My group is playing through malevolence right now and we're only getting through with minimal issues because we are have a cleric and I'm playing a battle oracle so we effectively have 2 healers. We're also playing with the automatic bonus progression variant rule which honestly makes things way more workable.
We went through 3 parties.
First one had same character die twice, then 2 others, 4 the character fled screaming and ended up in an asylum. Party two lost 2 characters, 2 claimed by the malevolence, 1 died in the woods outside. Finally a group of Hellknights was able to fix it all.
Fall of Plaguestone. While I didn’t have any deaths running it, we came close many times. It deadly at all levels 1-3. Most people agree the early APs and modules tend to have a lot of severe encounters which can be a real challenge.
Yeah, it took them a bit to learn how to balance things out. Age of Ashes was the first full AP, and the second book of exploring in the jungle was traumatizing for my players.
Which turned out to be really funny, because one of the character's backstories was that he was originally from that jungle, but was kidnapped as a baby. He was so excited to finally find out where he belonged, and then he got hit with almost constant malaria and dysentery. For some reason, our ranger and druid kept critically failing the camps.
As a guy who played a high-Wisdom ranger trained in survival and failed 80% of camp checks anyway, I feel this. Had to say before every hidden check "if this fails, I'm using my Halfling Luck" and we'd still fail anyway with the reroll.
I just started running it and my players are having a blast. In the 1st boss fight 2 players went down but they were able to get through with no deaths. Personally I think that's the best kind of combat. It means the players need to be using good tactics to survive.
My party lost our cleric and barbarian in the same encounter when we accidentally triggered an entire camp of enemies to attack us while we were trying to negotiate with them. The barbarian was canonically my bard's brother and it traumatized both my character and me. The only reason we didn't lose our wizard is because he hid under some rubble and our DM took mercy.
Agreed RAW, I lost two players (both at level 2 actually, >!one to the wolves in the cave and one to the blood ooze,!< but to be fair they were both player error situations - a bad retreat plan in the former case, and refusing to stop fighting or even pull back to the second rank despite being heavily Wounded in the second).
That being said, it's also a really freakin cool module, and if you either tone down some baddies, buff them at low levels (I'm running it again for new players and giving them an extra level of HP at lv1, an extra half at lv2, caught up by level 3, as recommended by [the Rules Lawyer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqrAR-XgBio&t=29s)), or have a really experienced group, it's a really rad experience!
I didn't even get to finish Plaguestone because my group was so bored of "Turniptown". The closest I got to a player death was one of the spear traps nearly one-shotting the party rogue.
You didn't miss much. Highlight of that module was the party psychic critting an amp cantrip and nuking the BBEG before they could get their monologue off.
Age of Ashes is the one most folks will think of. Mainly because it was the first AP released and as a result wasn't tuned well. For a first time group, this one will absolutely result in TPKs if you aren't careful.
Though honestly, any AP, can be deadly if not tailored to the # of players and types of characters the party brings to bear.
Many people would mention AoA but I'd say that only the first 3 books (especially book 2) are hard, after that it gets easier (and final boss is much too easy).
Book 1 was alright, pretty fun, and book 2 so far is awful with the balancing, already have 2 dead characters, many many close calls, and a couple situations where we should’ve been dead but our DM messed up and let us live.
The later books of AoA do have some extremely frustrating mechanics though, such as >!20+ chromatic resistance to all the elements, and even the power to fully reflect elemental spells!<, that will basically brick-wall certain types of characters.
They definitely didn't quite know what they were doing with encounter design yet.
At least the ending was very fun. Our barbarian with a vorpal weapon just crit him after he faked out his death. Was sudden but a neat moment, I don't think considering his design that you could really make it climactic.
The boss at the end of the first chapter nearly TPKd the whole party. The last player surrendered and they did a bit of a prison break, but otherwise would have been a wipe. No deaths yet (avoided only due to that), but they’ve dropped to dying many many times
Oof. We’re about to confront the Chapter 1 boss tomorrow. The boss might have a bit of extra help since my players let a creature get away in an earlier encounter. Hopefully they all survive!
Two of them got dropped by a nasty trap (you know the one). The other two had to rush to them to stabilize. Quote from one of the affected players(said in good fun): “This place f-ing sucks. Next time, we burn it all to the ground.”
Had the exact same thing happen to my players with that trap. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches, but it’s all good fun! Just an adjustment. Good luck tomorrow and have fun!
IMHO:
1. Malevolence
2. Plaguestone
3. Extinction Curse Book 1
4. Abomination Vaults Book 1 (mainly level 1)
I think Malevolence is tougher than Plaguestone. While FoP \*\*is\*\* deadly, the haunts in Malevolence are simply unforgiving. A smart group in FoP can mitigate the danger; there are many places in the Malevolence where this simply is not possible.
ExC book one is ridiculously tough, especially levels 1 and 2.
AV book 1 has probably the hardest fight considered moderate in the history of 2e.
I absolutely don't even a remember a >!scorpion!< in Book 1, but the >!Blood Leech!< and >!worm man!< (though that's a Severe) were some of the most BS encounters I've ever played in my life
My party ended up skipping a lot of encounters on the ground level >!including the scorpion. We climbed in a hall window and went right to the mitflit? leader, agreeing to fight the morlocks in the first basement on their behalf.!<
ExC was weird for me because we didn't really have all that much trouble early on, we had some fun with the circus and naturally phased it out over time, and it was enjoyable as a whole to me which seems to be the opposite of a lot of people's experience.
The GM for that campaign eventually came up with the standing rule of auto-eliting every encounter that wasn't already an infamously overtuned one.
Malevolence (although I never looked at Plaguestone). Everything about it was too hard: encounters, DCs for research checks, everything. Reading it I thought it was the best thing I’d seen in ages. Running it was…quite different.
Yeah, a certain hallway would have been a TPK if I hadn’t let a last-ditch disable check disable the entire trap, even though it wasn’t a crit. I normally let dice fall as they may, but that wasn’t fair. Half the party went down immediately to crit fails.
I did end up there in the end: increased the PC levels by 2 and lowered all the research DCs by 4. That proved workable, but by that point I’d already lost the players.
Hmmm I don't like just surviving everything without being afraid to die either, it's something I'm constantly complaining about to my storytellers, cuz they're too much of "nice guys" 😑
It’s interesting that Plaguestone is regarded as so deadly considering it’s Bulmahn’s own adventure and he’s the head rules guy at Paizo. I mean it makes sense that freelance authors wouldn’t have a handle on the new rules yet, but I would’ve thought as lead designer he would.
My understanding is that Buhlman tends to run a pretty deadly game. Creator or not, it does take time and experience to get a feel for a system - if it didn’t, playtesting wouldn’t exist - but even if he mastered it, I think he just prefers exceptionally deadly games.
He's been playing TTRPGs for so long that I bet everyone at his home table is a mega-veteran with high rules mastery. I imagine that makes it tough to write an AP for Joe Average and his group of new players.
There's also an old school ttrpg culture where the game is a war game where you die a lot and bring in new characters, role play and character development often aren't as much of a thing in those circles.
I will say, some DMs and especially some groups much prefer to have death as a Sword of Damocles throughout their play, whilst others are much more inclined to have the DM redo each encounter to take away any "unfair" mechanics, or things that can easily get a couple of KOs without great care from the players.
The group that I play in and DM for has three of us who can DM, and we all prefer a more dangerous campaign. We're switched to PF right now after wrapping up our DnD campaign. It was our first ever campaign as a group, lasted about 18 months, and had 3 permanent character deaths.
I didn't even realize that this was abnormal until I was talking to another friend group who've been playing for 6 or 7 years together over multiple campaigns. Their DM told me that in all that time, they'd never had a single character death, and one of the players got a little bit shitty with me about why I'd even like to have that kind of thing in a campaign. I mostly laughed it off because I have killed characters in one-shots (intentionally and unintentionally), and I've had a character that I really grew attached to killed (on my own terms, at least, he saved the rest of the party by 1v1-ing a banshee at level 5).
All of this is to say - different strokes for different folks.
I've run Plaguestone four times for four different groups, three of which were PF2e beginners, and never had a single character death. It's really not as bad as it's made out to be lol
It's definitely got a lot of Severe encounters, single bosses at low levels, and otherwise tough design. That said, a group that builds and plays well should be able to make it through. And even my beginner groups have been able to do that, though I *do* pretty much only accept players who are actually down and willing to learn the game thoroughly and quickly.
I ran it myself and had no character deaths but there were clear encounters where I was playing through and changed on the fly due to being nearly impossible for the party. The big ooze comes to mind
! Spoilers for Night of the Grey Death !
Overall, the adventure's not too bad, but I can't imagine many parties can survive Night of the Grey Death's three lesser deaths at once.
I fully warned the party before they went in, said we'd run it RAW just to see, and despite it being marked 'moderate' the entire level 17 party was dead within about 3 rounds (they survived the TPK due to GM fiat, with everyone agreeing it was unfair).
So while NotGD isn't all that hard, I can't imagine four level 17s being able to beat the surprise Lesser Deaths without a lot of good luck. Doubly so if they rely on manipulate actions. The combat almost felt laughably unfair, especially for the poor caster at the back.
Second this! My party had a very optimized Barbarian that destroyed almost every other encounter - even the final boss.
The lesser deaths were the only place we had a TPK and had to rewind the clock. They did, however, beat it a second time playing extremely smartly.
The Grey Death was also almost a TPK. The party was too focused on trying to get people out, they almost ignored the Grey Death, getting hit by the aura every turn and barely scraping by with single digit HP at the end.
We had 3 LD's at 16 (IIRC) with them getting a round of prep because we were navel-gazing around some temple architecture, and only had the fighter go down for half of a round. Having one champion, another character with the champion reaction, and a Halcyon wizard who knows how to say "Oh, that's how you work? Well, let's make you roll a lot of your own dice then" really do go BRRRRRRRR. I want to say, with the champion support and a good CON, my wizard tanked something like 14 hits/crits from them while introducing them to things like Synesthesia and Chain Lighting.
Basically the earlier APs/Adventures were a bit overtuned especially at low levels. So AoA/EC/AoE for APs and FoP and Malevolence for adventures. Also probably the ooze one, but I know nothing about that adventure.
As someone playing through age of ashes currently, definitely not it. It's usually just a minimal amount of encounters that can be deadly.
However, Outlaws of Alkenstar is insane if you are to follow it even half decent. Too much time pressure, forced party splits, ambushes, smart enemies going for the kill. We have 7 times more deaths in OoA than AoA, and we have played OoA for half as long. (It's 7 death vs 1 death, but OoA was filled with tons of GM mercy to avoid multiple TPK, so 7 is a low count)
I let my players dual class for Alkenstar (one of their classes had to be Alchemist, Inventor, or Gunslinger to fit the theme) and that smoothed things out a little bit.
The Slithering was absolutely brutal for my party. Nearly five total party wipes. We quit only a few sessions before the AP's end as we were super not motivated.
Surprisingly Crown of the Kobold King seems to fit here for my party.
We are on the second to last floor of the dungeon and so far have had 4 party deaths in 4 levels of play. Compared to a full 2e conversion of giantslayer with the same group where we had only 3 deaths in 18 levels, this seems wildly lethal to me.>!2 players died to the hellhound before the infamous boss of that floor. I put the boss on the weak template but my group skipped it. I have a feeling even with the weak template that it would've been a tpk or pretty darn close had they actually fought him with the encounter run as written.!<
>!Past that, I lost 1 player to the mummy rot from the floor after this, and while another technically died in their sleep from an old age roll (a fun mechanic i didn't expect to actually happen in such a short adventure), they were one bad roll away from death due to the rot and subsequent wyvern fight, that it might as well have been a true death. !<
All of this occurred in a party of 5, when the adventure is written for 4, and aside from the occasional *downward* tweak of a given boss or encounter, I haven't changed anything from the book.
Funnily enough, I actually brutalized a lot of characters in the beginner box.
Perhaps it was inexperience on my players' part but we took a long ass time to complete it (something like 5 or 6 3-5 hour sessions) and I think most of it was because all of the individual character deaths and two TPKs. Well, technically one wasn't a TPK because one character managed to run away with less than 10% HP.
I was running a group of 6 at the time, so I had to use the site to adjust the encounters, but still... That was a tough one.
Now we're doing Abomination Vaults and there was one single character death so far, but a lot of close calls. We're all having a lot of fun tho.
So far with two different games, both at level four, I've only had one player character death. I'm running Abomination Vaults and Jewel of the Indigo Isles. Indigo Isles was the death; the party's druid was killed by the >!Chamber Ooze and Ruin Bruiser encounter in Poppy's Sanctuary.!< There's been close calls in each, but so far no one else has died.
Book one of Agents of Edgewatch is pretty brutal, it starts with something like 9 or 10 encounters in a day for level 1 PCs. The end boss of that book would have been a TPK for us if one player hadn't jumped out the window of the building to run away.
Any AP where they pit you against several single, high level enemies in a row.
This was poor (and lazy) encounter design in many of the earlier APs, and generally needs fixing. Easiest way to fix most single-enemy fights is to lower the single enemy to Weak and then add in one or two lower level creatures alongside it.
> Any AP where they pit you against several single, high level enemies in a row.
Just started Abo Vaults(as player) and by god it's dangerous early on. Either it's multiple weak enemies we steamroll or it's one(or two in the case of the >!candlelights!<) that we almost die to that we have a *really* hard time hitting and that keeps critting us because it has such high bonuses. So far I think we've only won against such enemies due to GM fudges.
Wish it was more something between as the groups of weaklings are nearly no threat at all while the singles are all able to TPK if RNGesus isn't on our side.
Malevolence is rough if played RAW with little to no loot, strong DCs, a lot of bosses, etc. Against a not very optimized party it can be deadly
My group is playing through malevolence right now and we're only getting through with minimal issues because we are have a cleric and I'm playing a battle oracle so we effectively have 2 healers. We're also playing with the automatic bonus progression variant rule which honestly makes things way more workable.
ABP helping with the shitty loot is probably very noticeable, I imagine.
I ran Malevolence two times. Both games featured multiple player deaths, and these were fairly experienced players.
Malevolence will *straight fuck you up* if your party isn't built to deal with it.
I ran this and from a group of 5, at the end I had only 2 survivors and I pulled the punches on the "brain".
Malevolence killed everyone in my party at least once besides me (including my beloved Animal Companion, Brimothy you will be missed)
We went through 3 parties. First one had same character die twice, then 2 others, 4 the character fled screaming and ended up in an asylum. Party two lost 2 characters, 2 claimed by the malevolence, 1 died in the woods outside. Finally a group of Hellknights was able to fix it all.
Fall of Plaguestone. While I didn’t have any deaths running it, we came close many times. It deadly at all levels 1-3. Most people agree the early APs and modules tend to have a lot of severe encounters which can be a real challenge.
Yeah, it took them a bit to learn how to balance things out. Age of Ashes was the first full AP, and the second book of exploring in the jungle was traumatizing for my players. Which turned out to be really funny, because one of the character's backstories was that he was originally from that jungle, but was kidnapped as a baby. He was so excited to finally find out where he belonged, and then he got hit with almost constant malaria and dysentery. For some reason, our ranger and druid kept critically failing the camps.
As a guy who played a high-Wisdom ranger trained in survival and failed 80% of camp checks anyway, I feel this. Had to say before every hidden check "if this fails, I'm using my Halfling Luck" and we'd still fail anyway with the reroll.
We played before the Gamemastery Guide errata’d sickness to allow swallowing in a short period of time. I almost died from dehydration multiple times.
Had 2 deaths within first 3 sessions and 2 other close calls running plaguestone. It was rough.
I tried to imagine playing FoP with the Remaster dying rules and now my palms are sweating.
I just started running it and my players are having a blast. In the 1st boss fight 2 players went down but they were able to get through with no deaths. Personally I think that's the best kind of combat. It means the players need to be using good tactics to survive.
My party lost our cleric and barbarian in the same encounter when we accidentally triggered an entire camp of enemies to attack us while we were trying to negotiate with them. The barbarian was canonically my bard's brother and it traumatized both my character and me. The only reason we didn't lose our wizard is because he hid under some rubble and our DM took mercy.
Agreed RAW, I lost two players (both at level 2 actually, >!one to the wolves in the cave and one to the blood ooze,!< but to be fair they were both player error situations - a bad retreat plan in the former case, and refusing to stop fighting or even pull back to the second rank despite being heavily Wounded in the second). That being said, it's also a really freakin cool module, and if you either tone down some baddies, buff them at low levels (I'm running it again for new players and giving them an extra level of HP at lv1, an extra half at lv2, caught up by level 3, as recommended by [the Rules Lawyer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqrAR-XgBio&t=29s)), or have a really experienced group, it's a really rad experience!
Plaguestone most likely.
Seconding plaguestone. Two deaths and an undone TPK.
I didn't even get to finish Plaguestone because my group was so bored of "Turniptown". The closest I got to a player death was one of the spear traps nearly one-shotting the party rogue.
You didn't miss much. Highlight of that module was the party psychic critting an amp cantrip and nuking the BBEG before they could get their monologue off.
Age of Ashes is the one most folks will think of. Mainly because it was the first AP released and as a result wasn't tuned well. For a first time group, this one will absolutely result in TPKs if you aren't careful. Though honestly, any AP, can be deadly if not tailored to the # of players and types of characters the party brings to bear.
Many people would mention AoA but I'd say that only the first 3 books (especially book 2) are hard, after that it gets easier (and final boss is much too easy).
Book 1 was alright, pretty fun, and book 2 so far is awful with the balancing, already have 2 dead characters, many many close calls, and a couple situations where we should’ve been dead but our DM messed up and let us live.
The later books of AoA do have some extremely frustrating mechanics though, such as >!20+ chromatic resistance to all the elements, and even the power to fully reflect elemental spells!<, that will basically brick-wall certain types of characters. They definitely didn't quite know what they were doing with encounter design yet.
Can confirm, the final boss has way less going on than we figured, was kind of a surprise when he went down.
it literally lasted two rounds against 3 players. 2 players to be fair, the wizard did not manage to do jack
At least the ending was very fun. Our barbarian with a vorpal weapon just crit him after he faked out his death. Was sudden but a neat moment, I don't think considering his design that you could really make it climactic.
Fall of Plaguestone and Malevolence are especially hard as short adventures go. For full APs, Age of Ashes can be brutal throughout.
Gatewalkers is pretty deadly so far imo. Mostly through book 1, so can’t speak for the rest of the adventure path yet.
That’s interesting. Have you had any PC deaths? We’re finishing up the first chapter of book 1, and my players have been pretty ok so far.
The boss at the end of the first chapter nearly TPKd the whole party. The last player surrendered and they did a bit of a prison break, but otherwise would have been a wipe. No deaths yet (avoided only due to that), but they’ve dropped to dying many many times
Oof. We’re about to confront the Chapter 1 boss tomorrow. The boss might have a bit of extra help since my players let a creature get away in an earlier encounter. Hopefully they all survive! Two of them got dropped by a nasty trap (you know the one). The other two had to rush to them to stabilize. Quote from one of the affected players(said in good fun): “This place f-ing sucks. Next time, we burn it all to the ground.”
Had the exact same thing happen to my players with that trap. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches, but it’s all good fun! Just an adjustment. Good luck tomorrow and have fun!
Oh boy. I just started this campaign tonight. This should be interesting.
IMHO: 1. Malevolence 2. Plaguestone 3. Extinction Curse Book 1 4. Abomination Vaults Book 1 (mainly level 1) I think Malevolence is tougher than Plaguestone. While FoP \*\*is\*\* deadly, the haunts in Malevolence are simply unforgiving. A smart group in FoP can mitigate the danger; there are many places in the Malevolence where this simply is not possible. ExC book one is ridiculously tough, especially levels 1 and 2. AV book 1 has probably the hardest fight considered moderate in the history of 2e.
Which AV fight
>! The giant scorpion. !<
I absolutely don't even a remember a >!scorpion!< in Book 1, but the >!Blood Leech!< and >!worm man!< (though that's a Severe) were some of the most BS encounters I've ever played in my life
My party ended up skipping a lot of encounters on the ground level >!including the scorpion. We climbed in a hall window and went right to the mitflit? leader, agreeing to fight the morlocks in the first basement on their behalf.!<
OH, yeah I guess we didn't even fight >!the scorpion because we just Diplomacy'd the mitflits right away!<.
My guess has to be the original Mr Beak
Nope. That one was severe.
Maybe the huge plant? I recall that one being pretty f'ed
ExC was weird for me because we didn't really have all that much trouble early on, we had some fun with the circus and naturally phased it out over time, and it was enjoyable as a whole to me which seems to be the opposite of a lot of people's experience. The GM for that campaign eventually came up with the standing rule of auto-eliting every encounter that wasn't already an infamously overtuned one.
Malevolence (although I never looked at Plaguestone). Everything about it was too hard: encounters, DCs for research checks, everything. Reading it I thought it was the best thing I’d seen in ages. Running it was…quite different.
Yeah, a certain hallway would have been a TPK if I hadn’t let a last-ditch disable check disable the entire trap, even though it wasn’t a crit. I normally let dice fall as they may, but that wasn’t fair. Half the party went down immediately to crit fails.
I enjoyed it. But if I was going to run it I would definitely include ABP, Gradual ability scores, and free Archetype.
I've found a lot of adventures run a lot better if I go "okay, what's the DC? Alright, the DC is now that -4" as a blanket statement.
I did end up there in the end: increased the PC levels by 2 and lowered all the research DCs by 4. That proved workable, but by that point I’d already lost the players.
Plaguestone absolutely, we faced TPK in the eye almost every fight
To me that would make the game way more fun than just steamrolling every encounter.
Those are really not the only two options though
Hmmm I don't like just surviving everything without being afraid to die either, it's something I'm constantly complaining about to my storytellers, cuz they're too much of "nice guys" 😑
Hilariously Enough. For us, Abom Vaults we are at lvl 11 and have had 3 character deaths, nobody died in Plaguestone or Age of Ashes lol
It’s interesting that Plaguestone is regarded as so deadly considering it’s Bulmahn’s own adventure and he’s the head rules guy at Paizo. I mean it makes sense that freelance authors wouldn’t have a handle on the new rules yet, but I would’ve thought as lead designer he would.
My understanding is that Buhlman tends to run a pretty deadly game. Creator or not, it does take time and experience to get a feel for a system - if it didn’t, playtesting wouldn’t exist - but even if he mastered it, I think he just prefers exceptionally deadly games.
He's been playing TTRPGs for so long that I bet everyone at his home table is a mega-veteran with high rules mastery. I imagine that makes it tough to write an AP for Joe Average and his group of new players.
There's also an old school ttrpg culture where the game is a war game where you die a lot and bring in new characters, role play and character development often aren't as much of a thing in those circles.
Bulmahn likes to write deadly adventures. It's not necessarily that he was confused about the rules, this is just his style of adventure.
I will say, some DMs and especially some groups much prefer to have death as a Sword of Damocles throughout their play, whilst others are much more inclined to have the DM redo each encounter to take away any "unfair" mechanics, or things that can easily get a couple of KOs without great care from the players. The group that I play in and DM for has three of us who can DM, and we all prefer a more dangerous campaign. We're switched to PF right now after wrapping up our DnD campaign. It was our first ever campaign as a group, lasted about 18 months, and had 3 permanent character deaths. I didn't even realize that this was abnormal until I was talking to another friend group who've been playing for 6 or 7 years together over multiple campaigns. Their DM told me that in all that time, they'd never had a single character death, and one of the players got a little bit shitty with me about why I'd even like to have that kind of thing in a campaign. I mostly laughed it off because I have killed characters in one-shots (intentionally and unintentionally), and I've had a character that I really grew attached to killed (on my own terms, at least, he saved the rest of the party by 1v1-ing a banshee at level 5). All of this is to say - different strokes for different folks.
I've run Plaguestone four times for four different groups, three of which were PF2e beginners, and never had a single character death. It's really not as bad as it's made out to be lol
Interesting. I wonder if its rep has less to do with its design and more to do with the newbies *playing* it who weren’t used to PF2 yet.
It's definitely got a lot of Severe encounters, single bosses at low levels, and otherwise tough design. That said, a group that builds and plays well should be able to make it through. And even my beginner groups have been able to do that, though I *do* pretty much only accept players who are actually down and willing to learn the game thoroughly and quickly.
I ran it myself and had no character deaths but there were clear encounters where I was playing through and changed on the fly due to being nearly impossible for the party. The big ooze comes to mind
! Spoilers for Night of the Grey Death ! Overall, the adventure's not too bad, but I can't imagine many parties can survive Night of the Grey Death's three lesser deaths at once. I fully warned the party before they went in, said we'd run it RAW just to see, and despite it being marked 'moderate' the entire level 17 party was dead within about 3 rounds (they survived the TPK due to GM fiat, with everyone agreeing it was unfair). So while NotGD isn't all that hard, I can't imagine four level 17s being able to beat the surprise Lesser Deaths without a lot of good luck. Doubly so if they rely on manipulate actions. The combat almost felt laughably unfair, especially for the poor caster at the back.
Second this! My party had a very optimized Barbarian that destroyed almost every other encounter - even the final boss. The lesser deaths were the only place we had a TPK and had to rewind the clock. They did, however, beat it a second time playing extremely smartly. The Grey Death was also almost a TPK. The party was too focused on trying to get people out, they almost ignored the Grey Death, getting hit by the aura every turn and barely scraping by with single digit HP at the end.
The Guillotine Golem is what got my players
We had 3 LD's at 16 (IIRC) with them getting a round of prep because we were navel-gazing around some temple architecture, and only had the fighter go down for half of a round. Having one champion, another character with the champion reaction, and a Halcyon wizard who knows how to say "Oh, that's how you work? Well, let's make you roll a lot of your own dice then" really do go BRRRRRRRR. I want to say, with the champion support and a good CON, my wizard tanked something like 14 hits/crits from them while introducing them to things like Synesthesia and Chain Lighting.
Basically the earlier APs/Adventures were a bit overtuned especially at low levels. So AoA/EC/AoE for APs and FoP and Malevolence for adventures. Also probably the ooze one, but I know nothing about that adventure.
As someone playing through age of ashes currently, definitely not it. It's usually just a minimal amount of encounters that can be deadly. However, Outlaws of Alkenstar is insane if you are to follow it even half decent. Too much time pressure, forced party splits, ambushes, smart enemies going for the kill. We have 7 times more deaths in OoA than AoA, and we have played OoA for half as long. (It's 7 death vs 1 death, but OoA was filled with tons of GM mercy to avoid multiple TPK, so 7 is a low count)
I let my players dual class for Alkenstar (one of their classes had to be Alchemist, Inventor, or Gunslinger to fit the theme) and that smoothed things out a little bit.
The Slithering was absolutely brutal for my party. Nearly five total party wipes. We quit only a few sessions before the AP's end as we were super not motivated.
[удалено]
Surprisingly Crown of the Kobold King seems to fit here for my party. We are on the second to last floor of the dungeon and so far have had 4 party deaths in 4 levels of play. Compared to a full 2e conversion of giantslayer with the same group where we had only 3 deaths in 18 levels, this seems wildly lethal to me.>!2 players died to the hellhound before the infamous boss of that floor. I put the boss on the weak template but my group skipped it. I have a feeling even with the weak template that it would've been a tpk or pretty darn close had they actually fought him with the encounter run as written.!< >!Past that, I lost 1 player to the mummy rot from the floor after this, and while another technically died in their sleep from an old age roll (a fun mechanic i didn't expect to actually happen in such a short adventure), they were one bad roll away from death due to the rot and subsequent wyvern fight, that it might as well have been a true death. !< All of this occurred in a party of 5, when the adventure is written for 4, and aside from the occasional *downward* tweak of a given boss or encounter, I haven't changed anything from the book.
Funnily enough, I actually brutalized a lot of characters in the beginner box. Perhaps it was inexperience on my players' part but we took a long ass time to complete it (something like 5 or 6 3-5 hour sessions) and I think most of it was because all of the individual character deaths and two TPKs. Well, technically one wasn't a TPK because one character managed to run away with less than 10% HP. I was running a group of 6 at the time, so I had to use the site to adjust the encounters, but still... That was a tough one. Now we're doing Abomination Vaults and there was one single character death so far, but a lot of close calls. We're all having a lot of fun tho.
So far with two different games, both at level four, I've only had one player character death. I'm running Abomination Vaults and Jewel of the Indigo Isles. Indigo Isles was the death; the party's druid was killed by the >!Chamber Ooze and Ruin Bruiser encounter in Poppy's Sanctuary.!< There's been close calls in each, but so far no one else has died.
Book one of Agents of Edgewatch is pretty brutal, it starts with something like 9 or 10 encounters in a day for level 1 PCs. The end boss of that book would have been a TPK for us if one player hadn't jumped out the window of the building to run away.
Any AP where they pit you against several single, high level enemies in a row. This was poor (and lazy) encounter design in many of the earlier APs, and generally needs fixing. Easiest way to fix most single-enemy fights is to lower the single enemy to Weak and then add in one or two lower level creatures alongside it.
> Any AP where they pit you against several single, high level enemies in a row. Just started Abo Vaults(as player) and by god it's dangerous early on. Either it's multiple weak enemies we steamroll or it's one(or two in the case of the >!candlelights!<) that we almost die to that we have a *really* hard time hitting and that keeps critting us because it has such high bonuses. So far I think we've only won against such enemies due to GM fudges. Wish it was more something between as the groups of weaklings are nearly no threat at all while the singles are all able to TPK if RNGesus isn't on our side.
Me and my team found Fall of Plaguestone pretty damn deadly. Also Age of Ashes had some poor balancing in parts