I feel I’m becoming a grumpy, middle-aged man.

“Becoming?” someone mutters in a corner. “You’ve been that for a while now.”

There are a lot of games I bounce off rather hard, but there are some that I think I should like a lot more than I do. And so, I keep trying to play them, even though it might not be the best idea.

Pathfinder 2 is one of those games. Or as I want to stylize it, Pathfinder II.

With one of my players abandoning my Monday night game because he’s become a new father (again), I chose to run some Pathfinder II for my remaining two players. Let’s get this right: the “2” does not refer to the number of players you should have in the game. Pathfinder II, much like most D&D variants, rather wants four characters.

Due to how the game is balanced, I felt I was fairly safe to halve most of the monster numbers. Solo monsters would be a bit trickier. I knew I had to halve their hit points, but I also needed to reduce their damage potential. The obvious answer was to halve their damage dice. It’s what I should have done. Instead, I halved the number of actions they got. Well, sort of.

One problem with this tactic was that reducing the number of actions a solo monster could take required me to remember I was doing so. I was inconsistent with that.

Most of the adventure (we were playing the first adventure of the Abomination Vaults series – it’s coming out for D&D 5E!) went pretty well. My two players showed a strange disinclination to investigate the rooms I described, instead just rushing forward to find the next monster to fight. Well, as long as they were happy, although a giant skeleton did give them pause – they retreated from that encounter before it noticed them! Giant maggots, initially not a problem, hit harder than they expected.

They were playing a barbarian and a cleric, using the pregenerated characters. The Barbarian is one of those characters where I wonder if something went wrong during the balancing process. At first level, she was dealing 1d8+10 damage. The cleric’s best attack dealt 2d6 damage, and the cleric could only use it once a round. The barbarian could attack three times (though only the first two attacks had a realistic chance of hitting).

Then they met the giant scorpion.

Here are some key stats:
* AC of 19. (PC ACs: 17, 16)
* Attack of +11 (1d8+6 plus grab); PCs are +6.
* Initiative of +9; PCs are +5 at most.
* Can make attacks of opportunity (most creatures can’t in PF2)
* Reach of 10 feet

All of this says that the players should be very careful around it. In fact, I’d advise most players to just run away.

However, running away is problematic – it has a speed of 40 feet, ignores the difficult terrain in the room it’s in, and the characters move at a maximum speed of 25 feet. And with its reach and grab attack, it’s very likely one character will end up grabbed.

First-level adventure. Argh!

Look, I’m fine with killing characters. I’ve done it many times over the years. But I prefer to do it because the players have made bad decisions, not because I’ve put a killing machine in the dungeon they don’t have much of a chance against. A killing machine that is actually hard to run away from.

For those wondering, I was nice and didn’t kill the characters, even though they had incredibly poor dice-rolling. The barbarian just kept missing it. I blame my poor rules knowledge as to why it didn’t attack the cleric as he fed the barbarian a potion of healing. Also, we should have used Hero Points, but for new players, there was a lot to take in.

And I was really inconsistent with how many actions it got. Having it squeeze the barbarian three times when grabbed for 1d6+4 damage each time? A bit too much. I’ll remember to reduce damage next time rather than number of actions.

But even with that, it’s a fast monster that is almost impossible to escape! How is that fair?

Also remember, I’m a grumpy, middle-aged man. All of this could be terribly inaccurate.

Pathfinder II has a lot of good points. It’s a lot more detailed than I generally want with my RPGs at this point, but it’s worth introducing my players to new experiences. The cleric’s player is quite happy with challenging combats. The trick is making them challenging and not unfair.

(Some knowledgeable people might wonder how I halved three actions per monster. Well, it became 2 actions one round and 1 the next. Although because of how attacks got worse as they went along, perhaps 1 action per round would be the proper number. Regardless, it wasn’t the best strategy!)