Another approach you can take is simply making it so a violent resolution does not lead the players to accomplish their goals as well.
Trying to get information about a big nasty with a cult, and the players decide to just murder all the cult members? Well, the players might be able to beat the cult in a fight, but not fast enough to prevent the cult from burning their sacred texts, and now you have to piece info together out of the ashes.
This is a difficult line to walk: you have to plausibly present that the outcome would have been better if they had negotiated or infiltrated, versus just "well the DM was never going to give us the text anyway". You also have to make sure you don't just lock off the plot because they fought.
You need a clear backup plan that's just annoying enough to make it clear putting a little more thought into your first approach could have saved a lot of time., and maybe a slight downgrade of the end result of the plot (time is classic here, maybe a couple people the party was expecting to save got sacrificed while the party was messing around).
Why do you say they’re overconfident? Are they consistently winning fights without an opportunity cost? If so, then I would say their confidence is well placed. The fact that you jumped straight from overconfidence to character death suggests to me that you may be missing a more progressive range of costs and therefore haven’t been giving them any reasons to consider alternative solutions.
Are enemies one-dimensional? Can the players imagine interacting with them in ways other than fighting? A powerful noble they suspect but cannot prove is breaking the law is a different kind of enemy than a slavering beast. One can easily imagine the downsides of walking into the nobles manor and slicing them in half.
Do enemies have value beyond the loot on their corpse? Information is a common prize to dangle, find a way to talk to them (perhaps still after non-lethal combat) to gain some critical insight. Bounties for capture alive can spark some out of the box thinking, as can humanizing some enemies and introducing allies who advocate for negotiation and reform over eradication… the value of a non-lethal approach may be the favor of a powerful ally.
Does time matter? Resting 10m to recover lost HP in the middle of a chase has consequences for the chase. Maybe we have more important things to do than murder every passerby when we’re on the clock.
Collateral damage? Force a fight on home turf on the enemies terms. Victory could have a serious cost when the fight has been brought to you.
Do you employ loss without death? A training-wheels consequence of underestimating danger is capture or loss of gear. There are lots of ways for a fight to go wrong that don’t result in character death.
Do you give rewards for non-combat solutions? Ensure that solving problems outside combat earns XP/loot on par with the violent approach unless it’s a rare quest with a theme of selflessness.
Finally, consider just telling them that a fight would be dangerous and could result in death. We forget that the characters are seasoned adventurers and the players may not be. If the players lack an accurate intuition for the difficulty of a fight, let them know that their characters can judge the danger more accurately and fill them in. I did this without even a hint of an in-world justification with a first over-leveled dragon fight in a previous D&D campaign, warning the players directly that it wasn’t a fair fight and they would likely pay a serious price for rolling the dice an hoping their numbers were bigger. Because they were new players and this situation was unprecedented in their experience, I went so far as to run a round of combat in a vision-sequence to drive home how much devastation they were in for in a straight fight and then woke them up from the vision with no real world consequence for the combat other than maybe some exhaustion.This really changed their mindset and they began gathering intel and negotiating and planning how to tip the odds back in their favor through skullduggery.
In any case, I’d encourage to ask thoughtfully whether their confidence is genuinely misplaced or if you’d telegraphed to them that success is inevitable. If so, talk to them directly about a change in danger level, and start telegraphing it in multiple ways so they can see when other paths are available or advisable.
I'm very happy to see they're keeping the "Anyspell" version of Wish as a ranked spell. That was an important component of Wish and was my biggest concern about moving Wish to a ritual. Making the gamebreaking side of Wish a ritual makes a lot of sense.
I also like that the "monkey's paw" aspect of Wish is now tied into the ritual check. Crit-succeeding a level 18 ritual is not trivial so it's probably not going to break anything, and it adds some more chaos into world development instead of kicking it to the DM.
I kind of wish the focus pool scaled independently of spells known, because now we still have the issue of a character that really only wants to do one thing with his focus pool having to spend extra feats on things he won't use just to expand the pool. I think maybe the game just needs more focus spell options, especially utility stuff, and it will be easier to fill out the pool now that every spell expands the pool, but it'd be nice to not just have to take filler. A feat that just pushes the pool to 3 and nothing else would be neat.
For your third point, isn’t that already the case? The only difference is that now there is no focus spell option that doesn’t increase your pool size.
Yes, sorry, I was saying that I wish that they had fixed that when they reworked focus points.
Taking random focus spells that you don't need because you had to boost your pool was an issue before the rewrite, and it's arguably even worse now post rewrite, because you benefit by taking them earlier.
Previously you just needed a second focus point by 12 and a third by 18 (since the once-a-day extra points weren't that big a deal). Now if your party has time to rest longer you can get more focus spells per encounter as soon as you can take more spells.
pathbuilder2e.com - Character creator for Pathfinder 2e. Free, but requires paying a small one-time amount to get access to Free Archetypes, Pets and Cloud Storage
wanderersguide.app - Character creator for Pathfinder 2e. Free, but a Patreon subscription is required for more than 6 characters (I might be wrong on this part)
Pf2e workbench is a must-have, it comes with a bunch of macros (especially the Basic Action macro that bundles up a bunch of the other basic action macros into one menu) and other automation.
If you had to pick and choose, you should buy the first book of Abomination Vaults “Ruins of Gauntlight” I believe is the name; even if you ignore the adventure entirely. It gives you locations and all sorts of the NPCs in Otari.
Missed this when it was posted, but I generally like what I see here. Slightly sad about shocking grasp, but it’s already not that far ahead of other options for Magi. And of course, we don’t have the full picture yet, so we can’t really tell if they’re actually worse off overall.
But the general combining of similar effects, like light and dancing lights, is good, and better standardization of the math for cantrips and other things is great. Also like seeing simplifying stuff like VSM components and the damage for acid splash. All in all, a great direction for things.
I love Ronald’s videos. Just found that he also posts his video links to a Pathfinder group on Facebook. Not sure how often he’s in there: www.facebook.com/groups/pathfinder2e
Aha, that’s one thing I overlooked. It would help for sure. It still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, though, that I feel like despite being a CON based class, an air/water kineticist probably is trying to avoid being within 10ft of the enemy.
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