glass's page

ISTM that the whole thing is a big old mess, and it needs errata whatever the devs originally intended. Both to confirm what an instance of damage is, and fix the rules that only work with the other definition (of which there appear to be examples in both directions).

I will also say that, even if they originally intended "type as instance", they should probably change their minds and define it as "attack as instance". Fewer worms in that can than the other.

Combat makes up a significant part of the typical campaign and session. As such IMO, each character needs to be able to contribute meaningfully in combat. That does not necessarily mean dealing a bunch of hp damage to the enemy, but it mean doing something which matters.

As I see it, the acid test is "is the effect worth the table time needed to handle it".

Aaaargh. Making a spelling error, copying-&-pasting it a bunch oftimes, and spotting it after the Edit window closes is not my idea of a good time. I meant "worn" not "warn". And someone introduces some other kind of wand... in the footnotes.

Anyway, moving on. Defining categories of feats by name is kinda "low tech". A more PF2 approach would be to give the approriate feats a Resonate keyword and refer to that, and that would also give me more flexibility in naming that. So pretend I did that in the above post.

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Resonant Revitalisation† (Feat 1)
[Archetype][Resonate]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Resonator Dedication

As a Free Action you may spend Resonance Point on a magical or alchemical†† Healing Consumable that you have in hand. If you do so, and then use the Consumable before the end of your turn (or start using it, if it would take longer than a turn), the amount of hit points restored is increased: Any die rolls are maximised, and static values or modifiers are doubled. Additionally, if the item is alchemical, it also counts as magical if it is beneficial to do so.

Note that, unlike most other items you could spend Resonance Points on, Comsuambles do not need to be Invested.†††

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Aeon Resonance†††† (Feat 6)
[Archetype][Resonate]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Resonator Dedication

As a Free Action, you may spend a Resonance Point on an Aeon Stone which is Invested and orbiting you. If you do so, you gain the benefit of its resonant power for the next five minutes (or until it ceases to orbit).

Somehow I completely misses this post yesterday....

I think this is your first problem. When making changes to the game system, it's much better to use prevision like a scalpel, than to use a shotgun approach. Trying to hit a bunch a birds at once means you might hit a lot of other stuff (unintended consequence that are disruptive to other parts of the game).

I disagree, obviously. Every change has consequences, potentially including unintended ones. If you can fix multiple things with one change, that's fewer changes overall and therefore fewer opportunities for unintended consequences, not more.

Of course, this is not so much a change as an addition, but the principle still holds.

Allowing wands to function as 30 uses and rechargeable, even when limited to 4th level spells, means casters effectively have unlimited (low level) spells.

They're not unlimited, they cost gold. And gold, like seemingly everything else, is very tight in PF2.

It is intended to be an amount of gold that you can sustainably pay if you choose to. But not without making compromises elsewhere. The rest of the gear list is not going anywhere, and the gold supply is not increasing.

Bear in mind that spell casters are meant to use their cantrips at time, and not always be casting from their limited spell slot.

Yes, and they still will.

Modifying wands in the way you propose also has the consequence of making scrolls a "why bother" unless it's something you only expect to cast a couple times while playing the character.

Scrolls are already like that.

Yes, the aesthetic issue is a big reason I dislike your proposal honestly.

But my proposal largely removes the aesthetic issue, by encouraging fewer uses of higher-level items.

Interesting. Is the idea that this is something that is just added, or something that has some kind of buy-in (apart from buying the staff, of course)? If the former, I agree it should be Dex. If the latter, your casting stat is fine.

I don't think Dex is too out there - after all, rays used Dex in PF1, and nobody thought it was too weird. (Or did they?)

Anyway, it seems like you would need to review each staff to give it an appropriate attack. Or at least, every staff anyone in your game is considering buying/keeping (which to be fair might be much smaller number).

Okay, time to start figuring out some specifics:

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Resonator Dedication (Feat 1*)
[Archetype][Dedication]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Trained in Arcana, Nature, Occultism, or Religion; Int or Cha +1**

You gain a pool of Resonance Points which can be used to activate Resonate Feats (Feats from this Archetype whose names begin "Resonate"). The number of points in your pool is 12 plus the higher of your Intelligence or Charisma, and gains two additional points for each other Feat you have from this Archetype. You refill the pool back up to its maximum number of points during your daily preparations.

Additionally, you gain one Resonate Feat of your choice, for which you meet the prerequisites.

You may take a second Dedication*** Feat before taking two feats from this Archetype provided the second Archetype is a Class Archetype for a spellcasting class, or is an Archetype which grants spellcasting. If you do so, you must have two additional feats from Resonator, and typically also from the other Archetype, before you can take a third Dedication.

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Resonate Blasting Rod (Feat 1)
[Archetype]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Resonator Dedication

You may Invest one or more Blasting Rods as part of your daily preparations (even though Blasting Rods are not warn). You may make an attack with an Invested Blasting Rod that is held in your hand. The cost is one Resonance Point, unless the Blasting Rod's level is higher than your level, in which case the cost is equal to the difference in levels.

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Resonate Wand (Feat 1)
[Archetype]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Resonator Dedication, ability to cast spells from spell slots

You may Invest one or more Daily**** Wands as part of your daily preparations (even though Wands are not warn). When you have a wand Invested in this way, instead of activating it once per day (or twice by damaging the wand), you activate the wand by spending Resonance Points. There is no limit to how many times you can activate the wand other than the number of points you are willing and able to spend, and you never risk damaging the wand. The cost is one Resonance Point, unless the wand's level is higher than your level, in which case the cost is equal to the difference in levels.

Aside from the Resonance Point cost and number of uses per day, the wand functions as normal.

If anyone else uses a wand you have Invested, it counts as the second daily use (regardless of whether or how many times you have actually used it), and therefore they must roll to see if the wand is broken or destroyed.

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Resonate Staff (Feat 4)
[Archetype]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Resonator Dedication, ability to cast spells from spell slots

When you prepare a Staff as part of your daily preparations, you may also Invest it (even though Staves are not warn). When you have a Staff Invested in this way and Cast a Spell from it, you may spend Resonance Points on the activation in one of two ways:
-If the spell uses charges, it uses a number of charges equal to one third of the spell's Rank (rounded up), rather than equal to the Rank.
-If the spell has an attack roll, you may apply any Weapon Potency Runes on the Staff to the Attack roll (but not any other Runes).
In either case, the cost is one Resonance Point, unless the wand's level is higher than your level, in which case the cost is equal to the difference in levels.

Aside from applying one of the above-described benefits, the Staff functions as normal.

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Extra Resonance (Feat 6)
[Archetype]
Archetype: Resonator
Prerequisites: Resonator Dedication, Int +1, Cha +1

You add both your Intelligence and Charisma to your Resonance Pool, rather than one or the other (this is in addition to the two extra points you gain because this is a Resonator Archetype feat).

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Extra Feats: Trick Magic Item, Incredible Investiture

Someone else made a thread about using wands to do a weak one action attack. Could be a good collaboration idea. A Resonator channels his inner well of power and shoots out a bolt.

That is an interesting idea. I would not do it with wands, but maybe make a new category of item (call them "blasting rods" or something). Spend a point of Resonance and an attack comes out the end. I'd probably treat more like weapons than normal magic items (runes and all).

Allow the player to inscribe fundamental runes (but not property runes) into the wand or staff.

You can already do that, at least for staves. Do you mean to allow them to be applied to spell attacks from that staff or wand?

Basically adds another way for them to use the pool and gives them more choices on behavior.

I was thinking there would be a one-to-one mapping between categories of affected items and ways they are effected. But that's not hard-&-fast (nothing is, at this stage).

As a side idea, one possible way to add an extra handcuff (since people think this needs one apparently) could be to pull a card from PF1E Kins and make resonance act like Burn. It takes your own life force to power the magic, costing you some amount of HP do it.

That's not a bad idea in the abstract, but it's not going to fly in my group. A couple of them really disliked Burn!

The impression I got is that your Resonance pool is split off from your Investiture (I always think I'm talking about Cosmere when I use that word), and it applies to all magic items, I think.

That was the general idea. It interacts with Investiture in the sense that you have to Invest something before you can spend Resonance on it (even if it is not something you would normally need to Invest, like a wand). Otherwise, Investment and Resonance are separate.

I do agree with Teridax that getting to use a wand a ton of times each day is probably more trouble than it's worth.

That does seem to be the prevailing opinion across the three threads (and weirdly, in the PF1 thread too). I still think the idea has enough merit to at least warrant testing.

Are you thinking only wands, for example?

No, I am hoping to find five to six categories of items to spend it on. Although other than wands, I need to figure out which categories and what Resonance will do for them.

Also, on the subject of wands and Resonance, I think the way I'd implement would either have Resonance be equal to half your level, rounded up, or maybe turn all your unspent Investiture points into Resonance, so there is a choice between wearing lots of permanent items or triggering temporary ones.

I think half levels is probably a bit fast scaling - I would rather start a bit higher and scale up slower. OTOH, using left over Investment as Resonance (which is pretty much how Resonance worked in the playtest) scales negatively with level, that's probably a bit too far in the other direction.

Yup. Tiamat for the vast majority of gamers is the D&D version; a five-headed devil dragon (who they renamed Takhisis for Dragonlance). And that version also happens to be my favorite version of her as well, so it always felt a bit disappointing and lame to me to NOT be able to feature that version in Pathfinder. Tiamat's inclusion in Golarion crept in a little bit under the radar in those early days before we even started the actual Pathfinder RPG... and we probalby shouln't have ever done any of that stuff in the first place since that whole element of her is in a shady gray area of the OGL content (which focuses on the rules side of things and not so much the lore side) that has, as we've moved further and further away from 3.5 SRD/OGL rules over the decades, become an increasingly fraught proud nail that, when we shifted over to 2nd edition, we decided to wrench out and leave behind.

Ah, I think the reason I thought that Tiamat was never in PF1 was that I either misunderstood or misremembered a previous post from our favourite disnosaur, similar to this one.

When Glass wrote this, I think he was saying you could recharge your 30 charges by spending 2 hours of time. And he was saying "if you had nothing to do all day (8 hours)" you could spend your time (discharging and) recharging the wand 4 times.

Well, I was mostly thinking of recharging up to four different wands on your day off, rather than the same wand four times (although I guess you could do that too, unless I decided to specifically prohibit it). But other than that, you have correctly divined my intention.

Some characters don't care much about losing 2 skill feats (though they might care a bit more about having to lose those right at level 2 and 4), but if you don't happen to have a character like that already on the team it really sucks to have to contort around the tax feats.

Most Skill feats are kinda rubbish, so if it were just those two feats it would not be so bad.

But as I said upthread, you need to invest a lot more feats than that to keep pace IME. And even if that were not the case, the skill increases are a much bigger cost than the feats. Unless you are a Rogue or Investigator, you only get to scale up a tiny handful of skills. One of those being locked to Medicine is very limiting.

I had another idea, which keeps the wands themselves as they are in PF2, but adds other ways to improve them that are optionally bought into by specific characters. Maybe that will be better received than this idea has been: Behold, the Resonator Archetype.

(Well, a very sketchy first outline of the Resonator Archetype at this point.)

I recently started a couple of threads about making wands in PF2 a bit less rubbish, by changing wands themselves (or more precisely, adding a new kind of wand). The response was...not overwhelmingly positive. Anyway, I had another idea, this time tackling things from the character side rather than the wand side.

Early in the PF2 playtest period, there a concept called Resonance. It was an interesting idea as originally billed, but it could not survive its initial implementation (which was frankly terrible, and did basically none of the things it was supposed to do). It was replaced by the less-ambitious but better-implemented Investment mechanic.

My thought was, what if Resonance was an optional resource you bought into, rather a fundamental mechanic (the good version of Resonance that possibly only existed inside my head). Specifically, you'd have a pool of points refreshed daily, and which you could spend to get more or better use out of wands and other magic items. To use your Resonance on an item, you would need to Invest it, using up one of your ten (even if it was an item that did not normally require Investment).

In the hands of such a character, and Invested wand would cost a Resonance point for each use, but they could keep using it as long as they had points to spend (with no risk of breaking it). If anyone else tried to use the same wand, it would function normally, and doing so would break the Investment for the day. I would like to say that it would also work with other categories of magic items, but I don't have any concrete plans for that (just some tentative ideas for staves and comsumables, which I need to ponder a bit more).

This would probably be a bit much for a single feat, so I am thinking the best way to implement it would be an Archetype, called Resonator. The Dedication would give you the pool and allow you to use it with one category of item. Other feats would expand the pool and open it up to other categories of items.

Since that is not a huge number of feats, I would probably include the existing Incredible Investiture and maybe Trick Magic Item as Archetype feats too.

Obviously, the exact number of points in the pool would be critical. It needs to high enough to be worthwhile, without being so high as to render such items effectively at-will. It should probably scale up a little with level, but not massively (maybe with an Attribute or two).

There should probably also be some restriction on using Resonance on an item that is higher level than you. Maybe you just can't, or maybe you can but it costs extra points based on the level difference.

So, what do you think? Anyone have any ideas about non-wand effects? Any other categories of items which particularly need help?

(Also, is there any precedent for a non-Skill General feat in an Archetype?)

Unless it's a select few things, like the Drow in the Remaster (but not in Starfinder 2E), some select gods (like Tiamat or Kostchtchie), or some concepts (like Chromatic/Metallic Dragons). Those things are retcon'd or faded into the background until a new, Paizo-flavored replacement is made.

Tiamat was never in Pathfinder, was she?

Ultimate you're trying to put in bandaids that cause problems in other parts of the system when ultimately what you're trying to achieve is "with [enough] time everyone is back to full HP".

I am trying to achieve a lot of things, including having wands that do not suck (outside of very specific niches). The particular stone is aimed at a bunch of different birds.

So you could start there. A 10 minute rest, everyone is back to full health. Although that is a little too, easy in my opinion.

That takes Medicine from near-mandatory, to near-worthless. That's a rather large over-correction!

So make is a little more challenging, and with some limits, and you're going to end up in a place that looks a lot like the optional Stamina rules. Without messing up game balance in the way your proposal does.

What "way [my] proposal does"? You keep talking like it will be a game balance disaster, but you've been extremely short on specifics.

Because Wands, Scrolls, and Staves cast spell at your DC, it means they can be used offensively. It's their cost/low use limit that keeps them from being utilized a lot. If you remove or severely reduce the use limit restriction, you're just opening up the game to other problems.

Again, what other problems? Because wands of attack spells actually being usable, rather than being automatic vendor trash is not a problem for me, it is (part of) the point.

Edit: Honestly, the least disruptive solution that kind of does what you want is to take healing items (like potions and alchemical items) and just change the cost. Now people stock up on potions of healing, soothing tonic, and healing vapor. Reduce the cost to 10% of the original, but non-healing items cost remains unchanged.

It would have to be more like 1% IMO, but even if I did that we'd still have scaling issued, leading to the aesthetic problem of people using dozens after each fight at higher levels. Unless we changed the scaling too, but that would just invert the problem rather than remove it.

The devs didn't want items to be the main source of out of combat healing. But if you really want to bring that back, reducing the price of healing consumables is the best way to do it without having other impacts that throw off other parts of the game.

We're in the Homebrew subforum; everything we propose is something "the devs didn't want". Otherwise it would already be in the game.

And I think reducing the price of consumables likely will throw of other parts of the game (otherwise I would likely have done it already, given how vastly overpriced for their utility most of them are).

primary wand

Can I just check, is "primary wand" an existing mechanical concept I am unaware of, or something new you are proposing?

(I also think it is a little weird that you cannot have wands of cantrips, but I do not consider it important enough to expend any mental energy on. After all, you could buy or make wands of cantrips in PF1, but nobody ever did.)

So back to "mandatory medicine checks": have you considered just waiving the checks?

It is not so much the checks themselves (although as mentioned upthread, we did house rule them to make them quicker in and out of game). It is the build resources that go into it, and the distorting effect that that has on whichever character/player draws the short straw.

Honestly you get 10 skills feats on a character. Spending 2 of them on medicine isn't that big a deal IMO. It's honestly more than you need to spend skill proficiency increases that is a little harder to stomach.

It is a lot more than "two skill feats". The Bard in my Abomination Vaults game has about half a dozen feats invested in Medicine (including the Medic Dedication feat), and a bunch of Skill Increases (IIRC it is their only skill at Master so far). And with all that, it still took around an hour of in game time (and quite a bit of table time) to patch the party up after every 12-18 second fight. Until we house ruled it to be more generous and quicker.

While the player in question does not seem to mind too much, I am sure that they would have chosen to raise Occultism or Performance before Medicine if they felt like they had the choice. And they would use their focus spells a lot more, if they were not too busy with Medicine to Refocus.

glass wrote:

My referring to Medicine as mandatory is obviously hyperbolic. But the party needs to invest heavily in something to survive in PF2.

They also did in PF1 too: the something was just "burn a lot of money and make sure someone can activate endless wands."

Claxon was just saying it was too cheap, you're saying it was too expensive. To me, the costs were about right.

It also didn't work at low level there either because a healing wand was really expensive early on.

It's 750 gp, with PF1 money scaling. Yeah, you cannot afford it with starting money, but you will be able to literally days later IME.

Quote:

Which alchemical items? Because the ones have costs that start way too high to be routinely usable while level appropriate, and then scale highly non-linearly with level (and hp restored). Exactly like other PF2 consumables (and not all that differently from PF1 consumables, in terms of relative costs across levels, although they tended to be a bit cheaper overall).

Healing Vapor and Soothing Tonic (which does exactly what Infernal Healing does). As I said: massively cut the price on them and you've regained item healing spam without changing anything else.

The costs of those still scale quadratically, so even if you make the cost of the lowest-level versions reasonable, you still be better off spamming those than the higher-level versions.

4th rank heal does an average of 50 HP of healing, or 18 in AoE mode to a party (which is the way to go if 3+ people are injured). Given high level characters easily clear 200 HP and many clear 300 HP, you're going to be burning through a LOT of charges to recover after a fight of any significant difficulty. The 4 charges a day you can restore won't heal a Fighter or Summoner back up after a single encounter, let alone a Barbarian or Guardian. And if the whole party is injured, you're looking at over 10 charges per fight. So in a time compressed AP scenario with little downtime, the recharge mechanic won't matter and you'll have to just carry a pile of wands.

I am not sure what you're saying here: There is no 4 charge limit, you have 30 charges to play with. I deliberately make it only take 2 hour to recharge so that it would not be too much of an impediment. If you burn through 1500 hp before you can spare 2 hours, this won't work, but you've probably got bigger problems.

I really feel like you're too fixated on trying to do what PF1 did as a solution without recognizing why its not really suitable to PF2 and that there's better ways to go about doing the same thing. (Frankly it was a lousy solution in PF1 too, but it was what we had.)

And I think you and Claxon are too fixated on how PF2 currently does it, while I do not like how PF2 currently does it, and actively want to get away from that.

Also, this is not "what PF1 did as a solution". It is, IMNSHO, a significant improvement on PF1's solution. I literally have a sister thread in PF1 Homebrew pitching this as an improvement for PF1 as well.

I was going to repond to Claxon's latest post here also, but this is long enough already (and anyway it's bedtime). So it will have to wait.

It kind of sounds like you want a magic staff. Like a staff of curing.

I don't know about a staff of curing, but I have the staff of healing; it right there in the CRB (and on AoN). Clearly, I do not see that as sufficient.

Certainly they're more expensive

Which is the issue. Staves are high-level items, and they also tend to be one-per-character items. Which is very appropriate for them, but leaves a gap.

Also, staves are capped at ten charges IIRC.

Other than the higher level cost for the creation feat, you might be trying to rebuild the wheel (or usurp what magical staves are intended to do, which is something we're not supposed to allow other feats to do, invalidate other ones. Like making a 'wondrous item' that is basically a magic ring or staff without needing to take Craft Staff or Forge Ring.

My proposal functions exactly like a normal wand, except that the GP costs over time are different. The use cases and practicalities are much more like a wand than a staff. I am confident that Craft Wand is the correct feat.

That said, I would not be opposed to some extra requirement to make them, if we can think of something that would help balance them but not be too onerous.

Starting in my Homegame The.Very.Next.Session I eliminated ALL happy Sticks (I had *Never* allowed Stupid-Crap-Bag-Infernal-Healing!!!!) and made a 'Staff of Healing' a little easier for my group to get. So now at early and mid Levels Potions and such are coveted by the PCs and starting around 9th or 10th or so the PCs get a Staff.

All I can say is that it seems like a good job for both of us that I was not at your table. Playing under that house rule would be bad enough, but apparently having it sprung on me mid-campaign with no warning or prior discussion? Just no. EDIT: No other fantasy media has characters downing half a dozen healing potions after each fight either - I don't get how that is better than the wand.

It boiled down to HAVING to use a wand.

True, but IMNSHO that was much better than having to have a cleric. Making that cleric or alchemist (or whatever) is a step up from literally just cleric, but a step down from wand IMO, because it just costs gold, not one character's whole class and identity.

All your doing is suggesting replacing the necessity of Medicine in PF2, with the necessity of using wands (again) which I honestly feel is a worse and backwards solution.

No, I am not. I am not taking Medicine away or making it worse (in fact, as I said upthread, I have already house ruled it to be better). I am just providing another option that you can use instead, which is not (quite so) class-limited.

Again just use the Stamina rules if you really hate medicine.

I don't hate Medicine. I think it is a great option, but I want it to be just that - an option. I want there to be at least one other option that is not class locked.

Don't try to implement this wand change, which will greatly imbalance other portions of the game.

Such as? So far we have "wands of slow might be a bit strong" which might be a concern, but ISTM is not the balance disaster you are apparently seeing.

Edit: As an aside, I absolutely hated the CLW paradigm in PF1. It was too cheap and effective and I hated the imagery.Yes, Medicine does require someone in the party to make some investment of their character. It's going to take 2 to 3 of your skill feats (you get a lot) and 1/3 of skill increases to keep it relevant. As opposed to playing a specific class or other hoops to go through to use a wand of CLW.

This is trying to fix the "imagery". And "cheap and effective" is exactly what is needed IMNSHO - if you disagree with that basic premise, then we are probably never going to see eye-to-eye on this.

It is, though:

- When we played Shadows at Sundown (an 11-13 adventure), no one was past trained in Medicine and no one had any Medicine feats. We recovered with Lay on Hands via Champion Archetype.
- I'm playing Spore War now (11-20), and our primary recovery is the Alchemist using things like Healing Vapor & Soothing Tonic, and the Bard (when he was playing, the player recently had to leave the game due to real life) using Hymn of Healing. There is someone with Medicine but they don't have Ward Medic and so they can do that on one person while getting vials back.

Those are both high-level adventures. Obviously, higher-level characters have more abilities, resources, and options. So it is not surprising they can get away with more.

And the Champion is (with significant investment) still restoring a maximum of 18 hp per rank per ten minutes AFAICT. That's even more annoying standing around than you get with Medicine.

My referring to Medicine as mandatory is obviously hyperbolic. But the party needs to invest heavily in something to survive in PF2.

I think you're trying to solve the wrong problem, TBH. The problem you're having is downtime recovery feels annoying. It'd be a lot easier to address that directly.

I am trying to solve several problems at once. Medicine being, IMO and IME near mandatory is one of them. Wands in PF2 being utterly terrible (except for spells which last all day, where they're pretty good) is another.

(There are other related to my homebrew world, but they're not terribly relevant to the thread.)

Alchemical items can currently do that since you can get a pile of them and just use them as you need them

Which alchemical items? Because the ones have costs that start way too high to be routinely usable while level appropriate, and then scale highly non-linearly with level (and hp restored). Exactly like other PF2 consumables (and not all that differently from PF1 consumables, in terms of relative costs across levels, although they tended to be a bit cheaper overall).

If the cost is cheap, people will definitely spam wands of stuff like Synesthesia, Slow, Quandary, Chain Lightning, and such.

Teridax already pointed out quandary as a possible issue, and in response I changed the proposal to limit it to only spells whose base ranks is 4 or less. So there are not going to be chargeable wands of any of those except slow. Now that is definitely a spell that benefits from being spammable, since if you force enough saves eventually the enemy is going to fail one. I am not sure if I consider that to be a problem - I will have to ponder.

My framing and thought comes from this perspective, imagine the medicine skill and related feats didn't exist in game. Or was basically the same as PF1's version of the heal skill (where max you were going to heal like 20hp a day).

If you just took away Medicine, and left everything else the same? I am imagining TPK after TPK, until eventually you either house rule something back in or give up in disgust.

Now think about what you would need to do in PF2 if that were the case? You would require healing focused characters in every group, and back up healers. You'd probably want like a cleric and champion in every group for healing. So, from my perspective the Medicine skill is a generous change from PF1.

Okay, maybe if you had a Cleric and a Champion you would avoid most of the TPKs I am imagining. But you didn't need a Cleric and and Champion(-equivalent) in every group in PF1, you needed a wand of CLW or infernal healing and some way to activate it.

And as I mentioned before, I feel it's a generous change for Medicine because PF1 had the same dynamic, no one wanted to go into a fight below like 75% health because, why would you? Everyone just grabbed a ton of wands of CLW and spent ~10 minutes bopping party members.

Exactly. You could grab a stack of wands of CLW, get you hp back, and it just worked. You didn't need massive investment in skills and feats (possibly UMD if you did not have the relevant spells on your list, but that had other uses too). It was aesthetically unsatisfying, but it worked.

PF2's taking that away and giving Medicine checks as the consolation prize (which require more investment up front, and take more time both in game and at the table) is being less generous, not more.

Staves in fact do not function much like wands. Wands are "cast this spell once per day". Staves are a magic battery (you store you spell slots into it) and then can cast certain spell from it (based on the kind of staff it is) using that battery.

Yes, that's how it works. But the number of charges always works out to be enough to cast the spell at max rank exactly once. Staves go by a more complicated route to get to pretty much the same place (at least, for a lot of spells).

So why can I put fundamental runes on Staves but not Property runes for anyways? What is with that odd restriction for anyways they are already simple staff weapons. Is there a reason why you cannot do this or am I just over thinking such a thing anyways?

I just noticed that yesterday, and I thought it was odd too. It's not like staves are all that great apart from their ability to be used as weapons.

If it was just about shifting it into something else while (as some have speculated) then specifically disallow that.

I would address it to the shifting property description itself. Add something like: "If the weapon has other magical properties or abilities unrelated to its being a weapon, those properties are suppressed while it is not in its natural form (for example, a staff of...)".

Re Medicine checks:
Claxon kinda said that they were not compulsory, and then outlined the the reason why I, and others, feel that they are. PF2 is an unforgiving game - if you don't get your hp back after one fight, you are probably going to die in the next one. Other methods of getting your hit points back are not good enough to get your hp back after each fight, which means they are not good enough, full stop.

Re staves:
I don't have a lot of experience with them, but my impression is that they are kinda crap (which may be why I don't have much experience with them - nobody buys them, and people who find them rarely bother or remember to use them).

Basically, AFAICT they're basically wands with a choice of spells rather than just one, and a couple of cantrips. They do have a slight advantage in that they they scale to your slot rank without spending extra cash on them. I think.

I am not 100% sure that I am understanding your intentions or desires. For me, it seems most logical to just create a magic item to not just recharge wands, but transfer charges.

I want to create a new type of wand which works mostly like existing wands, except that it is more cost effective for spells you might want to cast a lot of (like cures and direct attack spells), especially at higher levels. Thereby making wands of CCW and wands of fireball a lot more useful and viable.

Preferably while leaving standard wands with the niche of "spells you want to cast a bunch of time over the course of the campaign, but not usually a bunch of times per encounter". Like haste

While, thematically having a 'battery wand' makes sense, mechanics-wise, it probably would be a rod (thus require Craft Rod, but you can always let them find or buy one).

Interesting idea, albeit different from what I was going for. One concern, which you touch on yourself, is that what a charge represents in terms of costs is is highly variable, even at the same spell level. My other concern is in the opposite direction: If you do put enough restrictions on it to avoid abuses, is there enough utility left?

glass wrote:

I am really not. Making wands of CSW and CCW more usable both in and out of combat is very much the goal.

As I mentioned, this problem is an intersection of both CCW and wands being underpowered. A big part of the problem is CCW itself, not just that wands are overpriced.

CCW is not a great spell, but in the CotCT game I am playing in, the witch casts it from spell slots fairly often. To the best of my knowledge, she has never cast it from a wand, despite having carried one around for the last several levels.

If it was economic to use it, she could use the wand for OoC healing, and she'd be more likely to use it in combat too.

glass wrote:

IME haste is just that good that most casters who can take it, will take it. And if you cast it yourself it will likely affect more targets and last longer.

CL 5 is already letting you target 5 creatures for 5 rounds, which is usually enough for a typical party to last an entire combat encounter.

Maybe, but it's tight. Five targets is not enough for every party, and those five rounds will run out occasionally so you have to track them every time. Whereas at full CL you will quickly reach the point where the former is a non-issue, and eventually not have to worry about the latter either.

The up-front charge is significant, yes, but if the party pools together then this is affordable by 5th level

If they can pool their wealth to buy a chargeable wand of haste at 5th level, they can pool their wealth to buy a standard wand of haste at 5th level. And have 750 gp left over.

and having such cheap Haste at 5th level is broken

But it not cheap haste at 5th level, it's more expensive haste at 5th level in exchange for cheaper haste at maybe tenth level, by which point the cost is pretty trivial either way.

That's why I say that getting a chargeable wand of haste is not broken - arguably, it's not even good!

Thanks for the reply!

glass wrote:

The cost to add charges would also be linear with spell level rather than quadratic

This is a bad idea.

Possibly, but not because I am doing this....

You're analyzing this with the presumption that action economy doesn't matter.

I am really not. Making wands of CSW and CCW more usable both in and out of combat is very much the goal.

At the moment IME, one of two things happen if they find one: Either, it is immediately added to the "to sell" list with all the other vender trash, and liquidated at the earliest opportunity. Or, someone will say "I'll take it, we might need it in an emergency" and then never use it.

If balance your wand pricing around CCW, you're going to end up with overpowered Wands of Haste.

IME haste is just that good that most casters who can take it, will take it. And if you cast it yourself it will likely affect more targets and last longer.

And you typically only need to cast it once per fight, so even if you are using a wand, it will take a very long time before you start to see any savings - you could buy a normal wand for less up front and then be good for 50 encounters. That is at least a quarter of the campaign (more like half for many campaigns) before you even break even. Obviously, if you do shell out for a second conventional wand, then you will have spent more. But you will also be at a level where 45 gp instead of 225 gp per charge is nice but not earth shattering. And when you had to pay out money matters as much as the total spent at the end of the campaign.

There may be spells which break this idea, but haste does not appear to be one of them.

Maybe 500x the spell level, so costs would range from a nice round 1000 gp for CLW to 2200 for CCW (assuming minimum caster levels)

That was clearly not right. It was supposed to be 250 x SL, and 22000 for CCW. EDIT: Sorry for the triple post - I blame short edit windows!

Hi Teridax, thanks for responding, and humouring my madness...

The main risk I'd see with a wand having 30 charges and being able to recharge 4 a day is that this could make wand balance quite variable depending on available downtime: with sufficient downtime, you might as well cast that wand spell at-will, and even with no downtime that's 4 free casts of a spell per day.

Sorry I was not clear: That four wands, not four charges. The idea was that you can add as many charges as you like to a Chargeable Wand in that time, as long as you pay for them (up to the max, of course).

They're not free, but at higher levels they are deliberately fairly cheap.

Given that staves can do the same for lower-rank spells, perhaps that could be fine, though I'd probably get annoyed as a GM if a high-level party each got a wand of quandary or the like to casually poof monsters out of existence every fight without dipping into their spell slots.

I need to take another look at the higher level spells! I had not seen quandary - that's pretty cool, and I agree it was bad to have it spammed. Although 32 gp per cast is not nothing, is is massively less than the 1300 gp you'd pay for an 8th-level scroll.

OTOH, I am loathe to abandon the linear charge pricing that works so well with heal and sooth (and direct damage attack spells like fireball, AFIACT).

Maybe I should take a leaf out of PF1's book, and limit it to spells whose base levels are 4 or less. That would include heal and magic missile, while preventing quandary. Now I'm off to have another read through the spell lists....

Anyway, upthread I mentioned the idea of rechargeable wands but sorta brushed past it. That probably deserves it own thread, but I mention it here because part of the idea is that PF1-style charged wands might be convertible to make them rechargeable (possibly by sacrificing some of the charges). Although the differing spell lists would still be an issue.

Threads are up for Chargeable Wands in PF1 and PF2 in their respective Homebrew forums.

The sister thread over in PF2 Homebrew is now up.

In creating it, I thought of something I meant to say here: Although I have concentrated on spells which restore HP in the post, I was not intending to limit Chargeable Wands to those spells only. I don't think there are any spells that would be particularly broken under this paradigm, that would not be already with normal wands. Unless you folks can think of one?

On the subject of a retronym for normal PF1 wands, how about "battery wands"?

So how does making wands rechargeable help? It kinda brings back the PF1 "happy-stick dance" without the elements that made that annoying (ie, the supremacy of low-level wands even at the very highest levels, leading to huge numbers of charges being used). What I am currently thinking is this:

Chargeable wands are "spells in a stick" like PF1 wands were, except that a fully charged wand only has 30 charges. Actually casting a spell from one works like a standard wand, except there is no daily restrictions (there may be a once-per-round restriction). They cost quite a lot up front, but the a significantly less to add charges. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four per day if you have nothing better to do).

My grasp on how to price them is less solid than in the PF1 version of this thread, largely because the relationship between rank and wand cost is not obvious to me. But I am leaning towards having the upfront cost the same as a standard magic wand. The cost to recharge would be linear with spell rank (maybe 4 gp per rank - same as a scroll at Rank 1). Because the HP restored per spell rank is linear (at least for heal and soothe), that conveniently keeps the cost per hp consistent across all versions (ignoring the upfront cost).

To charge the wand, you would probably need Magical Crafting, and would definitely need to match the spells level and provide a casting of the spell (from a slot). To make the thing in the first place, you would need all that plus an appropriate formula (and more time/castings, of course).

So what do you think? Any suggestions on price. Any flaws with my cunning plan that I have missed? Anyone want to weigh in on the costs? Any thoughts on a better name for the standard PF2 spell wand than "magic wand" (to differentiate it from this, and in general)?

EDIT: I meant to say, although I have focused on spells which restore hp, I was intending this option to apply to any wands. Are there any spells which would be particularly broken under than paradigm? I guess it would cut across the extremely restricted spells slots that PF2 caster have, but I am not sure how much of a problem I consider that to be!

So how does making wands rechargeable help? It allows higher-level wands to have a higher up-front cost, keeping them out of the hands of lower-level parties, while keeping the cost per hp around the same. This is an idea I have had before, but I could never figure out the specifics before - now I think I might have. What I am currently thinking is this:

Chargeable wands are still "spells in a stick" and work in exactly the same way when activated. But a fully charged wand only has 30 charges, and cost more upfront, but obviously it is possible to add charges to them. And the recharge cost is considerably less than the upfront cost. Restoring any number of charges takes two hours (you can do four wands per day if you have nothing better to do).

Initially I was thinking that the upfront cost should double the standard wand, but 42k for a level-4 spell feels like a tough ask even if it works out well in the long term. Maybe 500x the spell level, so costs would range from a nice round 1000 gp for CLW to 2200 for CCW (assuming minimum caster levels). That seems pretty reasonable to me.

The cost to add charges would also be linear with spell level rather than quadratic. Noodling around in Excel, SL*15 gives the same cost per hp as a standard wand for CLW (about 2.7 gp) falling to 2.4 for the higher level wands - that feels about right to me (although that's ignoring the upfront cost of the wand, of course).

The other question is who can add charges. At a minimum, you'd need the spell on your spell list and known/available to cast, and a CL equal to the wand. It feels like it should be a bit more restricted than that, but restricting it to people with Craft Wand seems a bit too restricted.

Making them in the first place does require Craft Wand, of course. And if you have that feat, you can also convert a standard wand into a Rechargeable wand by sacrificing 20 charges and paying the difference in price.

So what do you think? Any flaws with my cunning plan that I have missed? What do you think about the "who can charge" question? Any ideas what to call now to contrast them with these?

Thanks for pointing me at Healing Vapour, Tridus; I was not aware of it.

Now that I am aware - wow! That's really terrible at its listed price. Taking ten minutes to get 5 hp back each, when that'd usually be less than half you hp even at first level, let alone at a level where you can actually afford it. And it's capped at four people so it probably won't even heal the whole party!

IMNSHO it would be grossly overpriced at 2 gp, let alone 20. Maybe 2 sp?

Anyway, upthread I mentioned the idea of rechargeable wands but sorta brushed past it. That probably deserves it own thread, but I mention it here because part of the idea is that PF1-style charged wands might be convertible to make them rechargeable (possibly by sacrificing some of the charges). Although the differing spell lists would still be an issue.

I came here to make a similar comment: Apparently, there is one more post in the comment thread for the Vorpal Dragon post since I last looked at it (but presumably posted before the upgrade).

The comment thread still shows up in PF2 General, but if you click either the main thread link or the "1 new" it takes you to the blog post itself (which as the OP notes, no longer seems to be connected to its comment thread).

Quoting myself because the edit window is closed....

I have been playing her as Large, but I just checked the table to see when she would became Colossal, and I think she should actually be Medium at "Very Young" - I need to figure out how to fix that.

Since her Large size has been significant, and her exact age has not been really, I have suggested to the GM that I rejig things to make her Young rather than Very Young. It will cost her two levels of sorcerer, but she effectively gets one back since Young is when her built-in casting kicks in. And since I was about to level her up anyway, she can get the other one back at 15th level.

The GM has not replied to my email yet, but I am fairly confident he will agree with me that that is the best route forward.

One slight side effect of the realisation is that it does cast doubt on my suggestion upthread to use GitP LAs. I have started a thread over there to talk about whether the differences should actually make any difference.

I am, accidentally, playing a full-on dragon right now in Curse of the Crimson Throne, specifically a very young Gold Dragon named Swiftgleam. The "accidentally" part is because Swiftgleam started as a Cohort to my original character. But I thought (and the GM agreed) that a whole freaking dragon for a single feat was OP. Swiftgleam was more fun, so I kept her and retired the original PC.

We are using the 3.5 rules for powerful species, but with the revised Level Adjustments they have hashed out over at GitP. Which means Swiftgleam has 10 Dragon HD, and LA of +0, and four class levels (about to be 5 - I need to level her up).

I have been playing her as Large, but I just checked the table to see when she would became Colossal, and I think she should actually be Medium at "Very Young" - I need to figure out how to fix that. Either way, she is not going to be Colossal until well after the campaign is over.

Armbands and bracers are remaining different slots.

LTTP on this, but I have always thought that armbands were worn on the upper arms. So I am not surprised they have remained separate from bracers.

Their only use is to be used for a in person table were you use a TV set into the table as a battle map.

That's not their only use. My main group has played online since COVID, with battle maps in Google Slides, and I use the interactive maps extensively when GMing.

You can't use them in VTT or adjust them in Gimp or photoshop.

Why not?

Are you set on copying PF1E wands exactly as-is over to PF2E?

I am not really set on anything, just idly musing - it would be nice if that were feasible, but it does not look like it is.

It sounds like you are saying in your world you have first edition and second edition heroes all coexisting in the same world and you use the rules related to the heroes for things except for things that can't fit which you just have not work for them.

That's about the size of it, although I try not to be too fussy about it - for example, scrolls are close enough to the same that I don't have separate scroll types even though the mechanics are not identical.

Although now that I say that, an issue for both wands and scrolls is that (especially post Remaster) there is not that much overlap in spell lists, so for even if wands in general were usable with no restrictions, the iconic wand of cure light wounds would still need Trick Magic Item. And then where there are spells with the same name, they often work drastically differently (heal vs heal being a particularly extreme example), which is a whole other can of worms.

I tend to give each system its own continent, so it's not like it comes up all the time.

I'm also a little curious about how you handle the pricing of things, since Second edition moved to a Silver Standard, so things that used to cost 1gp were normally costing more like 1 sp. So unless you made your first edition gp worth about 10x as much, you their stuff would probably be super expensive in your world.

This is an example of something I don't worry about (I have pondered saying that Tamvaran coins are heavier, but I decided it didn't really work).

(Tamvara is the "PF2 continent".)

Pretty sure that should be 120 GP, or double the price of a PF2 wand.

You're quite right; I have no idea how I managed to come up with the 60 figure. I should probably stop trying to create house rules or setting rules until I have brushed up on basic arithmetic.

I guess I should explain what why I was even considering this. There were two reasons:

The first is my homebrew world, Pelhorin. When I use it with a new system, I try to only add stuff rather than subtract: So those charged wands from 3.5 and PF1 campaigns still exist (except the ones that were fully expended, of course). It is actually a thing in-universe, that different people have different item affinities, and cannot use items which do not match their affinities (or in some cases they work differently). Conveniently, those affinities tend to map to whichever systems are used to represent the characters.

Which means, PF2 characters could find a PF1-style wand, and sell it to someone who could use it. But it would be nice if they could use it themselves.

The second reason was, as much as the "happy stick dance" could get annoying in 3.P, the Medicine checks after every fight is not much better. And even with Free Archetypes, it is annoying for someone to be stuck as "The Medicine guy". It would be nice to offer some alternatives, of which charged or otherwise reusable wands might be one.

Thanks again everyone.

It is looking like my initial idea is not going to fly. A first-rank wand with the same relative pricing to scrolls as PF1 would be 60 gp, which seems totally out of the price range of any character for which it would be relevant. Which it turns out is exactly the same pricing as a normal PF2 wand - I knew they were expensive for their limited utility.

The exception of course is for spells which you usually only want to cast once per day anyway, like mystic armour, for which the pricing seems much more reasonable - maybe still a little on the high side, but close enough that blanket dropping the price of standard wands is iffy.

Which brings us back to "nobody is going to pay 60 gp for a rank-1 consumable". By the time you could justify it, rank-1 spells are not relevant any more. And while 50 charges is quite a lot, the USP of this kind of wand is that you can use a bunch of charges in a row if you want to, so you're going to burn through them. But them costing less than that would make scroll and normal-wand costs ridiculous (and while I am not too worried about overshadowing the latter, I don't want the discrepancy to become too blatant).

Thanks folks! I was thinking that a discount compared with X scrolls would be appropriate (albeit probably not a 50% discount like in PF1), depending on how big X was. But I had not considered the action economy of a wand compared with scrolls, so that does give me pause. Balance with scrolls is a concern.

I would not want to give them a once-per-minute limitation, for reasons I cannot adequately articulate (once per round seems fine, though).

Maybe there should be some kind of upfront buy-in, like a General Feat to be able to use them? Or make them rechargeable for cheap (but not free), but give them a higher upfront cost than the initial charges would imply.

As in X charges, use them until they are used up, then buy another one (X was 50 in PF1, but need not be). Obviously, nobody would want to buy PF2-style wands, but that is hardly different from now. Aside from that, what would happen?

glass wrote:

...

℟

I still have no idea what you're getting at - at least you are consistent, I guess.

Apologies for the double post, but I just noticed Azothath's last paragraph. I tried to edit a response into my previous post, but the window close just before I could submit.

You should review Full Attack actions as there are several options. This is about one of those, thus debunking 'whenever' in general context.

Once again you include a cryptic final paragraph, and once again I skipped over it initially. And once again, now that I have actually read it, I have no idea what you are getting at. There are "several options" for what?

Debate may not be your forte.

That certainly appears to be the case for one of us!

I have laid out a clear argument for why I think the extra attack from blessing of fervour can be taken at any point during a full attack. You have responded with an unsupported statement that I am "incorrect" and cryptic insinuations that I do not know I am talking about, but no actual counter-arguments.

glass, you're quoting Toshy not Azothath(me).

At least get it staight as you are repeating my point(s) without understanding or insight and ignoring my previous post...

No, I am quoting you and indirectly, myself. The quote tags are a bit mangled, but AFAICS there is nothing from Toshy in there (and of course, the edit window is now closed so I cannot fix it myself).

Unless the post directly above mine, which I am quoting and responding to is by Toshy, not you. In which case it was, and still is, mislabelled by the forum software on my screen.

I mean, if were talking real world history, the whole thing is inspired by /taken from a poem by Lewis Carrol, which is literally about a creature called the Jabberwock that is slain by a "vorpal blade" that went "snicker snack".

Since it's inception "vorpal" came to mean a keen blade capable of decapitating it's target. And so Golarion having lore the a creature called the Jabberwock being killed by a vorpal blade in the primordial days of Golarion and birthing a kind of dragon...is honestly pretty good lore in my book.

I am pretty sure that, like a lot of words Carol used, it was meant to sound cool and did not mean anything in particular. The poem does not actually specify that he kills the beast by decapitation (in fact "and through and through" implies stabbing to me).

Even with odd-level casters, Mystic Theurge is pretty awful without early-entry shenanigans (which might not be allowed, but should be). Even-level casters make it two character levels worse. Personally, if I wanted a single-stat Mystic Theurge, I would probably go for Empyreal Sorcerer plus either Cleric of Druid.

That rule only applies to iterative attacks; extra attacks for any other reason can be taken whenever.

It is not incorrect. If you do your +7 iterative before your +2 iterative, you have done them in the correct order and complied with the RAW, even if you do your blessing of fervour attack in between.

Not that it really matters - there is no practical difference AFAICT between +7/+7/+2 with the iterative first and +7/+7/+2 with the iterative second. But if you wanted to do the former, you could.

EDIT: I have no idea what you mean by your last paragraph - of course we are talking about Full Attacks. That is the only way you get iteratives, and the only way to get an extra attack from blessing of fervour or haste.

glass wrote:

EDIT: Pizza Lord, why do you say "some GMs might not care about the order". Why would any?

Because first, going from highest to lowest is RAW:

Full-Attack

If you get multiple attacks because your base attack bonus is high enough, you must make the attacks in order from highest bonus to lowest.

(Bolding mine.)

That rule only applies to iterative attacks; extra attacks for any other reason can be taken whenever.

Sadly metamagics don't increase DCs except for Heighten and a few that explicitly say that in their description.

Not for an actual caster, and not directly for an item either. But I think Taja was assuming the DC for the Quickened version would be indirectly increased because it would be worked out based on a minimum stat of 14 rather than 10.

I am honestly not sure if they are right or not.

Two attacks when you already had two attacks is hardly an "extra attack". You get an extra attack at +7, in addition to the +7/+2 which you already had, which can be taken at any point during your full attack.

EDIT: Pizza Lord, why do you say "some GMs might not care about the order". Why would any?

I won't speak on behalf of exequiel759, as I think they're more than capable of stating their position, but I personally believe it is valid to want Vancian spellcasting to no longer be the default mode of spellcasting, even if it is equally valid to still want Vancian spellcasting as an option and thus not see it excluded.

They did not ask for it to be "not the default" (it already isn't), they asked for it to be "removed":

[...]so I feel vancian should be tweaked or removed in a future edition to streamline it a bit.

That or offer an alternative for those that don't like vancian like I do.

Admittedly they said "tweaked or removed", but given Flexible Spellcaster was deemed inadequate I am confident that "tweaked" was a redundant synonym for "removed" in this case.

They did go on to say "or offer an alternative" but there are already many alternatives (probably more than actually-vancian classes by this point), and they are apparently not good enough.

-----------------

The following (approximately) was an edit to my previous post, but it got eaten. Trying again:

Re wands: IMNSHO, wands are terrible in PF2, with the specific and weird exception of spell you usually only want once per day anyway (like the few remaining all-day buffs). EDIT: I have toyed with the idea of adding back PF1-style 50-charge wands, but that might be a bit of an overcorrection.

Re "Ivory Tower" design: ISTM that, in the article, Monte was using the term to refer to the intersect between not providing much in the way of guidance alongside the rules, and deliberately designing in imbalance. Although ISTM that common usage these days is more about the latter (even though the term itself is more suggestive of the former).

Anyway, whatever you call it, deliberately designing in imbalance is a bad idea, because it will always be on top of the imbalance you design in accidentally. When they were designing in 3e, they thought that if they aimed for say a 20% imbalance, they would end up with 20% imbalance. But instead they ended up with 20000%.

If you want 20% imbalance in a system as complicated as D&D or Pathfinder, you have to fight tooth and nail to get eliminate as much imbalance as possible.