Pathfinder 2E's New Death & Dying Rules; More on Resonance

It's another day, and that means another round of Pathfinder 2nd Edition News! Today's menu includes more discussion on resonance, followed by the main course -- the new rules for death & dying! All added, as ever, to the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Compiled Info Page!

Photo by Paizo

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• There are Pathfinder Playtest pro-order posters at the GAMA trade show. See above! And below...
• Gnome Stew reported on the Future of Pathfinder seminar at Gary Con. Mainly stuff we've heard before, but there are some new tidbits:
  • Shadow of the Demon Lord, white-box D&D, Magic: the Gathering, Tales from the Loop, and Star Trek Adventures were all referenced during development.
  • The item (shield) damage system has a name -- it's called "dented".
  • Some "signature gear" can level up with your character.
  • "Background will grant a specific Lore, which is similar to a specialized knowledge skill, such as Lore—Alcohol being granted to a character with barkeep as a background".
• Resonance proved divisive yesterday.
  • Jason Bulmahn weighed in on the heated discussion -- "Hey there all! Let's all just take a breath here before things get too heated. Resonance is a system that we knew was going to come with some controversy. It's really hard to give you a full sense of what the system allows us to do with the design space without going on a deep dive on magic items. This is a topic we are going to hit soon, so hang in there. I will say this before I go to run more demos at GAMA. Players have rarely run out of resonance in our games, and there is a lot more healing to go around than you might think."
  • Class features don't use Resonance -- "We avoided making class features that use Resonance Points unless they're directly tied to items. Resonance is a resource for items thematically and specifically. If you have abilities from a bloodline, you'll have to pay for those some other way..." (Bonner)
  • "...we've had some delightful occultist-based thought experiments based on some of these ideas as the "kings of resonance."[FONT=&amp] (Seifter)[/FONT]
  • Bulmahn commented -- "Hmm... I keep seeing posts that tracking one pool of points is too fiddly. It's odd, considering that it's meant to replace a system where everything had its own personal system of usage with times per day, total charges, and time based limits. Of course, I have plenty of reservations about this particular mechanic. We're definitely pushing the envelope here, but fiddly is not the complaint I expected to see so frequently."
• New Dying Rules! "RumpinRufus" reported on how they worked in the live streamed game at the GAMA trade show:
  • There are no negative hit points - if you take damage equal or greater than your HP, you go down to 0 HP and get the Dying 1 condition.
  • If a crit knocks you to 0, you gain Dying 2 instead of Dying 1.
  • Each round, you must make a save to stabilize. The save DC is based off the enemy - a boss may have a higher death DC than a mook, so you are more likely to be killed by bosses.
  • If you reach Dying 4, then you are dead.
  • If you make the stabilize check, you gain a hit point, but are still Dying. If you make another save at 1 HP, you are no longer Dying, and you regain consciousness.
  • If an ally heals you while you are Dying, you still have the Dying condition, even though you have positive HP. You still need to make a stabilize check to regain consciousness. But, once your HP is positive, you are no longer at danger of death from failing your checks - failing a stabilize check just means you stay unconscious.
  • The Stabilize cantrip puts you at 1 HP.
  • Mark Seifter further added -- "If you get well and truly annihilated by an attack, you die instantly. Even a 1st PC could probably insta-kill a kobold grandmother, even if the GM chose for full tracking of unconscious and dying NPCs."
• Erik Mona on monster books again, and how self-contained stat blocks will be -- "I don't think we've fully committed one way or the other yet. The playtest monster book is going to be mega stat block dump without a lot of description of what, say, a skeleton looks like or eats. As for special abilities and how they're formatted, while I know the design team has been hard at work on this stuff, I haven't interacted with it too much yet (I just finished going through magic items last night!)."
• Both Erik Mona and James Jacobs feel strongly about the presence of more outsider types on the summoning lists -- "No, actually, James Jacobs and I also feel very strongly about this. Very strongly."
• Logan Bonner comments on complexity, options, and the 'cognitive load' -- "We're keeping it in mind for sure. That's one reason we've rejiggered the number of bonus types, altered the action economy to make choice clearer, and (at least mostly) made it so you have options for static feats instead of only giving options to expand your list of actions. We'll see in the playtest whether that mix is right."
• Logan Bonner informs us that coffee and tea have been added to the Playtest Rulebook.
• Mark Seifter on how corruption could work "...gaining a corruption could unlock a new set of ancestry feats, as your fundamental nature has shifted."

Photo by Paizo
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[Sunseeker]

Unless you use the lingering injury rules from the DMG, in which case you get an injury if you take two failed death saving throws. The first one is just damage superficial enough not to hinder you after you’ve rested for a night. The second is damage with a long-term effect. The third is death.

Which is a fairly terrible system anyway, one can have two gimp legs and be missing a hand and still not be dead. There's a usefulness in measuring degrees of serious injury (did you lose a finger 1, or a foot 2, or an arm? 3) but there's not much usefulness in saying "You've got 3 bad boo-boos now you're DEAD!" Abstracting injury to a simple number without valuing the degree is kinda...pointless. Okay you could say that "All lingering injures are inherently life-threatening." but that seems to remove a degree of granularity that while not terribly game-breaking makes story-telling based off the mechanical outcomes more difficult.

It's sort of like if I were to describe the temperature as "hot". Even if we all agree that anything over 80F is "hot", there's an important difference between when it is 85F and 140F.

Which, bringing this back to Pathfinder: is something I like seeing in the conditions so far, even if they are limited tiers there's "Condition Name" followed by a numerical degree.

 

[Charlaquin]

Which is a fairly terrible system anyway, one can have two gimp legs and be missing a hand and still not be dead. There's a usefulness in measuring degrees of serious injury (did you lose a finger 1, or a foot 2, or an arm? 3) but there's not much usefulness in saying "You've got 3 bad boo-boos now you're DEAD!" Abstracting injury to a simple number without valuing the degree is kinda...pointless. Okay you could say that "All lingering injures are inherently life-threatening." but that seems to remove a degree of granularity that while not terribly game-breaking makes story-telling based off the mechanical outcomes more difficult.

It's sort of like if I were to describe the temperature as "hot". Even if we all agree that anything over 80F is "hot", there's an important difference between when it is 85F and 140F.

Right. So what it comes down to is, 5e’s system of tracking injury is not granular enough for your taste. That’s fine, and a very different argument than saying it’s fundamentally broken.

Which, bringing this back to Pathfinder: is something I like seeing in the conditions so far, even if they are limited tiers there's "Condition Name" followed by a numerical degree.

Agreed, I think that’s a good way of handling it. I do hope we don’t see too much Condition bloat though. Chronicles of Darkness introduced a Condition system in its second edition, which I thought was a great idea, but after about the third gameline to get updated to 2e, there are just way too many conditions. I hope they lean on existing conditions as much as possible rather than constantly inventing new conditions representing basically the same thing as an existing condition but with slightly different details

 

[Shasarak]

Fortunately, we're talking about Pathfinder right now, and all damage in Pathfinder must always have a significant physical component. Hence slow healing times, and hence healing potions that actually heal physical injury rather than combat fatigue. Pathfinder 2 will not make that same error which 5E did.

It must have been because you were specifically talking about 5e that I got confused.

 

[Shasarak]

Charisma has been the stat for measuring innate magical power for almost twenty years now. This isn't a reasonable place for you to draw that line. If you think Charisma shouldn't be the stat for innate magical power, then you need to fix the Bard and Paladin before the Wizard gets to complain about it. All they're doing here is being consistent with what's already been established.

So it sounds like you are happy that the good looking Fighter can use more magic then the Ugly Wizard then because Bard and Paladin?

Well everyone has an opinion I guess.

 

[Charlaquin]

So it sounds like you are happy that the good looking Fighter can use more magic then the Ugly Wizard then because Bard and Paladin?

Well everyone has an opinion I guess.

Charisma doesn’t represent physical beauty. It represents social magnetism.

 

[Shasarak]

Charisma doesn’t represent physical beauty. It represents social magnetism.

Magic items are powered by social magnetism?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So it sounds like you are happy that the good looking Fighter can use more magic then the Ugly Wizard then because Bard and Paladin?

No, I use house rules to fix the Bard and Paladin by making their magic more reliant on Intelligence and Wisdom respectively. Just because they're being consistent, it doesn't mean I necessarily agree with every decision.

Consistency is a very important part of game design. That they're following through on their established premise is more important than whether I agree with that premise.

 

[Ancalagon]

Though I like the idea of trying to make Charisma more relevant, I'm starting to think Resonance might not be the best way to do this.

A different idea, and one that would allow each DM to tailor the magic-item use quota for her own game, would be to set Resonance at [character level plus {lowest, highest, something in between} stat], no matter which stat that is. Thus a DM who wanted to see more magic used in her game would set Resonance at [level + highest stat], while a DM who wanted less would put it at [level + lowest stat] and a DM who wanted the vague middle might set it at [level + (average of all six stats*)]

* - which if using array would be a known quantity.

I'm pretty sure the goal of resonance is *not* to make charisma matter more...

 

[Charlaquin]

Magic items are powered by social magnetism?

Just like perception is powered by common sense, damage with bows is powered by hand-eye coordination, melee weapon accuracy is powered by muscle mass.... None of the Ability Scores have made a lick of sense since 2nd Edition, and even then they were pretty abstract.

 

[Ancalagon]

Which is a bunch of handwavium to try and dance around the fact that characters can survive so many hits, which is only the case because not dying as quickly makes for slightly more-interesting gameplay.

Given how simplistic the model is, there's no narrative-vased reason for quantifying abstract things like "ability to stay in the fight" rather than definitive traits such as "how injured you are"; and honestly, the fact that 5E tracks only the former, and has no way to track the latter, is a serious deficiency in its mechanics.

Thankfully, it's extremely easy in 5e to fix this problem: long rest only restores some hit dice, not HP. That is what I did in my game.

There are problems in 5e that are hard to fix - the "proper number of encounters to balance short vs long rest classes" imposing a pace to the gm is one. But many are easy to solve.