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.