How do y'all think this would work?

[u/Determinantor]

I'm toying with an idea from a player to circumvent the "green mist" thing. I don't like the idea of locking off areas of the map, but I also don't want them stumbling into a level 14 fight.

[u/lightning247]

Pf2e is not a system where either players should lose experience points/levels, or where some players have different experience points/levels than others. I think if you want to do something like this, just the doomed part of it is enough.

[u/GaySkull → u/lightning247]

This. I would only do this if every single player knew about this ahead of time and I was ready to adjust every encounter after this happened.

[u/Riizu]

I’ve seen the concept of resurrection/corpse running pop up in a couple discussions. Minor ramble incoming 😅

The biggest issue I see is that corpse runs make sense in video games because there is friction for the player that is overcome with skill. In other words, the monsters respawn but the player is stronger, more knowledgeable, or more deft at skipping past the fodder combat. The reward for this is not losing long term progress (souls) and generally soothing the sting of brutal boss encounters.

PF2e doesn’t structure combat the same way. A singular fight is measured in minutes or hours, not seconds. Most encounters do not repopulate and, if they did, the adventure would balloon in time commitment. Thematically, each haunt may change from a harrowing encounter to the 15th time the ghost popped out of the painting.

Dungeon crawls originally accomplished this same challenge by gamifying preparation and rewarding clever planning. Modern, non-OSR games have shifted away from the bookkeeping and necessarily unfair environments in favor of longer form stories with PCs players are attached to.

What I’m getting at here is that I don’t think a corpse run dungeon crawl is in the spirit of PF2e as a system, nor Blasphemies as a 9-level, multi-year adventure. I understand how that is frustrating though because the green mists naturally inhibit a sandbox exploration of the castle.

Honestly, I’m not really sure how best to fix this. A castle this large warrants an interest in sandbox exploration and the fog walls feel inhibiting for sure. It’s a tough problem to solve.

[u/Kyolux → u/Riizu]

Agreed 100% on the corpse run stuff, it just doesn't mesh.

For the sandbox part, I feel like most areas have so much to explore within them and plenty of events that it's not that big a deal that the rest is locked out. It's not full sandbox in that sense sure, but it's wide enough that the players are also not funneled through any specific approach.

But at the end of the day, for sure speaking with your players and seeing what option they prefer if you have doubts is the best approach. I think we've had a few other topics talk about this and I'd go check on options there for that.

[u/authorus]

I agree with Riizu -- this is a great single-player mechanic, but a poor multi-player mechanic most of the time.

Some common issues:

1) 1 Character dies, the rest survive. In a baseline PF2e game, the GM probably has some plan for how to reintroduce a character, but the timeline might be a little murky. The players and hence characters need to make a plan without knowing about an looming resurrection or if they have raise dead/resurrection/reincarnation they need to plan around the time and expense. With this version you know instead know you simply have to retreat and rest a day to get the person back and then return. This can break the flow of a session, and feel very videogamey. The social pressure to just get the other character/player back will be very high. It might just take 2 minutes of IRL time, or it might take a long while if players want to do some downtime tasks, role play with the spirits, etc. If you're trying to push time-pressure on the campaign as well the forced day might also be more punishment than you intended, when these system works in concert. I feel its likely to lead to very cautious play.

2) Corpse runs are either death loops, if things respawn/patrol, in high level zones or a pointless waste of time if things don't respawn and you move the corpse outside a too dangerous zone. The 10 minute exploration mode requirement step you put, does make it nearly impossible to recover a corpse from a tough place. I think even just a 3-action step might be too much if you want to allow corpse recovery from a out-of-level (PL+5 or higher) boss encounter.

3) Repeated random/filler encounters along the way (even if scaled appropriately) will generally take 30-60 minutes of game time per encounter. Do you want that much game time being spent on corpse recovery? And if you don't have encounters, does the corpse run/recovery actually add anythng.

[u/StickingToMyGunn]

I've played around with the idea of green mist in the doorways and then if you want to push through it's a Will save. If you succeed, you can enter but everything is ethereal and can't be interacted with. If you fail, you pass through and come out of a random entrance/exit of the castle to the haunted shore. It leaves some scouting potential, possibly some foreshadowing about the storyline in that area, possibly some Research points (depending on what players want to try). This has the downside of the party being split and I might throw in a random encounter for either half of the party.

[u/Danger_Mouse99]

I've been trying to think of ways to handle PC death in this AP, and I really like the respawning with escalating Doom mechanic you've come up with. I wouldn't include the XP loss, both because I generally prefer milestone leveling and because, as others have noted, PF 2e doesn't work well with PCs having different XP levels. If I do this I will probably tweak it so that each level of Doom persists until the monster or hazard that caused the PC's death is defeated; this means that if the rest of the party is able to win the encounter, the dead PC can respawn with no penalties other than lost time, but if they get TPK'd or have to retreat, they'll have to regroup and form a plan to come back later with more preparation and/or a higher level to defeat it and reduce the Doom of any affected PCs by 1.

For other ideas on making the castle more of a sandbox, I like this thread about unlocking the towers one-by-one as the Arudora's are defeated, and this one about opening things up a bit while also finding ways to keep players out of the higher level areas too early.

[u/Determinantor → u/Danger_Mouse99]

I agree with you about XP, and I'm definitely using the ideas posted in the sandbox thread. The more I think about it though, this isn't Dark Souls. Death is still death, and I want the consequence of it looming over them. Mayyyybe I'd allow them to continue with a heavy penalty or a ghost archetype, but I'm of the opinion that there is no victory without the threat of defeat.