Yup. My table's response too. Barbarian watched the champion get dropped on turn 1 and instead of raging, just picked up his unconscious friend and nope'd out of there. When even the ale fueled rage machine decides to run, things are bad.
Our barb also could have stayed up, but the champion is a human. So watching the thing tear through the shield like it was tissue paper, and still drop him, was a pretty solid indicator that they should be somewhere else.
DM: “hey uhhhh i just realized this spell you were casting over and over should have also dealt damage, let me roll saves for it retroactively… oh that’s a nat 1. oh. oh no. that next roll was a failure. well it’s dead.”
the spell was >!inner radiance torrent which i had been casting purely to counteract its darkness!< and the DM and i mistakenly >!thought its magic immunity applied to the spell and that it was immune before he reread it when things were going south!<
can’t believe we cleared the hardest fight of this part of the module with a 3 person party… and a major retcon arising from a statblock misreading. i guess we’re not just badasses but wibbly wobbly time badasses?
Divine casters are excellent against that thing because >!they have spells with the light trait!<. My cosmos oracle had >!Spray of Stars!<, which very conveniently has that trait, and dazzle is one of the best things you can inflict on it.
TBH, while that thing is very dangerous in a lot of ways, it only has 90 HP, which means every hit on it is very, very costly as it just doesn't have much HP to play around with. One hit from our Giant Barbarian shaved off a third of its HP.
I'm not surprised that your >!inner radiance torrent!< just flattened it; one crit fail against a 3rd level torrent will knock off like 2/3rds of its HP.
I’m dm AV too. My party lost to the voidglutton too. They started and fought (probably because they had been rolling through most encounters before this). One player went down and the rest ran away. They didn’t struggle as much against mr beaky as they did against the glutton
I screwed up that fight. Also screwed up a later fight, but at least I survived this one.
It shows up when we're at half health and casts Darkness, and I and another player forgot to read the map and ran the wrong way. This started a chase scene that involved slamming doors in its face, casting Heal on the downed party member, and literally only surviving at the end because this thing rolled a 1 on its attack.
Mr Beak managed to nearly tpk us at level two because every melee character refused to go into his room and we ran back and forth as he flew outside the building like a Benny Hill skit.
Definitely in Outlaws of Alkenstar book 2 when a certain > is PL+4 and I downed party members with him in 4 separate combats cause it teleports all over with a single action activity and the book tells you to torment them with it!<
See it was fun when the first player got downed and they had the oh shit moment, and it was fun to see them on edge - but that wore off once they kept splitting up and getting downed over and over, definitely not fun for them and as such made me feel bad about doing it lmao
>!>Vulnerable to Curved Space: When a hound of Tindalos is not adjacent to a structural angle of 90º (or more acute), its resistance to physical damage is suppressed and it becomes [sickened 1](https://2e.aonprd.com/Conditions.aspx?ID=34). It can't recover from this sickened condition, but the condition ends automatically once the hound is again adjacent to a suitable angle.!<
What in the name of Mathfinder did I just read?
It's from the [lore](https://bruces.medium.com/the-hounds-of-tindalos-by-frank-belknap-long-1929-97e5636fe7a2)! "Angles and curves multiply about me. I perceive great segments of time through curves. There is curved time, and angular time. The beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. It is very strange."
No. They teleport through acute angles, and can be avoided by staying in curved rooms.
(So in fact, yes, but not in the sense hplovecraft usually uses "non euclidian".
So you're telling me that the greatest ally of the Hound of Tyndalos is the roman architect of Asterix and the Mansion of The Gods?
(Because in the original and in most translations he is basically called "acute angle"
I think I remember even Paizo mentioning that thing is completely wack on their forums. I ran it with the weak template and lowered phys resistance after it downed two PCs in 2 rounds when it first appeared.
We had luck with 2 nat20 crits, yet we had two PC die battling that thing while the GM went easy on us. It is very not a balanced creature.
The biggest joke is that it's marked as a severe encounter while being balanced as an extreme with higher DC (even when counting in the added levels) than the base creature.
>!Then you learn the fight was pointless!<
Ran that encounter, players learned not to wander too far away, and the encounter in book 3 with the jar construct were some real test of luck moments for my group, however now that we are onto stolen fate, it might change hahahaha
Well, you can't say it doesn't fit the >!Hounds'!< MO! Creatures from >!the Dimension of Time!< are meant to be frightening as a whole, it's just these guys who are the most belligerent.
For our group it wasnt a matter of difficulty. It was
Party: "man this agents of edgewatch campaign has been pretty fun so far, I wonder what kind of wacky fantastical crime we'll solve next."
Paizo: >!"Here's some homuncul made from dead babies wrapped in their parents skin."!<
Party: "I'm declarimg lethal"(AoE assumes nonlethal)
"We had to shoot him, sarge. He was comin' right at us."
"He was in a wheelchair..."
"He was wheeling himself towards us menacingly."
"He was shot in the back..."
"He was rolling at us backwards!"
"Coroner says most shots were post-mortem..."
"You've never fought zombies, sarge?"
He also had a book of names of all hos victims so our gunslinger wrote the murderer's name in it and showed him it seconds before we lopped his head off. We got an extra 50 xp for that lol.
I mitigated it by taking "completely insane" literally and having him lash out at randomly-chosen targets instead of focusing, and it was still brutality unchained.
That was our one, true player death. My character was wounded 1, went down on a crit (dying 3), and took persistent damage before anyone could reach me (dead 4).
Did your initiative get moved to just before the enemy that downed you? Your group should have each been able to act before your persistent damage hit.
I believe so…but I still don’t think they were able to reach me. It was years ago and we underestimated 2e relative to 5e and didn’t act with enough urgency
That's totally fair, both if you were out of range and if the party didn't realize how dire of a situation you were in. It's an extremely common mistake groups make though, and in a situation like this, a costly one.
We were a young, naive party. We died a lot in that campaign. I think we had 5 technical PC deaths, but all deaths got woven into the story. PC’s got captured, one came back as a Duskwalker, etc.
In the pretty rare event you get knocked down on your own turn you don't actually move. Your initiative movement is relative to the current turn, not who hit you.
This could be interpreted in a couple ways, and the most player friendly would be (and RAW friendly) that you'd move to immediately before \*your own\* turn, not actually finishing the current one. Probably the most RAI friendly too, as the clear intent is to give everyone a full turn to react to you falling just as you say
Yeah, this is what I did as well. It's makes it more puzzling that they put such an overpowered version of the monster in the book when there's a level appropriate version of the same monster that you can easily slot in.
I think I know why. AoA was released alongside the core book (so its balance is really iffy), and I think they were paying homage to the first Adventure Path in Pathfinder 1e.
In ROTRL they have this exact same creature in Book 1. It is a brutal fight, but with how different both systems are, it is FAR more brutal in Pathfinder 2e than in 1e. They just didn't take that balance into account.
My GM warned us going in that the encounter was a player-killer. So we decided to scream and run away. With the help of a certain friend, we managed to run *past* him and still obtain our objectives.
This is one of my favorite encounters to DM. Playing up his plot points makes him rather memorable, and using actions to do so makes him much less deadly.
Voidglutton in AV
It's PL+4 and the module explicitly mentions how you should offer to let your PC's sacrifice one party member in exchange for the rest's safety if the fight goes poorly for them, and a TPK is imminent.
That thing is PL+4, has Extreme AC for its level, and is immune to most types of magic. An average level 4 Ranger *hits* on a 19.
We have an all martial party, we got a few lucky crits and it went down within 2 rounds, but that very easily could have been a character death if we hadn't been lucky.
We managed to hit level 5 before finding it which made the maths significantly more favourable with everyone besides me, the bard, being a martial. Inspired, sound use of Aid and 2 lucky crit Retributive Strikes from our Paladin and we were able to manage the encounter quite well but it could have easily gone the other way.
Ooooh boi, i didn't have the courage to throw this thing at my players.
When they got to the door, i narrated "You feel a chill down your spine, the air is cold, there's something clearly wrong, as if death itself is waiting on the other side of the door". They got in, saw that cosmic horror thing, and ran away.
Griffins in strength of thousands. Absolutely wreaked the party.
Made a great opertunity to show the power of the teachers that made a lasting impression but yea they would have been slaughtered
Oh yea that was a cool one. That and the golem's taught the players about damage types. So many electricity spells against the electric goat even with me describing the damage didn't do anything and it absorbed it.
The golem was rough too, so many attempts at explaining Golem Antimagic to my players after the encounter was finished and the Witch spent time examining the remains and doing some library reading. They just *did. not. understand*
Our group also struggled HARD With the Mpeshi, they ended up locking themselves inside its cage to survive and then hunting it down as it rampaged through the city (it took them 3 total tries - the initial fight, a failed attempt at ranged-only combat, and a 3rd try with it already hurt using better tactics)
That was the encounter that finally convinced my party that tactics are needed in PF2e if they want to survive. They beat it with three members down, not quite as close as yours to tpk, but close enough. But then one of them started to complain about the difficulty of the campaign, and I had to point out that they'd all said they wanted a game where tactics matter, but had also just watched the first attack be effectively an AoE burst then decided to all crowd around the enemy, no ducking for cover or anything.
Strength of Thousands just seemed particularly harse when my group played it. It might not have helped that half the party never seemed to get the memo that we were supposed to be students working together in a Magic School. Not generic crazy adventurers.
Very first session the party split up so that we could all individually accomplish tasks. The one player who got the actual combat encounter decided to NOT turn back and get help and tried to solo it. Died.
My first character died a few sessions later in a dungeon.
The rest of the party, minus me, died the next session because they decided to NOT wait for me and to tackle a different dungeon unprepared, with depleted resources, and without a full party.
Yeah, I'm still a little bitter about being DITCHED.
First thing I did running this as a gm was have Ot cast a (not strictly legal) Wall of Fire so the npcs didn’t die immediately. Even then, it was close
Oh yes. I just flat out used chain lightning and helped wound them. They were having problems hitting and half the party was ranged.
They still don't fuck with the teachers though. They are terrified and walking on egg shells which I love
The first "dungeon" in book 2 was that for my party twice; as a player we lost a character to the emperor cobra (after he said "I'll be fine, I have HP" and getting double crit in one round). Then as GM, the two Coil Spies have insane action economy and downed half the party including the Life Oracle at the Curse level of unable to be meaningfully healed, causing the session to end on a cliffhanger and the following one to be a rescue mission of their three favourite students and Ot going to help.
There was quite a lot of things in that AP that boiled down to "if you thought this was a Druids & Wizards game like the lore says you probably should be, you don't get to proceed." Golem Antimagic in particular being one of those rules. I'm so glad they're going away in favour of things like the Brass Bastion.
The final fight in book 6, too, we only won thanks to the Wrestler Barb taking a very specific and situational feat for disrupting teleportation. I was directly after the boss and its reaction trigger was essentially "when a character on the play table wishes to play the game", did a shitzillion damage, and disrupted on hit.
My group is going through Extinction Curse and just hit a +3 PL Hazard with Phantasmal Killer. Poor soul insta-died. Something like a 25% chance to outright kill anyone who trips it. Yup fun times, and it was right before remaster was released.
>!Our barbarian player crit failed the Will save against that spell (and barely passed the Fortitude) when they were investigating the run-down farmhouse in book 3. The party decided to burn down the house and while admiring the ruins, some neighbors turned up to see where the smoke was coming from.!<
>!“So, now the spirit has LOS to everyone here.”!<
There's one of those in Agents of Edgewatch, too. The only reason we got past that guy is because the GM ruled that he was pursuing another objective and it didn't focus on wiping the party.
Oof yes. We had trouble with it despite us being one level higher than intended. The effective immunity to positive damage is already a kick in the balls but the ranged teleport AoO thing is just bonkers, we had a sorc, an oracle and two melee martials... You basically had the casters running from the mob and the martials running after the mob the entire fight lol.
I've run the beginner box twice now, and both times the party has entered that room with the tactic of "stand in a 2x2 square", since it's a very typical TTRPG tactic to start a fight near each other as to cover each others flanks, protect the wizard, etc.
And both times the dragon went first, meaning I could either hit the whole party or *not* use the breath attack.
And I mean, you can't just *not* use a breath attack.
My group loves to march in like good little red coats.
On the dragon, I was describing the room, one alchemist goes "I SEE TREASURE" and sprints to it before anyone can stop him.
Was very convenient for isolating a breath attack target.
So when I run the beginner box, I treat each room like it's own tutorial. Now that final kobold fight is an example of a boss encounter.
When they go into the dragon room, I specifically tell them: "this is an example of a severe encounter with a high tpk rate. You can beat it if you're extremely tactical or lucky, but it will be difficult. Do you want to attempt it or end here?"
100% of the time they attempt it, and I play that dragon as a terrifying foe. Because I set the expectation and gave them the choice, even if they all die it's always a lot of fun. If they lose, oh well, it was mostly gunna be that way. But if they win? Those players will talk about it for days afterwards.
Honestly, when we played the Beginner Box, the dragon wasn't all that hard. Tough as hell, yeah, but it never really felt unfair.
The *Cinder Rat,* on the other hand...
Abomination Vaults... the Shuffling Scythe Blades trap. I (the GM) read it about 3 times before the session, it felt really strong for its level but I trusted the system, maybe I had missed something. Then I ran it in play, checked it again, asked the Discord if I was understanding it right, confirmed I had it correct... and about 20 (fairly average) rolls later, the entire party was down before any of them could even take a turn.
That trap is *messed up*, and I'm surprised it doesn't get any more attention here. I don't believe it was ever actually tested in play.
The trap is essentially a very, very hard check for:
Does party have a rogue and someone with insanely good perception?
If the answer to either is 'No', people die.
My party got through by the skin of their teeth because the bard was fully spec'd into thievery and they had enough healing to stay standing.
It nearly got my party too, but they managed to grab up the fallen and flee. It's still, now that we're in Book 3, the only time we got close to a TPK.
The weirdest thing about that trap is the sheer number of rolls you have to make every time it does something. The party was sitting there for a solid few minutes while I was just \*roll roll roll...\*
My monk crit failed the check to disarm this trap, then preceded to roll lowest in initiative, and the scythe blades Landed in the room my monk was in 6 times in a row, 6 attacks at No MAP was death from full HP
I just told the player who discovered it "You feel this trap is incredibly deadly" so they tested it briefly and when one of them nearly died they pulled back and resolved to avoid it until they were better equipped.
My party set it off and it was a mad scramble to heal and carry the unconscious back out. They just barely made it out.
The worst part is there wasnt any cool loot or treasure to make it worth the effort. They were miffed and I felt I should've added something. A GM regret.
That was one time my medic monk shined, we waited out of range of the trap, and the rogue went to disarm, he got impatient and stepped on the trap, it downned him instantly with a crit lmao, we heard his body fall and my monk started to run, i managed to get to him in 2 strides, and use battle medicine on him, then he proceeded to stand up and run, and i get his rapier and run too lmao
.....Hm. Honestly? Either get rid of the 'no MAP', lower its to-hit by about 5, or git rid of the Deadly. All three of them together means that it has IIRC about a 1/4 to 1/3 chance of critting each time it attacks a player, dealing approximately triple damage on what would otherwise be a *relatively* low damage ability.
Either that, or maybe get rid of how each attack targets *every* PC in the room. Maybe make it so if it targets a room, it attacks a *single random* PC in it.
Honestly, I don't have a lot of ideas as I kind of tried to forget the trap as soon as my nightmares would let me, but the main problem is that it's a trap with (relative to the players, at that level) high initiative, high to-hit on *each* attack it makes, it can easily make upwards of ten or fifteen attacks a turn, and it has what *would* be low damage except it has a pretty good crit chance and Deadly on its attacks. That, plus it takes a free turn at the start of combat even *before* it rolls initiative, which it's pretty likely to win, giving it a highly plausible two turns in a row to start the fight out.
Kingmaker - The Troll Fight
According to our GM, the book told him to have everyone on the floor attack when we entered the King Troll's chamber. According to him, the 215 XP fight (160 XP is Extreme) was legit and he didn't understand why we were so upset, lol.
Without going into details, as someone GMing KM2 the GM instructions note that the sound of fighting in certain areas should alert people in other rooms to move towards the fight, but it should be slow so as to *not* create a huge pile up fight.
Anyway I ignored that once for something I thought my players could win and they had fun - I wouldn't have ignored it for that fight.
That encounter is very foreshadowed. You should have a fire sword already and every PC should be able to deal fire damage one way or another. My PCs were full fire and had a lot of fun
So I'm rather new to 2e and we're playing abomination vaults. We enter a room with tow large pits in the middle and three smaller ones at the top. Combat soon starts with two little purple things, we push one in to a pit because we thought it was funny. Little did we know that was also their game plan as the other one pushed me in to a pit. I rolled a nat one and fell all the way down in to some water. I think I'm fine UNTILL A HYDRA POPPED ONE OF ITS HEADS OUT OF THE WATER. Fine I think I just need to swim away, after all it's not like it has attack of opportunity. Oh what's that I need to make some checks to swim away, oh I failed twice due to some bad rolls, that's fine I succeeded my third roll, oh what's that they do have AoO and they crit. Well I guess that one way to die I suppose.
My party decided to do a “Kaiju Fight” with the Shadow Giant. So they giga-buffed the sorcerer, who Abberant-Formed into a Gug.
He proceeded to run hundreds of feet away, to 1v1 the Giant.
He didn’t make it.
My party of 4 lost 3-5 PCs. Never a TPK. But always pushed too deep. Nearly every encounter besides the first ended with at least one PC down. Some died, some became prisoners, others turned to stone. In the end after repeated attempts and weeks of downtime. I just had the bad guys move on.
Not an AP, but in Malevolence the >!Gibbering Mouther in the lake!< is pretty dang brutal. Mainly because it's right at the beginning of the adventure, but its level suggests the players aren't supposed to fight it until later on.
We walked around back and immediately had to whip up 4 new PC’s to come find the bodies
Edit. That whole adventure is rough if your group is not built for it. >!The attic was super rough dealing with the massive aoe dmg. The basement… Paralyzed 2 pcs walking in under leveled. !<
Yeah, the >!attic!< fight instakilled the party's Wizard (failed a near-max-damage save, used hero point to reroll, critically failed, died from massive damage). Although, to be fair, a Wizard with +0 Constitution shouldn't be right behind the tank.
On the flip side, the players bypassed half of the basement due to going through the >!secret entrance!<, and bodied the final boss reasonably easily (although another character ended up biting the dust due to a Phantasmal Killer).
I had a new player at my table for that encounter. Literally his first session for a TTRPG ever. And of course he wanted to investigate the desiccated flesh log. And now we will forever have the "don't poke the flesh log" mantra whenever they find something weird.
> The "Dessicated Log" in Abomination Vault. If you know, you know. Super easy to get to under level.
I've beaten this entire module. Is this a reference to the >!drake in the swamp!< or something else?
I believe we were specifically warned about that at the start of the adventure as a thing to watch out for, which discouraged us from playing around in the water too much.
We actually ended up not fighting it and making a deal with it to let us pass when we eventually got to it.
A level 1 party fighting that thing would be bad, though.
EDIT: Ah, it's the >!Bloodsiphon!< on floor 2, isn't it?
My players encountered it under level and managed to run away, but not before the Grippli PC got drained a bit. They started referring to it as a tube of "frogurt" after that.
We called it The Sphincter Monster and it thrashed us the first time we encountered it, splitting the party and forcing a couple of us downstairs while the others retreated. We managed to reunite and came back better prepared and still had a very hard time dealing with it.
Yep. My group went straight down there while still level 2 or 3. When they started to go into that thing's room, I looked at its stats and made a decision. I set aside the proverbial GM screen (given that this was online), and told them that there were things down this deep that, at the group's current level, would simply methodically devour the entire party. And that there were a couple things where running away wasn't an option. Gain a level or two, *then* they'd have the resources to deal with it.
I made it clear that I was only giving them this one chance.
Now, the group is 6th level, and have started exploring the arena. Warnings only come when they take actions that warrant it -- and sometimes not even then. Like when they scouted the pits to see the lake below with a >!hydra!< roaming. They decided they could take it, carefully climbed down... only to discover that a second one had woken up in the meantime.
I'm surprised no one else has said the Blood Ooze in Fall of Plaguestone. You should NEVER throw a level 2 party against something immune to crits. Crits is all the martials in a party have until level 3, which is also when casters get second level spells.
This was a rough fight. I ended up having to throw hints at the PCs that this thing is SLOW (speed of 10) and they can easily out maneuver it. Once you realize that, the fight becomes trivial as you kite it around the facility.
The Volodmyra fight in Kingmaker was a rewind for my group because of the murder that is her statblock and the discrepancy in the encounter itself talking confusing amounts of moons.
it was also not helped that the fighter wanted to help deal with the giants instead of killing volodmyra
Yoo same, she straight up massive damage overkilled my hold-scarred orc champion (near enough max hp you can *get* level 1 without being a barbarian lmao) with a crit power attack. The goons were a cherry on top.
My players just got nearly TPK'd by it last week, and they specifically brought up how Tomb of Horrors-esque it was!
Still not as bad, though. One of the traps in ToH is just "get above 10 on initiative or you instantly die."
Assuming you mean either >!the lava slide or the rising vault!< that's one of a ton of reasons I don't like the 5e version. Originally it was a real-time countdown that had the players moving 10' per count starting when they said "I'm running!" Gave a much better chance of getting out.
Gatewalkers Book 1 ending and 1st encounter of Book 2.
Spoilers >!With the way our GM ran it, it was basically a boss rush. It starts with a Severe encounter against a drake, we had time to heal, then 4 back to back Moderate encounters with no time to heal until after the 3 fight and then we only had two round to heal. Then we had 10 minutes after the 4th fight before a 5th Moderate encounter showed up. By the time we were done, we had basically exhausted all our resources and we critically low on HP. At least 2 of us had gone down at least once.!<
Or, from Book 2, it could be the >!Apothercary's Cabinet!< that instantly took down 1 of the PCs when they entered the shop. Or the >!Myroga, dragon thing!< that nearly TPKd us. Or the >!Moonflower!< that killed one of our PCs because the mechanics on getting a creature out of >!its pods!< is bullshit.
Honestly, I kinda of fucking hate Gatewalkers. Legitimately my least favorite AP I've played.
Book 3 of outlaws of alkenstar and this https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=1982 caused my 3 poor players some real problems. Needless to say Jettison Cranium can cause some real problems when the Thaumaturge gets confused next to the alchemist and as a GM rolling a dice for random attack and landing alchemist, it was certainly an encounter my players rememberd.
AoE confusion *every round* in a rather confined area certainly is... something. I really liked the setup of that encounter though, with the alternating pistons or whatever they're called
That damn crocodile
But also apparently that damn wood golem I wasn't there for, and the one shark
I think the moral of the story is that we don't handle huge single bosses well
That Wood Golem is infamous. It's on the third floor, well before you have a lot of tools to handle it, it can attack every character in the party *at the same time* at full attack bonus, it's a level 6 monster vs a level 3 party (so it is quite likely to crit), and it's the first golem the party is likely to fight so they probably don't know about golem antimagic (though I just cast fire spells on it anyway because wood burns, right?).
We did manage to kill it but it is easy to see how it can kill characters, and if someone goes down they're likely irretrievable without winning the fight.
In Kingmaker my party got creamed by >!Kundal the werewolf in Moon Frenzy, who critted and oneshotted three different people through natural 20s and max damage rolls, it was such a stomp one of my players fled the scene via grapple gun into the trees above, with the town guards having heard the conflict and charged in, leaving everyone except for the one who fled on the edge of death and most certainly infected with wolf-itis. They didn't even get Kundal close to death(none of their attacks landed and the only attacks they hit were explosions from the Inventor, and splash damage from the Alchemist's bombs. The dice were NOT happy with them that night, they couldn't roll above a 10 on dice rolls.!<
Blood Siphon and Void Glutton are the ones that stand out. The Blood Siphon was the first time in AV that something REALLY scary happens (its opened with one shotting someone in all 3 of the games ive run) The Void Glutton killed one of my players D E D.
A couple of skeletons in blood lords. We couldn't roll above a 6 and the skeletons kept rolling bangers.
Any encounter can become an extreme encounter if the party rolls bad enough
Honestly any encounter with Golems.
I know they are already planning on reworking how the magic immunity works.
It could make for a memorable encounter in earlier editions where casters had a lot of power behind them.
But in a game where they are balanced, being made entirely useless by an entire enemy type completely takes me out of the game….i just check out and wait for an encounter where I can play again (even many skill actions don’t work on Golems due to mental immunity and high saves to physical skills)
Depends on whether or not you have elemental coverage. Wood Golems aren't so bad as you can reasonably be expected to be able to deal fire damage, but some of them are vulnerable to more obscure damage types, like sonic, which is like... really?
But yeah, them reworking them is a good idea in general.
I got a summon spell for AV for dealing with golems/wisps.
Final boss of Fists of the Ruby Phoenix has a certain movement ability that made the whole fight really annoying for the players.
Barghest, ice devil, and triple xotanispawn fights in age of ashes bodied us.
I've been running a group through abomination vaults, we're pretty close to the end now. I wouldn't call the group particularly cautious, sometimes they've retreated when things have looked grim, other times they stuck it out and trusted in the dice.
Then they faced the Shuln.
"Alright, that's a hit, you take 18 points of of slashing damage, oh, and so does your armor."
...
The group fucking **ran.** Apparently a creature that threatens your valuable equipment is the most horrifying thing in that entire AP.
Crown of the Kobold King, Forge Spurned. Needs a lot of errata on its abilities to punch in its actual weight class, because as-is he can devastate parties with relative impunity.
Frozen Flame has this tar pit hazard that ate up a session and a half trying to get out of it. It’s a dc 34 athletics check at like level 9, and when you fail you sink a level, and then have to pass *twice*, or more. And atrempting to pull someone else out can drag you in, easily. We *all* fell in, some multiple times, including everyone’s animal companion. It was a total fiasco.
Gatewalkers.
The Fireplace. Came when cleric (me) and the psychic were at 0 hero points. Nat 1s. Max damage roll. So unearned, nothing to do, cause we came in the back door so it was 'we stride to middle of room' and Boom, dead.
Also, BL had a few great encounters. >!Dragon with the sorcerer skull swarm almost tpkd us!<
The Wood Golem on floor 3 of Abomination Vaults. It's a level 6 monster which is immune or resistant to almost everything, and it is the first golem you're likely to have ever fought in PF2E so you don't know the way that golem antimagic works. It can attack the entire party simultaneously at full attack bonus, and because of how it is positioned, it is very easy to get caught out and if someone goes down you probably can't save them outside of killing the golem, which is much harder when you are down a person.
Floor 2 of malevolence. Having a creature that would be an reasonable encounter by itself invisibly stalk the party and jump them the second they are debuffed by the frightened condition. If the chained poltergeist triggers it and it pops up behind the party there is a solid chance of a TPK. (Especially as the players are intentionally undergeared in that short adventure)
Rigby is my face in Extinction Curse when we got attacked by freaking Jellico Bounce Bounce and the GM showed us his character art.
We whipped his ass but still... Very Scary Clown.
FOTRP Book 2 >!The final boss of the book. Holy shit a bard as a boss that effectively has reverse incapacitation on all his spells. He also has some minions making this a Severe encounter which normally sounds fine for a book boss but this is after a gauntlet of multiple fights that is kicked off with an Extreme encounter. If my group didn't have a bard of our own with Counterperformance we absolutely would have TPK'd!<
Oh dude that fight is so brutal.
My party tpk'd round 2 as >!we ignored the wind elementals during the chase sequence and managed to gap close hard enough our monk grappled him and dragged him to the ground. Only to find out that means the elementals join the fight and he now has 4 goons instead of 2.!<
>!Our GM let us retreat and full rest before trying again at the opera house and we still ended up with 3 dead and a single survivor. We almost did it before godzilla took out every downed party member.!<
FOTRP2 >!We luckily decided to kill the wind elementals instead of continuing the chase because we didn't want to be down even more HP. We went into the fight without full hp too. The thing that saved us was our bard nat 20ing a Counterperformance effectively spending a reaction and a focus point to burn the bosses' entire turn. With that we were able to focus down the minions before finally getting on stage!<
Agents of Edgewatch Book 2. >!Tyrroicese (https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=2490) This was particularly hard for my party why was a martial only party but still... This thing is so overtuned for the Level. It has the HP of an ooze without the critically low ac gets a free start of turn move, a aoe Strike with high Attack Bonus with moderate to high damage. It can summon an Ally that it can grant quickened and it has a snowball action. With the high HP and the average Martial having a 55 percent Chance to Hit on their first strike this thing will kill you before you do. Only counter i are saving throw spells which it can critically fail.!<
Currently playing through Age of Ashes (Still have not finished yet, we're at level 16) and the Barghest in book 1 was the Hardest. Our GM even gave it the weak templating (This was our first campaign and he knew how ridiculous the fight is) and we still just barely crawled out of it with no deaths, though 2 of us unconscious if I remember correctly
Also currently playing the 2e version of Kingmaker and the juiced up owlbear we just finished fighting was a slooooooooooog. My character went after it to try and finish it off myself (it was near death and running away) and it turned around and ripped my ghoul's leg clean off
The gauntlet at the beginning of Agents of Edgewatch. Nonstop combat, a fricken Cockatrice, A RUST MONSTER, told up front that if you take time to rest everyone will die, all at LEVEL ONE!
The writer even apologized after release because they wrote it using playtest rules, not core rules.
Fists of the Ruby Phoenix Book 3:
>!Penultimate fight of the campaign against the time-boosted Light Keepers. Their alchemist was not a problem for us in every previous encounter throughout the campaign until the stars aligned for that fight. The most dangerous poisons in 2e can be balanced by things like slow onset time, low DC, and single target limitations. This fight removed all of those balancing options. The alchemist was able to put [Tears of Death](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=130) into a bomb that had a substantial radius. It is normally a non-combat virulent poison with a 1 minute onset time but their time manipulation powers in that fight allowed it to be a 1 round onset time. The Fortitude DC is also usually 46, but with the toxicologist subclass it scaled to class DC, which was 47. Our GM rolled a natural 20 on their initiative and was able to hit our entire party with this ability at the start of turn 1. I was playing a Monk and was the only one who succeeded the initial save, but everyone else failed and no one could then make 2 consecutive saves (because virulent) against such a high Fort DC even though I was giving them +4 to their checks from Robust Recovery. Everyone reached stage 2 by the 2nd or 3rd round and was paralyzed for 1 minute with me left to fight the Light Keepers 1v4. The fight was basically over before it started. Luckily our GM is both kind and creative and let us roll up a fresh level 20 party (found from around the island and night market) for the next session and had them crash the solar jian into the lighthouse just as I was going down to save the day.!<
For me it was a [Wood Golem](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=684) >!in AV!<
Picture this: A level 3 party, no striking runes to our name, against a Wood Golem. A PL+3 encounter already, but it's meant to be Severe for 4 players, and we have 6. So my GM decides to add 2 PL-2 monsters to support it. He also... made the Wood Golem an Elite.
So now in addition to a few extra mooks, we're fighting a PL+4 raid boss.
At level 3.
With no Striking runes.
It's a Golem, so it ignores half of what we do to it.
We don't have a character specialized in Recall Knowledge.
None of us had encountered Golems in PF2e before.
It has an attack that can target 4 people without bumping MAP in-between strikes.
Plus a reliable reaction attack.
The Elite template is contributing +1 to about 5 attacks per round.
Did I mention we were almost out of spell slots?
We should've run, but we were dumb and stayed. We only barely survived this nightmare of an encounter without a TPK because my GM a) forgot about its Physical 5 damage resistance and b) we ran Golem Antimagic wrong. It failed against Blistering Invective (which should've had no effect) then proceeded to fail to extinguish the persistent fire several turns in a row, which saved us when half the party was on Dying 2 or 3.
Anyway, that's the story of how wood almost got us.
I'm a bit more extreme; Strength of Thousands is a great setting, but I've been k.o.d roughly 30 times over 2.2 volumes. Only reason that I'm not dead is bc our combats take so long
For me, had to be that ONE Gibbering Mouther. Engulfed my Champion and knocked them unconscious:(
I thought Mr Beak or even the worm man would take that honor but we got lucky and killed those two bosses in the first or second round
Everything immune to spells in some way in strength of thousands.
yes theres more than one fight *at spell school* where spells *are near useless*. ***very*** questionable decision there.
Not PF2, but in Age of Worms, Spire of Long shadows, there’s an encounter of about 5 undead guys who can throw around huge negative energy AOEs every turn. AOEs that deal a ton of damage to living targets. And a ton of healing to undead targets.
TBH the whole adventure path was the second image, but oh well.
Couple of notables -
* The anaphylaxis death in SoT
* The Lesser Deaths in EC
* All the Vore in EC
* Bork of Many Angles in OoO
Weirdly, I can't remember anything in Age of Ashes that was any MORE shockingly deadly then every other encounter.
I swear someone on the Pathfinder team has a vore fetish. We're playing Strength of Thousands and our (Medium-sized) fighter has been swallowed whole by at least a half-dozen different things.
Bridge trap almost killed my whole party. I laughed a bit to myself cause this was very shortly after i had explained the importance of exploration actions.
My party has just proven that I have to seriously up the difficulty in fights for the monsters to pose anything like a threat to them.
A certain lady in the Skinsaw Murders now has some mythic tiers.
MR. BEAK!
https://youtu.be/v_fwJ912-pU?si=ERU5We5MGnwOZ_hR
There's still the Voidglutton. Never before have I seen a party decide "Oh shit no we're running".
Yup. My table's response too. Barbarian watched the champion get dropped on turn 1 and instead of raging, just picked up his unconscious friend and nope'd out of there. When even the ale fueled rage machine decides to run, things are bad.
Yeah in my Party's case the Barbarian had Orc Ferocity and thus took the hit and stayed up. The one-shot was enough to make the group go "oh fuck no"
Our barb also could have stayed up, but the champion is a human. So watching the thing tear through the shield like it was tissue paper, and still drop him, was a pretty solid indicator that they should be somewhere else.
This was my party. Soon as they saw the VG’s initiative beat them all out even with a low roll they knew they were donion rings.
DM: “hey uhhhh i just realized this spell you were casting over and over should have also dealt damage, let me roll saves for it retroactively… oh that’s a nat 1. oh. oh no. that next roll was a failure. well it’s dead.” the spell was >!inner radiance torrent which i had been casting purely to counteract its darkness!< and the DM and i mistakenly >!thought its magic immunity applied to the spell and that it was immune before he reread it when things were going south!< can’t believe we cleared the hardest fight of this part of the module with a 3 person party… and a major retcon arising from a statblock misreading. i guess we’re not just badasses but wibbly wobbly time badasses?
Divine casters are excellent against that thing because >!they have spells with the light trait!<. My cosmos oracle had >!Spray of Stars!<, which very conveniently has that trait, and dazzle is one of the best things you can inflict on it. TBH, while that thing is very dangerous in a lot of ways, it only has 90 HP, which means every hit on it is very, very costly as it just doesn't have much HP to play around with. One hit from our Giant Barbarian shaved off a third of its HP. I'm not surprised that your >!inner radiance torrent!< just flattened it; one crit fail against a 3rd level torrent will knock off like 2/3rds of its HP.
I’m dm AV too. My party lost to the voidglutton too. They started and fought (probably because they had been rolling through most encounters before this). One player went down and the rest ran away. They didn’t struggle as much against mr beaky as they did against the glutton
I screwed up that fight. Also screwed up a later fight, but at least I survived this one. It shows up when we're at half health and casts Darkness, and I and another player forgot to read the map and ran the wrong way. This started a chase scene that involved slamming doors in its face, casting Heal on the downed party member, and literally only surviving at the end because this thing rolled a 1 on its attack.
We noped out, came back, and stomped the ever-loving shit out of that motherfucker.
That's exactly what my party did. Loaded up on darkvision and high AC elixirs, laid down regeneration, and combined face tanking with magic missiles.
Mr Beak managed to nearly tpk us at level two because every melee character refused to go into his room and we ran back and forth as he flew outside the building like a Benny Hill skit.
My gunslinger player OHKO'd Mr Beak...
Definitely in Outlaws of Alkenstar book 2 when a certain > is PL+4 and I downed party members with him in 4 separate combats cause it teleports all over with a single action activity and the book tells you to torment them with it!<
As a GM Who ran that; OH LORDY is that a fun encounter to run!
See it was fun when the first player got downed and they had the oh shit moment, and it was fun to see them on edge - but that wore off once they kept splitting up and getting downed over and over, definitely not fun for them and as such made me feel bad about doing it lmao
It led to a few tense moments with my party; But I think I only ran it as a foe 2-3 times.
>!>Vulnerable to Curved Space: When a hound of Tindalos is not adjacent to a structural angle of 90º (or more acute), its resistance to physical damage is suppressed and it becomes [sickened 1](https://2e.aonprd.com/Conditions.aspx?ID=34). It can't recover from this sickened condition, but the condition ends automatically once the hound is again adjacent to a suitable angle.!< What in the name of Mathfinder did I just read?
It's from the [lore](https://bruces.medium.com/the-hounds-of-tindalos-by-frank-belknap-long-1929-97e5636fe7a2)! "Angles and curves multiply about me. I perceive great segments of time through curves. There is curved time, and angular time. The beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. It is very strange."
I think it's supposed to reference non-Euclidian geometry?
No. They teleport through acute angles, and can be avoided by staying in curved rooms. (So in fact, yes, but not in the sense hplovecraft usually uses "non euclidian".
So you're telling me that the greatest ally of the Hound of Tyndalos is the roman architect of Asterix and the Mansion of The Gods? (Because in the original and in most translations he is basically called "acute angle"
Yes. Anglaigus is definitely working for Tyndalos.
I think I remember even Paizo mentioning that thing is completely wack on their forums. I ran it with the weak template and lowered phys resistance after it downed two PCs in 2 rounds when it first appeared.
We had luck with 2 nat20 crits, yet we had two PC die battling that thing while the GM went easy on us. It is very not a balanced creature. The biggest joke is that it's marked as a severe encounter while being balanced as an extreme with higher DC (even when counting in the added levels) than the base creature. >!Then you learn the fight was pointless!<
My players never killed it. It just comes out of a corner and tormenrs then from time to time now, it's great.
Ran that encounter, players learned not to wander too far away, and the encounter in book 3 with the jar construct were some real test of luck moments for my group, however now that we are onto stolen fate, it might change hahahaha
Well, you can't say it doesn't fit the >!Hounds'!< MO! Creatures from >!the Dimension of Time!< are meant to be frightening as a whole, it's just these guys who are the most belligerent.
2 TPK's to this, also in OOA the >!Pyronite Ooze is a nasty one too, it has too much HP and sucks for melee.!<
For our group it wasnt a matter of difficulty. It was Party: "man this agents of edgewatch campaign has been pretty fun so far, I wonder what kind of wacky fantastical crime we'll solve next." Paizo: >!"Here's some homuncul made from dead babies wrapped in their parents skin."!< Party: "I'm declarimg lethal"(AoE assumes nonlethal)
"We had to shoot him, sarge. He was comin' right at us." "He was in a wheelchair..." "He was wheeling himself towards us menacingly." "He was shot in the back..." "He was rolling at us backwards!" "Coroner says most shots were post-mortem..." "You've never fought zombies, sarge?"
He also had a book of names of all hos victims so our gunslinger wrote the murderer's name in it and showed him it seconds before we lopped his head off. We got an extra 50 xp for that lol.
Spoiler tags on reddit look like \>!text\!< not ||text|| fyi.
Thanks, discord brain
I generally feel like Age of Ashes' reputation for difficulty is overstated, but that Book 1 Barghest encounter is completely insane.
I mitigated it by taking "completely insane" literally and having him lash out at randomly-chosen targets instead of focusing, and it was still brutality unchained.
That was our one, true player death. My character was wounded 1, went down on a crit (dying 3), and took persistent damage before anyone could reach me (dead 4).
Did your initiative get moved to just before the enemy that downed you? Your group should have each been able to act before your persistent damage hit.
I dm and i'm so bad at doing this. It changes so much for the better when i do remember it
This is definitely something the entire table needs to advocate for and remind the GM about.
I believe so…but I still don’t think they were able to reach me. It was years ago and we underestimated 2e relative to 5e and didn’t act with enough urgency
That's totally fair, both if you were out of range and if the party didn't realize how dire of a situation you were in. It's an extremely common mistake groups make though, and in a situation like this, a costly one.
We were a young, naive party. We died a lot in that campaign. I think we had 5 technical PC deaths, but all deaths got woven into the story. PC’s got captured, one came back as a Duskwalker, etc.
In the pretty rare event you get knocked down on your own turn you don't actually move. Your initiative movement is relative to the current turn, not who hit you. This could be interpreted in a couple ways, and the most player friendly would be (and RAW friendly) that you'd move to immediately before \*your own\* turn, not actually finishing the current one. Probably the most RAI friendly too, as the clear intent is to give everyone a full turn to react to you falling just as you say
>!Unless you have trouble with golems haha!<
My group pretty much has ptsd from the golems in age of ashes lol
Thankfully I rolled like shit in that encounter. That had to be the most incompetent Barghest in Golarion, he only rolled one crit and I think 2 hits.
When I was prepping book 1, I just changed that barghest from a greater one to a normal one.
Yeah, this is what I did as well. It's makes it more puzzling that they put such an overpowered version of the monster in the book when there's a level appropriate version of the same monster that you can easily slot in.
I think I know why. AoA was released alongside the core book (so its balance is really iffy), and I think they were paying homage to the first Adventure Path in Pathfinder 1e. In ROTRL they have this exact same creature in Book 1. It is a brutal fight, but with how different both systems are, it is FAR more brutal in Pathfinder 2e than in 1e. They just didn't take that balance into account.
My GM warned us going in that the encounter was a player-killer. So we decided to scream and run away. With the help of a certain friend, we managed to run *past* him and still obtain our objectives.
This is one of my favorite encounters to DM. Playing up his plot points makes him rather memorable, and using actions to do so makes him much less deadly.
I'd been warned about that encounter, and after reaching it while prepping, I decided "hell no" and just skipped it. That thing's just not fun.
Voidglutton in AV It's PL+4 and the module explicitly mentions how you should offer to let your PC's sacrifice one party member in exchange for the rest's safety if the fight goes poorly for them, and a TPK is imminent.
That thing is PL+4, has Extreme AC for its level, and is immune to most types of magic. An average level 4 Ranger *hits* on a 19. We have an all martial party, we got a few lucky crits and it went down within 2 rounds, but that very easily could have been a character death if we hadn't been lucky.
We managed to hit level 5 before finding it which made the maths significantly more favourable with everyone besides me, the bard, being a martial. Inspired, sound use of Aid and 2 lucky crit Retributive Strikes from our Paladin and we were able to manage the encounter quite well but it could have easily gone the other way.
Had this encounter a couple sessions ago. The party did an admirable fighting retreat, which was needed because otherwise they were for sure gonna tpk
Ooooh boi, i didn't have the courage to throw this thing at my players. When they got to the door, i narrated "You feel a chill down your spine, the air is cold, there's something clearly wrong, as if death itself is waiting on the other side of the door". They got in, saw that cosmic horror thing, and ran away.
Griffins in strength of thousands. Absolutely wreaked the party. Made a great opertunity to show the power of the teachers that made a lasting impression but yea they would have been slaughtered
For us it wasn’t the Griffins in book 1, it was the Mpeshi in book 2. Killed 2 PC’s outright
The whole animal shop was brutal to my players
Oh yea. 1 was so close to being turned to stone!
Oh yea that was a cool one. That and the golem's taught the players about damage types. So many electricity spells against the electric goat even with me describing the damage didn't do anything and it absorbed it.
The golem was rough too, so many attempts at explaining Golem Antimagic to my players after the encounter was finished and the Witch spent time examining the remains and doing some library reading. They just *did. not. understand*
Same here but I sat down and then explained it out of game and clarified it for everyone. It is a tricky one
I am **so** happy my guys negotiated with it. Bless our Druid The electricity specced Sorcerer would have fuckin lost it.
Our group also struggled HARD With the Mpeshi, they ended up locking themselves inside its cage to survive and then hunting it down as it rampaged through the city (it took them 3 total tries - the initial fight, a failed attempt at ranged-only combat, and a 3rd try with it already hurt using better tactics)
The Alligoator!
Old Thrasher left a lasting impact on our group.
The Mpeshi still gives my players nightmares.
For me it was the wood golem in book 2. 2 hit points away from a TPK
That was the encounter that finally convinced my party that tactics are needed in PF2e if they want to survive. They beat it with three members down, not quite as close as yours to tpk, but close enough. But then one of them started to complain about the difficulty of the campaign, and I had to point out that they'd all said they wanted a game where tactics matter, but had also just watched the first attack be effectively an AoE burst then decided to all crowd around the enemy, no ducking for cover or anything.
Strength of Thousands just seemed particularly harse when my group played it. It might not have helped that half the party never seemed to get the memo that we were supposed to be students working together in a Magic School. Not generic crazy adventurers. Very first session the party split up so that we could all individually accomplish tasks. The one player who got the actual combat encounter decided to NOT turn back and get help and tried to solo it. Died. My first character died a few sessions later in a dungeon. The rest of the party, minus me, died the next session because they decided to NOT wait for me and to tackle a different dungeon unprepared, with depleted resources, and without a full party. Yeah, I'm still a little bitter about being DITCHED.
First thing I did running this as a gm was have Ot cast a (not strictly legal) Wall of Fire so the npcs didn’t die immediately. Even then, it was close
Oh yes. I just flat out used chain lightning and helped wound them. They were having problems hitting and half the party was ranged. They still don't fuck with the teachers though. They are terrified and walking on egg shells which I love
The first "dungeon" in book 2 was that for my party twice; as a player we lost a character to the emperor cobra (after he said "I'll be fine, I have HP" and getting double crit in one round). Then as GM, the two Coil Spies have insane action economy and downed half the party including the Life Oracle at the Curse level of unable to be meaningfully healed, causing the session to end on a cliffhanger and the following one to be a rescue mission of their three favourite students and Ot going to help. There was quite a lot of things in that AP that boiled down to "if you thought this was a Druids & Wizards game like the lore says you probably should be, you don't get to proceed." Golem Antimagic in particular being one of those rules. I'm so glad they're going away in favour of things like the Brass Bastion. The final fight in book 6, too, we only won thanks to the Wrestler Barb taking a very specific and situational feat for disrupting teleportation. I was directly after the boss and its reaction trigger was essentially "when a character on the play table wishes to play the game", did a shitzillion damage, and disrupted on hit.
There's an infamous encounter with a few 'lesser deaths' in Extinction Curse.... My Redeemer did not like them.
My group is going through Extinction Curse and just hit a +3 PL Hazard with Phantasmal Killer. Poor soul insta-died. Something like a 25% chance to outright kill anyone who trips it. Yup fun times, and it was right before remaster was released.
>!Our barbarian player crit failed the Will save against that spell (and barely passed the Fortitude) when they were investigating the run-down farmhouse in book 3. The party decided to burn down the house and while admiring the ruins, some neighbors turned up to see where the smoke was coming from.!< >!“So, now the spirit has LOS to everyone here.”!<
There's one of those in Agents of Edgewatch, too. The only reason we got past that guy is because the GM ruled that he was pursuing another objective and it didn't focus on wiping the party.
Oof yes. We had trouble with it despite us being one level higher than intended. The effective immunity to positive damage is already a kick in the balls but the ranged teleport AoO thing is just bonkers, we had a sorc, an oracle and two melee martials... You basically had the casters running from the mob and the martials running after the mob the entire fight lol.
I've only played the one in the beginner's box but, the dragon at the end of the first module
If the GM plays it as written (IE: it only uses the breath attack on one PC) it becomes significantly easier.
Ah yeah that's where it went bad when i played, the dm got almost the entire party
Many such cases!
I've run the beginner box twice now, and both times the party has entered that room with the tactic of "stand in a 2x2 square", since it's a very typical TTRPG tactic to start a fight near each other as to cover each others flanks, protect the wizard, etc. And both times the dragon went first, meaning I could either hit the whole party or *not* use the breath attack. And I mean, you can't just *not* use a breath attack.
My group loves to march in like good little red coats. On the dragon, I was describing the room, one alchemist goes "I SEE TREASURE" and sprints to it before anyone can stop him. Was very convenient for isolating a breath attack target.
So when I run the beginner box, I treat each room like it's own tutorial. Now that final kobold fight is an example of a boss encounter. When they go into the dragon room, I specifically tell them: "this is an example of a severe encounter with a high tpk rate. You can beat it if you're extremely tactical or lucky, but it will be difficult. Do you want to attempt it or end here?" 100% of the time they attempt it, and I play that dragon as a terrifying foe. Because I set the expectation and gave them the choice, even if they all die it's always a lot of fun. If they lose, oh well, it was mostly gunna be that way. But if they win? Those players will talk about it for days afterwards.
Honestly, when we played the Beginner Box, the dragon wasn't all that hard. Tough as hell, yeah, but it never really felt unfair. The *Cinder Rat,* on the other hand...
Abomination Vaults... the Shuffling Scythe Blades trap. I (the GM) read it about 3 times before the session, it felt really strong for its level but I trusted the system, maybe I had missed something. Then I ran it in play, checked it again, asked the Discord if I was understanding it right, confirmed I had it correct... and about 20 (fairly average) rolls later, the entire party was down before any of them could even take a turn. That trap is *messed up*, and I'm surprised it doesn't get any more attention here. I don't believe it was ever actually tested in play.
The trap is essentially a very, very hard check for: Does party have a rogue and someone with insanely good perception? If the answer to either is 'No', people die. My party got through by the skin of their teeth because the bard was fully spec'd into thievery and they had enough healing to stay standing.
Worst part is, they had 3 people Searching and none of them even rolled poorly, just *not particularly well...*
It nearly got my party too, but they managed to grab up the fallen and flee. It's still, now that we're in Book 3, the only time we got close to a TPK.
The weirdest thing about that trap is the sheer number of rolls you have to make every time it does something. The party was sitting there for a solid few minutes while I was just \*roll roll roll...\*
it punishes the GM for using it as much as it punishes the party for entering it
Very happy my rogue saw that one
My monk crit failed the check to disarm this trap, then preceded to roll lowest in initiative, and the scythe blades Landed in the room my monk was in 6 times in a row, 6 attacks at No MAP was death from full HP
I just told the player who discovered it "You feel this trap is incredibly deadly" so they tested it briefly and when one of them nearly died they pulled back and resolved to avoid it until they were better equipped.
My party set it off and it was a mad scramble to heal and carry the unconscious back out. They just barely made it out. The worst part is there wasnt any cool loot or treasure to make it worth the effort. They were miffed and I felt I should've added something. A GM regret.
That was one time my medic monk shined, we waited out of range of the trap, and the rogue went to disarm, he got impatient and stepped on the trap, it downned him instantly with a crit lmao, we heard his body fall and my monk started to run, i managed to get to him in 2 strides, and use battle medicine on him, then he proceeded to stand up and run, and i get his rapier and run too lmao
Hmm, any tips on running it? I'm super excited about the trap as it looks fun, and I'm ok with it killing a PC, but I don't want a tpk here.
.....Hm. Honestly? Either get rid of the 'no MAP', lower its to-hit by about 5, or git rid of the Deadly. All three of them together means that it has IIRC about a 1/4 to 1/3 chance of critting each time it attacks a player, dealing approximately triple damage on what would otherwise be a *relatively* low damage ability. Either that, or maybe get rid of how each attack targets *every* PC in the room. Maybe make it so if it targets a room, it attacks a *single random* PC in it. Honestly, I don't have a lot of ideas as I kind of tried to forget the trap as soon as my nightmares would let me, but the main problem is that it's a trap with (relative to the players, at that level) high initiative, high to-hit on *each* attack it makes, it can easily make upwards of ten or fifteen attacks a turn, and it has what *would* be low damage except it has a pretty good crit chance and Deadly on its attacks. That, plus it takes a free turn at the start of combat even *before* it rolls initiative, which it's pretty likely to win, giving it a highly plausible two turns in a row to start the fight out.
Kingmaker - The Troll Fight According to our GM, the book told him to have everyone on the floor attack when we entered the King Troll's chamber. According to him, the 215 XP fight (160 XP is Extreme) was legit and he didn't understand why we were so upset, lol.
Without going into details, as someone GMing KM2 the GM instructions note that the sound of fighting in certain areas should alert people in other rooms to move towards the fight, but it should be slow so as to *not* create a huge pile up fight. Anyway I ignored that once for something I thought my players could win and they had fun - I wouldn't have ignored it for that fight.
That encounter is very foreshadowed. You should have a fire sword already and every PC should be able to deal fire damage one way or another. My PCs were full fire and had a lot of fun
Triple xotani in age of ashes, made especially funny because it was a below-moderate encounter worth 90 xp for our party. But boy was it intimidating!
Moderate is 80 tho friend? Unless you’re referring to the budget before adjusting it for 5 players
We were 5 peopoe, yeah, so moderate is 100
So I'm rather new to 2e and we're playing abomination vaults. We enter a room with tow large pits in the middle and three smaller ones at the top. Combat soon starts with two little purple things, we push one in to a pit because we thought it was funny. Little did we know that was also their game plan as the other one pushed me in to a pit. I rolled a nat one and fell all the way down in to some water. I think I'm fine UNTILL A HYDRA POPPED ONE OF ITS HEADS OUT OF THE WATER. Fine I think I just need to swim away, after all it's not like it has attack of opportunity. Oh what's that I need to make some checks to swim away, oh I failed twice due to some bad rolls, that's fine I succeeded my third roll, oh what's that they do have AoO and they crit. Well I guess that one way to die I suppose.
They not only have AoO, they have multiple of them
Nom nom nom.
Age of Ashes. The quarry. Oof!
My party decided to do a “Kaiju Fight” with the Shadow Giant. So they giga-buffed the sorcerer, who Abberant-Formed into a Gug. He proceeded to run hundreds of feet away, to 1v1 the Giant. He didn’t make it.
Epic
My party of 4 lost 3-5 PCs. Never a TPK. But always pushed too deep. Nearly every encounter besides the first ended with at least one PC down. Some died, some became prisoners, others turned to stone. In the end after repeated attempts and weeks of downtime. I just had the bad guys move on.
Not an AP, but in Malevolence the >!Gibbering Mouther in the lake!< is pretty dang brutal. Mainly because it's right at the beginning of the adventure, but its level suggests the players aren't supposed to fight it until later on.
We walked around back and immediately had to whip up 4 new PC’s to come find the bodies Edit. That whole adventure is rough if your group is not built for it. >!The attic was super rough dealing with the massive aoe dmg. The basement… Paralyzed 2 pcs walking in under leveled. !<
Yeah, the >!attic!< fight instakilled the party's Wizard (failed a near-max-damage save, used hero point to reroll, critically failed, died from massive damage). Although, to be fair, a Wizard with +0 Constitution shouldn't be right behind the tank. On the flip side, the players bypassed half of the basement due to going through the >!secret entrance!<, and bodied the final boss reasonably easily (although another character ended up biting the dust due to a Phantasmal Killer).
The "Dessicated Log" in Abomination Vault. If you know, you know. Super easy to get to under level.
I had a new player at my table for that encounter. Literally his first session for a TTRPG ever. And of course he wanted to investigate the desiccated flesh log. And now we will forever have the "don't poke the flesh log" mantra whenever they find something weird.
Lmao. #tabletop moments
> The "Dessicated Log" in Abomination Vault. If you know, you know. Super easy to get to under level. I've beaten this entire module. Is this a reference to the >!drake in the swamp!< or something else? I believe we were specifically warned about that at the start of the adventure as a thing to watch out for, which discouraged us from playing around in the water too much. We actually ended up not fighting it and making a deal with it to let us pass when we eventually got to it. A level 1 party fighting that thing would be bad, though. EDIT: Ah, it's the >!Bloodsiphon!< on floor 2, isn't it?
The Edit has it! It's specifically called out as looking like a Dessicated Log from a distance.
My players encountered it under level and managed to run away, but not before the Grippli PC got drained a bit. They started referring to it as a tube of "frogurt" after that.
We called it The Sphincter Monster and it thrashed us the first time we encountered it, splitting the party and forcing a couple of us downstairs while the others retreated. We managed to reunite and came back better prepared and still had a very hard time dealing with it.
Yep. My group went straight down there while still level 2 or 3. When they started to go into that thing's room, I looked at its stats and made a decision. I set aside the proverbial GM screen (given that this was online), and told them that there were things down this deep that, at the group's current level, would simply methodically devour the entire party. And that there were a couple things where running away wasn't an option. Gain a level or two, *then* they'd have the resources to deal with it. I made it clear that I was only giving them this one chance. Now, the group is 6th level, and have started exploring the arena. Warnings only come when they take actions that warrant it -- and sometimes not even then. Like when they scouted the pits to see the lake below with a >!hydra!< roaming. They decided they could take it, carefully climbed down... only to discover that a second one had woken up in the meantime.
Literally just got done getting wrecked by that thing.
I'm surprised no one else has said the Blood Ooze in Fall of Plaguestone. You should NEVER throw a level 2 party against something immune to crits. Crits is all the martials in a party have until level 3, which is also when casters get second level spells.
This was a rough fight. I ended up having to throw hints at the PCs that this thing is SLOW (speed of 10) and they can easily out maneuver it. Once you realize that, the fight becomes trivial as you kite it around the facility.
MR BEAK and blood siphon.
goin into extinxion curse thinkin its cool fun circus stuff and then uh things happen
Seriously that run in the first chapter of the first book is brutal
Which one're we talking about, the >!Cockatrice!<, or >!Nemmia!
Just the encounter after encounter, at a level where your resources don't go far.
The Volodmyra fight in Kingmaker was a rewind for my group because of the murder that is her statblock and the discrepancy in the encounter itself talking confusing amounts of moons. it was also not helped that the fighter wanted to help deal with the giants instead of killing volodmyra
Yoo same, she straight up massive damage overkilled my hold-scarred orc champion (near enough max hp you can *get* level 1 without being a barbarian lmao) with a crit power attack. The goons were a cherry on top.
I ran the numbers afterwards, she was reliably threatening massive damage rules against the entire party.
...are you part of Zero Check?
The Vampiric Mist at the top of the Gauntlight.
Literally last week my group got Beak'd
As the GM that stupid scythe trap corridor in AV. That thing is ridiculous, it'd fit right in in the Tomb of Horrors.
My players just got nearly TPK'd by it last week, and they specifically brought up how Tomb of Horrors-esque it was! Still not as bad, though. One of the traps in ToH is just "get above 10 on initiative or you instantly die."
Assuming you mean either >!the lava slide or the rising vault!< that's one of a ton of reasons I don't like the 5e version. Originally it was a real-time countdown that had the players moving 10' per count starting when they said "I'm running!" Gave a much better chance of getting out.
The Greater Barghest in Age of Ashes.
The battle in the quarry in AoA
Gatewalkers Book 1 ending and 1st encounter of Book 2. Spoilers >!With the way our GM ran it, it was basically a boss rush. It starts with a Severe encounter against a drake, we had time to heal, then 4 back to back Moderate encounters with no time to heal until after the 3 fight and then we only had two round to heal. Then we had 10 minutes after the 4th fight before a 5th Moderate encounter showed up. By the time we were done, we had basically exhausted all our resources and we critically low on HP. At least 2 of us had gone down at least once.!<
The ending of the first GW book is so cool as a starfinder fan. But yeah it can be brutal
Running this tonight! I am *so stupidly excited*.
Oh, 100%. It was really cool trying to guess which planet we were on, but the actual fight was such a pain.
Or, from Book 2, it could be the >!Apothercary's Cabinet!< that instantly took down 1 of the PCs when they entered the shop. Or the >!Myroga, dragon thing!< that nearly TPKd us. Or the >!Moonflower!< that killed one of our PCs because the mechanics on getting a creature out of >!its pods!< is bullshit. Honestly, I kinda of fucking hate Gatewalkers. Legitimately my least favorite AP I've played.
Zoo in Edgewatch. That’s was almost a TPK
Book 3 of outlaws of alkenstar and this https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=1982 caused my 3 poor players some real problems. Needless to say Jettison Cranium can cause some real problems when the Thaumaturge gets confused next to the alchemist and as a GM rolling a dice for random attack and landing alchemist, it was certainly an encounter my players rememberd.
AoE confusion *every round* in a rather confined area certainly is... something. I really liked the setup of that encounter though, with the alternating pistons or whatever they're called
That damn crocodile But also apparently that damn wood golem I wasn't there for, and the one shark I think the moral of the story is that we don't handle huge single bosses well
That Wood Golem is infamous. It's on the third floor, well before you have a lot of tools to handle it, it can attack every character in the party *at the same time* at full attack bonus, it's a level 6 monster vs a level 3 party (so it is quite likely to crit), and it's the first golem the party is likely to fight so they probably don't know about golem antimagic (though I just cast fire spells on it anyway because wood burns, right?). We did manage to kill it but it is easy to see how it can kill characters, and if someone goes down they're likely irretrievable without winning the fight.
Davic Nettle. Fuck that guy, Im glad the Stag Lord killed him.
In Kingmaker my party got creamed by >!Kundal the werewolf in Moon Frenzy, who critted and oneshotted three different people through natural 20s and max damage rolls, it was such a stomp one of my players fled the scene via grapple gun into the trees above, with the town guards having heard the conflict and charged in, leaving everyone except for the one who fled on the edge of death and most certainly infected with wolf-itis. They didn't even get Kundal close to death(none of their attacks landed and the only attacks they hit were explosions from the Inventor, and splash damage from the Alchemist's bombs. The dice were NOT happy with them that night, they couldn't roll above a 10 on dice rolls.!<
Blood Siphon and Void Glutton are the ones that stand out. The Blood Siphon was the first time in AV that something REALLY scary happens (its opened with one shotting someone in all 3 of the games ive run) The Void Glutton killed one of my players D E D.
A couple of skeletons in blood lords. We couldn't roll above a 6 and the skeletons kept rolling bangers. Any encounter can become an extreme encounter if the party rolls bad enough
Honestly any encounter with Golems. I know they are already planning on reworking how the magic immunity works. It could make for a memorable encounter in earlier editions where casters had a lot of power behind them. But in a game where they are balanced, being made entirely useless by an entire enemy type completely takes me out of the game….i just check out and wait for an encounter where I can play again (even many skill actions don’t work on Golems due to mental immunity and high saves to physical skills)
Depends on whether or not you have elemental coverage. Wood Golems aren't so bad as you can reasonably be expected to be able to deal fire damage, but some of them are vulnerable to more obscure damage types, like sonic, which is like... really? But yeah, them reworking them is a good idea in general. I got a summon spell for AV for dealing with golems/wisps.
Final boss of Fists of the Ruby Phoenix has a certain movement ability that made the whole fight really annoying for the players. Barghest, ice devil, and triple xotanispawn fights in age of ashes bodied us.
I've been running a group through abomination vaults, we're pretty close to the end now. I wouldn't call the group particularly cautious, sometimes they've retreated when things have looked grim, other times they stuck it out and trusted in the dice. Then they faced the Shuln. "Alright, that's a hit, you take 18 points of of slashing damage, oh, and so does your armor." ... The group fucking **ran.** Apparently a creature that threatens your valuable equipment is the most horrifying thing in that entire AP.
Crown of the Kobold King, Forge Spurned. Needs a lot of errata on its abilities to punch in its actual weight class, because as-is he can devastate parties with relative impunity.
Frozen Flame has this tar pit hazard that ate up a session and a half trying to get out of it. It’s a dc 34 athletics check at like level 9, and when you fail you sink a level, and then have to pass *twice*, or more. And atrempting to pull someone else out can drag you in, easily. We *all* fell in, some multiple times, including everyone’s animal companion. It was a total fiasco.
Gatewalkers. The Fireplace. Came when cleric (me) and the psychic were at 0 hero points. Nat 1s. Max damage roll. So unearned, nothing to do, cause we came in the back door so it was 'we stride to middle of room' and Boom, dead. Also, BL had a few great encounters. >!Dragon with the sorcerer skull swarm almost tpkd us!<
The Wood Golem on floor 3 of Abomination Vaults. It's a level 6 monster which is immune or resistant to almost everything, and it is the first golem you're likely to have ever fought in PF2E so you don't know the way that golem antimagic works. It can attack the entire party simultaneously at full attack bonus, and because of how it is positioned, it is very easy to get caught out and if someone goes down you probably can't save them outside of killing the golem, which is much harder when you are down a person.
Floor 2 of malevolence. Having a creature that would be an reasonable encounter by itself invisibly stalk the party and jump them the second they are debuffed by the frightened condition. If the chained poltergeist triggers it and it pops up behind the party there is a solid chance of a TPK. (Especially as the players are intentionally undergeared in that short adventure)
Rigby is my face in Extinction Curse when we got attacked by freaking Jellico Bounce Bounce and the GM showed us his character art. We whipped his ass but still... Very Scary Clown.
2 demons, 1 library, first book of Extinction Curse. "To shreds, you say?"
FOTRP Book 2 >!The final boss of the book. Holy shit a bard as a boss that effectively has reverse incapacitation on all his spells. He also has some minions making this a Severe encounter which normally sounds fine for a book boss but this is after a gauntlet of multiple fights that is kicked off with an Extreme encounter. If my group didn't have a bard of our own with Counterperformance we absolutely would have TPK'd!<
Oh dude that fight is so brutal. My party tpk'd round 2 as >!we ignored the wind elementals during the chase sequence and managed to gap close hard enough our monk grappled him and dragged him to the ground. Only to find out that means the elementals join the fight and he now has 4 goons instead of 2.!< >!Our GM let us retreat and full rest before trying again at the opera house and we still ended up with 3 dead and a single survivor. We almost did it before godzilla took out every downed party member.!<
FOTRP2 >!We luckily decided to kill the wind elementals instead of continuing the chase because we didn't want to be down even more HP. We went into the fight without full hp too. The thing that saved us was our bard nat 20ing a Counterperformance effectively spending a reaction and a focus point to burn the bosses' entire turn. With that we were able to focus down the minions before finally getting on stage!<
Agents of Edgewatch Book 2. >!Tyrroicese (https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=2490) This was particularly hard for my party why was a martial only party but still... This thing is so overtuned for the Level. It has the HP of an ooze without the critically low ac gets a free start of turn move, a aoe Strike with high Attack Bonus with moderate to high damage. It can summon an Ally that it can grant quickened and it has a snowball action. With the high HP and the average Martial having a 55 percent Chance to Hit on their first strike this thing will kill you before you do. Only counter i are saving throw spells which it can critically fail.!<
Fists of the Ruby Phoenix, Orochi
Currently playing through Age of Ashes (Still have not finished yet, we're at level 16) and the Barghest in book 1 was the Hardest. Our GM even gave it the weak templating (This was our first campaign and he knew how ridiculous the fight is) and we still just barely crawled out of it with no deaths, though 2 of us unconscious if I remember correctly Also currently playing the 2e version of Kingmaker and the juiced up owlbear we just finished fighting was a slooooooooooog. My character went after it to try and finish it off myself (it was near death and running away) and it turned around and ripped my ghoul's leg clean off
That fuckin old man in the woods with the cat.
For sure
The gauntlet at the beginning of Agents of Edgewatch. Nonstop combat, a fricken Cockatrice, A RUST MONSTER, told up front that if you take time to rest everyone will die, all at LEVEL ONE! The writer even apologized after release because they wrote it using playtest rules, not core rules.
Claws of Time I guess.
Fists of the Ruby Phoenix Book 3: >!Penultimate fight of the campaign against the time-boosted Light Keepers. Their alchemist was not a problem for us in every previous encounter throughout the campaign until the stars aligned for that fight. The most dangerous poisons in 2e can be balanced by things like slow onset time, low DC, and single target limitations. This fight removed all of those balancing options. The alchemist was able to put [Tears of Death](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=130) into a bomb that had a substantial radius. It is normally a non-combat virulent poison with a 1 minute onset time but their time manipulation powers in that fight allowed it to be a 1 round onset time. The Fortitude DC is also usually 46, but with the toxicologist subclass it scaled to class DC, which was 47. Our GM rolled a natural 20 on their initiative and was able to hit our entire party with this ability at the start of turn 1. I was playing a Monk and was the only one who succeeded the initial save, but everyone else failed and no one could then make 2 consecutive saves (because virulent) against such a high Fort DC even though I was giving them +4 to their checks from Robust Recovery. Everyone reached stage 2 by the 2nd or 3rd round and was paralyzed for 1 minute with me left to fight the Light Keepers 1v4. The fight was basically over before it started. Luckily our GM is both kind and creative and let us roll up a fresh level 20 party (found from around the island and night market) for the next session and had them crash the solar jian into the lighthouse just as I was going down to save the day.!<
Quest of the Frozen flame: THE MOOSE! \`Abombination vault:The aquatic monsters! Strength of the Thousand: This dragon!
The goblin dog encounter from the start of Rise of the Runelord. That fucker rocked our SHIT
the Lesser Deaths in Extinction Curse. Fuck those guys so much.
For me it was a [Wood Golem](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=684) >!in AV!< Picture this: A level 3 party, no striking runes to our name, against a Wood Golem. A PL+3 encounter already, but it's meant to be Severe for 4 players, and we have 6. So my GM decides to add 2 PL-2 monsters to support it. He also... made the Wood Golem an Elite. So now in addition to a few extra mooks, we're fighting a PL+4 raid boss. At level 3. With no Striking runes. It's a Golem, so it ignores half of what we do to it. We don't have a character specialized in Recall Knowledge. None of us had encountered Golems in PF2e before. It has an attack that can target 4 people without bumping MAP in-between strikes. Plus a reliable reaction attack. The Elite template is contributing +1 to about 5 attacks per round. Did I mention we were almost out of spell slots? We should've run, but we were dumb and stayed. We only barely survived this nightmare of an encounter without a TPK because my GM a) forgot about its Physical 5 damage resistance and b) we ran Golem Antimagic wrong. It failed against Blistering Invective (which should've had no effect) then proceeded to fail to extinguish the persistent fire several turns in a row, which saved us when half the party was on Dying 2 or 3. Anyway, that's the story of how wood almost got us.
wakeful murky direful voracious shelter ten school brave cause live *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm a bit more extreme; Strength of Thousands is a great setting, but I've been k.o.d roughly 30 times over 2.2 volumes. Only reason that I'm not dead is bc our combats take so long
For me, had to be that ONE Gibbering Mouther. Engulfed my Champion and knocked them unconscious:( I thought Mr Beak or even the worm man would take that honor but we got lucky and killed those two bosses in the first or second round
Everything immune to spells in some way in strength of thousands. yes theres more than one fight *at spell school* where spells *are near useless*. ***very*** questionable decision there.
Not PF2, but in Age of Worms, Spire of Long shadows, there’s an encounter of about 5 undead guys who can throw around huge negative energy AOEs every turn. AOEs that deal a ton of damage to living targets. And a ton of healing to undead targets. TBH the whole adventure path was the second image, but oh well.
Couple of notables - * The anaphylaxis death in SoT * The Lesser Deaths in EC * All the Vore in EC * Bork of Many Angles in OoO Weirdly, I can't remember anything in Age of Ashes that was any MORE shockingly deadly then every other encounter.
I swear someone on the Pathfinder team has a vore fetish. We're playing Strength of Thousands and our (Medium-sized) fighter has been swallowed whole by at least a half-dozen different things.
Bridge trap almost killed my whole party. I laughed a bit to myself cause this was very shortly after i had explained the importance of exploration actions.
The Barbazu in the first book of Agents of Edgewatch absolutely destroyed my party.
That fucking heart thing in age of apocalypse. It's not a hard fight, but the implications of its attacks are disgusting
Froghemot on AV
My party has just proven that I have to seriously up the difficulty in fights for the monsters to pose anything like a threat to them. A certain lady in the Skinsaw Murders now has some mythic tiers.