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

[Retreater]

The worst case I can think of is actually not 4E-style skill challenges. Yes, despite them being utterly broken and over-engineered. No this "honor" goes to FFG's gobsmackingly useless and in-yer-face system they shoveled in WFRP3. They actually manufactured little boards and markers so you could put a marker on the round 4 spot (say); and then spent half a page spewing words that explained how that worked.

Half a page... and physical clutter... all to express what I can say in seven words: "the goblins attack in four rounds".

I don't expect to see a more useless system ever in my life, to be honest.

I was introducing WFRP 4e to a group of new players last night, and they were asking about the history of the system. I attempted to explain the ridiculousness of 3e.

My experience was running a few sample encounters on my living room floor. I ended up putting all the tokens and chits in ziplock bags and returning it to the game store for a trade-in the next day.

For all the grief I give PF2 and the occasional dig at 4e D&D, I don't think anything can live up to the complete departure of style, tone, and everything we loved about a previous edition as what FFG did to Warhammer.

I think they tried to relaunch the line without all the board game components, but the Critical Injury had been done.

 

[kenada]

I was introducing WFRP 4e to a group of new players last night, and they were asking about the history of the system. I attempted to explain the ridiculousness of 3e.

My experience was running a few sample encounters on my living room floor. I ended up putting all the tokens and chits in ziplock bags and returning it to the game store for a trade-in the next day.

For all the grief I give PF2 and the occasional dig at 4e D&D, I don't think anything can live up to the complete departure of style, tone, and everything we loved about a previous edition as what FFG did to Warhammer.

I think they tried to relaunch the line without all the board game components, but the Critical Injury had been done.

I think it’s a shame FFG insist on imposing their goofy dice on every game they publish even when it’s a new edition of an existing system. I have no interest in the new L5R because of that.

 

[payn]

I think it’s a shame that FFG insist on imposing their goofy dice on every game they publish even when it’s an iteration of an existing system. I have no interest in the new L5R because of that.

I hear that. I really like the android universe and wanted to try out genisys. I got my copy of the rule book and see all these different symbols in place of mechanics. Its kind of jarring and immersion breaking. Makes their TTRPGs feel more like board games even if they dont play like BGs.

 

[Retreater]

I think it’s a shame FFG insist on imposing their goofy dice on every game they publish even when it’s a new edition of an existing system. I have no interest in the new L5R because of that.

When I was running my FFG Star Wars game, I had to have another player figure out all the rules stuff for me and tell me what the dice result meant. For a months-long campaign. I basically just told the story and he handled the mechanics.
It was like having someone puree food for a baby. It was embarrassing, but I could never get a handle on it.
Maybe if they'd added the board game components from WFRP3 the system would've made more sense?

 

[Campbell]

The new L5R is so much cleaner than Genesys / Edge of the Empire. We're playing it now and really enjoying it. So far it runs a lot tighter than 4th Edition did. I do not miss raises and adding up massive dice pools.

 

[Teemu]

I’ve been using a skill challenge based retreat system in two of my 4e games for about three years now. At any point during a player’s turn the party can end combat and move to a retreat scene. It’s always the shortest challenge (4 successes) and its level is equal to the highest level enemy in the encounter. The retreat always succeeds but it also always costs 1 healing surge from all party members (fatigue, loss of morale, etc.). Failed checks also cost resources, and I use the injury variant for failures after the first (first being a surge). Failing a check by 5 or more costs an extra surge.

It’s worked extremely well. The skill challenge is quick to resolve, the players can push on during an adventure since a retreat is always on the table, and I as the GM have more freedom in encounter building since I know the party can escape if the fight is too tough.

I’m planning on adapting this to PF2 using Victory Points to come up with a Retreat subsystem. Coming up with costs is a bit tougher since PF2 doesn’t have a similar daily resource or an injury variant, but I’m thinking of marrying it with a modified Stamina ruleset where Resolve is used as a currency. And I’ll probably include the fatigued condition as a failure option.

 

[Justice and Rule]

<The FFG Dice Defender has logged on>

I'll be honest, I f'n love the dice stuff Fantasy Flight does. I know I had similar doubts about proprietary dice when they started that stuff, but with Star Wars and Genesys they really knocked it out of the park with me. Maybe it's because I'm a wargamer and also that I started their RPG after having bought into their X-Wing game (which also uses symbols for success rather than numbers) but Advantage/Threat is easily my favorite new mechanic of the decade. The systems have some problems (Space combat with snubfighters is particularly deadly, which is accurate to the movies but probably not to what people want) but ultimately they are overall really fantastic. I find it funny that my grognard group adores those games more than my newer players.

I haven't played a game of the new L5R but I've been reading it and the dice (along with the ring system) are really fascinating and make me want to play it. My biggest problem right now is that while the dice are simplified, the system itself kind of feels more complex... or at the very least, they could do a better job at explaining some of the more important aspects of things. It took me a little while to grasp the whole of what is going on there, but strife is really solid and the move away from absolute physical skills to more abstract "approaches" is something I'd love to see in more games. I was discussing using the underlying system to make a DBZ game for a buddy, using Strife representing ki drain.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In reality, people's individual speeds are often not a deciding factor.

In ttrpgs that aren't using theater of the mind (obviously) it is very hard to argue it is not the ONLY thing that matters. If you move eighteen squares away (because your Speed is 30), and I then move twenty-one squares closer (because my Speed is 35) there's no ifs or buts about it: I will catch up to you, and I will do it very very soon.

Really? Did you see exactly where I went after I ducked around that copse of trees? Can you hurdle the creek the way I did? Are you willing to get ahead of your friends to do it?

I don't think its hard to argue other things factor in at all.

All the fuzziness about a real escape are simply things that are discarded during ttrpg battlemat based combat.

They aren't really; some of them just don't come up, and some are only relevant during closing. But as an example, being able to cross barriers and the fact getting too far ahead of people can be a bad idea comes up relatively frequently.

 

[Thomas Shey]

First off (and this is not an attack on you): my personal bugbear is people defending alignment with "if you don't like it you can always have your NPC buy a Hat of Non-Detection." In other words, just because D&D sooner or later (sooner in earlier editions) make every clunk go away does not a good argument for not fixing the clunk make.

I don't disagree, but its still a reason a lot of people aren't going to notice the problem.

More generally, to me (and I am not alone in this) there's no point in creating or using a separate escape subsystem, since it all boils down to "magical escape".

Since I've indicated why I don't agree with this, you can follow up on me were I talk about it (say, my post above) if you see fit, but otherwise I don't see any point in going around on it again. Pursuits are not identical to tactical engagements, and treating them like they are is, as far as I'm concerned, a categorical error.

In summary: no, it's far from obvious that the combat system doesn't work for escapes,

And as I've indicated, I think it is, so here we are.

 

[CapnZapp]

The point of clocks is to take the decision-making out of the GM’s hands once they are put on the table. You decide how big the threat is, then the mechanics dictate if and when it becomes a problem. This is one of the gaps in PF2’s VP subsystem, which doesn’t have as rich of a dice mechanic as BitD. In BitD, there’s a lot of give and take when making a roll because you can do various things (take stress to assist each other, trade position for effect, etc) to alter the fiction and increase your dice pool (often at a cost).

Taking your goblin example, the GM my decide it’s a 4-segment clock. That doesn’t translate into any particular number of rounds. BitD doesn’t use rounds. Everything is just role-playing. As the PCs are conducting themselves, they’ll make rolls. One of the {edit: possible} consequences for a non-successful roll is a clock ticks. For example (in Scum and Villainy), if I Attune myself to the Way to scope something out and roll a 4, then one consequence can be that the goblins’ own mystic noticed me, and now they know where we are, so the clock ticks one segment.

Note that while the GM can decide those things, players can also offer consequences. That’s what happened in one of our games. The GM was wracking his brain for a consequence for our mystic, and I was like: we know the Nightspeakers are coming, so maybe they noticed us when (one of us) attuned to the Way. And that’s what happened. The GM then put a clock on the table for “the Nightspeakers are coming”. As we proceeded deeper, the clock continued ticking as a consequence for non-successful rolls.

So yes, the GM can decide by fiat that the PCs just escape, but that’s boring. The point of having a subsystem is to see what kinds of things happen to the fiction during the escape and to take some of that out of the GM’s hands. If the GM just declares that the PCs lose some of their treasure as the cost of escaping, they’ll be unhappy about that. If the PCs choose to drop treasure as bait, then they may still be unhappy, but their is more properly directed at the enemy that drove them off, and they can scheme to get it back.

Yeah, well, from my vantage point, that's just another rules subsystem overlay.

By that I mean - if this is the core conflict resolution mechanism, great!

But in a game like D&D (or PF2) there already exists a huuuuge core conflict resolution mechanism, for which a fuckton of character abilities and options are geared toward 100%.

I'm simply not interested in adding a second set of rules, especially since there is no integration with the existing set of character options, and especially since the first set of character options is so unbelievably detailed and intricate in PF2. (When I say I get a feeling of "cheating", I don't mean in the sense that somebody is depriving you of agency - I mean in the sense you're cheated out of whatever optimizations you've done on your character build - carefully selecting feats or subclasses or whatever means less and less, the more matters are resolved by a completely different set of parameters.)

So it's not that I'm dead set against it in general.

In a game such as "one page D&D" I would mind much less, since there is essentially nothing to supplant or replace. In a game based around it, I would actively be interested to learn more.

But in PF2, there already exists a mechanism that enables you to "take the decision-making out of the GM’s hands once they are put on the table".

It is called "combat". (To a limited degree, you have skill checks - which absolutely is small and simple enough - but why would you play a complicated game like PF2 if you settle for skill checks as your primary conflict resolution engine?)