I won't go through a blow-by-blow. I'll summarize as such: the players went to a mine. They fought a bunch of orcs outside the mine with help from a couple higher level NPCs. Once cornered in the mine, they fought an even larger wave of orcs. At battle's end, one PC and one NPC were still conscious; the rest were downed. It was a tough battle and in a couple ways a bit above their ability. Part of it was one player (a ridiculously solid tank) wasn't there that day and I chose to write him out of that session with "terrible, terrible runs". The other was that yes, I had intentionally given them a tougher fight than was the recommended average. I wanted them to know the satisfaction of just barely winning a hard fought battle.

Well, apparently I now know that that's not quite how they were feeling.

The one fellow with quite a lot of pencil & paper experience just straight up compared our campaign to other games he's played and felt that things were just far too unbalanced, that if players were all going down so often then there must be something wrong.

Yeah. Kinda stung.

I had actually been talking a lot about my campaign with another friend of mine whom we can call "the consultant" (and yes, those who read my stuff probably know her by another name or two). My consultant had been playing 3rd edition D&D and Pathfinder for the better part of the past two decades. She knew this game better than anyone else I knew, and was and still is my first non-text resource for how best to proceed with running this game.

Over dinner she again reiterated to me that I really needed to start throwing these guys some bones regarding gear and magic items, and that Pathfinder is really designed with those sorts of items in mind for the regular play. I had thus far played a fairly minimalistic-magic campaign, and hadn't really dished out as much gear as I could have. Part of it was logic; a dire wolf isn't going to be packing any items, and an orc is unlikely to be fighting with a magical longbow. There are other reasons for having magical loot on a monster's body, though, and I agreed. I needed to throw my players some bones.