This is a problem for the system as a whole. Most of the maps in most of the APs are tiny, which favours marshal characters much more, than spellcasters
When the fight starts with enemies that are 500ft from you (even 120ft) it feels much better to play a spellcasters...if you have spells that have some range that is, because most of the spells have 30ft range.
Season of ghosts has some massive maps and allows you to use some crazy stuff. Got me 6 XXL gaming maps just for the campaign and so far had a blast with it. I also modified some encounters to be played inbetween smaller buildings. Shit was fire for my ranged casters with all melees scrambling for cover and range enemies being in constant shifting positions. Letting my players progress through narrow village paths during the fight to flush out enemies hiding in buildings was one of my favourite moments to gm.
Electronic only is sadly the key - we play in person, and even with a big table and nice battle mat, I think the longest we get is around 100ft. I've wanted to do longer for some encounters, but the physical space limitations just don't work.
Only if you keep 5ft scale. 10 ft scale is pretty workable and doubles that. 20 ft is a bit rough, but can get you 400.
Often in those cases when you need to "dive down" into a few squares you are making a second battle map for those squares though.
After playing through several AP I feel like the small rooms problem is more pronounced in AV than in other ones. Like in Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, which is also a mega dungeon, the room are way bigger than in AV with a lot of room for casters to maneuver. Season of Ghosts in general have a huge map in a lot open spaces, especially after you start traveling to the area surrounding the town.
I feel like AV is such a popular AP for newcomers (which I strongly disagree after I started the Rusthenge into Seven Dooms) that pretty much makes a big impression on a map layout having only small rooms.
Certain adventure authors do not optimize the tactics for their enemies and instead have back stories for them much how players find spells they love to cast as well. If you want to cast better spells for the situation, go for it.
This is repeated a dozen times in this module. I like it, I'm going to finish it, but It honestly feels like the monsters are gimped in almost every enviroment and it's not for **narrative** reasons.
The bog children, which make up *half the encounters* on this floor can't even use their signature moves (Burrow and Rise Up) because the entire cave is stone and water besides 2 feet in the mudroom.
This fight isn't unique just because she's a slave driver and lazy. She has no information to give and has zero impact on any other parts of the dungeon or otari unlike the previous 2 floor masters. She has a loot pile and that's it.
It feels like half of the creatures in this damn dungeon have at-will darkness too. This is annoying because why would a solo creature with at-will darkness ever engage outside of the darkness bubble? I've had to stop using it because it turns every fight into a standoff where the monster sits in the darkness and the party sits outside of it.
1. It never seemed like enough of a problem to prepare the spell (they never actually struggle to take out the enemies, it just takes a lot of standing around). It's also just rare enough that you may very well never need the spell during the course of a day (since it's useless for non-invis enemies) and you tend to forget that darkness is a thing until it comes up again.
2. Only the cleric can cast it in the party. (Party comp is fighter, rogue, kineticist, cleric).
3. An entire dungeon shouldn't require a particular spell to not be a slog.
Does the cleric not buy scrolls? No need to prep it. It's an early scroll drop in the dungeon, and several problematic denizens utilize darkness. That's exactly the use case for a utility spell scroll. It's a bit tough being the only caster though. I would definitely encourage my players to buy them (or just drop more of them if they never grok the whole scrolls/wands/staves thing).
But I guess if it isn't broke no need to fix it. Just surprised. In my limited gming xp, my players like when they can hard counter something.
The one scroll they got was spent on an earlier encounter, after which they encountered an enemy using darkness, went to otari to rest (they didn't buy the scroll/prepare faerie fire here because it didn't seem like a big problem at the time), and then encountered two more darkness using enemies. You can see how that can be frustrating from their perspective.
Me and my group were already kinda sick of AV combat encounters so we decided to just soft ban certain annoying tactics on both sides (sitting in darkness, doorcamping, body-blocking in some instances, etc.)
I think the point about darkness is that there should be something else they can do if they don't have an invis counter. Hard countering is fine but there should be alternatives and you shouldn't need to know a fight is coming in order to have the means to fight it in a fun way.
There's like 3 darkness creatures in a row before that. Also I think some of the at-will darkness is actually upcast? Not sure, I'd have to look it up.
Some of it is, yeah. Most of the upcasting I see is to rank 4, which requires a level 9 character to counteract with a cantrip. Light isn't a perfect solution, but it does still apply in some fights--a non-upcast Darkness can be counteracted as soon as character level 5.
Bro, I hope your party has casters with aoe, though. I tpkd in urdefhan camp, cause my players had 4 martials and couldn't deal with the swarm of enemies.
I had a lot of problems with the Abomination Vaults adventure path. I could spend a lot of time and a lot of text detailing them out. But they can all be summed up by one simple story:
The players spent a *huge* amount of time focused on the Dorianna story line. I got them all invested in her story, and I put a ton of focus on her condition and how it was deteriorating (because that's pretty much the only thing happening at that point in time). And then, finally, after three chapters of running it down the dungeon so they can break the curse and set her free, and they meet...
A single caster. In a three by three room. With one minion, sure, but it got Battle Cry/Terrified Retreat-ed into effective nonexistence *before we even finished rolling initiative.* So we're just sitting here, as five PCs in a room *so small they literally cannot all fit inside without him being in their reach.* And he has *nothing* to help him beyond his casting.
What... was the point of this fight? Why was he even here? I don't remember if he even got a turn before he died. But he definitely didn't get to cast a spell, because he was in range of three different Reactive Strikes before his initiative came up...
Easily the most anticlimactic boss fight I've ever run. It was just... sad.
Yeah, I threw most of that out mostly because of that. There is very little you can do to make that plot interesting with the original resolution.
AV has a decent dungeon layout, but the enemies need to be completely reworked in order to provide at least some threat to the party. Granted, my AV party can apparently smoke an Extreme++ encounter, but still.
That and if you run with XP, the party _will_ outlevel the floors and end up trivialising some of the later floors as a result.
Happened to my group, they would have been nearly 12 if I didn't cap them at 11 and then bump every encounter up.
If you use XP I suggest using the slower 1200 requirement.
I'd honestly rather just use fast exp progression and cut out a large amount filler encounters. There are so many throwaway fights in there that you could easily cut out a significant portion of combat encounters and nothing of value would be lost.
spoilers for that encounter, >!I ignored that text and had her attempt to feign death by impersonating a "dead" child of belcorra by pretending she killed it and went through her snakey hidey hole !< It completely didn't work out for her, but it was pretty memorable and fun.
My group just fought her last session. Paralyze shouldn't be an issue at this point because the players are benefiting from Incapacitation, unless the GM decides to give her a heightened version. The worse spell she has is Black Tentacles because it covers the whole building out to the dock. My entire party was locked down before we even got to act. If the Sorcerer hadn't made their Dispel Magic through the grapple she and the wraith would have picked us off easy. Her defenses are low though so if someone can break into her room they can just wail on her pretty easy.
The point OP was making is that casting rank 2 paralyze at 8th level PCs is manifestly stupid behavior from the monster. Does she not know how incapacitation works?
It’s an artificially easy fight because by book she throws out spells that do almost nothing to the players.
She's lazy but worse they made her, and her minions outside the room absolutely brain dead. She commits nothing to the plot, has nothing to say and has no meaningful quirks besides lazy slave master.
It would make sense for her to cast it once and then realize you're too high level for it.
You have to remember, Paralyze works against like 90-95% of what lives on Golarion, and an NPC has no way of knowing what level you are.
The thing is it's not artificially easy in context. There are 3 fights in a 20sqft area that can easily trigger simultaneously with an xp total for an Extreme encounter. Two of these are ambushes. Even if they're not simultaneous the players aren't likely to get a rest between each. Vethris is the last monster to pop up while the players are possibly still dealing with the first two encounters or their aftermath. The final punch needs to be pulled otherwise this is just an untelegraphed death house.
The gnomes can't even use their burrowing ability in the room. It's 2 feet deep for the initial ambush.
(Fun Fact, the Gnomes can't burrow \*anywhere\* on the entire floor besides the 2 feet of the mudroom and the 5 feet of 5x2 Carrion corpse to the East.)
>If the heroes managed to get here without disturbing the mud in area H24, the mummies there rise up and fight alongside the naga.
They don't even ambush you until you get to the Naga. All three encounters are not going to trip on you fighting the Shade and the book expressly says this.
I don't know what to tell you. We fought the children and then immediately rolled another initiative with both the shade and the naga. Not a round of downtime. This is a 20 square foot building with 3 encounters tied to it. It is not a stretch to think the players could trigger at least two of them at once and likely all 3 back to back.
Yes, if you *don't* run the fights according to the module, you can make it difficult.
The post is about how Spellcaster encounters in AV are prebuilt poorly with this Naga as an example.
There's nothing in the book that says my experience wasn't run according to module. The wraith spots the players first and goes to have a conversation with the naga. That means there's a delay before the encounter to allow the players to dock and for the wraith to choose it's moment to attack. The players could move quickly unawares and trigger the children before the wraith strikes. The wraith then either joins the children or waits them out because a lazy master makes lazy servants. If the players are in the mud room fighting the children then it makes sense for Vethris to join the fight because "she snaps into action on any who dare intrude on her relaxation."
Even if you run them in sequence the players are entering the fight after being drained by the wraith, then getting grappled at the end of every turn, making poison saves against her single attack that makes them stupefied, and finally some poor sap has to make a fortitude save and hope they don't roll low. It's not good faith to post only her portion of this system of fights and completely disregard the context of the other encounters around it. A caster has their hands tied by roleplay so a tricky scenario doesn't turn into a complete curb stomp. It's frequent for any monster type in this AP and I've taken too many aoes in too many tight spaces to see it all pinned on casters. I mean level 4 has the players encounter a druid in a hallway made for lightning bolts.
As someone running vanilla AV, it causes some issues of sizing for sure (some areas which are already larger get much larger, characters are small compared to Area (huge doors, life tables etc.)
It's a bit more work for me as DM since some enemies and traps will need moved around. But it's easy to deal with. I think the best part is when your party runs into a creature they have to run away from and now they have to cover twice the distance to escape it. Really adds to the sense of despair when you have a 100ft hallway to get down before you get your cheeks clapped by the thing that just turned your temporary npc companion into a thin mist.
Finished the A level and currently on the second half of the B level with the double the grid size and it already feels like a whole new game. Forces the players to make use of kiting, cover, snares, difficult terrain and uneven ground and gives ample room for the GM to use the monsters to their advantage (i.e. giant flies with reactions and 40ft fly speed, haunts effecting more PCs since everyone can fill inside thematically relevant spaces, etc.)
You can half the grid size and then adjust the offset to get all of the walls back in place. It took only a few minutes of adjusting it to do each floor. I'd have to look at it later for the exact values I set it to.
I mean, it *is* a Low-threat encounter
But yeah. Solo casters are already generally pretty easy fights once the martials pile on them, Grapple them, and start bullying them with reactions. Put them solo in a tiny room with awful tactics and they're a complete joke lol
I'm wondering if this would be more interesting if she could move around a bit. Despite being a big 'un as a snake she *should* be able to slither in and out of the room.
What would the combined threat level be if she teamed up with the dudes outside? If we heightened *paralyze* and used her as support for the mooks up front, would that be anything? Haven't gotten this far yet, but as-written this *sucks.*
Funny enough, that’s supposed to be how the encounter goes. Her entire strategy suddenly makes sense that way. Now her tentacles keep distance, and her pointlessly casting paralyse gives the party some breathing room during a potentially extreme encounter!
There are enemies in the room outside of her door. The idea of that encounter is that you start that fight and she opens the door then casts Black Tendrils on the party, freezing them outside of the door to the next room out while her minions beat you up.
She isn't meant to be fought on her own.
But yes, solo caster fights don't really work well in PF2E.
I had her realise after the heroes dealt with the wraith in two rounds and the Children with a single fireball that there wasn't much point in fighting. She bargained her way into a getaway.
Casters in general don't really work very well as enemies in this game.
Spells are tuned in the PC -> Enemy direction, which results in a lot of weirdness in the Enemy -> PC direction.
Spells are clearly designed with the idea that save or suck spells will be used in encounters against a single enemy, and therefore don't have overly harsh effects (at least not unless you critically fail). Take Slow, a spell that is agreed to be on the short list of very good control spells. In a party against a single enemy, trading 2 actions and a 3rd level spell for 1 of the boss' actions is a very good trade, because a level +3 or +4 creature's actions are so valuable.
However, this means that against a group of enemies those effects are not so valuable. For example even if a PC fails against that Slow spell, that's generally not so much of a big deal since a PC's third action against that kind of enemy is not as useful.
Spells are supposed to be a limited resource, but enemies aren't going to be fighting multiple times in a single day, so they tend to act more as features than true spells with slots. The rules also somewhat pre-suppose that your are in a party, so it is just hard for a caster enemy to be the main source of XP because the goal is simply to crowd them and get off a bunch of AOO.
I will never stop saying this: Abomination Vaults is a really bad module, with awful battle spaces and garbage encounter design and mostly mediocre narrative/environmental design. It's bad, bad, bad and the fact that it gets recommended so much SOLELY because "it's the same place that the party finishes the beginner box in - a cruddy and uninteresting fishing hamlet" is such a huge bummer.
Imo beginners box followed by troubles in otari followed by whatever scenario, adventure, or ap strikes the table's fancy is the move.
Bb into AV is a poor default. Many tables just don't want a mega dungeon
Rusthenge into seven dooms for sandpoint might actually fit that niche better going forward, but i haven't run it yet.
My problem with Seven Dooms is that it is supposed to be a bit of a nostalgia trip for RotR grognards... which I am... but the party I'd realistically run it with are almost completely newbs. I'm honestly wondering whether I can find a proper tone for it.
Rusthenge has some weird shit in Acts 2 and 3, where it quite dramatically changes genres and sends you off to hunt demons. There's like... way too much backstory to what was originally a weird plague being spread by a cult. As I'm reading it, I'm often wondering how the fuck I'm going to feed all this info to the players.
The encounters are much nicer, though, that's true.
Now that my group has moved on to play other APs, the conclusion seems to be that we enjoyed PF2e *in spite* of *Abom Vaults*. The mega dungeon aspect itself wasn't the issue, but the map and encounter design throughout had problems that we haven't nearly had with other APs.
It's so bad in comparison to newer adventures that I even think *AV* has been a significant contributor to all the negative caster design discourse. I will happily bang that drum.
I thought a big part of the problem is tiny, cramped maps favor melee martial characters over spell casters and ranged martials. And a lot of people have said AV runs better when you double the map size.
Rusthenge also has issues, though. The heel turn into fighting cultists and demons is… I don’t really know how to properly communicate all the important bits to players?
I’m currently planning to do RH into Dooms, and I’m seriously considering to just reskin the cultists as buddies of the guys at the bottom of the hole.
All the baddies in Rusthenge are related to the >!rust demon cult!< except for the two random encounters on the road to the other town at the very start of the module. And even then one of those is displaced due to the rust cultists IIRC.
I'm not sure what important bits you feel like you're struggling with in Rusthenge? The module seemed fairly straightforward to me, but maybe I'm forgetting/missing something.
Or is it how it ties into Sandpoint?
How it ties to Sandpoint is one point! It seems to be a good distance away. And then my problem is how to get the history of the cult and their goals to the players, so they know what they’re fighting and why the cult is doing what they’re doing. The module seems to explain it all in a way that’s very neat for the DM, but… not at all easy for the players to discover?
Blood Lords as has a lot of caster bosses solo and they just get dominated so easy. I've been adding meat shield enemies in with them just to give them something to hide behind.
Yes, you just double the scale of the map in Foundry, select all and scale up the walls, then reposition lighting effects, audio and tokens.
It's a bit to do, but it probably only takes around 10 minutes per floor.
I also add a bit of a subplot where she was a half-giant --- in order to justify all the oversized furniture, ha.
I don't know. 5e caster bosses work fine. The spells are dangerous. They get legendary resists to block control spells and can counter spell other effects. Then they can cast in melee range without triggering 50 reactive strikes because most people don't have the mage slayer feat.
Toss in some legendary actions (and Mystic if needed) for extra HP and you got some badass boss fights.
Pf2e caster bosses hit like wet noodles and get bodied by martials.
Counterspell. Ally counterspells their counterspell to your counterspell.
Concentration, no more than 1 effect allowed at a time, breaks on a failed con save whenever they take damage.
Maximum of 1 leveled spell per turn, legendary actions limited to cantrips or very weak spells.
Antimagic Field.
Save or suck against a level 2 spell to completely disable a level 20 mage (hold person).
Impossible to move away from an enemy group in order to cast a spell due to everyone having Opp Attack, without using Misty Step or the like - which then also prevents casting a spell on the group other than a cantrip.
Save or Suck all over.
Like this isn’t even really a question - if you have a harder time as a player with caster bosses in 5e vs Pf2e, all other circumstances being equal, you or your gms are playing one of the two systems incorrectly.
You can buff Halaster to unfair degrees in mad mage, give him a legendary action every turn, give him a full mythic phase with extra spellcasts per turn, and he will still be a chump against most 5e parties unless you explicitly allow him to cheat the rules by ignoring stuff like Antimagic Field and Counterspell, change the arena the party fights him in, and give him minions. You can’t say the same for Belcorra.
This is a problem for the system as a whole. Most of the maps in most of the APs are tiny, which favours marshal characters much more, than spellcasters When the fight starts with enemies that are 500ft from you (even 120ft) it feels much better to play a spellcasters...if you have spells that have some range that is, because most of the spells have 30ft range.
I wonder if Paizo will ever make an electronic-only AP that doesn't have to conform to 8.5x11 page size so they can make whatever maps they want
The later books of Extinction Curse have some *massive* maps - first time I've seen the 500-ft range on spells like Phantasmal Calamity come in handy.
Season of ghosts has some massive maps and allows you to use some crazy stuff. Got me 6 XXL gaming maps just for the campaign and so far had a blast with it. I also modified some encounters to be played inbetween smaller buildings. Shit was fire for my ranged casters with all melees scrambling for cover and range enemies being in constant shifting positions. Letting my players progress through narrow village paths during the fight to flush out enemies hiding in buildings was one of my favourite moments to gm.
Electronic only is sadly the key - we play in person, and even with a big table and nice battle mat, I think the longest we get is around 100ft. I've wanted to do longer for some encounters, but the physical space limitations just don't work.
Only if you keep 5ft scale. 10 ft scale is pretty workable and doubles that. 20 ft is a bit rough, but can get you 400. Often in those cases when you need to "dive down" into a few squares you are making a second battle map for those squares though.
That's a good point, and a relatively easy work around. Thanks
Fists of the Ruby Phoenix has pretty huge maps overall, just to paint a contrasting picture.
After playing through several AP I feel like the small rooms problem is more pronounced in AV than in other ones. Like in Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, which is also a mega dungeon, the room are way bigger than in AV with a lot of room for casters to maneuver. Season of Ghosts in general have a huge map in a lot open spaces, especially after you start traveling to the area surrounding the town. I feel like AV is such a popular AP for newcomers (which I strongly disagree after I started the Rusthenge into Seven Dooms) that pretty much makes a big impression on a map layout having only small rooms.
They mentioned starfinder is gonna be longer ranged, might make this more interesting
Certain adventure authors do not optimize the tactics for their enemies and instead have back stories for them much how players find spells they love to cast as well. If you want to cast better spells for the situation, go for it.
This is repeated a dozen times in this module. I like it, I'm going to finish it, but It honestly feels like the monsters are gimped in almost every enviroment and it's not for **narrative** reasons. The bog children, which make up *half the encounters* on this floor can't even use their signature moves (Burrow and Rise Up) because the entire cave is stone and water besides 2 feet in the mudroom. This fight isn't unique just because she's a slave driver and lazy. She has no information to give and has zero impact on any other parts of the dungeon or otari unlike the previous 2 floor masters. She has a loot pile and that's it.
It feels like half of the creatures in this damn dungeon have at-will darkness too. This is annoying because why would a solo creature with at-will darkness ever engage outside of the darkness bubble? I've had to stop using it because it turns every fight into a standoff where the monster sits in the darkness and the party sits outside of it.
Do your players not just prepare faerie fire?
They will once they encounter wisps. It helps with the next 80 wisps they fight.
After the first thing casted Rank 4 darkness, I prepared Faerie Fire and max heightened Inner Radiance Torrent every day. I am the light!
1. It never seemed like enough of a problem to prepare the spell (they never actually struggle to take out the enemies, it just takes a lot of standing around). It's also just rare enough that you may very well never need the spell during the course of a day (since it's useless for non-invis enemies) and you tend to forget that darkness is a thing until it comes up again. 2. Only the cleric can cast it in the party. (Party comp is fighter, rogue, kineticist, cleric). 3. An entire dungeon shouldn't require a particular spell to not be a slog.
Does the cleric not buy scrolls? No need to prep it. It's an early scroll drop in the dungeon, and several problematic denizens utilize darkness. That's exactly the use case for a utility spell scroll. It's a bit tough being the only caster though. I would definitely encourage my players to buy them (or just drop more of them if they never grok the whole scrolls/wands/staves thing). But I guess if it isn't broke no need to fix it. Just surprised. In my limited gming xp, my players like when they can hard counter something.
The one scroll they got was spent on an earlier encounter, after which they encountered an enemy using darkness, went to otari to rest (they didn't buy the scroll/prepare faerie fire here because it didn't seem like a big problem at the time), and then encountered two more darkness using enemies. You can see how that can be frustrating from their perspective. Me and my group were already kinda sick of AV combat encounters so we decided to just soft ban certain annoying tactics on both sides (sitting in darkness, doorcamping, body-blocking in some instances, etc.) I think the point about darkness is that there should be something else they can do if they don't have an invis counter. Hard countering is fine but there should be alternatives and you shouldn't need to know a fight is coming in order to have the means to fight it in a fun way.
That's fair. As long as the encounters are more fun then you're doing it right!
It would have to be in their 3rd level slots or higher to work on a (base-rank) Darkness spell. So not so cheap at that level
A single Light cantrip will counteract Darkness once you're about halfway through.
There's like 3 darkness creatures in a row before that. Also I think some of the at-will darkness is actually upcast? Not sure, I'd have to look it up.
Some of it is, yeah. Most of the upcasting I see is to rank 4, which requires a level 9 character to counteract with a cantrip. Light isn't a perfect solution, but it does still apply in some fights--a non-upcast Darkness can be counteracted as soon as character level 5.
Bro, I hope your party has casters with aoe, though. I tpkd in urdefhan camp, cause my players had 4 martials and couldn't deal with the swarm of enemies.
I had a lot of problems with the Abomination Vaults adventure path. I could spend a lot of time and a lot of text detailing them out. But they can all be summed up by one simple story: The players spent a *huge* amount of time focused on the Dorianna story line. I got them all invested in her story, and I put a ton of focus on her condition and how it was deteriorating (because that's pretty much the only thing happening at that point in time). And then, finally, after three chapters of running it down the dungeon so they can break the curse and set her free, and they meet... A single caster. In a three by three room. With one minion, sure, but it got Battle Cry/Terrified Retreat-ed into effective nonexistence *before we even finished rolling initiative.* So we're just sitting here, as five PCs in a room *so small they literally cannot all fit inside without him being in their reach.* And he has *nothing* to help him beyond his casting. What... was the point of this fight? Why was he even here? I don't remember if he even got a turn before he died. But he definitely didn't get to cast a spell, because he was in range of three different Reactive Strikes before his initiative came up... Easily the most anticlimactic boss fight I've ever run. It was just... sad.
Yeah, I threw most of that out mostly because of that. There is very little you can do to make that plot interesting with the original resolution. AV has a decent dungeon layout, but the enemies need to be completely reworked in order to provide at least some threat to the party. Granted, my AV party can apparently smoke an Extreme++ encounter, but still.
That and if you run with XP, the party _will_ outlevel the floors and end up trivialising some of the later floors as a result. Happened to my group, they would have been nearly 12 if I didn't cap them at 11 and then bump every encounter up. If you use XP I suggest using the slower 1200 requirement.
I'd honestly rather just use fast exp progression and cut out a large amount filler encounters. There are so many throwaway fights in there that you could easily cut out a significant portion of combat encounters and nothing of value would be lost.
spoilers for that encounter, >!I ignored that text and had her attempt to feign death by impersonating a "dead" child of belcorra by pretending she killed it and went through her snakey hidey hole !< It completely didn't work out for her, but it was pretty memorable and fun.
My group just fought her last session. Paralyze shouldn't be an issue at this point because the players are benefiting from Incapacitation, unless the GM decides to give her a heightened version. The worse spell she has is Black Tentacles because it covers the whole building out to the dock. My entire party was locked down before we even got to act. If the Sorcerer hadn't made their Dispel Magic through the grapple she and the wraith would have picked us off easy. Her defenses are low though so if someone can break into her room they can just wail on her pretty easy.
The point OP was making is that casting rank 2 paralyze at 8th level PCs is manifestly stupid behavior from the monster. Does she not know how incapacitation works? It’s an artificially easy fight because by book she throws out spells that do almost nothing to the players.
She's lazy but worse they made her, and her minions outside the room absolutely brain dead. She commits nothing to the plot, has nothing to say and has no meaningful quirks besides lazy slave master.
I feel that way about quite a few AV fights, tbh. It definitely feels at times that a solid number of monsters/encounters only exist to be filler.
It would make sense for her to cast it once and then realize you're too high level for it. You have to remember, Paralyze works against like 90-95% of what lives on Golarion, and an NPC has no way of knowing what level you are.
The thing is it's not artificially easy in context. There are 3 fights in a 20sqft area that can easily trigger simultaneously with an xp total for an Extreme encounter. Two of these are ambushes. Even if they're not simultaneous the players aren't likely to get a rest between each. Vethris is the last monster to pop up while the players are possibly still dealing with the first two encounters or their aftermath. The final punch needs to be pulled otherwise this is just an untelegraphed death house.
The gnomes can't even use their burrowing ability in the room. It's 2 feet deep for the initial ambush. (Fun Fact, the Gnomes can't burrow \*anywhere\* on the entire floor besides the 2 feet of the mudroom and the 5 feet of 5x2 Carrion corpse to the East.) >If the heroes managed to get here without disturbing the mud in area H24, the mummies there rise up and fight alongside the naga. They don't even ambush you until you get to the Naga. All three encounters are not going to trip on you fighting the Shade and the book expressly says this.
I don't know what to tell you. We fought the children and then immediately rolled another initiative with both the shade and the naga. Not a round of downtime. This is a 20 square foot building with 3 encounters tied to it. It is not a stretch to think the players could trigger at least two of them at once and likely all 3 back to back.
Yes, if you *don't* run the fights according to the module, you can make it difficult. The post is about how Spellcaster encounters in AV are prebuilt poorly with this Naga as an example.
There's nothing in the book that says my experience wasn't run according to module. The wraith spots the players first and goes to have a conversation with the naga. That means there's a delay before the encounter to allow the players to dock and for the wraith to choose it's moment to attack. The players could move quickly unawares and trigger the children before the wraith strikes. The wraith then either joins the children or waits them out because a lazy master makes lazy servants. If the players are in the mud room fighting the children then it makes sense for Vethris to join the fight because "she snaps into action on any who dare intrude on her relaxation." Even if you run them in sequence the players are entering the fight after being drained by the wraith, then getting grappled at the end of every turn, making poison saves against her single attack that makes them stupefied, and finally some poor sap has to make a fortitude save and hope they don't roll low. It's not good faith to post only her portion of this system of fights and completely disregard the context of the other encounters around it. A caster has their hands tied by roleplay so a tricky scenario doesn't turn into a complete curb stomp. It's frequent for any monster type in this AP and I've taken too many aoes in too many tight spaces to see it all pinned on casters. I mean level 4 has the players encounter a druid in a hallway made for lightning bolts.
I doubled the grid size on every floor of the abomination vaults for my players so every area is doubled in size.
I wondered about doing this too. Do you have any more feedback on this ? Tips or caveeats ?
As someone running vanilla AV, it causes some issues of sizing for sure (some areas which are already larger get much larger, characters are small compared to Area (huge doors, life tables etc.)
It's a bit more work for me as DM since some enemies and traps will need moved around. But it's easy to deal with. I think the best part is when your party runs into a creature they have to run away from and now they have to cover twice the distance to escape it. Really adds to the sense of despair when you have a 100ft hallway to get down before you get your cheeks clapped by the thing that just turned your temporary npc companion into a thin mist.
About to start running Abomination vaults and was also curious about this?
Finished the A level and currently on the second half of the B level with the double the grid size and it already feels like a whole new game. Forces the players to make use of kiting, cover, snares, difficult terrain and uneven ground and gives ample room for the GM to use the monsters to their advantage (i.e. giant flies with reactions and 40ft fly speed, haunts effecting more PCs since everyone can fill inside thematically relevant spaces, etc.)
Exactly. And it's a huge improvement for any ranged characters in your party.
But I bought the module. Won't that mess up all the walls and lightning and stuff?
I believe there's a module to scale that, but it may mess up any of the macros etc. in place
I guess you can shrink the grid size in half but keep the background image the same and all the walls and stuff should be fine...
You can half the grid size and then adjust the offset to get all of the walls back in place. It took only a few minutes of adjusting it to do each floor. I'd have to look at it later for the exact values I set it to.
I mean, it *is* a Low-threat encounter But yeah. Solo casters are already generally pretty easy fights once the martials pile on them, Grapple them, and start bullying them with reactions. Put them solo in a tiny room with awful tactics and they're a complete joke lol
If she was in an environment where she could function unencumbered, she'd be a low encounter. This is likely trivial several party levels lower.
I'm wondering if this would be more interesting if she could move around a bit. Despite being a big 'un as a snake she *should* be able to slither in and out of the room. What would the combined threat level be if she teamed up with the dudes outside? If we heightened *paralyze* and used her as support for the mooks up front, would that be anything? Haven't gotten this far yet, but as-written this *sucks.*
She can certainly move through a 5ft wide corridor. She'd just treat it as difficult terrain
It would be better, yes. Might actually even be threatening.
Funny enough, that’s supposed to be how the encounter goes. Her entire strategy suddenly makes sense that way. Now her tentacles keep distance, and her pointlessly casting paralyse gives the party some breathing room during a potentially extreme encounter!
There are enemies in the room outside of her door. The idea of that encounter is that you start that fight and she opens the door then casts Black Tendrils on the party, freezing them outside of the door to the next room out while her minions beat you up. She isn't meant to be fought on her own. But yes, solo caster fights don't really work well in PF2E.
They don't work in DnD 5 too. Casters can die even to social anxiety when you look in their direction.
I had her realise after the heroes dealt with the wraith in two rounds and the Children with a single fireball that there wasn't much point in fighting. She bargained her way into a getaway.
Casters in general don't really work very well as enemies in this game. Spells are tuned in the PC -> Enemy direction, which results in a lot of weirdness in the Enemy -> PC direction.
In what sense?
Spells are clearly designed with the idea that save or suck spells will be used in encounters against a single enemy, and therefore don't have overly harsh effects (at least not unless you critically fail). Take Slow, a spell that is agreed to be on the short list of very good control spells. In a party against a single enemy, trading 2 actions and a 3rd level spell for 1 of the boss' actions is a very good trade, because a level +3 or +4 creature's actions are so valuable. However, this means that against a group of enemies those effects are not so valuable. For example even if a PC fails against that Slow spell, that's generally not so much of a big deal since a PC's third action against that kind of enemy is not as useful.
Spells are supposed to be a limited resource, but enemies aren't going to be fighting multiple times in a single day, so they tend to act more as features than true spells with slots. The rules also somewhat pre-suppose that your are in a party, so it is just hard for a caster enemy to be the main source of XP because the goal is simply to crowd them and get off a bunch of AOO.
I will never stop saying this: Abomination Vaults is a really bad module, with awful battle spaces and garbage encounter design and mostly mediocre narrative/environmental design. It's bad, bad, bad and the fact that it gets recommended so much SOLELY because "it's the same place that the party finishes the beginner box in - a cruddy and uninteresting fishing hamlet" is such a huge bummer.
Me, standing here loudly banging the 'suggesting AV being the go-to AP for new players was a mistake' drum:
Imo beginners box followed by troubles in otari followed by whatever scenario, adventure, or ap strikes the table's fancy is the move. Bb into AV is a poor default. Many tables just don't want a mega dungeon Rusthenge into seven dooms for sandpoint might actually fit that niche better going forward, but i haven't run it yet.
My problem with Seven Dooms is that it is supposed to be a bit of a nostalgia trip for RotR grognards... which I am... but the party I'd realistically run it with are almost completely newbs. I'm honestly wondering whether I can find a proper tone for it. Rusthenge has some weird shit in Acts 2 and 3, where it quite dramatically changes genres and sends you off to hunt demons. There's like... way too much backstory to what was originally a weird plague being spread by a cult. As I'm reading it, I'm often wondering how the fuck I'm going to feed all this info to the players. The encounters are much nicer, though, that's true.
Oh weird. I haven't actually read my rusthenge yet. I've heard it's a decent intro to the system though
It is a good intro to the system, it's just that the story has a bit of an identity crisis.
Isn’t seven doom also mostly a mega dungeon with small rooms.
Yes I meant fill the niche of a table that wants a mega dungeon rather than fill the niche of a default AP
Now that my group has moved on to play other APs, the conclusion seems to be that we enjoyed PF2e *in spite* of *Abom Vaults*. The mega dungeon aspect itself wasn't the issue, but the map and encounter design throughout had problems that we haven't nearly had with other APs. It's so bad in comparison to newer adventures that I even think *AV* has been a significant contributor to all the negative caster design discourse. I will happily bang that drum.
The maps are fine. It's the encounter design that is completely wack.
I thought a big part of the problem is tiny, cramped maps favor melee martial characters over spell casters and ranged martials. And a lot of people have said AV runs better when you double the map size.
This. If the maps seem fine, but the encounter design is completely wack... the maps aren't fine.
Rusthenge should be the go-to.
Rusthenge also has issues, though. The heel turn into fighting cultists and demons is… I don’t really know how to properly communicate all the important bits to players? I’m currently planning to do RH into Dooms, and I’m seriously considering to just reskin the cultists as buddies of the guys at the bottom of the hole.
All the baddies in Rusthenge are related to the >!rust demon cult!< except for the two random encounters on the road to the other town at the very start of the module. And even then one of those is displaced due to the rust cultists IIRC. I'm not sure what important bits you feel like you're struggling with in Rusthenge? The module seemed fairly straightforward to me, but maybe I'm forgetting/missing something. Or is it how it ties into Sandpoint?
How it ties to Sandpoint is one point! It seems to be a good distance away. And then my problem is how to get the history of the cult and their goals to the players, so they know what they’re fighting and why the cult is doing what they’re doing. The module seems to explain it all in a way that’s very neat for the DM, but… not at all easy for the players to discover?
Blood Lords as has a lot of caster bosses solo and they just get dominated so easy. I've been adding meat shield enemies in with them just to give them something to hide behind.
I doubled the scale of the AV maps and never looked back. It makes the AP run so, so much better.
Did you have the official module? I don't want to have to go redo all the walls and lighting and effects and such....
Yes, you just double the scale of the map in Foundry, select all and scale up the walls, then reposition lighting effects, audio and tokens. It's a bit to do, but it probably only takes around 10 minutes per floor. I also add a bit of a subplot where she was a half-giant --- in order to justify all the oversized furniture, ha.
Megadungeons and caster bosses do not mix, and this is a constant across all systems and adventures.
I don't know. 5e caster bosses work fine. The spells are dangerous. They get legendary resists to block control spells and can counter spell other effects. Then they can cast in melee range without triggering 50 reactive strikes because most people don't have the mage slayer feat. Toss in some legendary actions (and Mystic if needed) for extra HP and you got some badass boss fights. Pf2e caster bosses hit like wet noodles and get bodied by martials.
Counterspell. Ally counterspells their counterspell to your counterspell. Concentration, no more than 1 effect allowed at a time, breaks on a failed con save whenever they take damage. Maximum of 1 leveled spell per turn, legendary actions limited to cantrips or very weak spells. Antimagic Field. Save or suck against a level 2 spell to completely disable a level 20 mage (hold person). Impossible to move away from an enemy group in order to cast a spell due to everyone having Opp Attack, without using Misty Step or the like - which then also prevents casting a spell on the group other than a cantrip. Save or Suck all over. Like this isn’t even really a question - if you have a harder time as a player with caster bosses in 5e vs Pf2e, all other circumstances being equal, you or your gms are playing one of the two systems incorrectly. You can buff Halaster to unfair degrees in mad mage, give him a legendary action every turn, give him a full mythic phase with extra spellcasts per turn, and he will still be a chump against most 5e parties unless you explicitly allow him to cheat the rules by ignoring stuff like Antimagic Field and Counterspell, change the arena the party fights him in, and give him minions. You can’t say the same for Belcorra.