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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[Charlaquin]

It just sounds a bit naff...items stopping working because you’ve overdosed on your magic quota for the day.

Now that I can empathize with. I’ll have to wait and see how (and if) they justify it in the fiction. Sounds like they’re expanding on the concept the Occultist introduced of imbuing some of your essence into magic items to make them work. Apparently that’s how all magic items will work im Golarion if they do end up sticking with this mechanic.

 

[Nikosandros]

I'm very perplexed by the tidbit about the dying save DC being dependent on the type of opponent.

 

[kenmarable]

I have a question here, because I have been wondering if this is actually a problem in Pathfinder or not. Are people actually complaining about the Christmas Tree effect in Pathfinder? Or is this a perceived problem that is being carried over from other d20 games and there's an assumption that there's a problem?

I ask because I can't believe that gamers are uniform in their hatred of the 3e Magical Item Christmas Tree effect. There have to be a portion of gamers who actually like it because there isn't anything in D&D that gets 100% uniformity of opinion. Maybe they're a tiny group, but I expect them to exist.

And if they exist I'd expect that they might have migrated to Pathfinder. Because that's the system that supports that style of play. So I'd be curious to know if it's actually perceived as a problem at the table for Pathfinder groups, or if it's a feature, or if it's not something anyone thinks about because it's just "how the game is played" and they work around it.

For me, being able to be a magic item Christmas Tree can be fun. Needing to be a magic item Christmas Tree or else you fall behind is not so much fun. This is especially true for me who finds "+X to Y" to be extremely boring whether it's a magic item or feat, yet 3.x and I'd say even moreso with PF1 it kind of expects you to get a lot of those. I'm far more interested in "able to do X that you couldn't before" than in dull and boring "+X to Y" boosts.

So, choosing to be a magic item Christmas Tree decorated how I want can be a lot of fun. Being basically required to be a magic item Christmas Tree only decorated a certain way isn't so much fun.

 

[Pandatheist]

Context on the divisive comment. After 12 pages and well over 500 comments, there appear to be 3 camps on the paizo forum when it comes to resonance: Resonance is good for all the reasons of simplification Paizo say. Resonance is bad because it attacks the symptoms and not the core system problems. Resonance is fine for wands and magic items but is bad for single use items such as potions and scrolls, because it changes some assumptions for how magic work in the system/world of Golarion, or due to thoughts on it feeling to "gamey"/hurting immersion.

 

[The Human Target]

My two cents-

They have a lot of the right ideas, but are doing things in a very unnecessarily fiddly 3rd edition way.

 

[Charlaquin]

Context on the divisive comment. After 12 pages and well over 500 comments, there appear to be 3 camps on the paizo forum when it comes to resonance: Resonance is good for all the reasons of simplification Paizo say. Resonance is bad because it attacks the symptoms and not the core system problems. Resonance is fine for wands and magic items but is bad for single use items such as potions and scrolls, because it changes some assumptions for how magic work in the system/world of Golarion, or due to thoughts on it feeling to "gamey"/hurting immersion.

Weird that these are three different camps, given that none of the positions they hold are mutually exclusive. I actually agree with all three points. Resonance does streamline the process of tracking magic item uses, and that is a good thing. It does attack the symptoms of magic item spam and not the underlying system issues that cause magic item spam, which is a good reason to be critical of it. And it is pretty awkward from a verisimilitude standpoint that shooting too many lazer beams with your magic sword can make it so potions of healing don’t work on you any more, which is another valid reason to be critical of it. Why would those three perspectives be divisive? Seems more like solid feedback, acknowledging both the strengths and weaknesses of the rule. I for one am interested to see how it sits alongside the rest of the mechanics and how they present it within the fiction.

 

[Ancalagon]

I've always found it to be problematic for me. Can't speak for anybody else.

It annoys me as well; but I know some people like it.

 

[houser2112]

Weird that these are three different camps, given that none of the positions they hold are mutually exclusive. I actually agree with all three points. Resonance does streamline the process of tracking magic item uses, and that is a good thing. It does attack the symptoms of magic item spam and not the underlying system issues that cause magic item spam, which is a good reason to be critical of it. And it is pretty awkward from a verisimilitude standpoint that shooting too many lazer beams with your magic sword can make it so potions of healing don’t work on you any more, which is another valid reason to be critical of it. Why would those three perspectives be divisive? Seems more like solid feedback, acknowledging both the strengths and weaknesses of the rule. I for one am interested to see how it sits alongside the rest of the mechanics and how they present it within the fiction.

The verisimilitude angle is the one that bothers me the most. I'm all for streamlining things where they are warranted, but it doesn't make a bit of sense to me that items that are not connected in any way can be affected by each other. The wand either has juice left and you know the command word, or not. "Fiddly" is perhaps a bad word to use when the word they want to use is "gamist".

 

[CubicsRube]

13th Age is a d20 OGL that was out in playtest before D&D Next, (and in production before 5e). 5e shares a lot of concepts with it. This isn't because 5e copied them from 13th Age, but because there were ideas in the industry, and problems that needed to be solved. That PF, another d20 OGL, encountered the same sort of problems and similar types of answers can easily be explained by parallel evolution.

For example, let's look at "Christmas tree of magic items" that gamers were not fond of.

13th Age gave every item a quirk, and if you have more items then levels (it's only a 10 level game), the quirks take over. All consumables are one-shots, there are no 50 charge wands.

5e made some items attunement, and you only have 3 attunement slots. Plus daily usable charges on consumables was greatly reduced.

Pathfinder has resonance points, where your permanent magic items eat up a chunk per day, and that's also the resource used to activate consumables.

Three solutions that are close, because all three are solving the same problem.

I didn't specify but i was mostly talking abput the death saves idea.

I like 5e, so i dont mind that they are gaining inspiration from ideas that gained popularity in 5e, even if it didnt orginate there. Howeber the paizp staff at the moment seem to be trying to counter the perception they are "copying" from 5e too hard i think.

In board games no pne accuses the game designer of cppying another game if they use a worker placement system, or an ai card deck, etc. Well, some do, but its not taken very seriously.

If resonance is implemented well and replaces charges in things like wands etc, it could be a useful and potentially elegant addition to the system.

 

[CubicsRube]

I'm very perplexed by the tidbit about the dying save DC being dependent on the type of opponent.

Yup, me too