PATHFINDER 2E BEGINNER'S GUIDE: BUDGETING YOUR ENCOUNTERS

howdy my name is no NAT and today I'm going to teach you how to build balanced encounters in Pathfinder second edition [Music] creating encounters is an integral part of campaign design no matter what you're playing you want to create interesting and balanced encounters that aren't too easy and aren't too hard unless that's your goal in Pathfinder to e it can be a bit hard to determine exactly how difficult an encounter may be for your party when you first look at a creature stat block in the bestiary you may be overwhelmed by all of the information in front of you luckily Pathfinder has a formula for determining the theoretical difficulty of an encounter to create a balanced encounter you'll need to assign an XP budget before we get into how the XP budget works I want to explain how enemy experience is calculated experience is based on the difference between the party's average level and the creatures level a creature of equal level to the party's average is always worth 40 experience so assuming you have a party of level 5 heroes then a single level 5 creature would be worth 40 experience experience is calculated using this chart on page 489 of the core rulebook since single levels can offer extreme advantages any creatures that are higher than the average party level pose a serious threat and are thus worth much more experience on the contrary lower level enemies are much less of a threat and thus are worth increasingly less experienced determining which enemies to use and how many to add to an encounter is where the XP budget comes into play first take your party size for our example we'll say we have a party of 5 players next figure out how difficult you want your encounter to be the rule book offers trivial low moderate severe and extreme as difficulty options finally use the appropriate XP budget listed next to that difficulty and adjust it accordingly for your party size since we have a party size of 5 if we want to have a moderate encounter will be given an XP budget of 180 from the standard budget for a party of four and an additional 20 for having a fifth player another way to think about this is simply to multiply your party size by 10 for a trivial encounter 15 for a low threat encounter 20 for a moderate encounter 30 for severe and 40 for extreme this will give you the appropriate XP budget for your encounter at this point using the creature experience I explained earlier we can fill our XP budget to bring all this information together I'm going to build an encounter for you let's assume our party of 5 level 3 heroes have entered a cave and we want to give them a moderate balanced encounter nothing crazy just something to get them engaged and on their toes with 5 players we multiply that by 20 for moderate difficulty giving us a 100 XP budget to spend on monsters since our party's average level is 3 you want to look around that level for enemies to add if we look at page 350 of the Pathfinder bestiary we can find every enemy sorted by level since they're in a cave something like a direwolf would work perfectly being a level 3 creature each direwolf would spend 40 XP of our budget so let's drop to direwolves into the encounter we still have 20 xp to spare so we have multiple options we could leave it at 2 direwolves making the encounter a bit on the easy side we could add a third direwolf increasing our XP budget to 120 a bit higher than we planned though this would still be considered a moderate threat just a bit harder if we really want to hit that 100 XP budget exactly we can add a regular wolf to the encounter since a regular wolf is level 1 2 levels lower than the party average it only adds 20 XP to the budget so the two dire wolves plus the regular wolf gives exactly 100 XP and there we have a balanced encounter now remember this difficulty is entirely subjective and your party's composition or the array changement of enemies can throw and encounters balanced totally out of whack if your party of all melee player characters is suddenly beset by a group of archers on towers even if these archers are technically a balanced encounter the fact that they have high ground and a total advantage over the party shifts the balance in their favor so always keep the party composition and enemy groups in mind when creating an encounter also never feel like you have to abide by the XP budgets strictly a fun way to make your party feel powerful is by throwing stronger foes at them but picking enemies that are specifically weak to certain abilities your characters have consider throwing powerful plants elementals at your party so the wizard can decimate them with a fireball or let your party figure out a way to get the jump on a powerful ogre even if it's two levels above them and the encounter is a severe threat if your players are smart they can sway the odds in their favor the XP budget is a great way to consistently get balanced encounters and Pathfinder but never be afraid to experiment sometimes it's fun to throw an enemy at your party just because you think it's cool though the party wasn't quite as thrilled after the TPK anyway I hope I was able to explain the XP budget system in Pathfinder 2nd edition let me know in the comments if you've got any cool encounters planned or tell me some of the awesome ones you've used in the past I want to hear from you thanks so much for watching if you liked what you saw consider subscribing and ring the bell to know exactly when the next video goes live in the description there are links to both my patreon where I post bonus content once a week as well as the community discord where you can talk to me and a bunch of other awesome RPG nerds we talk pathfinder D&D video games and a bunch of anything else it's a ton of fun anyways that's all from me I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and until next time known at one's

Channel: Nonat1s

Views: 29,046

Keywords: pathfinder, 2e, 2nd, edition, guide, Pathfinder 2e, Pathfinder 2e Basics, Easy to Follow, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, Pathfinder Second Edition, Paizo, Pathfinder Beginner's Guide, Pathfinder Encounter, Pathfinder 2nd Edition Encounters, Building Pathfinder Encounters, XP Budget, Pathfinder 2e XP Budget, Encounter XP Budget, Building Encounters, Creature XP, Pathfinder Creature XP

Id: 2Rb0OjejZ3U

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020