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Here's Combat in Pathfinder 2E | How does it work? | Jason Bulmahn, posted on his personal youtube channel in February. He talks about Death and Dying at 1:04:32 and the wounded condition at 1:08:18. Interestingly, in the dying section, he doesn't mention the fact that on a failure, dying increases by 1 plus your wounded value, and in the wounded section, he only ever says that wounded increases the value of the initial dying.

As it stands now with the new rule it appears to be that "your first one is free" and after that you're incredibly likely to die. Which I like. There is a buffer for game play consideration but it is much more true to life that going down and getting wounded means you're more likely than not to die

I don't think that being true to life is something that this game should be concerned with. This is heroic fantasy after all.

But on another point entirely, I really hate the fact that fast healing, small heals and the like can make the situation worse. In my opinion, getting a small heal should never make a character more likely to die, ever. It really doesn't make sense and feels terrible to experience.

Especially because, as a fundamentally unintuitive mechanic, new players are more likely to get stung by it and be put off the system entirely.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

The number-crunching part of my brain isn't working today. Anyone feel like working out the math with the high-lethality rule but pushing death off a couple notches to dying 6? Normal recovery rules---I'm thinking of a change to the baseline, not of characters with relevant feats.

Gladly! If we set player death at dying 6 as a baseline, here's what the likelihood of death would be with RAW wounded rules:

0: 26%

1: 69% (!)

2: 88%

3: 95%

4: 98%

5: 100%

So unfortunately, while the starting death chance would be lower, it would still spike the moment you'd get to wounded 1. Adding more dying states unfortunately doesn't change things all that much, because the moment you hit wounded 2 and beyond, you can still die with one failed recovery check, and even if you do reach a dying state where a failure doesn't immediately kill you, it sets you back so far that you're unlikely to succeed on every check thereafter.

Really, I think this highlights the problem with the implementation of the wounded condition as-is, in that it turns what's currently a double whammy of death likelihood into an excessive triple whammy:

Being wounded means you start at a higher dying state, and thus have to succeed on more checks to recover (and also die on fewer failures).

Starting at a higher dying value already means you're more likely to fail your recovery checks.

With the rule clarification, being wounded means each failure sets you back significantly more, multiplying the first two effects.

Just the first two I think would already be enough to make wounded a punishing condition. As it stands, the current implementation means that if you go down once, you immediately become extremely likely to die, with persistent damage in particular being a near-guaranteed death sentence.

Ah, I'd forgotten that you only lose one dying on a success, while gaining 1 + wounded on a failure.

The number-crunching part of my brain isn't working today. Anyone feel like working out the math with the high-lethality rule but pushing death off a couple notches to dying 6? Normal recovery rules---I'm thinking of a change to the baseline, not of characters with relevant feats.

This makes characters harder to kill when they don't have the wounded condition, and also means that they can survive going down at up to wounded 4, in theory. They can take the same number of hits as a pre-clarification character at wounded values of 1 and 2 (3 and 2 hits before dying, respectively).

Whether or not this is a change or a clarification is getting too far into the weeds, I think. From polling and my own experiences, it seems like the (vast?) majority of players were at tables where dying only added wounded when the condition was first gained -- including players at PFS events where this ruling matters the most.

Personally, I don't like the newly clarified rule and won't be running it that way at my tables, and I hope that I will be able to convince GMs where I am a player to do the same. High lethality, in my opinion, doesn't align super well with the heroic fantasy vision of PF2E as a whole, and I don't like the fact that healing someone who is down often decreases the amount of hits it takes to kill them.

I also think that the lethality of the low levels of the game was already too high, and so anything that makes that experience even rougher is a real feels bad.