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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8005320" data-attributes="member: 75787">I guess I'm a little confused. If you watch pretty much any movie it's completely obvious how attrition works -- you don't allow the players time to rest. This has been true in AD&D, in 3E, in 4E and it's just as true in PF2.Healing in PF2 can be magical -- the standard across all of D&D forever. In PF2 you get healing spells back daily, so if you allow players a day between encounters, you can be pretty sure they'll use healing to fix themselves up fully (just like pretty much every edition). There is also mundane medicine, which worlds like this:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A healer and a target each take 10 minutes for it to work (I do not know of any way of reducing this)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The base DC is 15, but the GM can increase that if the circumstances are bad (e.g. in a storm)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The target regains 2d8 hits</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If you are a good healer, you can try for a harder DC (or just more often get critical successes). And expert of medicine can try to hit a 20 to get 2d8+10 hits, with a critical getting 4d8+10 hits. This is probably the optimum up till maybe level 14+ as missing a DC 30 is quite likely and so not worth trying (plus you have to be a master)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If the character has the feat CONTINUAL RECOVERY they can do this every 10 minutes, otherwise it's only once an hour.</li> </ul>So, running the numbers:At, say, level 11, each character has 3-4 expert or better skills. We'll be generous and assume we have 2 expert medicine people both of whom have taken the skill feat. We'll given them medicine skills of 18. So every 10 minutes they try for the DC 20, and pretty much always make it, half the time critically succeeding, so doing an average of about 25 hits each, for a total of 50 hits.With our last few battles having enemies do 200-300 damage per combat (My "favorite" round was a burst doing 36 or 72 to all the party, followed by a 70 point finger of death in the same round)  you can see that for mundane healing to keep up, you will have the party sitting around in the middle of a room, doing nothing but mundane healing for a good hour -- and this assumes it's a safe comfortable place to rest and the party has two characters who spent the skill and feats to get good at medicine (they can also use a nature variant I think).So, mundane healing is really, really slow. The book doesn't give any specific advice on how to make its even harder, but honestly, just reading the rule makes it pretty obvious. To me, some clear options are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Don't give the party time to rest. 10 minutes is a nice amount of time as it allows the players some value form their skills, but not enough to do more than about 20% of the damage taken. This has been the standard approach in D&D since forever, and any action film (John Wick, Bourne series ...) uses this paradigm. If you want an attritive game, don't let people rest ever!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Make the environment unfriendly. A +5 to the DCs for bad weather or for being in a swap will seriously affect healing</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Restrict the "continual recovery" feat, making it generally unavailable. It will then take 6+ hours for the party to head with mundane healing, which is essentially the same as traditional "rest overnight" systems.</li> </ul>Honestly, this is something easily under the GM's call -- not needing anything special; mundane healing is a nice addition to PF2 because it means that you have options to run a game that does not require a magical healer, but all you have to do to make the game one of attrition is not to allow the party one+ hours of uninterrupted time in a safe, pleasant environment. I think most GMs can manage that!----------------Our 11th level party just finished such an attrition fight (Age of Ashes). We were in a location where there was no chance of more than a short breather, fighting enemies putting out multiple hundreds of hit of damage. After each combat our two serious healers (a cleric and druid) would get together and decide the most efficient way to do the magical healing, and then the two mundane healers would add a little to the worst hit members. Definitely felt tense as went into the last fight with everyone down hit points, the druid having two low-level heals only, and my cleric down to zero healing. The barbarian took 140+ hits up front (stayed up), then my cleric took 132 (left him on 8) and went down in the second round. We won, but yeah, that was effectively a zero-healing combat which we went into already damaged.</blockquote>

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