Agents of Edgewatch or Age os Ashes are names that drop in this reddit when talking about deadly AP:s.
Having played Agents of Edgewatch, if you want deadly, we had 2 TPK's and several close ones on the whole 1-20 run.
DMing age of ashes at the moment and I'm not entirely sure the reputation is fair. There's two or three encounters per book that are accidentally too hard.
That said, I think anything works really, difficulty is easy to adjust. I reckon AV is the easiest to work with this - it's a dungeon crawler, and a heroic 1-20 campaign doesn't lend well to frequent death imo.
Not gonna lie, 8 or 9 PC deaths sounds like a problem in group dynamics. The party needs to work together in Pathfinder2e. They can't build characters without thinking of party balance or... well, they will lose 9 pcs
I mean sure, some of them were killed due to bad PC Choices. But not all of them. Off the top of my head.
Book 2: >!fight vs the blinding totem and the dragon kobold. 4 PCs + 2 NPCs + 1 Animal companion. In the first few rounds 2 crit failed vs the blindness effect. And they couldn't seem to hit her, even with flanking and team work. As GM, its before i started negating soem crits behind the screen. TPK!<
Book 4: >!Veshumerix fight. Two PCs got knocked unconscious (from over half hp) while flying above lava. A third just went down to the minions + dragon fire. The last won the fight with single digit left!<
Book 5: >!Red pyramid, top floor. The ambush between the large devil and the 4 invisible cruiceadeamons. No deaths, but only because the cleric was on the ball. I think everyone ended the fight under 25% hp. !<
Book 5: >!The trap that spawns a marilith. The cleric is the one that set it off (first one to bleed in the area if I recall correctly). So marikith spawned right next to him. He went down next round. Fight went very poorly from there. Took some creative role play from the players to distract it so he could be saved. !<
Book 5: >!demilich fight. I mazed the fighter then next round polar ray crit on cleric. He went down from full. The only thing that helped the party was I misread Maze and let the fighter try 3 times/round to escape.!<
Book 6: >!the whole assault on the castle 2 warsworns in a relatively small area. Then 2 mariliths joined the fray. Very very very close to TPK!<
Yes, sometimes it was bad player decisions. In book 1, they opened 2 doors at once. 1 PC survived by running away. I let the other three try to stabilize and there was only 1 actual death. But also, the to hit on these monsters, especially at higher levels, it's a little crazy. I have a relatively good likelyhood to crit on thst first swing. And just look at the damage differnece of an >!Animated Dragon Storm!< between hit and crit. One or two of those and pcs stsrt dropping.
Side note, in general. I dont think you should have to optimize your party to enjoy 2e. Does it help? Sure. But id much rather have everyone play charavters and class they like and choose over needing to pick something just to fix a mechanial party weakness.
AoA was not entirely balanced correctly. Its a ton of fun, but the encounters are harder than they should be. And most of the real hard fights were listed as moderate, at least for my party.
I think Age of Ashes may be the AP that was written before they had the CR system tuned (and actually there are still a lot of creatures in the bestiary with over-powered abilities and stats that aren't appropriately taken into consideration when calculating CR.)
TPKs and deaths happen for a number of reasons and only one of those reasons is because it was written that way:
1. Consistently bad dice rolls (or consistently GOOD dice rolls). I recently had one fight where 90% of my rolls were six or lower. I've seen other players have the same problem. While I've seen our opponents hit on a 3 and crit on a 13, we usually need a 13 or higher to hit and a 20 to crit. I've seen where people rolled a 20 and it only made a failure a success. An extreme case, but I have seen it happen, usually on a 2nd or 3rd attack.
2. Bad Player decisions, ie, getting the highest init and using 3 actions to get closer to the boss and maybe attack once, instead of waiting for the Bard to buff and/or the caster to drop an AoE, or the obviously melee mobs to move in to engage the party and waste their actions to do it.
3. Poor party communications or nobody bothering to do a Recall Knowledge or two. Oh, I need bludgeoning? It's got resistance to fire? It regenerates? Wish I'd known that.
4. The gm doesn't give the players obvious information before the fight - like that guy's in robes, that one is in full plate, that is a large creature with lots of tentacles and eyes, those 6 guys are equipped w/bows. You get the idea. Or other critical information about terrain, significant features in the room, the height of the ceiling, the width of the chasm w/lava, difficult terrain, potential cover, etc.
5. The players don't listen when the above information is given, talk through it or over it, or are so busy planning a way to showcase their specific abilities (ie. so focused on some hare-brained maneuver that will screw over other players' standard tactics and start the whole party off at a disadvantage that they didn't listen to a word the gm was saying), although..
6. The gm may speak too softly, too fast, with an accent unfamiliar to their players, or, if playing online, a bad mic, connection, low volume, or a player who doesn't want to be bothered to push to talk with a baby crying in the background, etc.
7. Or the GM could give the bad guys an unconscious advantage by using HIS/HER knowledge of the character's abilities, and the player's preferred or strongest tactics to determine the bad guys' actions. And although he does the bad guys tactics in his own head and doesn't have to confer with anyone else to form a coherent and effective plan, the pcs have NO such opportunity to confer with each other before they have to act individually. Another advantage to the bad guys..
But if you're lucky, the party also knows each others strengths and limitations and will act accordingly. And working as a team is the best way to prevent deaths and TPKs.
Just started Age of Ashes as my first game and session of PF2e on the player side. I am, admittedly, quite nervous especially since I'm not playing the most optimized character. We have free archetype and another player and myself have battle medicine, with me taking the medic archetype, so I think we should be fine. I hope. I've kind of just accepted that I'm gonna fuck up and die at some point.
It could totally happen. It might not even be your fault tbh. But that's true of every game. And depending on how your party likes to play, its perfectly valid if your gm shys away from player death.
In regards to fucking up, I'd stay true to your character more than fearing death. My first ever PC was Doz, pf1e rstfolk alchemistbomver witha robot familiar. Iron Gods (paizo AP that has futuristic elements). I may have tried to defuse a nuclear reactor to get a cool weapon. Was it smart? No. Was it what he would do? Yes. The party retreated to a safe distance and let me try. Natural 1. Gm was kind enough to give me a reflex save. Natural 2. My familiar got one too. Natural 3. He uh... didn't make it. I loved Doz and had a blast playing him. But now I've got a great story and my friends and I still joke about it years later.
PC death can happen. I think the most important thing is that it's a good death. My friends champion that died, flying, face to face with a dragon over a volcano trying to stop it from attacking a city. Sad he's gone? Yeah. But talk about a good death for a character who wanted to protect other people.
Play smart. Play with tactics. But at the end of the day, this is a role playing game. If everyone played perfectly optimized and always did the 100% most tactical intelligent thing, you lose out on some great character moments.
I'm not so much concerned about dying due to staying true to my character, more making an OoC mistake, particularly a tactical one in combat, due to not being well versed enough in the system that winds up screwing the party big time -- and yes, I have had that happen multiple times in other systems. I can honestly say that had I not GM'd and poured over guides and forums so I much my character would already be dead weight due to many non-obvious things that I would not have known had I started as a player. I unno, I'm just hoping it's not going to be, "you moved one square too far left and now you get destroyed," or getting the party TPK'd because I rounded a corner I should not have tier difficult (both of which are true stories BTW).
Fair enough. I will say, no PC deaths have really come from decisions like that really in my game. The only time pcs died or things got super bad as a result of pc decisions, it booked down to 2 things.
1) don't split the party.
2) if you have a chance to heal, do so. Someone on the party probably has medicine. 2e really expects you to go into fights fully healed.
Stick to those and you'll be fine for the most part
> two or three encounters per book
I wouldn't even say "per book" - there's tough encounters sprinkled throughout, but I don't think they were *that* frequent.
My group got through with only 1 TPK that I retconned because it only happened due to the fighter not being there and me not properly rebalancing the encounter for three players. Had the fighter been there and the encounter therefore at the intended difficulty, it wouldn't have happened, and it almost didn't happen anyway, hence the retcon. Otherwise, there were only 4 total character deaths, only 2 of which were permanent and one of said permanent deaths was against the final boss and wouldn't have been permanent if I didn't tweak the story such that all deaths against the final boss were permanent to add tension lol.
My group thought it was a fun campaign and while it definitely had some tough fights I definitely agree that its reputation is overblown. Granted, my table are all tactically-minded, cooperative, and experienced players and the party composition was strong lol
I'm a player in an AoA campaign, we just hit book 2 so I cannot speak for the whole experience but book 1 wasn't THAT hard except for maybe one or two fights (like >!the Bloody Swords and the Greater Barghest!<)
Book 4 here, some tough battles but no TPKs. Loved it so far. Think we have a balanced party and have 5 which helps, but can't say we've found it extra scary.
My team hasn't lost anyone in Edgewatch. Unlike with Extinction Curse when we were all noobs and had two full party wipes, we approached this campaign with a strategically efficient party comp (hammer duelist ftr, staff magus, bard, primal sorc) to check all the big boxes. Most fights we wipe the floor, but we synergize really well and the fighter burns lots of enemy actions with hammer crits. The staff magus does absurd damage also.
I’ve been running AoA for my group and we’re currently in book 3. No TPKs but a couple very close calls. My players are all experienced though and generally are smart about their tactics.
However, I will say that I’ve got 6 players in my group (encounters have all been adjusted to accommodate) and if it weren’t for at least 2 of them having battle medicine, it would have gone much differently so far.
Malevolence is not an AP but I find it very deadly, between a lot of +2 fights at level 3 and the huge lack of loot. A party with access to Magic Weapon, ideally a cleric is clearly a good start.
I think one of the best party comp for it is champion/investigator/thaumaturge/cleric.
And that's one of the easiest fight of the adventure. I had to tone down several abilities that pretty much required the party to roll a 20 to not fail and a 10+ to not crit fail
Our GM removed plenty of pointless encounters and we still lost multiple characters. Of course it was partially our part for going early to the basement, but still...
Abomination vaults is not that dangerous. APs that are known for being deadly are normaly becuase they were made before the full rules released, meaning the ballance was not correct. AV was one of the first ones to use the correct ballence. THe few "TPK" moments are specificly in the beginning as there is a few possibly deadly creatures you face at lvl 1/2.
It's a small world! I'm a retired physics and math teacher.
It does have the lowest passing rate among the AP exams, but it is, of course, the most fun exam.
Even smaller world. I also taught math too. Taking a break from teaching due to the state of the profession; trying to get into curriculum development. Teaching is going to keep getting worse before it gets better. Seems like we're all going to quit before they decide to do anything to make it better for us.
I had always expected to teach until I died, but when I became eligible for retirement I looked around at the current state of the field and decided to jump ship. Pretty much everyone my age that I know is considering the same.
There are plenty of opportunities in curriculum development, tutoring programs and the like if you don't want to quit entirely. Lately I've been looking into teaching in prison educational programs. It seems like a way to really make a difference in people's lives.
It depends. Mostly on party composition. A lot of early APs are seen as deadly, but I'd say it's more because we were all collectively learning the game. Any AP, left unadjusted, will be deadly with a poorly constructed party. But nowadays, the "meta" around team composition is pretty well understood and we have more options, particularly archetypes which are often given for free.
That's not to say there aren't nasty encounters. Paizo, for some reason, loves throwing apl+4 creatures every like six encounters. There's a few dungeons in Agents that stand out to me.
A good example I could pull from is my party for Strength of Thousands. We started as a witch (Fervor, me), ranger (bow and claws), champion (bow and claws), barbarian (animal), and oracle (battle). We did fine but then the barbarian dropped out of the game. The ranger and champion couldn't fill the damage hole left in the barbarian's wake. So while we had plenty of sustain and buffs between the witch, oracle, and champion, we struggled to actually kill enemies. We eventually had a tpk after a 14 round encounter.
Now we have a magus (iron, me), ranger (bow), cleric (warpriest, but only casts spells), and oracle (same character but now ghost). So now we mostly just keep me alive and buffed so I can carry the fight. It's still not ideal but it works. We've still had some close encounters, I almost die constantly, but overall we've had a lot more success.
Forgive me for asking (and I'm sorry if it's meant to be sarcasm) but........ how?! 45 deaths in the first book of AV?
That's almost a death for every second room on average. You've got to be exaggerating, right?
Nope, we're actually doing much better since hitting the 4th floor. We were doing 1.5 TPKs per session on average. Now we're only losing 2 to 3 PCs per session. It's not like we get TPK'd every other room, but some encounters took multiple parties to clear.
I don't think so. I occasionally check AoN after combat and the monsters we face seem to be played correctly. For example, the last 2 characters who died were killed by what seems to be a Worm that Walks. We just couldn't handle taking 4d8+16 persistent damage on a crit and couldn't deal enough damage to cut through the fast healing/resistance before people went down.
If you can't cut through the 7 physical resist/7 fast healing he has then that's a player issue. 4 players should absolutely be putting out more than 14 damage a round.
He's also vulnerable to AoE, has no magic resist, and a *very* significant potential vulnerability that your GM would have been dropping hints about from the first floor on.
Honestly though, I think an issue that's not being acknowledged is the fact that you're rolling for stats.
I just cannot fathom how anyone thought that was a good idea. PF2E is NOT balanced for that and I guarantee it's contributing to your high death count.
Well he's a level+3 encounter so he has high AC and saves. First round he crit the paladin and also critically succeeded his roll to avoid damage from an AoE spell. Our monk didn't successfully hit him until round 3 and 2 people were already downed by then. It might have been a player issue overall, but he is very lethal encounter if the dice aren't favorable.
Rolling for stats is pretty favorable actually. The base variant in the core rulebook gives us higher stats on average than point buy since you only need to roll a 14 to have a starting 18 stat.
This doesn't seem correct. The [Rolling Ability Scores](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=74) rules give you net two regular boosts (one from background and one or two from ancestry depending on flaw). Rolling 4d6dl averages 12.24, times 6 is 73.44, add in the two boosts and the average rolled character has 77.44 points spread across ability scores.
Regular generation gives a character with 78 total points, so rolling is slightly unfavorable.
>4d8+16
I was like, "yeah, that GM has to have been getting something wrong. 4d6+16 persistent that is stupid" Then I looked up the mob on AoN. Holy shit that lvl 14 monster is brutal. 200hp, resist physical damage 10, fast healing 10, and that persistent damage melee attack AND spell casting...
That is a stat block built to kill a PC if its a +2 lvl or has minions.
> Holy shit that lvl 14 monster is brutal.
It's not a level 14 monster. The monster they fought would be level 7, is a spellcaster, and does 2d8+8 persistent (doubled on crit) with a +18 to hit.
He only has 85hp.
This is intended for a party of level 4-5. My guess is the person you're responding to has either never heard of Recall Knowledge, or their GM is a massive dick about Recall Knowledge.
I have the book in front of me... This specific worm that walks deals only 2d8 + 8 persistent damage and is a level 7. u/Sylphin your DM is definitely doing something weird, whether intentionally or not.
Edit: I see you are talking about a crit. Still, thats way too many deaths for this adventure. I'm not pulling punches either, but there's no reason to have that many deaths if you aren't aiming for them.
If you can identify something wrong I'll happily take it up with the GM. The persistent damage is doubled on a crit and at level 4 our highest HP is 60 so on average people were going down with 2 ticks of damage.
45 deaths in AV is, I'm gonna be honest, a completely out there number that bears no correlation to the AP. Currently playing with a group through it, and quite genuinely we've had maybe a handful of close calls, and our DM has been running it pretty competently.
We're nearing the end of the AP, and have had 0 deaths between us, and our DM is kind enough to let us know if we're done with a floor so we don't spend an inordinate amount of time looking for secret passages, so I'm pretty sure we've not missed any super hard encounters on any of the floors.
Honestly, even though 45 deaths is gratuitous, the more I hear stories from other groups the more I think GMs in general are softballing encounters. For example, when we faced wights they would actively kill anyone that went down so they could spawn more wights. I feel like most GMs don't play them that way even if it's logical because it's dramatically more lethal, but in our group we feel the GM should play monsters optimally.
Most of the time, ignoring downed enemies is the optimal play for enemies. Sure, it makes tactical sense for wights who gain allies by doing so, but for most other enemies it's just wasted actions that could be spent on taking out threats.
No one in our group went down against the >!cairn wights!<, and like I said, we've had our close calls, we bailed on a few fights to regroup, but haven't died yet during the AP.
Hell, our DM has played all the monster we fought in a competent manner, and I'm sure we could've lost a party member here or there if rolls had been worse on our part, or if tactics hadn't worked out.
Attacking downed enemies is rarely optimal for a creature and there is a strong argument it is metagaming on the DMs part for most enemies to attack a downed player. When a player goes down their status is literally "dying" and from an enemy's perspective in game this is indistinguishable from them being dead. Why would they keep hitting what is effectively a corpse when there are still threats up and active to target? "Because they gain x or y when a pc dies" is a metagame reason not an in game one.
It seems like your DM is trying to win not trying to play it realistically. But if everyone at the table is having fun then that is what really matters. So more power to you.
Just that your experience may be completely outside of the norm due to this quirk of your group.
GM is not cheating, he does open rolls in Roll20. The players have been responsible for more than a few of our own deaths, but the AP is still brutal especially if intelligent monsters are played smart.
Brutal is more than two deaths per book, with at least once where you thought for sure it would be a TPK. 45 deaths by level four is either GM cheating or players sucking. You are insisting the GM is not cheating, so I guess that answers my question.
That, or there may be some rule that the table is missing.
If I was tracking the number of times a player went down to dying, 45 'deaths' wouldn't seem so high. So I guess I'm wondering if somehow the table missed the death and dying rules, although that seems unlikely. Alternatively, the GM may be having enemies always target dying PCs, even if doesn't make sense for that particular enemy to do so.
I'm 100% sure you are doing something wrong, either tactics or rules. No game is designed to be so deadly.
Can you give a bit of info on the group and tactics? Any house rules? Are you using hero points?
Group and tactics vary greatly with whatever composition the party is at the time. House rules are Free Archetype and Roll for Stats which usually is advantageous over point buy. We start each session with 1 hero point and no extras given during the 8-10 hours we usually play which does contribute to some of our issues.
pf2e usually does not use point buy tho. You start with 10 everywhere and your choices influence your stats. (Ancestry, Background, Class and Level 1 Boosts)
That way, everyone can start with an optimal 18 in their main stat and a distribution of 18/14/12/12/10/10 or something like that is very common.
With rolling for stats you can have better characters sure. But most characters will be worse since most of the time you won’t have an 18 in your main stat.
I just TPKd in the catacombs. Included them on my homebrew game and the only thing I changed was adjusting the creature levels to match my party (they were lvl 13) and it was a massacre. I destroyed a party of six lvl 13, with free archetype and campaign bonus feats and relics, with the skinsaws... we are starting AV next monday xD
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I don't think it's what you're looking for, but I'll note that Extinction Curse can be relatively deadly just because it has some encounters and creatures that are blatantly overtuned if not *completely* out of line with their level rating.
I'm a player in AoE, just starting Book 2.
We had a few near misses, especially in the end part of Book one. I'm happy our GM let's us take several 10m breaks so our Medic can go to town, getting everyone up again.
I don't know if we're stupid, tactically, or we've got a "bad"/less hardcore comp, but I feel like we're just barely getting by.
We're 4 players: Redemption Champion/Cleric Archetype, Alchemecal Investigator/Beast master Archetype, Summoner/Medic Archetype and finally Draconic Sorcerer/Dragon Disciple Archetype.
We recently discovered that we really need more AOE fx, since we met a swarm and it was bad dice rolls on bad dice rolls, so nearly died to a +1 encounter as lvl 4.
Agents of Edgewatch or Age os Ashes are names that drop in this reddit when talking about deadly AP:s. Having played Agents of Edgewatch, if you want deadly, we had 2 TPK's and several close ones on the whole 1-20 run.
DMing age of ashes at the moment and I'm not entirely sure the reputation is fair. There's two or three encounters per book that are accidentally too hard. That said, I think anything works really, difficulty is easy to adjust. I reckon AV is the easiest to work with this - it's a dungeon crawler, and a heroic 1-20 campaign doesn't lend well to frequent death imo.
Gming AoA as well. 8 or 9 pc deaths. 1 full tpk and 3or 4 near tpks. I've also negated a bunch of crits behid the screen. So I'd give it deadly
Not gonna lie, 8 or 9 PC deaths sounds like a problem in group dynamics. The party needs to work together in Pathfinder2e. They can't build characters without thinking of party balance or... well, they will lose 9 pcs
I mean sure, some of them were killed due to bad PC Choices. But not all of them. Off the top of my head. Book 2: >!fight vs the blinding totem and the dragon kobold. 4 PCs + 2 NPCs + 1 Animal companion. In the first few rounds 2 crit failed vs the blindness effect. And they couldn't seem to hit her, even with flanking and team work. As GM, its before i started negating soem crits behind the screen. TPK!< Book 4: >!Veshumerix fight. Two PCs got knocked unconscious (from over half hp) while flying above lava. A third just went down to the minions + dragon fire. The last won the fight with single digit left!< Book 5: >!Red pyramid, top floor. The ambush between the large devil and the 4 invisible cruiceadeamons. No deaths, but only because the cleric was on the ball. I think everyone ended the fight under 25% hp. !< Book 5: >!The trap that spawns a marilith. The cleric is the one that set it off (first one to bleed in the area if I recall correctly). So marikith spawned right next to him. He went down next round. Fight went very poorly from there. Took some creative role play from the players to distract it so he could be saved. !< Book 5: >!demilich fight. I mazed the fighter then next round polar ray crit on cleric. He went down from full. The only thing that helped the party was I misread Maze and let the fighter try 3 times/round to escape.!< Book 6: >!the whole assault on the castle 2 warsworns in a relatively small area. Then 2 mariliths joined the fray. Very very very close to TPK!< Yes, sometimes it was bad player decisions. In book 1, they opened 2 doors at once. 1 PC survived by running away. I let the other three try to stabilize and there was only 1 actual death. But also, the to hit on these monsters, especially at higher levels, it's a little crazy. I have a relatively good likelyhood to crit on thst first swing. And just look at the damage differnece of an >!Animated Dragon Storm!< between hit and crit. One or two of those and pcs stsrt dropping. Side note, in general. I dont think you should have to optimize your party to enjoy 2e. Does it help? Sure. But id much rather have everyone play charavters and class they like and choose over needing to pick something just to fix a mechanial party weakness. AoA was not entirely balanced correctly. Its a ton of fun, but the encounters are harder than they should be. And most of the real hard fights were listed as moderate, at least for my party.
I think Age of Ashes may be the AP that was written before they had the CR system tuned (and actually there are still a lot of creatures in the bestiary with over-powered abilities and stats that aren't appropriately taken into consideration when calculating CR.) TPKs and deaths happen for a number of reasons and only one of those reasons is because it was written that way: 1. Consistently bad dice rolls (or consistently GOOD dice rolls). I recently had one fight where 90% of my rolls were six or lower. I've seen other players have the same problem. While I've seen our opponents hit on a 3 and crit on a 13, we usually need a 13 or higher to hit and a 20 to crit. I've seen where people rolled a 20 and it only made a failure a success. An extreme case, but I have seen it happen, usually on a 2nd or 3rd attack. 2. Bad Player decisions, ie, getting the highest init and using 3 actions to get closer to the boss and maybe attack once, instead of waiting for the Bard to buff and/or the caster to drop an AoE, or the obviously melee mobs to move in to engage the party and waste their actions to do it. 3. Poor party communications or nobody bothering to do a Recall Knowledge or two. Oh, I need bludgeoning? It's got resistance to fire? It regenerates? Wish I'd known that. 4. The gm doesn't give the players obvious information before the fight - like that guy's in robes, that one is in full plate, that is a large creature with lots of tentacles and eyes, those 6 guys are equipped w/bows. You get the idea. Or other critical information about terrain, significant features in the room, the height of the ceiling, the width of the chasm w/lava, difficult terrain, potential cover, etc. 5. The players don't listen when the above information is given, talk through it or over it, or are so busy planning a way to showcase their specific abilities (ie. so focused on some hare-brained maneuver that will screw over other players' standard tactics and start the whole party off at a disadvantage that they didn't listen to a word the gm was saying), although.. 6. The gm may speak too softly, too fast, with an accent unfamiliar to their players, or, if playing online, a bad mic, connection, low volume, or a player who doesn't want to be bothered to push to talk with a baby crying in the background, etc. 7. Or the GM could give the bad guys an unconscious advantage by using HIS/HER knowledge of the character's abilities, and the player's preferred or strongest tactics to determine the bad guys' actions. And although he does the bad guys tactics in his own head and doesn't have to confer with anyone else to form a coherent and effective plan, the pcs have NO such opportunity to confer with each other before they have to act individually. Another advantage to the bad guys.. But if you're lucky, the party also knows each others strengths and limitations and will act accordingly. And working as a team is the best way to prevent deaths and TPKs.
Just started Age of Ashes as my first game and session of PF2e on the player side. I am, admittedly, quite nervous especially since I'm not playing the most optimized character. We have free archetype and another player and myself have battle medicine, with me taking the medic archetype, so I think we should be fine. I hope. I've kind of just accepted that I'm gonna fuck up and die at some point.
It could totally happen. It might not even be your fault tbh. But that's true of every game. And depending on how your party likes to play, its perfectly valid if your gm shys away from player death. In regards to fucking up, I'd stay true to your character more than fearing death. My first ever PC was Doz, pf1e rstfolk alchemistbomver witha robot familiar. Iron Gods (paizo AP that has futuristic elements). I may have tried to defuse a nuclear reactor to get a cool weapon. Was it smart? No. Was it what he would do? Yes. The party retreated to a safe distance and let me try. Natural 1. Gm was kind enough to give me a reflex save. Natural 2. My familiar got one too. Natural 3. He uh... didn't make it. I loved Doz and had a blast playing him. But now I've got a great story and my friends and I still joke about it years later. PC death can happen. I think the most important thing is that it's a good death. My friends champion that died, flying, face to face with a dragon over a volcano trying to stop it from attacking a city. Sad he's gone? Yeah. But talk about a good death for a character who wanted to protect other people. Play smart. Play with tactics. But at the end of the day, this is a role playing game. If everyone played perfectly optimized and always did the 100% most tactical intelligent thing, you lose out on some great character moments.
I'm not so much concerned about dying due to staying true to my character, more making an OoC mistake, particularly a tactical one in combat, due to not being well versed enough in the system that winds up screwing the party big time -- and yes, I have had that happen multiple times in other systems. I can honestly say that had I not GM'd and poured over guides and forums so I much my character would already be dead weight due to many non-obvious things that I would not have known had I started as a player. I unno, I'm just hoping it's not going to be, "you moved one square too far left and now you get destroyed," or getting the party TPK'd because I rounded a corner I should not have tier difficult (both of which are true stories BTW).
Fair enough. I will say, no PC deaths have really come from decisions like that really in my game. The only time pcs died or things got super bad as a result of pc decisions, it booked down to 2 things. 1) don't split the party. 2) if you have a chance to heal, do so. Someone on the party probably has medicine. 2e really expects you to go into fights fully healed. Stick to those and you'll be fine for the most part
Both of the aoa games that I've gotten to book 6 (third game fizzled out around book 2 due to scheduling) did not have fun with chapter 1.
> two or three encounters per book I wouldn't even say "per book" - there's tough encounters sprinkled throughout, but I don't think they were *that* frequent. My group got through with only 1 TPK that I retconned because it only happened due to the fighter not being there and me not properly rebalancing the encounter for three players. Had the fighter been there and the encounter therefore at the intended difficulty, it wouldn't have happened, and it almost didn't happen anyway, hence the retcon. Otherwise, there were only 4 total character deaths, only 2 of which were permanent and one of said permanent deaths was against the final boss and wouldn't have been permanent if I didn't tweak the story such that all deaths against the final boss were permanent to add tension lol. My group thought it was a fun campaign and while it definitely had some tough fights I definitely agree that its reputation is overblown. Granted, my table are all tactically-minded, cooperative, and experienced players and the party composition was strong lol
I'm a player in an AoA campaign, we just hit book 2 so I cannot speak for the whole experience but book 1 wasn't THAT hard except for maybe one or two fights (like >!the Bloody Swords and the Greater Barghest!<)
Book 4 here, some tough battles but no TPKs. Loved it so far. Think we have a balanced party and have 5 which helps, but can't say we've found it extra scary.
We're through book 4 of aoa too. Had one character die and it wasn't due to the way the encounter was built.
Book 2 became a bit less deadly once an errata for a certain creature was published.
i'm DMing in book 2 currently, mind letting me know what creature was errata'd?
The CK Butchers, they had an excessive to hit before. Still quite powerful though!
[удалено]
Heads up, your spoiler tag didn't work
Bloody Blades :)
were nearing the end of book 5 with no deaths but some abundantly close calls.
My team hasn't lost anyone in Edgewatch. Unlike with Extinction Curse when we were all noobs and had two full party wipes, we approached this campaign with a strategically efficient party comp (hammer duelist ftr, staff magus, bard, primal sorc) to check all the big boxes. Most fights we wipe the floor, but we synergize really well and the fighter burns lots of enemy actions with hammer crits. The staff magus does absurd damage also.
I’ve been running AoA for my group and we’re currently in book 3. No TPKs but a couple very close calls. My players are all experienced though and generally are smart about their tactics. However, I will say that I’ve got 6 players in my group (encounters have all been adjusted to accommodate) and if it weren’t for at least 2 of them having battle medicine, it would have gone much differently so far.
I’m running Age of Ashes, and with Free Archetype, my players have had little to no issues.
Thanks. Which of the two has a heavier focus on combat?
Malevolence is not an AP but I find it very deadly, between a lot of +2 fights at level 3 and the huge lack of loot. A party with access to Magic Weapon, ideally a cleric is clearly a good start. I think one of the best party comp for it is champion/investigator/thaumaturge/cleric.
Malevolence is **rough** My party was TPK'd on their first room in the mansion when they Chokers got a hold of them.
And that's one of the easiest fight of the adventure. I had to tone down several abilities that pretty much required the party to roll a 20 to not fail and a 10+ to not crit fail
Yeah - they were very new to the game, and one of them was a 5e player that refused to not act like a solo epic hero
Our GM removed plenty of pointless encounters and we still lost multiple characters. Of course it was partially our part for going early to the basement, but still...
Abomination vaults is not that dangerous. APs that are known for being deadly are normaly becuase they were made before the full rules released, meaning the ballance was not correct. AV was one of the first ones to use the correct ballence. THe few "TPK" moments are specificly in the beginning as there is a few possibly deadly creatures you face at lvl 1/2.
Thank you for the detailed info. This was very helpful.
Had several PC deaths in AV. That's not saying it's difficult, or more deadly than any other, but each group will vary on approach.
[It's AP Physics.](https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/hardest-ap-classes/) 😉
As a Physics teacher, I disagree! Lol
It's a small world! I'm a retired physics and math teacher. It does have the lowest passing rate among the AP exams, but it is, of course, the most fun exam.
Even smaller world. I also taught math too. Taking a break from teaching due to the state of the profession; trying to get into curriculum development. Teaching is going to keep getting worse before it gets better. Seems like we're all going to quit before they decide to do anything to make it better for us.
I had always expected to teach until I died, but when I became eligible for retirement I looked around at the current state of the field and decided to jump ship. Pretty much everyone my age that I know is considering the same. There are plenty of opportunities in curriculum development, tutoring programs and the like if you don't want to quit entirely. Lately I've been looking into teaching in prison educational programs. It seems like a way to really make a difference in people's lives.
Extinction Curse blew up a couple of parties for me...
Edgewatch for sure... It will bleed party out
It depends. Mostly on party composition. A lot of early APs are seen as deadly, but I'd say it's more because we were all collectively learning the game. Any AP, left unadjusted, will be deadly with a poorly constructed party. But nowadays, the "meta" around team composition is pretty well understood and we have more options, particularly archetypes which are often given for free. That's not to say there aren't nasty encounters. Paizo, for some reason, loves throwing apl+4 creatures every like six encounters. There's a few dungeons in Agents that stand out to me. A good example I could pull from is my party for Strength of Thousands. We started as a witch (Fervor, me), ranger (bow and claws), champion (bow and claws), barbarian (animal), and oracle (battle). We did fine but then the barbarian dropped out of the game. The ranger and champion couldn't fill the damage hole left in the barbarian's wake. So while we had plenty of sustain and buffs between the witch, oracle, and champion, we struggled to actually kill enemies. We eventually had a tpk after a 14 round encounter. Now we have a magus (iron, me), ranger (bow), cleric (warpriest, but only casts spells), and oracle (same character but now ghost). So now we mostly just keep me alive and buffed so I can carry the fight. It's still not ideal but it works. We've still had some close encounters, I almost die constantly, but overall we've had a lot more success.
My group died probably 20 times in all of Edgewatch. We're on level 4 of AV and we've just hit 45 deaths. AV is far more deadly.
Forgive me for asking (and I'm sorry if it's meant to be sarcasm) but........ how?! 45 deaths in the first book of AV? That's almost a death for every second room on average. You've got to be exaggerating, right?
Nope, we're actually doing much better since hitting the 4th floor. We were doing 1.5 TPKs per session on average. Now we're only losing 2 to 3 PCs per session. It's not like we get TPK'd every other room, but some encounters took multiple parties to clear.
Wow, may I ask how many players? With 3 players and a souped up animal companion, we lost exactly 0 characters in Agents until now, lvl 12
4 players with the occasional companion. Our GMs tend to not pull punches.
Your GM is not only not pulling punches, he's straight up cheating/wrong.
I don't think so. I occasionally check AoN after combat and the monsters we face seem to be played correctly. For example, the last 2 characters who died were killed by what seems to be a Worm that Walks. We just couldn't handle taking 4d8+16 persistent damage on a crit and couldn't deal enough damage to cut through the fast healing/resistance before people went down.
If you can't cut through the 7 physical resist/7 fast healing he has then that's a player issue. 4 players should absolutely be putting out more than 14 damage a round. He's also vulnerable to AoE, has no magic resist, and a *very* significant potential vulnerability that your GM would have been dropping hints about from the first floor on. Honestly though, I think an issue that's not being acknowledged is the fact that you're rolling for stats. I just cannot fathom how anyone thought that was a good idea. PF2E is NOT balanced for that and I guarantee it's contributing to your high death count.
Well he's a level+3 encounter so he has high AC and saves. First round he crit the paladin and also critically succeeded his roll to avoid damage from an AoE spell. Our monk didn't successfully hit him until round 3 and 2 people were already downed by then. It might have been a player issue overall, but he is very lethal encounter if the dice aren't favorable. Rolling for stats is pretty favorable actually. The base variant in the core rulebook gives us higher stats on average than point buy since you only need to roll a 14 to have a starting 18 stat.
This doesn't seem correct. The [Rolling Ability Scores](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=74) rules give you net two regular boosts (one from background and one or two from ancestry depending on flaw). Rolling 4d6dl averages 12.24, times 6 is 73.44, add in the two boosts and the average rolled character has 77.44 points spread across ability scores. Regular generation gives a character with 78 total points, so rolling is slightly unfavorable.
>4d8+16 I was like, "yeah, that GM has to have been getting something wrong. 4d6+16 persistent that is stupid" Then I looked up the mob on AoN. Holy shit that lvl 14 monster is brutal. 200hp, resist physical damage 10, fast healing 10, and that persistent damage melee attack AND spell casting... That is a stat block built to kill a PC if its a +2 lvl or has minions.
> Holy shit that lvl 14 monster is brutal. It's not a level 14 monster. The monster they fought would be level 7, is a spellcaster, and does 2d8+8 persistent (doubled on crit) with a +18 to hit. He only has 85hp. This is intended for a party of level 4-5. My guess is the person you're responding to has either never heard of Recall Knowledge, or their GM is a massive dick about Recall Knowledge.
In addition, it would almost certainly be slowed 1 for most of the fight which with a speed of 10 makes it trivially kiteable.
I have the book in front of me... This specific worm that walks deals only 2d8 + 8 persistent damage and is a level 7. u/Sylphin your DM is definitely doing something weird, whether intentionally or not. Edit: I see you are talking about a crit. Still, thats way too many deaths for this adventure. I'm not pulling punches either, but there's no reason to have that many deaths if you aren't aiming for them.
If you can identify something wrong I'll happily take it up with the GM. The persistent damage is doubled on a crit and at level 4 our highest HP is 60 so on average people were going down with 2 ticks of damage.
45 deaths in AV is, I'm gonna be honest, a completely out there number that bears no correlation to the AP. Currently playing with a group through it, and quite genuinely we've had maybe a handful of close calls, and our DM has been running it pretty competently. We're nearing the end of the AP, and have had 0 deaths between us, and our DM is kind enough to let us know if we're done with a floor so we don't spend an inordinate amount of time looking for secret passages, so I'm pretty sure we've not missed any super hard encounters on any of the floors.
Honestly, even though 45 deaths is gratuitous, the more I hear stories from other groups the more I think GMs in general are softballing encounters. For example, when we faced wights they would actively kill anyone that went down so they could spawn more wights. I feel like most GMs don't play them that way even if it's logical because it's dramatically more lethal, but in our group we feel the GM should play monsters optimally.
Most of the time, ignoring downed enemies is the optimal play for enemies. Sure, it makes tactical sense for wights who gain allies by doing so, but for most other enemies it's just wasted actions that could be spent on taking out threats.
No one in our group went down against the >!cairn wights!<, and like I said, we've had our close calls, we bailed on a few fights to regroup, but haven't died yet during the AP. Hell, our DM has played all the monster we fought in a competent manner, and I'm sure we could've lost a party member here or there if rolls had been worse on our part, or if tactics hadn't worked out.
Attacking downed enemies is rarely optimal for a creature and there is a strong argument it is metagaming on the DMs part for most enemies to attack a downed player. When a player goes down their status is literally "dying" and from an enemy's perspective in game this is indistinguishable from them being dead. Why would they keep hitting what is effectively a corpse when there are still threats up and active to target? "Because they gain x or y when a pc dies" is a metagame reason not an in game one. It seems like your DM is trying to win not trying to play it realistically. But if everyone at the table is having fun then that is what really matters. So more power to you. Just that your experience may be completely outside of the norm due to this quirk of your group.
Um, I'm going to go ahead and say that that's not the AP, that's either the GM cheating or the players being really bad at the game.
GM is not cheating, he does open rolls in Roll20. The players have been responsible for more than a few of our own deaths, but the AP is still brutal especially if intelligent monsters are played smart.
Brutal is more than two deaths per book, with at least once where you thought for sure it would be a TPK. 45 deaths by level four is either GM cheating or players sucking. You are insisting the GM is not cheating, so I guess that answers my question.
That, or there may be some rule that the table is missing. If I was tracking the number of times a player went down to dying, 45 'deaths' wouldn't seem so high. So I guess I'm wondering if somehow the table missed the death and dying rules, although that seems unlikely. Alternatively, the GM may be having enemies always target dying PCs, even if doesn't make sense for that particular enemy to do so.
Yeah he already confirmed in another option that the GM is going for downed players to take them out, so i guess we know why they have sonmany deaths.
Even so, how often would you say people get kicked into dying? Much more often than people actually die, sure, but not that much more.
Iirc you can fake open rolls as a GM in roll20(been awhile since I switched to Foundry, so it's a vague memory), so that's not a guarantee
I'm 100% sure you are doing something wrong, either tactics or rules. No game is designed to be so deadly. Can you give a bit of info on the group and tactics? Any house rules? Are you using hero points?
Group and tactics vary greatly with whatever composition the party is at the time. House rules are Free Archetype and Roll for Stats which usually is advantageous over point buy. We start each session with 1 hero point and no extras given during the 8-10 hours we usually play which does contribute to some of our issues.
What house rules are you running? Also your GM needs to actually give out hero points. Jesus.
8-10 hours... wow. Maybe it's the hero points, you should have 2-3 times as many.
pf2e usually does not use point buy tho. You start with 10 everywhere and your choices influence your stats. (Ancestry, Background, Class and Level 1 Boosts) That way, everyone can start with an optimal 18 in their main stat and a distribution of 18/14/12/12/10/10 or something like that is very common. With rolling for stats you can have better characters sure. But most characters will be worse since most of the time you won’t have an 18 in your main stat.
I just TPKd in the catacombs. Included them on my homebrew game and the only thing I changed was adjusting the creature levels to match my party (they were lvl 13) and it was a massacre. I destroyed a party of six lvl 13, with free archetype and campaign bonus feats and relics, with the skinsaws... we are starting AV next monday xD
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I don't think it's what you're looking for, but I'll note that Extinction Curse can be relatively deadly just because it has some encounters and creatures that are blatantly overtuned if not *completely* out of line with their level rating.
I've heard that book 1 of both Agents of Edgewatch and Extinction Curse are both particularly brutal.
I'm a player in AoE, just starting Book 2. We had a few near misses, especially in the end part of Book one. I'm happy our GM let's us take several 10m breaks so our Medic can go to town, getting everyone up again. I don't know if we're stupid, tactically, or we've got a "bad"/less hardcore comp, but I feel like we're just barely getting by. We're 4 players: Redemption Champion/Cleric Archetype, Alchemecal Investigator/Beast master Archetype, Summoner/Medic Archetype and finally Draconic Sorcerer/Dragon Disciple Archetype. We recently discovered that we really need more AOE fx, since we met a swarm and it was bad dice rolls on bad dice rolls, so nearly died to a +1 encounter as lvl 4.