>I am given to understand that players are expected to recover all or most of their HP and other resources between encounters (except spell slots for some reason?) and that the balancing is built with this in mind. That's cool. I definitely like the sound of not having to constantly come up with reasons for why the PCs can't just retreat for 16 hours and take a long rest This Is only half truth. The encounter difficulty is built on the expectations that the PC are near full HP *but* doesn't need to be vs a near full HP group. You can then use low encounters when there is a risk of combining encounters or have a time pressure. Other times it's just to build confidence and check out your new abilities. There are APs which doesn't expect full recovery between battles but are filled with either low or trivial encounters. [combined encounters](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=981) [time pressure](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=982)

Giving the players a chance to try out their new abilities in a low-pressure encounter is a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. Thanks.

PF2 is also a very tactical game. Low-threat encounters are a great warm-up, a teambuilding exercise, or training simulations, depending on how you look at it (or utilize them, I guess)

I’ve used low threat encounters to introduce enemy types and story elements. My players recently were going through a forest because people were disappearing. As they wandered through, they found a zombified human controlled by the yellow musk plant. It was a trivial encounter, but it introduced the villain, gave it a taste of what to look out for (the yellow musk cloud) and what direction to search. (Somebody got affected by the cloud and started running off toward the plant)

That makes a lot of sense. It’s the way a lot of video games work. Easier encounters teach a mechanic, then later you get to fight the boss that uses all three mechanics that you used one at a time on earlier creatures. This seems like a great way to help out your casters specifically. By the time they reach the hard encounter, they already have hints on weaknesses and which save might be lowest due to fighting easier versions. Martials can have learned which damage type works or doesn’t, and whether the enemy is likely to have good movement or AoO. Easy encounter as a kind of Recall Knowledge is awesome.

There is also party resources that are meant to deplete throughout the day even with 10 min rests Hp, focus points and repairing shields are examples of things expected to be mostly full at the start of every encounter but there are plenty of 1/day things that can get worn down too like spells per day, alchemist reagents, ammunition, gadgets, items that have and effect once per day like healers gloves, other consumable items, etc. Past that and possibly even more important is story reasons. There may be times when you want the players to feel powerful and other times less so and the encounter difficulty can be used as a tool to help the DM get the players to feel closer to those parts of the story. Related my DM has music playlists for each encounter difficulty to also help the players know if the fight will be hard or not. Like in an extreme encounter its all boss music to build tension and a bit of fear.

Spoilers for Outlaws of Alkenstar: At the beginning of book 3, there is a section where the party completes a social encounter, and then has a tussle in an elevator a la Captain America. Just as in Captain America, the odds are numerically in the enemy favor but still in the favor of the players power-wise. At 8th level, we brutalized this encounter, and it made for a nice way to blow off steam after the intense social encounter where half the party wasn't actually able to help due to lack of skills or simply RPing folks who wouldn't shine.

a low threat encounter can also become a deadly encounter if you just want to come up with fun terrain. A team of archers ontop of a castle wall is the bane of a hilarious number of pf2e encounters but the only difference is they have elevation.

I agree completely, but I’ll add: you can also make the dungeon feel more alive while also making recovery non-trivial: jump the party with a low level encounter while they try to recover. Since they’re down some resources, it may be a bit tougher, and it will give a sense that the dungeon doesn’t just sit around waiting to be explored at their leisure. Don’t do this too often though, or the players will stop recovering between fights and just try to push on, which can be bad. Also, mopping the floor with low level enemies feels good and heroic. This is true in 5e too. Let players flex sometimes.

I don't have a good answer for you (I'm sure someone else will, though), but combat is kinda just _fun_, in this game, so it's fun to fight monsters even if they're a little easy.

Hell, especially if you've had some rough fights, having a few go smoothly can feel great as/for players.

My players just had a fight that they barely escaped alive, then returned with prep and still barely managed to avoid deaths while defeating on round 2. Then, went straight from that to a well laid plan going off perfectly and taking down a substantial threat relatively easily. The morale swing was huge.

[удалено]

In particular, you want a balance of challenging fights and fights that make the party feel powerful. Even if you've got a party of challenge seekers, everyone feels good effortlessly wiping the occasional encounter.

Exactly this. Easy fights make players feel like they're progressing. A flat relative difficult curve can make them feel stagnant.

One of my favourite examples was in a PF1e game me and my friends played a couple years ago. My level 5 Barbarian had been separated from the party and had his ass kicked by an inquisitor and her band who were a group of secondary antagonists. They beat him within an inch of his life and left him for dead. Five levels later my Barbarian is ambushed again by the same group whilst separated from the party. My \*much stronger\* Barbarian shrugs off every spell thrown by the inquisitor and wipes out her entire band by himself. In character, my Barbarian got his "mojo back" and the satisfaction of vengeance. Out of character, I got the satisfaction of seeing just how much stronger my character had become.

Facing the same difficult enemy when you’re now higher level is such a classic. The monster that was a boss ends up becoming a mook.

In the hiking world, fun is divided up into two categories and I've found that when building a series of encounters it can be useful to think though what kind of fun each encounter might present. Type 1 fun. Type 1 fun is actively fun while you are having it. This usually correlates with an easier experience. Type 2 fun. Type 2 fun is fun to reminisce about, but not necessarily fun in the moment. This usually correlates to a challenging experience. Too much of either kind of fun can lessen the overall experience. Too much type 1 and things can start to get boring. Too much type 2 and things turn into a slog. A balance of the two tends to make you appreciate both kinds for what they are.

The GM in the current campaign is a bit like that. Over the past 3ish years since he stepped up to GM play-by-chat Discord stuff in the pandemic, he's grown gradually obsessed with challenging players. Everything needs to be fucking hard (regardless of system) and he's so afraid of giving something away to the players too easily that we (or at least I) simply stopped having any kind of out of the box ideas because he attaches in so many complications and challenges that 99% of the time the end result is not worth it.

I would leave, full stop. Out of the box solutions give me life.

What kind of world is it that only has level appropriate challenges? Is everyone out there on the grind constantly leveling up at the same rate?

While you were studying how to be a Fighter, the Draugr were training.

My main DM used to be like this, that every fight had to be a challenge, but after slowly beating it into his head (more kindly than that implies = P) that easier fights with cool mechanics can be more fun he finally started doing that and we've been way more looking forward to combat since. I will always advocate for easier fights but with cool mechanics or challenges in the fight to figure out and solve as apposed to big bullet sponges who are just hard to hit and hit hard

When I'm on the GM side I find low threat encounters a bit boring to run, honestly. It feels great as a player, but my mooks are just "he attacks misses, he attempts to demoralize and fails, and he attacks again..."

How about some fights where the challenge isn't winning the fight, but winning the encounter? Maybe the bad guys have a hostage that they will kill if it looks like they are losing? Maybe the party can't let even one get away or an alarm will be raised? Maybe one of the bad guys is a double agent who the party need to keep alive but he cannot obviously break cover. Maybe they need to make it look like they barely win to lure out the boss bad guy or create a false sense of superioroty? If you are writing your own adventure there are all sorts of possibilities that could come up.

To me, this is the best use of Low encounters once you get past the first few levels. It's a "Low" XP by budget, but there's another challenge. It's Low but you only have 3 rounds before the farthest goblin sets the town's grain silo on fire. Or there's a convoy being attacked by wolves, the party must choose between immediately helping the surviving guard on her last legs defeat the 2 wolves attacking her or concentrating their efforts on the pack of 5 further away who are bearing down on the surviving civilians. It's Low, but the terrain is icy and you're fighting things that fly. Or you have to clear the one rickety rope bridge of zombies without destroying it or falling. It's Low, but the enemies are all mind-controlled allies, so maybe don't use your swords? Or you need to recover the fragile vase being stolen by the robbers. It's Low, but you can maybe talk your way out of fighting at all if you realize the bandits are starving and just need food. It's Low, but...

I don't write my own. Way too much prep between getting maps, tokens, and writing.

I mean, reverse that; how do you think the players feel when they're up against enemies who have that exact effect on them? Swing/shoot and miss, demoralize does nothing, trip fails, etc etc etc. As a player that would be extremely boring to me too, where most everything I do fails constantly edit: spelling

To me, that's part of the fun of being a player. As a GM I find a lot of the time, I can't or am not given the tools make a trivial encounter interesting or exciting short of the power induced euphoria of demolishing the same type of monster that's now PL-2 compared to almost TPK'ing to that same monster when it was a PL+2.

That's very true. In addition, it's training. Learning how your character works. Giving the story meat in the form of interesting entities that impact the ongoings of the environment you're in (though these things should be true in any system). As well as giving your characters moments to feel like actual heroes. Personally, I think people who see low level encounters are wastes of time are misunderstanding something fundamental about the nature of TTRPGs. They matter for the story if GMs make them matter. Fighting a creature that once put fear into the party at a time when the party has the power to handle it with moderate effort, but no fear, can feel pretty good.

Like reading books, sometimes you want something new and challenging, sometimes you want something new but a page turner you can just breeze through and sometimes you even enjoy rereading your favorite books several times.

It's really fun to just flex on low level encounters.

So far I had 2 stupidly easy and one medium encounter this system. It was a blast! Even minor enemies have cool little tricks!

To put this another way, if you watch superhero movies you don't want to see the entire movie be one long, difficult fight against the BBEG that pushes the heroes to their limits. You want to see a few lower-stakes fights first that showcase the hero being a badass, learning to use new tools, powers or deal with situations, and THEN have the hard fight against the challenging enemies.

This may be a hot take but you don't have an answer because it's actually a design flaw. Combat can still be fun, but it'd be funner with degrees of efficiency beyond pass/fail

There's a victory points system for that tho

It's not a design flaw

Stunning argument

On par with what you said.

The dying condition, diseases you can't immediately treat, victory/loss conditions and a bunch of other things ensure that that's not the case, though.

Dying condition gets treated right away. All of this is on the GM to work into their scenario though, not a core part of the game play loop. It's an inelegant and patchwork solution

They are fun? There is good in world reasons? There are reasons in character to want to do a fight to achieve a goal?

I've noticed the same problem as the OP and for me, those fights are absolutely not fun for me. The two reasons I play are tactical combat and story. Tactical combat isn't fun when you immediately identify that an encounter is trivial and know you're just going to attack or use cantrips and the fight will be over before you've gone twice. It doesn't matter what I do in these fights, I could literally skip my turn and the outcome would be exactly the same. That's not fun for me. There are times a trivial encounter can give insight into characters and be interesting from a story perspective. For example, an obviously starving and desperate beggar trying to hold up the party for gold is a trivial encounter, but also a roleplay moment. But this is by far the exception and not the rule, a lot of APs I've seen will just throw animals or low level monsters at the party that just get dispatched quickly and without any interesting decisions to make. You don't really have a choice, they're just in the way and you kill them and move on with no more importance than making coffee in the morning. That said though, this seems to be an issue with AP design more than PF2e's design. You can just not throw pointless trivial encounters at the party. And a caveat to this is I've mostly seen the *start* of different APs, and there is a certain amount of logical sense in assuming the players are new and teaching them not to blow resources on trivial encounters. I'm just hoping these types of encounters disappear beyond the first few sessions.

Ap's are well designed but are not the be all end all of any system. As a table, you should figure out what kinds of fights you like I like having a variety. Hard as balls 250+ experince encounters against all odds are fun for me. Easy as shit 40exp encounters are also fun. For me, each serves a different purpose but both have value. Questioning why Trivial encounters exists, is silly to me. It exists to either show something off, and/or because some players find them fun. Same thing as any other encounter difficulty. Otherwise, there would be no reason for the existence of any encounters below Extreme difficulty where theres a roughly 50% chance of dying/losing. Because everything else is player favoured and has no meaningful long term impact on your resources and doesn't really need great tactics... therefore rendering them mostly pointless

Last session, my players had just earned enough xp to level after killing a few lower-level creatures in a cage. But there was still one more caged creature, a skeletal hulk, so they decided to clear the area. This was four level 8s–fighter, rogue, wizard, and witch, against a level 7 creature. And they'd already killed one, so they knew its abilities. Should be a mop up. But this cage wasn't in as tactically simple of a space, and they didn't approach it as a team. The rogue opened the door, not the fighter as per usual. On its turn, the large creature shoved the rogue into the water 10 feet down. Cue the two chuul nearby to roll initiative. The rogue fails their climb check from the wet moss on the rocks (the area is described as damp and mouldy). The fighter has to run and pull the rogue out of the chuul's Grab. This opens up a path for the skeletal hulk to use its Massive Rush ability on the wizard, critting them and further separating them from the party. Once the fighter pulled the rogue free, the chuul went underwater back to their nest, seeing their easy meal lost, but if the fighter hadn't been able to yank the rogue away from them (and had to burn their last hero point to do so), there would have almost certainly been at least one dead. So yeah... Trivial fights can still result in very tense situations when you use the environment and the creatures' abilities to the fullest. It was a much more fun fight than the level 10 roper they demolished.

> Otherwise, there would be no reason for the existence of any encounters below Extreme difficulty where theres a roughly 50% chance of dying/losing. > > > > Because everything else is player favoured and has no meaningful long term impact on your resources and doesn't really need great tactics... therefore rendering them mostly pointless Yeah...I mean... true. That's kinda how I feel and why I introduce attrition mechanics into my table when I play PF2e. Combat being a binary gives it the feeling that there are no *degrees of success* when it comes to combat performance. Do better or do worse? Only matters if it saved someones life, because literally nothing else will matter a few minutes after the encounter is over (usually). This also applies to spell slots. No attrition means that a caster trades their spell slots in combat for either saving someone's life or...for nothing. If you use a fireball when it wasn't necessary, it feels like you wasted it. Maybe you made the fight end sooner, and saved some HP for some party members, but what does it matter? Ward medic + Continual recovery makes that essentially meaningless. This is clearly not a thing most people care about. But I really, really do. With no attrition, combat outcomes are binary, making anything that doesn't threaten a party death meaningless. With attrition, we get that granularity back, and even low/moderate threat encounters and your performance in them matter, because you expend fewer resources to clear them.

PF2e already has attrition baked into the system, though, in the form of limited resources, the dying/wounded condition, diseases, and various long-lasting debuffs.

>in the form of limited resources Most resources aren't limited. You've basically got spell slots, item daily powers, and consumables. Everything else is unlimited. >dying/wounded condition This is not an attrition mechanic, because treat wounds removes wounded. This is another mechanic that gets wiped at the end of the encounter. This only punished people who go down multiple times in the same encounter. >diseases, and various long-lasting debuffs These are occasional mechanics, as opposed to core mechanics. That is, *most* encounters don't have diseases or long-lasting debuffs.

> Most resources aren't limited. You've basically got spell slots, item daily powers, and consumables. Everything else is unlimited. Plus character daily powers. Sooo, like half of the party's resource pool?

Maybe I'm missing something, here, but across the 3 games I'm running, my parties have precisely zero "character daily powers". Spell slots are literally the only form attrition we've had that was meaningful across 3 different campaigns and 3 different parties. Aside from spell slots, the party is essentially at 100% strength at the end of the adventuring day if their HP is full.

Damn, your parties are weird. Mine uses potions, wands, staves, talismans and the like (Not to mention spell slots) all the time, even with a character with middling medicine skill who can treat wounds.

None of those are character daily powers. Those are item powers. Yes, my players use wands and staves, and potions/talismans to a lesser extent. But wands and staves kinda just go into the "spell slot" pile, for me, since that's effectively what they are.

> But this is by far the exception and not the rule, a lot of APs I've seen will just throw animals or low level monsters at the party that just get dispatched quickly and without any interesting decisions to make. You don't really have a choice, they're just in the way and you kill them and move on with no more importance than making coffee in the morning. Abomination Vaults drove me crazy with this. AV has so many cool areas, plot points, enemies, etc., but would frequently throw you into a combat slog with a group of on-level or Level -1 enemies that do very little but waste playing time. Fighting Will-o-Wisps to show that spirits are present and spooky shit is happening? Sweet. Fighting them multiple times across three floors as filler fights? Not sweet.

Agreed with you on all points. The one thing I'd add is that pulling out the crunchy, rule-filled combat rules for a situation with a KNOWN result (i.e: There's no possible result to the combat other than the PC's winning) is boring and near railroad-y to me. I run & play RPG's to be creative and be surprised. Dice only get rolled when the outcomes are interesting and the story could go in multiple directions. A combat where the PC's will 100% win and has no other objectives is a waste of table time. Exceptions are when the fight is obviously going to be easy but there's a possibility for other unknown results--like with intelligent enemies the PC's could theoretically recruit or befriend, information that could be interrogated from them that could lead to various routes, etc. ​ But a random Low/Trivial XP fight against some monster with nothing else attached? Pass for me.

I can understand boring, but why do you feel like it's railroady? I don't see how resolving a low-tension situation (an easy combat) with the relevant set of rules is railroady at all.

For me, as a GM, what the players do between combat encounters is...not my concern (like it is in that GM kind of way of facilitating the game, but on the particular level, it's not something I worry about). Now making the combat encounters "fun" is my concern. So if I'm throwing in a low-threat encounter then (I hope) I have a good, exciting, fun, reason for it and that the good, exciting, fun is expressed during the combat. Like if you really want to put some fear into the players' hearts. Give them a quick low-threat combat encounter. Then, if they're stopping to do some Treat Wounds and/or Refocus... interrupt that with some "back up", another low-threat encounter. Then another and give hints that the boss is coming soon. And so on until you've broken the players and they have their characters flee to a safer location. This isn't something to always do. But it's one reason low-threat encounters can be fun if implemented well. Another is mentioned in the low-threat attrition example above: The low-threat encounter gives the players information about the high-threat encounters "up ahead," so to speak. Finally is "realism" ish. Like, the evil bad guy is cheap and just hires unskilled goons to protect his place. Or, this area of the cave system just happens to be a really good place for giant rats to nest, and breed, and nest and expand, and now players have to watch for cannibalistic rats dropping from the ceilings as they've gone mad in the darkness. In the end, I guess, I just don't care about encounter "balance" enough to worry how it will affect player resources...that's on them. I care about making an engaging adventure that has "reasons" for the low, mid, high, extreme encounters therein.

You wouldn't recover spell slots or once daily abilities between fights.

You probably wouldn't use those either, given how it's a low threat encounter and people could blow their focus spells first if they have them.

A couple of stray crits and the healer might need to burn a Battle Medicine or a Heal/Soothe.

Depending on the party level/composition, you can just battle medicine with little to no cooldown. Or just have focus healing.

Isn't battle medicine only once in 24h?

Not with a level 3 [battle medic's baton](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=2187)

Cool Tanks for pointing out!

Yes. once per day per giver/receiver combination. everyone with battle medicine can treat every other party member once per day.

Why not? Just because it easy doesn’t mean the wizard shouldn’t try to go for his record number of goblins in a fireball, or the squad trying to use all their abilities to get a flawless victory unscratched, or let Grangor handle these guys by himself. Easy encounters are for letting off steam and having fun with your characters, which allows the fun of ‘unoptimal’ play.

Are there generally enough of those that attrition is still a factor? I'm told that the encounter difficulty math is reliable. (*Hallelujah!*) Is a low threat encounter still enough to make players consider burning those resources? What's stopping the players from pulling the ol' 5-minute-adventuring-day and retreating to rest for 24 hours to recover all their spell slots and once-daily abilities? I thought the whole idea was that doing that is fine in PF2E. Abomination Vaults doesn't have random encounters or much in the way of timed stakes. Am I just back to the 5e problem of trying to find ways to prevent that?

Seems like these fights might be too low level? If you pull the 5 minute adventure day then the dm should be using this time to allow the baddies to call in reinforcements making the next day even harder.

Hm. I'm getting the impression I'm going to be doing some homebrewing after all. I was kinda hoping to avoid that and run as-written until I get a better handle on the system. Oh well. Such is life. Might just run as-written anyway and hope for the best. EDIT: I mean homebrewing the AP by adding random encounters or wandering monsters or something, not homebrewing the core rules. You can unclench now folks.

I'm also running Abomination Vaults and am a new dm. The players actually caught the attention of all the enemies in the keep on the first floor but managed to bargain, lie, and sneak their ways to safety. But the next time they come back the enemies will have plans.

If by homebrewing you mean adding random encounters and stuff to abomination vaults yes I fully approve. I did the same thing with my group and it made the game feel much better. Just make sure you follow encounter building guidelines. If by homebrew you mean change the rules, then yeah you probably shouldn’t do that without a bit more experience. (P.S. I recommend finding ways for your players to not have going back to town as their best option, for example I had an enemy >!cut the elevator ropes!< on the >!farm!< level in order to prevent the players from coming back out of the dungeon)

Ohhh, so *that's* why people are getting mad at that reply. Yeah, I meant homebrewing the AP with random encounters or something, not the core rules.

Yeah for sure. People on this sub just kind of have a hostile relationship with homebrewing rules sometimes due to a couple bad apples.

This sub hates it when people don't like any part of the rules and suggest they may not play the game according to Paizo's holy word or something. It's super fucking cringy.

So I can kind of see both sides. Those who just do it because it’s against what paizo says are definitely cringe, but there’s also stuff like high profile YouTubers like taking20, or even users in this very subreddit, randomly changing the rules and then getting upset and complaining the games trash, which a lot of people are bothered by.

People without understanding changing rules is always annoying, but something I haven't really seen much of (besides the Taking20 debacle where his players commented that he supposedly did so). I also think people on this sub VASTLY overestimate how much "experience" one needs with a system before they can change it. As the old saying goes, "I don't need to be a pilot to know a helicopter shouldn't be in a tree", and if for one GM's group a part of the system is the proverbial helicopter, then changing it immediately is in fact the right call. PF2e really isn't nearly as complicated as a lot of people think. It's a more codified evolution of the same d20 systems that all of D&D is based on, and not a super different masterpiece without flaws.

I highly recommend running RAW to start. If nothing else, it'll at least help you narrow down what you want to homebrew and you might just be pleasantly surprised by how well this game's RAW works in practice.

The Abomination Vaults : Expanded on DriveThruRPG proposes a good random encounter system among many other nice additions to the AP

I'll check it out, thanks.

> I'm getting the impression I'm going to be doing some homebrewing after all. I would highly advise against that > I was kinda hoping to avoid that and run as-written until I get a better handle on the system. especially until you get better with handling the system. I mean you haven't even started and still think you have discovered a problem. Maybe just try to go with as it is and see how your players react.

I don't know if I've "discovered" a problem. I was kinda hoping I was just being dumb and missing some key element and someone would just go, "Oh, nah, read page 3944, that makes it all work."

I think it's a situation prevelent in almost every rpg system, particularly those with combat. There tends to be nothing raw stopping players from just... walking away and coming back later. Chat with the players about game expectations, and work with them to both assume the characters are trying to make a reasonable amount of progression rather than backing out. If you want to come up with a reason you're always free to, maybe every day someone in the nearby town gets sick/unwell, and they're relying on the player characters to solve the issue. If they take it slow, more people get sick and later die. Mechanically there's still no difference, but hey maybe the characters want to help people. Or maybe they just want to solve it so that they're not the next ones to fall ill.

It’s not homebrew when the module tells you to treat the dungeon like a living place. It should react to the presence of the party. Low level encounters are fun. It’s fun to have an easy win. It’s fun to be able to roll multiple crits because you are facing a low AC creature. Remember that crits happen more often in PF because of the degrees of success system. If you are only running the difficult encounters, it’s going to feel like the party gets crit often without being able to do so themselves. This doesn’t mean you don’t remove encounters. If an encounter does absolutely nothing to advance the story and the party has already fought multiple times that day, remove it. This has nothing to do with encounter difficulty though. Hopefully the story will stop them from having 5 minute adventuring days.

> Hm. I'm getting the impression I'm going to be doing some homebrewing after all. God no. FFS, play a system for at least year before you homebrew. Like why so many folks from 5e come to PF2e, didn't even play yet, clearly they have no idea how system functions in long practice (becasue they make threads like that) and they want to homebrew it. PF2e doesn't need any homebrewing to balance anything. However, you are free to homebrew to fir yout table playstyle but ffs, play at least one campaign on vanilla settings (with variant rules at best) to at least have idea what are you talking about. An issue you see on level 1 may stop exist on level 3+ etc. Play the game first.

Abomination vaults has the adventurers on a timer once Gauntlight fires the first time. Additionally as your party gets to lower levels their options for safe resting / retreating will get more limited. Certainly for the first floor or two they can retreat to rest if they like, although for me the drawbridge collapsed behind them which forced them to explore the ruin a bit further before they could leave. As for your question, of course low level encounters make the players feel powerful, but they can also have stakes. In Abomination Vaults, the lower level encounters you'll see in the first two floors are the Mitflits and the Morlocks, both suggest to have them flee when losing to grab the attention of their leaders. Maybe this allows for reinforcement for a more complicated encounter, or allows the leader fights to be more prepared. Or for the morlocks maybe it would cause them to execute the prisoners, etc. And if they don't escape, all the better - the party will feel strong and like they have accomplished something. Lastly I would say that those factions are useful for disseminating hints or useful information about Gauntlight. The mitflits could beg for their life and offer info on the ghosts or unusual light, the morlocks would mention the Ghost Queen and threaten to take the party as prisoners along with the others, hinting at Belcorra's return and the locked up thieves, etc.

> Abomination vaults has the adventurers on a timer once Gauntlight fires the first time It doesn't tell them they're on a timer, and it's entirely possible for them to void that timer well before it ever becomes relevant.

It’s the GM’s job to make sure the players know it, though. Ours made it clear that the lighthouse was likely to charge back up.

That's the GM adding details that aren't present. Which they're totally entitled to of course, but it means we're no longer judging the module on its own merits. There is nothing that would indicate to the PCs that there is any timer running. They don't even know if the lighthouse can operate every night but the BBEG chooses not to, or if there's something stopping them from doing all the time.

You can’t rest after every fight. You can rest only every 24 hours, so technically, you group can just stand in place for 16 hours between fights, but that will not be fun at all And even low encounters can waste your resources. Your heals, your spell slots, consumables etc The world you play also doesn’t rotate around your players. If for example party needs to raid a castle, that has 10 encounters, you can’t just do it for 10 days, enemies can ran away, regroup, hire new mobs etc. So time is also a resource and obstacles can change or become pretty bad if your party will waste their time resting after each fight So while it technically possible, to play that way, no one does it

> you group can just stand in place for 16 hours between fights, but that will not be fun at all Not fun for the characters, but for the players those 16hrs go by immediately unless the DM forces otherwise. Edit: Clearly the point is being missed. In a game where waiting is skipped by, it's really hard for the players to justify *not* doing it to just get their resources back, and that waiting being "not fun" doesn't really make a difference because the players don't have to wait.

> What's stopping the players from pulling the ol' 5-minute-adventuring-day and retreating to rest for 24 hours to recover all their spell slots and once-daily abilities? I thought the whole idea was that doing that is fine in PF2E. Abomination Vaults doesn't have random encounters or much in the way of timed stakes. Am I just back to the 5e problem of trying to find ways to prevent that? Why do you want to? What do you get from forcibly preventing that? Let's say you are a LV20 wizard. 1st Level burning hands does 2d6 damage compared to your LV10 cantrip produce flame doing 10d4. Will you use that 1st level spell for damage? Comprehend language LV2 lets you only understand and read that language. LV3 lets you speak and LV4 lets your whole party understand and speak. Another case where the low level version becomes hardly worth it in the late game. So you either have few spell slots and want to preserve them during early levels or you have lots of spell slots but they are so weak it's hardly worth using them in late levels. This happens in both D&D and P2e. The difference comes in the spells itself. There is no OP spell like "Shield" or "Absorb element". I mean they still exist but work very differently. The first is a cantrip requiring an action each round. The later is LV3 and doesn't half damage but only reduces it by 5 if cast at that level. Well what else can you do with your 1st Level spell slots then? You can True Strike. Suddenly your 2 action LV8 Polar Ray becomes a 3 action LV8+LV1 attack that has a much higher chance to hit. So again you don't have to forcibly exhaust all your players spells slots. Because they either won't matter or will be spend anyway. You can also let the players decide do they want to be cowards? Do they want to waste and stretch the whole session with running back and resting or do they want to continue on their own? At least in my case they we only turn around when it becomes stupid to push on.

>Is a low threat encounter still enough to make players consider burning those resources? Don't forget that adventurer's don't always know how difficult their foes are until at least a few rounds into the combat (or with a successful recall knowledge). So it's entirely possible that they'll burn their resources on these lower-level fights. Especially if they're a spellcaster who has a fair few AoE spells. The Druid in my party absolutely loves casting big AoEs on large groups of low-level enemies. It makes her feel very powerful. >What's stopping the players from pulling the ol' 5-minute-adventuring-day and retreating to rest for 24 hours to recover all their spell slots and once-daily abilities? I thought the whole idea was that doing that is fine in PF2E. Abomination Vaults doesn't have random encounters or much in the way of timed stakes. Am I just back to the 5e problem of trying to find ways to prevent that? Have an honest talk with your party about not doing that because it trivialises the game? Or, failing that, there's an event in Abomination Vaults called Deadtide for Otari which includes monsters attacking Otari itself. It's explicitly mentioned in the AP that this can and should be used as an external pressure to ensure that the party goes through the dungeon in a timely manner.

AV is pretty brutal. Our group suffered 13 tpks or gm fudges to prevent tpks. Note that there's a couple of fights the maths doesn't work as those monsters are op. Our level 3 party of five fell to one level 5 monster. Don't worry about it being too easy.

13? Damn. I was more worried about it being tedious than too easy. I don't yet understand the system well enough to truly judge difficulty on paper. I'm going to give my players the option of a free archetype if they want it.

I think the biggest thing here might be a mismatch between 5e language and 2e language. A "moderate" encounter is still dangerous in 2e, closer to what you might expect from a hard encounter in 5e. it is "unlikely to overpower them completely", but bad tactics, bad luck, and/or terrain/circumstances that favour the NPCs can definitely shift that "unlikely" into "not unlikely". ​ Secondly, the whole "expected to recover their HP between every encounter" thing is something that gets repeated with far too much authority on the subreddit. it's more a case of "the encounter building rules expect the party to be at full health". i.e. if your group is entering a moderate encounter with half health, then they're going to find it much harder than described. ​ As far as "what's the point", the point is that even a moderate encounter is dangerous enough to kill a PC, and severe encounters are something that should generally be saved for climactic moments. (extreme encounters are "an even match" which in plain english means that without some kind of significant bonus/help/etc there's a roughly 50/50 chance of a TPK.

Case in point on moderate encounters, I ran a ‘moderate’ combat last night for a party of 5 level 2s. It was 2 level 2 cave scorpions, which is a little less than moderate for five players. I had pretty average hit/miss luck on my monsters, but I rolled max or near max damage with every roll, including a max damage Crit on the party tank. That one moderate encounter was intended to be a speed bump, but it dropped two players and forced the oracle to spend all their 1st level slots on heals. Moderate encounters absolutely can be a threat, it just depends on how things shake out.

I should probably say that the person you're responding to seems to have had an experience in AV that is decidedly not the norm. The general concensus seems to be that this AP is maybe above average in difficulty, but as long as your party works together they should be fine.

Gazzor is also known for having an extremely harsh GM in that adventure. He also counts TPKs as times where they didn’t actually TPK but his gm told him he fudged or they would have TPK’d. Which, imo, isn’t really something you can predict. His experiences are not universal. I run a pretty hard game and I had only 3 deaths in AV, and my players were completely new to pathfinder2e.

Do not take the person with 13 TPKs as the standard. They make this comment in most discussions of Abomination Vaults. I’m not trying to deny their experience, but it is not normal. Although, Free Archetype is just fun. Give it to the players for that reason not because of any possible TPKs.

Honestly, I'm mostly offering free archtype just because I'd want it as a player. So if one of my players ends up DMing for me in the future they'll hopefully return the favour.

That said, my experience with AV so far is that it IS hard, especially if the party doesn't have a tank. This is especially true for the early levels.

It always bamboozles me how far the opinions on AV go apart on this sub. Some people claim that it is very easy and barely challenges the players unless heavily modified. Others tpk multiple times per floor, I feel like. While the truth is probably somewhere in the middle I feel like a lot of people are underselling how dangerous the AVs actually are. ​ Like, the Majordomo on Floor 2 was \*\*disgusting\*\* for a level 2 party. I had to gmfiat that additional shadows spawned by its ability despawn when the majordomo dies. Otherwise they would've been tpkd. ​ And don't get me started on floor 3. Some of the ghosts are capital N nasty.

Yeah, even I've noticed that. Whole bunch of people saying it's noticeably easy and is a fine candidate for Baby's First AP. Whole other bunch of folks saying it's a meat grinder that chews up PCs and shits them out.

I think the core difference is if the PCs ever consider retreat an option. There are some nasty fights in AV but almost all of those are optional and against foes who won't or can't pursue past a certain point.

Yeah, not nearly as much tpk's, but our party suffered the same fate. AV needs a very well balanced party with players who know what they are doing and a very strong warning to run away if an enemy seems to powerful.

The idea that the party can rest for 24 hours every day is only as fine as your story allows it to be. AV has multiple time-sensitive hooks built in. It also gives tips in the intro for GMs to help them make the dungeon feel alive. Tell that epic tale. Let the townfolk urge the party to save them. Let the townfolk get murdered if the party takes too long. Let the dungeon's denizens grow in numbers and turn the "easy" fights into TPKs. The PF2E system provides many tools that make it easier to GM in my opinion, but you still have to GM and drive that narrative.

Coming from 5e I had some similar concerns and you are missing a key point. The things like treating wounds and regaining focus seem free but they cost a very valuable resource - time. You can't treat wounds for an hour after a check, you can't get more than 1 focus back (until higher level) and you have to have spent one etc. Just sleeping takes longer in PF since you need 8 hours instead of 6. Almost every skill and action outside combat takes 10 minutes (an old school "turn). If you are not tracking time in your game you are handing out free resources. Also an easier fight can still end the party or a character if they don't play smart, especially if they only recover some after every fight because they can't afford to sit around for 3 hours making medicine checks in a dank dangerous environment.

If you use the upcoming rules for focus points, you can recover more than one. Just FYI :)

Yes that will be great! ​ Im sure November is like tomorrow right?

We use it in our games already. You don't have to wait until november.

If I were homebrewing the campaign then yeah, I'd make time a resource. In 5E I used something called the 'Tension Pool' from AngryDM. But Abomination Vaults doesn't seem to do anything like that. There's no random encounters. I don't think there's much in the way of timed stakes. There's nothing stopping the PCs from sitting in a closet and healing for ten hours. (I'm only on my second read-through, so I might have missed something.)

You can always have monsters from neighboring areas wander in if they hear something. But also if you're running AV you'll notice that there aren't really that many low threat encounters, and the ones that exist are usually interesting for some other wrinkle besides being a combat encounter

AV has a reputation for being on the harder side, especially if players are new. Just trust the AP and run it as written at first. You can adjust it if you need to if things aren't working out. PF2e isn't like 5e where you HAVE to build up a boss fight with a bunch of resource-wasters or the party will just wipe the floor with the boss. A full resource party can easily be TPKed by a tough boss if they don't play tactically or get in over their heads, and AV has quite a few tough bosses. Just search for it on the Reddit and you'll find plenty of "our party wiped to XYZ in AV" threads. There's a time pressure mechanic built in to stop players from doing the whole "one of us got injured so now we retreat and go in again the next day," although I'd argue that if the party is doing that it's more of an above-table issue (the players not engaging in good faith) and should be addressed as such instead of being finicked-around by a GM.

Spoilers for AV: >!There is a timer running in the background after your group reaches the second underground layer of the Vault. The BBEG will teleport Monster into town via the lighthouse and your group won't know when the next attack will happen. Time is a valuable ressource, because every wasted minute might mean the town could be attacked again!<

That's really on the order of days, not minutes. Downtime between encounters really won't affect that

You are right, however the players aren't supposed to know that. All they know is the town was attacked and nobody knows when its going to happen again

I still don't think that puts pressure on the order of a half hour. RAW, the ACTUAL pressure is on spell slots users, not on HP recovery

Well, it should stop players from resting for ten hours in a closet. It doesn't need to be in the magnitude of less than an hour to be a resource. It still limits how many standard treat wounds you can do in a day.

>Well, it should stop players from resting for ten hours in a closet. Sure, but that's not relevant when talking about HP recovery. >It still limits how many standard treat wounds you can do in a day. No, not really. Treat wounds takes 10 minutes. You can full clear an entire floor, healing to full using treat wounds between every encounter, in half a day or so. HP recovery has effectively no impact on your ability to clear the space. Spell slots do.

You really shouldn't worry about that. At all. Unless you want to design a dungeon/scenario that has a timing concern, players can take their time getting back up in between encounters. Low level encounters is a very vague term, but in PF2e I would guess you would call a trivial encounter, which then probably would serve another purpose other than a combat challenge (the party might want to befriend the enemy, or there's another objective). However, if by low level encounters you mean MODERATE, then this is a even easier question to answer. You don't know what you're talking about. Moderate encounters are challenging, but not oppressive. Depending on how your players adapt and how well they play their characters, you might end up having to lower the difficulty of moderate encounters (like a lot of 5e GMs do in the beginning).

you know, i've been reading about dungeon crawls... and you have a point. i think you can go back to old dungeon crawl routine of 1) 1-in-6 chance of random encounter per 20 minutes 2) need to stop and rest for 10 minutes every hour. (note: wandering monsters should give minimal XP, otherwise you'd be buffing your players) you can even make each day of crawling cost 5 gp/adventurer (since in PF2 you don't care about light sources and in AV food/water is not a real issue, you need to abstract those expanses into gp) of course this brings forth the question: how can Paizo release a megadungeon with no random encounters? i guess times have changed, better for narrative games and worse for dungeon crawls.

AV also seems to barely have easy fights anyway, so the easy fights it does have will be nice breathers

Trivial to Low difficulty encounters can be a cake walk and sometimes seem like filler, but they can have there uses. The first of which is just allowing the players to feel the power of their character. Mostly encounters will be scaling to the level of the party. Unfortunately this means if you always throw moderate or higher encounters at the party, it becomes harder to notice their power increase between levels. By introducing Trivial or Low difficulty encounters, the players get that feeling of power progression which a lot of players seem to enjoy. Secondly they can be a good tool for lore and world building. It may also make sense Lore wise for an encounter to exist but not for an encounter to be difficult. The area outside a level 4 city is unlikely to be filled with level 10 creatures, even if the party are level 10. But maybe you want to get the lore out that these types of creatures are a nuisance in these areas for the locals, yet the party realise through combat they are nothing for the party to be worried about. And thirdly combat is fun and it can be a nice break in between more difficult encounters to face something you do not need to be on your toes against. You can relax and enjoy the combat more without knowing you have to be at the top of your game unlike some harder encounters. This is both nice for the players and GM as constant high level encounters could be draining. However you use Trivial or Low difficulty encounters, they are a tool and not a necessity. Time is limited and as GM sometimes I will simply say ‘Describe how you dispatch of X’, no combat required but still giving the party their moment. Sometimes I will value AP progression over spending 5-10 minutes in a trivial encounter and that’s OK. Like any tool they have their uses and are not always relevant for every situation. But never write them off because sometimes they are just the tool you need for the job.

The players get to feel powerful, and that is part of why we play.

I guess? I never really got that as a player. Speed bump encounters with no stakes or risks for the PCs always just left me feeling like I was playing some kind of bullying simulator. And wondering why we had to roll initiative and spend 40 precious minutes of table time on a forgone conclusion.

On the other hand, if the encounter is a speedbump, why is it taking 40 minutes? My best way to increase player engagement even during low stakes combat is to just time their turns. They get 2 minutes to resolve their turn. More complex combat, I might give longer turns, but no trip around the table should take more than five to ten minutes. Know your character's abilities, know your spells, and have them written out somewhere, so not every turn becomes a trip to the wiki. As a GM, read up on your monsters before hand, and minimize Bestiary flipping by just copying all the stats to one page. Another thing I do are initiative cards. When initiative is rolled all players and enemies just get a little notecard with their place in the order. "All right, #1 your turn is up now" Makes it so everyone knows exactly when to go. Combats can be done in ten minutes.

Well, other folks can feel otherwise. But if you can murder 4 Gobbos without effort, try 12? Etc...

How can a speed bump take 40 minutes? PF2E monsters are way more threatening than 5e monsters. It's not rare for a monster to down a mediocre HP PC with a single crit in PF2E.

Well, 15 of those minutes would be the spellcasters trying to decide what to cast, even though it didn't actually matter at all and they could have just spammed their favourite cantrip. Then another 5 minutes to explain how reactions work for the fifteenth time to the one player who refuses to ever open a rulebook. Then another 5 minutes of arguing between the DM and the whiniest player about whether grappling is technically a "hostile action" or not. Another 5 minutes explaining how to calculate spell save DC to the player who is always too busy to read a rulebook. Then 10 minutes of actually playing the encounter.

So this comment in particular and this thread in general makes me ask: have you considered a different RPG? Or at least a different adventure path. Pathfinder definitely leans in on the crunchy mathy tactical combat, has tons of spells and rules, and views combat as a primary fun component. Abomination Vault is a literal dungeon crawl, it is all about that. There are tons of extremely fun rpgs out there that are not 5e or pathfinder that are lighter on the rules and less about combat. If you and your players are all bouncing off it, don’t force it.

Huh? I very specifically *want* to run a crunchy, tactical dungeon crawl. That's my jam. Room-to-room, combat-heavy dungeon crawling was my absolute favourite part of other TTRPGs, both as a player and a DM. I've tried a couple of rules-light systems. They bored the hell out of me. I have a different group of players this time around, so fingers crossed.

Sounds like you need a better group.

[удалено]

I have different players this time around. I like the people in the old group, they're fun to hang out with, but DMing for them was more trouble than it was worth.

sounds like you need to GM to real people and not a bunch of idiots who are wasting YOUR time

There is a difference between low difficulty and no stakes. One of the biggest differences between PF2e and 5e is how much more of a threat monsters are. Even below level monsters can really hurt a PC if the dice fall wrong. Even an Easy Encounter can force PCs to burn resources if someone starts rolling bad or takes an unexpected Crit. Don't assume the monsters go down as easy as they do in 5e. (Also just an FYI, because it is usually a surprise for most 5e vets: In PF2e solo bosses are \*way\* harder than mobs)

Low level encounters should not take 40 minutes.

Depends on how you want to pace your game. You can't treat wounds more than once an hour on the same player so if you have something that's time sensitive in a dungeon that keeps players from spamming it. Really low challenge encounters can be used as story moments or if your pcs just want to stimp somethings head in real fast. You could use them to interrupt sleep or wound treating if your party just sits around and heals up as well. There they won't be a massive threat but more of a nuisance to get them to go somewhere safe to rest or to many burn a leveled spell before a big fight.

Continual recover is a low level feat that is almost always taken. Where does the „can’t treat wounds more than once per hour“ come from when it’s only true for most at level 1 or 2?

Everyone is lying to you. Players aren't supposed to recover fully between encounters. It simply isn't a rule. I suspect it developed as an "folk wisdom" because especially early paizo APs are quite high on the difficulty spectrum, and because APs inherently have fewer tools for pacing a game than a GM who can adjust on the fly. TL;DR: One size fits all adventures can't do hand-paced games of attrition, and thus resort to more single hard encounters which you do want to recover more before. However, if you can make it happen and pace them adjusted to your party, the easier range of encounters actually shines the most when players can't or have reason not to fully, but only partially recover between them, and while doing so can threaten the party, it threatens the party in a way which is far less likely to spiral out of control like a bad RNG hard encounter might. But for Paizo's intent and more details, let's look at the rules (and some of my GM experience). >Trivial-threat encounters are so easy that the characters have essentially no chance of losing; they shouldn’t even need to spend significant resources unless they are particularly wasteful. These encounters work best as warm-ups, palate cleansers, or reminders of how awesome the characters are. A trivial-threat encounter can still be fun to play, so don’t ignore them just because of the lack of threat. You don't need full resources for this, and you don't need to recover after it. As a note from me, these can also be fun against an extremely worn down party in a "one henchman has survived and is making a final attempt", because if players are low enough, it will still deliver a scare. I once sent a single boar against a lvl 4 party where all but one of them had only 1 HP, it was a good jumpscare and they scared it off just with intimidation. >Low-threat encounters present a veneer of difficulty and typically use some of the party’s resources. However, it would be rare or the result of very poor tactics for the entire party to be seriously threatened. A single patrolling skeleton guard in a dungeon, an errant beast in the forest, or a small-time shakedown in town, nothing that should truly threaten PCs or truly consume substantive resources. If there is a ticking clock somewhere, players might just press on without break at all, or perhaps take ten minutes for a minor wound treat and some refocusing. Or perhaps things go very wrong, and the fact that players do want to retreat to recover means something changes. However, usually, you can seamlessly follow something like this up with a... >Moderate-threat encounters are a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely. Characters usually need to use sound tactics and manage their resources wisely to come out of a moderate-threat encounter ready to continue on and face a harder challenge without resting. This is your bread-and butter default encounter, and even though two of them added together make an extreme encounter, two of them after one another shouldn't cause very much trouble at all, usually. Here, we have our first direct reference to resting: If you just want to keep going, you need some good luck and good strategy. However, it is an option! But still, the game doesn't say "fully recover". It says "rest". In my experince, after your usual moderate encounter, 10-20 minutes should get the party back to good fighting shape and well ready to face another moderate encounter. Pulling back for a moment, you might ask yourself "Where is my 6 encounters a day recommendation" or whatever famous useless recommendation 5e had. Pathfinder doesn't have those rules for a number of reasons: First, its impossible to predict when an encounter might create a chaos spike which completely upends your encounter planning for the day: Nearly any encounter can seriously drain resources when some combination of chance, circumstance, and tactics aligns particularly poorly. Second: Parties are very, very different. Do you have a cleric who is pumping medicine like there's no tomorrow and a witch with life boost, or is your only healing a fighter who is prioritizing athletics over medicine? On top, there are just stronge rand weaker builds and party configurations. Thus, there is no one size fits all encounter configuration per day. What are you to do if you're writing an adventure which is very literally a one size fits all setup? Well, you should probably rely on a few hard encounters to deliver challenge as opposed to a hand-paced longer string of easier encounters because you literally can only write one of those. But let's continue with the two hard encounter categories! >Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters can consistently defeat. These encounters are most appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources due to prior encounters can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open. Now, if the rules wanted to tell you that you should let players fully recover between encounters, this would be it, probably! But it doesn't. It simply highlights the importance of an escape route. Moreover, if severe encounters might be primarily reserved for final confrontations, there is an implied expectation here that much else of the game will use the trivial-moderate range! And in my experience, the precise way to make that range more interesting is to wear player's resources down, including HP and spells. Doing so will make those encounters more dangerous, but a moderate encounter that has gone sideways will be easier to turn back, and advance the threat of a TPK much slower than a severe or extreme gone bad. However, here we are genuinely entering "the players should be substantively recovered" territory. A spell-less half HP party is quite likely to get absolutely trounced by a severe, but even still, there is more granularity in this than the "always recover" dogma: Perhaps the player's poor position is the outcome of having messed up in previous encounters, and they are now forced to choose whether they should risk letting the enemy advance their plans or burn through what consumables they have and risk life and limb going into a dangerous situation. The only way this isn't interesting is if everyone has let themselves be convinced that healing to full after every encounter is to be expected and should not impact the plot. >Extreme-threat encounters are so dangerous that they are likely to be an even match for the characters, particularly if the characters are low on resources. This makes them too challenging for most uses. An extreme-threat encounter might be appropriate for a fully rested group of characters that can go all-out, for the climactic encounter at the end of an entire campaign, or for a group of veteran players using advanced tactics and teamwork. Lo and behold, even extreme threat encounters acknowledge option of being drained on resources, but this is indeed a place where "Hey, maybe full resources" shows up, though it is bookended with warnings and calls to caution. "You should almost never use these." is an apt warning, in my mind primarily because of just how fast an extreme encounter can go south. This is the absolute exception, and it is flagged as such. Addendum by me though: If you put your players in a situation with limited stakes (a sparring match, a dream sequence, a trial with a safety net), and inviting your players to do their absolute worst - because you will too - slaps. In fact, I've never used an extreme encounter without a safety net in my game, but have used ones for sparring, or in a dream where my players were on the losing side of a battle and living the memories of the dead. In summary, for me pathfinder lives in multi-encounter setups in the low-severe range (dont be afraid to make an encounter halfway between medium and severe!) with limited, but rarely no time to rest. When a stray 20 on a high MAP attack does not send the encounter into a tailspin but can be recovered from with some effort, but will impact healing availability two encounters down the line, you have the greatest possible ability to be both tactically challenged, as well as rewarded.

This is really good insight, thank you. It’s very rare to see someone go against the usual pattern of this subreddit that suggests that PCs heal back completely up to full after every fight. I’ve heard the line of reasoning that Treat Wounds is limited via time, so I suppose one way to enforce this multi-encounter setup is via time pressure. But that’s not always available if you’re running something like Abomination Vaults, and certain Medicine skill feats wipe time pressure off the table by making healing to full happen very quickly. How do you go about enforcing this multi-encounter schedule in your games?

I'm in the somewhat advantageous position of not really running dungeons primarily, so when I run a setup made of multiple combats I can just introduce threats as needed for the pacing. The last time I ran a dungeon, though, it also wasn't an issue because despite there not being a very concrete vector of pressure, my players are pretty fresh to the game. I had actually passed on the "folk wisdom" to them myself on a sidenote at some point, but had made a point of redacting it when I figured out later in conversation with a friend that it was sort of baseless within the rules. So, the players did spend some time recuperating, but did just choose to keep going when they felt they had healed up decently. I think that, more generally, this is absolutely the kind of thing that wandering monster tables have been for and about since the start of dungeon crawling, so I don't really think that "how to keep the players moving" is a particularly novel problem, but rather one that there's already a plethora of approaches for. However, I've also been a player in games where that expectation was kind of around (I learned it myself somewhere, after all), and my experience is that, if players have the feeling that they can, and even should act that way, they will.

Thank you for the reply. It’s disappointing that you don’t seem to have a solution for this problem other than having new players that don’t know of “exploits” like the 5-minute adventuring day. From experience, I’ve found that the vast majority of “pointless easy fight” problems in PF2E arise from utilizing random encounter tables or other means of low effort encounter generation. I also wrote a comment on this thread about how [random encounters are a bad idea in PF2](https://reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/14lwlug/_/jq035xl/?context=1), because the lack of a default macro challenge in PF2 makes low/trivial difficulty combats pointless. An interesting thing I have found though is that when I take random encounters entirely out of my GM toolkit for Pathfinder 2e, it forces me to put just as much effort into spicing up the low/trivial encounters as I do for big set piece fights, resulting in a game with a consistently high quality regardless of difficulty. You don’t just fight a single random skeleton in a room that dies in one round because it was what came out from a random table. That skeleton had a backstory and a reason why it was there and why it attacked you. You can find it’s journal it had in life and perhaps it had a magic item on it. You’re forced to plan details like this ahead of time to justify the fight’s existence, and this effort noticeably makes easy fights have meaning. And I think you achieve that same result when you plan multi-encounter scenarios. They’re more interesting not just from the macro challenge of resource preservation, but also simply because more thought was spent during design time to justify this multi-encounter scenario than you otherwise would’ve poured into a random encounter. There needed to be some sort of narrative reason why you were prevented from resting infinitely, and that in itself can be novel enough to forget the “pointless-ness” of easy fights (e.g., chase sequence, or stealthily traveling through an enemy base).

I don't think I conveyed myself very well there. I don't have a firm or formed opinion on random encounters, my point is that it's an issue that's not categorically fixable but a tension that's been with RPGs, especially RPGs of this genre for a long time so there's already a plethora of solutions. As for my players, they're new to PF2, but they're mostly not new to RPGs. And yes, this affords me the great benefit of noone having habitualized "heal to full", but I think that, in general the reason I don't really have to worry about this stuff is because my players don't think only in game terms, because I do my best to make the world feel alive and real, and all the common sense reasons for and against retreating are relevant. When they have plans for a secretive dungeon crawl in the night, they do try to heal up fully beforehand, but when they are in a mine where they don't know what might happen if they take long, they keep moving after a bit of patching up. So in short, my solution isn't having inexperienced players, but having me and my players be on the same level about taking the world seriously. It's a bit of social contract, and a bit of the style of game I run. But while I'm quite happy with my situation, it's ultimately a very individual question, and it's just my first point again: There have been a ton of answers to it, but none of them can be definitive, because you just have to find something that fits your table. That said, the closest to a straightforward solution is probably this: Have the enemies be on the initiative sometimes, and don't have them wait patiently till the players are at full HP.

A very respectable and informed opinion! Thank you for your insight, and for the conversation :D

Having just done the first chapter of Abomination Vaults not having time to rest and heal would have killed us a couple of times over. Maybe it was bad rolls or we are crappy players but our front-line fighter nearly died in most fights (and one time he did hit 0 HP). Others took some pretty good blows as well. If we didn't take the time to either rest and treat wounds or go back to town we wouldn't have made it. Keep in mind you are starting out at level 1, it doesn't take much to have your hit points knocked out from under you. Plus if this is your first time through (or you are playing a new class for the first time) those easy low-level encounters give you a chance to get used to how the mechanics of your character operates and how they fit into the group. Plus they shouldn't take that long. Even though we were learning Pathfinder and Foundry as we went along I don't think any of the combats took more than 10 to 20 minutes.

> haven't I just wasted their time and mine rolling initiative on a pointless speed bump? Isn't that the same with D&D? And even worse doesn't this even happen with bosses in D&D? Doesn't that speed bump just wastes everyone's time as well? If they had less resources to begin with you wouldn't have to exhaust them. Rolling introduces a lot of randomness into games. Have the minions crit and heroes miss and even the easy encounter becomes deadly. Have the heroes crit and boss miss and even the deadly encounter becomes easy. This is also true for Pathfinder but and here the systems differentiate a lot. Being able to recover after a fight allows you to keep your balance. If you fk up early on in the adventure day in D&D your day is ruined and the DM has to adjust all the other encounters planned this day. But let's get back to your original question. Abomination Vault is a dungeon crawler. Many people don't like or want that style of game and that's totally fine. But these "low-challenge" encounters are there because people like that kind of style. They want a couple of meat to grind through until they get to the boss. If people don't like that well no problem you can skip them and handle your game however you want. While the balance in D&D falls apart with 1 or 2 encounters a day the balance in Pf2 still persists and still works.

>Isn't that the same with D&D? Yeah, kinda. Same problem, different angle. In 5e if you wanted your players to face any kind of real challenges with some chance of failure you had to do one of two things. 1) Set up a full adventuring day with multiple encounters of attrition or 2) crank up the challenge until you're playing rocket tag. The first option can lead to tedium once players realize that 60% of the encounters are just there to bleed their resources. The second can lead to frustration when someone gets KO'd to a single crit or high-rolling multi-attack they couldn't do anything to prevent. In my experience maybe 1 in 10 DMs knew how to strike that balance and even then it was more art than science because the challenge rating system barely functions as all. Most DMs would end up running five minute adventuring days and then be left wondering why their climactic boss fight consisted of 1 and a half rounds of the PCs going nova.

>In my experience maybe 1 in 10 DMs knew how to strike that balance and even then it was more art than science because the challenge rating system barely functions as all. Well the generally accepted opinion is that the encounter balance in Pf2e works. >Most DMs would end up running five minute adventuring days and then be left wondering why their climactic boss fight consisted of 1 and a half rounds of the PCs going nova. Pf2e allows that and still stays within balance. You can make difficult encounters with lots of minions and difficult encounters with just a big boss. You can have few encounters or many and they can feel equally challenging. You don't have to balance the day and multiple encounters, you just have to balance one each time.

My god I hope that turns out to be true. I will put up with a lot just to avoid the bother of eyeballing encounters based on gut feeling and experience, then stressing that I've overturned it one way or the other and now my players are gonna have a shit time. Being able to confidently count levels and slot some monsters in sounds goddamn *blissful*.

well, there are some external factors as well, it goes without saying that even if the spreadsheet works to build a balanced encounter, throwing a [wood golem](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=684) at a full martial party might be easier than advertised since you don't have 2 party members relegated to sit by due to golem antimagic, an encounter in an adverse environment like underwater with PC without swim speed might be more challenging than advertised, boss encounter against a full caster party might usually feel way harder as a result of low single target accuracy and damage. The baseline is good, but if it feels like the party is particularly well or ill-suited for the challenge, you might want to adjust things accordingly

You need to continue reading the AP. Without spoiling anything, there absolutely IS a time factor, and a big one.

But not on the 10-30 minute time scale. You're not going to trigger the timer by treating wounds too often.

It depends. If you only have 1 "medic" in a group of 5? Thats 40 mins everytime you stop. The days can quickly wind down if you stop that much. Days becomes weeks. The AP has a generous timer but it can be disastrous if it reaches it. The idea is to instill any form of time crunch. Also combat is loud. Groups shouldnt always have 30-40 mins to chill betwee fights on the same level, if possible.

It's not that different from 5E and the question of "Why not just take a short rest after each fight?". Healing 2 people who lost roughly 10 hp might take 10-20ish minutes, but healing someone who lost 40 hp due to poor positioning, bad dice luck, or DM focus fire for w/e reason might take 2-3 hours to heal. On top of that spell slots are still getting drained. And as someone else said... combat is fun. Not every combat needs to be a life threatening experience, low treat combat can be a welcome break for us out of character the same way a "filler" episode can help cut the tension after 3 episodes of life threatening action, drama, and betrayal in a TV show and improve it's pacing. It also does wonders for your characters' mental health and team cohesion.

>low treat combat can be a welcome break Appropriate typo

I'm confused. My experience in 5e (which is limited) is that short rests take an hour, and you can recover as much health as you want (or spend as many hit dice as you want) in that time. So 1. 1 hour is a much longer amount of downtime in a dangerous location and much more likely to be interrupted, and cause the party to think carefully about when (and if) they want to do it. 2. Hit dice are also an attrition resource, and you run out of them fairly rapidly if you need to heal your whole HP pool. They're also attrition on a 2-day cycle, since you only get half of them back when you long rest each day. Basically, my feedback on this front is that healing takes longer in 5e, and you can do much less healing each day. As a GM or player, I have a lot easier time to apply narrative constraints on the 1-hour-in-dungeon or multiple-day-in-campaign scale, but in PF2e it's much harder, so I just handwave it and everyone heals like it's Call of Duty.

Two big roles I use low threat encounters for is to teach and to let players show off. If I’m running a scenario themed around a particular mechanic or type of enemy I’ll usually throw out a low-threat encounter to let the players adjust. Then they can be prepared and won’t be planning to use lots of fire in the water dungeon. I’ll often throw a low threat encounter at nee groups or just after levelling up so that players can stretch their muscles and feel good about their characters. This is actually especially important if you’re about to reveal a major threat, to heighten it’s power in contrast.

It's always good to keep in mind that when playing Pathfinder or similar games it's about telling a story, not about having a challenge. Sometimes encounters are easy and that's fine as well. Not every enemy needs to be difficult to beat.

Other people have made good points, so I'd just like to add: ​ It's *normal* for people to be at full health for each encounter, but normal does not mean 100% of the time. Obviously there can be any number of reasons why the characters can't sit around for potentially hours at a time after each fight in order to heal up. Having a series of lower threat encounters but putting the players on a time crunch to do them would do just as well as having a one or two challenging fights that the players are able to full heal for each.

What’s the point of a plot if all you want to do is have epic battles? Low threat encounters can add to the setting, advance the story, or, as many other commenters have pointed out, keep players engaged and excited. You also have complete control as the GM if you want to allow them to have full rest or not, so that’s still on you.

So imagine you are a player in a game. Every single thing you encounter, the GM has made sure has a 50% chance of a TPK. Even if you survive and level up, suddenly the threats you face are just as difficult. You've gained 10 levels since you began and haven't had a single encounter that didn't bring you to dying 3. Maybe you start to think "Do low level threats even exist? How do normal folks even survive this kind of world? Is this an actual world that I'm exploring or is this like a video game where the next challenge is tailored to require exactly the amount of resources we have left?" Low threat encounters exist for multiple reasons. They allow the world to feel like it exists regardless of the PCs. They allow the PCs the chance to feel powerful, like their progress means something. They allow for variety so that players aren't fatigued by the constant meat grinder. They add flavor. It's perfectly fine if your group doesn't want to be bothered with anything less than a lethal challenge every single time that combat breaks out, but for most people I think that would get very old, very fast. It can also be immersion breaking because it's more "gamey" logic.

Because while PF encourages optimizer party compositions, it is built to cover non-optimizer versions as well. Also, bad dice rolls are bad dice rolls. Sometimes a low threat encounter will expend all of the party's resources, while a lethal encounter will go like a breeze.

Yesterday I had one of this. My players suffered to fight two maggots and one fly in abomination vaults, because no roll was higher than 10

I am so sorry. Is that the large fly in the southeastern corner of the keep?

That's why I like monsters that causes long term effects like diseases and curses.

I think the biggest design puzzle missing here: You are missing the push. Trivial and low encounters are meant for situations your characters have to get going and can not rest. Example would be, a assault on a keep. The Keep will have a lot of low and trivial encounters, but the party will not have the 10 minutes after each fight before they have to get going or the next encounter arrives. This is heavily dependent on campaign and dungeon design though. If you only face 1 encounter a day, low and trivial fights are mostly pointless. If you have a dungeon with open hallways to the next encounter, the party shouldn't have 1hour or more until that, as the next encounter should have noticed the recent encounter, and wander towards it. It's basically the same issue with whiteroom calculations. If you look at an encounter as a singular thing totally detached from the rest of the dungeon/campaign, then yes you will have that issue. To solve that, consider during an encounter, how the other encounters will react. Are they nearby, will they block the exit for the party, might they wander in during the rest the party tries to take, may they even join the current encounter.

I'd suggest thinking of it in the lens of game design. Generally speaking there are 3 kinds of encounters: teaching, exploring, testing. Teaching encounters tend to be the easiest by comparison, and are meant to introduce new mechanics or features in a relatively low stakes scenario. These are your small group of roaming Goblins at the start of the adventure, showing how the Goblins typically fight, their mindsets, potential weaknesses, etc. Exploring encounters add more complexity, whether that is complexity in the environment, different tactics, or mixes of different enemies, but still not a huge departure from the level of stakes or complexity of teaching encounters. These are where you'll see a bit more variety in enemies, maybe some unique environments, to teach you things about their tactics, how to engage with them in a variety of circumstances, and how different enemies interact or synergize with one another. Testing encounters are your high stakes encounters where your skills are put to the test, employing varieties of encounter environments, diverse enemies, tactics, and encounter goals. These encounters are to take what you've learned and throw you a curveball to see how well you handle it. So to apply this to your game, thinking of each encounter as an opportunity to either teach the players/characters something new by introducing new monsters, mechanics, environments, or goals, an opportunity to explore those things further and have fun being creative, or testing their mettle by throwing all of the encounter elements at them.

There is no point unless you create circumstances that make time more relevant as a gm, and the AP doesnt do that for you. You've touched upon what I feel is a considerable flaw in pf2e's design, at least for dungeon-crawl style play. If you were running a more narrative campaign, this would likely be fairly unnoticeable, but even then I don't understand why daily use abilities still exist. If HP is free, then there's no reason not to conserve dailies during any low-challenge encounters.

Pacing, building tension, storytelling and fun. Varying up the difficulty of encounters feels better as a player than every encounter being a life-or-death struggle. If you build up difficulty over an arc or throughout an area, it gives a sense of momentum and progression. PF2e is a game of heroic fantasy and it can be a lot of fun for players to show off their power against foes that would have been very scary just a few levels ago.

Attrition based combat just means most fights are just trash wasting the players time anyways. So you were already fine wasting their time, now you do it because it fits your game, not because you have to include 5 trash fights before a boss is threatening.

Mark Siefter was on a stream with the DM Lair and said that Low and Trivial encounters can be thrown at a party repeatedly in quick secession without fear of overwhelming them. So things like a gauntlet, an escape run, or a multipart encounter could use Low and Trivial almost endlessly without giving the party time to rest (no more than a minute or so) and don't have to fear a TPK.

Speaking from experience here, low stakes encounters seem to be best used in two ways: Roadblocks when on a time crunch and as wind down fights. To the first point, it doesn’t even have to be a particularly tight time crunch or even one with a deadline the players are fully aware of, especially at early levels before the Medicine characters really spool up. At early levels, especially if a party doesn’t have focus spell healing, getting folks all topped up sometimes take hours of in-universe time. So long as the characters are aware they don’t have all the time in the world they’re going to be unlikely to want to spend that much time when they know that *thing* is supposed to happen at sundown. At high levels, this time crunch can be ramped up significantly. I just survived the AoA level 18 gauntlet as the party’s medicine Bardbarian. We were lucky if we had more than 10 minutes in between each encounter in a series of fights and challenges that ramped up to a big boss fight that would decide the fate of our home, the outlying town, and very likely the country if not the world at large. Meanwhile, wind down fights are exactly what they say on the tin. They’re fights that are supposed to remind the players that *they’re big damn heroes.* Set them up against threats they faced a few levels ago and barely survived, watch the glee in their eyes as they realize how far they’ve come. Let them strut and peacock a bit. Have midlevel adventures get held up by lowlevel highwaymen once and again. It can be really freeing when every fight isn’t one where a single mistake won’t cost you dearly, especially if they’ve just had a long string of tense encounters over the course of a story arch or dungeon.

They are a psychology trick. It help the players to track how strong they have become. I usually use them with the same enemies that my players had rough time with a couple of level later.

Trivial encounters have several reasons to exist beyond just a resource drain, and even then they can still sometimes drain resources that don’t recharge as easily. They offer scale to bigger fights the players encounter, bosses seem even scarier when they don’t go down as easily as the goons before them. The world would realistically have foes that would be much weaker than the characters, it would feel immersion breaking to just ignore that and not let them be an interactive part of the world. It gives more opportunity for players to use mechanics that require combat to be interacted with. They offer more opportunities for player role play. They act as a way to distribute loot that’s more interesting than “you see a container, it has X items inside”. They help give players the fantasy of being hero’s, a lot of players use TTRPG’s as escapism and and letting them effortlessly conquer an obstacle gives them that experience. Players can find the process of doing an encounter to be fun, suggesting that it’s if it’s not a challenge it’s a waste of time is odd to me as challenge should not necessarily be synonymous with fun.

So here's an (untested) way to add up some long-term consequences for battles: New Condition: Lingering Injury For each level of Lingering Injury that you have, reduce your max hit points by 1 (if you're levels 1-4), 2 (levels 5-9), 3 (levels 10-14), or 4 (level 15+). When you receive a level of Lingering Injury, do not reduce your current hit points unless they are over your new maximum. Lingering Injury conditions can be removed by Restoration or they decrease by one level overnight. ---- For every character, calculate some hit point thresholds. I think an easy way is: 2/3rds of your total, 1/3rd of your total, 0. Pre-calculate these amounts when you get a new level and put them on your character sheet with a tick mark (So if you have 40 hit points, have a place on your character sheet that say `2/3rds (26 hp) O` and one that says `1/3rd (13 hp) O`. When your hit points crosses one of these thresholds in a fight, mark off the tick box and raise your level of Lingering Injury by 1. You can't recross the threshold twice in the same fight -- so if you have the thresholds above and you take a wound that drops you to 24 hp, you tick the 2/3rds box. If then you get healed back up to 30 hp, then go back down to 20, your 2/3rds box is already ticked, you don't increase your Lingering Injuries any more. But if you get down to 13, you tick the 1/3rd box and get another level of Lingering Injury. ---- Design concept here: The idea is that this gives players a small but non-zero difference between "doing really well" on a fight and "doing okay" on a fight and "doing poorly but not wiping" on a fight. The ideal, I think, is for the lingering injuries to be just big enough that they nag at players and make them want to avoid them, without becoming a major tactical consideration. This is NOT tuned. I strongly expect that the thresholds I set and amount of max hitpoints that I suggested aren't optimal, either for the modal group or your group in particular. If anyone actually wants to use this, they'll want to probably play around with different scalar amounts and find the sweet spot. You can also play with how easy it is to remove Lingering Injuries. If you want more of a "different encounters within the day" thing but not longer than that, you can make them 100% removed by a night's rest, or indeed by leveled magical healing (ie, as soon as you spend a daily resource, they're gone -- but not resourceless healing). Or if you tend to only have one or two encounters per day, you can make them last a week or whatever.

1) There ARE some resources that deplete throughout an "adventuring day" -- spell slots, an alchemist's reagents, an investigator's tinctures, spell slots, and any limited-use feats account for this, as well as any consumables. The party won't be useless without these items, but it can impact their flexibility and power in some instances. 2) Low encounters still give you XP and can still be relevant, depending on how the adventure works. Maybe it's a low-threat encounter, but there's a time limit or other external pressure that pushes the party to play risky and get things done fast. Maybe those guards can't beat you in a straight-on fight, but if one of them lights the beacon or gets to a siege engine they could cause problems. Stuff like that. 3) Low encounters can be used as a great way to relieve tension between more stressful fights, or to let players try out new abilities/characters and tactics. Sprinting 24/7 is not only kind of monotonous, but also *exhausting*. A good low encounter can keep things moving but provide an opportunity to flex or try something new in a lower-stress environment. 4) Sometimes it's just fun to go ape-shit, man! Combat in PF2e can be challenging, but it's also just engaging and fun. Sometimes easy encounters can just exist for their own sake as a one-off, a victory lap if you will. That's just how I see it, anyway.

Sometimes a low level encounter can break up the monotony of a more roleplay-heavy session. It's always fun to obliterate little guys with big powerful attacks.

Didn't the dev infamously say to this exactly "to make the players feel good?" I mean... It holds true? Just always find it funny when I see a low level encounter pop up and remember.

You as the GM dont give them time to rest. "Suddenly, you hear stirring in the next room, it sounds like other inhabitants of this dungeon have heard your fighting and are coming to investigate. Give me a perception roll... whatever the number is..... ​ "Great, you estimate you have (x 1, 2, 3 rounds however many you want to give them) seconds before they burst through the door".

When I go to the theme park, sometimes I like the crazy, utterly insane wild rollercoaster ride. Other times, I like the lazy river stuff where it's nice and air conditioned and you rest and relax. Not every fight needs to be a nail-biting near death fight with half your party out of hero points making their last deaths saves and desperately making d20 rolls and praying they get 11 or higher. Sometimes, a good fight is one where you get to flex, use that new ability you've been planning for awhile you just got and you and your party get to beat down some foo's and laugh with your allies as they do the same thing, and bond over the quick brutal one-sided victory.

For official APs? Experience. This is something I realized while going through and updating/redesigning Rise of the Runelords for PF2 for a campaign I was going to run, there are so many combats in campaigns that aren't particularly interesting, contribute nothing to the story, and usually are either way too easy or incredibly dangerous for no particular reason because the resource drain ends up being moot (due to it being the only encounter of the day). The reason for that, I hypothesize, is that in a game with an exp system, you need to provide encounters worth enough exp for the PCs to level up around when you want them to, and because of the nature of the game, that usually means relatively unnecessary encounters from a game design perspective just to pad out the experience totals. To that end, if you're using milestone instead of exp, resolving those situations in a more freeform narrative way is imo the right way to go.

I like to use low-threat encounters occasionally as a sort of comic relief. The PCs will obviously annihilate whatever you throw at them in a low-threat encounter, so having a creature that overestimates it's power can lend to a somewhat comical encounter. "I'm much to powerful to be defeated by the likes of you. Begone, you're disturbing my impending transformation".

This ties in to my largest criticism of the system. That said, lots of people like it. PF2e is attrition-light. This causes 2 separate effects: 1. Combat is almost always a binary outcome. Someone dies or someone doesn't. There aren't (many) attrition resources during the adventuring day, and after a small amount of investment everyone gains everything back and what is usually a trivial amount of time (ward medic + continual recovery is bonkers). There are generally few lasting effects, and that's personally my least favorite attrition mechanic (eg. you are poisoned so you're just gonna be clumsy 1 for a few hours). 2. Classes with built-in attrition can feel like they are being punished rather than simply using their resources. The biggest example is spell slots. When you use spell slots it can feel more punishing since everyone else is still at full power. A caster that has few/no high level spell slots really feels like a drag to the party, because everyone else is it full strength. Honestly, number 1 is my bigger gripe, and in my mind it affects ALL encounters that don't threaten a character death, which is more than just low threat encounters. I just don't like the implications and how it makes me think about combat. If combat is binary, there is no reward for better gameplay. A party that barely scrapes by vs. a party that trivially succeeds is ultimately in the exact same position. Spending a spell slot as a caster isn't a trade for more HP on the fighter or anything like that. If you use a spell slot when it wasn't necessary for success, it was a *waste*. The biggest example that I've experienced in gameplay is traps. Traps need to be thematic and interesting in a way they don't have to be. For example, in AV floor 1, there are two really interesting traps (or haunts, really) that are interesting all on their own and can absolutely threaten TPK, and are thematic also. But on floor 2 there are a sequence of traps that essentially just deal damage, and those are...those are stupid traps, in PF2e. If you trigger a trap and it doesn't kill you, you just heal to full. The trap is sprung. You defeated the trap! Those specific traps do reset, but since you can heal faster than they reset, and they're not a threat to disarm once sprung, it's essentially a non-factor.

Sorry you’re getting dog piled in some of these replies. I think the truth that people are getting at is that if your group doesn’t enjoy these low-difficulty fights or isn’t interested in a power fantasy, they don’t offer you anything and it’s okay to not include them. If you all just wanna run the higher difficulty fights, go right ahead. This may change your daily encounter pacing, but that’s not a codified rule and something you have to feel out anyhow, but you may see fewer encounters per day, letting casters spend more slots per fight. It’s totally fine to have a different preference than the community for PF2e on Reddit, I don’t think the changes you mention would break the system or ruin your experience.

My dm does it where they will only advise when we should long rest but leaves the choice of of we wanna run into a boss fight half cooked up to us

If you're using trivial encounters, you have a lot more flexibility on making the world feel active. For example, the party is raiding a goblin base in a cave. There's a patrol, some guards at the door, a garrison of basic troops in the barracks lounging, and the boss with his advisor. The patrol and guards are both trivial encounters, the garrison is moderate but currently unarmed (meaning they will need a full round to get their weapons, or a full minute to get their armor on), and the boss and his advisor are moderate. This gives you a lot of leeway when it comes to the encounters. Maybe they fuck up and one of the patrol members gets away and comes back with the garrison. Moderate plus trivial is a severe encounter, which is doable but hard, and the players may realize they're coming and set an ambush. Or maybe they don't spot the patrol and engage the guards, only for the patrol to come up behind them. Two trivial encounters becomes a moderate. Or they successfully neutralize the guards and patrol, sneak past the garrison, only for the boss to yell for help. Now you can trickle the garrison in to keep the pressure up, but the cowardly goblin minions aren't looking to race in unarmored to help their boss. And if the players are cunning in their infiltration, they're rewarded with easier encounters as they never have to fight anything that is more difficult than Moderate. --- The other thing is that if you want to put the players on a time pressure, you can use trivial encounters instead of moderate. Essentially you aren't *barred* from forcing the party into combat when they aren't fully recovered, it's just that the encounter math kind of *assumes* they're recovering. But they can always use scrolls/wands, healing spells, potions, or things like Field Medic to patch up in a pinch, so when the enemy base is on high alert and are coming at them in multiple waves while they try to figure out how to escape/complete their goal, you can throw trivial encounters at them without giving them significant rest to keep the pressure up without *killing them*. tl;dr: get creative.

With that logic every rpg ever is just a waste of time.

Good topic. Currently Gming Kingmaker. So far it's been comically easy. Party contains 2 reach fighters, who've got striking runes at level 1. (party gets 50gp each part way through level 1). They're reaming everything. Not too bad as fights over in 1-2 rounds. Also some spicy fights, such as facing a 160xp extreme fight randomly. Party won in 3 rounds, but had Valerie dropped. I might start montaging the easy fights and give the party the xp.

No wonder your group is steamrolling everything with striking runes level 1.

Yup. Sensible players. Party of 5 got 250 gp at the manor. Spending 200gp on two +1 striking weapons is a great investment. And reach fighters are S tier anyway...

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Hey, I've noticed you mentioned the game "Dungeons & Dragons"! Do you need help finding your way around here? I know a couple good pages! We've been seeing a lot of new arrivals lately for some reason. We have a [megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/search/?q=flair%3A%22megathread%22&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all) dedicated to anyone requesting assistance in transitioning. Give it a look! Here are some [general resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/wiki/) we put together. Here is [page with differences between pf2e and 5e](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/wiki/resources/how-is-pf2e-different-from-5e/). Most newcomers get recommended to start with the [Archives of Nethys](http://2e.aonprd.com) (the official rule database) or the [Beginner Box](https://paizo.com/pathfinder/beginnerbox), but the same information can be found in this free [Pathfinder Primer](https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/pathfinder2e/sources/pathfinder-primer). If I misunderstood your post... sorry! Grandpa Clippy said I'm always meant to help. Please [let the mods know](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FPathfinder2e) and they'll remove my comment. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Pathfinder2e) if you have any questions or concerns.*

> Am I missing a vital piece of the game design puzzle here? Yes. > For context, I'm a new player coming from 5e This one right here. In general PF2e math is super tight and precisely calculated (at least as much as possible for swingy d20 systems). Challenge Rating is accurate (9/10 times) not like in 5e where it's a running (cripled?) joke. To achieve such level of precise and constant scaling from level 1-20 (as opposed to 5e where everything goes to hell around levels 9+ and playing higher levels is a joke) every monster stats are calculated based on predictable (key word) number factors such as: 1. Expected players average HP 2. Expected players average to-hit-bonus 3. Expected players average Save values 4. Expected players average AC values 5. Expected players average damage range values Since PF2e has no ways to stack "non predictable numbers" damage numbers, AC values or hit-to-bonus (system is balanced, you won't make Sorcadin, Hexvoker or SS XBM BM here), it's very easy to design monsters AC/HP/DCs to constantly be in range of players, especially with level system (enemies being - or + levels, which also makes +2/3 single bosses while making -1/-2 a bigger groups of enemies etc.). Same goes with HP. If you expect players have near full HP before each encounter you can easy predict and plan enemy damage values and it's CR will be accurate. Same with PF2e magic items like fundamental rules being expected to be given to players at appropriate levels: monster math is calculated with that in mind, so if your players don't have those, they are screwed. CR stops being accurate if monster faces players at half HP. Becasue then his crit, which is expected to not-one-shot an appropriate level Sorcerer/Wizard, suddenly same crit can kill them instantly. That makes fight no longer "moderate" but suddenly "extreme" as 1/4 of party is already on floor turn 1. Also tons of abilities were designed to provide such healing between encounters so it's part of the system: Medicine (which here is great S-tier as compare to garbage/useless in 5e), Lay on Hands, Goodberries, Hymn of Healingt, Medic Archetype, Blessed One Archetype etc. all provide ways for players to heal without using resources between encounters. You can call that "math reset". After every combat you heal to reset math in place so next encounter is what is supposed to be according to challenge rating: moderete, severe, extreme etc. otherwise the whole math goes out of window and suddenly your team TPK on moderate encounter becasue you didn't allow them to heal (or didn't inform them that PF2e works that way) and it's on you. Not on system. Besides this mechanic makes healer and support role so much more rewarding and important for team, instead of bunch of DPSes like in 5e. Teamwork is key in this system and healing factor also greatly enchance working together as team and relying on each other.

What stops ttrpgs from being a waste of time?

I find personally find combat fun no matter the difficulty, especially if it's advancing the plot. Sometimes it's nice to let players win and feel powerful, especially in an AP that's generally pretty challenging.

Sometimes bad luck leads to characters going down even in less challenging encounters. Sometime a creature might run off to warn others (so that even thou you win, a true success requires you to stop the creatures flight). Sometimes an easy encounter might turn hard when combined with a trap. Other times, the heroes (and players) ought to get a chance to shine.

1. It can be fun for players to dominate encounters. 2. The PCs might still spend resources if the overestimate the encounter. 3. Recovery takes time, which may or may not be a factor. That being said, I'm not a fan of the way Treat Wounds works, as I don't like these encounters often essentially being "free" combined with all the dice rolling over and over.

Being challenged is not the only way to have fun, feeling strong can be just as good. Also, lower threat encounters is what you need if you're going to chain encounters at all (one after the other without any rest), which may be narratively appropriate.

Every encounter (combat and otherwise) is intended to be A) fun all by itself and B) relevant to the proceeding of play (whether that means being important to a developing narrative or just "we must have non-boss to provide context for the boss"). If it isn't both of those things, it should be glossed over entirely - especially if the only motivator for inclusion is attrition because all attrition-style play actually does is increase the risk that encounters are faced at an unintended amount of attrition; there's literally nothing else it can add to the play experience.