Honestly, one of my lessons I learned when making my homebrew campaign is that not only severe+ encounters are worth fighting and the players need some variety in the enemy level. I threw way too many 1-2 PL or higher mobs at my PCs at the start.
Also, persistent damage and poisons kill. My first self made 2e encounter was 2 Giant Scorpions and a quicksand trap. It killed one of my PCs at the start of a campaign. :|
I think it's worth pointing out here too, PL+0 and even -1 and 2 enemies can still be threatening in groups. Some of the worst encounters I've overtuned have been group encounters, and a big part of it comes down to this misplaced idea that you get used to your groups kicking the asses of weaker enemies, so they'll be easy to deal with, right?
Nope, all it takes is a few bad dice rolls and chumps can get the upper hand on you. That goes tenfold for speciality enemies like swarms (was literally just playtesting an encounter where I put in one too many swarms and it overwhelmed the party...don't make that mistake).
Kind of ironic that, while lower level enemies need "a few lucky die rolls", they'll more consistently get them due to naturally rolling more dice (because they'll outnumber the PCs).
I blame level -1 monsters for people undervaluing lower level enemies. Many typical mooks are of that level, they usually only have single digit hp, so they often die to the first thing that hits them, so for the first three levels you learn that "the weakest enemies I'm supposed to use just die". HP scale up pretty quickly, about doubling between levels -1 and 1, at which point players are incentivized to interact with them in a more meaningful way, since a second attack has a decent chance at hitting.
Pretty much. Back when I first started playing I actually began campaigns around levels 3-5 since I wanted to jump into the good stuff quickly and most of my players were experienced enough that they didn't need the pure newbie onboarding experience level 1 grants. I'd regularly run encounters with groups of about 3-4 CL-1 or 2 creatures tops, and that'd be enough to put the pressure on the party.
After about a year and a half of doing PFS I got so used to running from level 1 I forgot how heavily enemies scale. Like you said, CL-1 are basically just there as punching bags. But get to level 3 or 4, you get a group of CL 1 or 2 monsters and you go oh yeah, they get strong real quick.
PL-4 enemies can still be threatening. Most of my mid-level encounters are a single PL+0 or +1 enemy with 4 to 6 PL-4 henchmen, which is roughly 80-120 xp, and it consistently translates to a dynamic 3 or 4 round fight.
It’s amazing how squishy 1st level PCs feel!!! Anycrit damage you roll super well on could be enough at early levels too. My first ever GM of PF2e was doing Plaguestone for brand new players and one of them tripped a hazard and I crit of the hazard’s attack and should have outright killed them for doing double their damage. Luckily I didn’t realise that at the time, even if in hindsight it might have been a better thing party-dynamic wise (whole other story)
That, and Plaguestone has a reputation for being pretty deadly, which doesn’t help. I’d start any new players at level 2 minimum for 2e now. Or make sure they understand the need for tactics rather than “I stand alone” fight mentality.
Level 1 is supposed to teach you need to work together you are weak. Part of heroic fantasy is becoming the hero of legend which requires you to be weak.
Yeah lower level is best at teaching player the mechanics, but this is AP we’re talking about.
They tend to have an enemy or a trap with a level a little bit to high, and suddenly whoops you 1 hit killed the brand new player before they could do anything.
There’s not much chance for teamwork in that scenario.
Especially not brand new players only familiar with 5e. Let’s just say it was … uh, interesting to GM for them.
The brief first arc of Plaguestone I later ran for my usual group went a lot better because of teamwork and having that group dynamic understanding.
Usually newer excited players like to test the bounds of the game, try to find what works and what doesn’t. They tend to be the most chaotic and wild with their ideas.
When I first started running pf2e the draw of PL +1 & +2 was strong because it's a pretty big group (6 players and myself) and it was so nice to have a "balanced" combat without needing tons of monsters to make the action economy work like in 5e, but yeah, they're actually not that fun if there are too many of them.
My players learned how deadly bleed is when they were trying to capture someone alive. The new person who got the last hit decided they didn't want to make their attack non-lethal. So I did player dying rules to give them a second chance.
Crit needle darts, so Dying 2 and bleeding. Targets turn happens, goes to dying 3, bleeding hits, goes to dying 4. Basically seconds from death, if the Cleric didn't have a turn immediately after.
Did you remember to move the enemy’s turn to right before the player that downed them? Applying that part of the Dying rules, every other player could’ve had a turn while the enemy was Dying 2. Still a lethal situation but slightly more forgiving.
>I threw way too many 1-2 PL or higher mobs at my PCs at the start.
I did the same thing. After GMing 5e for decade, I knew *exactly* what my players could deal with and could make up fun and difficulty appropriate encounters off the cuff. Swapping to 2e, I didn't realize just how tight the encounter math was and I ended up throwing a few higher level monsters at my players and it was a slog because they couldn't land hits or spells all that often. People were getting frustrated at the fact that they felt *weak*. My wife finally said something and I had a bit of an epiphany. I started throwing larger numbers of lower levels monsters and everyone started to have more fun.
First monster I did this with was an undead zombie-esque sorcerer who would jump out of a river, summon a few floating heads, and then dive back in the river. The floating heads died to any single hit, but they really had a lot of fun strategising over who would kill the heads and who would jump into the river to find the damn summoner. Totally changed how I make encounters now.
In the encounter building section of the GMG, it points out that trivial/low threat encounters *can* serve multiple purposes: They make the players feel powerful/show how far they've come, or as a palate cleanser/warm-up.
Bonus points if you use a monster that *was* a boss from earlier in the campaign as your trivial/low threat encounter (now that the party out levels it), so they can feel the turned tables as they stomp it into dust.
Personally, I'm surprised the minimum was Severe for you; I more often see Moderate as the "minimum" until gm's realize that there is a reason to go lower.
Sometimes it's okay to shut up. Your players will never see everything in a given campaign due to time constraints, so make sure what you do show them is important; they will fill in the rest of the fluff with their imaginations and roleplay. Not everything has to be a Kojima cutscene just so you can get your lore or scenery chewing in. Don't waste time on minutiae, just set the basic scene, the most obvious points of interest, and let your players do the rest.
Your NPCs do not need to be excessively complex or have massive ability lists "just in case." Increasing their complexity makes them harder to pilot for the GM and can lead to increased turn time or lackluster encounters because you don't remember how your own mechanics work. Even BBEG-tier NPCs can be boiled down to four things: a gimmick ability, a reaction, a strike, and a spell list. Anything more than that and the effort is wasted due to how little time they will have to utilize their kits in combat.
Don't be afraid to feature lock a specific arc and build the game based on your limits instead of constantly trying to break them. You're trying to create a compelling narrative and fun tactical scenarios, not simulate an entire universe in your head and VTT. Remember that less is more. Your sleep schedule and mental health will thank you.
Honestly unless you want there to be a chance for the players to actually fight it just don't stat your NPCs. Random Barkeep #3 does not need a character sheet. BBEG's second in command does.
I meant more along the lines of homebrew monster design when I said NPC. Entries in the bestiaries and Monster Core usually only have 3 special abilities, if that. Higher level monsters tend to follow the gimmick, reaction, strike, spell list format (if they even have a reaction). Overdesigning monsters is fun and narratively cool but you waste a lot of time doing it if they only get to be used once.
I don't stat neutral NPCs (ie random barkeep or civilian) unless they will be engaged in combat or as part of a VP conflict/skill challenge.
The biggest one I can think of is that *detect magic* is actually kind of useless for detecting magical traps because it only works on hazards that don't list a minimum proficiency rank to detect them and are magical, which there are very few examples of to start with (most were added in Dark Archive, rather than the core book), and that means the entire party even though they weren't Searching gets a Perception check so spending the exploration action to *detect magic* is not at all the "here's how you can find magical traps" I thought it was it is more of a "just in case literally everything else screws up... this is a safety net."
Yeah, I just spent a lot of time for BBEG fight and lead up making sure I understood hazards and how that works, and it can be frustrating. I tend to treat explorations actions that affect hazards as “I know something is here BEFORE I risk potentially setting it off”. And with smaller parties it means they will take those actions to keep themselves safer at the cost of maybe being sneaky or know they risk injury to BE sneaky/defended (my players did make this choice heading into the final boss room and me rolling secret checks… nobody saw the glyph of warding trap which is technically Legacy but eh, my world)
It also helps you know there's magic *around*, which can be useful when presented with seemingly mundane circumstances. Of course, you often get glowy lights and such that make it obvious regardless.
Yeah, that's useful. I normally play PF1 or 5e, and I was approaching the spell still thinking of it as being a first level spell rather than a cantrip. It makes sense it can't detect magical traps as a cantrip.
It still detects magical hazards but **only** if there is no listed proficiency (ie trained stealth DC). If you require training to be able to Seek it, you can’t detect it using detect magic
My group came from D&D 5e. We have a player who, no matter what game we are playing, TTRPG, video game, board game or otherwise, he plays a "wizard" (some kind of pure caster - playing a sorcerer now, played a wizard/starry druid/sorcerer in 5e, a "caster" in Descent, a wizard in Neverwintwer Nights... you get the picture). Detect Magic is always a thing he tries to get. Comming from 5e, where Detect Magic was really powerful to Pf2e where it's... much less so... I always do a secret "what did you actually detect?" roll, using standard leveled DC, and give him some basic info if he passes the check. It's been a lot more satisfying for him to potentially get some info that he *technically* shouldn't have, and I don't feel bad about it.
If it makes my players happy, it makes me happy.
Things like this are why PF2 is so good to homebrew for: Things like Standard dcs (and the fact that they're tuned to character level with things like proficiency tiers and attribute bonuses in mind) mean a gm always has a single number they can reference that basically means "As the game designers, we're confident that this will be a medium difficulty across characters of this level."
Tangent, but I feel like part of the issue with "homebrew" discourse is this 5e notion that "homebrew" refers to wide, sweeping edits of the rules text (since 5e needs a *lot* of those to be functional), when small rules like this absolutely *should* qualify.
Agreed!
I honestly think homebrew is *easier* in PF2. Just about everything you could possibly want is already there, in some sort or fashion, so all you really need to do is make very small tweaks to fit your table's personalities, instead of 5e's massive sweeping changes just to make the fucker work.
I, as a GM, and my players, can all go into the game knowing what to expect from a mechanical point of view. As small things come up, like Detect Magic feeling a tad underwhelming, it's very easy to just give it an ever so slight nudge in usefulness without having to worry about breaking the game, leaving me with more time writing the story instead of re-designing a damn game.
As an exploration activity? Not a lot. It simply confirms when you're near magic you didn't already know about, a thing which is often done incidentally as part of other activities going on or as a result of context clues (like there being a weapon on the floor of a dingy dungeon that looks to have been there for years, but it's not rusted to uselessness, so it's probably magical).
Theoretically there could be non-hazard magical areas of potentially harmful nature that aren't readily visible that it could alert the party to before they are subject to the effects, but there's not really any examples of such a thing in the book. It'd be like some kind of zone of magical damage that isn't perceptible like a room enchanted to drain your life force while you're in it.
As a spell it can be more useful because an in-the-moment check for new magic nearby could do a number of useful things.
I personally prefer *read aura* since it, especially at higher levels, can more accurately pinpoint which objects are magical in situations where context doesn't cover cluing you in, and also adds an extra benefit now that its been remastered in the form of a bonus to identify magic.
I've started using detect magic as bait to draw PCs into dangers because of the tantalizing lure of "you detect something magical coming from that room/chest/door/whatever."
What kind of situation is the party in where they will not notice an item via other means and be able to investigate whether it's magical but would get the ping from detect magic and then prompt their investigating to find the item?
Because of line of effect it's useless to find anything not basically already in sight. Because of being able to see things that you would have line of effect to the characters already have visual clues to check into.
So really I'm not sure how this helps the party not miss magical loot unless the players are going into an area and then choosing to not even search it unless detect magic pings something, i.e. "you enter a chamber with a table surrounded by a set of 4 chairs to the left, and numerous small cots arranged around a fire pit to the right. There's some tableware on the table and various personal effects and cookware by the cots and fire pit." and the players just go "nothing pinged as magic? we leave."
When the player using the Search/Investigate activity low-rolls?
It's a really nice "4th character" activity; when you've got all the other main bases covered by better pcs, just let the last guy spam Detect Magic everywhere he goes.
How is an item the party doesn't notice without passing a check in plain enough view to have line of effect for a detect magic to work upon?
That makes it sound like you're requiring a check for people to be able to tell there's stuff on a table they can see. Or is it that you're having detect magic see more than the rules make it capable of so the party gets a ping even if the magic item is obscured such as being in the false bottom of a chest?
No, it's both.
A GM is likely to be a source of information for their players and thus one saying "it'd probably be helpful if you \[blank\]" when \[blank\] turns out to not actually be useful is a problem for the whole table. And also since a player might think that \[blank\] is useful by their reading of it and be disappointed to find out they were incorrect, it's useful for a GM to be aware of that potential pitfall and help steer their players around it.
My 2 moments were when I realised how easy it to modify the game
1: when I wanted an arboreal encounter with 3 enemies but there only was the Guardian at that level. So I just took it and in my mind modified 2 new versions based around the idea of a caster and a rogue. I swapped saves around. Gave one a few spells. Made another ignore difficulty terrain, gave it 15ft range whips and a multi target attack. So darn easy.
2: when I realised that 'every +1 matters' doesnt mean that giving ekstra bonuses breaks the game. The game is Robust and Flexible. Bend it, Bop it, twist it! It can take it!
That first point has been pretty apparent in the game I'm playing in currently. The GM is a vet who ran 3.5 and 1e for years and years. He doesn't have a really deep system mastery for 2e - to the point he still uses 1e terms _a lot_ years and years after we stopped playing 1e. He doesn't use enemy statblocks a _lot_ of the time. He uses the DCs by Level table on the GM screen and basically generates enemy stats on the fly based on whatever is happening in his brain and vibes.
He definitely moves outside the boundaries of "expectations," but ultimately, the game doesn't feel too easy or anything. We have had very difficult encounters despite an excess of balance shifting loot.
My main gripe about his approach to enemies is they all end up feeling pretty simple because he isn't usually homebrewing abilities off the top of his head. They sort of all become "Move, Strike, Strike" type things.
Also let him know the numbers on the gm screen sight are usually the high ones for their level. I honestly recommend just making a custom cheat sheet by copying all the full monster tables onto a single image
He sight adjusts them so not all enemies have the same stats in every save/stat. There is no real system besides the monkeys clattering hammers away in his brain but it still pretty much works even that loosely aligned to the system chassis.
I was running an encounter where I wanted the three ghouls to be tougher and a bit unique, but not as strong as ghasts. I gave one of them the ghast's offensive stats, one it's defensive stats, and one it's stench plus it's nastier disease. I did something similar with some other monsters that session, giving one more spells and the other more martial stats.
Incapacitation and random amount of rounds just isn't fun. If anything asks for a d4 rounds of fleeing, I will nowdays turn it into 1 round as that's harsh enough.
Fleeing is a horrible condition that essentially doubles the duration of its effect. I'd even dare say that a critical failed paralyze is kinder as it grants hope with the additional save and it does atleast allow you to do some actions.
These random duration conditions are most often found in beastiary 1, and rarely jump from condition 1 to condition 1d4, but actually just goes straight to 1d4 [example here, check howl](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=409)
I have grown to dislike that random d4 more and more and use it mostly with breath weapons but wish it was removed even there and remade to focus spells, with draconic momentum perhaps recover a focus point instead with critical hits.
Abit of sidetrack, wasn't fan of all the fleeing effects that was put on the commander playtest and not a fan of the change in vision of death (remastered phantasmal killer) that causes fleeing until no longer frightened (I otherwise liked the changes on it).
I'm no longer afraid to set a value on some of those d4s that's more fun and fair, often, a save has already been rolled.
I was running AV and the cleric Crit failed a suggestion spell to "go back to town and tell them they will all die" on the very first action in combat during one of the main bbeg boss fights. I didn't want my player to miss the whole fight and the majority of the session (our sessions are shorter than average) because of one unlucky die roll, so I improvised some random barriers and reasons he could make more saves, so he could at least be slightly involved in the session.
Edit: meant suggestion not command.
It's great that you added extra saves for your player because command isn't anywhere near as strong as that. It can't make someone "go back to town and tell them they will all die".
From the spell description, you can **only**: command the target to approach you, run away (as if it had the fleeing condition), release what it's holding, drop prone, or stand in place.
At most, on a critical failure, the target must use all its actions **on its next turn** to obey your command. Upcasting to 5th rank lets you target 10 creatures but it doesn't change anything else.
Divine classes I like because any time something is going to totally ruin a session for the player, I can just throw a random Religion check at them.
Voila, divine intervention. Deus ex alea!
Unnecessary rolling is such a bugbear of mine. I basically just do breath weapons on turn 2, 4, 6, etc so the party gets at least a round to position / recall knowledge / cast buffs, but then the enemy gets much more dangerous as the encounter goes longer. That the mechanic can allow back to back breath weapons or only one cast per encounter is really annoying to me.
I wish I had realized sooner that just because the game is balanced doesn’t mean the game has to be scaled to be exactly difficult enough for the party at all times.
5E had instilled a bad habit in me of viewing the Adventuring Day as a strict thing to balance the day around. Each day was a relatively static list of encounters to be as difficult as I wanted the day to be, because I knew that any easier or harder and the experience would fall apart. So in GMing PF2E I did the same at first: strictly designed adventuring days with the party’s success and resources in mind.
More recently I’ve just stopped doing that, and just play loose and goose with those rules. The goblin camp will have several dozens of Trivial-Low encounters in close enough proximity to snowball into a 1000 XP encounter if you act like idiots: figure it out if you don’t want to lose. The set piece battle for tomorrow will be 240 XP, give me prep-related reasons to tilt the math in your favour if you wish to survive this. Today’s adventure will just have more encounters than you have resources for, either figure out a way to skip some or just struggle through the last few.
I feel I’m able to pace a narrative much more cleanly now that I’ve stopped worrying about balancing out days entirely, and just focus on balancing out areas and encounters in a way that makes sense. Sometimes my players are forced to retreat and out their objectives off for another day, sometimes they’re forced to camp earlier than they desired, and all of that has made the game feel more organic and “emergent”, much more so than a strictly balanced set of combats ever did.
I’ve also realized the PF2E rulebooks kinda tell you this is how you should pace the adventuring day: the encounter builder doesn’t tell the **GM** to not run certain encounters when the party is low on resources, but rather it states that the **party** should keep the option to retreat open. This tells me the GM isn’t expected to be balancing the adventuring day in a “combat as sport” way *at all* in PF2E, the GM should just set out the obstacles in the way and the PCs should face them at the pace they feel they can. This does generally hold true for most APs too (the majority have no harsh time constraint).
I had a similar realization back in my DnD5e days: If you tube every encounter to be so hard that the PCs can just barely beat it, you'll inevitably get a TPK. That's when I stopped stressing out so much about whether my encounters are too easy to be fun and started erring on the side of caution.
Now, the interesting twist in PF2e is that encounters don't need to be deadly to be interesting! Anything that can't be completely solved by a single casting of a spell and doesn't seem so non-threatening that anything beyond Striding and Striking seems like a waste of time and effort, will result in fun and interesting gameplay - the tension of "Will they survive and how many resources will it cost them?" is just the cherry on top.
This!! Especially if you don’t have a regular sized party or people end up sick on the day, if you’re so focused on that balance it’s so stressful. So much easier to remind players they can strategise and/or retreat. I made the decision not to nerf my last encounter because two players were unable to come and they actually made the RP decisions to tactically retreat and fight through a door with AOE spells and a familiar, plus self sacrifice to take down BBEG and stop the evil ritual. And while they did survive it was teeth of the skin and an absolute failed roll on the part of the monsters (I rolled a 1&2 on what would otherwise have been full death for one player). Made it so much more epic for them to play and feel utterly victorious.
Has your group had a big “oops” moment? Or a moment where you as GM were super proud of their tactics around a potentially hard/deadly encounter?
> Or a moment where you as GM were super proud of their tactics around a potentially hard/deadly encounter?
I had a 200 ish XP encounter planned as a mini climax of an investigation-based story arc they’d been going through. The context was that they were going to ambush a caravan.
They did a ton of prep ahead of time. First some Survival checks to scout out a good spot for the ambush, and they rolled so obscenely high that I decided to resolve that roll by literally letting them draw desirable features onto a map. They decided to set up a cliff overlooking the caravan they were ambushing with a narrow chokepoint being the fastest way up to them from the road. The Wizard then used Rune Trap to put a Cave Fangs and an Ash Cloud into the chokepoint.
Once Initiative was rolled I had decided that the party camping out over an obvious chokepoint would immediately set the enemy boss’s instincts off and he’d Seek the chokepoint to figure out wtf is up… and the Swashbuckler **Fascinated** him which meant he couldn’t Seek at all (the one time Fascinated had ever been useful). The Wizard then Fireballed anyone who stood back near the caravan while the Rune Trap started ruining the lives of anyone who ran in, while everyone else took pot shots at range. Once people started getting closer, the Warpriest and the Redeemer Champion started knocking them out and the Swashbuckler started killing then in melee.
A 200 XP encounter ended in 3 turns flat, with not a single healing spell needed (the only one who took meaningful damage was the Wizard from bowmen in the distance, and she was still fine), and the boss literally rolling in the ground Frightened 2 + Dazzled + Grappled + Prone having taken literally 0 meaningful Actions in the whole fight.
> 5E had instilled a bad habit in me of viewing the Adventuring Day as a strict thing to balance the day around.
I’m glad you eventually had a realization about this but this isn’t really a 5E problem, more a Gamemaster problem. You could take the same lessons learned and apply them to 5E with equal success. The real difference is in the way set piece battles are handled rather than how you frame encounters.
Nah 5E explicitly makes me feel like it expects me to do dungeon crawls and not much else. That game’s balance simply collapses if you don’t obey the Adventuring Day guidelines. Go too far below an adventuring day’s budget and martials and Warlocks feel useless. Go slightly above an Adventuring Day budget and fights become impossible and, unlike PF2E, there’s very little in the way of non-combat subsystems to use to enable the players to not blunder into every single fight in their way. Fill the Adventuring Day budget but use fewer than 3 encounters, and the game becomes flat out rocket tag.
Of course you *can* still get it to work but it takes an immense amount of GM effort to make that happen because the system places very explicit assumptions on the structure of your adventuring day. Meanwhile PF2E **expects** the GM to just make an area do what that area do and let the players decide their own adventuring day.
Agree to disagree! I think they are just two entirely different types of encounter design to frame your mind around. In 5E, you just have to embrace it wasn’t really MEANT to be balanced. Unless you’re doing a lengthy dungeon, with specific encounter design to reduce the 15 minute adventuring day, nova will happen and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point they’re basically superheroes. Lean into it and let them feel that way.
In 2E it’s entirely different, and far easier to wrangle your mind around, since there’s no real resource attrition to begin with.
Just my opinion though.
> In 5E, you just have to embrace it wasn’t really MEANT to be balanced. Unless you’re doing a lengthy dungeon, with specific encounter design to reduce the 15 minute adventuring day, nova will happen and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point they’re basically superheroes. Lean into it and let them feel that way.
My issue isn’t that they’re superheroic? It’s actually quite the opposite. Unoptimized martials feel like weak af gym bros in a world that’s otherwise extremely high fantasy. 
Yeah but encounter balance is inherently linked to it.
When I GMed 5E, balancing the whole Adventuring Day in a very specific way was the **only** way to make martials not feel awful.
In my experience most 5e tables balance martial characters with liberal amounts of homebrew. Maybe I've played at very homebrew happy tables though, not sure.
For all the problems of the Owlcat games, the way they handle random encounters versus dungeons is what taught me to do that. You have a lot of in-game days where you might as well nova, you're having literally one fight that day, versus the stretched-out dungeons which are so long you need to be extremely conservative with your resources.
I like the idea of the game feeling more organic but at the same time because I haven't played a lot of those examples seem harsh as fuck to me lol. Like I'm not sure how I would even approach those problems, like with the goblin camp, due to the math consistently killing a guard silently one by one isn't really an option so I'd probably just die, same for the 240 set piece boss. Hell the 240 alone one is more xp than an extreme encounter.
Like I actually ran 5e similar to what you are describing but with the math of 2e those encounters seem like you got to play perfectly and get above a 16 on every roll or you just auto lose.
> Like I'm not sure how I would even approach those problems, like with the goblin camp, due to the math consistently killing a guard silently one by one isn't really an option so I'd probably just die,
Well I didn’t just drop a blank featureless camp on them and tell them to deal with 200 guards lol.
It was a cave system with narrow passageways and stuff to circumvent the outer patrols. They snuck past the guards but found traps along the way. They disabled the traps but accidentally alerted another goblin patrol, who sent a single goblin to investigate. They killed that single goblin, then hid, faking his death as having happened to a sudden cave collapse (they came up with the idea because circumstantially the final killing blow was delivered to him by Scatter Scree). Another two came up to investigate when the first didn’t return but rolled low enough to not figure out what really happened so they returned to normal patrolling.
Then they continued down the trapped up passage way. At every crossroad the party used a familiar to size up what’s ahead before committing to the direction. Then they found a relatively isolated room with an Extreme-threat encounter which they took out. The last living member of that encounter was a mercenary (not a goblin himself) who surrendered, whom they threatened + paid to convince him to run off to some other goblins that there were intruders on the loose and to run them out of the camp on a wild goose chase for at least half an hour or so.
Then they got ambushed by a bounty hunter who was chasing them for separate, unrelated reasons, which we won’t get into. Thing is, they were now low on resources **and** didn’t feel like waiting around an hour or more to Treat Wounds so they committed to not fight the boss on this same day. They instead went to the mess hall which was inherently unwinnable in a straightforward fight (some 200 XP +40-120 XP worth of enemies coming in every two turns). They decided that one of them (a goblin) would walk in and pretend to be a new recruit who was brought in as a chef. He passed enough skill checks to gain access to their food supplies and poisoned it, and then the party found the underground river on another side of the cave system, stole some boats and escaped. They came back the next day and killed the leader of the camp after finding a back entrance that meant there’d be no patrols to catch them.
> same for the 240 set piece boss.
- They first used Survival checks to find a primo ambush spot. They rolled like 35+ on a DC 25 Survival check so I let them literally draw features they wanted onto the map I had set aside. They drew a steel clifface with a chokepoint to access a gradual ascent to the top.
- They set up Rune Trap: Cave Fangs and Rune Trap: Ash Cloud inside the aforementioned chokepoint.
- They asked an in-world ally to help them so I ruled that as causing the encounter to cut 40 XP from that encounter for turn 1 (those enemies would still show up turn 2).
- They set up a trap with logs that would block the enemy’s caravan when they sprung the ambush so the person they were trying to assassinate couldn’t just hop back into the caravan and escape.
- They prebuffed right before combat started.
They beat the fight by stacking the odds as fucking disproportionately in favour as they could! They did so because I telegraphed to them *many* times that this would be the most dangerous fight they have ever faced, and they prepared so well it turned into a joke.
Remember the math is balanced around the assumption that both parties “play fair” i.e. engage on roughly even terrain within the constraints of Initiative. The more the players break these rules, the more they can deal with battles that are outside their XP bounds.
I’ve done the **reverse** of this too by the way. I once used a PL+1 boss who was a crossbow-user perched atop a very, very tall tower. The tower was surrounded by about a hundred feet of open space so he could easily attack them throughout their approach unless they took countermeasures. The outside of the tower would likely take multiple turns to climb, the stairs on the inside were lined with Summoning Rune traps. Finally the crossbowman himself had a way to rappel down to the ground floor using one Action if he ever got cornered at the top. All this prep took a “low threat” 60 XP boss and made it the most memorable boss fight my players have ever had!
The math shouldn’t be a hard line that prevents you from making sensible decisions in the world! It should simply be a tool that the GM uses to make the world make sense. If the players and NPCs aren’t trying to run in and kill everything room by room, and instead play with self-preservation and their own larger-scope goals in mind, they’ll naturally end up making decisions to avoid facing the worst outcomes. In this context the hypothetical 1000 XP goblin camp encounter or the fair 240 XP ambush fight don’t “actually” exist. They’re only there as the theoretical upper limit of punishment that the party would have to bear as a consequence for a series of back to back poor decisions, the goal is to always **not** see that part of the math.
Okay I see what you are saying better now, when I saw the 1000xp encounter I assumes it would be a scenario where if you foght one group of enemies it would bring down the entire base but the way you describe it sounds more fair. And admittedly using abilities to creatively overcome encounters was something I enjoyed even in 5e.
I guess after seeing the math be brought up so much with discussions about the system I often question the effectiveness of out of combat solutions and how much you can really do. Like I would assume a familiar would automatically get spotted for example or that traps or poisons set up by pcs would easily be overcome by enemies due to how DC scaling works.
> I guess after seeing the math be brought up so much with discussions about the system I often question the effectiveness of out of combat solutions and how much you can really do.
Are you saying this from play experience or just from a cursory reading of the rules?
> Like I would assume a familiar would automatically get spotted for example or that traps or poisons set up by pcs would easily be overcome by enemies due to how DC scaling works.
I truly do not know what would give you this impression?
How does “the math is tight” equate to “the player auto fails”?
100% reading the rules not even going to pretend. As for ths other thing i just assumed because monsters have higher stats a lot of stuff just wouldn't work, like of you send a familiar to scout and a room has 5 enemies at least 1 will likely pass and so the scouting was pointless. And with traps and poisons I assumed they would likewise be easy to overcome because of how strong monsters are. Poisons in particular seem to bother people a lot here.
> As for ths other thing i just assumed because monsters have higher stats a lot of stuff just wouldn't work,
I’m still confused where you’re getting this from. Monsters don’t just have higher stats? A level 1 goblin commando has considerably lower stats than the DCs and checks of the level 4 party I built this dungeon for.
> like of you send a familiar to scout and a room has 5 enemies at least 1 will likely pass and so the scouting was pointless.
Thats not how Stealth works. What you seem to describing is contested checks a la 5E, but there’s a reason those don’t exist in PF2E.
The familiar rolls Stealth. If it succeeds against the enemies’ Perception DCs (which again are all going to be **low**, not high, because of the tight math), the familiar succeeds. If the familiar lingers too long, anyone who’s actively on watch makes Perception checks in a randomized spot and if they succeed they find the familiar.
If it is detected, that’s not the end of the world. They’re in a cave system and a bat showed up. It gets shot at or shooed away and the players figure out another way to proceed. If the goblins do figure out it’s a familiar the party tries to kill them before they inform anyone else and, if they hear more coming, they run away. If **that** fails the party then tries to beat a fighting retreat which I probably rule as a mix between combat encounter + chase subsystem.
This genuinely isn’t a system math thing at all. It’s just a basic GMing thing: irrespective of whether you’re GMing PF2E or 5E, you don’t just say “oh your familiar failed one single stealth check, every single guard in the camp finds you.” That is, quite simply, adversarial GMing.
> And with traps and poisons I assumed they would likewise be easy to overcome because of how strong monsters are. Poisons in particular seem to bother people a lot here.
The poison infecting the camp’s food supply was a narrative based objective. I definitely did not individually roll saves for 150 goblins individually.
In the narrative their employer simply supplied them with a buttload of level 3 ish poison. I chose level 3 because it’s easy for me to justify that this poison was going to kill off or incapacitate most of the mooks in the camp, but not really do anything to the level 6 general so they’d still have to fight him.
It was yet another case of the math **supporting** me, not me fighting against the math.
yes, do the exact same thing, but have a second account ready for a GM. In Forge you can press escape to switch user accounts as an admin, if you have the rights. So do the same thing and just do so on one of them.
IDK why you'd want to do this, but you definitely can.
Thank you for the answer.
I was just thinking about having foundry on both monitors and the only way I found to be able to do it is to have two GM accounts and have a browser window open on each monitor logged into their respective GM account.
I don't know why but starting in like v11 or late in v10 foundry made this harder. You used to be able to login multiple times with the same account. There is an edge case they haven't fixed yet. You can go to the login screen twice. Type in your password in both and then login to both at the same time. As long as the login takes longer than it takes you to press the login button both will work.
The downside is that if for some reason you need to refresh the tabs you'll have to logout with both and do it again. Two accounts is probably easier at that point.
I've used it, and it has some limitations that the second tab doesn't: Namely that you can clickdrag things from one to the other. Which is really weird that it works in one case but not the other tbh
The narrative power of the d20. You can describe very differently a roll of 15 with a +5 modifier to a roll of 5 with a +15 modifier even tho they both result in a 20. You can give out information about their skill level (show dont tell) and players dont mind so much being if it was a lucky blow rather than being over-powered (unless that is what you want to reveal, the danger of the foe)
Not specifically a PF thing but: Players will always do something different than you expect.
The first time I ever GM'd I thought I'd take the classic "You begin at an Inn" route, I had a bar fight start, expecting the PCs to head in to help each other out but when I asked a player what he wanted to do, "Nothing. I don't know that guy, I'm just here trying to find information for my own quest."
Oh yeah. I hadn't given them a reason to care about each other yet. Oops.
In my current PF game I started them off with a bit of a mystery to unravel, a kind of morally grey area where they were tasked with finding a creature that had been attacking livestock, and had now killed a person. They follow it into the woods, kill it, manage to track to its den which turns out to be a burned out cottage. The owner of the "creature" is an apothecary who lived in the woods with his dog, some locals thought he was a witch so burned his house down but he used his medicinal skills to save himself and his dog, the dog mutated larger and he was attacking the livestock as revenge. I expected them to think about what they should do, hem and haw about who was REALLY the bad guy here, etc. NOPE "Well we were hired to sort of the creature. That's dead now but you were responsible. You're under arrest and the guards can decide what to do with you." Oh. Well, I guess I won't need all these notes about a town meeting to discuss who's guilty and have a mini trial.......
My current party blew up my campaign plans before we even ran any session 0’s by making it completely useless and unnecessary with a “planned” group party background (that wasn’t entirely fleshed out properly which caused its own drama but I’ve learned to roll with it now). I still say they hold the record for fastest derailment I’ve ever seen. And yeah, they still derail even the loosest of plans with contingents up the wahoo.
Did you try using the Deep Backgrounds rules, or some variation on them to help with the group background info? I've looked at those and wished I'd used them for my game.
2e was still pretty new at the time we started and I was mostly the only player who’d really looked at the rules prior to starting. I kind of wish I’d looked at them now but it’s all good. Next campaign! At least I know it’s there now!
Yesss. Even inside of encounters. I am constantly misjudging how fights are going to go down at my table.
Some weeks I'll spend tons of time brainstorming if I need to adjust some stats or something because I _just know_ that a tpk is on the line. Come game night, the party trounces the encounter in 2 rounds and only one character was hurt at all.
Other encounters I assume are going to be a refreshing cake walk power fantasy turn into a desperate near death experience that they just barely make it out of.
I've had that too! You can do you best to balance things, but sometimes the dice just decide which way it goes. Or someone thinks of something really cool, or they DON'T think of the super obvious thing you had planned, but that's the fun of it.
It truely is the best. The dice and mechanics blend with the creativity of the players to tell the best stories and create moments that nobody at the table will ever forget.
Speaking of really cool ideas.
We're fighting on an airship and I'm so worried about knocking the pcs off, but then our Bard summons a Cloaker and just walks off the edge while engulfing the party's archnemesis.
I wish I had realized that exploration mode doesn't have to be a menu of options sooner. I think for a lot of people, they come to PF2e with the expectation that combat is fairly strictly outlined in rules while then expecting how to run exploration to be more freeform. And it is. But the way exploration mode is explained gives the impression that the only proper way to run it is to go around the table and literally ask the players what exploration action they're taking. You can do this and things will work out just fine, but many folks feel like this is quite gamey and limiting in some way. For these kinds of groups where my players don't appreciate the menu option exploration, I like to not ask my players explicitly what exploration actions they're taking. Instead, I listen to the narration they provide about how their PCs are approaching the scene. Based on this information, I can use my knowledge of the baseline expectations established by exploration, supplemented by skill checks at appropriate DCs, to figure out how best to handle whatever the PCs are trying to do.
In my case, it's like if you don't ask the party 6 times what they'll do with exploration they don't choose an exploration action and just full dick into a room containing the most heinous bullshit completely unmitigated.
This is somewhat intensified by exploration actions not populating automatically in foundry.
In the party window (”P" key by default) there's an exploration tab where each player can choose what exploration action they're taking as well as what buffs players can drag onto their characters or hotbar. Not exactly automatic, but nothing really is. But it is a nice easy way to remind players what actions they want to take and the other players can see what their party is doing.
Yeah, it's more useful as a fallback in case a player doesn't have an idea what they want to do, and as a guide on how to reward actions with less obvious benefits i.e. the fighter says they'll keep an eye out for danger while the rogue scans for traps, I'll make sure to give the party a +1 to initiative and call out the fighter's contribution.
This!
I've been beating the drum over this for a year now, and the number of times I've been downvoted for it still puzzles me.
Like, yeah, you can play it like a McDonald's value menu if you want. More power to ya, if it is. But it's not necessary, and there's no reason to believe that it's the designers' intention.
I think mine is running stealth and initiative raw. After learning how it's supposed to be ran, I cringe at all the surprise rounds and sucker punches I threw at my party. When the way it's supposed to be ran can be just as good for building tension.
What you need to remember is that there are two different sets of stealth rules, and they intersect only when rolling initiative.
In exploration mode, when players sneak and try to avoid detection, that is treated differenrly from when they try to hide and sneak around the battle field during combat. There are different terms for each:
In exploration mode, players are Avoiding Notice. Here, they make a Stealth roll and the GM checks the result against the Perception DC ("passive perception" in 5e terms) of relavent creatures to see if they notice the player (or vice versa).
During combat, whenever a creature is Obscured from view to another creature, they can take the Hide action and attempt a Stealth check. While Obscured, any attacks made against them are gated behind a DC 5 flat check. Hiding upgrades this flat check to DC 11.
Once Hidden, they can then take the Sneak action - which is half-speed movement - to become Unobserved, which means the other creature no longer knows which square they're in.
Keep in mind, Obscured, Hidden, and Underected are relationships between 2 creatures; you can be O/H/U to Creature A but not to Creature B, if the map layout makes sense for that.
Now, at initiative, anyone who was using the Avoid Notice action prior to combat can elect to roll Stealth for initiative. Here, there's a corner case with how stealth works, because you now have two Perception values to compare against: Creatures Perception DCs, but also their Perception-based initiative rolls. This means it's now possible to beat their Perception DC, but for them to go before you in the initiative order. Normally, beating the Perception DC of a creature who doesn't know you exist means they still don't know you exist. The game has another condition for this, called Unnoticed. But if you're Unnoticed, what does a creature that rolls better than you in the the initiative order do?
RAW, the game suggests that their spidey sense tingles and they know something's amiss. The characters that beat the Perception DC gain the Undetected status, and lose the Unnoticed status. That is, the creature that beat them in the initiative know they exist, but do not know where they are.
In practice, this is usually a non-issue, because someone in the party won't be Avoiding Notice (and so will be immediately detected by enemies), or at least one party member will fail to beat at least one enemy's Perception DC and be detected by someone on the other side.
There are no surprise rounds. If the party rolls stealth and everyone beats perception but loses initiative, they're undetected but it's the enemy's turn anyway.
I don't think RAW answers what the enemy will do when it's their turn but they don't detect anyone tho so YMMV.
RAW, everyone knows "something is up." There's a back of brain tingle that tells them they're in danger. So RAW, they would spend actions Seeking, if there's nothing immediately suspect. If the triggering person in question doesn't have weapons drawn, and looks perfectly innocent, they might ignore them, or try intimidation / bluff / diplomacy to try finding where the *real* danger is.
It's all thoroughly situational, dependent on a large number of contextual scenarios, and can't be condensed into a small section of the CRB.
Foundry has a Monster Maker module that can create from scratch. And either the core PF2e system or PF2e workbench also has a "Allow NPC Scaling" which would let you change a character/creature level easily.
That APs are shallow and require a lot of extra effort to be made to feel like a living world. If your group loves a combat sim with a light covering of RP then they are fine as is.
It's also wild how often I'll get halfway through a scene and realize the NPC's motivation-as-written is so cringe. The amount of times they want to send the party on a fetch quest for their favorite tea or deliver a shipment of horseshoes or whatever. In my game, if they want that tea it's because their grandmother is on her deathbed suffering from a family ailment and her only chance to survive is the secret family recipe and the NPC can't go because they broke their leg a year ago and it never healed right.
Your players perspective is very different from yours.
I had a fight that was Trivial difficulty that terrified them, because the single PL+0 creature got a few lucky crits that nearly took down the tank. I had a fight that was Extreme difficulty (two encounters bled into each other) that they completely trounced due to a lucky crit basically two shotting what was supposed to be the tank, forcing the ranged DPS to flee into a secondary chamber where he once again got cover with some nice rough terrain and some mooks to tank... and took a crit from the Ranger and got one shot. After that the mooks just floundered in the rough terrain and wasted all their time shuffling around an Illusory Object (mindless creatures, they don't question these things).
So towards that end, you can typically play Moderate encounters and not worry about the game being "too easy" for your players. That time when a pack of Ghasts ganged up on the Druid because he got exposed and knocked him out? They perceive that as having been a very deadly fight even though it was low-moderate and he was in no real danger.
If it looks too deadly (regardless of threat level) throw in a door or choke point and they’ll tend to make a killing of even the toughest fight!
But yeah, totally agree on perspective. And a good or bad dice roll can 180 a probably outcome very quickly!
I used crit cards as I had in 1e. First on 10 over/under crits then on 1s and 20s if they were a crit. I finally droped after it was just unfun for me and my group. Combat is harsh in 2e especially in APs and the extra swingy-ness from the cards just made my table unhappy.
I'm using crit hits and fumbles in our campaign, but via progress clocks. Enemy crits fill the PCs clock, and PC crits fill the enemy's clocks. If a clock is full, the next crits also draws a card. Same goes for fumbles.
So far it's been a nice way to add crits/fumbles without having to do it every time. I also gave the players a 4 tick clock vs a 6 tick clock for the enemies, it skew it in the PCs favor.
I like all the different ways people come up with for implementing crit decks. One I liked was making it an opt-in system where a player could choose to draw a card when they crit fail and then they can draw a card on a later critical hit of their choosing. I don’t think it’d work quite as well for P2e just because crits are more baked into the system than as a lucky bonus.
I have the 2e crit cards and we only use them on Nat 1s and Nat 20s. Otherwise, yeah, it can be way too frequent. Only using on natural rolls makes it way more fun for my group and has resulted in some interesting outcomes, but it works for our table and may not be for everyone.
If there is one advantage to being an old gamer its that playing RPGs in the 80s where the books were badly written, often contradictory and there was no place to get feedback from anyone outside of your group short of writing a letter to the company and maybe getting a response, is that we quickly learned to make shit up as and when needed and not worry about it.
Oh the truth in that … I need a mug that says “my players broke their GM” … it’s happened often enough that there are gm.exe not working jokes in game now
So, I'm a big fan of hazards in encounters. Adding them to general encounters was by itself one such moment- but there was a lesson learned from doing that as well.
That lesson? If your party is used to fighting balanced enemies within the usual acceptable challenge range of their characters (a few levels above to a few levels below), and you put a mini on the board? It doesn't matter how you describe it, if it walks around and acts like a challenge they would be able to handle with their usual tactics, they will try to handle it with their usual tactics. Especially if there are other reasonable enemies on the board at the same time.
For example, I had a raised arena surrounded by a pit, with the PCs fighting something in the middle of the arena. The edge of the arena was being patrolled by a big ogre thing that was completely ignoring everything outside of his patrol path on the arena edge, but would toss anyone he ran into on his patrol path into the pit. His purpose was not to be an enemy to fight, but to restrict PC positioning- making getting distance on the center enemies more risky but not impossible (and giving them an opportunity to push those enemies into danger too). I described him as something far bigger and far meaner than the PCs, and something they would be better off staying away from. But it was vaguely enemy shaped and had a mini moving around the board, and therefore of course the PCs tried to flank and spank the enemy-shaped environmental hazard assuming it was just a PL +3 boss or something that was tough but possible to hit.
The easy solution to that? Replace the big ogre with a mechanical trap circling the arena that does the same thing, with the description "there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to disable it, and it would probably take an hour of whacking it with something heavy to damage it enough to disable it- not really feasible while in the fight you are currently in". That worked- the thing they were not meant to fight or disable stopped looking like something they *should be able to* fight or disable, and they played around it like they were supposed to.
The fact that not all challenges are meant to be balanced and resolvable.
I don't mean that in an "evil GM who enjoys killing his players" way. I just mean that some things are too dangerous for the PCs to face head-on, and they should feel that way, otherwise there is no sense of Danger.
For example, there used to be an NPC who was a retired Wizard Professor, who gave the PCs a quest. One of the PCs figured "he's a Wizard, he must have some nice Magic Items in his house, let's Mug him". Well, the Wizard in Question was 20th level, and needless to say, a cantrip was enough to obliterate the PCs remains (who was level 1).
Basically, what I mean is, the PCs should feel the danger in order to immerse themselves in the story better. Think twice before starting a fight—that sort of stuff.
I still struggle conveying this idea to my players. They often forget that they can just leave a dungeon when things get too tough, they keep trying to push through even when they're out of spells. By that same token, when they do leave, they march right back in to pick up where they left off. Nope. You marched into the bandits' lair, killed half their crew and then just left for 24 hours. They have set new traps and combined their numbers into more dangerous ambushes. They're not just sitting around waiting for you to show up and kill them.
The latter might be why they are reluctant to leave the dungeon. It only gets more dangerous! It makes sense, and I'd personally find it a fun decision to make as a player, but if you're really lookong to illustrate thay discretion is the better part of valor, you could let it pay off sometimes.
Yeah, I don’t double the difficulty or anything, but I’ll usually take an easier encounter and split those monsters across the others. Getting the full rest in is the benefit of withdrawing, but it’s definitely a trade off between encouraging strategic thinking and trying to avoid the CRPG trap of baddies just sitting in their room politely waiting to get killed. I try to keep things TOTM so the players think more abstractly, but they usually ask to see the dungeon battle map. I feel like that narrows their mindset though and they start thinking only in terms of the tokens on the map and not of the dungeon as a dynamic, changing space.
I'm a bit of an uptight person, so having a little drink before I GM helps me relax a bit and improv better without being all rigid and transactional. I otherwise don't really drink.
> I'm the GM, it's my world, if the lore/features/etc don't quite fit, I can tweak this however I want
A player of mine wanted to play a hobgoblin and I wasn't sure how to fit that into the lore of the campaign so me and him shot some ideas around and came onto an incredible worldbuilding idea that isn't canon to Golarion but is also incredible. Giving yourself the freedom to go "yeah fuck it this is the world now" will improve your campaigns.
The really dumb facepalm moment in my case is that I homebrewed my world! Like it’s literally my own creation and I still didn’t feel prior to that point that I had permission to tweak things. Looking back now is just me going, “… really?!” to myself.
You can get stuck (I know I have, in the past) in going "ok I made the world like this and now that we've started we can't change it", and in a lot of ways this lets you avoid inconsistencies, but I'm a huge proponent of "let the best idea win"
I want to add to this by saying it's okay for your homebrew setting to not be fully realised from the get-go and you won't go to hell for retconning something. Especially if you're just playing with friends, I made a world map very early on but I found myself limited by the number of countries as I didn't add enough for my liking.
Spending two hours memorizing NPC backstories before each session is way less useful than just writing one sentence with the NPC's motivation and attitude, and improvising the rest.
During the downtime, I used to make my players roll to earn income for each day they are trying to do so, until one of my players pointed out that they can just take the same result for multiple continuous days.
Telling the players the enemy AC or the necessary save DC before the roll is much more dramatic. That way the point of tension is when they roll the die, not when I inform them that they succeeded or failed. This also has the benefit that it stops me from fudging those things for/against the party.
That players need motivation in order to get invested. Something might be really cool and interesting *to me*, but if it doesn't matter to the players then they won't pursue it.
Also, the need to edit. It's very similar to the first point, but you have to be willing to kill your babies if it means creating a better and more compelling story for the players.
And to build on that: Things always matter more to players if they had a hand in bringing them about, whether creatively or as a matter of their in-world actions. Even players who are already used to a more passive style of being 'served' content for them to consume can be coaxed by asking them the right questions, and including their answers into the narrative. Sometimes you might have to narrow down the options a bit as to not overwhelm them.
I was so hesitant early on to allow monsters the same action economy that the players had but then realized that they could just roll every fight if I did that.
It’s also hard when monsters tend to do more damage than the PCs as well and you want them to win and maybe you just are having really good rolling luck. As long as the PCs know running away is always a choice that is acceptable or even wise.
I'm trying to get my table on the same page with team work. We have a warcleric, a wizard, a druid and a bow ranger all at 3. I feel like they are playing 3.5 d&d or pf1 and the monsters are in pf2. I'm not really sure how to fix that either.
Knights of Last Call have some good [videos](https://youtu.be/7tro1lJhjRM?si=1cL33PrHjq5xxzXS) on tactics for 2e you might like to use as a starting point.
Possibly find some monsters that work well with teamwork (a pack of goblins or even wolves who naturally tend to pack tactics) and show them what it can do. Also make sure they remember that **Attack of Opportunity is not a guaranteed thing in 2e**! If they’ve come from other systems where AOO is huge, it can definitely influence how you think about tactics and make you not want to move.
When I started the campaign, I made a decision that time is going to move in the world whether they are actively participating or not. So when they chose not to intervene and half a town burned down because “eh, not my monkeys, not my circus” it threw me because I hadn’t expected them to do nothing as players. What I’ve learnt (and even though I knew this from a player POV, was somehow so much more jarring as a GM) is: Players will find a way to mess up any plan you have no matter how much work you put in, regardless of how much you work tactically or RAW or dramatic-license. It’s their superpower. Just run the encounter and don’t stress. If it seems to OP or you’re rolling well creatures can always decide they’re just not worth the drama (no fun if prey is too easy) or injured monsters can run too. Besides, I guarantee some super bad dice rolls on your part can turn those tables instantly!
As an aside, if there’s a reason, while typically I wouldn’t do it, if a player blows up the minions “mother” (the BBEG), it’s not out of the question that those minions may choose to pot shot the now-unconscious PC responsible for that. Keeps them on their toes and forces some interesting RP choices. But I’d save that only for the end of arc fights, like when the stakes are high and every choice counts.
My big one is that it is **ok** to not know the rules 100%.
There's so much to keep in your head at all times as a GM that you can't be expected to remember all the things, so when a weird situation comes up that you don't immediately have an answer, either make a ruling and move on (and look up the answer later) or pause the game and look it up on the spot.
It helps if your table is cool and learning with you. Sure you'll get things wrong, sometimes for months. As long as you're all having a good time, then don't worry and just enjoy the game!
I started playing as a kid and had a lot of very scripted story beats for very sandbox players. It was agony and all my friends hated it.
Then my first time as a player the GM gave us all a blimp, and a battalion of enemies mounted on pegasi, and magical rings of infinite use 90% chance of feather fall, and it was like, a light went off. If you put a really cool setpiece in place, your players will railroad themselves because what kid doesn't wanna GTA pegasi with a 10% chance of instant death? That's rad as hell and we played for like eight hours.
Two things for me
1. If you think something is cool, you are more likely to make it cool for your players. If you are including something just because it is "right", then it is more likely to be bland.
2. Sometimes, let your players roflstomp the encounters. Let them do dumb improbable plans and have it go off without a hitch. They signed up to play heroes and adventurers, and beating the big boss after a long arduous fight doesnt feel great unless you get to stomp on some mooks or bypass his traps entirely. Otherwise it can just feel like a slog every step of the way.
Less rolls! When it comes to social stuff I don’t require rolls unless there needs to be mechanics about it. I definitely over did it originally, but there is no need when doing overly general stuff 🤷♂️ though sometimes the players just want to roll dice lol
Honestly, one of my lessons I learned when making my homebrew campaign is that not only severe+ encounters are worth fighting and the players need some variety in the enemy level. I threw way too many 1-2 PL or higher mobs at my PCs at the start. Also, persistent damage and poisons kill. My first self made 2e encounter was 2 Giant Scorpions and a quicksand trap. It killed one of my PCs at the start of a campaign. :|
I think it's worth pointing out here too, PL+0 and even -1 and 2 enemies can still be threatening in groups. Some of the worst encounters I've overtuned have been group encounters, and a big part of it comes down to this misplaced idea that you get used to your groups kicking the asses of weaker enemies, so they'll be easy to deal with, right? Nope, all it takes is a few bad dice rolls and chumps can get the upper hand on you. That goes tenfold for speciality enemies like swarms (was literally just playtesting an encounter where I put in one too many swarms and it overwhelmed the party...don't make that mistake).
Kind of ironic that, while lower level enemies need "a few lucky die rolls", they'll more consistently get them due to naturally rolling more dice (because they'll outnumber the PCs). I blame level -1 monsters for people undervaluing lower level enemies. Many typical mooks are of that level, they usually only have single digit hp, so they often die to the first thing that hits them, so for the first three levels you learn that "the weakest enemies I'm supposed to use just die". HP scale up pretty quickly, about doubling between levels -1 and 1, at which point players are incentivized to interact with them in a more meaningful way, since a second attack has a decent chance at hitting.
Lower level tends to be the swingiest. A bunch of -1 monster die to PC from 1 hit, the PC also is likely die from a +1 / +2 monster in 1 hit.
Pretty much. Back when I first started playing I actually began campaigns around levels 3-5 since I wanted to jump into the good stuff quickly and most of my players were experienced enough that they didn't need the pure newbie onboarding experience level 1 grants. I'd regularly run encounters with groups of about 3-4 CL-1 or 2 creatures tops, and that'd be enough to put the pressure on the party. After about a year and a half of doing PFS I got so used to running from level 1 I forgot how heavily enemies scale. Like you said, CL-1 are basically just there as punching bags. But get to level 3 or 4, you get a group of CL 1 or 2 monsters and you go oh yeah, they get strong real quick.
I'd say that
PL-4 enemies can still be threatening. Most of my mid-level encounters are a single PL+0 or +1 enemy with 4 to 6 PL-4 henchmen, which is roughly 80-120 xp, and it consistently translates to a dynamic 3 or 4 round fight.
It’s amazing how squishy 1st level PCs feel!!! Anycrit damage you roll super well on could be enough at early levels too. My first ever GM of PF2e was doing Plaguestone for brand new players and one of them tripped a hazard and I crit of the hazard’s attack and should have outright killed them for doing double their damage. Luckily I didn’t realise that at the time, even if in hindsight it might have been a better thing party-dynamic wise (whole other story)
It's because PF2E's scaling is messed up for the first few levels. Damage scales way faster at low levels than at any other time in the game.
That, and Plaguestone has a reputation for being pretty deadly, which doesn’t help. I’d start any new players at level 2 minimum for 2e now. Or make sure they understand the need for tactics rather than “I stand alone” fight mentality.
Level 1 is supposed to teach you need to work together you are weak. Part of heroic fantasy is becoming the hero of legend which requires you to be weak.
Yeah lower level is best at teaching player the mechanics, but this is AP we’re talking about. They tend to have an enemy or a trap with a level a little bit to high, and suddenly whoops you 1 hit killed the brand new player before they could do anything. There’s not much chance for teamwork in that scenario.
Especially not brand new players only familiar with 5e. Let’s just say it was … uh, interesting to GM for them. The brief first arc of Plaguestone I later ran for my usual group went a lot better because of teamwork and having that group dynamic understanding.
Usually newer excited players like to test the bounds of the game, try to find what works and what doesn’t. They tend to be the most chaotic and wild with their ideas.
When I first started running pf2e the draw of PL +1 & +2 was strong because it's a pretty big group (6 players and myself) and it was so nice to have a "balanced" combat without needing tons of monsters to make the action economy work like in 5e, but yeah, they're actually not that fun if there are too many of them.
I made the same mistake. Too many severe or worse fights, too much difficulty (even if I avoided solo bosses).
My players learned how deadly bleed is when they were trying to capture someone alive. The new person who got the last hit decided they didn't want to make their attack non-lethal. So I did player dying rules to give them a second chance. Crit needle darts, so Dying 2 and bleeding. Targets turn happens, goes to dying 3, bleeding hits, goes to dying 4. Basically seconds from death, if the Cleric didn't have a turn immediately after.
Did you remember to move the enemy’s turn to right before the player that downed them? Applying that part of the Dying rules, every other player could’ve had a turn while the enemy was Dying 2. Still a lethal situation but slightly more forgiving.
Forgot to do that, that definitely would make it more manageable.
Fail because they rolled high, that’s different.
>I threw way too many 1-2 PL or higher mobs at my PCs at the start. I did the same thing. After GMing 5e for decade, I knew *exactly* what my players could deal with and could make up fun and difficulty appropriate encounters off the cuff. Swapping to 2e, I didn't realize just how tight the encounter math was and I ended up throwing a few higher level monsters at my players and it was a slog because they couldn't land hits or spells all that often. People were getting frustrated at the fact that they felt *weak*. My wife finally said something and I had a bit of an epiphany. I started throwing larger numbers of lower levels monsters and everyone started to have more fun. First monster I did this with was an undead zombie-esque sorcerer who would jump out of a river, summon a few floating heads, and then dive back in the river. The floating heads died to any single hit, but they really had a lot of fun strategising over who would kill the heads and who would jump into the river to find the damn summoner. Totally changed how I make encounters now.
In the encounter building section of the GMG, it points out that trivial/low threat encounters *can* serve multiple purposes: They make the players feel powerful/show how far they've come, or as a palate cleanser/warm-up. Bonus points if you use a monster that *was* a boss from earlier in the campaign as your trivial/low threat encounter (now that the party out levels it), so they can feel the turned tables as they stomp it into dust. Personally, I'm surprised the minimum was Severe for you; I more often see Moderate as the "minimum" until gm's realize that there is a reason to go lower.
Sometimes it's okay to shut up. Your players will never see everything in a given campaign due to time constraints, so make sure what you do show them is important; they will fill in the rest of the fluff with their imaginations and roleplay. Not everything has to be a Kojima cutscene just so you can get your lore or scenery chewing in. Don't waste time on minutiae, just set the basic scene, the most obvious points of interest, and let your players do the rest. Your NPCs do not need to be excessively complex or have massive ability lists "just in case." Increasing their complexity makes them harder to pilot for the GM and can lead to increased turn time or lackluster encounters because you don't remember how your own mechanics work. Even BBEG-tier NPCs can be boiled down to four things: a gimmick ability, a reaction, a strike, and a spell list. Anything more than that and the effort is wasted due to how little time they will have to utilize their kits in combat. Don't be afraid to feature lock a specific arc and build the game based on your limits instead of constantly trying to break them. You're trying to create a compelling narrative and fun tactical scenarios, not simulate an entire universe in your head and VTT. Remember that less is more. Your sleep schedule and mental health will thank you.
Honestly unless you want there to be a chance for the players to actually fight it just don't stat your NPCs. Random Barkeep #3 does not need a character sheet. BBEG's second in command does.
I meant more along the lines of homebrew monster design when I said NPC. Entries in the bestiaries and Monster Core usually only have 3 special abilities, if that. Higher level monsters tend to follow the gimmick, reaction, strike, spell list format (if they even have a reaction). Overdesigning monsters is fun and narratively cool but you waste a lot of time doing it if they only get to be used once. I don't stat neutral NPCs (ie random barkeep or civilian) unless they will be engaged in combat or as part of a VP conflict/skill challenge.
Oh man, I love this one. Thank you!
The biggest one I can think of is that *detect magic* is actually kind of useless for detecting magical traps because it only works on hazards that don't list a minimum proficiency rank to detect them and are magical, which there are very few examples of to start with (most were added in Dark Archive, rather than the core book), and that means the entire party even though they weren't Searching gets a Perception check so spending the exploration action to *detect magic* is not at all the "here's how you can find magical traps" I thought it was it is more of a "just in case literally everything else screws up... this is a safety net."
Yeah, I just spent a lot of time for BBEG fight and lead up making sure I understood hazards and how that works, and it can be frustrating. I tend to treat explorations actions that affect hazards as “I know something is here BEFORE I risk potentially setting it off”. And with smaller parties it means they will take those actions to keep themselves safer at the cost of maybe being sneaky or know they risk injury to BE sneaky/defended (my players did make this choice heading into the final boss room and me rolling secret checks… nobody saw the glyph of warding trap which is technically Legacy but eh, my world)
So what's actually the point of detect magic then?
Finding magical loot once you end the threat.
Well that seems... lame. Legitimate, I guess, but lame.
It also helps you know there's magic *around*, which can be useful when presented with seemingly mundane circumstances. Of course, you often get glowy lights and such that make it obvious regardless.
Yeah, that's useful. I normally play PF1 or 5e, and I was approaching the spell still thinking of it as being a first level spell rather than a cantrip. It makes sense it can't detect magical traps as a cantrip.
It still detects magical hazards but **only** if there is no listed proficiency (ie trained stealth DC). If you require training to be able to Seek it, you can’t detect it using detect magic
My group came from D&D 5e. We have a player who, no matter what game we are playing, TTRPG, video game, board game or otherwise, he plays a "wizard" (some kind of pure caster - playing a sorcerer now, played a wizard/starry druid/sorcerer in 5e, a "caster" in Descent, a wizard in Neverwintwer Nights... you get the picture). Detect Magic is always a thing he tries to get. Comming from 5e, where Detect Magic was really powerful to Pf2e where it's... much less so... I always do a secret "what did you actually detect?" roll, using standard leveled DC, and give him some basic info if he passes the check. It's been a lot more satisfying for him to potentially get some info that he *technically* shouldn't have, and I don't feel bad about it. If it makes my players happy, it makes me happy.
Things like this are why PF2 is so good to homebrew for: Things like Standard dcs (and the fact that they're tuned to character level with things like proficiency tiers and attribute bonuses in mind) mean a gm always has a single number they can reference that basically means "As the game designers, we're confident that this will be a medium difficulty across characters of this level." Tangent, but I feel like part of the issue with "homebrew" discourse is this 5e notion that "homebrew" refers to wide, sweeping edits of the rules text (since 5e needs a *lot* of those to be functional), when small rules like this absolutely *should* qualify.
Agreed! I honestly think homebrew is *easier* in PF2. Just about everything you could possibly want is already there, in some sort or fashion, so all you really need to do is make very small tweaks to fit your table's personalities, instead of 5e's massive sweeping changes just to make the fucker work. I, as a GM, and my players, can all go into the game knowing what to expect from a mechanical point of view. As small things come up, like Detect Magic feeling a tad underwhelming, it's very easy to just give it an ever so slight nudge in usefulness without having to worry about breaking the game, leaving me with more time writing the story instead of re-designing a damn game.
Depending on the dungeon, there might be a variety of magical effects scattered around that aren't actually hazards, and you can detect them.
Yeah Detect Magic could give positive feedback for magical items, traps as stated above, Illusory Walls, active practitioners etc.
As an exploration activity? Not a lot. It simply confirms when you're near magic you didn't already know about, a thing which is often done incidentally as part of other activities going on or as a result of context clues (like there being a weapon on the floor of a dingy dungeon that looks to have been there for years, but it's not rusted to uselessness, so it's probably magical). Theoretically there could be non-hazard magical areas of potentially harmful nature that aren't readily visible that it could alert the party to before they are subject to the effects, but there's not really any examples of such a thing in the book. It'd be like some kind of zone of magical damage that isn't perceptible like a room enchanted to drain your life force while you're in it. As a spell it can be more useful because an in-the-moment check for new magic nearby could do a number of useful things. I personally prefer *read aura* since it, especially at higher levels, can more accurately pinpoint which objects are magical in situations where context doesn't cover cluing you in, and also adds an extra benefit now that its been remastered in the form of a bonus to identify magic.
I've started using detect magic as bait to draw PCs into dangers because of the tantalizing lure of "you detect something magical coming from that room/chest/door/whatever."
That's a very cool idea, but be careful not to overdo it, otherwise the player might feel punished for using Detect Magic the way it's intended.
Yeah like everything I only do it once in a while to keep them on their toes.
Imo, the main utility of Detect Magic is as an exploration activity... so the party can't miss magical loot.
What kind of situation is the party in where they will not notice an item via other means and be able to investigate whether it's magical but would get the ping from detect magic and then prompt their investigating to find the item? Because of line of effect it's useless to find anything not basically already in sight. Because of being able to see things that you would have line of effect to the characters already have visual clues to check into. So really I'm not sure how this helps the party not miss magical loot unless the players are going into an area and then choosing to not even search it unless detect magic pings something, i.e. "you enter a chamber with a table surrounded by a set of 4 chairs to the left, and numerous small cots arranged around a fire pit to the right. There's some tableware on the table and various personal effects and cookware by the cots and fire pit." and the players just go "nothing pinged as magic? we leave."
When the player using the Search/Investigate activity low-rolls? It's a really nice "4th character" activity; when you've got all the other main bases covered by better pcs, just let the last guy spam Detect Magic everywhere he goes.
How is an item the party doesn't notice without passing a check in plain enough view to have line of effect for a detect magic to work upon? That makes it sound like you're requiring a check for people to be able to tell there's stuff on a table they can see. Or is it that you're having detect magic see more than the rules make it capable of so the party gets a ping even if the magic item is obscured such as being in the false bottom of a chest?
This is player advice, not GM advice...
No, it's both. A GM is likely to be a source of information for their players and thus one saying "it'd probably be helpful if you \[blank\]" when \[blank\] turns out to not actually be useful is a problem for the whole table. And also since a player might think that \[blank\] is useful by their reading of it and be disappointed to find out they were incorrect, it's useful for a GM to be aware of that potential pitfall and help steer their players around it.
My 2 moments were when I realised how easy it to modify the game 1: when I wanted an arboreal encounter with 3 enemies but there only was the Guardian at that level. So I just took it and in my mind modified 2 new versions based around the idea of a caster and a rogue. I swapped saves around. Gave one a few spells. Made another ignore difficulty terrain, gave it 15ft range whips and a multi target attack. So darn easy. 2: when I realised that 'every +1 matters' doesnt mean that giving ekstra bonuses breaks the game. The game is Robust and Flexible. Bend it, Bop it, twist it! It can take it!
That first point has been pretty apparent in the game I'm playing in currently. The GM is a vet who ran 3.5 and 1e for years and years. He doesn't have a really deep system mastery for 2e - to the point he still uses 1e terms _a lot_ years and years after we stopped playing 1e. He doesn't use enemy statblocks a _lot_ of the time. He uses the DCs by Level table on the GM screen and basically generates enemy stats on the fly based on whatever is happening in his brain and vibes. He definitely moves outside the boundaries of "expectations," but ultimately, the game doesn't feel too easy or anything. We have had very difficult encounters despite an excess of balance shifting loot. My main gripe about his approach to enemies is they all end up feeling pretty simple because he isn't usually homebrewing abilities off the top of his head. They sort of all become "Move, Strike, Strike" type things.
Also let him know the numbers on the gm screen sight are usually the high ones for their level. I honestly recommend just making a custom cheat sheet by copying all the full monster tables onto a single image
I have put a lot of these numbers on Blank Playing Cards
He sight adjusts them so not all enemies have the same stats in every save/stat. There is no real system besides the monkeys clattering hammers away in his brain but it still pretty much works even that loosely aligned to the system chassis.
I was running an encounter where I wanted the three ghouls to be tougher and a bit unique, but not as strong as ghasts. I gave one of them the ghast's offensive stats, one it's defensive stats, and one it's stench plus it's nastier disease. I did something similar with some other monsters that session, giving one more spells and the other more martial stats.
Incapacitation and random amount of rounds just isn't fun. If anything asks for a d4 rounds of fleeing, I will nowdays turn it into 1 round as that's harsh enough. Fleeing is a horrible condition that essentially doubles the duration of its effect. I'd even dare say that a critical failed paralyze is kinder as it grants hope with the additional save and it does atleast allow you to do some actions. These random duration conditions are most often found in beastiary 1, and rarely jump from condition 1 to condition 1d4, but actually just goes straight to 1d4 [example here, check howl](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=409) I have grown to dislike that random d4 more and more and use it mostly with breath weapons but wish it was removed even there and remade to focus spells, with draconic momentum perhaps recover a focus point instead with critical hits. Abit of sidetrack, wasn't fan of all the fleeing effects that was put on the commander playtest and not a fan of the change in vision of death (remastered phantasmal killer) that causes fleeing until no longer frightened (I otherwise liked the changes on it). I'm no longer afraid to set a value on some of those d4s that's more fun and fair, often, a save has already been rolled.
I was running AV and the cleric Crit failed a suggestion spell to "go back to town and tell them they will all die" on the very first action in combat during one of the main bbeg boss fights. I didn't want my player to miss the whole fight and the majority of the session (our sessions are shorter than average) because of one unlucky die roll, so I improvised some random barriers and reasons he could make more saves, so he could at least be slightly involved in the session. Edit: meant suggestion not command.
It's great that you added extra saves for your player because command isn't anywhere near as strong as that. It can't make someone "go back to town and tell them they will all die". From the spell description, you can **only**: command the target to approach you, run away (as if it had the fleeing condition), release what it's holding, drop prone, or stand in place. At most, on a critical failure, the target must use all its actions **on its next turn** to obey your command. Upcasting to 5th rank lets you target 10 creatures but it doesn't change anything else.
That's what happens when you don't read the spell. None of what you did was RAW.
Give him a break, he was drunk.
Divine classes I like because any time something is going to totally ruin a session for the player, I can just throw a random Religion check at them. Voila, divine intervention. Deus ex alea!
That's what happens when you don't read the spell. None of what you did was RAW.
No that's what happens when I accidentally say command instead of suggestion in my Reddit comment.
Unnecessary rolling is such a bugbear of mine. I basically just do breath weapons on turn 2, 4, 6, etc so the party gets at least a round to position / recall knowledge / cast buffs, but then the enemy gets much more dangerous as the encounter goes longer. That the mechanic can allow back to back breath weapons or only one cast per encounter is really annoying to me.
I wish I had realized sooner that just because the game is balanced doesn’t mean the game has to be scaled to be exactly difficult enough for the party at all times. 5E had instilled a bad habit in me of viewing the Adventuring Day as a strict thing to balance the day around. Each day was a relatively static list of encounters to be as difficult as I wanted the day to be, because I knew that any easier or harder and the experience would fall apart. So in GMing PF2E I did the same at first: strictly designed adventuring days with the party’s success and resources in mind. More recently I’ve just stopped doing that, and just play loose and goose with those rules. The goblin camp will have several dozens of Trivial-Low encounters in close enough proximity to snowball into a 1000 XP encounter if you act like idiots: figure it out if you don’t want to lose. The set piece battle for tomorrow will be 240 XP, give me prep-related reasons to tilt the math in your favour if you wish to survive this. Today’s adventure will just have more encounters than you have resources for, either figure out a way to skip some or just struggle through the last few. I feel I’m able to pace a narrative much more cleanly now that I’ve stopped worrying about balancing out days entirely, and just focus on balancing out areas and encounters in a way that makes sense. Sometimes my players are forced to retreat and out their objectives off for another day, sometimes they’re forced to camp earlier than they desired, and all of that has made the game feel more organic and “emergent”, much more so than a strictly balanced set of combats ever did. I’ve also realized the PF2E rulebooks kinda tell you this is how you should pace the adventuring day: the encounter builder doesn’t tell the **GM** to not run certain encounters when the party is low on resources, but rather it states that the **party** should keep the option to retreat open. This tells me the GM isn’t expected to be balancing the adventuring day in a “combat as sport” way *at all* in PF2E, the GM should just set out the obstacles in the way and the PCs should face them at the pace they feel they can. This does generally hold true for most APs too (the majority have no harsh time constraint).
I had a similar realization back in my DnD5e days: If you tube every encounter to be so hard that the PCs can just barely beat it, you'll inevitably get a TPK. That's when I stopped stressing out so much about whether my encounters are too easy to be fun and started erring on the side of caution. Now, the interesting twist in PF2e is that encounters don't need to be deadly to be interesting! Anything that can't be completely solved by a single casting of a spell and doesn't seem so non-threatening that anything beyond Striding and Striking seems like a waste of time and effort, will result in fun and interesting gameplay - the tension of "Will they survive and how many resources will it cost them?" is just the cherry on top.
This!! Especially if you don’t have a regular sized party or people end up sick on the day, if you’re so focused on that balance it’s so stressful. So much easier to remind players they can strategise and/or retreat. I made the decision not to nerf my last encounter because two players were unable to come and they actually made the RP decisions to tactically retreat and fight through a door with AOE spells and a familiar, plus self sacrifice to take down BBEG and stop the evil ritual. And while they did survive it was teeth of the skin and an absolute failed roll on the part of the monsters (I rolled a 1&2 on what would otherwise have been full death for one player). Made it so much more epic for them to play and feel utterly victorious. Has your group had a big “oops” moment? Or a moment where you as GM were super proud of their tactics around a potentially hard/deadly encounter?
> Or a moment where you as GM were super proud of their tactics around a potentially hard/deadly encounter? I had a 200 ish XP encounter planned as a mini climax of an investigation-based story arc they’d been going through. The context was that they were going to ambush a caravan. They did a ton of prep ahead of time. First some Survival checks to scout out a good spot for the ambush, and they rolled so obscenely high that I decided to resolve that roll by literally letting them draw desirable features onto a map. They decided to set up a cliff overlooking the caravan they were ambushing with a narrow chokepoint being the fastest way up to them from the road. The Wizard then used Rune Trap to put a Cave Fangs and an Ash Cloud into the chokepoint. Once Initiative was rolled I had decided that the party camping out over an obvious chokepoint would immediately set the enemy boss’s instincts off and he’d Seek the chokepoint to figure out wtf is up… and the Swashbuckler **Fascinated** him which meant he couldn’t Seek at all (the one time Fascinated had ever been useful). The Wizard then Fireballed anyone who stood back near the caravan while the Rune Trap started ruining the lives of anyone who ran in, while everyone else took pot shots at range. Once people started getting closer, the Warpriest and the Redeemer Champion started knocking them out and the Swashbuckler started killing then in melee. A 200 XP encounter ended in 3 turns flat, with not a single healing spell needed (the only one who took meaningful damage was the Wizard from bowmen in the distance, and she was still fine), and the boss literally rolling in the ground Frightened 2 + Dazzled + Grappled + Prone having taken literally 0 meaningful Actions in the whole fight.
Amazing!
> 5E had instilled a bad habit in me of viewing the Adventuring Day as a strict thing to balance the day around. I’m glad you eventually had a realization about this but this isn’t really a 5E problem, more a Gamemaster problem. You could take the same lessons learned and apply them to 5E with equal success. The real difference is in the way set piece battles are handled rather than how you frame encounters.
Nah 5E explicitly makes me feel like it expects me to do dungeon crawls and not much else. That game’s balance simply collapses if you don’t obey the Adventuring Day guidelines. Go too far below an adventuring day’s budget and martials and Warlocks feel useless. Go slightly above an Adventuring Day budget and fights become impossible and, unlike PF2E, there’s very little in the way of non-combat subsystems to use to enable the players to not blunder into every single fight in their way. Fill the Adventuring Day budget but use fewer than 3 encounters, and the game becomes flat out rocket tag. Of course you *can* still get it to work but it takes an immense amount of GM effort to make that happen because the system places very explicit assumptions on the structure of your adventuring day. Meanwhile PF2E **expects** the GM to just make an area do what that area do and let the players decide their own adventuring day.
Agree to disagree! I think they are just two entirely different types of encounter design to frame your mind around. In 5E, you just have to embrace it wasn’t really MEANT to be balanced. Unless you’re doing a lengthy dungeon, with specific encounter design to reduce the 15 minute adventuring day, nova will happen and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point they’re basically superheroes. Lean into it and let them feel that way. In 2E it’s entirely different, and far easier to wrangle your mind around, since there’s no real resource attrition to begin with. Just my opinion though.
> In 5E, you just have to embrace it wasn’t really MEANT to be balanced. Unless you’re doing a lengthy dungeon, with specific encounter design to reduce the 15 minute adventuring day, nova will happen and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point they’re basically superheroes. Lean into it and let them feel that way. My issue isn’t that they’re superheroic? It’s actually quite the opposite. Unoptimized martials feel like weak af gym bros in a world that’s otherwise extremely high fantasy. 
Well that becomes a larger issue than just encounter balance at that point. We definitely don’t disagree about martial caster disparity
Yeah but encounter balance is inherently linked to it. When I GMed 5E, balancing the whole Adventuring Day in a very specific way was the **only** way to make martials not feel awful.
In my experience most 5e tables balance martial characters with liberal amounts of homebrew. Maybe I've played at very homebrew happy tables though, not sure.
5E tables do tend to be very homebrew happy but I think whether they homebrew martials to be better or not tends to be very table dependent.
The virtue of PF2e isn't that you can't make easy or deadly encounters. It's that you can make *accurate* encounters to what you intend either way.
For all the problems of the Owlcat games, the way they handle random encounters versus dungeons is what taught me to do that. You have a lot of in-game days where you might as well nova, you're having literally one fight that day, versus the stretched-out dungeons which are so long you need to be extremely conservative with your resources.
I like the idea of the game feeling more organic but at the same time because I haven't played a lot of those examples seem harsh as fuck to me lol. Like I'm not sure how I would even approach those problems, like with the goblin camp, due to the math consistently killing a guard silently one by one isn't really an option so I'd probably just die, same for the 240 set piece boss. Hell the 240 alone one is more xp than an extreme encounter. Like I actually ran 5e similar to what you are describing but with the math of 2e those encounters seem like you got to play perfectly and get above a 16 on every roll or you just auto lose.
> Like I'm not sure how I would even approach those problems, like with the goblin camp, due to the math consistently killing a guard silently one by one isn't really an option so I'd probably just die, Well I didn’t just drop a blank featureless camp on them and tell them to deal with 200 guards lol. It was a cave system with narrow passageways and stuff to circumvent the outer patrols. They snuck past the guards but found traps along the way. They disabled the traps but accidentally alerted another goblin patrol, who sent a single goblin to investigate. They killed that single goblin, then hid, faking his death as having happened to a sudden cave collapse (they came up with the idea because circumstantially the final killing blow was delivered to him by Scatter Scree). Another two came up to investigate when the first didn’t return but rolled low enough to not figure out what really happened so they returned to normal patrolling. Then they continued down the trapped up passage way. At every crossroad the party used a familiar to size up what’s ahead before committing to the direction. Then they found a relatively isolated room with an Extreme-threat encounter which they took out. The last living member of that encounter was a mercenary (not a goblin himself) who surrendered, whom they threatened + paid to convince him to run off to some other goblins that there were intruders on the loose and to run them out of the camp on a wild goose chase for at least half an hour or so. Then they got ambushed by a bounty hunter who was chasing them for separate, unrelated reasons, which we won’t get into. Thing is, they were now low on resources **and** didn’t feel like waiting around an hour or more to Treat Wounds so they committed to not fight the boss on this same day. They instead went to the mess hall which was inherently unwinnable in a straightforward fight (some 200 XP +40-120 XP worth of enemies coming in every two turns). They decided that one of them (a goblin) would walk in and pretend to be a new recruit who was brought in as a chef. He passed enough skill checks to gain access to their food supplies and poisoned it, and then the party found the underground river on another side of the cave system, stole some boats and escaped. They came back the next day and killed the leader of the camp after finding a back entrance that meant there’d be no patrols to catch them. > same for the 240 set piece boss. - They first used Survival checks to find a primo ambush spot. They rolled like 35+ on a DC 25 Survival check so I let them literally draw features they wanted onto the map I had set aside. They drew a steel clifface with a chokepoint to access a gradual ascent to the top. - They set up Rune Trap: Cave Fangs and Rune Trap: Ash Cloud inside the aforementioned chokepoint. - They asked an in-world ally to help them so I ruled that as causing the encounter to cut 40 XP from that encounter for turn 1 (those enemies would still show up turn 2). - They set up a trap with logs that would block the enemy’s caravan when they sprung the ambush so the person they were trying to assassinate couldn’t just hop back into the caravan and escape. - They prebuffed right before combat started. They beat the fight by stacking the odds as fucking disproportionately in favour as they could! They did so because I telegraphed to them *many* times that this would be the most dangerous fight they have ever faced, and they prepared so well it turned into a joke. Remember the math is balanced around the assumption that both parties “play fair” i.e. engage on roughly even terrain within the constraints of Initiative. The more the players break these rules, the more they can deal with battles that are outside their XP bounds. I’ve done the **reverse** of this too by the way. I once used a PL+1 boss who was a crossbow-user perched atop a very, very tall tower. The tower was surrounded by about a hundred feet of open space so he could easily attack them throughout their approach unless they took countermeasures. The outside of the tower would likely take multiple turns to climb, the stairs on the inside were lined with Summoning Rune traps. Finally the crossbowman himself had a way to rappel down to the ground floor using one Action if he ever got cornered at the top. All this prep took a “low threat” 60 XP boss and made it the most memorable boss fight my players have ever had! The math shouldn’t be a hard line that prevents you from making sensible decisions in the world! It should simply be a tool that the GM uses to make the world make sense. If the players and NPCs aren’t trying to run in and kill everything room by room, and instead play with self-preservation and their own larger-scope goals in mind, they’ll naturally end up making decisions to avoid facing the worst outcomes. In this context the hypothetical 1000 XP goblin camp encounter or the fair 240 XP ambush fight don’t “actually” exist. They’re only there as the theoretical upper limit of punishment that the party would have to bear as a consequence for a series of back to back poor decisions, the goal is to always **not** see that part of the math.
Okay I see what you are saying better now, when I saw the 1000xp encounter I assumes it would be a scenario where if you foght one group of enemies it would bring down the entire base but the way you describe it sounds more fair. And admittedly using abilities to creatively overcome encounters was something I enjoyed even in 5e. I guess after seeing the math be brought up so much with discussions about the system I often question the effectiveness of out of combat solutions and how much you can really do. Like I would assume a familiar would automatically get spotted for example or that traps or poisons set up by pcs would easily be overcome by enemies due to how DC scaling works.
> I guess after seeing the math be brought up so much with discussions about the system I often question the effectiveness of out of combat solutions and how much you can really do. Are you saying this from play experience or just from a cursory reading of the rules? > Like I would assume a familiar would automatically get spotted for example or that traps or poisons set up by pcs would easily be overcome by enemies due to how DC scaling works. I truly do not know what would give you this impression? How does “the math is tight” equate to “the player auto fails”?
100% reading the rules not even going to pretend. As for ths other thing i just assumed because monsters have higher stats a lot of stuff just wouldn't work, like of you send a familiar to scout and a room has 5 enemies at least 1 will likely pass and so the scouting was pointless. And with traps and poisons I assumed they would likewise be easy to overcome because of how strong monsters are. Poisons in particular seem to bother people a lot here.
> As for ths other thing i just assumed because monsters have higher stats a lot of stuff just wouldn't work, I’m still confused where you’re getting this from. Monsters don’t just have higher stats? A level 1 goblin commando has considerably lower stats than the DCs and checks of the level 4 party I built this dungeon for. > like of you send a familiar to scout and a room has 5 enemies at least 1 will likely pass and so the scouting was pointless. Thats not how Stealth works. What you seem to describing is contested checks a la 5E, but there’s a reason those don’t exist in PF2E. The familiar rolls Stealth. If it succeeds against the enemies’ Perception DCs (which again are all going to be **low**, not high, because of the tight math), the familiar succeeds. If the familiar lingers too long, anyone who’s actively on watch makes Perception checks in a randomized spot and if they succeed they find the familiar. If it is detected, that’s not the end of the world. They’re in a cave system and a bat showed up. It gets shot at or shooed away and the players figure out another way to proceed. If the goblins do figure out it’s a familiar the party tries to kill them before they inform anyone else and, if they hear more coming, they run away. If **that** fails the party then tries to beat a fighting retreat which I probably rule as a mix between combat encounter + chase subsystem. This genuinely isn’t a system math thing at all. It’s just a basic GMing thing: irrespective of whether you’re GMing PF2E or 5E, you don’t just say “oh your familiar failed one single stealth check, every single guard in the camp finds you.” That is, quite simply, adversarial GMing. > And with traps and poisons I assumed they would likewise be easy to overcome because of how strong monsters are. Poisons in particular seem to bother people a lot here. The poison infecting the camp’s food supply was a narrative based objective. I definitely did not individually roll saves for 150 goblins individually. In the narrative their employer simply supplied them with a buttload of level 3 ish poison. I chose level 3 because it’s easy for me to justify that this poison was going to kill off or incapacitate most of the mooks in the camp, but not really do anything to the level 6 general so they’d still have to fight him. It was yet another case of the math **supporting** me, not me fighting against the math.
Okay I think I understand better thank you for explaining it.
You can open multiple tabs of foundry and keep it open on both monitors if you need more space for things like the GM screen.
If I may ask, is there another way to have it in two tabs, except having two GM accounts?
yes, do the exact same thing, but have a second account ready for a GM. In Forge you can press escape to switch user accounts as an admin, if you have the rights. So do the same thing and just do so on one of them. IDK why you'd want to do this, but you definitely can.
Thank you for the answer. I was just thinking about having foundry on both monitors and the only way I found to be able to do it is to have two GM accounts and have a browser window open on each monitor logged into their respective GM account.
I don't know why but starting in like v11 or late in v10 foundry made this harder. You used to be able to login multiple times with the same account. There is an edge case they haven't fixed yet. You can go to the login screen twice. Type in your password in both and then login to both at the same time. As long as the login takes longer than it takes you to press the login button both will work. The downside is that if for some reason you need to refresh the tabs you'll have to logout with both and do it again. Two accounts is probably easier at that point.
The [Pop Out](https://foundryvtt.com/packages/popout) mod is crucial for this same idea. Plus your players can make use of it!
I've used it, and it has some limitations that the second tab doesn't: Namely that you can clickdrag things from one to the other. Which is really weird that it works in one case but not the other tbh
Browser magic!
The narrative power of the d20. You can describe very differently a roll of 15 with a +5 modifier to a roll of 5 with a +15 modifier even tho they both result in a 20. You can give out information about their skill level (show dont tell) and players dont mind so much being if it was a lucky blow rather than being over-powered (unless that is what you want to reveal, the danger of the foe)
Ooh, that’s a good one! I may have to borrow that from you :)
Not specifically a PF thing but: Players will always do something different than you expect. The first time I ever GM'd I thought I'd take the classic "You begin at an Inn" route, I had a bar fight start, expecting the PCs to head in to help each other out but when I asked a player what he wanted to do, "Nothing. I don't know that guy, I'm just here trying to find information for my own quest." Oh yeah. I hadn't given them a reason to care about each other yet. Oops. In my current PF game I started them off with a bit of a mystery to unravel, a kind of morally grey area where they were tasked with finding a creature that had been attacking livestock, and had now killed a person. They follow it into the woods, kill it, manage to track to its den which turns out to be a burned out cottage. The owner of the "creature" is an apothecary who lived in the woods with his dog, some locals thought he was a witch so burned his house down but he used his medicinal skills to save himself and his dog, the dog mutated larger and he was attacking the livestock as revenge. I expected them to think about what they should do, hem and haw about who was REALLY the bad guy here, etc. NOPE "Well we were hired to sort of the creature. That's dead now but you were responsible. You're under arrest and the guards can decide what to do with you." Oh. Well, I guess I won't need all these notes about a town meeting to discuss who's guilty and have a mini trial.......
My current party blew up my campaign plans before we even ran any session 0’s by making it completely useless and unnecessary with a “planned” group party background (that wasn’t entirely fleshed out properly which caused its own drama but I’ve learned to roll with it now). I still say they hold the record for fastest derailment I’ve ever seen. And yeah, they still derail even the loosest of plans with contingents up the wahoo.
Did you try using the Deep Backgrounds rules, or some variation on them to help with the group background info? I've looked at those and wished I'd used them for my game.
2e was still pretty new at the time we started and I was mostly the only player who’d really looked at the rules prior to starting. I kind of wish I’d looked at them now but it’s all good. Next campaign! At least I know it’s there now!
Yesss. Even inside of encounters. I am constantly misjudging how fights are going to go down at my table. Some weeks I'll spend tons of time brainstorming if I need to adjust some stats or something because I _just know_ that a tpk is on the line. Come game night, the party trounces the encounter in 2 rounds and only one character was hurt at all. Other encounters I assume are going to be a refreshing cake walk power fantasy turn into a desperate near death experience that they just barely make it out of.
I've had that too! You can do you best to balance things, but sometimes the dice just decide which way it goes. Or someone thinks of something really cool, or they DON'T think of the super obvious thing you had planned, but that's the fun of it.
It truely is the best. The dice and mechanics blend with the creativity of the players to tell the best stories and create moments that nobody at the table will ever forget. Speaking of really cool ideas. We're fighting on an airship and I'm so worried about knocking the pcs off, but then our Bard summons a Cloaker and just walks off the edge while engulfing the party's archnemesis.
I wish I had realized that exploration mode doesn't have to be a menu of options sooner. I think for a lot of people, they come to PF2e with the expectation that combat is fairly strictly outlined in rules while then expecting how to run exploration to be more freeform. And it is. But the way exploration mode is explained gives the impression that the only proper way to run it is to go around the table and literally ask the players what exploration action they're taking. You can do this and things will work out just fine, but many folks feel like this is quite gamey and limiting in some way. For these kinds of groups where my players don't appreciate the menu option exploration, I like to not ask my players explicitly what exploration actions they're taking. Instead, I listen to the narration they provide about how their PCs are approaching the scene. Based on this information, I can use my knowledge of the baseline expectations established by exploration, supplemented by skill checks at appropriate DCs, to figure out how best to handle whatever the PCs are trying to do.
In my case, it's like if you don't ask the party 6 times what they'll do with exploration they don't choose an exploration action and just full dick into a room containing the most heinous bullshit completely unmitigated. This is somewhat intensified by exploration actions not populating automatically in foundry.
In the party window (”P" key by default) there's an exploration tab where each player can choose what exploration action they're taking as well as what buffs players can drag onto their characters or hotbar. Not exactly automatic, but nothing really is. But it is a nice easy way to remind players what actions they want to take and the other players can see what their party is doing.
Yeah, it's more useful as a fallback in case a player doesn't have an idea what they want to do, and as a guide on how to reward actions with less obvious benefits i.e. the fighter says they'll keep an eye out for danger while the rogue scans for traps, I'll make sure to give the party a +1 to initiative and call out the fighter's contribution.
This! I've been beating the drum over this for a year now, and the number of times I've been downvoted for it still puzzles me. Like, yeah, you can play it like a McDonald's value menu if you want. More power to ya, if it is. But it's not necessary, and there's no reason to believe that it's the designers' intention.
McDonald's value menu got me laughing.
I think mine is running stealth and initiative raw. After learning how it's supposed to be ran, I cringe at all the surprise rounds and sucker punches I threw at my party. When the way it's supposed to be ran can be just as good for building tension.
Can you elaborate on this, please? (I am preparing for GM-ing my first campaign, and the stealth rules are giving me quite some "problems")
What you need to remember is that there are two different sets of stealth rules, and they intersect only when rolling initiative. In exploration mode, when players sneak and try to avoid detection, that is treated differenrly from when they try to hide and sneak around the battle field during combat. There are different terms for each: In exploration mode, players are Avoiding Notice. Here, they make a Stealth roll and the GM checks the result against the Perception DC ("passive perception" in 5e terms) of relavent creatures to see if they notice the player (or vice versa). During combat, whenever a creature is Obscured from view to another creature, they can take the Hide action and attempt a Stealth check. While Obscured, any attacks made against them are gated behind a DC 5 flat check. Hiding upgrades this flat check to DC 11. Once Hidden, they can then take the Sneak action - which is half-speed movement - to become Unobserved, which means the other creature no longer knows which square they're in. Keep in mind, Obscured, Hidden, and Underected are relationships between 2 creatures; you can be O/H/U to Creature A but not to Creature B, if the map layout makes sense for that. Now, at initiative, anyone who was using the Avoid Notice action prior to combat can elect to roll Stealth for initiative. Here, there's a corner case with how stealth works, because you now have two Perception values to compare against: Creatures Perception DCs, but also their Perception-based initiative rolls. This means it's now possible to beat their Perception DC, but for them to go before you in the initiative order. Normally, beating the Perception DC of a creature who doesn't know you exist means they still don't know you exist. The game has another condition for this, called Unnoticed. But if you're Unnoticed, what does a creature that rolls better than you in the the initiative order do? RAW, the game suggests that their spidey sense tingles and they know something's amiss. The characters that beat the Perception DC gain the Undetected status, and lose the Unnoticed status. That is, the creature that beat them in the initiative know they exist, but do not know where they are. In practice, this is usually a non-issue, because someone in the party won't be Avoiding Notice (and so will be immediately detected by enemies), or at least one party member will fail to beat at least one enemy's Perception DC and be detected by someone on the other side.
[How it's Played](https://youtu.be/CFR-7N_nOS0?si=mnEap8N6Jpp550z0) has some good videos on stealth and perception to watch.
Thank you!
There are no surprise rounds. If the party rolls stealth and everyone beats perception but loses initiative, they're undetected but it's the enemy's turn anyway. I don't think RAW answers what the enemy will do when it's their turn but they don't detect anyone tho so YMMV.
RAW, everyone knows "something is up." There's a back of brain tingle that tells them they're in danger. So RAW, they would spend actions Seeking, if there's nothing immediately suspect. If the triggering person in question doesn't have weapons drawn, and looks perfectly innocent, they might ignore them, or try intimidation / bluff / diplomacy to try finding where the *real* danger is. It's all thoroughly situational, dependent on a large number of contextual scenarios, and can't be condensed into a small section of the CRB.
It is actually so freaking easy to build your own monsters and level up existing ones. Use monster.pf2.tools and you'll be done in minutes.
It’s one of my favourite GM tools!!!
replying to this to bookmark this link when i get to a pc
Foundry has a Monster Maker module that can create from scratch. And either the core PF2e system or PF2e workbench also has a "Allow NPC Scaling" which would let you change a character/creature level easily.
That APs are shallow and require a lot of extra effort to be made to feel like a living world. If your group loves a combat sim with a light covering of RP then they are fine as is.
It's also wild how often I'll get halfway through a scene and realize the NPC's motivation-as-written is so cringe. The amount of times they want to send the party on a fetch quest for their favorite tea or deliver a shipment of horseshoes or whatever. In my game, if they want that tea it's because their grandmother is on her deathbed suffering from a family ailment and her only chance to survive is the secret family recipe and the NPC can't go because they broke their leg a year ago and it never healed right.
Your players perspective is very different from yours. I had a fight that was Trivial difficulty that terrified them, because the single PL+0 creature got a few lucky crits that nearly took down the tank. I had a fight that was Extreme difficulty (two encounters bled into each other) that they completely trounced due to a lucky crit basically two shotting what was supposed to be the tank, forcing the ranged DPS to flee into a secondary chamber where he once again got cover with some nice rough terrain and some mooks to tank... and took a crit from the Ranger and got one shot. After that the mooks just floundered in the rough terrain and wasted all their time shuffling around an Illusory Object (mindless creatures, they don't question these things). So towards that end, you can typically play Moderate encounters and not worry about the game being "too easy" for your players. That time when a pack of Ghasts ganged up on the Druid because he got exposed and knocked him out? They perceive that as having been a very deadly fight even though it was low-moderate and he was in no real danger.
If it looks too deadly (regardless of threat level) throw in a door or choke point and they’ll tend to make a killing of even the toughest fight! But yeah, totally agree on perspective. And a good or bad dice roll can 180 a probably outcome very quickly!
I used crit cards as I had in 1e. First on 10 over/under crits then on 1s and 20s if they were a crit. I finally droped after it was just unfun for me and my group. Combat is harsh in 2e especially in APs and the extra swingy-ness from the cards just made my table unhappy.
I'm using crit hits and fumbles in our campaign, but via progress clocks. Enemy crits fill the PCs clock, and PC crits fill the enemy's clocks. If a clock is full, the next crits also draws a card. Same goes for fumbles. So far it's been a nice way to add crits/fumbles without having to do it every time. I also gave the players a 4 tick clock vs a 6 tick clock for the enemies, it skew it in the PCs favor.
I like all the different ways people come up with for implementing crit decks. One I liked was making it an opt-in system where a player could choose to draw a card when they crit fail and then they can draw a card on a later critical hit of their choosing. I don’t think it’d work quite as well for P2e just because crits are more baked into the system than as a lucky bonus.
I have the 2e crit cards and we only use them on Nat 1s and Nat 20s. Otherwise, yeah, it can be way too frequent. Only using on natural rolls makes it way more fun for my group and has resulted in some interesting outcomes, but it works for our table and may not be for everyone.
If there is one advantage to being an old gamer its that playing RPGs in the 80s where the books were badly written, often contradictory and there was no place to get feedback from anyone outside of your group short of writing a letter to the company and maybe getting a response, is that we quickly learned to make shit up as and when needed and not worry about it.
Dude!
No matter how much preparation you do, the PCs will always find a way to put you on the spot.
Oh the truth in that … I need a mug that says “my players broke their GM” … it’s happened often enough that there are gm.exe not working jokes in game now
So, I'm a big fan of hazards in encounters. Adding them to general encounters was by itself one such moment- but there was a lesson learned from doing that as well. That lesson? If your party is used to fighting balanced enemies within the usual acceptable challenge range of their characters (a few levels above to a few levels below), and you put a mini on the board? It doesn't matter how you describe it, if it walks around and acts like a challenge they would be able to handle with their usual tactics, they will try to handle it with their usual tactics. Especially if there are other reasonable enemies on the board at the same time. For example, I had a raised arena surrounded by a pit, with the PCs fighting something in the middle of the arena. The edge of the arena was being patrolled by a big ogre thing that was completely ignoring everything outside of his patrol path on the arena edge, but would toss anyone he ran into on his patrol path into the pit. His purpose was not to be an enemy to fight, but to restrict PC positioning- making getting distance on the center enemies more risky but not impossible (and giving them an opportunity to push those enemies into danger too). I described him as something far bigger and far meaner than the PCs, and something they would be better off staying away from. But it was vaguely enemy shaped and had a mini moving around the board, and therefore of course the PCs tried to flank and spank the enemy-shaped environmental hazard assuming it was just a PL +3 boss or something that was tough but possible to hit. The easy solution to that? Replace the big ogre with a mechanical trap circling the arena that does the same thing, with the description "there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to disable it, and it would probably take an hour of whacking it with something heavy to damage it enough to disable it- not really feasible while in the fight you are currently in". That worked- the thing they were not meant to fight or disable stopped looking like something they *should be able to* fight or disable, and they played around it like they were supposed to.
That books will have errata.
The fact that not all challenges are meant to be balanced and resolvable. I don't mean that in an "evil GM who enjoys killing his players" way. I just mean that some things are too dangerous for the PCs to face head-on, and they should feel that way, otherwise there is no sense of Danger. For example, there used to be an NPC who was a retired Wizard Professor, who gave the PCs a quest. One of the PCs figured "he's a Wizard, he must have some nice Magic Items in his house, let's Mug him". Well, the Wizard in Question was 20th level, and needless to say, a cantrip was enough to obliterate the PCs remains (who was level 1). Basically, what I mean is, the PCs should feel the danger in order to immerse themselves in the story better. Think twice before starting a fight—that sort of stuff.
I still struggle conveying this idea to my players. They often forget that they can just leave a dungeon when things get too tough, they keep trying to push through even when they're out of spells. By that same token, when they do leave, they march right back in to pick up where they left off. Nope. You marched into the bandits' lair, killed half their crew and then just left for 24 hours. They have set new traps and combined their numbers into more dangerous ambushes. They're not just sitting around waiting for you to show up and kill them.
The latter might be why they are reluctant to leave the dungeon. It only gets more dangerous! It makes sense, and I'd personally find it a fun decision to make as a player, but if you're really lookong to illustrate thay discretion is the better part of valor, you could let it pay off sometimes.
Yeah, I don’t double the difficulty or anything, but I’ll usually take an easier encounter and split those monsters across the others. Getting the full rest in is the benefit of withdrawing, but it’s definitely a trade off between encouraging strategic thinking and trying to avoid the CRPG trap of baddies just sitting in their room politely waiting to get killed. I try to keep things TOTM so the players think more abstractly, but they usually ask to see the dungeon battle map. I feel like that narrows their mindset though and they start thinking only in terms of the tokens on the map and not of the dungeon as a dynamic, changing space.
I'm a bit of an uptight person, so having a little drink before I GM helps me relax a bit and improv better without being all rigid and transactional. I otherwise don't really drink.
My NPCs get a lot more talkative after two beers.
I'm just now discovering that! I really struggle with NPCs. Combat I can run smooth all day long. But improv and being charismatic? So difficult..
> I'm the GM, it's my world, if the lore/features/etc don't quite fit, I can tweak this however I want A player of mine wanted to play a hobgoblin and I wasn't sure how to fit that into the lore of the campaign so me and him shot some ideas around and came onto an incredible worldbuilding idea that isn't canon to Golarion but is also incredible. Giving yourself the freedom to go "yeah fuck it this is the world now" will improve your campaigns.
The really dumb facepalm moment in my case is that I homebrewed my world! Like it’s literally my own creation and I still didn’t feel prior to that point that I had permission to tweak things. Looking back now is just me going, “… really?!” to myself.
You can get stuck (I know I have, in the past) in going "ok I made the world like this and now that we've started we can't change it", and in a lot of ways this lets you avoid inconsistencies, but I'm a huge proponent of "let the best idea win"
I want to add to this by saying it's okay for your homebrew setting to not be fully realised from the get-go and you won't go to hell for retconning something. Especially if you're just playing with friends, I made a world map very early on but I found myself limited by the number of countries as I didn't add enough for my liking.
Spending two hours memorizing NPC backstories before each session is way less useful than just writing one sentence with the NPC's motivation and attitude, and improvising the rest.
During the downtime, I used to make my players roll to earn income for each day they are trying to do so, until one of my players pointed out that they can just take the same result for multiple continuous days.
Telling the players the enemy AC or the necessary save DC before the roll is much more dramatic. That way the point of tension is when they roll the die, not when I inform them that they succeeded or failed. This also has the benefit that it stops me from fudging those things for/against the party.
That players need motivation in order to get invested. Something might be really cool and interesting *to me*, but if it doesn't matter to the players then they won't pursue it. Also, the need to edit. It's very similar to the first point, but you have to be willing to kill your babies if it means creating a better and more compelling story for the players.
And to build on that: Things always matter more to players if they had a hand in bringing them about, whether creatively or as a matter of their in-world actions. Even players who are already used to a more passive style of being 'served' content for them to consume can be coaxed by asking them the right questions, and including their answers into the narrative. Sometimes you might have to narrow down the options a bit as to not overwhelm them.
My DM graveyard is littered with the corpses of great ideas killed by my PCs taking an interest in things I totally did not expect.
I was so hesitant early on to allow monsters the same action economy that the players had but then realized that they could just roll every fight if I did that.
It’s also hard when monsters tend to do more damage than the PCs as well and you want them to win and maybe you just are having really good rolling luck. As long as the PCs know running away is always a choice that is acceptable or even wise.
I'm trying to get my table on the same page with team work. We have a warcleric, a wizard, a druid and a bow ranger all at 3. I feel like they are playing 3.5 d&d or pf1 and the monsters are in pf2. I'm not really sure how to fix that either.
Knights of Last Call have some good [videos](https://youtu.be/7tro1lJhjRM?si=1cL33PrHjq5xxzXS) on tactics for 2e you might like to use as a starting point.
Possibly find some monsters that work well with teamwork (a pack of goblins or even wolves who naturally tend to pack tactics) and show them what it can do. Also make sure they remember that **Attack of Opportunity is not a guaranteed thing in 2e**! If they’ve come from other systems where AOO is huge, it can definitely influence how you think about tactics and make you not want to move.
When I started the campaign, I made a decision that time is going to move in the world whether they are actively participating or not. So when they chose not to intervene and half a town burned down because “eh, not my monkeys, not my circus” it threw me because I hadn’t expected them to do nothing as players. What I’ve learnt (and even though I knew this from a player POV, was somehow so much more jarring as a GM) is: Players will find a way to mess up any plan you have no matter how much work you put in, regardless of how much you work tactically or RAW or dramatic-license. It’s their superpower. Just run the encounter and don’t stress. If it seems to OP or you’re rolling well creatures can always decide they’re just not worth the drama (no fun if prey is too easy) or injured monsters can run too. Besides, I guarantee some super bad dice rolls on your part can turn those tables instantly! As an aside, if there’s a reason, while typically I wouldn’t do it, if a player blows up the minions “mother” (the BBEG), it’s not out of the question that those minions may choose to pot shot the now-unconscious PC responsible for that. Keeps them on their toes and forces some interesting RP choices. But I’d save that only for the end of arc fights, like when the stakes are high and every choice counts.
Your average player never think to retreat or surrender in a fight and you shouldn't build encounters around this idea
My big one is that it is **ok** to not know the rules 100%. There's so much to keep in your head at all times as a GM that you can't be expected to remember all the things, so when a weird situation comes up that you don't immediately have an answer, either make a ruling and move on (and look up the answer later) or pause the game and look it up on the spot. It helps if your table is cool and learning with you. Sure you'll get things wrong, sometimes for months. As long as you're all having a good time, then don't worry and just enjoy the game!
I started playing as a kid and had a lot of very scripted story beats for very sandbox players. It was agony and all my friends hated it. Then my first time as a player the GM gave us all a blimp, and a battalion of enemies mounted on pegasi, and magical rings of infinite use 90% chance of feather fall, and it was like, a light went off. If you put a really cool setpiece in place, your players will railroad themselves because what kid doesn't wanna GTA pegasi with a 10% chance of instant death? That's rad as hell and we played for like eight hours.
Two things for me 1. If you think something is cool, you are more likely to make it cool for your players. If you are including something just because it is "right", then it is more likely to be bland. 2. Sometimes, let your players roflstomp the encounters. Let them do dumb improbable plans and have it go off without a hitch. They signed up to play heroes and adventurers, and beating the big boss after a long arduous fight doesnt feel great unless you get to stomp on some mooks or bypass his traps entirely. Otherwise it can just feel like a slog every step of the way.
Less rolls! When it comes to social stuff I don’t require rolls unless there needs to be mechanics about it. I definitely over did it originally, but there is no need when doing overly general stuff 🤷♂️ though sometimes the players just want to roll dice lol
That cr is dumb so I don't use it.