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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8074688" data-attributes="member: 12731">Okay.I don't run Medicine - I'm the GM!My players get annoyed if I handwave it "an hour passes, you're all fully healed". Makes them feel their skill and feat investments are wasted. Why take them if you still heal up fully, like?I want to remove skills and feats that encourage (my) players to spend time on the wrong things, such as finding out if the party can proceed after 40 minutes, or if it takes them 50 minutes to heal up. I think you and I agree the difference is largely pointless.But more to the point - the rules to me strongly indicate the design intent was for downtime between encounters to take between 10 and 30 minutes, making the choice which 10-minute activities you select important. Do you prioritize getting your focus point(s) back, and if so, how many? ...is just one question I get the impression the "downtime minigame" was created to encourage.So when I started out GMing PF2 I set out to always allow ten minutes of risk-free rest, but to associate the choice to rest longer than that with an increasingly large risk of wandering monsters (or other consequences).But Medicine just isn't up to snuff. Monsters hit so hard that we immediately found that a mere one or three ten-minute downtime activities weren't enough to heal up fully. I found my players just couldn't stick to that baseline. First they rested for 20 or 30 minutes. Then they just gave up, and rested for as long as it took, wandering monsters be damned.And that makes my implied threat toothless. Wandering Monsters that you actually use only slows down gameplay (since it adds combat encounters that doesn't contribute towards the story). The real value of Wandering Monsters is when you don't use them, only threaten to use them. (Remember, I'm running an Adventure Path here. I'm not speaking about open-ended sandboxes)What should I do? Kill off any group that insists on healing up to full before moving further (by a constant stream of wandering monsters that slowly deplete hit points faster than resting recuperates them?) No, that's clearly unworkable.Which is to get to the real elephant in the room: if encounters are balanced on the assumption adventurers go into them fully healed, why not simply have a rule that says "you heal up fully after each fight"? Why have all the cluttery details, if players are still supposed to rest for the 20, or 50, or 80 minutes it takes to heal up fully (without expending resources)?!And the answer, of course, is to enable the adventure to string multiple encounters together as one. Three encounters' worth of enemies that strike in succession without giving time for resource-less healing should obviously be possible. (It will be much easier than fighting all monsters at once, but still noticeably harder than when the fights are spaced one hour apart)But this can be accomplished so much easier than the current Medicine implementation, where you at every point is asked to make decisions: which patient to treat first? At which DC? Who's treated by the healer with Continual Recovery and who got her healing from someone else (making you immune to further treatment). Who's got Battle Medicine already and from whom? With the Godless Healing Feat, you als need to remember if the Cleric has cast magic on you. It's an insane level of clutter, for very very little benefit. To be honest, whenever I hear people say things like "I don't find the rolls difficult" I assume they're simply skipping the rules (whether because they can't be bothered, because they don't understand them, or because they handwave them isn't important). But it means the argument "I don't have a need to simplify Medicine" feels hollow to me.So I'm just cutting out the clutter. Now a player can take Medicine and feel he's getting his money's worth even though no dice are rolled because the rule says no dice needs to be rolled. (My rules simply says "every ten minutes your patient heals 1/3rd of his max hp") In turn this enables me to handwave "you're all rested and ready to go" without depriving the player of any rolls.Yes, it does mean the benefits of going higher than Expertise in Medicine appears to be less compelling. One character with Legendary Medicine can of course treat everyone, but so can a party where every member is Trained in Medicine. Froma group optimization perspective, maybe agreeing to set aside a "Trained slot" for Medicine to enable everybody to use their three Master/Legendary slots elsewhere, will be what players choose? Or maybe the GM will insist on enforcing rolls against non-trivial DCs whenever the party rests in hostile weather conditions (adding back value into putting skill increases into Medicine)... my rules leave that up to each group.Not sure why you're asking why higher hit rolls are needed? I though I made it clear the main benefit is to transform talismans from vendor trash to items a player might actually consider using. That is, making it so the Talisman mechanism sees actual usage at my table.As for the numerical bonuses, my observation is that (at least at the levels we play) monsters are so difficult that a small bonus (~+2) will only make gameplay faster, more fun, less frustrating.As for "ACs can already be substantially shifted" I assume you mean something else than flanking and frightened? Things I assume come online during the double-digit levels? And that doesn't require Bards or Druids (remember our party consists of Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, Cleric, Wizard)?At level 10, we aren't feeling that yet. But thank for the feedback - I'll be sure to only design for the single-digit levels at this time.</blockquote>

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