Almost had a TPK last night in the Pathfinder 2e beginner box
Almost had a TPK last night in the Pathfinder 2e beginner box
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/631499
So, I've been running the PF2E beginner box, which is like a tutorial adventure, for a group of 5 people (we play as long as at least 3 show up). The players had the option of playing any of the pregen "iconic" characters for Pathfinder. So far, we've had a fighter, witch, monk, swashbuckler, and summoner. Of those, only the witch has any sort of healing, and the witch player couldn't make our session last night.
The players went into this room that is meant to be like an optional miniboss (but there isn't really a way for them to have known that). The miniboss is this fire elemental rat that is supposed to teach you how "persistent damage" works. It's a very tough fight, and the elemental has a lot of defensive options like a cloud of smoke around it. Eventually the rat killed two party members (the swashbuckler and the monk), and one more (the fighter) went unconscious but didn't die. The last player (summoner) got chipped down to like 3 HP but was able to drag the fighter out of the fight to safety.
I think it was a good learning opportunity for the players that you need to be tactical and work together in PF2e, since they basically just all tried to attack the rat in melee. It also shows the value of having support characters in the party.
Going forward we are going to complete the beginner box, the two players who lost their PCs are going to play new pregens (bard and investigator). I'm hoping the players don't get too disillusioned with PF2e because it is very difficult at times.
I'd love to hear other Pathfinder GMs' thoughts. I'm still new, so it's possible I was doing something wrong, but I think I ran that fight the way it's meant to be run.
Is there anyone in the party that is Trained in Medicine? If so, let them find Healer's Tools. The Treat Wounds activity can be used by anyone at least Trained in Medicine with Healer's Tools in the inventory for out-of-combat resourceless healing once per hour per healed character, more often if you take certain skill feats, and in combat (doctor's visitation & combat medic) with some others.
Pathfinder 2e that the party is going in with full HP, balance wise, so granting your party time to heal up between fights and to Refocus is important.
Something that has been frustrating the party throughout the beginner box is that very few of the "iconics" are trained in medicine. Feiya the Witch is, and she comes with Soothe, but none of the other pregens the players chose are trained in medicine. However, I will say that going into the fight with the rat, the players were all at or very nearly full health. The beginner box doesn't have a lot of time pressure, so I've been letting the players go up to Otari to long rest and buy healing stuff whenever they need to.
I've never run the beginner box, but I've done several PF2e APs.
As written, a lot of the encounters are hard. Many many encounters are tpk bait if the player's don't play optimally; without perfection, a bit of bad luck can turn the tide.
I don't like to fudge things mechanically for the players, but I do play the enemies dumb much of the time, especially like, animals. Even then, there's quite a few encounters I've looked over, and applied the 'weak' template to some enemies during my prep.
The balance on PF2e is great, but razor thin at times. This does mean that you should be able to follow the math on enemy level vs party level fairly easily, and see how rough you want the encounters to be.
Also, I'll ditto the other comment, that having someone with the medicine skill is invaluable. I've never used the iconics, but it does seem weird that you said so few have the medicine skill.
I'm never sure how people find this adventure difficult. The first floor was an absolute cakewalk for my players who used the medicine skill after every fight. The second I nerfed to adequated challenge levels for a 3-person party and it actually felt like a game. But as long as the Cleric didn't go mel it also wasn't actually hard.
Yeah. As I mentioned elsewhere, I didn't restrict the characters to the 4 pregens the beginner box recommends (Esrin, Valeros, Merisiel, Kyra). Instead I let them pick whatever class they wanted (although still using the pregen iconics). Unfortunately, only a couple (and almost none of the classes the players picked) start with medicine training, which seems like a bit of an oversight for the iconic pregens. The only player who picked an iconic capable of healing was the one who picked Feiya the Witch, who comes with battle medicine, treat wounds, and soothe. Unfortunately the Witch player missed last night's session, so the players lacked a lot of healing. I have been letting them take very liberal rests and return to the town above to heal up and buy health potions, but I think the bigger killer with the fire rat was simply that they didn't recognize that they could use the water in the environment against it.
My party didn't play the very last three rooms (kobold quarters, the queen and the dragon) because we all had enough of "tutorial" by then, but the rooms that presented my players (Swash/Cleric/Barbarian) any challenge were:
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The Crypt in 1F. I had added one more skeleton and reduced their total HP to 1 to better incentive the slot-hoarding Cleric to cast Heal for once. The Cleric didn't, so I used the opportunity instead to teach them about skill actions (Trip, Grapple, etc). If the skeletons were attacking instead of spamming Trip or Disarm or etc against the Swashbuckler it would have been a hard fight, though.
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The xolgath. I took one xolgath less. It was a challenge because the Cleric had gotten cocky with how easy the previous fights were even without her help at all, and went into meele range. She got downed quickly. That was their only hard fight.
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The fire rat. I had leveled them up beforehand because by now it was seven sessions and they didn't feel like they were progressing. None of them even thought of using water. The swashbuckler (our party's tank) had gotten into some bad ropes being the sole target of the rat's attack, but he had the support of the Cleric so it wasn't a big of a deal.
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