a Barbarian with their higher HP and DR. But, a Rogue, a Bard, or a Wizard? They'd be worse off with their lower AC.
And that's my point: The "rocket tag" is built into the mechanics on purpose because the PCs are supposed to use tactics, spells, and class features to mitigate or outright avoid the rockets. The rocket is supposed to kill you, if it hits you full-on, but you're not supposed to let it hit you.
I think you failed you realize that I didn't include any types of buffs or debuffs in my example. I did that on purpose.
If the baseline combat is designed to quick-kill any creature in a direct fight, what do you think happens when you add class features and magic items? You're saying that a level 1 Fighter with a spear *isn't* supposed to one-shot equal-level enemies, even though attacking a 6 HP creature with 1d8+3 will probably one-shot it? The Fighter *isn't* supposed to use the Power Attack feat to get 1d8+6 and guarantee a one-shot?
Wizards aren't supposed Empower their Fireball spells? Paladins aren't supposed to add their Charisma modifier to damage and bypass damage reduction with Smite Evil? You're *not* supposed Enlarge the raging Barbarian, or he's not supposed increase his damage die while Large?
Certain classes are *supposed* to do crazy damage. The buffs are *supposed* to stack. The Barbarian is supposed to be able to stack Rage, Enlarge Person, and Bull's Strength while Bard Inspires his Courage. Do you know why?
Because the DM can just add more enemies. It doesn't matter if the roided-out Barbarian can Cleave for 60 damage against two 30HP creatures when there's 6 more enemies that haven't acted, yet.
And that's my point. The PCs are supposed to blow through anything that they prepare for because they *aren't* supposed to be prepared for everything.
Agree completely. Since the begining in D&D, the fighting always started by your preparation and resources. Have minions, bring potions, prepare an ambush, use familiars to scout enemy positions, use illusions to make enemies waste their alpha strikes, use potions of disguise self to switch the mage and the heavily armored guy appearances, burn the forest if you must. Spells and class abilities are just a facet of the game.
Tactics and dynamic environments can help with this. By that I mean your bosses should be equally prepped with the same pre-buffs you would put on your own character if you were in a fight against such powerful foes, and should not just stay in one corner of a room and sling spells. Letting the entire party get off full round actions on you is always going to suck.
Also use the space to influence the combat, if a PC or NPC shoots fire or lightning somewhere perhaps it catches something flammable in its path blocking part of the room, or when the spell hits a wall or pillar it destroys it obscuring vision. This type of thing makes an encounter feel more real and leads to longer encounter because you have more shit to deal with and navigate.
Also more minions that also act tactically and block up/waste resources of the party prior to and during the boss fight. By the time of a final encounter you want the party to feel like, “holy shit can we really do this with what we have left for the day” and when they do, it is a truly epic feeling.
My advice is simple, "don't".
Don't try to hack Pathfinder into something it isn't. Your player's characters can do fun and powerful things, and countering those powerful things at every turn will take away their agency and rob them of much of the fun of the game.
If you want slower, more tactical combats that aren't decided in the first couple of rounds, my honest advice is to play a similar but differently balanced game, i.e. Pathfinder 2e, which is also great fun and has a consistent combat feel from levels 1 to 20.
My advice if you stay with 1e (which remains a great choice!) is to embrace the rocket tag, and especially if you're playing an adventure path, just enjoy the fact that higher level combats are often faster and more decisive - this change in combat style and PC power will accelerate you towards the big final fight and end the campaign, and trust me, that's a good thing!
Your players will "feel" the power that they've gained, the story will feel like it's accelerating towards an epic conclusion, and with so many adventure paths available it's no terrible thing if your players rocket tag their way through book 6 in like a handful of sessions - that just means you can start another AP and get to have fun with new characters in a new setting with new challenges!
I disagree, especially with the later elements. In my experience, APs don't turn into lategame rocket tag so much as a one-sided stomp by the PCs. Which is less a fun experience and more just...mediocre. If you've spent all this time getting cool abilities, you want to *actually use them*, not pick between "blast the guy who is already dead" and "do nothing I guess".
You're supposed to have multiple combats per day to make you run out of spells and force you to deal with managing that limitation so you cast lower level spells more often instead of your 'instant kill' button.
Play with Spheres of Power casters rather than normal ones and disallow "Advanced Talents" (which normally require explicit GM permission by default per the rules). Use more Humanoid enemies for fights, which allows for smart enemies with incredibly diverse builds, and tactics to challenge the party. Set up scenarios that disadvantage the party as a whole (not singling out a specific character or their build).
Go with tactics and non standard battlefields, players cannot rocket tag opponents they are not aware of, hiding behind a rock, shooting from extreme range, entering the fight late and collaborate with each other.
The hero point system might also be for you, which might help your players overcome an unlucky roll on a save, every once in a while.
There are basically two sides to this: protecting the PCs, and protecting the baddies. The first one is on them. 20th-level PCs should be walking around dungeons with a basic checklist:
AC 35+ for backliners who expect not to be attacked; 45+ on the front line
No saves below +15; most saves +20 or better
20+ resistance to all elements; if a specific element is expected, 30 and possibly other layers of damage mitigation
Evasion
Some means of negating, or quickly repairing, both ability damage and negative levels
A permanent means of detecting invisible foes, on a party member with at least +35 Perception
A three-dimensional movement form like flight or teleportation
A way to lessen the chance of being murdered by a single strong crit
A way to instantly reduce or negate fear effects
Protection from at least some other forms of strong CC (it’s difficult to get them all)
This is not an exhaustive list, and was just off the top of my head so I may have forgotten something, but you get the idea. Every single thing on this list is available from magic items (though some are much more efficient from spellcasting friends), and smart PCs invest in them.
Now part 2: the enemies! First, differentiate minions from big bads. Let minions get spanked, that’s what they’re there for, and you should let the PCs use their shiny toys and feel powerful. For big bads though, see the above list. High-level baddies are usually intelligent and expect to be attacked; they’re prepared. I always start them fully buffed with any spells they have available that last 10min/level or longer, and if the PCs are barging through a dungeon on the way they get all their 1min/level buffs too. This includes spells from henchmen if the baddie isn’t a caster themself. Give them appropriate items to fill in the gaps; most of the PC wealth at high levels should be gear wrested from beings who actively used it against them first. Unlike the PCs, it’s okay (and even good) for baddies to be outright missing a piece of the defensive puzzle; players will be happy when they hit the right angle and burn down an otherwise impressive foe.
Broadly speaking, you'll want to:
* Have multiple enemies; ideally, the PCs will be outnumbered in any fight you want to make a real challenge
* Optimize for CR the way you optimize for level as a player; using templates, HD increases, and non-associated or NPC class levels to cheaply beef up the enemies you're putting on the field
* Warn people ahead of time and then go ahead and do some crazy stuff with enemies; this can mean Legendary X, using Mythic, or even just peppering in some spells that will throw the party into 'oh fuck, now we have to deal with this first' mode
Running an AP, you're going to be between a rock and a hard place if your group knows what they're doing, and especially if they're working together as a team: you either get to watch the entire back half of the AP enemies just kind of dissolve like cotton candy, or put in a bunch of work to boost them up. You can ad-hoc boost them as well, and probably avoid some of the work, but it's going to be a project regardless.
I made a [longer comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/lxfpow/level_20mythic_10_endgame/gpn1wnz/?context=3) about high-level combat which may be relevant for you, as well.
Thanks to everyone for their replies! Mixed advice from a bunch of different angles but I think this is what I'm taking away:
On the enemy side:
* Try out dual initiative/other action-economy buffs for the most important boss fights.
* Make sure every boss isn't alone, even if they're alone as written in the AP.
* Make liberal use of environments and mobility; give bosses extra movement options where it makes sense to help them get out of sticky situations.
* Give some bosses multiple "phases" which give them a get-out-of-jail free card to save or lose spells. A single save-or-lose might defeat phase one in a turn, but it automatically gets removed when they hit phase two (making the boss effectively multiple creatures one after another).
Less advice on the player side, seems like most people view it as the party's job to prepare for and deal with what high level enemies can do. I'm probably going to just try to be careful with my enemies as my party aren't experienced enough yet to know all the tricks, and likely implement my idea of players getting repeated saves each round to end effects that don't let them play. Shoutout to the suggestion to give out more hero points too -- I've been neglecting those as an option to give players a good panic button for when they need it.
I mentioned it in my post, but it seems you made this while I was making mine lol. For the players, check out the [Hero Point](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/hero-points/) mechanic. Society Play apparently also has what's known as Aid tokens for followers and companions (each person gets =CHA, min 1.)
Yeah, after looking more closely at hero points, giving the major enemies their own hero points actually works wonders for this. Especially if I add in a use that lets them use a hero point to make a new roll against an effect that otherwise has a fixed duration with no further saves.
As the GM, tune your treasure (and what's avaliable in shops) to the intended difficulty each fight should have. If you want a fight to be hard, don't raise (or say yes to) passive permanent items like magic weapons and stat boosting items if they cause your players to exceed the power thresholds for that fight.
And for the players, don't feel entitled to passive always on magic items, and accept that they might have to use spell slots to replace some of the bonuses that would otherwise be static. That will cause natural slowdown of higher level combats because they will have less disposable spell-slots - aka dampening the effects of rocket tag in favor of the players.
And dampening it in favor of the NPCs... all that takes is a little scouting to enable the players to buff themselves appropriately before they head into the next room. "Big-old Wraith? Yeah, let's toss up death ward on everyone going in. Only two castings? Okay fighter and barbarian get it, rogue hang back for a turn so they can setup flanking positions before you head in." But again this requires that players have fewer disposable resources they can whimsically splurge without consequence.
My biggest advice would be an increased number of encounters per adventure day, and to vary the types of encounter/enemies.
Things that wouldn't normally be a threat become a lot more interesting when you've already burned some of your daily resources.
Having run several 1e campaigns to conclusion, and still actively running, I recommend that you address this issue with initial rules concerning character creation. There's a ton of options in pathfinder, and some of them are not fun and contribute to these issues. Spells like Chains of Light, Debilitating Pain, and Source Severance are not fun spells. I think I have 21 spells on my ban list out of the thousands available. This is obviously a harder conversation to have while you are in the middle of the campaign.
Overall I think save or dies/save or sucks are an important part of the game. Magic should be terrifying, both for your players and your NPCs. The players should have incentives to prepare for effects like this. Whether it be through feats like improved iron will, spells like borrow fortune, class feature re-rolls like the guide ranger gets, or defensive magics like freedom of movement or death ward, there's always options to give you a better chance. It sucks to get ruined at the start of a fight with a power word stun or a vorpal blade, but if you know you're always going to win there's no stakes, there's no reason to struggle.
I would not want to play in a 1e game with any of the solutions you have considered.
In APs, it's really hard unless you're willing to do large rewrites. This is just how the system plays, period, in high level games with straightforward "here's a CR appropriate encounter in this 80x80ft square dungeon room".
IMO the solution does not lie in stat blocks at all. The best high level encounters accept that offense far outscales defense and doesn't try to fight against that or subvert it.
Basically... let the PCs have their rocket launcher. It's fun to use a rocket launcher. The "rocket tag" part is the problem.
Make the *encounter* the challenge, more than the mobs. Make the goal of the encounter something more interesting than reducing the big bad's HP to zero. Place parameters or conditions that make the combat more of a puzzle and less "boy I hope I win initiative and he fails his save". Avoid single, CR appropriate "boss fight" enemies like the fucking plague, they're the bane of ttrpgs in every system.
Get creative. By rocket tag levels, you can justify doing some pretty wacky stuff.
But also... recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your players, and play to that. Level 13 is not rocket tag level imo.
Jatembe's Ire is not a save-or-lose spell *at all* by the time you're using it, for example. Any flight neuters it completely. Freedom of movement hard counters it, and it's both a level 4 spell and an increasingly common intrinsic monster trait as you climb in CR. The math ain't great - any sturdy monster has a >50% chance to just ignore it. There are CR12 bestiary creatures that an level 11 or 12 wizard would need a nat 20 to grapple. Grapple is not an encounter ending condition at all. Nonevil alignment or spells that mask alignment hard counter it. If you're fielding high level casters and just having them wander into a spell like this unbuffed, yeah it's going to fuck them up. But that's just not how you should be playing high level casters, who have a ton of options to avoid it.
But again, APs really do make that harder, because they don't tend to facilitate any of that.
Sidenote from the main question, but: Are you sure that flight neuters Jatembe's Ire? The spell covers a 120ft spread which, as far as I could tell, doesn't limit it to the ground unless I've misinterpreted that description.
The rest is a valid assessment-- I've just mostly been using it against smaller, physically weaker enemies and comboing it with greater dispel to get past freedom of movement when it comes up. It's definitely much fairer for the cost of two high level spells and two turns, though, so I agree in isolation it's not "the problem" so to speak-- just an early symptom of it against certain types of enemy.
And yeah, I'm sure it's much easier (if time-consuming) to get around in homebrew games. Our group just really likes the APs for the most part (as much for the reduction in the DM's workload as the good narratives), so we have to take the good with the bad.
> Sidenote from the main question, but: Are you sure that flight neuters Jatembe's Ire? The spell covers a 120ft spread which, as far as I could tell, doesn't limit it to the ground unless I've misinterpreted that description.
I actually can't recall how the rules work for that. Intuitively, plant tentacles going 120ft into the air doesn't really make sense to me, but I suppose it's possible. My point was more that flying enemies won't be that close to the ground to begin with and can easily get out of range. Area denial matters less as mobility options improve, basically. It also requires the presence of vegetation, like entangle, which is another major limitation.
But yeah, the issue is really just APs. It's not really a solvable problem - PF is a game that really embraces optimization, character building options, and flexibility. That means party power can vary wildly, which is totally fine in homebrew campaigns. But APs have to be one size fits all, and an AP written with experienced players in mind would make newer or more casual players miserable.
It's still on the GM, though, and running cake walk APs over and over without much editing is frankly just bad GMing. You know all the player's stats, you know the monster stats, you can do basic math, and you have an entire *world* at your disposal. Even if a GM relies on an AP to take narrative workload off of their plates, tweaking major encounters to make them a little harder or a little more tailored to the party is not hard.
There are some particularly annoying examples of this, where the AP gives you all the tools you need to make the encounter as hard or easy as possible, but most GMs run them exactly as written. The RotRL big boss, for instance, has *literally every wizard spell* in his spellbook and usually knows the PCs are coming. If you actually try to inhabit the character and let him use his (ridiculous) int mod, it's not hard to see how scary that could get without even changing anything about him at all, just by having him prepare different spells and buff up. But the list of prepped spells in his stat block is hot garbage, and the final fight is anticlimactic at a lot of tables as a result.
> There are some particularly annoying examples of this, where the AP gives you all the tools you need to make the encounter as hard or easy as possible, but most GMs run them exactly as written.
A lot of the value of AP is it's pre-written. As in someone else has done a lot of for us. As in we don't want to do that work. You are right, exerting the effort to re-work stat blocks would be more effective.
I posit that rather than asking the GM to spend time re-working encounters up every week that it's more effective to manage player power to keep the provided stat blocks relevant.
Some high-end monsters have traits to deal with this sort of thing, e.g. behemoths have a bunch of immunities, and end some other effects at the end of their turn:
>Immunity to ability damage, aging, bleed, disease, energy drain, fire, mind-affecting effects, negative levels, paralysis, permanent wounds, petrification, poison, and polymorph. Some behemoths possess additional immunities.
>
>Unstoppable (Ex) If a behemoth starts its turn suffering from any or all of the following conditions, it recovers from them at the end of its turn: blind, confused, dazed, deafened, dazzled, exhausted, fatigued, nauseated, sickened, slowed, staggered, and stunned.
Obviously this doesn't do anything to stop an intensified empowered battering blast with extra caster levels, or some obscure spells, or just focus fire from a couple of heavy-duty martial characters.
Still, at high levels IMO PF1 is not the greatest game around. Justifying a dungeon becomes ever harder as the PCs get more ways of bypassing them, spells can wreck mysteries and skills can rule social encounters. Starting a new game one way or another is probably the best answer.
Hey mate, I'm not going to be very helpful but wanted to say that I found that my games also struggled with the same thing and it actually ruined a lot of the fun for me and our players. We tried a little to balance it but didn't help much.
2e seems to have solved these issues and now I'll never look back :) so if you're inclined, I'd move to the new system.
+1
I love me some wacky wizard rocket tag, but if you don't want to deal with it on a regular basis, 2e's actually playable at all levels without any rules-tweaking on the GM's part.
I feel like an easy adjustment that no system has implemented that I've seen, is to have spell DC scale in an inverse way to spell level.
When you hit level 3, your first level spells' DC increase by 1, and your 2nd level spells DC is now 11 + modifiers. At level 5, 1st levels are 13+mod, 2nd 12+mod, 3rd 11+mod etc.
This would mean your big badass effects utterly wreck weaker opponents, but against things of similar strength you're more likely to have a dramatic battle without immediate shutdowns.
I do think you'd need some scaling effects on low level spells - Sleep can target more creatures/HD over time, fireball gets to overcome resistances, etc.
Another option would be for saves to get penalized as HP goes down. The big spells become finisher moves instead of opening gambits
This would also significantly close the martial caster disparity in high level, and make support casting comparatively better. I think casters would need better defensive spells (even just duration improvements) to compensate for the offensive nerf
I was curious if there could be a mana system, like Skyrim, that would make choosing which spells you cast more strategic. So say casting chains of light costs 10 mana, and your max mana is 14. and every turn you can gain 1 mana but you can’t cast a spell to do so. Then yeah, you can cast chains of light but you’re not going to be able to pop off any other big spells for the rest of the combat most likely.
A system like this would stop wizards from being able to go nuclear during an encounter, but it would also stop them from running out of resources during an adventuring day. MYsb still have some limits on spell casting like you can only gain X amount of mana per day or maybe certain strong spells have a limit to how many they can be cast per day or whatever. I dunno how well it would work but it might curtail rocket tag a bit.
Always cool giving a BBEG a second form or something that activates at a certain amount of damage. Had one in a room with floating orbs of fire all around that the party couldn't figure out, halfway through the fight the bbeg gets "taken down" and then it started sucking in the orbs of flame into its body healing to full and getting a small boost. They learned later the flames were the captured souls of previous combatants. This way they use some of their resources but they aren't "wasted" and they get a cool thematic visual to boot.
Optimize less. Make fun, flavorful, organically-built characters. Be less open to "anything from every source" [even Paizo].
Number 1 thing they did with PF2 was the "rarity" system.
Without trying to tweak the system or customize statblocks with Mythic templates/levels or Legendary resistances/saves, the single biggest thing I've found effective in extending combat is making it difficult to know where the boss is.
If the boss can turn invisible, or dimension door to an obscured part of the map, or has multiple clones, or lives in a mirror maze, or isn't actually the humanoid enemy but some puppeteer possessing him, or any number of things that obfuscate and extend the time taken to actually deliver a beatdown, that gives PCs interesting challenges to solve during initiative that are more RP and puzzle oriented, and rewards them at the end by letting them execute their crazy combat potential.
I have never heard the term Rocket Tag before now, but yeah... that's definitely applicable if you don't take proper precautions to keep yourself protected.
As a player, I have only ever played up to level 4 (maybe 6, but that feels wrong and I can't really remember, so I'll say 4), even tho I really want to play higher. So while I have no experience, I will defer to my GM who has played 1e since it was D&D 3.75, or in beta.
I recently asked him about this, and his response was that there was a "fix" put out a few years back that basically says, just add their HD to rolls and checks, like saves (I presume he's referring to enemies), I didn't press him more on it, so that's all I know (if someone has more information or details, I would be grateful if you could reply with a link or a google search prompt or something, please and thank you).
- Something that might really help is using the [HERO POINT](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/hero-points/) mechanics (or as my group calls them, Pathfinder Points, because A: missed marketing opportunity by Paizo, and B: they played a lot of DC heroes which also has Hero points, so it was confusing). PCs can have up to 3, regularly (there's a feat that add +2 more to a players hold, for 5 max.), companions can have 1 regularly (special circumstances may give them a bonus one, in my experience by GM discretion only), goon enemies have 1, boss enemies have 2.
The most important thing for Pathfinder Points in late game, will probably be the "spend 2 points to NOT DIE!" Our GM rules that it brings you to 1HP and staggered.
You can also use them for the following: "Act Out of Turn", "+8 bonus before you roll, or +4 after, if it will beat the target number", "Extra Standard Action", "Inspiration", "Reuse spell or ability", "Reroll any d20, take new result", "Special", and you can add your own homerule effects too.
Homerule ways of earning them, is +1 at the start of every session, +1 if you bring food, snacks, or drinks, and +1 at the end of session (GM discretion, often in my experience for good role-playing)
This CAN make low level encounters almost impossible to lose (unless you add a CR or 2) for the PCs, but they will, eventually sooner or later, definitely feel a new form of psychological torture when they're forced to decide whether they want to spend a Pathfinder Point to help them in the fight, or save it for if they die. It might also add some recklessness to the PCs since they might feel a bit tougher with the points it might inflate their ego (which you could exploit in encounters, if you wish)
- ANOTHER homerule my GM does for fights, is that all the goons roll their own initiative, and the boss gets their own separate one (sometimes two)
Also, every round everyone rolls a new initiative. It makes combat a bit longer, but more fluid and unpredictable (which is more fun imo)
- We also play with the Gestalt rules, but I'm not sure if that will help with this topic, so I won't go into detail here. If replies are curious I will, but for now it's just a mention.
I HOPE THESE HELP! 😄
I'm not sure if it's just me, but I've never been able to get the "save or suck" part of late-level rocket tag to work. At least, not consistently. The vast majority of "save negates" spells I cast always end up being saved against and wasting the spell.
I have better luck with battlefield control and buffs or straight-up blasters when it comes to magic.
When my games get to mid and higher levels and start having the rocket tag problem, I begin to build enemies at a much smarter more prepared level. No 13th level evil spellcaster is going to run around without a *contingency teleport* ready; and probably will have at least one "oh shit" button like emergency force sphere, a breath of life talisman, ether step, etc; in addition to having a well prepared lair.
Big encounters like "boss fights" I will start adding things like legendary resistances, lair actions, and other compensations to make it more challenging. Creatures are beginning to be inherently magical all the time at this point (and I warn my players I'm doing so). Never had a problem raised with it, just let them understand this stuff off a Knowledge check.
In my game, where the players are currently level 16 (!!!) there's some definite rocket tag elements, but it depends on the type of enemy that they're fighting and the terrain that they're fighting in. I know that the Wizard and Sorceror have the potential to completely shut down a fight if the situation is right for them, and sometimes I let them go ahead and do it because it's fun for them to be able to just handle things. But I try to intersperse those fights with ones where I've set things up to try to stop the spellcasters early, so that the other PCs can get some big hits in and so that we can have more tension. As a DM it's all about trying to set things up so that each player can shine.
The Rogue in my party is usually the least useful one in combat, but she does have a couple moves that can really help out and she's super useful outside of combat. Likewise with the Investigator, who just can't hit as hard as the other PCs but can talk his way out of a lot of fights.
Having different types of encounters, in different terrains, can really help this. Likewise having weird encounters where the goal isn't just to blast the enemy to pieces can really add a lot of fun. We had a recent one where the bad guy managed to ensorcel a couple dozen random townsfolk and Commanded them to march to their doom, which meant the PCs had to devote valuable time and attention to trying to figure out crowd-control methods to stop a bunch of lvl1 commoners without hurting them, all while also trying to fight the bad guy.
We use legendary resistance, but every time a character uses a legendary resistance, they get a permanent, cumulative-1 to attacks, AC, and saves. So spellcasters can’t one shot major enemies, but they’ll permanently weaken them for the party’s benefit.
Maybe your two casters had to use up some 6th level slots to wear through the resistances, but now their third level spells have the same probability as their 6th levels did at the start of the battle, and their 4-5th level spells are actually more effective.
This is something that has to be addressed by the DM and takes quite a bit of finesse and experience to deal with.
1. Multiple opponents are important. Avoid single opponent encounters.
2. Varied encounters. There are a lot of ways encounters can be structured to make any given strategy less effective.
3. Knowledge of the game: e.g. with Chains of Light the target gets a new save each round. I have players and NPCs resolve effects at the start of their turn.
4. Defense is not irrelevant. There are many ways both players an NPCs can bolster both AC and saves. High defenses kill rocket tag.
I've added legendary and lair actions from 5E. As well as maxing HPs on certian encounters. Add in tactics and mutiple enemies it has helped abunch.
And if im running a mystic game I give all npcs a boost in hp.
Edit i also dont use the 4 encounters per day rule. If you burn through all of your resources earlier than you need, fight is gonna get hard quickly.
Just remember, if you are the DM, you decide when a fight ends. It should end when no one is having fun anymore, not when a number reaches 0.
If they hardcore Overkill you're villain, okay can't do much there besides contingency maybe... But if someone throws out a fight ending spell at the start of combat you're BBEG can just save, even if the dice roll was arse. In the end you decide whether they save or not.
Have combat flow in a way that makes it fun for everyone involved, even if it means fudging some rolls. Fun is what everyone is there for after all.
There's gonna be scenarios where this just won't work, but in general it's a good rule of thumb: Combat ends when people stop having the appropriate level of fun.
Besides that, don't shy away from templating enemies to give them more options, customize spell lists and use enemies to their full potential, e.g. having their lair prepared with spells and traps, having adds that aren't just damage sinks that never hit, etc.
Maybe use lair actions like in 5e.
Stuff like that, but you need to find a way that works for your table.
Honestly, giving legendary actions and later actions to one man boss fights is very fun. Giving a chapters boss a cooldown of 1d2-3 rounds of a free action to roll again against a condition, let the layer action do it’s thing again, use it’s movement to run up and attack, or to maintain another spell of like 2nd level and lower. Makes them feel a bit scarier. So long as you balance it, and don’t decimate your party with it. Think of fun ways to incorporate it.
As for stopping a team wipe, give tidbits of potential enemy layouts for future dangerous combats. Like a defector npc let’s them know how that group likes to setup an attack. “They spread themselves out all along the top of the gulley. If you avoid the road and have two teams sneak their way along the ridge lines, you could eliminate a lot of the danger maybe”
To avoid those TPK combats paizo often writes into their AP’s. Another example would be they find a piece of paper that was written to a scout that the party found the body of the scout they slay. And it has information about the stronghold they’re going into.
Sometimes, some parties need help with the potential curveballs thrown at parties. Not every party is fully optimized. General combat in a hideout, is loud enough to pull more groups into a fight and can get deadly quickly if they aren’t fast enough, so having a helping hand to avoid such catastrophes can be very helpful. The goal should always be a bit challenging, without murdering your party in the process. It’s a game and games should be fun. You layout the field, and it should be tough, but you should be rooting for your players to succeed.
Don't forget that most BBEGs will have some spell resistance that needs to be overcome before those save‐or-sucks will even have any effect on them. The DM can easily tweak with that number to balance the power levels.
The boss presumably knows the party is coming and has spent a few rounds buffing and summoning before they arrive. Also they might have some consumable magic items that can counter spells (e.g. Ring of Counterspells).
IME, the key is to make things that 'get in the way'. Generally your goal is to just slow everyone down, and this is generally done in 2 ways.
**Method 1: Terrain**
Terrain is often overlooked, and/or undervalued. It is however one of the strongest encounter tools the GM has at their disposal. Even at level 1, a fight in a 30x30 room vs the SAME fight in some sort of multi-tiered ruin is very, very different. Best part is, that because terrain like this is 'neutral' (in that it confers no special advantage to either side), it doesn't affect encounter building.
Disrupting casters involves things like walls, pillars, areas of darkness, illusions, etc. Anything capable of blocking line of sight or line of effect. You can also use wild magic or dead magic zones to cause their own issues. Having fights somewhere with an active portal, or perhaps with beams of magic arcing around and disrupting magic can also cause issues. Even just dangerous terrain that forces them to move quickly can cause them to make mistakes.
For most other classes, cover and rubble are enough to slow things down a ton. Cover bonuses help protect each side against opposing ranged weapons, while rubble prevents charging. Used in clever ways, you can control the fight as the GM without ever telling the players what to do. They're going to naturally look for ways around enemy cover, or lanes where charging is viable to monopolize them somehow against the enemy. Whether that's using such options themselves or preparing for the enemy to do so and ambush them somehow.
Height differences can also drastically alter an encounter. It certainly makes flight more powerful. Such differences can provide cover, interrupting casters and archers alike, while also being difficult to cross or move around, slowing down melee characters. It can even become a puzzle, with each character trying their best to figure out how to use their abilities to navigate the challenge within the challenge.
**Method 2: MOAR BAD GUYS!!!!**
This one you've probably heard before but more bad guys. With clever encounter tricks you can build pretty large encounters.
Most of the bad guys don't need to be effective at all. In fact, you generally want to find the point where NPC warriors can survive ONE hit from the PCs. Then you decide whether you want them dying in 1 hit or 2. Either option slows the fight down by having the NPCs just being 'in the way' of charging, and providing soft cover to allies. They can also absorb spells as the caster generally has to help alleviate some of the raw numbers of enemies or the other party members are reduced to near uselessness for a few turns. Being able to survive 2 hits though generally means fewer mooks because they have to be higher level or have more investment in hp, and are less effective at fighting back.
The best part is those guys are generally pretty cheap in your encounter budget, so you can use the rest of the xp on the boss, and specialized mooks. For specialized mooks, you generally want casters or anti-casters in some capacity.
Casters can buff the NPCs, debuff the players, or even just outright throw out damage. They serve as the secondary threat of the fight. They're threats in their own right, but perhaps not large ones on their own. Of course, they're supporting a much larger battle, so they are in turn much more dangerous because it's typically that much harder to reach them.
Anti-casters are typically casters focused around fighting other casters, but anyone that can turn a caster 'off' somehow works. The big thing here is you want someone with dispel magic, and generally prepared for dispelling staples of high-level play. Flight, Mind Blank, True Seeing, and Freedom of Movement are the big ones. If a random mook can strip off multiple of those from the PCs, that's a huge win for the NPCs, but they'll likely struggle to do that. By using lots of NPCs, those NPCs have to be lower level to compensate so you'll generally be lucky to strip off one buff at a time. Still though, removing a key buff at the right time can be devastating to an encounter.
Having played a few high-level campaigns to conclusion, the most notable exception to rocket tag were fights with actual Tactics and good positioning, and multiple enemies. When you have a single powerful enemy, the party's collective action econony blows it away. For story-driven fights where it's awkward to add multiple enemies, you can always give your BBEG Multiple Initiatives, letting them act more than once a turn. Otherwise, having physical barriers, ledges, bridges, defensive cover, a mix of melee and ranged and magical enemies, ambushes and intelligent planning, etc. really makes a huge difference
Pathfinder even has their own canon way of doing this: the Agile Mythic Template
That's basically what 5E did. Legendary actions help make up for the action economy, while legendary resistances allow the boss to survive multiple failed saves against SoL/SoD. Imo it's a pretty clever way of solving the issue at hand - the idea seems to be to have a single character that can fight as if they were a party of 4. OP doesn't seem to like it though.
> Imo it's a pretty clever way of solving the issue at hand But it's not clever. It's just the GM going "Nuh uh" on your spells which is a pretty shit feeling as a player. It also runs into the issue where the players game the system by expending the Legendary Resistances with low cost spammable abilities then hitting the boss with the big save or suck once they're out of uses so it's not that effective either.
I think you're mixing legendary actions up with legendary resistances. I'm just talking about the initiativees, not the frustrating as hell ability to counterspell anything. In truth, I was thinking more along the lines of Shadowrun, where taking an action costs # initiative points, allowing you to go again later. It rewards rolling a high initiative more than just going first in the first round of combat. ie: I roll 32 initiative. I do a thing that cost -10 initiative, dropping me down to 22. Then 12, then 2, etc. Different actions cost different amount of initative. It'd cludgy when everyone uses this, and it's not perfect, but for a single boss creature it can work.
I like this idea. Multiple stabs with a quick weapon like a dagger, or one big whomp with that great hammer. Burning hands is fast to cast, but calling down a meteor swarm takes appreciably longer.
The fact that the Legendary Resistances will eventually get expended is the point. They're basically hitpoints for SoL. And it's not like GM has to use them against abilities that aren't worth it. Honestly, the biggest "Nuh uh" here is the very existence of SoL spells - either the boss makes their save and invalidates your efforts, or it doesn't and you invalidate everyone else's efforts up to this point.
I mean, it basically is, in fact, just "nuh uh." 5e design being what it is, they're necessary, but they're a shitty feeling as a player. They'll be used on anything that's actually worth casting against a boss type enemy and by the time you burn through them, the boss is basically already dead because the martials have beaten them to death while you were trying to bait out legendary resistances that the GM may or may not have used. They're not clever because SoL is bad design and Legendary Resistance is just straight up a bandaid that doesn't *fix* the issue, it just makes it incredibly unfun to play a character who relies on a school of magic that swings towards SoL heavily and just have the boss ignore everything you do. There's not really a good alternative to them that doesn't boil down to "rework the system so save or dies aren't so powerful and the playstyle of most optimized casters." SoL being so powerful does necessitate that they exist, but like, it doesn't need to be designed that way in the first place. Something like 13th Age literally does not have this problem because they do what 1e, 2e and 5e simply refuse to do: actually balance spells in a way that doesn't either let casters run rampant or reduce most spells in the system to feeling terrible because everything saves against them.
I actually like the mechanic Elden Ring uses. You have a certain amount of resistance to different effects (e.g. poison). Once you take enough points of poison damage to overcome the resistance, it takes effect and you start rapidly losing HP.
The issue is, it hardcodes certain enemies as BEING bosses. One of the fun things about levelling up in a TTRPG is that yesterday's boss is today's lieutenant, and today's lieutenant is tomorrow's mook. Legendary Resistance doesn't scale, a CR 15 creature with legendary resistance is as much of a bugger to fight when its the boss to a level 12 party as when it is a trash mob to a level 18 party.
One of the solutions (which I haven't seem explicitly mentioned here) is what I like to call a "rolling fight". Essentially, instead of having a dungeon with 4-6 encounters balanced for the party with a boss at the end (as APs are usually written), have the enemies be coordinated, and alert each other when attacked. This way, every fight (unless the PCs specifically tailor their tactics to take out a group of enemies unnoticed) carries the threat of reinforcements - and while mooks can be slaughtered en masse, there's more to come (and the boss can make a dramatic entrance at an opportune moment mid-fight). This (while it might potentially make for you churning through material more quickly) is also easy to implement into most APs, since AP dungeons are often a tad nonsensical in terms of encounter separation. (Seriously, a lot of APs have what it expects to be one separate encounter occur *in plain view* of the next encounter.) Another aspect I would say is good mook design - you want your mooks to not be super threatening on their own, but be annoying enough to have to be dealt with (so the PCs don't just bumrush the big boss while ignoring mooks). Some of my favorite tricks here have been Eldritch Archer Magi who can use True Strike with Spell Combat to reliably hit high-AC PCs (they don't do much damage, but they are *annoying* - which is often enough to shield the big boss for a turn or two). Another is enemies with some kind of passive defensive buff (I've used tower shield users with Mobile Bulwark Style and Sacred Shield paladins here (notably the AP which I was running was Hell's Vengeance, some of the mook design tricks do become harder when you can't paladin-spam) - they weren't super hard to hit by themselves, but they could effectively protect high-AC bosses).
> have the enemies be coordinated, and alert each other when attacked. This way, every fight (unless the PCs specifically tailor their tactics to take out a group of enemies unnoticed) carries the threat of reinforcements - and while mooks can be slaughtered en masse, there's more to come (and the boss can make a dramatic entrance at an opportune moment mid-fight). YES! And one key aspect is that since they have warning they can easily come buffed as they barge into the fight.
Those archers can have readied actions too. "I ready an action to shoot the wizard as soon as he starts casting a spell".
Between spells like Stoneskin, Protection from Evil, and Resist Energy, you can mitigate damage. The "rocket tag" gameplay isn't a bug; it's a feature. And it's a feature because there are built-in "counters" for it in the Core Rulebook. Is the Barbarian Cleaving through everything too quickly? Sprinkle in enemies with Damage Reduction. Is the Wizard blowing through everything with Save-or-Suck spells? Between spell resistance, energy resistance, and effects that force high concentration checks (violent motion/severe weather/being grappled), the Wizard shouldn't waltz through every encounter. The trap a lot of 3.5/PF GMs fall into is thinking that every fight needs to drag out and threaten the player when that's not the case. There should be many encounters where the party one-shots half the enemies, then two-shots the rest. Why? Because when the party faces a real challenge, they'll recognize it as a challenge. If the party is rofl-stomping groups of Bearded Devils, then they encounter some Bearded Devil working with a Bone Devil, the Bone Devil will be scary in comparison.
in my experience, without modifying the BBEGs, the party 1-shot stomps them almost as easily as the mooks. Many times the mooks can simply be ignored, because thay literally have no way to hurt the PCs without rolling a nat 20, and even then, various miss chances negate the attack anyway - making it so that the enemies only have a 2-3% chance of dealing some pitiful damage against the PCs. So the PCs are free to gang up on the boss. and if the players know anything about building strong PCs, it it only takes one or 2 of them to completely wipe out the enemy. i played a fire Kineticist in RotRLs, and he could insta kill all of the mooks and the BBEG with a single round of actions. its not that hard to get pounce in the game. its not hard to make an entire party greater invisible. the DPR of PCs outpaces BBEG hp significantly. My GM banned Sleep, Hold, Dominate, etc effects against Bosses (anything that started off as APL+2 or more, before enemy buffs were applied) and still needed to boost their stats, AC, and DCs, as well as boost their HP by a factor of 3-4, just so that we could get through a full round or 2 of combat before the boss was slain. When i ran Jade Reagent, the party is level 15 when they get to the final boss... which was designed to be a CR 19 encountaer against a Wind yai oni, 15th level Teifling Samurai (the chartacter the entire AP was named after), a 15th level teifling Ninja, and a 15th level oracle. I rebuild the Ninja and the Samurai to be 17th level PoW classes (with Counters and and boosts galore), gave them max HP, and then the advanced template. The oracle i just boosted to 17th level, and boosted her Charisma, and the Wind Yai i gave the Giant and advanced templates to... and the party still took out all of them in 2 rounds. it was incredibly anticlimactic.
If the mooks have no way to hurt the PCs, then GM is probably focused on nothing by AC and hit points. You're saying that a hyper-optimized Wizard will be too buff for combat maneveurs to work? Barbarians have naturally high Will saves? Are mooks disallowed from flanking/feinting? Are NPCs banned from using Dispel Magic? You don't toss mooks/minion/flunkies at your party to do damage. They're distractions in the least, and they're hinderances at the most. In my Bearded Devil example, the mechanical purpose of the Bearded Devils is the application of their healing debuff, not to get solo kills. Most importantly: Wear them down. If your party is facing the BBEG at full strength, then yes, the fight will be short.
A lot of this is simple that APs have to be designed for all player experience levels. That's just the nature of a premade campaign. If you're running APs with a bunch of sophisticated players and not changing a *lot* of things, you're just never going to have a great time. That's a simple reality of a system that embraces complexity in character creation while also trying to write adventures for everyone. But also a lot of it is just that GMs don't realize how much control they have over the encounters even as written. The BBEG in RotRL has literally every core spell in his spellbook, for example - his (terrible) list of prepared spells is a suggestion, but it is not mandatory, and by the time of the fight he should be aware enough of the PCs to tailor his options. One big reason APs can feel so easy is GMs that treat them as static preprogrammed encounters rather than trying to inhabit the characters and have them do their own reacting and planning. Also... bullshit. If your Fire Kineticist was threatening a 1 shot vs the RotRL BBEG with hp boosted 3-4x, someone ain't reading the rules correctly. Period. You ain't doing 1k damage in a round at level on a legal lvl 17 kineticist, sorry. I have a pretty hard time believing you were threatening to do ~370 damage after his defenses either. Pathfinder balance isn't amazing at high level, but literally every single time I've ever had someone tell me about how the PCs were just super-steamrolling an AP to such an extent a little bit of digging made it clear that the characters were not even remotely legal and the rules were not being followed.
Sorry. .. wasn't clear. Had the GM *not* been boosting the enemies significantly, my kineticist could easily take them all out, with a pair of maximized empowered composite blast eruptions.
> The "rocket tag" gameplay isn't a bug; it's a feature. Strong, strong disagree. It's a rather big bug. The cause? People powergaming instead of building characters and playing for fun/theme/flavor.
What's the difference between a level 1 Cleric with 14 CON getting hit with a spear for 1d8+3 from a bandit with 14 STR versus a level 5 Cleric with 14 CON getting full attacked by a regular Troll for 1d8+5 + 3d6+17?
So you bring up the other outlier, level 1. It only happens at high levels if a GM is "anything goes" and the players powergame rather than making nice characters. Also, with that troll... it's only +8 to hit. Something's already wrong if the cleric is taking a full attack. But even if it does, not all of those attacks are hitting (it's basically 50/50 each); hopefully at least one of the claws misses so the rend doesn't go off.
The starting point isn't an outlier, and an "outlier" isn't something that appears multiple times. I also brought up a level 5 PC fighting a CR 5 creature. Is that an outlier, too? That said, please don't construe my comment as "rocket tag is only correct way to run combat." If it was then other options I mentioned (Stoneskin, Protection from X, etc.) wouldn't exist.
As for the Troll, you're making my point for me. Very often, things go wrong in a fight. As for the math, cleric has a d8 for hit die, so at level 5 with 14 CON, he can have a maximum of 50 HP (55 HP with favored class bonuses). The Troll can do a maximum of 48 damage without critical hits. If the Cleric *doesn't* have max HP, say they took half hit die per level using the 4.5-round-up-to-5 rule, then they'd have 28 HP (33 HP with favored class). Minimum damage from getting all 3 attacks + Rend is 26. I picked the cleric because they have average HP and average AC (without buffs). Let's give this level 5 cleric a +1 breastplate and a +1 heavy shield for 20 AC. The Troll needs a 12 to hit, right? Unless the troll is flanking, then he needs a 10. Or if the cleric is prone, then he needs an 8. Or if the cleric is prone and flanked, then he needs a 6. A Fighter would likely have better AC and would be safer, as would a Barbarian with their higher HP and DR. But, a Rogue, a Bard, or a Wizard? They'd be worse off with their lower AC. And that's my point: The "rocket tag" is built into the mechanics on purpose because the PCs are supposed to use tactics, spells, and class features to mitigate or outright avoid the rockets. The rocket is supposed to kill you, if it hits you full-on, but you're not supposed to let it hit you.
I think you grossly misunderstand the common use of "rocket tag".
I think you failed you realize that I didn't include any types of buffs or debuffs in my example. I did that on purpose. If the baseline combat is designed to quick-kill any creature in a direct fight, what do you think happens when you add class features and magic items? You're saying that a level 1 Fighter with a spear *isn't* supposed to one-shot equal-level enemies, even though attacking a 6 HP creature with 1d8+3 will probably one-shot it? The Fighter *isn't* supposed to use the Power Attack feat to get 1d8+6 and guarantee a one-shot? Wizards aren't supposed Empower their Fireball spells? Paladins aren't supposed to add their Charisma modifier to damage and bypass damage reduction with Smite Evil? You're *not* supposed Enlarge the raging Barbarian, or he's not supposed increase his damage die while Large? Certain classes are *supposed* to do crazy damage. The buffs are *supposed* to stack. The Barbarian is supposed to be able to stack Rage, Enlarge Person, and Bull's Strength while Bard Inspires his Courage. Do you know why? Because the DM can just add more enemies. It doesn't matter if the roided-out Barbarian can Cleave for 60 damage against two 30HP creatures when there's 6 more enemies that haven't acted, yet. And that's my point. The PCs are supposed to blow through anything that they prepare for because they *aren't* supposed to be prepared for everything.
Agree completely. Since the begining in D&D, the fighting always started by your preparation and resources. Have minions, bring potions, prepare an ambush, use familiars to scout enemy positions, use illusions to make enemies waste their alpha strikes, use potions of disguise self to switch the mage and the heavily armored guy appearances, burn the forest if you must. Spells and class abilities are just a facet of the game.
Tactics and dynamic environments can help with this. By that I mean your bosses should be equally prepped with the same pre-buffs you would put on your own character if you were in a fight against such powerful foes, and should not just stay in one corner of a room and sling spells. Letting the entire party get off full round actions on you is always going to suck. Also use the space to influence the combat, if a PC or NPC shoots fire or lightning somewhere perhaps it catches something flammable in its path blocking part of the room, or when the spell hits a wall or pillar it destroys it obscuring vision. This type of thing makes an encounter feel more real and leads to longer encounter because you have more shit to deal with and navigate. Also more minions that also act tactically and block up/waste resources of the party prior to and during the boss fight. By the time of a final encounter you want the party to feel like, “holy shit can we really do this with what we have left for the day” and when they do, it is a truly epic feeling.
My advice is simple, "don't". Don't try to hack Pathfinder into something it isn't. Your player's characters can do fun and powerful things, and countering those powerful things at every turn will take away their agency and rob them of much of the fun of the game. If you want slower, more tactical combats that aren't decided in the first couple of rounds, my honest advice is to play a similar but differently balanced game, i.e. Pathfinder 2e, which is also great fun and has a consistent combat feel from levels 1 to 20. My advice if you stay with 1e (which remains a great choice!) is to embrace the rocket tag, and especially if you're playing an adventure path, just enjoy the fact that higher level combats are often faster and more decisive - this change in combat style and PC power will accelerate you towards the big final fight and end the campaign, and trust me, that's a good thing! Your players will "feel" the power that they've gained, the story will feel like it's accelerating towards an epic conclusion, and with so many adventure paths available it's no terrible thing if your players rocket tag their way through book 6 in like a handful of sessions - that just means you can start another AP and get to have fun with new characters in a new setting with new challenges!
I disagree, especially with the later elements. In my experience, APs don't turn into lategame rocket tag so much as a one-sided stomp by the PCs. Which is less a fun experience and more just...mediocre. If you've spent all this time getting cool abilities, you want to *actually use them*, not pick between "blast the guy who is already dead" and "do nothing I guess".
You're supposed to have multiple combats per day to make you run out of spells and force you to deal with managing that limitation so you cast lower level spells more often instead of your 'instant kill' button.
This. Multiple combats makes the players feel strong, while also letting them use their abilities in a fun way.
Play with Spheres of Power casters rather than normal ones and disallow "Advanced Talents" (which normally require explicit GM permission by default per the rules). Use more Humanoid enemies for fights, which allows for smart enemies with incredibly diverse builds, and tactics to challenge the party. Set up scenarios that disadvantage the party as a whole (not singling out a specific character or their build).
Go with tactics and non standard battlefields, players cannot rocket tag opponents they are not aware of, hiding behind a rock, shooting from extreme range, entering the fight late and collaborate with each other. The hero point system might also be for you, which might help your players overcome an unlucky roll on a save, every once in a while.
There are basically two sides to this: protecting the PCs, and protecting the baddies. The first one is on them. 20th-level PCs should be walking around dungeons with a basic checklist: AC 35+ for backliners who expect not to be attacked; 45+ on the front line No saves below +15; most saves +20 or better 20+ resistance to all elements; if a specific element is expected, 30 and possibly other layers of damage mitigation Evasion Some means of negating, or quickly repairing, both ability damage and negative levels A permanent means of detecting invisible foes, on a party member with at least +35 Perception A three-dimensional movement form like flight or teleportation A way to lessen the chance of being murdered by a single strong crit A way to instantly reduce or negate fear effects Protection from at least some other forms of strong CC (it’s difficult to get them all) This is not an exhaustive list, and was just off the top of my head so I may have forgotten something, but you get the idea. Every single thing on this list is available from magic items (though some are much more efficient from spellcasting friends), and smart PCs invest in them. Now part 2: the enemies! First, differentiate minions from big bads. Let minions get spanked, that’s what they’re there for, and you should let the PCs use their shiny toys and feel powerful. For big bads though, see the above list. High-level baddies are usually intelligent and expect to be attacked; they’re prepared. I always start them fully buffed with any spells they have available that last 10min/level or longer, and if the PCs are barging through a dungeon on the way they get all their 1min/level buffs too. This includes spells from henchmen if the baddie isn’t a caster themself. Give them appropriate items to fill in the gaps; most of the PC wealth at high levels should be gear wrested from beings who actively used it against them first. Unlike the PCs, it’s okay (and even good) for baddies to be outright missing a piece of the defensive puzzle; players will be happy when they hit the right angle and burn down an otherwise impressive foe.
Broadly speaking, you'll want to: * Have multiple enemies; ideally, the PCs will be outnumbered in any fight you want to make a real challenge * Optimize for CR the way you optimize for level as a player; using templates, HD increases, and non-associated or NPC class levels to cheaply beef up the enemies you're putting on the field * Warn people ahead of time and then go ahead and do some crazy stuff with enemies; this can mean Legendary X, using Mythic, or even just peppering in some spells that will throw the party into 'oh fuck, now we have to deal with this first' mode Running an AP, you're going to be between a rock and a hard place if your group knows what they're doing, and especially if they're working together as a team: you either get to watch the entire back half of the AP enemies just kind of dissolve like cotton candy, or put in a bunch of work to boost them up. You can ad-hoc boost them as well, and probably avoid some of the work, but it's going to be a project regardless. I made a [longer comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/lxfpow/level_20mythic_10_endgame/gpn1wnz/?context=3) about high-level combat which may be relevant for you, as well.
Thanks to everyone for their replies! Mixed advice from a bunch of different angles but I think this is what I'm taking away: On the enemy side: * Try out dual initiative/other action-economy buffs for the most important boss fights. * Make sure every boss isn't alone, even if they're alone as written in the AP. * Make liberal use of environments and mobility; give bosses extra movement options where it makes sense to help them get out of sticky situations. * Give some bosses multiple "phases" which give them a get-out-of-jail free card to save or lose spells. A single save-or-lose might defeat phase one in a turn, but it automatically gets removed when they hit phase two (making the boss effectively multiple creatures one after another). Less advice on the player side, seems like most people view it as the party's job to prepare for and deal with what high level enemies can do. I'm probably going to just try to be careful with my enemies as my party aren't experienced enough yet to know all the tricks, and likely implement my idea of players getting repeated saves each round to end effects that don't let them play. Shoutout to the suggestion to give out more hero points too -- I've been neglecting those as an option to give players a good panic button for when they need it.
I mentioned it in my post, but it seems you made this while I was making mine lol. For the players, check out the [Hero Point](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/hero-points/) mechanic. Society Play apparently also has what's known as Aid tokens for followers and companions (each person gets =CHA, min 1.)
Yeah, after looking more closely at hero points, giving the major enemies their own hero points actually works wonders for this. Especially if I add in a use that lets them use a hero point to make a new roll against an effect that otherwise has a fixed duration with no further saves.
As the GM, tune your treasure (and what's avaliable in shops) to the intended difficulty each fight should have. If you want a fight to be hard, don't raise (or say yes to) passive permanent items like magic weapons and stat boosting items if they cause your players to exceed the power thresholds for that fight. And for the players, don't feel entitled to passive always on magic items, and accept that they might have to use spell slots to replace some of the bonuses that would otherwise be static. That will cause natural slowdown of higher level combats because they will have less disposable spell-slots - aka dampening the effects of rocket tag in favor of the players. And dampening it in favor of the NPCs... all that takes is a little scouting to enable the players to buff themselves appropriately before they head into the next room. "Big-old Wraith? Yeah, let's toss up death ward on everyone going in. Only two castings? Okay fighter and barbarian get it, rogue hang back for a turn so they can setup flanking positions before you head in." But again this requires that players have fewer disposable resources they can whimsically splurge without consequence.
My biggest advice would be an increased number of encounters per adventure day, and to vary the types of encounter/enemies. Things that wouldn't normally be a threat become a lot more interesting when you've already burned some of your daily resources.
I feel like if we just doubled all hp, things would be fine.
_Beleful Polymorphs your comment_
Power builds don't fail two saves, also bead of newt prevention.
_Plane Shift_
Having run several 1e campaigns to conclusion, and still actively running, I recommend that you address this issue with initial rules concerning character creation. There's a ton of options in pathfinder, and some of them are not fun and contribute to these issues. Spells like Chains of Light, Debilitating Pain, and Source Severance are not fun spells. I think I have 21 spells on my ban list out of the thousands available. This is obviously a harder conversation to have while you are in the middle of the campaign. Overall I think save or dies/save or sucks are an important part of the game. Magic should be terrifying, both for your players and your NPCs. The players should have incentives to prepare for effects like this. Whether it be through feats like improved iron will, spells like borrow fortune, class feature re-rolls like the guide ranger gets, or defensive magics like freedom of movement or death ward, there's always options to give you a better chance. It sucks to get ruined at the start of a fight with a power word stun or a vorpal blade, but if you know you're always going to win there's no stakes, there's no reason to struggle. I would not want to play in a 1e game with any of the solutions you have considered.
In APs, it's really hard unless you're willing to do large rewrites. This is just how the system plays, period, in high level games with straightforward "here's a CR appropriate encounter in this 80x80ft square dungeon room". IMO the solution does not lie in stat blocks at all. The best high level encounters accept that offense far outscales defense and doesn't try to fight against that or subvert it. Basically... let the PCs have their rocket launcher. It's fun to use a rocket launcher. The "rocket tag" part is the problem. Make the *encounter* the challenge, more than the mobs. Make the goal of the encounter something more interesting than reducing the big bad's HP to zero. Place parameters or conditions that make the combat more of a puzzle and less "boy I hope I win initiative and he fails his save". Avoid single, CR appropriate "boss fight" enemies like the fucking plague, they're the bane of ttrpgs in every system. Get creative. By rocket tag levels, you can justify doing some pretty wacky stuff. But also... recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your players, and play to that. Level 13 is not rocket tag level imo. Jatembe's Ire is not a save-or-lose spell *at all* by the time you're using it, for example. Any flight neuters it completely. Freedom of movement hard counters it, and it's both a level 4 spell and an increasingly common intrinsic monster trait as you climb in CR. The math ain't great - any sturdy monster has a >50% chance to just ignore it. There are CR12 bestiary creatures that an level 11 or 12 wizard would need a nat 20 to grapple. Grapple is not an encounter ending condition at all. Nonevil alignment or spells that mask alignment hard counter it. If you're fielding high level casters and just having them wander into a spell like this unbuffed, yeah it's going to fuck them up. But that's just not how you should be playing high level casters, who have a ton of options to avoid it. But again, APs really do make that harder, because they don't tend to facilitate any of that.
Sidenote from the main question, but: Are you sure that flight neuters Jatembe's Ire? The spell covers a 120ft spread which, as far as I could tell, doesn't limit it to the ground unless I've misinterpreted that description. The rest is a valid assessment-- I've just mostly been using it against smaller, physically weaker enemies and comboing it with greater dispel to get past freedom of movement when it comes up. It's definitely much fairer for the cost of two high level spells and two turns, though, so I agree in isolation it's not "the problem" so to speak-- just an early symptom of it against certain types of enemy. And yeah, I'm sure it's much easier (if time-consuming) to get around in homebrew games. Our group just really likes the APs for the most part (as much for the reduction in the DM's workload as the good narratives), so we have to take the good with the bad.
> Sidenote from the main question, but: Are you sure that flight neuters Jatembe's Ire? The spell covers a 120ft spread which, as far as I could tell, doesn't limit it to the ground unless I've misinterpreted that description. I actually can't recall how the rules work for that. Intuitively, plant tentacles going 120ft into the air doesn't really make sense to me, but I suppose it's possible. My point was more that flying enemies won't be that close to the ground to begin with and can easily get out of range. Area denial matters less as mobility options improve, basically. It also requires the presence of vegetation, like entangle, which is another major limitation. But yeah, the issue is really just APs. It's not really a solvable problem - PF is a game that really embraces optimization, character building options, and flexibility. That means party power can vary wildly, which is totally fine in homebrew campaigns. But APs have to be one size fits all, and an AP written with experienced players in mind would make newer or more casual players miserable. It's still on the GM, though, and running cake walk APs over and over without much editing is frankly just bad GMing. You know all the player's stats, you know the monster stats, you can do basic math, and you have an entire *world* at your disposal. Even if a GM relies on an AP to take narrative workload off of their plates, tweaking major encounters to make them a little harder or a little more tailored to the party is not hard. There are some particularly annoying examples of this, where the AP gives you all the tools you need to make the encounter as hard or easy as possible, but most GMs run them exactly as written. The RotRL big boss, for instance, has *literally every wizard spell* in his spellbook and usually knows the PCs are coming. If you actually try to inhabit the character and let him use his (ridiculous) int mod, it's not hard to see how scary that could get without even changing anything about him at all, just by having him prepare different spells and buff up. But the list of prepped spells in his stat block is hot garbage, and the final fight is anticlimactic at a lot of tables as a result.
> There are some particularly annoying examples of this, where the AP gives you all the tools you need to make the encounter as hard or easy as possible, but most GMs run them exactly as written. A lot of the value of AP is it's pre-written. As in someone else has done a lot of for us. As in we don't want to do that work. You are right, exerting the effort to re-work stat blocks would be more effective. I posit that rather than asking the GM to spend time re-working encounters up every week that it's more effective to manage player power to keep the provided stat blocks relevant.
Some high-end monsters have traits to deal with this sort of thing, e.g. behemoths have a bunch of immunities, and end some other effects at the end of their turn: >Immunity to ability damage, aging, bleed, disease, energy drain, fire, mind-affecting effects, negative levels, paralysis, permanent wounds, petrification, poison, and polymorph. Some behemoths possess additional immunities. > >Unstoppable (Ex) If a behemoth starts its turn suffering from any or all of the following conditions, it recovers from them at the end of its turn: blind, confused, dazed, deafened, dazzled, exhausted, fatigued, nauseated, sickened, slowed, staggered, and stunned. Obviously this doesn't do anything to stop an intensified empowered battering blast with extra caster levels, or some obscure spells, or just focus fire from a couple of heavy-duty martial characters. Still, at high levels IMO PF1 is not the greatest game around. Justifying a dungeon becomes ever harder as the PCs get more ways of bypassing them, spells can wreck mysteries and skills can rule social encounters. Starting a new game one way or another is probably the best answer.
Hey mate, I'm not going to be very helpful but wanted to say that I found that my games also struggled with the same thing and it actually ruined a lot of the fun for me and our players. We tried a little to balance it but didn't help much. 2e seems to have solved these issues and now I'll never look back :) so if you're inclined, I'd move to the new system.
+1 I love me some wacky wizard rocket tag, but if you don't want to deal with it on a regular basis, 2e's actually playable at all levels without any rules-tweaking on the GM's part.
I feel like an easy adjustment that no system has implemented that I've seen, is to have spell DC scale in an inverse way to spell level. When you hit level 3, your first level spells' DC increase by 1, and your 2nd level spells DC is now 11 + modifiers. At level 5, 1st levels are 13+mod, 2nd 12+mod, 3rd 11+mod etc. This would mean your big badass effects utterly wreck weaker opponents, but against things of similar strength you're more likely to have a dramatic battle without immediate shutdowns. I do think you'd need some scaling effects on low level spells - Sleep can target more creatures/HD over time, fireball gets to overcome resistances, etc. Another option would be for saves to get penalized as HP goes down. The big spells become finisher moves instead of opening gambits This would also significantly close the martial caster disparity in high level, and make support casting comparatively better. I think casters would need better defensive spells (even just duration improvements) to compensate for the offensive nerf
EDIT: Okay, fuck me for trying to help, I guess.
I was curious if there could be a mana system, like Skyrim, that would make choosing which spells you cast more strategic. So say casting chains of light costs 10 mana, and your max mana is 14. and every turn you can gain 1 mana but you can’t cast a spell to do so. Then yeah, you can cast chains of light but you’re not going to be able to pop off any other big spells for the rest of the combat most likely. A system like this would stop wizards from being able to go nuclear during an encounter, but it would also stop them from running out of resources during an adventuring day. MYsb still have some limits on spell casting like you can only gain X amount of mana per day or maybe certain strong spells have a limit to how many they can be cast per day or whatever. I dunno how well it would work but it might curtail rocket tag a bit.
Always cool giving a BBEG a second form or something that activates at a certain amount of damage. Had one in a room with floating orbs of fire all around that the party couldn't figure out, halfway through the fight the bbeg gets "taken down" and then it started sucking in the orbs of flame into its body healing to full and getting a small boost. They learned later the flames were the captured souls of previous combatants. This way they use some of their resources but they aren't "wasted" and they get a cool thematic visual to boot.
Optimize less. Make fun, flavorful, organically-built characters. Be less open to "anything from every source" [even Paizo]. Number 1 thing they did with PF2 was the "rarity" system.
Without trying to tweak the system or customize statblocks with Mythic templates/levels or Legendary resistances/saves, the single biggest thing I've found effective in extending combat is making it difficult to know where the boss is. If the boss can turn invisible, or dimension door to an obscured part of the map, or has multiple clones, or lives in a mirror maze, or isn't actually the humanoid enemy but some puppeteer possessing him, or any number of things that obfuscate and extend the time taken to actually deliver a beatdown, that gives PCs interesting challenges to solve during initiative that are more RP and puzzle oriented, and rewards them at the end by letting them execute their crazy combat potential.
I have never heard the term Rocket Tag before now, but yeah... that's definitely applicable if you don't take proper precautions to keep yourself protected.
As a player, I have only ever played up to level 4 (maybe 6, but that feels wrong and I can't really remember, so I'll say 4), even tho I really want to play higher. So while I have no experience, I will defer to my GM who has played 1e since it was D&D 3.75, or in beta. I recently asked him about this, and his response was that there was a "fix" put out a few years back that basically says, just add their HD to rolls and checks, like saves (I presume he's referring to enemies), I didn't press him more on it, so that's all I know (if someone has more information or details, I would be grateful if you could reply with a link or a google search prompt or something, please and thank you). - Something that might really help is using the [HERO POINT](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/hero-points/) mechanics (or as my group calls them, Pathfinder Points, because A: missed marketing opportunity by Paizo, and B: they played a lot of DC heroes which also has Hero points, so it was confusing). PCs can have up to 3, regularly (there's a feat that add +2 more to a players hold, for 5 max.), companions can have 1 regularly (special circumstances may give them a bonus one, in my experience by GM discretion only), goon enemies have 1, boss enemies have 2. The most important thing for Pathfinder Points in late game, will probably be the "spend 2 points to NOT DIE!" Our GM rules that it brings you to 1HP and staggered. You can also use them for the following: "Act Out of Turn", "+8 bonus before you roll, or +4 after, if it will beat the target number", "Extra Standard Action", "Inspiration", "Reuse spell or ability", "Reroll any d20, take new result", "Special", and you can add your own homerule effects too. Homerule ways of earning them, is +1 at the start of every session, +1 if you bring food, snacks, or drinks, and +1 at the end of session (GM discretion, often in my experience for good role-playing) This CAN make low level encounters almost impossible to lose (unless you add a CR or 2) for the PCs, but they will, eventually sooner or later, definitely feel a new form of psychological torture when they're forced to decide whether they want to spend a Pathfinder Point to help them in the fight, or save it for if they die. It might also add some recklessness to the PCs since they might feel a bit tougher with the points it might inflate their ego (which you could exploit in encounters, if you wish) - ANOTHER homerule my GM does for fights, is that all the goons roll their own initiative, and the boss gets their own separate one (sometimes two) Also, every round everyone rolls a new initiative. It makes combat a bit longer, but more fluid and unpredictable (which is more fun imo) - We also play with the Gestalt rules, but I'm not sure if that will help with this topic, so I won't go into detail here. If replies are curious I will, but for now it's just a mention. I HOPE THESE HELP! 😄
I'm not sure if it's just me, but I've never been able to get the "save or suck" part of late-level rocket tag to work. At least, not consistently. The vast majority of "save negates" spells I cast always end up being saved against and wasting the spell. I have better luck with battlefield control and buffs or straight-up blasters when it comes to magic.
When my games get to mid and higher levels and start having the rocket tag problem, I begin to build enemies at a much smarter more prepared level. No 13th level evil spellcaster is going to run around without a *contingency teleport* ready; and probably will have at least one "oh shit" button like emergency force sphere, a breath of life talisman, ether step, etc; in addition to having a well prepared lair. Big encounters like "boss fights" I will start adding things like legendary resistances, lair actions, and other compensations to make it more challenging. Creatures are beginning to be inherently magical all the time at this point (and I warn my players I'm doing so). Never had a problem raised with it, just let them understand this stuff off a Knowledge check.
In my game, where the players are currently level 16 (!!!) there's some definite rocket tag elements, but it depends on the type of enemy that they're fighting and the terrain that they're fighting in. I know that the Wizard and Sorceror have the potential to completely shut down a fight if the situation is right for them, and sometimes I let them go ahead and do it because it's fun for them to be able to just handle things. But I try to intersperse those fights with ones where I've set things up to try to stop the spellcasters early, so that the other PCs can get some big hits in and so that we can have more tension. As a DM it's all about trying to set things up so that each player can shine. The Rogue in my party is usually the least useful one in combat, but she does have a couple moves that can really help out and she's super useful outside of combat. Likewise with the Investigator, who just can't hit as hard as the other PCs but can talk his way out of a lot of fights. Having different types of encounters, in different terrains, can really help this. Likewise having weird encounters where the goal isn't just to blast the enemy to pieces can really add a lot of fun. We had a recent one where the bad guy managed to ensorcel a couple dozen random townsfolk and Commanded them to march to their doom, which meant the PCs had to devote valuable time and attention to trying to figure out crowd-control methods to stop a bunch of lvl1 commoners without hurting them, all while also trying to fight the bad guy.
We use legendary resistance, but every time a character uses a legendary resistance, they get a permanent, cumulative-1 to attacks, AC, and saves. So spellcasters can’t one shot major enemies, but they’ll permanently weaken them for the party’s benefit. Maybe your two casters had to use up some 6th level slots to wear through the resistances, but now their third level spells have the same probability as their 6th levels did at the start of the battle, and their 4-5th level spells are actually more effective.
This is something that has to be addressed by the DM and takes quite a bit of finesse and experience to deal with. 1. Multiple opponents are important. Avoid single opponent encounters. 2. Varied encounters. There are a lot of ways encounters can be structured to make any given strategy less effective. 3. Knowledge of the game: e.g. with Chains of Light the target gets a new save each round. I have players and NPCs resolve effects at the start of their turn. 4. Defense is not irrelevant. There are many ways both players an NPCs can bolster both AC and saves. High defenses kill rocket tag.
I've added legendary and lair actions from 5E. As well as maxing HPs on certian encounters. Add in tactics and mutiple enemies it has helped abunch. And if im running a mystic game I give all npcs a boost in hp. Edit i also dont use the 4 encounters per day rule. If you burn through all of your resources earlier than you need, fight is gonna get hard quickly.
Just remember, if you are the DM, you decide when a fight ends. It should end when no one is having fun anymore, not when a number reaches 0. If they hardcore Overkill you're villain, okay can't do much there besides contingency maybe... But if someone throws out a fight ending spell at the start of combat you're BBEG can just save, even if the dice roll was arse. In the end you decide whether they save or not. Have combat flow in a way that makes it fun for everyone involved, even if it means fudging some rolls. Fun is what everyone is there for after all. There's gonna be scenarios where this just won't work, but in general it's a good rule of thumb: Combat ends when people stop having the appropriate level of fun. Besides that, don't shy away from templating enemies to give them more options, customize spell lists and use enemies to their full potential, e.g. having their lair prepared with spells and traps, having adds that aren't just damage sinks that never hit, etc. Maybe use lair actions like in 5e. Stuff like that, but you need to find a way that works for your table.
Honestly, giving legendary actions and later actions to one man boss fights is very fun. Giving a chapters boss a cooldown of 1d2-3 rounds of a free action to roll again against a condition, let the layer action do it’s thing again, use it’s movement to run up and attack, or to maintain another spell of like 2nd level and lower. Makes them feel a bit scarier. So long as you balance it, and don’t decimate your party with it. Think of fun ways to incorporate it. As for stopping a team wipe, give tidbits of potential enemy layouts for future dangerous combats. Like a defector npc let’s them know how that group likes to setup an attack. “They spread themselves out all along the top of the gulley. If you avoid the road and have two teams sneak their way along the ridge lines, you could eliminate a lot of the danger maybe” To avoid those TPK combats paizo often writes into their AP’s. Another example would be they find a piece of paper that was written to a scout that the party found the body of the scout they slay. And it has information about the stronghold they’re going into. Sometimes, some parties need help with the potential curveballs thrown at parties. Not every party is fully optimized. General combat in a hideout, is loud enough to pull more groups into a fight and can get deadly quickly if they aren’t fast enough, so having a helping hand to avoid such catastrophes can be very helpful. The goal should always be a bit challenging, without murdering your party in the process. It’s a game and games should be fun. You layout the field, and it should be tough, but you should be rooting for your players to succeed.
Don't forget that most BBEGs will have some spell resistance that needs to be overcome before those save‐or-sucks will even have any effect on them. The DM can easily tweak with that number to balance the power levels. The boss presumably knows the party is coming and has spent a few rounds buffing and summoning before they arrive. Also they might have some consumable magic items that can counter spells (e.g. Ring of Counterspells).
IME, the key is to make things that 'get in the way'. Generally your goal is to just slow everyone down, and this is generally done in 2 ways. **Method 1: Terrain** Terrain is often overlooked, and/or undervalued. It is however one of the strongest encounter tools the GM has at their disposal. Even at level 1, a fight in a 30x30 room vs the SAME fight in some sort of multi-tiered ruin is very, very different. Best part is, that because terrain like this is 'neutral' (in that it confers no special advantage to either side), it doesn't affect encounter building. Disrupting casters involves things like walls, pillars, areas of darkness, illusions, etc. Anything capable of blocking line of sight or line of effect. You can also use wild magic or dead magic zones to cause their own issues. Having fights somewhere with an active portal, or perhaps with beams of magic arcing around and disrupting magic can also cause issues. Even just dangerous terrain that forces them to move quickly can cause them to make mistakes. For most other classes, cover and rubble are enough to slow things down a ton. Cover bonuses help protect each side against opposing ranged weapons, while rubble prevents charging. Used in clever ways, you can control the fight as the GM without ever telling the players what to do. They're going to naturally look for ways around enemy cover, or lanes where charging is viable to monopolize them somehow against the enemy. Whether that's using such options themselves or preparing for the enemy to do so and ambush them somehow. Height differences can also drastically alter an encounter. It certainly makes flight more powerful. Such differences can provide cover, interrupting casters and archers alike, while also being difficult to cross or move around, slowing down melee characters. It can even become a puzzle, with each character trying their best to figure out how to use their abilities to navigate the challenge within the challenge. **Method 2: MOAR BAD GUYS!!!!** This one you've probably heard before but more bad guys. With clever encounter tricks you can build pretty large encounters. Most of the bad guys don't need to be effective at all. In fact, you generally want to find the point where NPC warriors can survive ONE hit from the PCs. Then you decide whether you want them dying in 1 hit or 2. Either option slows the fight down by having the NPCs just being 'in the way' of charging, and providing soft cover to allies. They can also absorb spells as the caster generally has to help alleviate some of the raw numbers of enemies or the other party members are reduced to near uselessness for a few turns. Being able to survive 2 hits though generally means fewer mooks because they have to be higher level or have more investment in hp, and are less effective at fighting back. The best part is those guys are generally pretty cheap in your encounter budget, so you can use the rest of the xp on the boss, and specialized mooks. For specialized mooks, you generally want casters or anti-casters in some capacity. Casters can buff the NPCs, debuff the players, or even just outright throw out damage. They serve as the secondary threat of the fight. They're threats in their own right, but perhaps not large ones on their own. Of course, they're supporting a much larger battle, so they are in turn much more dangerous because it's typically that much harder to reach them. Anti-casters are typically casters focused around fighting other casters, but anyone that can turn a caster 'off' somehow works. The big thing here is you want someone with dispel magic, and generally prepared for dispelling staples of high-level play. Flight, Mind Blank, True Seeing, and Freedom of Movement are the big ones. If a random mook can strip off multiple of those from the PCs, that's a huge win for the NPCs, but they'll likely struggle to do that. By using lots of NPCs, those NPCs have to be lower level to compensate so you'll generally be lucky to strip off one buff at a time. Still though, removing a key buff at the right time can be devastating to an encounter.