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

[Thomas Shey]

If one is already implementing house rules, then the occasional conflict with options (particularly new ones) doesn’t seem like it should be a problem in practice. Just change the conflicting option or ban it. That’s how things typically go once one starts making substantive changes to a game. That strikes me less as a problem and more working as intended.

Or at least an intrinsic necessity when you houserule a game that has ongoing mechanical development.

 

[JmanTheDM]

sorry about the heavy edits. I hope I maintained the intent of your question. Jason Bulmahn in one of his Gencon presentations - I think it was his "ask paizo anything" panel, found on Youtube. in it, he was asked why he creates such hard adventures. laughter ensues, evil laughter.. but in it he does mention that if you come at PF2 with a PF1 mindset, you will run into trouble. one concrete example he gives is in the expected healing between encounters. he was explicit in saying the system expects full healing between encounters. So, I'd say this is fully Rules as Intended, but maybe not as clearly expressed as need be.

Cheers,
J.

replying to my own thread... I'm such an uncouth barbarian.

I was wrong. the video is Paizo: Gen Con 2021 | Know Direction Interview: Jason Bulmahn
here's the exact link Default Assumptions: Video starts at 8:31, key line is at 8:53'ish. seems pretty clear.

Cheers,

J.

 

[ReshiIRE]

Thank you Jman. I know that all systems have unstated assumptions but this feels like one that should have been included in print, at-least in the Gamemastry Guide. But I'm loving that I have a source for this and can help mentally remind myself for if / when I run a PF 2e game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thank you Jman. I know that all systems have unstated assumptions but this feels like one that should have been included in print, at-least in the Gamemastry Guide. But I'm loving that I have a source for this and can help mentally remind myself for if / when I run a PF 2e game.

Unfortunately, unstated assumptions are things that creep into every design, but I'm not going to argue that people shouldn't have to figure this out by looking at the Medicine rules (though I don't believe there was any deliberate attempt to slip one past PF1e fans.)

 

[CapnZapp]

No no no. You're mistaking my point. I'm not talking about dungeon attrition, but something more long-term. You're right that conditions can totally do that, but that's short-term stuff like Vitality. I'm not as interested in that stuff, to be honest.

What I'm talking about is stuff that would keep players in place and resting, giving them a reason to actually have downtime when they might not necessarily want to. Like, real healing time. Strain in Worlds Without Number nails exactly what I'm talking about: it puts a limit on healing by making it so that you get a pool of healing equal to your Constitution, and that it recovers only once a day (potentially). To me, that's the attrition I'm looking for: you can run into some real s**** and you're unlikely to use all your heals in a single day. However, it might get dicey to continue pushing too hard. It creates a limit on both medicine and stuff like Cure Wounds spam and forces the party to actually recuperate.

Does that clear up what I'm talking about a bit?

Not sure. Perhaps.

I can tell you PF2 is not a good game for groups interested in exploring the "do we dare go on?" conundrum.

You need games that don't harshly punish players for pressing on a bit too far. Games that let you recover from such mistakes.

Games balanced around the single encounter just don't have that.

You are far better off with games balanced around concepts like "a day" or "a chapter of the story". Multiple encounters, that is. Games where any given single encounter might not be challenging in isolation, but might well be challenging when evaluated as a series of encounters with limited recuperation in-between.

A primitive but to-the-point example might be the now-old Dungeons & Dragons Online game where the challenge was to complete a given dungeon with the resources at hand. If you used up too many resources too fast you might find yourself unable to proceed, so you would give up and restart.

There is no free healing: no "time passes" and you slowly or quickly heal back up, regain spell slots etc.

In such a game encountering a group of lowly Goblins is not a waste of time even though you KNOW you will win any combat that breaks out, since even winning while taking moderate damage could be seen as a loss.

Pathfinder 2 is pretty much the opposite of this; where the focus is almost entirely on making each combat encounter fun and exciting in isolation. There are very few published scenarios where the author even attempts to string multiple encounters together in a balanced fashion.

Instead the game just pretends it's like Pathfinder 1 where there's nothing unreasonable with, say, having a couple of wandering monsters turn up during a fight. (Don't believe me? Read all the GM guidance of the CRB and GMG and get back to me.)

Is that on topic? (your topic that is)

 

[Justice and Rule]

Not sure. Perhaps.

I can tell you PF2 is not a good game for groups interested in exploring the "do we dare go on?" conundrum.

You need games that don't harshly punish players for pressing on a bit too far. Games that let you recover from such mistakes.

Games balanced around the single encounter just don't have that.

You are far better off with games balanced around concepts like "a day" or "a chapter of the story". Multiple encounters, that is. Games where any given single encounter might not be challenging in isolation, but might well be challenging when evaluated as a series of encounters with limited recuperation in-between.

A primitive but to-the-point example might be the now-old Dungeons & Dragons Online game where the challenge was to complete a given dungeon with the resources at hand. If you used up too many resources too fast you might find yourself unable to proceed, so you would give up and restart.

There is no free healing: no "time passes" and you slowly or quickly heal back up, regain spell slots etc.

In such a game encountering a group of lowly Goblins is not a waste of time even though you KNOW you will win any combat that breaks out, since even winning while taking moderate damage could be seen as a loss.

Pathfinder 2 is pretty much the opposite of this; where the focus is almost entirely on making each combat encounter fun and exciting in isolation. There are very few published scenarios where the author even attempts to string multiple encounters together in a balanced fashion.

Instead the game just pretends it's like Pathfinder 1 where there's nothing unreasonable with, say, having a couple of wandering monsters turn up during a fight. (Don't believe me? Read all the GM guidance of the CRB and GMG and get back to me.)

Is that on topic? (your topic that is)

I mean, first off I disagree with what you are saying: you can totally do that in PF2, but the CHALLENGE RATING is specifically balanced off being fresh. So yes, you can totally do that sort of stuff, but if you take into account the idea that the players may attempt to do a whole dungeon in a day, you have to take that into account. To me, that's fine: I can more easily eyeball those things when there are clear expectations given around what CR is meant to be, compared to the nonsense of 5E where the adventuring day is nonsense and the CRs just not good. And even with that I can still (kind of) run that sort of game in 5E.

But you're still not really getting what I'm talking about and I'm not sure how to make it clearer. Like, what I'm talking about is that there is cost to continuing on in that you are spending a resource that will require multiple days to recover and will possibly impede you going forward. This is what Strain is: you can use it almost all up and totally do a bunch of things in a single day... but because it recovers at a pace of 1 a day, you could potentially be down a week or more if you want to safely continue adventuring. With that system in place, it doesn't matter how much healing you have, it doesn't work if you don't have enough strain to actually use it.

Maybe giving an example will make this clearer: so we have a party of 4 players: Khargin Orcslayer (Con 18), Nia Leaftree (Con 14), Wilbo the Burgler (Con 10), and Sister Hamza (Con 12). Each player has a Strain equal to that of their Constitution.

These players get into a fight and it's not terribly bad. To get their HP back up, Khargin heals up 3 times, Nia 4 times, Wilbo 2 times, and Hamza 2 times.

So now their Strain is at 15 for Khargin, 10 for Nia, 8 for Wilbo, and 10 for Hamza. That's the total amount of times they can be healed at all at this point. Even if Hamza uses lay on hands and refocuses, even if Nia uses Medicine repeatedly, they have a limited amount of times they can actually get life back. Right now they are at a fairly safe level, so they push on.

Now they get into a rough one. At the end, Khargin needs 7 heals, Nia needs 4, Wilbo needs 5, and Hamza needs 4. So now Khargin can be healed 8 times, Nia 4 times, Hamza 6 times, and Wilbo 3 times. So if Wilbo needs to be healed more than 3 times, he can't be no matter what. They can still continue on, but it's likely to be the last time they do for a while, and if Wilbo gets really beaten up, it could be bad. Remember, you only get 1 Strain back a day, so if you use it all up, it'll restrict your ability to heal for a while. They might well want to hang back and build a nice buffer.

To me, that idea sounds awesome. Suddenly the adventurers might take two or three days of rest (even in the wilderness) because they want to have enough healing to make it through a bad encounter. Healing from resting (which I'd say doesn't use Strain) suddenly becomes an option because your party might actually need it or opt to use it instead of healing up quickly. It completely changes the nature of the game in exactly the way I want it to.

Plus you can toss on a bunch of limiting factors: are you wounded? Well, you need to remove that Wounded condition before you can get back Strain. Fatigued? Same deal. As a resource pool, I think it works fantastically and can link back to a bunch of different things. Really just talking about this makes me want to just write this all out because I think it's fantastically cool.

So yeah, hopefully that outlines what I'm talking about.

 

[CapnZapp]

I now understand enough to say that when I responded to you in the first place, I was talking about what Pathfinder 2 offers. I now realize you mentioned this "strain" thing already back then, but I didn't intend to reply to that part. I replied to the audience - what Pathfinder 2 offers in terms of longer-term attrition than the single encounter, is conditions. Cheers

My point was to make clear that the traditional approach, to shave off a couple of hit points to make the next fight more exciting doesn't work in this game. You gotta go conditions. It's the only tool Paizo provides for attrition that keeps the combat reasonably well calibrated. (And no, the gamesmaster advice does not tell you this in a clear and direct way. I just did, though.)

I have nothing to add when you start talking about "challenge ratings". It's a D&D term not part of Pathfinder 2.

I know Paizo sells this game as "just another D&D game" (with the implication you can use it for all sorts of game styles, much like how 5E or OSR or AD&D can lend itself to other playing styles)... buuut hard nope - that's just not the case at all. PF2 is spectacularly inflexible in a surprising number of regards. Any time you need something significantly different than the house "combat as sports" dungeons of the APs, that is, gameplay focused around strings of individually challenging combat encounters, I think you are MUCH better off using a different game as your starting point. There are just way too many game choices (like feats) that get invalidated (sometimes with you not realizing it until much later) as soon as you try to play it significantly differently.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I mean, it's clear from where I started the conversation a few pages ago and I felt like most people got it. But suffice to say I'll just disagree with you further on the topic.

 

[Campbell]

Me experience differs. I actually think PF2 is not particularly well suited to the sort of set piece combat encounters we often see in the APs. My best experiences with the game come from leaning into things like exploration mode, like managed recovery, monsters that make use of long term afflictions, etc. When you embrace the entire game it plays much better in my experience.

 

[Retreater]

Me experience differs. I actually think PF2 is not particularly well suited to the sort of set piece combat encounters we often see in the APs. My best experiences with the game come from leaning into things like exploration mode, like managed recovery, monsters that make use of long term afflictions, etc. When you embrace the entire game it plays much better in my experience.

Having only the APs and individual modules to go on as examples, I'm curious about your experiences. What do you mean by managed recovery? What are some monsters that have long term afflictions?