Positives and Negatives

One possible solution to the Wand of Cure Light Wounds problem might be to track magical healing of any type that you want to limit and not let it stack. Let's say that somebody uses the PF1 version of this wand to heal somebody and rolls a 5, a 2, and a 9 on the d8+1 in that order. The first roll heals 5 hit points, the second roll has no effect, and the third roll heals 4 hit points (9-5). Further rolls with the same type of wand would have no effect until the character takes more damage.

The advantage of this approach is that you would have good reason to use higher level wands of healing when they are available. The disadvantage is complexity, as it is probably even harder to track than Resonance.

One possible solution to the Wand of Cure Light Wounds problem might be to track magical healing of any type that you want to limit and not let it stack. Let's say that somebody uses the PF1 version of this wand to heal somebody and rolls a 5, a 2, and a 9 on the d8+1 in that order. The first roll heals 5 hit points, the second roll has no effect, and the third roll heals 4 hit points (9-5). Further rolls with the same type of wand would have no effect until the character takes more damage.

The advantage of this approach is that you would have good reason to use higher level wands of healing when they are available. The disadvantage is complexity, as it is probably even harder to track than Resonance.

That also nerfs clerics, and hard. The problem was never that healsticks exist. It's that natural healing is so abysmally slow that you need magical support, whether it's in the form of clerics or healsticks.

The problem is not as bad with 2nd Edition prices, but it is still there.

Healing potions on pages 393-394.
Minor healing potion, 3gp, heals 1d8 hit points, 1.5 hp/gp
Lesser healing potion, 8 gp, heals 2d8+4 hit points, 1.63 hp/gp
Moderate healing potion, 20 gp, heals 3d8+8 hit points, 1.08 hp/gp
Greater healing potion, 60 gp, heals 5d8+12 hit points, 0.58 hp/gp
Major healing potion, 250 gp, heals 7d8+20 hit points, 0.21 hp/gp
True healing potion, 1200 gp, heals 9d8+30 hit points, 0.06 hp/gp

Wand of Heal, page 413
Level 2 with...

They really should take a page from Spheres of Power here. It has a similar progression looking just at hit points restored:

1d8+1 hp, 50 gp, 0.11 hp/gp
2d8+2 hp, 200 gp, 0.065 hp/gp
...
Xd8+X hp, 50*X^2 gp, 11/(100*X) hp/gp
...
7d8+7 hp, 2450 gp, 0.016 hp/gp

So if all you care about is raw healing potential, it will always be more economical to buy smaller potions (especially due to lack of resonance). But the larger potions can also come with riders (6 to choose from, you get one for every die above the first, and there are technically other effects you can add that increase the cost, but not the amount healed). For example, "2d8, all ability damage, and all temporary negative levels" or "heals 3d8, cures blindness, deafness, and other loss of senses, and makes a check to attempt to cure poison or disease"

Suddenly, there actually is a reason to buy larger potions, while still leaving small potions available for raw hit point damage.

Any mechanic that resembles resonance will not be well received.

Stop trying to fixing the game by changing the world around it has ben working for decades.

Resonance is completely gamey, artificial and has no space in Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder tradional scenarios.

Lastly, the Resonance Point system is intended to eliminate or at least severely limit the bookkeeping involved in those X-uses-per-day and X-rounds-per-day items. Instead of tracking a bunch of little point pools, Resonance Points can do the job in most, if not all, cases, with the rest limited to once per day. Admittedly, this aspect was not as thoroughly implemented as it could have been in the playtest rules.

This is the biggest issue for me. I thought Resonance was replacing X times per day items AND abilities, like a psuedo mana system.

What I think Resonance needs is a in-lore explanation as to why consumables cost Resonance.

I reasoned that potions are substances that react to your Resonance to create an effect.

If people don't like this, then I suggest implementing a harsher penalty for overusing items.

In the Witcher games, potions are basically poisonous to normal people, such that only Witchers can drink them safely, and only a certain number of them before they start to suffer ill effects.

I'm not saying it should be THAT extreme, but some sort of a "spell plague" downside to popping potions like a drug addict should exist. Apply it to spellcasting in general and give us back powerful spells, and you can kill two birds with one stone.

As far as wands and scrolls, it makes sense that you have to supply magical energy to activate these items.

Stop trying to fixing the game by changing the world around it has ben working for decades.

Demi-human level limits, paladins only for humans and multi-classing never for humans were all ways the world worked "for decades". They changed, for the better too.

I mean, "the world changes" is an unavoidable part of an edition change, since a lot of new things become possible and a lot of old possible things are no longer possible. Like it seems pretty likely that the cavalier is no longer going to be a class, but wizards can now swordfight pretty effectively.

I'm okay with "burns through 150 charges of CLW wands in a single day" as a thing we're relegating to the dustbin of history. I just don't want excessive character mortality as the consequence.

Is the 5 minute adventure day a feature or a bug?

First I see people talking about the "15 minute adventure day" as if it's a given and everybody knows about it. Now this. How long before we see complaints about the thirty second adventure day?

My answer to the question is "no".

I’d be curious how much of the community either “don’t see the challenges” that resonance is attempting to fix or “don’t see them as problematic.”

Because if a big enough chunk of the player base either doesn’t see a “challenge” or doesn’t see that “challenge” as problematic, then it arguably isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed.

I have another far more outthere option. If you want damage to carry over battle to battle build that system not some work around to limit items. Here is an example that simulates rounds in a boxing match.

HP is changed to Endurance.

Endurance is lost when you are hit and for some special abilities associated with very physical classes (this is based of the kineticist). After each encounter you fully recover endurance after 1 min, but you keep you level non-leathal damage that can not be healed until a full rest.

Damage carries over from fight to fight to fight, healing items are only useful in combat meaning higher level items are better than lower level ones, and the rules are modeled after something real.

One problem I see with resonance is the potential storyline absurdity.

Morrolan : "How are we doing on supplies?"
Aliera : "Not too bad, we have a couple crates of arrows, a bunch of rations, access to the well in back, some spare shields and swords ..."
Sethra : "I'm making some more healing potions."
Vlad : "Guys, we have a real problem."
(Team turns and looks at him)
Vlad : "I'm just about out of Resonance, and I'll bet you are too. We can't hold these guys off without it."
Loish : *Boss, what exactly is Resonance and why do we care?*
Vlad : *Good question. I have no idea but apparently I can't operate Spellbreaker or make Sethra's potions work without it.*

The only thing that will stop the 15 minute adventuring day is narrative pressure.

If it doesn't matter whether I clear this dungeon in an hour or a month, there is nothing stopping me from nuking every room and taking an 8 hour power nap to recover my nukes.

Realistically, why would anyone risk their lives more than necessary to accomplish a goal in the first place? If all I want is the loot from the dungeon, then taking it nice and slow makes perfect sense.

The problem with this is that some people don't like being forced to finish a dungeon in one day. It sucks when you have to rescue the "damsel in distress" before the dragon eats her, and you realize that you don't have the resources left to do it. Either you drop the hero act and let the damsel die, sacrifice yourselves in vain, or have the GM deus ex machina some reason why the dragon doesn't eat her, or that you miraculously get some of your resources back.

Then you have the people who have been spoiled by the 15 minute adventuring day and complain when they can't enter the boss fight with a full load out.

One thing I am trying to implement in my home system is a mana system where magic regenerates like hit points do. It takes a few days to heal wounds naturally, so it makes sense that it takes a few days to regenerate spells naturally. If you "go nova" you can't just rest for 8 hours and be ready to go the next day. You may have to camp out for a week, in which time there is plenty of narrative freedom to have all manner of beasts assail the party.

One problem I see with resonance is the potential storyline absurdity.

Is this really worse than the Monk being out of Ki, or the Shifter being out of Wild Shape, or the Swashbuckler being out of Panache, or the Investigator being out of Inspiration, or the Occultist being out of Mental Focus, etc.?

All metacurrencies are gamey abstractions that look silly when you lampshade it. Like hit points sort of imply that a high level character can be pierced by a dozen spears and then do a tap routine every bit as good as they could if they did not have sharp metal and wood stuck in their body.

RealAlchemy wrote:

One problem I see with resonance is the potential storyline absurdity.

Is this really worse than the Monk being out of Ki, or the Shifter being out of Wild Shape, or the Swashbuckler being out of Panache, or the Investigator being out of Inspiration, or the Occultist being out of Mental Focus, etc.?

Short answer: Yes.

Is there someway to make Healing actually fun ?

I like Healing, but just spamming Cure Wounds spells seems dull. There is a lot of ways of damaging, why can´t be a lot of tactical ways of healing ? MMO has damage mitigation, slow and fast healing, emergency healing, heavy damage healing, etc...

When we got the Healer Handbook, each Healer class got each own way of Healing, but seems forgotten on the Playtest.

Short answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Yes, of course.

I mean, to me whether we're talking about HP, or spell slots, or class-based metacurrency, or spell points, or resonance it's all exactly the same explanation: "I can't do this all day, I've only got so much in me."

Just to throw in my 2 cents: I hope a better system can be put in place, because Resonance as it currently exists, will be ignored in my campaigns. I have never experienced any of the "problems" that were given as a reason to have it. No one I've personally gamed with has expressed this either. Since we are not seeing these as issues, we can simply ignore them for home campaigns (replacing Resonance with "spell points" for Alchemists since they are directly tied to Alchemists in this game).

Unfortunately, if we are going to continue with the Pathfinder Society, we will have to deal with these rules. So I'm hoping they fix them, replace them, or remove them officially from the game.

I have hated hated hated the paradigm that has emerged (a lot of it since the advent of online MMOs) where the magic in the game is viewed by the players to all be available at the Magic Walmart. It's in the core book, it has a price tag in gold pieces, therefore they can buy it.
The attitude where players act like their character also has a copy of the game's core rulebook in their backpack annoys the crap out of me.
Magic is mysterious. Wizards are fearsome figures that dwell in a forbidden tower on the hill.
But it's become a tabletop version of "Level 5 wizard LFG!"
Resonance might need work. But the idea and reasoning I am in 100% support of.
Maybe have wands cost more points the more uses per day they're used? Give characters more resonance points, but make 1 charge 1 point, the second charge costs 2 points, and so on. That way, there's plenty of resonance for worn items, but your magic stick will cost you if you want to try going to every encounter fully buffed & healed.

Maybe also the magic items chapter in the book should have a paragraph telling the GM and players that the list of items in the book is not a Sears magic catalog. It's not a shopping list.
This might help set the tone better.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

RealAlchemy wrote:

One problem I see with resonance is the potential storyline absurdity.

Is this really worse than the Monk being out of Ki, or the Shifter being out of Wild Shape, or the Swashbuckler being out of Panache, or the Investigator being out of Inspiration, or the Occultist being out of Mental Focus, etc.?

Short answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Yes, of course.

Agreed. Wildshape and ki are internal abilities of the PC. Resonance prevents external abilities of items from working. If we're using Wildshape and ki, it's like running out of wildshape on the druid somehow preventing the monk from using ki because... *shrug* No one knows, but it does.

just spamming Cure Wounds spells seems dull.

This is something that confuses me with the playtest. One of the complaints with CLW spam are that it was dull/boring/or didn't make sense: then the game makes a cleric that can sit back and spam a dozen+ heals just like the CLW wand and it's ok?

Having potential spell backfires could also help.

Who wants to spam a CLW wand 50 times to heal the party when a nat 1 causes a backfire that could range from turning someone purple, to transforming them into a newt? (Perhaps the wand explodes, severly injuring the user?)

Of course this shouldn't happen ALL the time, but perhaps a number of failed attempts causes a backfire? Something reasonable, like 3 or 5.

Granted, people probably wouldn't like this, because they want the power of magic without the in-lore drawbacks associated with it.

What percentage of arcane students die in college due to failed casting attempts?

Fallyrion Dunegrién wrote:

Stop trying to fixing the game by changing the world around it has ben working for decades.

Demi-human level limits, paladins only for humans and multi-classing never for humans were all ways the world worked "for decades". They changed, for the better too.

Interesting. Every change you mentioned and labeled "for the better" was a removal of a restriction rather than the imposition of a new restraint such as resonance.

Having potential spell backfires could also help.

More I think about it, the more I like the following system:

So drinking too many potions can make you temporarily blind, or turn blue, or feel sick, or hallucinate, or tired, or emit bubbles from your skin, but you're not going to die from it.

Having potential spell backfires could also help.

Well battle medic had a 'backfire' and it isn't exactly fun, interesting or something I want more of in the game.

One thing I am trying to implement in my home system is a mana system where magic regenerates like hit points do.

You may already know of it, but there is an official Recharge Magic system in the 3rd Ed UA, you might be interested.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/rechargeMagic.htm

Like hit points sort of imply that a high level character can be pierced by a dozen spears and then do a tap routine every bit as good as they could if they did not have sharp metal and wood stuck in their body.

That is not how hit points work, what they represent, this was all explained over 40 years ago.

thflame wrote:

Having potential spell backfires could also help.

More I think about it, the more I like the following system:

- Resonance counts up, not down
- Each character has a threshold defined by their level and their ChaMod and some scalar.
- If you surpass the threshold, the item works, but you have to roll a save against a flat (and scaling) DC where if you fail it you have to roll on some synthesis of the "potion miscibility" and "primal magic events" table.

So drinking too many potions can make you temporarily blind, or turn blue, or feel sick, or hallucinate, or tired, or emit bubbles from your skin, but you're not going to die from it.

Or something like "high difficulty DC of level [previous number of uses], subtracting Cha mod from the DC"? Not sure if I'd actually like that, but it could possibly be pulled into other mechanics. Probably a bad idea though.

I think I'd possibly be more interested in Fatigued or something than random effects, but that is in part a distaste for 5e wild magic table goofiness.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Like hit points sort of imply that a high level character can be pierced by a dozen spears and then do a tap routine every bit as good as they could if they did not have sharp metal and wood stuck in their body.

That is not how hit points work, what they represent, this was all explained over 40 years ago.

And yet mechanically that is how they work.

EDIT: To expand, either we care about whether mechanics vs in world narratives conflict should either apply to every abstracted resource mechanic or we shouldn't use it as a complaint against a specific one we don't like. Even then, given the slower scaling of Resonance versus HP and its constitency in what it represents (1 Resonance always does x where what 1HP represents changes based on whether you have 10 or 200HP and who is holding that greatsword) I would say it is one of the least egregious forms of mechanics and narratives not lining up I've seen.

Vic Ferrari wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Like hit points sort of imply that a high level character can be pierced by a dozen spears and then do a tap routine every bit as good as they could if they did not have sharp metal and wood stuck in their body.

That is not how hit points work, what they represent, this was all explained over 40 years ago.

And yet mechanically that is how they work.

Ah, you mean you are not reduced in ability being at low hit points, you are fine until you simply drop at 0; SWSE has a Condition Track that is an interesting way to address this part of hit points.

Malk_Content wrote:

Vic Ferrari wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Like hit points sort of imply that a high level character can be pierced by a dozen spears and then do a tap routine every bit as good as they could if they did not have sharp metal and wood stuck in their body.

That is not how hit points work, what they represent, this was all explained over 40 years ago.

And yet mechanically that is how they work.

Ah, you mean you are not reduced in ability being at low hit points, you are fine until you simply drop at 0; SWSE has a Condition Track that is an interesting way to address this part of hit points.

No I mean that HP directly improve your ability to no die to extreme physical trauma mechanically, even if that isn't "what they represent." There are many situations that narratively only "HP makes you physically more durable" makes any sense. HP makes being fully submerged in Lava less deadly. Nothing makes that not silly, nothing makes that not how HP mechanically works. HP is way more offensive to verisimilitude than the idea that a person can only give so much personal chutzpah to external magical sources or that magical items require something from the user in order to actually work.

Some more thoughts on Resonance:

4) Spell Points for Magic Items: This is basically the impression of Resonance that I had gotten from the earliest previews. This is the idea of complete removal of charges, to be replaced by expending Resonance. I really, really like this idea, but only if consumables are not included. So a potion or elixir can always save your life if you need it, but Resonance is exclusively a resource that you use to do awesome things. As long as you can still hold a potion or elixir or two in reserve, then you don't get that "Frozen Pea" syndrome of people hanging onto Resonance for emergencies. Much like Spell Points are a catch-all for powers, Resonance should a catch all for activated, but permanent magic items.

5) Humans vs. Efficiency: This is kind of circling back to the point I made about healing between encounters being human nature. But I don't think that healing between encounters is always the problem people have here, it's that they used to use the cheapest item over and over again in an un-thematic way. But the reason why the wand of CLW was king was because it was mathematically determined that it gave the absolute best HP/gold ratio. Nothing else could beat it, so that was the go-to option. When given the choice, humans will always go for the best deal, and the problem here was that the best deal was the first one.

So the obvious thing to do here is not to restrict how many times you can use an individual something, but to make the higher level somethings a better deal. If each successive wand or potion or whatever of heal was slightly more efficient, money-wise, than the previous level version, then your problem entirely evaporates. People will always go for the better one, because it's the best bang for your buck. And these higher level items are naturally gated by price, so unless the GM is dropping higher level potions or what-have-you, the players are always in that sweet zone of "this is the most efficient option I can afford." You fix the problem by removing the incentive to do the thing you want to stop, not by banning it. That just breeds resentment.

6) More on Permissivity: This is circling back to the point I made about needing more options that interact with Resonance in a positive way. I thought of a whole bunch more. Not all of these need to be default options, either. Some of them make for great general or class feats.

- Armor - I think there's some wiggle room in the design space for armor. I think magic armor should always protect you, because it's magic armor. It doesn't stop being magic armor because you didn't invest Resonance into it. But there's a second thing that magic armor does in this edition: bonus to saves. So you make protection an always-on property, and then give the option to invest in the armor to get the bonus to saves. This makes your expenditure or Resonance feel voluntary all of a sudden, and brings armor more in line with how magic weapons work (i.e. they don't cost resonance unless they do something extra)

- Wands, Staves & Scrolls - So I'm entirely in favor of removing charges from wands and staves, but there's another option here. Keep them with charges. You can even keep them with the same charges. But you can spend a point of resonance instead of using a charge. You can even include scrolls in this category. So not having resonance doesn't stop you from using (and potentially depleting) your magical resource, but you can spend your own innate reserves to avoid doing so. But the key here is that it's now your choice.

- Other uses entirely - One big issue that people often bring up is how much of a leg up charisma casters like the Sorcerer and Bard have on others when it comes to magic items, because they have so much more Resonance. I think the best solution here is to give those classes something else to spend their resonance on. The Alchemist has extra Resonance, and the ability to spend it to do different things. You could give Sorcerers (either with or without a feat requirement) the option to spend Resonance to heighten a spell on the fly that wasn't one they picked. Or to cast a spell without using a slot. Bards could get options to spend Resonance to empower their performances, or their skills (or both).

I think the biggest point here, is that Resonance needs to be flipped around. It needs to be something you want to spend rather than something you want to hoard.

Healing potions on pages 393-394.

Minor healing potion, 3gp, heals 1d8 hit points, 1.5 hp/gp
Lesser healing potion, 8 gp, heals 2d8+4 hit points, 1.63 hp/gp
Moderate healing potion, 20 gp, heals 3d8+8 hit points, 1.08 hp/gp
Greater healing potion, 60 gp, heals 5d8+12 hit points, 0.58 hp/gp
Major healing potion, 250 gp, heals 7d8+20 hit points, 0.21 hp/gp
True healing potion, 1200 gp, heals 9d8+30 hit points, 0.06 hp/gp

Wand of Heal, page 413
Level 2 with 1st-level Heal (1d8+Wis); Price 27 gp; 3.15 hp/gp
Level 4 with 2nd-level Heal (3d8+Wis); Price 72 gp; 2.43 hp/gp
Level 6 with 3rd-level Heal (5d8+Wis); Price 180 gp; 1.47 hp/gp
Level 8 with 4th-level Heal (7d8+Wis); Price 405 gp; 0.88 hp/gp

I think this is striking at the heart of the problem, but it needs further expansion.

The actual cost of healing with a consumable item can be best understood by looking at how much it costs to fully heal a character's hit points, and then comparing that to the expected treasure yield per encounter. In PF1 using a wand of cure light wounds to fully heal a 1st level fighter from 0 to full health costed about 10% of the treasure yield of a CR 1 encounter. Since treasure per encounter grows faster than hit points, this dropped by about an order of magnitude over 20 leves; it costs a 10th level fighter 5% of a CR 10 encounter's treasure yield, and a 20th level fighter 1% of a CR 20 encounter's treasure yield.

Now let's look at this in some detail for PF2. There isn't a treasure per encounter table, but there is a treasure per level table and we know how many monsters you need to fight to level up. So we can simply divide to get a per-encounter reward yield. With a rough estimate of an average value of the item drops, we can get a sense of how much treasure the party is getting per encounter on average. At 1st level, my estimates are 5.5 gp per 1st level encounter. A 1st level human fighter with 14 constitution has 22 hit points. Using a wand of heal to fully heal costs about 7 gp, or about 127% of a single 1st level encounter's treasure drop. Put another, using consumables is almost 13 times more expensive at 1st level in PF2 than in PF1. And that's without even considering the limitation of resonance!

Now let's look again at 10th level. Again I need to do some estimation based on the wealth table, but it comes out to 286 gp of value per 10th level encounter. That 10th level fighter probably has 18 constitution by now, so that's about 150 hit points. Let's hand-wave resonance away for a moment and presume we can just spam 1st level heal wands. How much does it cost to heal? The wand is slightly better now due to potentially higher wisdom modifiers (3.5 hp/gp) so that gives 43 gp to fully heal the fighter with the wand. That's 15% of an encounter income - about three times more expensive than it was in PF1, but less than a 10th of what the 1st level PF2 party was paying! What if we're forced to use 4th level wands? Now it's 170 gp, or about 60% of an encounter's income.

Finally let's look at 20th level. Again, I do some quick estimation and come out with about 7600 gp of treasure per 20th level enocunter. That 20th level fighter probably has 20 constitution by now, so that's about 310 hit points. If resonance weren't a thing and wand-spam were possible, it would cost about 80 gp to fully heal him, or about 1% of the encounter's treasure reward. Now what if he's forced to use those true healing potions instead due to resonance? That costs him 5000 gp to fully heal, about 65% of an encounter's income.

I think the most important takeaway here is that the cost-efficiency of low-level healing consumables in PF2 increases much faster than in PF1, improving in cost-effectiveness by a factor of 127 for 1st level healing wands. This compares to the factor of 10 we saw in PF1. This indicates that any pricing level that would be acceptable at 1st level would be essentially free at higher levels. Strictly speaking this isn't a problem at 20th, where some classes get infinite casting capstones, but the steepness of that curve means healing with consumables would start looking very cheap long before then. This does give some caution to the "just remove resonance from consumables" solution, since it would effectively preclude the much-needed price drop on low-level consumables, which I feel is necessary since they are grossly overpriced at low-level play.

HP makes being fully submerged in Lava less deadly.

Yes, that is a classic problem, but that is not purely to blame on hit points. Just that X amount of hit points don't represent X amount of flesh.

I’d be curious how much of the community either “don’t see the challenges” that resonance is attempting to fix or “don’t see them as problematic.”

Because if a big enough chunk of the player base either doesn’t see a “challenge” or doesn’t see that “challenge” as problematic, then it arguably isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed.

I'm not sure they would like the answer to that question. A lot of effort is being spent on something that just isn't that big a problem to a huge number of players.

So, who are they actually trying to solve this for?

Demi-human level limits, paladins only for humans and multi-classing never for humans were all ways the world worked "for decades". They changed, for the better too.

Not everyone sees all of these as improvements. No multi-classing for anyone has been a consistent feature of the best games I have been in from either side of the screen.

Tridus took the words out of my mouth. Literally had a post written up in Notepad while I read through the thread and Tridus wound up writing almost everything I'd intended to say.

I think that when it's not uncommon to hear stories of players fighting one or two battles, exhausting their healing resources, then leaving the dungeon and resting a day to recover spells and resonance, spending all those spells and resonance to finish healing, resting again, and then returning to the dungeon after two days, something has gone horribly wrong. That should never be necessary. If monsters are going to be this dangerous, then PCs cannot safely adventure at anything less than full resources.

I am not interested in playing the Dark Souls of tabletop gaming where PCs are forever at a razor's edge, uncertain whether they want to press on and risk a TPK or fall back and suffer storyline consequences while they consolidate resources.

The problem isn't wands of CLW. The problem is that wands of CLW are the best source of healing -- but that's a complaint about healing itself. No one really wants to sit in a circle waving a series of wands for 8 minutes, but compared to casting eight healing spells and then resting for eight hours and then casting eight spells and then resting for 24 hours (because you can't recoup your spells twice in one day)...

And the answer to that is not "Fine, you can only wave your wands around for thirty seconds before we stop you and you have to do something else."

I feel like "the right party can do this entire sequence all in one go just by spending cash on appropriate wands" is also a problem worth fixing for people who design adventures.

Since "this dungeon takes between 8 hours and 8 weeks" is kind of a pain to design a narrative around.

The only thing that will stop the 15 minute adventuring day is narrative pressure.

And there's the rub.

I very much don't like 15-minute adventuring days, or players who expect to be fully healed between every encounter. But the ways that have worked for me to deal with that have been making safe places to rest mid-dungeon rare, or have them need significant expenditure of other resources to establish. I am all for fiddling with the magic item economy to make healing resources a good bit rarer generally, too, at least in a setting recognisable as Pathfinder/D&D standard fantasy. (High-magic settings are a lot of fun but they are very different beasts; no agriculture when everyone can magically create their food all the time, no need for transport infrastructure when everyone can teleport, build from those and similar axioms and you end up somewhere a long way from Golarion.)

OK, it seems like I just can't stay away.. I tried, but I keep coming back and reading threads. I apologize for saying I was leaving and then not being able to.

I love the discussion on the magical economy and scaling, and the discussions on feeling heroic. I would like to bring up another problem I have with Resonance that I hope will be fixed.

My characters don't feel magical anymore, and I feel like all the color was drained out of the pathfinder universe. And it has nothing to do with the healing economy and playbalancing the combats, it has to do with the flavor and the fluff.

I enjoy my characters, even my non spellcasting characters, living in a magical universe. I like having the tengu jug for one of my characters with it's unlimited booze, or the disguise hat that makes almost human character look human, or a fun token of fill in the blank.

Resonance cuts us off from the FUN magic that fills the universe, not just the combat oriented magics. If it were me to fix resonance (rather than remove it) here is how I would change it to help keep magic in the universe.

1. If it is a consumable, it costs no resonance to use. Currently wands are a consumable and people have problems with wands. Either raise the costs of wands OR make them less available OR make then run of resonance INSTEAD of charges so they aren't consumable. Don't create hybrid items (like staffs) that require me to do complex math at the start of every day to figure out what I can do with it that day.

2. The crafting of items is flat, which increases the problem with things like wands. Separate the wands (and other items) into common, uncommon, and rare with different prices for each because some wands require hard to get materials that costs more, and put the wands you want LESS of in the rarer categories.

3. Allow characters to take feats that increase their resonance so that players who have fun with magic items can select that instead of an additional bloodline power/attack type/extra cantrips/etc. Also, by making this a feat then it is easy for GM's to not allow it in the game. If you build extra resonance into character classes then the GM has to block the whole class, not just the feat.

4. For items that the character should be using throughout the day (like a bag of holding) allow a scaled approach for use. 1rp to retrieve an item once, 2 or 3rp to equip the bag for unlimited retrievals during the day. This includes magic sword/armor/shields that have extra powers. So you spend 1RP to use your magic sword for the day, spend another 1RP to make it flame for a combat, or spend 3RP at the beginning of the day to both equip the magic sword AND use flaming whenever you fight.

5. For low powered fluff items, allow 1RP point to be used for a multiple of them. For example, let us say that 1rp point enables 5 "cantrip" level magic items. If you spend 1/5 a point on the magical seasoning spoon, you don't have enough left to power a 1RP magic item, but you could use the seasoning spoon another 4 times, or use the tengu jug 4 times, or however you want to split it up.

6. Charge 1RP to use magic armor for the day. Right now you are going to charge non-fighters 1rp for their armor (amulet of nat armor, cloak of prot, etc) so the same should be true for magic armor. If you don't, then you are really breaking your own magic system.

7. Allow for there to be items that do not use resonance, but add a large cost multiplier (like is done for exotic metal armors) and make them rare. This allows for higher level, more rich characters to buy armor (or the like) that doesn't take from their resonance, but costs a lot of money.

8. If you want to get people to use high powered healing wands rather than low powered healing wands, fix the cost/HP as healing items increase in power! When you have time, right now, it is always less expensive to use a low level wand a dozen times than use a higher level wand once.. so of course people are going to buy low level items for when they have the time.

At any rate, those are some ideas to add to all the other idea's being suggested. :)

Boojum the brown bunny

I'm glad you guys are reconsidering Resonance Points. I'm a little concerned about the amount of time you have to come up with a new fix and test it before the final book has to get sent to the printers.

I had a lot of time to read messageboard posts before I finally got to run my first playtest session last night. We actually had a lot of fun, which I didn't feel was guaranteed going in.

So, I am hopeful that you can find some good fixes for the buggy parts of this edition (like shields!) in the very, very short amount of time you have.

My main complaint is that this seems to be a game for people who love bookkeeping, and I don't personally find bookkeeping fun.

Thanks for listening.

I am not interested in playing the Dark Souls of tabletop gaming where PCs are forever at a razor's edge, uncertain whether they want to press on and risk a TPK or fall back and suffer storyline consequences while they consolidate resources.

That's a pretty good description of exactly the style I do want my games to be, provided the difference between the risk and the falling back has a reasonable blend of player and DM agency, and strategic choices aren't unduly easy to mess up with bad dice rolls.

I am particularly hoping to see elegant ways of extending that style into high-level play.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Like hit points sort of imply that a high level character can be pierced by a dozen spears and then do a tap routine every bit as good as they could if they did not have sharp metal and wood stuck in their body.

That is not how hit points work, what they represent, this was all explained over 40 years ago.

I daresay some people playing this game, and probably even some in this thread, weren't even born then. So they're probably unaware of this explanation. And I'm too old to remember it. Can you enlighten us?

I mean, to me whether we're talking about HP, or spell slots, or class-based metacurrency, or spell points, or resonance it's all exactly the same explanation: "I can't do this all day, I've only got so much in me."

How about this? Swinging a sword makes you tired. Casting a spell makes you tired. Walking 20 miles makes you tired. Being tired makes you a bit worse at doing whatever you're doing than you would be if you were fully rested. You can rest up *some* between encounters, but you need eight hours to become fully rested. In the meantime, doing stuff makes you tired, etc.

One mechanism covers it all.

Some more thoughts on Resonance:

4) Spell Points for Magic Items: This is basically the impression of Resonance that I had gotten from the earliest previews. This is the idea of complete removal of charges, to be replaced by expending Resonance. I really, really like this idea, but only if consumables are not included. So a potion or elixir can always save your life if you need it, but Resonance is exclusively a resource that you use to do awesome things. As long as you can still hold a potion or elixir or two in reserve, then you don't get that "Frozen Pea" syndrome of people hanging onto Resonance for emergencies. Much like Spell Points are a catch-all for powers, Resonance should a catch all for activated, but permanent magic items.

5) Humans vs. Efficiency: This is kind of circling back to the point I made about healing between encounters being human nature. But I don't think that healing between encounters is always the problem people have here, it's that they used to use the cheapest item over and over again in an un-thematic way. But the reason why the wand of CLW was king was because it was mathematically determined that it gave the absolute best HP/gold ratio. Nothing else could beat it, so that was the go-to option. When given the choice, humans will always go for the best deal, and the problem here was that the best deal was the first one.

So the obvious thing to do here is not to restrict how many times you can use an individual something, but to make the higher level somethings a better deal. If each successive wand or potion or whatever of heal was slightly more efficient, money-wise, than the previous level version, then your problem entirely evaporates. People will always go for the better one, because it's the best bang for your buck. And these higher level items are naturally gated by price, so unless the GM is dropping higher level potions or what-have-you, the players are always in that sweet zone of "this is the most efficient...

I like these thoughts.

Arakhor wrote:

Fallyrion Dunegrién wrote:

Stop trying to fixing the game by changing the world around it has ben working for decades.

Demi-human level limits, paladins only for humans and multi-classing never for humans were all ways the world worked "for decades". They changed, for the better too.

Interesting. Every change you mentioned and labeled "for the better" was a removal of a restriction rather than the imposition of a new restraint such as resonance.

Dual classing (instead of multi-classing) for Human was not a restriction, it was a benefit. A human could be a Thief for X levels, then completely switch class to say Fighter (if they had the qualifying stats), and once the human reached X+1, they had full access to all previous class abilities without penalty (even using the old class abilities before X+1 only gave an experience penalty). Given how locked in class abilities were back then (examples: only Fighter got significant bonus HP from Con and could gain extra attacks per round, only Thief could hide, move silently, open locks, and disable traps) that could be huge.

I think you guys should look to starfinder to solve your abundance of healing problems. I understand the problem in pathfinder, so I wont go into that because I believe I can get on your page even though I dont really consider it a problem.

Now in starfinder, healing is very absent in the how system. Channel healing is available only to one connection option to the mystic. Cure wounds only available to the mystic. And only item is serum of healing, also spell amps and gems which are one time uses and cure wounds spells. All only heal HP's which is only half of the characters overall health. Stamina is the other have and only can heal from 10 min rest plus resolve point burn. Which is similar to the resonance mech. Or envoy exploit to heal stamina, but only during battle.

I feel like you've already solved your problem in starfinder. (Which is being overshadowed by the playtest, but that's just a minor gripe.) Why not just do what you do their? Because people are gonna complain about stamina points? Will those complaints be worse than those raised about PF2.0? I don't think so. My starfinder players love starfinder even though healing is scarce. I believe that's why they like it even though they wont admit it and always looking for ways to have healing on hand. It's a great system, you've already adopted a lot of it for PF2.0. Why not that as well?

I actually really like resonance, in theory. In practice, as I have yet to play an Alchemist, it hasn't been an issue for me and my group. Only alchemists have run out, and whenever anyone had to make a roll beyond their allotted points of resonance it just worked fine.

My problem isn't so much with resonance, but with the way it interacts with consumables and charges. Having to spend resonance AND a charge for a wand or stave or invested magic item feels... bad, it's double dipping. The same could be said for when an alchemist uses resonance to craft something and then someone else has to use resonance to use it, more double dipping.

I like limitations, it should be clarified; I don't think a caster should be able to cast all day, nor do I think a wand or stave should be able to unlimitedly be used all day. I never liked the feeling of chugging the happy stick all the way up until we're about to fight Karzoug, either. I like that the team is looking for ways to make resonance work, but I'm not a huge fan of how things sit right now. Alchemist is the most heavily punished for it, that I have seen, hands down.

Rereading the original post. It sounds like design difficulties are being shifted to the player.

We have an issue with how adventures are designed and with how magic items are designed, and how these two things work together to keep the "real" magic items from seeing use. This shows up in the second point where specialized once per day items are displacing "better" versions of the same magic item.

Ideally, this problem would be solved in item or adventure design not on character sheets. The small modifier range that keeps the game reliable has also made the design space for items very narrow. If a player wants a constant +X to an item, they always get the cheapest version of something and stop. There can't be a better version of that item giving a better bonus since the modifier range is low. Improved items thus need to offer a different benefit and players may be inclined to pick up a second item rather than an advanced version of the first. Further, with improvements to the narrative impact of skills, you risk those skill bonuses being the only thing that is important. There's also the issue of spells being focused slightly more on party interaction rather than party replacement and how that means casters could be displaced by spells.

Essentially, the game has written itself into a corner and discovered there's an issue somewhere up the tree that needs to be solved, or this end point needs a patch. They went with the patch.

I would recommend creating magic item trees where a certain bonus type needs to be filled before a second type can be filled. Some items already do this but formalizing it would help with future item design.

Something like this:

All skills should be aligned with a spell school and in order to add spells, you need to add a skill that reflects that spells school.

That narrows the expected range of available items without burdening the player with design issues.

The healing spam issue is a pace setting issue and shouldn't be approached in the core mechanics of the game. Some games just won't have a pace where healing speed matters, others will be paced in a way that can't accommodate long recovery sessions. Hard coding story pace will just make the game less versatile.

Several people have already touched on this, but I was thinking about it as we were playing PF1 last night, so I figured I'd add my two cents.

When you get right down to it, CLW wands are not the problem. Rather, they are just one way that players are addressing a different problem: how to keep the party going from one fight to the next without having to constantly leave the dungeon to find a safe place to rest. For a lot of adventures it just doesn't make sense, plot-wise, for the party to do that. The villain shouldn't sit there like a lump on a log while the party takes a week to clean out his fortress of evil, two rooms at a time--followed by 8 hours of rest back at the inn. (The fact that the GM can play intelligent adversaries who respond to the PC's actions is one of the great benefits of pen-and-paper role playing. The villain shouldn't just sit back and ignore the slow elimination of his minions, sitting patiently on his throne-o-nastiness and waiting for the party to come for their boss fight.)

The thing about CLW wands is that once a party moves out of the lowest character levels, the wands aren't that useful during most combat encounters. (How many medium-level enemies are dishing out a measly 5.5 average hp of damage per round?) But out of combat the wands can be great for providing quick, cheap healing that lets the party keep going, deeper into the fortress, fighting more minions. The party will still have to stop and rest once other resources are expended, but it won't be due to a lack of hp. Between-encounter healing keeps the adventure going.

In our current PF1 campaign, I'm the cleric, and our characters are just moving out of the low-level range. The way things have been working out, my in-combat job, quite often, is to keep the barbarian going: healing him up, giving him combat bonuses, getting rid of nasty status effects, et cetera. Secondarily, I help out the casters if something gets too close to them and bites a chunk out of them. But sometimes I can engage the enemy more directly, if I have a spell that's particularly well-suited to a particular encounter, or if there are undead who need to be channeled at. Although healing is a big part of my job, I have flexibility to do other things as well.

What's nice about having CLW wands is that I can save my spells and channels for combat. With CLW wands for between-encounter healing, I can actually use a channel against some undead or a spell that hasn't been converted to healing, without worrying that I'm wasting the party's healing resources. That means that even though I'm the cleric and thus the party medic, I'm not limited to that role. If that last channel is what's needed to help take down the undead monstrosity, I can use it. Out of combat, I can use my plot spells (speak with dead, etc.) when the story calls for them. Without CLW wands, I would have to save most of my spells and channels for healing. That means although in theory I would still have plenty of options (the cleric spell list, etc.) in reality I couldn't afford to use most of them, because I'd be depleting the party's store of potential healing. With CLW wands, I have flexibility in combat--I can convert a spell to heal the barbarian after he takes a nasty blow, or I can use the unconverted spell more directly against the enemy.

Back to my original point: even if they feel a bit munchkiny, CLW wands aren't the real problem. There needs to be some healing between encounters, to avoid the in-and-out-of-the-dungeon-to-rest problem. In 5e, the short rest partially solves this by providing an alternate source of healing that every character inherently has access to. In PF1, the most economical solution is the CLW wand. If you don't have the wand, then it falls to the cleric to heal everybody by using up their class resources between encounters. In the process, the cleric's player is chained to that role, because healing is just too important to let the cleric do much else with their spells and channels. At that point, you had might as well just bring along an NPC cleric, because most people get bored with such a limited role pretty quickly.

At that point, you had might as well just bring along an NPC cleric, because most people get bored with such a limited role pretty quickly.

This.

I have already seen ppl asking at forums about how much resonance NPCs have, whether familiars and summoned creatures have RPs, and the like. In DD3, our group seriously considered calling up the hiding friendly NPCs and handing them our wand of heal to use right away, between fights. Just in case we need these resonance points for something else.

Resonance system does nothing to solve the wand-of-clw "problem" (in fact, the wand of clw economical solution).

Grandlounge wrote:

It seems to me this is a problem for organized play but in any home game or in the system in general, you can just make the consumable items much harder to find. Though economical from a GP perspective healing a level 10 barbarian twice take a whole wand and game time.

This article seems to be missing key aspects of game design. Does this make the game more fun, more immersive, or more easily adopted. I would say from the tone of the article the answer is no. The most frequent 1st ed complaint about items was that some were mandatory and filled slots that can be used for more fun and interesting items. It is the reason the company wrote the automatic bonus progression, which became a highly utilized rule system.

This is an answer to a problem very few people had. Look at the success of Borderlands and Diablo people love loot and magic items make them fun and helpful but not mandatory that is how you fix the problem.

Ding ding ding. Resonance sounds completely devised for PFS play.

I haven't read all of this to the end, so someone might have covered this - but I can't agree with this. It seems terrifyingly bad (to me) for organised play. When you can't know who you are playing with then these kinds of restrictions will lead to a lot of dead players and/or inability to complete scenarios.

Not knowing who or what capabilities your fellow players will have necessitates a batman-like approach to magic and items - you need multiple low level solutions to a wide range of challenges just in case you don't have the requisite skill or ability amongst you.

Resonance makes that much harder to achieve.

Since "this dungeon takes between 8 hours and 8 weeks" is kind of a pain to design a narrative around.

This is the big thing I, as a GM, want to see fixed. The PCs blitzing through the dungeon in an hour is fine and so is the PCs breaking for weeks at a time to heal up. The problem is the unpredictability.

Not all groups use wands or even really realize they're an option. They're taking days to cut through an adventure in PF1. If they don't have a healer, that can jump to weeks.

This means, essentially, time threats in a published adventure have to be "try to convince the party they just got there in the nick of time." Which, even if the GM succeeds at maintaining the illusion, makes the group think they need better healing. So they're spending resources and choosing classes to run faster on the treadmill.

The same unpredictability splits encounter design (because a fully healed party needs a very different set of challenges) and class balance (because daily abilities are tied to the same challenge clock). It even ties deeply into the one encounter adventuring day, because a lot of players eventually realize that the game had ended up running on narrative time.

And the thing that makes me sad about this, as a GM and a developer, is that a lot of the people who want wands of cure light wounds want them because they're trying to do well. They want to not just succeed, but to excel at the challenges that have been put in front of them. But without a set timeline to measure it against, the speed and efficiency they're gaining doesn't actually mean anything. And I'd like to see them getting actual results in the game.

Anyway, I just really think that we need to figure out what people want as a time scale for their adventures (minutes, hours, days, weeks, decades, whatever) before we can have a real conversation about magical healing. Because we don't need wands or clerics to have people heal up as often as the players want.

Cheers!
Landon