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

[Retreater]

I feel there's good (or even great) stuff about PF2, sometimes buried under minutiae or hidden in a poorly organized rulebook. If it were streamlined to my preferences, I don't doubt I'd prefer it to 5e.
As it plays now, it feels more like a clunky beta release.
Maybe PF3 will get it right - but it's more likely Paizo will make it a PF1.5.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Healing has always been problematic in the D&D world because with Cure Wounds you can basically get an entire party up and running in a few minutes if you do things right. Healing Surges were probably the smartest abstract of that in 4E, even if they had some wonky bits, but at the end of the day I'm guessing there's some consideration for Adventurer's League/Pathfinder Society in these games: while a guy like me would love to have mechanics that force players to heal for a week or two, people who go to a game shop once a month for their only game probably don't want to waste that much time.

The Medicine change is a good one if only because it makes non-magical healing very viable, and thus allows people to always have healing options. The problem is that you can just keep doing it, which I suspect is a feature rather than a bug: you're meant to be able to heal up to full if you don't have a Cleric, thus allowing you to get away from having to have a healer in the party. But for a guy like me, who wants more attrition... it's irritating. My solution was to limit the unlimited healing options you could use per-day, though I was looking at doing something a little more complicated with Medicine.

(I don't mind the DCs... I guess I just internalize that stuff much more quickly than others, so it doesn't really bother me)

Years ago pretty early in 5E I came up with "Wound Points", based on one's Constitution Stat along with using Wound Thresholds from SW:SE. It was at the least kind of complicated and I never got to use it outside of a test game. The idea of Strain from Worlds Without Number (Thanks @kenada ) seems like an interesting way of possibly doing it. I know there are Vitality rules in the DMG that I haven't read because reading the word "Vitality" in that context just gives me bad flashbacks to SW:RCR.

But at the end of the day, it's a hard problem to fix given both the mechanical problems (magical healing on demand) and the non-mechanical problems (We live in a Pathfinder Society).

 

[Thomas Shey]

As others have said, in practice PF2e has moved away from hit point attrition on a strategic level being relevant as a default. I also do agree that its perhaps a bit obscured, but its too obvious once you go down the rabbit-hole of looking at how Medicine works for it to be reasonably viewed any other way.

 

[kenada]

Years ago pretty early in 5E I came up with "Wound Points", based on one's Constitution Stat along with using Wound Thresholds from SW:SE. It was at the least kind of complicated and I never got to use it outside of a test game. The idea of Strain from Worlds Without Number (Thanks @kenada ) seems like an interesting way of possibly doing it. I know there are Vitality rules in the DMG that I haven't read because reading the word "Vitality" in that context just gives me bad flashbacks to SW:RCR.

The Stamina rules don’t seem as bad as the usual wounds/vitality system. They (more or less) split your hit points in half, and that’s it. There’s no extra punishment for taking a critical hit. It’s just a way to change the pacing of recovery. Resolve pools are optional, so groups can decide whether or not they want attrition in their games.

 

[Campbell]

My personal response to any disconnect between the game's design and Adventure Path design is that i personally have a strong preference for the game they have designed over the game they design adventures for.

 

[Retreater]

My personal response to any disconnect between the game's design and Adventure Path design is that i personally have a strong preference for the game they have designed over the game they design adventures for.

That's not the same game? Two sides to the same coin?

 

[payn]

Yeah, I dont see this game playing differently outside of APs unless GM uses houserules.

 

[Justice and Rule]

The Stamina rules don’t seem as bad as the usual wounds/vitality system. They (more or less) split your hit points in half, and that’s it. There’s no extra punishment for taking a critical hit. It’s just a way to change the pacing of recovery. Resolve pools are optional, so groups can decide whether or not they want attrition in their games.

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.

 

[Retreater]

Talking to my wife last night, we were discussing about how 4e might actually be the superior version of PF2 (except being out of print and not being on VTT). That's probably a topic for another thread, but something I'm interested in talking about.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Talking to my wife last night, we were discussing about how 4e might actually be the superior version of PF2 (except being out of print and not being on VTT). That's probably a topic for another thread, but something I'm interested in talking about.

I can see the argument, but I think in a number of areas 4e just felt A Bridge Too Far for me, where PF2e stays on the right side of that, but that can't be but a subjective feeling.