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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[Shasarak]

Healing potions in 5E only cure HP damage, which is a problem because (as you mentioned) HP damage doesn't correspond to physical injury in 5E. If someone is down 10hp out of their 30hp total, then they're perfectly fine and definitely not injured in any way, so they have no reason to drink a potion that is supposed to heal physical injury. Instead, 5E healing potions are basically Gatorade, in that they'll refresh someone who is basically still okay, but they have no effect on someone who is actually injured (because the only way to suffer injury in 5E is if you're dead).

Healing potions have never been able to bring someone back from the dead, so at least they are consistent in 5e.

Characters don't talk about Resonance and HP. Characters talk about the in-game realities which are reflected by the Resonance and HP mechanics.

Except that I have never heard anyone talk about their HP. There is no realistic way that would happen.

Likewise the dissonance of the Smart but ugly Wizard being able to use less magic per day then the dumb but good looking Fighter. I mean I can see the mechanics but the story behind it? Yeah, no.

The players may end up talking about Resonance and HP, rather than the in-game realities which those rules reflect, if the rules are too fuzzy to figure out the correlation between the two. For example, if the rules say that HP corresponds to physical injury, then the players can talk about that physical injury rather than saying they're low on HP; but if HP is just handwavium that doesn't correspond to anything in the game world, then the players are forced to talk about them as HP because they have no alternative.

Exactly what does Resonance correspond to in the game world? If it is tied to your Charisma then do you start popping out facial warts every time you use an item? Was Frodo for example unable to use the one ring because he had already used his mithril armour, eleven bread and elven cloak for the day? There is no narrative behind it like the Barbarian who can Rage x number of times per day after which he can just get really angry.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

 

[Nilbog]

I'm not entirely sold on Resonance, but I think a key point people seem to be overlooking is that once you are out of it, Items don't just stop working they require a roll to use.

I'm not sure they've said what this roll is, but it still means things *could* work there is just a chance of failure

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not entirely sold on Resonance, but I think a key point people seem to be overlooking is that once you are out of it, Items don't just stop working they require a roll to use.

I'm not sure they've said what this roll is, but it still means things *could* work there is just a chance of failure

Cool.

Wonder if they'll build in a chance of a wild magic surge on failure...now that would be fun!

 

[Henry]

The nice thing about Resonance is that it incentivizes the use of more powerful items (e.g., Wand of CSW) rather than the spamming of lower-powered ones (e.g., Wand of CLW), as the former will count less against your Resonance than spamming the latter.

From a meta-game perspective, it also brings to mind what a single wand of cure light wounds could do for an entire community of people. Unlimited healing could change an entire community of farmers, or a city, dramatically.

 

[Henry]

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.

Just as in real life, he who has the most toys wins. In the early days, things like mining for cryptocurrency could be fun; as time went on, only those with massive expensive rigs of dedicated GPUs would be able to see a return on investment, making it effectively impossible for the little guy to do the same thing. I will say that very few fantasy stories I’ve read ever had a hero with more than two or three magical items called out on their persons.

Even Drizzt, a D&D novel character, the most egregious example, had at most about four at any one time (his cat, his two scimitars, and his cloak, and maybe one Macguffin of the week that was called out as a plot point in the story).

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.

However, I don’t believe this would be this would be a meaningful enough differentiator, because you’re only talking about a difference of on average about four or five points depending on low or high magic, when level is going to quickly outstrip the ability modifier. However, just counting charisma will most really matter at low levels (level 6 and below), where the ability modifier is an appreciable fraction of your resonance score. Not saying resonance is particularly elegant anyway, but I think that may be intentional. The 10th level character will not care so much that their charisma is a 10 as the 3rd level character will.

By elegance, I mean that resonance doesn’t have that “HOLY CRAP! OF COURSE!” {smacks forehead} effect for me that the three actions system had; waiting to see the full effect in play first.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not entirely sold on Resonance, but I think a key point people seem to be overlooking is that once you are out of it, Items don't just stop working they require a roll to use.

I'm not sure they've said what this roll is, but it still means things *could* work there is just a chance of failure

They have. It’s a straight-up d20 roll, no modifiers of any kind, DC 10 + 1 for each time you’ve used a magic item over your Resonance limit (so the first is DC10, the second is DC11, third is DC12, etc.) If you succeed, the item works. If you fail, it doesn’t work. If you fail by 10 or more (so, you’d have to get a natural 1 on your second try,1or 2 on your third.etc.) then you can’t use any more magic items for the day.

 

[Aldarc]

From a meta-game perspective, it also brings to mind what a single wand of cure light wounds could do for an entire community of people. Unlimited healing could change an entire community of farmers, or a city, dramatically.

This would also require rethinking many of the core assumptions about "wide magic" in Eberron. A war artificer, for example, could not just carry around a lot of fireball wands and spank the battlefield, as they would be limited by their Resonance.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

5E does track the latter. They're called failed death saving throws.

No, because if you pass your saves, you're back to full the next day with no indication that you were ever actually hit. It's impossible for anyone in 5E to be injured to such a degree that they aren't fine the next day, even if they were literally knocked unconscious and within six seconds of having died. The fact that they made their save is apparently proof that they were never actually injured in the first place. If you were severely wounded, then the only way we can know that is because you subsequently died. It's ridiculous.

Healing potions have never been able to bring someone back from the dead, so at least they are consistent in 5e.

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.

Except that I have never heard anyone talk about their HP. There is no realistic way that would happen.

You have never heard the fighter say, after suffering a critical hit that took away more than half of their HP, anything along the lines of "Ow, that really hurt!" ? I mean, I'm not going to deny your lived experiences, but I hear that sort of thing almost every time there's a critical hit. HP (in most games) measures the physical integrity of your meat body, and the degree of injury is proportional to the damage inflicted. That's why the only factors that increase damage are things that would increase physical trauma (e.g. size of the weapon, strength of the wielder, extra sharpness in the form of enchantments, etc).

Likewise the dissonance of the Smart but ugly Wizard being able to use less magic per day then the dumb but good looking Fighter. I mean I can see the mechanics but the story behind it? Yeah, no.

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.

 

[Charlaquin]

No, because if you pass your saves, you're back to full the next day with no indication that you were ever actually hit. It's impossible for anyone in 5E to be injured to such a degree that they aren't fine the next day, even if they were literally knocked unconscious and within six seconds of having died. The fact that they made their save is apparently proof that they were never actually injured in the first place. If you were severely wounded, then the only way we can know that is because you subsequently died. It's ridiculous.

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.