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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8133696" data-attributes="member: 12731">I found this to be working poorly when I tried it in Extinction Curse. You can't entice players to stop resting when that only means increasing the risk.If the party breaks off healing because of the threat from wandering monsters, that means getting on with the adventure. Which means they are all but certain to... face even harder encounters! And since they're not fully healed, the risks involved are significant.If the party instead insists on staying put at camp, despite the risk of being found by a wandering monster, they might be lucky and not have such an encounter. But if they do, they hopefully vanquish that monster. Then the analysis is exactly the same - they keep resting again. In the end, either the wandering monsters deplete healing faster than Medicine can replenish it, and you mostly get frustration as the story grinds to a complete halt (if not the even greater frustration of a TPK). Or Medicine heals you faster than the wandering monsters can eat it away - and then why have wandering monsters in the first place?Wandering monsters work when the analysis is that these encounters just pose a drain on your limited resources. Better move on with the adventure and spend your resources there instead.But in PF2 hit points aren't limited. And pressing on without them is incredibly dangerous. So the choice between staying put and moving on changes completely - you always want to - need to! - stay put until your hit points are back.I realized that in order to reestablish "let's move on" as a meaningful choice, I would have to make a load of changes to Pathfinder 2. Too many. It quickly gets to be too much. In the end, I instead abandoned the whole idea that "should we rest 10 minutes or 60?" is a useful minigame to have. Pathfinder just doesn't let that work. (Yes, when reading the rules you get the definite impression it was meant to work. It just didn't end up working in actual play)Once you instead simply assume players always heal up after each fight (except in the rare case when the script tells you there's no time) the game just works much better:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">you save time since there's no more discussions "should we keep moving or stay put and rest" (and its follow-ups "where is a safe place to rest" and so on)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">you save time since there's no need to invoke the cluttery Medicine rules, just say "you rest until fully healed". Whether this takes 30 minutes or 50 minutes doesn't matter.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">you avoid needless lethality since players no longer are incentivized to make the mistake of adventuring with damage</li> </ul>The "showcase fight" style of adventure pacing, in other words.Of course, certain things just cease to matter. In particular, the "mini game" of "what will you do with your 10 minute activities?" Since you basically give up counting them, heroes have as many as they need, and things like "should I Refocus or Repair my shield or just stand guard?" fall by the wayside, since you simply do all of them. Besides, Medicine will routinely require 40 or 50 minutes. That's 4 or 5 such activities. Each time you rest. So the idea that these are limited and that choosing between them is an interesting decision point just doesn't work.So between each dungeon room you simply go "everyone is topped up on healing, focus points, shield repairs and such; where do you go now?". That sentence takes 5 seconds to speak, compared to easily 15 minutes of admin if you actually follow the very fiddly rules for every subsystem involved...Of course, just assuming players can and do heal up after each fight doesn't suit every gaming group. But then again, Pathfinder 2 doesn't suit every gaming group. (In fact, I remain amazed how few steps Paizo have taken to accommodate different play styles!)Yes, it isn't realistic that the next room's monsters just stand there for 40 minutes, while you recover from a fight maybe 60 feet away. But that's the way AP dungeons are designed, and that's the way the game want to run.</blockquote>

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