Party wipe last night. The GM wins.
Yes, I know it's not "GM vs the Players" -- except this entire campaign, that's what I've felt like. I said it as soon as we went in and the fight started -- and he kept throwing more shit at us regardless even if he could have adjusted. Our best melee fighter went down within two rounds and the tank lasted 6 or so. It was just reedic. I have a real issue with his balancing; I feel like he's still playing PF1 and prone to just killing us. EVERY combat we've had has felt like we were going to wipe. We are under resourced. We aren't getting the equipment support we need. etc.
I don't necessarily like PF2. Still trying to decide. I like the three-action economy the best. But you can't play it like PF1.
- There's far more variance in critting. PF1 controls crits pretty tightly, it's based on Feats + weapon type (as far as the crit box). You have a crit range for your weapon, that can then be doubled with a particular feat or magical trait you can purchase for the weapon, but can't go past it. Even if you roll within that crit range, you have to confirm the crit by rolling To Hit again and hitting, or your crit is just a regular swing. In PF2, you either roll the Nat 20 to crit or you have to roll +10 higher than what you needed. There is no confirmation needed, just the first roll. Which leads into the second point:
- Running against higher-level monsters puts you at huge risk. Basically their To Hit bonuses are higher, which makes it far more likely they will regularly roll +10 above your AC, which is an auto-crit = Double Damage + any specials they get that come with a Critical Success. Basically even 1-2 levels higher than the party can be dangerous, plus if you are in a class with a lower AC and/or you haven't kept your AC where it needs to be, this makes you even more vulnerable to crits.
- Death rolls. When you hit unconscious, you are Dying 1. Every turn you roll, no bonuses added to the d20. Your DC is 10 + Dying level (so at Dying 1 you have a DC 11). Every failure increments your Dying score by 1. If you reach Dying 4, you are dead. If you succeed, instead of stabilizing, it just moves you back a step. So if you get to Dying 3, you need to make 3 successful rolls to get back to Stable but Unconscious. However, you also accumulate a Wounded 1 condition, and if you are dropped below 0 again -- aka something stabs you while you're unconscious -- you're immediately back in Dying, except you start at Dying + Wounded Level. So in this scene you would start at Dying 2, but Dying 4 still kills you. (PF1 = you get three successes on your dying rolls before getting three failures and you're stable. Plus there are no penalties for Stabilizing.) This means it's really dangerous to just heal someone awake with a minor healing spell; you should really heal them as high as possible, because if they go down again they will be that much closer to real death.
- Hero Points. You get a free Hero Point per session (doesn't carry over) to adjust rolls, and can earn more during the session. If you want to immediately stabilize, you can spend all Hero Points to do that. So it's a Get Out of Jail Free Card, except that if you do it while the group is still in combat, you can get hit and die more quickly. So Hero Points are nice, but not really greatly effectual at preventing death.
So this does immediately remove some of the silliness of PF1 or DnD 5e where you can just heal someone back to 5 HPs and they are running around fighting again like idiots, multiple times in the same combat. Combat seems so much more deadly, and you really should not enter combat unless you are in decent shape and have resources.
We did not get time to rest, so the spellcasters were mostly stuck with cantrips. (Which is okay in a sense, as far as damage output goes -- cantrips are really powerful in PF2, depending.) Out of five people, 2 were only at quarter health going in, apparently. (Smack those players!) We were put into a tactically bad situation with no way to change the battlefield. We had no spells left to control the battlefield. We couldn't see all the combatants. We were led to believe we were supposed to save a particular captive so we didn't really get a choice. There were multiple combatants that appeared after the fight started.
Mercy was furthest out and managed to do a lot of damage with just cantrips, but basically the whole thing got reduced to a smackfest and we ran out of hit points first. as the last party member fell, Mercy used her cantrips to move faster and run through the tunnels to escape. A foe popped up in front of her and she crit-splattered him on the wall.
Then when she was climbing up 50' of wall to escape (and I wasn't precise about where because the DM + the group seemed indifferent to where I climbed), suddenly I was attacked by a bunch of stirge-like creatures who in one round reduced me from 2/3 health to 1 Hit Point and were attached to me and draining blood. Yes, I was Patrick Hoffstettered to death. Again, it was at the mercy of the DM who might have just avoided that entire encounter -- and I could have ascended an area I already knew was safe but he actually moved me towards the other exit. So it felt like I was railroaded so I couldn't escape.
I'm annoyed by the whole thing but it's not worth being all-consuming mad about. I'm just frustrated for wasting so much time trying to develop this character and plan ahead, and not really getting to truly know how to play the spec, before this stupidity. I wanted to see what spellcasting was like as I went, and was still learning Witch action economy.
Looks like I am building my monk who worships chaos and destruction.
And in the wings is my Awakened Anima lemur kineticist.