Resonance, Potency, & Potions: A Look At Magic Items in Pathfinder 2

Paizo has been delving into the way magic items work in its latest previews of Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Last week they spoke about Resonance, a resource that characters have for activating magical items; and on Friday they blogged about Potency, which is linked to the power of a magical weapon.

​

Resonance is measured in Resonance Points (RP). Activating an item costs 1 RP, and your RP total is your level plus your Charisma modifier. Paizo points out that "We expect Resonance Points to be a contentious topic, and we're really curious to see how it plays at your tables. It's one of the more experimental changes to the game, and the playtest process gives us a chance to see it in the wild before committing to it."

They also preview a few magic items - cloak of elvenkind, floating shield, staff of healing, and some trinkets such as a fear gem, and vanishing coin.

When it comes to weapons, Resonance is not required; weapons have a "potency" value, which is roughly equivalent to its "plus" -- it gives you a bonus to attack, increases damage by a whole damage die per potency point (i.e. a +1 longsword gives +1 to hit and +1d8 damage). Potency and special qualities are limited by a weapon's quality - standard, expert, master, legendary.

[TABLE="width: 500, align: center"]
[TR]
[TD]Quality[/TD]
[TD]Max Potency[/TD]
[TD]Max Properties[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Standard[/TD]
[TD]+0[/TD]
[TD]0[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Expert[/TD]
[TD]+2[/TD]
[TD]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Master[/TD]
[TD]+4[/TD]
[TD]2[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Legendary[/TD]
[TD]+5[/TD]
[TD]3[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Potency and properties are contained within transferrable magical runes, often found on a runestone. Some examples shown are disrupting, and vorpal.

Amor similarly has potency and properties. Potency affects AC, TAC, and saving throws. Some properties include invisibility and fortification.

This takes us on to potions. Potions can now have high level effects, and they don't have to be tied to the spell lists. Examples including healing potions, invisibility potions, dragon's breath potions, and oil of mending.​

[FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT][FONT=&quot]Save[/FONT]​

 

[Jer]

In Pathfinder 1E, and supposedly in D&D 3E before it, healing wands trivialized any amount of HP damage (as long as you survived the fight). D&D had long been a game of resource management and attrition, which was inadvertently obviated through the combination of linear HP-growth with exponential wealth rewards.

Resonance is specifically trying to fix that problem. If you use a cheap wand of Cure Light Wounds to try and heal a mid-level character, then they'll run out of Resonance before they're half-way back. In order to keep a mid-level character up and going, you'll need to use a (vastly more expensive) wand of Cure Serious Wounds.

Are there any other examples other than healing where this problem appears? Because this still sounds like a problem with the rules for healing to me rather than a problem with magic items in general. It seems like they're trying to kill a fly with a bazooka.

Though I will admit - it's a tough nut to crack. You've got a game that is balanced on daily resource refreshes, but you also have a long tradition of healing spells and items that get around the refresh rate that you expect PCs to use. You want your magic items to scale with level and for lower-level items to be truly less useful than higher-level ones, and you want people to be able to craft/buy magic items.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but why isn't the solution to have proper pricing on higher level healing items? In the preview they have a level 1 healing potion for 3 gp and a level 16 potion for 1200 gp. That's 400x the cost, but the level 19 potion only provides a little less than 16x the healing power of a level 1 potion (on average). If you priced the level 19 potion at around 45 gp or so (or increased the cost for a level 1 potion and scaled the rest accordingly) it would be comparable in price to the healing you actually get and there would be no reason to carry around a bag of healing potions instead of just one higher level potion.

(I personally prefer the idea of tying hp recovered to the character level rather than the item level, but I know that's a controversial stance that a lot of people hated in 4e, so I guess I can see why for PF2 they want to try something different.)

 

[Sunseeker]

What's to stop a player from hiring a dozen clerics and let the clerics use their RP for wands of CLW to top off the party? [emoji14]

Almost sounds like wands just need to be axed for good, an idea I'm not opposed to. And I'm onboard for resonance but keeping charges and X/day abilities seems fiddly and redundant. Why have resonance at that point?

Or you could just not hand out wands.

 

[Emerikol]

I am fine with the concept but I really don't like it being a positive pool that goes down. I'd prefer it be a taint that goes up. It kind of makes magic something the wears you down, stretches your lifeforce, etc... Kind of like the one ring in Lord of the Rings. I know I can reflavor it easily. Still this is a playtest. Anybody with me on that?

 

[MechaTarrasque]

It occurs to me that even if the playtest results cause resonance to be dropped, there is no evidence that they will go back to WBL and body part slots as their solution to PC's getting too many magic items. Which means that they will do something else. I suspect this could easily be a 'better the devil you know' type situation.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Are there any other examples other than healing where this problem appears? Because this still sounds like a problem with the rules for healing to me rather than a problem with magic items in general. It seems like they're trying to kill a fly with a bazooka.

As far as I can tell, cheap healing wands were the one big issue. A lesser issue was that high-level characters could festoon themselves with dozens of low-level magic items, at virtually no cost to themselves (because of exponential wealth growth). Resonance is attempting to kill two birds with one stone, in a semi-organic way. An absolute limit on how many magic items you can use at once (or in a day) is relatively less silly than placing a level cap on items that would prevent high-level characters from using them.

It's honestly not the worst idea in the world, especially if they could use it to also make tracking wand charges unnecessary. Wand charges added a lot of bookkeeping in 3E/PF1, and still do in 5E.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but why isn't the solution to have proper pricing on higher level healing items? In the preview they have a level 1 healing potion for 3 gp and a level 16 potion for 1200 gp. That's 400x the cost, but the level 19 potion only provides a little less than 16x the healing power of a level 1 potion (on average). If you priced the level 19 potion at around 45 gp or so (or increased the cost for a level 1 potion and scaled the rest accordingly) it would be comparable in price to the healing you actually get and there would be no reason to carry around a bag of healing potions instead of just one higher level potion.

I'm not quite following your exact numbers, but the reason you can't have a high-level potion that is as cost-efficient as a low-level potion is because of the action economy. High-level cure spells and high-level potions are action-balanced against other things that a high-level character can do, so letting a low-level character use a high-level item would be giving them an action that's over-powered compared to other actions they might take. If you have a drag-out back-and-forth fight that goes on for several rounds, and then someone drinks a potion that brings them back to full, then they just win.

High-level consumables need to be exponentially more expensive than low-level consumables in order to prevent low-level characters from buying them. Video games get around that problem by simply gating access to good shops behind story progression, but you can't always do that in tabletop. You're going to go to the big city, sometimes, and the big city should have the best shops with the best items. Price is the only reliable barrier available, in that situation.

It gets worse when there are high-level offensive items that you can use, but the designers were aware of that issue, which is why they capped potions at level 3 spell effects, and made high-level scrolls likely to fail when used by low-level characters.

The underlying issue is just one of pricing consumables relative to always-on items. Either consumables are too cheap, and you end up with bags full of them, or they're too expensive and you just ignore them (in favor of getting a better weapon). Most video games solve the issue by applying other limits. WoW limits you to using one potion per fight. The Tales series uses the same healing item at every level (Apple Gel, which restores 30% of your max HP), but limits you to carrying 15 at a time. Those limits are both pretty arbitrary, though, and I don't think they would translate well to tabletop.

 

[Imaculata]

Or you could just not hand out wands.

This seems like a far more elegant solution. Or they could simply change the way wands work. Instead of having them contain spammable spells, they could enhance any spells cast with it of a specific school.

Their current idea just adds more things to track, which goes against what made 3.5 so good to begin with (in comparison to 2nd edition).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What's to stop a player from hiring a dozen clerics and let the clerics use their RP for wands of CLW to top off the party? [emoji14]

Almost sounds like wands just need to be axed for good, an idea I'm not opposed to. And I'm onboard for resonance but keeping charges and X/day abilities seems fiddly and redundant. Why have resonance at that point?

Well, I gotta agree that the ROOT cause of the issue seems to be the existing of healing wands AT ALL. AD&D worked perfectly well without all this 'put any spell in a magic item' stuff. In fact it was close to impossible to make most items, unless the GM was very kind (especially in 2e). This worked perfectly fine for 20+ years until 3e had a 'better' idea, which apparently is now so sacrosanct that it has to keep borking up games for another 20 years. People, 3e was BROKEN, it was FILLED with bad ideas, lose them!

 

[Imaculata]

People, 3e was BROKEN, it was FILLED with bad ideas, lose them!

It was also filled with plenty of good ideas.

Every version of D&D has its flaws, and this was definitely one of 3rd edition's. So yes, they should discard things that didn't work, but they should also build further on what made it good.

Third edition removed all of the pointless saves from 2nd edition, and simplified it down to just three. Armor class was no longer negative, attack rolls were more straight forward (no more convoluted Thac0 system). So why are they coming up with ideas for PF2 that make it more convoluted? If healing wands are the issue, just remove them entirely.

 

[Jer]

High-level cure spells and high-level potions are action-balanced against other things that a high-level character can do, so letting a low-level character use a high-level item would be giving them an action that's over-powered compared to other actions they might take. If you have a drag-out back-and-forth fight that goes on for several rounds, and then someone drinks a potion that brings them back to full, then they just win.

Ah yes - I wasn't thinking about low-level characters getting access to high-level magic items too early. I was thinking of it the other way - with high level characters creating/buying tons of low level items because it's cheaper to do that than to buy/make the high level item. When I have merchants the sell magic items in my games I typically restrict their wares to lower level items and higher level items aren't even available. But that's a personal choice of how my players and I like our campaigns, so I can see how others would have a problem with it.

Although if you've already added item levels to the game there's a fix for that, which is to say that high level magic items are too powerful for low level characters to use. Or you could even let them use them but have them cause damage when they do because of the raw power of the item in question. It certainly would solve the problem of low level characters using higher level healing items if you took more damage from using it than you were able to heal with it

 

[Sunseeker]

This seems like a far more elegant solution. Or they could simply change the way wands work. Instead of having them contain spammable spells, they could enhance any spells cast with it of a specific school.

Their current idea just adds more things to track, which goes against what made 3.5 so good to begin with (in comparison to 2nd edition).

I really wish "wands" worked more like you see in Harry Potter or other magical lore: they either enhance your casting (like a +1 weapon), or add special effects (Fire spells can harm ghosts, or something). Because you NEVER see in ANY of the source fantasy materials wands working like they do in D&D.

To add: I think it would also differentiate the Wizard more from the Sorcerer if they were required to use a wand (even a basic wooden stick).