Pathfinder 2E Pathfinder 2e: is it RAW or RAI to always take 10 minutes and heal between encounters?

[Thomas Shey]

I think this is where a lot of my trouble with PF2 comes from. Its one foot in 3E design and another foot in 4E design. The presentation manages to seem familiar to 3E style and feel, but it comes out 4E in the wash. Thats likely a goldilocks area for some folks.

That seems fair, and to some extent that's how it feels for me--assuming I want a D&D style experience at all (which I occasionally can though its not been generically my cuppa for many years now).

 

[Thomas Shey]

The beginner's box is as close as you'll likely get. 5E is the streamlined D&D and Pathfinder's way to differentiate is to be the more complex D&D in the market. What will really be interesting is to see how level up shakes things up? It might give folks that 5E feel with the crunch they want from PF2 without PF2s design choices.

The problem is some of us at least dislike a couple of 5e's core design ideas (the way Advantage and Disadvantage works in particularly, though I'm not a massive fan of bounded accuracy either) so I'd assume Level Up is still going to be stuck with that.

 

[payn]

The problem is some of us at least dislike a couple of 5e's core design ideas (the way Advantage and Disadvantage works in particularly, though I'm not a massive fan of bounded accuracy either) so I'd assume Level Up is still going to be stuck with that.

I hear you on Advantage/disadvantage its an over simplification and too common. Though, bounded accuracy was a breath of fresh air. I hope it never leaves D&D.

 

[Nilbog]

I feel healing (and crafting) are the fly's in the ointment for PF2E (stealth took me a while to get used to, but now I have I think it works). Luckily both systems I find are fairly easily house ruled and neither have impacted on our enjoyment of the game.
Like a few others have mentioned I just tend to allow the group to fully heal between encounters unless circumstances would prevent it

 

[Justice and Rule]

I feel healing (and crafting) are the fly's in the ointment for PF2E (stealth took me a while to get used to, but now I have I think it works). Luckily both systems I find are fairly easily house ruled and neither have impacted on our enjoyment of the game.
Like a few others have mentioned I just tend to allow the group to fully heal between encounters unless circumstances would prevent it

One of the biggest problems for Stealth is that there are 4 states which are fairly good, distinct, and useful... but we just don't have good one-word terms that convey the differences between each instantly. "Unnoticed", "Undetected" and "Hidden" can all mean the same thing colloquially, which makes it easy to confuse all the terms. If I were to switch them around, I would do Observed-Detected-Hidden-Unnoticed, but even then it's still really difficult to get that instant recognition of the differences.

And both Crafting and Healing feel like they were designed with PFS in mind. Now all players have access to healing without needing a bunch of wands, and crafting is no longer the gold mine it once was. I do agree that it's fairly easy to houserule these to get to wherever you want to be for a game.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Those are interesting in limiting the short-term, but again I'm more about long-term attrition. With those, you might have trouble with a running fight because you won't be easily able to heal up to full, but a day of downtime and you'll be just like new. I like the idea of having to spend a week or two recovering. I feel like 5E encouraged my players go just break-neck around the place, even with "gritty" healing on.

In this case, I like having multiple options to heal. But I also want some limiting factor so that you don't just recover in a single day. Looking over the mechanic, Strain seems like a fantastic way of managing that: typically speaking a PF2 party isn't for lack of healing (especially with Fonts for Clerics), but I want them to have to manage that in some way. Having so much means that long-term healing isn't really something that happens... unless you put in a limit. Strain... that looks like it could do it.

The only situation I'd say that you might be able to heal from without Strain is from 0 hitpoints (which is fine, since the Wounded condition means you're not going to get much out of that edge case). In fact, you could probably do something about having levels of Wounded limiting how much strain you can recover until the condition is gone. Lot of potential in adding in that limit, just like Healing Surges were meant to do in 4E.

I kinda like the idea of injuries taking longer than a day to heal, too, so in my 4E inpsired Star Wars game, I created the concept of wounds. When you get reduced to Bloodied or 0 hit points, you suffer a wound, that will have longer lasting penalties (some only "active" when you're bloodied). To recover wounds like that, you need someone treating your wounds and it can take a few days for them to resolve.

In practice we're not really a group that puts much effort into long-term resource management, we were more focused on other things, so it never has been a big deal in the campaign. (And it's Star Wars anyway, where you have advanced medical technology and Bacta and stuff like that). But I can see such a system working in most hit point based systems.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One of the biggest problems for Stealth is that there are 4 states which are fairly good, distinct, and useful... but we just don't have good one-word terms that convey the differences between each instantly. "Unnoticed", "Undetected" and "Hidden" can all mean the same thing colloquially, which makes it easy to confuse all the terms. If I were to switch them around, I would do Observed-Detected-Hidden-Unnoticed, but even then it's still really difficult to get that instant recognition of the differences.

And both Crafting and Healing feel like they were designed with PFS in mind. Now all players have access to healing without needing a bunch of wands, and crafting is no longer the gold mine it once was. I do agree that it's fairly easy to houserule these to get to wherever you want to be for a game.

I don't have much of an opinion on crafting, but I suspect strongly that they wanted to remove the mandatory healbot role even more than D&D4e did, but didn't want to make hit points completely irrelevant, so making the non-tactical healing more gated by the Medicine skill (which a number of different classes can do as a side-gig--heck, the party Rogue could cover that one without much impacting their main operation) rather than spells did that. That, of course, doesn't address the issue of people who want hit point ablation to be a strategic concern, but that ship had sailed by D&D3e, let alone PF1e, so its probably no surprise they didn't give it any attention in PF2e.

 

[Campbell]

Crafting feels like a John Wick esque design where you don't want to include rules for something, but fans love it too much for you not to include rules so you purposefully include rules that suck. Thinking of ronin and shinobi in Legend of the Five Rings (before the current glorious edition) here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We hadn't had any trouble with the crafting we've done, but that's mostly just been moving runes around and repairing shields, so it doesn't get very deep into the system.

 

[Teemu]

I played in a reasonably long 4e campaign, and there were things I both liked and even more I respected about the design.

But somehow the overall effect left a bad taste in my mouth, and I write it off to the degree of stylization. I don't think I can post at anything in particular or specific though, it was just the overall feeling.

Maybe the game language oriented and uniform presentation of powers, plus the uniform recovery and acquisition rate of powers.