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Problem: Pathfinder is more fun when everyone can recover most of their HP between encounters without spending a ton of gold or burning through spells slots. Unfortunately, that would take a dedicated healer, and nobody wants to play a dedicated healer.
Pretty Much Everyone's Response: Buy wands of cure light wounds, spam between encounters. It's clunky, annoying, and a little cheesy, but it gets the job done. Everyone knows about this, everyone expects it, and everyone is basically happy. But it would sure be nice if a New Edition handled this more elegantly. (Hint, Hint.)
Paizo's Response: THAT'S not how Pathfinder is meant to be played! Here's a new, complicated system that will put a stop to this! And it totally won't have any loopholes!
I feel like this is emblematic of a lot of Paizo design philosophy of late. Sometimes, it seems like they're interested in propping up their pet ideas at the cost both of formal standards of elegant design, and of what most people find fun. I really like Pathfinder and want 2e to succeed, but I haven't gotten as many indications as I'd have liked that the design team really has their finger on the community's pulse.
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Problem: Pathfinder is more fun when everyone can recover most of their HP between encounters without spending a ton of gold or burning through spells slots. Unfortunately, that would take a dedicated healer, and nobody wants to play a dedicated healer.
I strongly disagree that this is true. I think the game is much more fun when you have to make actual decisions about where your healing is coming from. There needs to be enough of it available to heal you up between fights, but Wands of CLW were a 'lesser of two evils' situation. Bad, but much better than forcing someone to play something they don't want to or waste spells on healing when this cheap option was available.
I think Paizo's current solution has awful complexity issues and needs a serious work over before we can say it's adequate, but I profoundly disagree with you on what the initial problem was.
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I think the game is much more fun when you have to make actual decisions about where your healing is coming from.
Personally, I've never found angst over out of combat healing as fun. Some things in the game works perfectly well without needing a meaningful decision. I also don't need to spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and worry over rest, eating, drinking, ect... I don't fret over the fact that water and food don't dramatically leap upwards in cost as I level the way higher level healing items do.
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Personally, I've never found angst over out of combat healing as fun. Some things in the game works perfectly well without needing a meaningful decision. I also don't need to spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and worry over rest, eating, drinking, ect... I don't fret over the fact that water and food don't dramatically leap upwards in cost as I level the way higher level healing items do.
It's not about angst, it's about logistics and resource management. I'm not necessarily endorsing Paizo's solution, but having the healing be free if you have a store but not if you don't is just weird and broken in the sense that it doesn't work properly.
The cost of food is at least consistently a non-issue, whereas whether healing has a cost is wildly variable. Which is bad.
Besides, Wands of Infernal Healing were even better. :p
If you were an Evil party or didn't have Alignments to hold up.
It otherwise came with a nagging GM that wanted to take over your character sheet if you used it too much, which is a whole other headache.
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Personally, I've never found angst over out of combat healing as fun. Some things in the game works perfectly well without needing a meaningful decision. I also don't need to spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and worry over rest, eating, drinking, ect... I don't fret over the fact that water and food don't dramatically leap upwards in cost as I level the way higher level healing items do.It's not about angst, it's about logistics and resource management. I'm not necessarily endorsing Paizo's solution, but having the healing be free if you have a store but not if you don't is just weird and broken in the sense that it doesn't work properly.
The cost of food is at least consistently a non-issue, whereas whether healing has a cost is wildly variable. Which is bad.
You say it's bad. I disagree. Healing out of combat when you have time to spare SHOULD be cheap. By contrast, healing IN combat when you don't have time and need to maximize those precious actions should be expensive, but in exchange for that high price it needs to be worth it, and needs to actually heal a respectable amount. You're trading time for money.
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You say it's bad. I disagree. Healing out of combat when you have time to spare SHOULD be cheap.
If you want to make it free, make it free. The current situation is not that, though. It's effectively free beyond a certain level, and with weird and awkward conditionals attached, which is what I'm concerned about.
But also, I disagree. If out of combat healing is cheap, then damage you take in combat is not meaningful unless it kills you or renders you unconscious. People should not, thematically speaking, prefer taking half their HP in damage to one minor condition, but they do because the HP are easier to heal.
And that's a problem.
By contrast, healing IN combat when you don't have time and need to maximize those precious actions should be expensive, but in exchange for that high price it needs to be worth it, and needs to actually heal a respectable amount. You're trading time for money.
I talked a little about this in the other thread, but I don't disagree with the basic idea that action economy is worth something. I'm not sure that has much to do with Resonance, though.
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I have the rough idea that RPG healing should be a variant of those signs you might see in small mechanics shops.
They boil down to "Fast, Cheap, Good. You can have any two."
Unfortunately, that would take a dedicated healer, and nobody wants to play a dedicated healer.
I feel personally attacked right now.
Honestly, I think Paizo has a good answer without this resonance nonsense already. Make charges lower, have them recharge daily (as they do with a staff). Keep the limit on how many magic items you can have at once (if it scales appropriately then your lower level items won't have to be thrown by the wayside to make room) and have your wands count. Boom, now you have a restraint on wand spam that still allows wands in general to fulfill their function, and makes it a genuine choice whether to dedicate multiple magic item spots to more wands or not. In the meantime, you also make other kinds of non-focused healing work (based on their assertion of a barbarian healer the heal skill is probably sufficient) and on top of that, make healing fun! Give me my AoE healing, HoTs, reactive healing, give my my favorite combo from WoW where I fired a laser out of my hands that damaged an enemy and shielded my allies. You can 100% make healing a fun, proactive and tactical mechanic.
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Problem: Pathfinder is more fun when everyone can recover most of their HP between encounters without spending a ton of gold or burning through spells slots. Unfortunately, that would take a dedicated healer, and nobody wants to play a dedicated healer.
Pretty Much Everyone's Response: Buy wands of cure light wounds, spam between encounters. It's clunky, annoying, and a little cheesy, but it gets the job done. Everyone knows about this, everyone expects it, and everyone is basically happy. But it would sure be nice if a New Edition handled this more elegantly. (Hint, Hint.)
Paizo's Response: THAT'S not how Pathfinder is meant to be played! Here's a new, complicated system that will put a stop to this! And it totally won't have any loopholes!
I feel like this is emblematic of a lot of Paizo design philosophy of late. Sometimes, it seems like they're interested in propping up their pet ideas at the cost both of formal standards of elegant design, and of what most people find fun. I really like Pathfinder and want 2e to succeed, but I haven't gotten as many indications as I'd have liked that the design team really has their finger on the community's pulse.
This isn't really anything new in my opinion.
When Crane Wing was making big waves in PFS due to an exploit made with a certain Monk archetype and being Human for the extra feats, thereby nullifying most any painful aspects of low level encounters, Paizo made a kneejerk reaction and gutted the Crane Wing feat entirely (and by relation, nullified the Crane Riposte feat that was supposed to follow due to breaking their own mechanics). To this day, I think this was one of the biggest blunders Paizo made in regards to fixing something that was "problematic" (it was really only an issue in PFS).
There were so many other options they could have done instead to solve this problem. They could have:
-Banned Crane Style feats from PFS.
-Banned the Monk archetype from PFS.
-Nerfed the Monk archetype to disallow the abuse (which they later do after this kneejerk reaction)
-Allowed PFS to have more flexibility in encounter presentation to account for different players
The first two are simple applications that would have solved this basic issue. The third is something that would have had lasting implications, but considering they did this anyway, and the factor that it would have disallowed the PFS abuse as a result, this would have been the most conservative answer. The last one isn't a realistic answer, but it does demonstrate that homebrew tables can account for these kinds of builds and still challenge them, whereas PFS could not because they are inflexible goobers and just run encounters "as-is." (I would seriously get bored of PFS after playing through it all once, no lie. It's like playing the same AP over and over and over and over again.)
But instead, they take the instant-gratification, high-backlash, horrible-feedback option because they felt like an instant change was needed. And considering how bad that change was, they had to go in and revise it twice to get it to a state that wasn't nearly contentious. (It still sucks IMO, creating a fiddly bit you have to keep track of a lot of the time, and part of that revision was the Monk nerf mentioned above.)
In short, Paizo brought that sort of thing on themselves when there were much better options for them to take in response to this issue.
Resonance isn't much different. Resonance was created for two main reasons. The first is to try and cut down on magic item spam (AKA the Christmas Tree effect), but also to remove the crutch that is CLW wand spam.
The former isn't really an issue of mechanics, but of playstyle. (I don't like having too many magic items because I only have so many actions and abilities I can do in a given round, making having more than the Big 6 a bit problematic to me.) Therefore, using a mechanics solution to a playstyle issue doesn't really add up.
The latter is perhaps the biggest example of the Crane Wing issue all over again. As I've stated with Crane Wing, there are several options they could have taken to fix this issue. They could have:
-Improved other out-of-combat healing options to no longer require CLW wands (which they may have done, but no evidence to support this).
-Improved higher level healing scaling to no longer have such a disparity between CLW wands and Heal spells (I mean the 6th level Heal spell, not just healing spells in general), thereby cutting down on the need or desire for CLW wands (i.e. if the cost for healing between two items is the same, then CLW wands will be phased out as appropriate).
-Completely revised wand rules so that CLW wands are balanced better to not be such a reliant crutch.
-Remove Wands from the game entirely.
The first is actually a nice thing to do. Many games allow full healing between combats, regardless of what happens. The problem here is that people complain it's too much like 4E/5E, so they don't want to see more of the same, and want something different. (Which is fine, but you can't really argue against tried and true here.)
The second is another viable option which synergizes well with magic item cost balancing. This could have actually made sense, but I've seen the crazy prices on higher level magic items compared to items that are either slightly or somewhat less than it, and the insane disparity between those prices are a prime example of this not being the case whatsoever. (It's actually probably worse now than before.)
The third is most likely what I would have done, which is completely change up the Wand rules. If "spell in a can" doens't necessarily have to be the case, as evidenced by the Potion rules blog, then something similar for a Wand (most specifically, CLW wands) should also be possible.
The last is ultimately a failsafe nuke that I wouldn't recommend unless there is absolutely no other way to do it (i.e. not even Resonance can fix it). However, since this is a completely new edition, and they have the guts to introduce new things like Trinkets to us, it could be time for no more Wands.
But you know what they do? Create some backwoods system that's supposed to solve all of these apparent problems, except it only appears to make more of them, and Paizo appears to also be doubling down with things like Spell Points, and redundant Action names. It's history repeating itself all over again (pretty much).
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If you can get bags of holding an d handy haversacks by the truck load why not a skin of endless water or Beer? Just because the game designers over looked a handy Item does not mean a good GM or player could not come up with one. Years ago I had a hobbit rogue that had a status chest of holding that he called the elvensies box. The only things allowed in the box were food an drink. For six months we had dragon fixed as many ways as a hafling with 25 ranks of profession chef could prepare. The ranger was the handlings best friend the ranger found all the food and water with high skill ranks in all the skills to find us good food. The dwarf of course had profession brewe. The line was finely drawn when we tried to get a magical fermentation tank of holding to make wine. As the GM thought that would disrupt the local economy too much. You get the point. Players and gm’s can have a great deal of fun with food and drink.
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So my other thread (which I haven't read since initially creating unfortunately) was meant to define what the problem was with wands of CLW spam. Is it the act of using a 1st level wand for 20 levels? Is it healing to full after every combat? Or is it relying on magic for between combat healing?
Unfortunately I don't think the thread really defined what the problem was. And I don't think this thread is going to do any better. Already in the first two posts we have a disagreement with what the actual problem is. I don't think this conversation will be particularly productive without Paizo confirming what aspect of wands of CLW spam they don't like.
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I want mundane (or at least non-spell) solutions to be viable for most problems, including healing.
I would say "all problems" but I suppose "win the wizarding competition" is a thing that should require spells.
We still don't know how "I have healing as a signature skill, I'm going to rank it up whenever I can, and I'm going to take good healing skill feats when they are available" manages the problem.
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having the healing be free if you have a store but not if you don't is just weird and broken in the sense that it doesn't work properly.
Personally speaking, I agree with this. I'd rather have a strong push to 5e's "go into fights without full HP" method which it has done (in my experience) quite well or I'd rather go with 4e's "full HP after every combat without magic" method. Wands of CLW is the worst solution IMO. Well, sorry, second worst solution. Having Wands of CLW but limiting them with resonance is the worst solution.
having the healing be free if you have a store but not if you don't is just weird and broken in the sense that it doesn't work properly.Personally speaking, I agree with this. I'd rather have a strong push to 5e's "go into fights without full HP" method which it has done (in my experience) quite well or I'd rather go with 4e's "full HP after every combat without magic" method. Wands of CLW is the worst solution IMO. Well, sorry, second worst solution. Having Wands of CLW but limiting them with resonance is the worst solution.
Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.
Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.
Monks have spell points, one assumes Rangers and Paladins do as well.
Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.
HP is a resource. They've spent a significant amount of effort in removing CLW wand spam (whether as a side effect of another goal or as a direct goal itself). I'd be surprised if they then turn around and give everyone free healing.
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having the healing be free if you have a store but not if you don't is just weird and broken in the sense that it doesn't work properly.Personally speaking, I agree with this. I'd rather have a strong push to 5e's "go into fights without full HP" method which it has done (in my experience) quite well or I'd rather go with 4e's "full HP after every combat without magic" method. Wands of CLW is the worst solution IMO. Well, sorry, second worst solution. Having Wands of CLW but limiting them with resonance is the worst solution.
I don't think that's how Resonance will work out, but yeah, I'm not at all pleased with the current Resonance dynamic vis a vis Wands.
Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.Monks have spell points, one assumes Rangers and Paladins do as well.
Paladins do. Rangers we don't know, but I suspect are mostly like Monks (who only have Spell Points if they want).
Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.HP is a resource. They've spent a significant amount of effort in removing CLW wand spam (whether as a side effect of another goal or as a direct goal itself). I'd be surprised if they then turn around and give everyone free healing.
For clarification, that's one reason that was confirmed as one of their problems with PF1, which they were attempting to fix in 2E.
For clarification, that's one reason that was confirmed as one of their problems with PF1, which they were attempting to fix in 2E.Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.HP is a resource. They've spent a significant amount of effort in removing CLW wand spam (whether as a side effect of another goal or as a direct goal itself). I'd be surprised if they then turn around and give everyone free healing.
I don't understand what your trying to communicate here. What was the "problems with PF1"?
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It's not about angst, it's about logistics and resource management.
This sounds like a matter of semantics. Pick any set of words you want, the thing you are talking about isn't a fun/interesting part of the game. For me, it is anything BUT a "meaningful decision".
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It's not about angst, it's about logistics and resource management.This sounds like a matter of semantics. Pick any set of words you want, the thing you are talking about isn't a fun/interesting part of the game. For me, it is anything BUT a "meaningful decision".
Resource management, along with neat mechanical combinations, has always been an important part of Pathfinder's design. It's not one everyone enjoys, and it should be relatively unobtrusive and low effort if possible, but getting rid of it gets rid of a system element that many people do, in fact, enjoy.
The way Resonance is currently, it is neither unobtrusive nor low effort, and I would hope that will change, but just arguing that HP loss not even being a concern isn't a problem is simply not true for many people. It's not an issue for you, but that's not quite the same thing.
arguing that HP loss not even being a concern isn't a problem is simply not true for many people.
HP loss is always a concern: out of combat healing is a different issue. IMO, is someone if interested in attrition, then pacing is a much better way to deal with it that doesn't affect those that do NOT care about it [clw spam].
It's not an issue for you, but that's not quite the same thing.
I'll be the first person to say that it's my opinion: I say things like "Personally, I've never found angst over out of combat healing as fun" and "For me, it is anything BUT a "meaningful decision"". I know some agree and some disagree with me and try not to state things as fact.
However I have to reverse what you said and say just because you have an issue with out of combat healing doesn't make your situation true either: each person/group varies. "logistics and resource management" = "fun" isn't a universal truth. It really boils down to this 'fix' for a problem only part of the community has. My worry is that it'll be harder for those of us that do not have an issue to remove the 'fix' than it would have been for those of you that had an issue to fix what you saw in the old system if something similar was kept for the new game. So far, I'm not too happy with what I see.
I don't understand what your trying to communicate here. What was the "problems with PF1"?For clarification, that's one reason that was confirmed as one of their problems with PF1, which they were attempting to fix in 2E.Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.HP is a resource. They've spent a significant amount of effort in removing CLW wand spam (whether as a side effect of another goal or as a direct goal itself). I'd be surprised if they then turn around and give everyone free healing.
Literally what I stated. For rephrasing in a full sentence:
One of the things mentioned by developers as a problem with PF1 is the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can keep going functionally forever without caring.
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I don't understand what your trying to communicate here. What was the "problems with PF1"?For clarification, that's one reason that was confirmed as one of their problems with PF1, which they were attempting to fix in 2E.Well, I remember one thing they confirmed was basically the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can go functionally forever without caring.HP is a resource. They've spent a significant amount of effort in removing CLW wand spam (whether as a side effect of another goal or as a direct goal itself). I'd be surprised if they then turn around and give everyone free healing.
Fighters only resource to manage was HP which was cheaply restored each fight by CLW spam which meant fighters entered every battle with full HP while casters got weaker and weaker as they consumed their spells. This made designing encounters difficult because each of them needed to be capable of reducing a fighter from full HP to 0 in a single encounter to be a threat while also considering casters may or may not have any resources left.
If healing is more restricted in PF2 then it can be expected at the end of the day the fighter may be low on HP and the casters are low on spells and a medium level fight could be a good challenge. If we as a playing group can get behind the idea that you don’t need to be at full HP at the start of every combat and the game is balanced around that ideal then we could have more varied encounters and likely a more interesting game.
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HP loss is always a concern: out of combat healing is a different issue. IMO, is someone if interested in attrition, then pacing is a much better way to deal with it that doesn't affect those that do NOT care about it [clw spam].
Pacing doesn't quite do it for most people who have this issue, IMO.
I'll be the first person to say that it's my opinion: I say things like "Personally, I've never found angst over out of combat healing as fun" and "For me, it is anything BUT a "meaningful decision"". I know some agree and some disagree with me and try not to state things as fact.
Fair enough, just noting that some people had an issue.
However I have to reverse what you said and say just because you have an issue with out of combat healing doesn't make your situation true either: each person/group varies. "logistics and resource management" = "fun" isn't a universal truth. It really boils down to this 'fix' for a problem only part of the community has. My worry is that it'll be harder for those of us that do not have an issue to remove the 'fix' than it would have been for those of you that had an issue to fix what you saw in the old system if something similar was kept for the new game. So far, I'm not too happy with what I see.
I'm not especially happy with the current version of Resonance either. I just think the right solution is one that fixes the 'CLW Spam' issue but is also relatively low effort for people who don't care to manage logistics in detail.
My preferred version at the moment is to have no items with charges/limited uses, making Resonance the only number you need to keep track of, which is simple enough for me, and seems workable. We'll see how things work out.
My preferred version at the moment is to have no items with charges/limited uses, making Resonance the only number you need to keep track of, which is simple enough for me, and seems workable. We'll see how things work out.
For me, I could work with it being used for attuning items ONLY:
#1 It just tracks what items you can use.
#2 one use items do not use it.
#3 multicharge items use it and get a number of charges when attuned.
#4 multicharge items become unattuned if all charges used.
#5 wands gain level + highest mental stat bonus charges.
#6 staves gain highest mental stat bonus charge.
This is just a rough starting place but I think it could work.
I'm not sold on #5 and #6, I don't think, but something like that could definitely work, too.
The point is to make it so, generally, you don't need to track more than one resource when you use an item.
For me, the goal is too big for one pool. If you have enough resource to make staves/wands meaningful, it becomes meaningless for controlling items used: hence charges/attunement. If you want to get rid of charges 100%, you'd need a total rework of wands/staves to do something other than multiple spell use. Something like they hold spells that are added to your spells known while attuned and some minor at will effect.
Why's there 2 threads on this now? It feels like Paladin or PC Goblin era all over again.
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So my other thread (which I haven't read since initially creating unfortunately) was meant to define what the problem was with wands of CLW spam. Is it the act of using a 1st level wand for 20 levels? Is it healing to full after every combat? Or is it relying on magic for between combat healing?
Unfortunately I don't think the thread really defined what the problem was. And I don't think this thread is going to do any better. Already in the first two posts we have a disagreement with what the actual problem is. I don't think this conversation will be particularly productive without Paizo confirming what aspect of wands of CLW spam they don't like.
Some people want a game where attrition is a serious problem and heavily restricts the number of fights you can manage in a day, and dislike the way a group can conserve resources by treating hit point damage as trivial. I suspect this is Paizo's main issue. But other people don't really care about that. (GM: "Aha! One of you used up your spells carelessly and now you all have to choose between setting up camp early and resting until the next day, or pushing on and probably dying!" Player: "Oh good, we get to stop having fun.")
Some people dislike the imagery of cheap wand usage ("My bard gets a wand from his bag of wands, jabs the fighter with it ten times, then chucks it away"), and others aren't bothered by that ("My priestess offers a prayer to Sarenrae as she kneels by the body of her ally, clutching her divine wand in one hand and tending to his wounds with the other.")
Some people dislike the economics of cheap wand usage ("Hey, let's stroll into the village shop and spend the equivalent of $300,000 on the magic wands they always have!") and other people aren't bothered. ("We restock. I'll cross 3000gp off the party loot.")
Some people dislike rolling lots of d8s after every battle ("So you're down 140HP... That's about half a wand's worth. I'll do five charges at a time; tell me when you're getting close to full. Five, eight, eleven, sixteen, twenty-three plus five is twenty-eight. One, three, nine, ten...") Other people just accept it.
So it's not surprising the other thread has gone on for hundreds of posts, meandering in all directions.
Why's there 2 threads on this now? It feels like Paladin or PC Goblin era all over again.
Well, it does seem apropos to spam threads about spam... :P
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Literally what I stated. For rephrasing in a full sentence:
One of the things mentioned by developers as a problem with PF1 is the fact that martial characters have effectively 0 resources, so they can keep going functionally forever without caring.
So your saying that one of the problems in PF1e is that martials have 0 resource management (other than HP) which means they can go all day. And the designers have stated that's a problem? I find that perplexing when barbarians who are "martials" have had their daily resource removed from the game. Something doesn't add up there.
As for fighter's daily resources, I'm not seeing any except for resonance which we have been assured "rarely ever comes up during a normal work day" which hardly seems like they've given martials a daily resource (unless of course what the designers mean to say is "resonance daily limits hardly ever come up when players hoard their resonance and barely use it for fear that they won't be able to heal when they need to". Except that would be a frighteningly important detail so I'm giving the designers fair credit for not having left off that tiny detail and instead take their statement that resonance barely pops up at face value). So I don't see how giving fighters a resource that almost never comes up gives them a meaningful daily resource.
Why's there 2 threads on this now? It feels like Paladin or PC Goblin era all over again.
Because one of the threads was evidently poorly worded and has not contributed towards any clarity on the issue (and if I'm wrong on this point, please point me to the good posts. I lost track of that other thread extremely quickly so I have no idea what has been said in it. Anytime I've read a handful of posts I didn't spot anything worth reading).
Some people....I suspect....Some people....Some people....Some people...
This isn't meant to pick on you or discount all of the valuable things you've said (and this is a good post). I'm reducing your post to the above because it doesn't answer the question I have no matter how many good points you raise. And I think it's becoming clear I can't get an answer to that question unless Mark Seifter or someone else weighs in. My question is: WHAT is the problem that Paizo has with CLW wand spam?
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A quick history lesson:
Once upon a time, magic items could not be bought or sold, but we're freely received as loot. The very idea of a "magic mart" was deemed laughable.
Consequently, pcs picked up long lists of varied treasures (our 5th level characters had a page of magic items each!), Most of which were never used. Since loot was random, having a wand of healing was a matter of luck and adventures were a list of hp draining encounters leading up to the final showdown which was made more exciting since you often had to go in at half hp.
Then along came pathfinder. Wealth by level guidelines told the th that the pcs had too much, and a crude system of selling (and buying) magic items was introduced. While it wasn't supposed to be a magic mart where you could buy what you liked, Most gms couldn't be bothered to learn and apply the (somewhat complex) availability rules, so it became a de facto magic mart.
As a result, cheap healing became freely available. Every encounter could be met at full health and easy encounters became a road bump on the way to the final showdown. This was a problems cause the entire CR system was geared towards the idea that easy encounters still drain resources (e.g. HP), making the final showdown more difficult. So the CR system became skewed (there were other problems with it, too, but this is not the place to go into it).
So now we have a chance to fix this. The magic mart is here to stay, nobody wants to go back to the days of Month Haul campaigns, but something needs to be done. After all, when was the last time you read a book where the heroes healed up between encounters on the way to the final showdown? It never happens, because the idea that they are worn and bloodied builds suspense. The same should happen here. The resonance system is paizo's attempt to fix it, along with a couple of other problems.
That said, I am increasingly of the opinion that charges are no longer necessary and should be dumped. It would make wands into permanent items rather than consumables, but they would still be limited by resonance, so I don't think it would make a huge difference to the adventuring day.
My question is: WHAT is the problem that Paizo has with CLW wand spam?
As others have said: probably the way it makes it possible for a group to overcome encounters without using limited daily abilities, since the game is supposedly designed around attrition and finite resources.
For casters, spells are the primary limited daily resource. For martials, it's hit points. At least, in theory.
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In the games I play the wand of Cure Light wounds has become ubiquitous because it allows players to play any character they want and have fun doing so.
With resonance being what it is, I see a lot more NPC trains of Bards and Clerics (replaced by Oracles when the time comes). It will be more expensive then the old wand of CLW and have more times where it is not feasible, but I imagine camps will be set up out of dungeons fairly often.
One of the underlying issues here that I don't see getting discussed that often is the fact that HP is kind of a terrible metric of simulation, and so it becomes very difficult to moderate in a RPG. Nobody ever knows how close to death they are from injury in real life, until we are close enough that it could still happen even if we when we are staying out of dangerous situations. Pushing on while injured is a terrible choice to make in real life because injury greatly reduces our effectiveness and becomes increasingly more likely to become a permanent disability if we do. People do push on when injured, but it is usually at a detriment to the people counting on them, especially in a long term capacity.
The possibility of magic healing absolutely shifts this dynamic but is very difficult to overlay onto "real life" strategies, because Injury in RPGs, especially D&D derivatives is not like real life either. It is just another resource pool to manage, but one that only tangibly effects the game when it hits 0. (It might effect the game earlier if the players change their tactics based on having low HP, but that is a tactical choice not a game mechanic).
Long story short: I think a big part of the "how much healing" puzzle is complicated by the fact that HP is a very abstract concept that different players and tables interpret in radically different ways and this makes it very challenging to moderate from a rules perspective.
what does it mean to take 5 hp of damage?
What does it mean to have 5 hp left?
What does it mean to take 95% of your total HP in damage from one hit?
Does it matter if it from a dragon's bite or a goblin's fist?
Because this is so nebulous, I appreciate seeing the developers try to point out that healing systems and how much healing are going to have to be game dependent and based on the mood and tone of each game, requiring a lot of flexible house rules to be possible. I think it might be good to start looking at the wand of CLW situation as "what are some different ways we could handle this for different kinds of games.
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As others have said: probably the way it makes it possible for a group to overcome encounters without using limited daily abilities, since the game is supposedly designed around attrition and finite resources.
For casters, spells are the primary limited daily resource. For martials, it's hit points. At least, in theory.
Except resonance and higher level wands make HP a non-issue. Paizo hasn't stopped player's from going into battle with full HP, Paizo has just given them a resource pool that is so big that it has little to no impact on characters on a typical adventuring day which means the only actual cost is gold pieces. So if Paizo actually had a problem with people going into battle with full hit points they've failed to address that problem.
Except resonance and higher level wands make HP a non-issue. Paizo hasn't stopped player's from going into battle with full HP, Paizo has just given them a resource pool that is so big that it has little to no impact on characters on a typical adventuring day which means the only actual cost is gold pieces. So if Paizo actually had a problem with people going into battle with full hit points they've failed to address that problem.As others have said: probably the way it makes it possible for a group to overcome encounters without using limited daily abilities, since the game is supposedly designed around attrition and finite resources.
For casters, spells are the primary limited daily resource. For martials, it's hit points. At least, in theory.
Except even with the tiny amount of information provided, this is blatantly incorrect. To the point where this is not something that can be based in reality.
Except for a particular time when my playtesters explicitly tried to see if they could get away with saving money on CLW wand spam despite being high level adventurers who could afford a better wand, and a few extreme stress test situations where I told them "This is the only fight today. Nova your heart out," my playtest group never really hit hard against the resonance caps, even the ones with lower Charisma.
That would imply that yes, they hit the resonance caps. Did they hit way earlier than should theoretically happen, ie. one fight into the day? No. Did they actually hit the caps? Yes.
I think the idea is to encourage the party to get CMS wands, then CSW wands, not to get rid of using wands for healing. With the healing spells doing more healing, the costs have changed. We don't know how yet.
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I just don’t like the resonance mechanic. I think Paizo is inventing a problem where none exists and the cure is worse than the perceived problem.
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I think that would become obvious during playtest. Groups are free to modify or Reject the accepted system once it is established, but let's get a baseline established first.
"never really hit hard" does not mean never running out or never worrying about it.
It means they never really felt it was punishing. What that means depends a lot on the group. If it was my group for example, we wouldn't consider running out of resonance one or two events before they would otherwise stop to be hitting hard.
Actually, I think that statement might just mean that the playtester's didn't complain loudly enough about running out, or that Mark chose to ignore their complaints to preserve his preconceptions regarding the mechanics he was supposed to be stress testing. His table could also have been a statistical anomoly.
The whole point of an open playtest is to see what breaks when you don't play it as intended, but making sure it even can be played as intended is what the closed playtests are for. In that regard he is doing his job. Running/playing strictly "as-intended" will only tell you if you like the system as it exists in your head... not the system actually sitting on the table. It will be our jobs to break the **** out of PF2E before it's final release so that we get something that's good.