pi4t's page

The general rule is in the Request action. It specifies which attitude conditions are allowed for a target creature to have in order for you to use the action on them.

The Tense Negotiator feat is a specific rule that overrides the general rule. If you have the feat, then you are allowed to use Request on an Indifferent creature.

Indifferent and unfriendly creatures, actually. But the Tense Negotiator feat doesn't override the rule that "you must couch the request in terms the target would accept given their current attitude to you." Unfriendly creatures explicitly never accept requests, and Tense Negotiator doesn't change that, so RAW there are no terms that you can couch the request in when speaking to an unfriendly creature.

This might seem like I'm just being pedantic - obviously, if you have Tense Negotiator, then you're allowed to make requests of unfriendly creatures. But what requests can you make? Does it let you completely ignore the requirement that the request be one the target would accept given their current attitude? Does it simply let you request things that a friendly target would accept? Does it only let you request things the target was going to to anyway?

It would be fairly easy to make a house rule deciding how to interpret this, but it would be a house rule and different tables will run it differently. The fact that the feat doesn't specify how this works suggests that whoever wrote Tense Negotiator ignored the "couch the request" rule.

The Social Skills Rules that you cited don't override the restrictions in the Request action. They give guidance on setting the DC if you do somehow manage to use the Request action on an Indifferent creature - such as by having the Tense Negotiator feat, or by GM Fiat from a one-time role-play/plot grant.

That doesn't seem to line up, frankly. Why would Paizo waste valuable page space writing about how to calculate DCs for something which is only allowed at all by GM fiat, or a feat which hasn't even made it to the remaster? And then not spare half a dozen words clarifying that it can only be done at all by GM fiat? Why would they say you should adjust the DC for requests to easy/very easy for friendly/helpful NPCs, if you can't normally make requests at all until they're friendly? Surely that would have been put in the description of the Request action, rather than hidden in GM Core, since it will apply to 99% of all Requests?

While what you've written is perhaps the best way to interpret those guidelines if the request rules are accepted as "canon", it's clearly not what the writer of the social skill guidelines in GM Core had in mind.

And we haven't even discussed the fourth view, suggested by the Attitude conditions themselves - that you can make requests of indifferent+ but can't make requests of unfriendly creatures.

I'm confused by the rules for Requests, which seem to contradict themselves.

The Request action says:

You can make a request of a creature that's friendly or helpful to you. You must couch the request in terms that the target would accept given their current attitude toward you.

The attitude conditions say the following:

It will accept reasonable Requests from that character, as long as such requests aren't at the expense of the helpful creature's goals or quality of life.

It is likely to agree to Requests from that character as long as they are simple, safe, and don't cost too much to fulfill.

(Doesn't mention Requests)

The unfriendly creature won't accept Requests from the character.

It doesn't necessarily attack, but it won't accept Requests from the character.

The GM Core section on Social Skills says:

When a character uses Deception, Diplomacy, Intimidation, or Performance to influence or impress someone...It often makes sense to adjust the DC based on the target’s attitude for Deception, Diplomacy, or Performance, making the DC easy for a friendly creature, very easy for a helpful one, hard for an unfriendly one, or very hard for a hostile one. You might adjust the DC further or differently based on the PC’s goal; for instance, the DC to Request something an indifferent NPC is fundamentally opposed to might be incredibly hard or impossible, and it might be easy to convince an unfriendly creature to do something it already wants to do.

Then there's the Tense Negotiator feat, one of whose benefits is:

You can attempt checks to make Requests of creatures who're indifferent or unfriendly toward you.

I've quoted these from the Remaster version where appropriate, but as far as I can tell none of the quoted text has changed between Premaster and Remaster.

All of these seem to indicate something different.

The request action clearly says that you can only make requests to creatures which are friendly or helpful, and you have to ask for something that they would accept - per the descriptions of friendly and helpful, this means simple, safe and non-costly requests for friendly creatures, or requests that don't harm the character's goals or quality of life for helpful creatures.

Tense Negotiator also confirms that you can't normally make requests of creatures which aren't friendly or helpful. But it doesn't work properly if you enforce the requirement for the request to be one "the target would normally accept given their current attitude to you" as stated in the Request action, since unfriendly creatures normally explicitly won't accept any requests.

The attitude descriptions themselves explicitly say you can't make requests of unfriendly (or hostile) creatures, but don't say that for indifferent creatures. This strongly suggests that you're supposed to be able to make requests of indifferent creatures. Reading the attitude descriptions, it appears that Helpful creatures automatically accept requests that aren't opposing their goals or quality of life, without having to make diplomacy roll at all. From this section of the rules, it looks like you're supposed to be able to make requests for anything, and make requests of indifferent creatures, and friendly/helpful gives you lower DCs or automatic successes on reasonable requests.

Finally, the GM guidance explicitly says that you can make a Request to an indifferent creature, and even request things which it's fundamentally opposed to (albeit at a very high DC). It even indicates that you can make a request to an unfriendly creature, and that the DC might be very low if you request the right thing.

Could we get some clarity on which of these is the correct reading?

pi4t wrote:

Another thought. Is it really necessary to reduce the rank of the spell slot steadfast archetype casters get compared to vanilla archetype casters, once they take expert casting benefits? I know it seems like it ought to be needed at first glance, but many casters can get a focus spell with a single low level class feat, and focus spells scale automatically with your actual level just like with a full class caster.

Of course focus spells aren't quite as powerful as spell slot spells of a given level, and you have slightly more versatility with archetype steadfast spells than you would with a focus spell. But you also have to pay three class feats total for it, and are always a rank behind non-archetype casters even without the extra penalties the steadfast archetype feats add.

Comparison with non-archetype casters is pretty much the reason why I kept the steadfast slot at a lower rank. If you pick a caster archetype, you get lots of slots up to 8th rank, but all of those slots are once-a-day. Meanwhile, the steadfast slot you get can be used once every 10 minutes, which is a huge advantage. I very much wanted to make sure that going for this different casting model represented a tradeoff, rather than a buff, which is why the slot ends up downranked by one.

But by the time you're taking expert casting, you're already giving up three spell slots and three quarters of your spell repertoire, and that number is only going to grow. If it's ok for full casters to lose their lower level spell slots and most of their repertoire in exchange for regenerating slots of their highest level, shouldn't it be ok for archetype casters to make the same exchange?

Another thought. Is it really necessary to reduce the rank of the spell slot steadfast archetype casters get compared to vanilla archetype casters, once they take expert casting benefits? I know it seems like it ought to be needed at first glance, but many casters can get a focus spell with a single low level class feat, and focus spells scale automatically with your actual level just like with a full class caster.

Of course focus spells aren't quite as powerful as spell slot spells of a given level, and you have slightly more versatility with archetype steadfast spells than you would with a focus spell. But you also have to pay three class feats total for it, and are always a rank behind non-archetype casters even without the extra penalties the steadfast archetype feats add.

It looks like the spontaneous bounded and archetype casters never get to learn any spells except heightened first rank ones. This completely cuts them off from 90% of their spell lists. Would it be better to allow one of their two spells in their repertoire to be of any rank, seeing as it's going to be a signature spell anyway?

pi4t wrote:

Given that all your spell slots are max rank, doesn't that make prepared casters much more versatile than spontaneous ones (who, if I understand correctly, are limited to 2 max-rank spells known and the rest are lower level)? And arguably more versatile than vanilla prepared casters, at least as regards high level spells. Technically the spontaneous caster knows more spells, but they're unlikely to use one of their limited slots to cast a low level spell in combat.

As a prepared caster, you have a collection of 9 spells at most. As a spontaneous caster, you will on average have a repertoire of 18 spells, 9 of which will be signature spells (if you're a 3-slot caster like a Bard or Oracle). Thanks to the rules for swapping out spells in your repertoire, you can also bring several of your non-signature spells to a higher rank if you want as well. In both cases, you are far less versatile than a spellcaster that didn't pick this archetype, but the spontaneous caster has significantly more versatility within the day than the prepared caster, who maintains superior versatility from one day to the next.

Ah, signature spells are what I was missing. Given that all your spell slots are cast at their highest rank, those are effectively all max-rank spells known and equivalent on their own to the prepared caster's collection.

pi4t wrote:

Am I correct in understanding that the prepared caster can make all their prepared spells max level? That doesn't seem like it would be intended, but I can't see anything preventing it.

All of your spells would be max-rank with this archetype. You'd just have a very small number of spell slots to use per encounter, and only a small collection of prepared spells as a prepared caster.

Given that all your spell slots are max rank, doesn't that make prepared casters much more versatile than spontaneous ones (who, if I understand correctly, are limited to 2 max-rank spells known and the rest are lower level)? And arguably more versatile than vanilla prepared casters, at least as regards high level spells. Technically the spontaneous caster knows more spells, but they're unlikely to use one of their limited slots to cast a low level spell in combat.

Am I correct in understanding that the prepared caster can make all their prepared spells max level? That doesn't seem like it would be intended, but I can't see anything preventing it.

Kaspyr2077 wrote:

Had a silly optimization idea regarding the Aldori Duelist build in the guide. See, the Aldori Duelist Dedication means you are as proficient with the Aldori dueling sword as you are with your highest proficiency weapons. That being the case, you get all the benefits of higher proficiency with the Aldori dueling sword, even if you don't specialize in Swords at 5th level, right? Also, the Swords category doesn't have a thrown weapon, but Axes or Hammers do. Finally, you take Aldori Duelist Dedication at Level 2, and don't get Fighter Weapon Mastery until 5. Is there an advantage to choosing Swords instead of Axes or Hammers in a build with Aldori Duelist Dedication, or would it be better to cheese it and have your master swordsman character actually specialized in Hammers instead, for throwing light hammers at full bonus?

I love your guides. I've learned so much from them.

Why not have them specialize in Bows? Dueling Swords are finesse weapons, so you can start a fight with some shots with a longbow and then draw your curling sword when enemies close in, with both methods of attack being equally as accurate.

Alternatively, why not specialise in the "shield" weapon group? Only Aldori Parry requires you to have a free hand, while the rest of the weapon archetype works very well without one...

Easl wrote:

This works fine when it's one or just a few encounters per day. When it gets to about 3 or more, then the model of "build the class assuming they can use highest slot + lower rank slots in every encounter" breaks down. I think the remastering of focus spells is intended to help with this - essentially making them available for every encounter. Am I guessing correctly? Or is there some other remastery update that helps the Wizard class be robust against 3+ combat encounters between morning preparations?

Three encounters is basically the assumed baseline, which is why 3 is the default number of spells per level that core casters cap out at. You're generally assumed to be having about 3 encounters per day and using 1 top-rank slot per encounter, supplemented by some combination of cantrips, focus spells, consumables, limited-use non-consumables, lower level slots, etc.

Can I politely suggest putting that information in the revised rulebooks somewhere? It's about half the number of encounters per day recommended in 5e or PF1, and I think groups coming from those systems try to run the number of encounters per day they're used to and end up finding spellcasters aren't able to contribute properly.

I've been reading about Lastwall on the Pathfinder wiki, and I think I've noticed a continuity error. According to the page on Lastwall itself, the Hordeline was the third border line between Lastwall and Belkzen (after the Sunwall, and Harchrist's Blockade, both failed), and was constructed after Harchrist's Blockade was overrun in 4517. But according to the page on the Hordeline itself, the Hordeline it was created in 4515 and overrun two years later in 4517, which seems to be describing Harchrist's blockade.

Could someone with access to both books check the citations for both those articles? And if they are both "correct", maybe a passing writer could weigh in on which is the canonical Hordeline?

Following the discussion that Mathmuse refers to, I've decided to rebuild the militia system to suit the needs of my campaign. Specifically I've changed the rules so that the number of actions the militia gets depends on its number of teams - every team gets one action, and is represented and led by a named NPC. This means that I can hide the militia mechanics from my player while still letting her make the decisions, something she specifically requested. It also seems to reflect the way that Nirmathas militias work.

The four NPCs (other than Aubrin, who I'm using in another way) who can be rescued in Part 1 will lead the first four teams, according to their speciality. Of course, they can't all be rescued, but the Ironfang will keep their prisoners in the area as slaves, and the PC and/or militia can rescue them.

I plan to start the militia out pretty much immediately, at the Hemlock Banner event. But initially, two teams will be permanently occupied just dealing with basic survival, so they'll only have one team. They'll gain another when the food situation is sorted, and a third when they have a permanent home.

If I was using the vanilla rules, I would probably say that doing the survival mechanics for a week takes an action, and that their initial training is the number of people the PCs saved. So if they saved a lot of people, they might start with a level 2 militia and be able to spend one action doing other stuff, while if they didn't save so many people they're going to spend all their time surviving until they have supplies to last for a whole week.

Thanks for the detailed response. Mathmuse has guessed the interpretation I meant. I was referring to the "tiny, scrappy band of farmers-turned-warriors" (player's guide) living in Misthome (later Fort Trevalay) who are commanded by the PCs, and who may optionally be represented by the "militia" system.

These aren't described in the text of the adventures as helpless refugees who need protecting. They're described as "farmers-turned-warriors", as "soldiers in a young militia" (Trail of the Hunted); they think of themselves as "adventurers" or "freedom fighters" rather than "survivors of a violent attack", and they are "a military force to be reckoned with" by the end of Fangs of War. The official campaign description says that the "small band of refugees [will] grow into champions and push back against Azaersi's horde".

You certainly could run things saying that they're all helpless refugees and the campaign is about keeping them alive. In many ways, that would actually fit the adventures in the campaign better. And obviously, there will be some people like that - children, the elderly, and so on. But the writers seem to expect there to also be a core of competent characters who are actually going out and fighting back in various ways.

More importantly, that's how I ended up pitching the campaign to my group - leading a band of freedom fighters hiding in the wood, not babysitting a bunch of helpless survivors. So I kind of have to include that element in the story somehow. And if they are a bunch of freedom fighters, then they need to be doing some actual, erm, freedom fighting. Which leads to the question of whether the PCs should keep going out alone to attack entire fortresses and suchlike, or whether the militia should be involved; and if so, how to handle that.

I'm confused about what the militia is supposed to be doing during this book. Whether or not you're using the subsystem, the PCs are still working with a group of warriors wanting to defend their homeland. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to bring their militia to attack the keeps, rather than doing everything themselves?

It allows you to choose exactly how much to heal people, so you don't "overheal" them and waste the extra hit points. Increasing your efficiency in terms of spell points.

For example if someone is only down 3 hit points then normally you wouldn't want to waste a spell point healing them for 1d8+CL hit points. But with fount of life, you could cast a heal, use 3hp of that healing on your friend, and save the rest for the next time someone gets injured.

Quite a necro, but if Marshmallow is still around: how do you handle spell combat? The text makes it sound like you allow a spell-and-attack for a single act action as many times as you have primary attacks, but that seems enormously powerful...

(Continued from the review section)

Thanks for the detailed review, but I think you've made a mistake in your interpretation of how bracers of armour and enhancement bonuses to armour work. An enhancement bonus on a suit of armour increases the armour bonus to AC given by that suit of armour. It doesn't increase your AC directly. So if you wear a +5 leather armour and bracers of armour, you will be getting a +6 armour bonus to AC from the armour and a +8 armour bonus from the bracers. These don't stack, so your total bonus is +8. Not +13, as you suggest in the review.

How do you reconcile recovering Phaendar with the events of book 6? And more generally, with the fact that there's a big teleporty tower there which hobgoblins keep coming out of, and it's meant to be right in the middle of hobgoblin held territory?

Despite your combattive tone, I'll answer.

My apologies for the tone. I was writing on my phone and wasn't able to read through the post as much as I'd wanted. I've seen several rather toxic comments on these forums in response to questions like the one I asked, accusing the poster of Playing the Game Wrong because they dared to imply there are flaws with the system. I kind of got the impression you were one of those. Reviewing your post, I can see I was being unfair. Sorry.

It's up to the DM to decide how his story is going to run. If you're running an AP, a lot of that is done for you.

And yes, I'd be happy playing a caster in a game where there were some arbitrarily large number of encounters in a day. Because the players have some control over that too. They can decide to go back to town and rest. They can decide to camp out somewhere. Unless the DM is being particularly perverse, they have some input on how many encounters they're going to have in a given day.

I suppose that the fact that the players (almost) always can theoretically choose to rest and regain spells and accept whatever narrative cost is associated with that does make it a bit less bad than the extreme example I gave of "no regaining spells until you level up". But I still think some guidance for the GM is needed. If I'm making an adventure where the PCs have to go through the Dungeon of Twenty Encounters to rescue the Princess Macguffin, and Baron Evil is going to give them a time limit to get through before he kills her, then how long should that time limit be so rescuing the princess will be a reasonable challenge for the party, rather than being a cakewalk or nearly impossible? If I'm working out how much worse things get every time the PCs take a nap while the Demon Spawn of Arach-Nacha is still alive, how many days should I say it takes before the Spawn sends its army of kobolds to attack the local town? (That latter one is something that I actually had to decide in my campaign some years ago. In the end, the PCs rested twice and arrived just in time to see the attack starting, which was what I'd been hoping.)

If you want to houserule spellcasters regaining all their spellslots after a ten-minute rest, nobody's stopping you. But I think most spellcaster PCs know they need to economize their spells to some degree, because they can't count on there being only one or two encounters in a given day.

But doesn't that depend on the campaign? I mean I've played in games (in other systems) where there would be only a single encounter per month. I've played in other games (again, in other systems) where an entire book's worth of adventures would take place in one day.

If I tried to run the former game in PF2, the players would quickly figure that out and stop bothering to economise their spells. The reason they "know" they can't count on there just being one encounter per day is because it's common wisdom for GMs and module writers that a good adventure will at least sometimes include multiple encounters on a single day, in order to discourage casters from spending all their slots on a single encounter.

It seems to me that you've demonstrated by your own words that there is an expected number (or more accurately, range of numbers) of encounters per day, and that "always just 1 encounter" isn't within that expectation.

I think the limited resources of casters vs the near unlimited DPR of the martials should take into account treasure and gear. A wizard can double even triple their spell output with wands, staves, and especially scrolls. Granted they are still limited when compared to martials, but you cannot ignore the volume of non cantrips you can cast with scrolls the equivalence of magic arms/armor.

That seems to just be shifting the balance question to a different part of the game. How much should a wizard be spending on consumables, compared to advancing their gear. Would it be reasonable for me to say "This is a fast paced campaign with very little time for resting and lots of fighting; the wizard can expect to cast virtually all his magic from scrolls and to spend most of his gold on buying more of them"? My instinct is that that would be unreasonable and cause balance problems. The wizard wouldn't be able to improve his other gear and would fall behind where the game's maths expects him to be, and the designers seem to consider that a serious problem. But I don't know. The game doesn't tell me. It's possible that what I described is intended to be an option for how to run the game.

Age of Ashes, especially the first book, is a little bit of an outlier of encounter design.

Good to know. It was the first book, so that makes sense. Is there a more representative adventure you would recommend, if I wanted to examine one to see how Paizo is balancing things?

The GM really should take their party composition and player expectations into account when they are establishing a pace for their campaign.

I agree too. But it would be useful to have some idea of what would be considered "normal", especially when you're learning a new system and don't yet know what will be fun for your players' party composition. The GM can look at the party and say "OK, I've got a bunch of spellcasters, so they'll probably be expending daily resources on even easier encounters and will be wanting to rest more often than normal. I'd better make resting easier than I normally would to keep things fun." But that's no help if the GM doesn't know what that normal level would actually be.

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In summary, I just don't understand why you would build some classes around the idea of resources draining over the course of a day, and others around the idea of resources draining over the course of an encounter and then coming back when you take a rest, if you're intending your system to have tightly balanced maths, and to remain balanced no matter how many encounters the group has in a given day. It seems like that would inherently cause balance problems, and at least as far as my own playstyle is concerned, my playtesting seems to have confirmed that.

Casters can always use their cantrips. They are surprisingly effective. And they have many other options, using skills, roleplaying, etc, because they game shouldn't be reduced to mere combat.

Casters in D&D variants have always been weak at low levels. In PF2 they are less weak than in many other game systems. Don't turn up your nose at cantrips, and don't just judge them on their ability to deal damage.

AFAIK there are no suggested guidelines for encounters per day. It all boils down to the story the DM has decided to lay out, and what he wants to see the players accomplish. With non-magical healing available to every character, regardless of his class, most parties will have options for healing between encounters, unless the DM really puts a timer under their nose.

And for those who think spellcasters don't have enough slots, don't foget scrolls & wands. There are ways to boost spells per day, maybe not at first level, where everything is far too expensive, but soon-ish.

So what's the point of having slots per day at all? If, as you claim, the game is perfectly well balanced however many encounters you have per day, why not just say casters can't regain spells at all until they gain a level? That's effectively what a GM would be doing if "the story he decided to lay out" involved a lot of encounters in a day. Would you be happy playing a caster in a game with that rule?

Or flipping it around, what about just saying that casters regain all their slots with a ten minute rest? That's effectively what happens if the GM is running a "1 encounter per day" sort of game, which you claim is fine. Would you be happy playing a mundane character with a sword when the casters are dropping fireball after fireball in every combat and killing all the enemies far more efficiently than you?

Or are you saying that spells aren't really much more powerful than cantrips, so it doesn't really matter whether casters have spells available or not? Because if so, Paizo's own game design comments contradict you. I can't find the quote right now as I'm on my phone, but they explicitly designed cantrips to be backup options that were significantly worse than a martial character's attack or using a proper spell, but were at least able to achieve something.

In most D&D-esque systems, where some classes expend resources over multiple encounters and restock them when they rest, there's some common wisdom regarding how many encounters a party can face per day. Often this is spelled out by the game designers explicitly. Has Paizo made any comments about how many encounters they anticipate players having per day? If not, how many would you recommend?

I've repeatedly seen people on these forums claim that PF2 doesn't need such guidelines because there are ways to restore hp, etc, after every encounter so the resource drain of PF1 isn't really a thing, and I'd like to save time by responding to those claims in advance. To some extent, they seem to be valid. I tested the system by making a party of 4 characters (including a Champion) and running them through the first floor of the fortress in Age of Ashes, and thanks to some lucky dice rolls and regular use of Lay on Hands I was able to get through the whole thing without anyone dying and without having to rest for the night.

But the game didn't feel great. In 90% of the battles, my casters were on cantrip auto-attack, and contributing a lot less than the martials. I'd been anticipating using the druid as a healer, but in fact his healing spells only got used once in the final battle, where a character was at risk of dying. It was OK, because I was also playing the martial characters and that was fun, but if that had been a real game and I'd been playing a caster in it I'd have found it extremely boring, because of the large number of encounters per day. And even the martials were less fun to play than they would have been with more status effects and buffs flying around.

Conversely, if I played a campaign which had just one encounter per day and the casters were able to nova all their high level spell slots on each encounter, it seems like they'd be controlling the battles and it would feel bad to play a martial character.

Both of these extremes seem bad to me; bad enough that I wouldn't want to play in a game which regularly used them. But presumably, there must be some amount of content per day between those two extremes where the casters don't end up either controlling the game or relegated to cantrip duty in battle. What is that amount of content? Does it vary depending on the difficulty of the encounters, or the level of the party? How much tolerance is there in going over or under the amount, before the game becomes un-fun?

Your proposal for Dodge would mean that wearing a shield would be much less useful since you can't both raise a shield and Dodge. So effectively you're giving pay of the shield bonus to everyone without having to use a shield.

Martialmasters wrote:

If you don't like religion at all on some level cleric isn't for your, neither is champion.

I can play either but I don't play preachy characters.

I enjoy playing religious characters while not personally liking religion.

I'm pretty much the opposite. In real life I'm strongly Christian, and that makes playing religious characters feel rather awkward. Interestingly, it's not exactly the "pretending to worship another god feels like idolatory" problem, though. The thing is, the "gods" of Pathfinder (and D&D) seem...well, kind of rubbish and not worthy of worship. They're simply another type of creature within creation, not the One who created it all and is behind all things. In many cases they're simply humans who happened to gain a lot of power, in one case by accident! The whole "gods need prayer badly" trope is also problematic for me, and the idea that the cleric's power comes from "faith" rather than from the god feels like an awkward sort of distortion of ideas from Christianity. In short, my worldview would make me a textbook "atheist" in Golarion's terms, precisely because I'm a Christian. And that means that I view any character worshipping them as...at best woefully misguided and rather tragic. Which can be interesting to roleplay, but isn't something I'd want to play as with every character.

Also, ArchSage20, biblical afterlives include memory loss as petitioners? That's horrible.

You know tho really it doesn't make sense that christian's view death negatively unless you know your being sinful and are afraid of judgement... hmm actually maybe it does make sense...

While I'm here perhaps I can quickly clear up a couple of misunderstandings about Christianity.

Correction: The Delving, Exploration & Writing kits got a duplicate flint and steel which I didn't intend to include and which should be deleted.

I've been trying out PF2 with some solo adventures (that is, me GMing and controlling the whole party of PCs at the same time), and one of the things which has frustrated me is the very small number of spell slots. I don't know if it's just my playstyle, but I found myself playing my casters very conservatively, relying on the Champion's Lay on Hands and the Medicine skill for healing and avoiding using any daily resources if I could get away without them. In doing so, I discovered that unless my dice hated me or I found an enemy my builds were bad against, I could generally get through anything less than a severe encounter without spending any daily resources like spell slots. Thus I still had nearly all my spell slots when I reached the boss, and I was able to nova him and win easily and anticlimactically. For the rest of the battles, though, my casters felt rather unexciting - since I wasn't willing to cast their spells on fights where they weren't needed, they were stuck just using cantrips which rightly seem to be less effective than martial attacks. All in all, while it was an OK experience while I was playing the whole party, I think I would be rather disappointed to either play a caster, or play in a party with a caster if they were played in the way I was playing them. And yet that method is the one I gravitate to since I dislike expending resources I can't replace if I think I can safely avoid it. They're Too Awesome to Use, as TV tropes would put it.

(Digression: I think this effect is more pronounced than it is when I play PF1 because of the smaller number of spell slots making me want to hoard them more, and because the focus/medicine mechanics mean that hp isn't a resource you have to spend spells to restore any more, so unless there's an immediate time pressure I prefer to lose a few more hp and then rest for 10 minutes more rather than spend a daily ability to finish a fight faster.)

Rather than just complain about the issue, I've been trying to think of a solution, and I wonder about simply making spell slots recharge like focus points. Nearly everything else seems to recharge at that kind of rate anyway, including hp (if you have a healing focus power, or the right skill feats), so why not? Of course, you'd also have to decrease the number of spell slots you get, dramatically, to avoid overwhelming the noncasters and nova-ing every battle. I'm currently thinking of someting like this:

You get only 1 spell slot of each spell level you have access to. If you're a prepared caster, you prepare a spell in each slot at the start of the day as usual. If you cast spontaneously, then you can use the spell slot to cast any spell in your repertoire - use the official spell slot progression to determine how many spells you can have in your repertoire. A spell which lasts "until the next time you make your daily preparations" ends if you regain the spell slot using the Refocus activity. Otherwise, spellcasting works normally.

If instead your casting comes from archetype feats, you get one spell slot if you have basic spellcasting, a second slot if you have expert spellcasting, and a third if you have master spellcasting. These slots' levels are equal to the highest level slot their respective feats would normally give you at your level. For example, if you're level 14 and have Basic and Expert spellcasting, then your two spell slots will be 3rd and 5th level.

The Refocus activity is adjusted as follows:

Obviously, this is not a finished house rule. I'm not really experienced enough in the game to predict all the knock-on effects or judge what effect it will have on balance, so I'm posting here to ask: is this viable in principle, or will it break the game for some reason? As written, are martials and casters reasonably balanced in how much they can contribute to an encounter, or would it be better to be more generous/stingy? Does it make spontaneous casters too strong compared with prepared ones? How about archetype spellcasters? Which special abilities will need rewriting which I haven't noticed? How could they be rewritten? Are there more obvious solutions to the "Too Awesome to Use" problem which I haven't noticed?

Re: villain points.

It comes down to to this:

Should the GM actively use meta points against the heroes?

For some, even the notion that the GM gets to decide which monsters get plot armor is too much. They prefer the hands-off approach taken by Incapacitation: any monster that fulfills this or that criteria, gets plot armor.

I have no problem with this level of "meta assistance". After all, you decide that more as an adventure writer than as the games master. It is decided well before the encounter is played out. It doesn't change once the encounter is underway. Which monsters that are designated legendary doesn't change during play at all. It's preordained (for any given campaign).

I do however have a problem with villain points. They're meant to be used right there, in the encounter. Should THIS monster get them, or the NEXT? should I hold on to my villain points for "later" or spend them now? That makes me an active participant to a degree I find uncomfortable. Not to mention the added admin; I'm the GM - I already have my plate full. I don't need more variables to track.

Deciding when I write an adventure that Mr X gets plot armor is not shafting the players. Deciding on the spot that the monster suddenly gets to reroll a failed save does. It makes me feel like a dick, especially to the spellcaster whose spell now goes down the drain.

But mostly it comes down to this: I'm the GM, I can *already* help or hinder the NPCs as I see fit, to create the best experience for the players. I am not gonna pretend I play fair by using points accurately and stop when they run out! :-)

Look at it like this: every GM is already using invisible villain points of sorts, behind the scenes. And in one scene there might be zero villain points available, yet in the very next one, suddently there's a limitless amount!

These invisible villain points are of course not used for benefits as tangible as re-rolls or anything the players can detect. There aren't really any points, and nobody's keeping...

That's a fair point. And yeah, I'd noticed there's a...resistance to the idea of legendary saves around here. But why not give 1-2 of these hero points to individual enemies when making the adventure, instead of giving them legendary saves in 5e style? You could fluff it as certain creatures being chosen by Pharasma for great things, to give an in-universe explanation of why the PCs and "important" NPCs have the points and others don't.

Obviously, it might be a good idea to rename them to something less protagonist-centred, like "fate points".

Doing it this way means that there's some equality between the PCs and the NPCs - the plot-important NPCs are just receiving the same powers the PCs do, which may make it more palatable for people who don't like legendary saves. Burning away a hero/fate point is also more significant than burning away a legendary save - each point you force an enemy to spend in negating a nasty spell is one fewer two-action abilities the enemy can interrupt you with, so you've still achieved something significant. Rather than just getting the BBEG one step closer to actually being able to affect him with a spell.

As I think I said before, I'd suggest making the third option (surviving death) restricted to the PCs, and perhaps one or two enemies who you want to become recurring villains.

"What, everyone brought chalk?"

I've got a bit tired of seeing entire groups of adventurers all carrying exactly the same equipment, just because that's what was in the adventurer's pack. An average size party will have:

200ft of rope but no grapple
20 torches for lighting up the dungeon but no ten foot poles or crowbars
40 pieces of chalk but no paper for mapping

Clearly, this is a bit silly, so I set up some alternative options. These packs are a little more expensive than the standard one, as they include more gear, but they're still significantly cheaper than buying the stuff individually. For that reason, you can only buy these during character creation.

If anyone wants to contribute more specialisation options, please do. To match up with the ones above, they should add up to about 16-17sp in value, and should ideally contain a torch or a couple of candles in case no one went for the light specialisation.

You're acting like there is some inherent difference between "the monster is lower level than you, so it can't take one of you out of the fight with just one spell" and "you're lower level than the monster, so you can't take it out of the fight with just one spell" and declaring inequality.

I'm seriously not trying to pick sides here (like I said, I haven't actually got the experience to make an informed judgement yet) but there actually is a difference between those two. A monster is normally expected to fight a single battle, and lose. A PC is expected to fight a lot of battles, and win all of them. Changing that dynamic in a D&D based game would require a major overhaul of the game mechanics with that in mind, and 2e has (probably sensibly) not done so.

But if a PC is expected to fight a lot of battles and win, then letting enemies (permanently) take a PC out with one spell *is* problematic in a way which letting a PC take an enemy out with just one spell isn't. If an enemy loses to a single spell - even if it's a boss, or even the BBEG - all that happens is we have a bit of an anticlimax and the group has more resources available for the next encounter. Things proceed more or less as expected. If a PC gets unexpectedly killed, that has a massive impact on the entire campaign.

So it's normal, nowadays, to give PCs some sort of advantage, to compensate for having to fight so many more battles and to make sure they don't lose quite as easily. Hero points, that let you avoid death. Inspiration. In 1e, that was the point of giving PCs max hp at 1st level - to avoid them dying to a lucky critical hit. Giving the NPCs less money. Even something like tuning the xp budget so that the PCs will nearly always outnumber their enemies is an example. All other things being equal, a PC of a given level *is* more powerful than an NPC of the same level. And the game's encounter design (and, more to the point, its adventuring day) accounts for that.

When designing a system, you can go with a gritty simulationist and try to reduce those effects down to almost nothing, and end up with a world where PCs of a given level are no more (or less) powerful than NPCs or monsters of that level. That's fine. But you need to incorporate that very carefully into the way you balance encounters. Especially if "one level higher" means near-immunity to a class of spells. If you do that, then you should make sure to only use high level enemies when the narrative really calls for an enemy that negates that stuff, not just when you felt like making an enemy slightly stronger instead of giving him another ally. And your balancing mechanics should account for the way that immunity moves around between level+1 and level+2 depending on the party level.

2e doesn't do that fine tuning. It just shrugs and says a level+1 enemy is always worth 1.5 on-level enemies, when in reality that changes dramatically depending on how much the casters are using incapacitation effects and whether you're playing at an even or odd level.

Edit: I suppose the trouble with doing this sort of approach is really is that incapacitation is so binary. For most characters, an enemy having 1 more level means they get a +1 bonus to all their defences and a few extra hp.* And that's the case whatever level the enemy is. So it has a pretty predictable, linear effect. But for a caster who's trying to use incapacitation spells, a monster gaining a level normally makes relatively little difference to its defences. It gets a +1 to saves, but as thenobledrake rightly points out, most incapacitation magic does something vaguely useful even on a successful save so that's not so painful as it is for other characters. But when you cross that particular threshold from level to level+1, or level+1 to level+2, it suddenly has a massive impact. And that causes problems with encounter balance which the system doesn't address - at even levels, an encounter with 3 on level enemies will be a lot easier for an incapacitation based caster to deal with than 2 level+1 enemies, even though the two encounters have the same XP value. And vice versa at odd levels.

*And an improvement to their offences, of course, but that will be the same for everyone.

To get back to the actual question, there are some house rules I saw in another thread which try to remove incapacitation, while keeping things balanced by giving every spell a minor buff to compensate.

I'm not intending to use them right now - I'm currently testing the system by running a group of GM-played characters through Age of Ashes and want to give incapacitation a fair chance in actual gameplay - but I could see myself using them if I find incapacitation is as irritating as it looks.

Possibly one could add some sort of extra cost to supercharging a spell, so you have the choice of using the base version or the upgrade. A gold cost like esoteric material components from 1e, or perhaps a cost in hp or a condition, or a wild magic chance of some kind. Or something else, if you have any other ideas.

Also, regardless of anything else, it might be worth adding something like the following spell:

That would at least allow you to make an informed decision, knowing when a creature is too high level for an incapacitate spell so you don't waste the spell against an enemy that turned out to be slightly too high level for it. The reason for limiting the number of uses per turn is so that you can't just scan an entire crowd of people in one round and find the high level assassin among them.

I really think the root of the issue stems from a mismatched view.

A poster on the internet says "single mooks" when referring to the same creature which the game itself calls "standard creature or low-threat boss" and regardless of the case what is being referred to is a participant in combat estimated to be roughly equal in power to a member of the players' party.

Creates a weird narrative in my head to call at-level enemies "mooks" because then, if being consistent, what's being complained about is that some "mook" can't one-shot a non-mook.

Maybe it's me not understanding the intended meaning of "mook" in this context? To me, the word "mook" is synonymous with the word "lackey" which the game uses for creatures of party level -2 and lower, more-so than it is synonymous with "standard creature" or "boss"

I think it might be because of the number of enemies you tend to face in a given day, and their distribution. True, an enemy of level equal to your own is theoretically equivalent to a PC in power, but in terms of how likely they are to survive? Not so much.

For example, the second chapter of Hellknight Hill includes the following encounters:
3 on level enemies
1 level +1
2 level -1
1 level +1
2 on level, with the help of a level +1 ally
1 level +1
2 on level
1 level +1
3 level -2
1 level +1
4 level -1
1 level +2 (the boss)

Total:
3 level -2
6 level -1
7 on level
5 level +1
1 level +2

As far as I can tell from a cursory reading, it's expected that the PCs get through most of these encounters within at most a couple of days, resting for an hour and using treat wounds every couple of encounters. If it takes much more time than that, then the boss's read-aloud text doesn't really make sense. (Side question: is there an official guideline for how many encounters are expected in an adventuring day?)

So, narratively, the on-level enemies //are// mooks in this adventure. They attack in groups, and exist to be killed in large numbers by the PCs over the course of a day. Even if it completely takes him enemy out of the battle, my instinct is that using one of your 2-3 highest level spell slots* to do something which only harms one enemy of your level is a waste of the spell slot.

Unless I've misunderstood badly (entirely possible, I'm new to 2e) and you're expected to rest for the night after every couple of battles, you won't be able to use your highest level spell slots in every combat, or anywhere near every combat. This isn't the case in 1e, where you can generally use a top level spell in each nontrivial encounter and still not run out. But in 2e, you have 2-3 spells of your maximum spell level, and have to conserve them carefully and use them only in encounters where they'll be most effective or are most needed. And when you use those high level slots, if you use them well, you should be having a bigger impact on the encounter than another party member who wasn't expending resources.

If we're playing at an even level in an adventure whose enemies follow this distribution, we have three spell slots of max level, or six if this takes place over a couple of days. Assuming you use incapacitation spells and about half the enemies fail their saves, you'll be able to remove about 3 equal level mooks from that roster over the course of the adventure - and then the rest of the time you have nothing left but lower level spell slots and cantrips. I don't have much experience with 2e, but to me that looks like a rather poor net contribution to the battle given how many enemies there are in total.

If we're at an odd level, things get a little better - you only have two spell slots, but at least you can use them against the level+1 enemies. Making the same assumption, you can probably remove a couple of those solo encounters entirely, although again at the cost of being significantly less useful in combat than the rest of the group for most of the rest of the adventure.

If I've misunderstood and it's expected that the group will expend top-level spell slots in even most "moderate" encounters and rests are expected every 3-4 encounters, then I agree that it doesn't make sense to call on-level enemies "mooks" and the balance is more sensible than perhaps it seems. If so, then I think we could do with some rather clearer guidelines in that regard, both in the rules and published adventures. (Or possibly those already exist and I could do with a higher proficiency rating in Perception.)

But if the number of encounters Paizo seems (to me) to expect PCs to get through in a day is accurate, then on-level enemies simply have to be treated as mooks when analysing which spells to use, to avoid running out of spell slots early on. The game claims that a single on-level enemy alone can constitute a "low-threat boss"; but that enemy will be worth only 40XP, which the game defines as a "trivial" encounter where you "shouldn't need to spend significant resources". So either Paizo's got a different definition of "boss" to me, or their guidelines are a bit confused here.

*Well, one of your two only spell slots as this particular adventure is level one. And I realise that as this is taking place at level 1, in this particular adventure you could actually use an incapacitate on the +1 level enemies. I'm just trying to get an idea for the way that Paizo is distributing their enemies relative to the PC level, though.

I notice you've argued in other threads for giving suitably important enemies some equivalent of 5e's legendary saves (to replace the incapacitation trait). Could you combine the two ideas together, and give enemies hero (villain?) points? Or, if you don't mind things being a little metagamy, give the GM some villain points which he can use on any enemy he likes?

You might have to restrict the "incredible survival" option though, since it's expected that enemies will be killed in the encounter they appear in so it would arguably be rather silly of them to squander their points on anything else.

Apologies if this turns out to be a duplicate; there was some sort of hiccup with the forum the first time I tried to post this.

I've been trying to work out whether Lonjiku's wife was Tian or Varisian, and there seem to be contradictions in the timelines. She has a clearly Minkaian/Japanese name, and the fan-run wikis seem to think she was Tian. Originally I assumed that they had met and married before coming to Varisia; but according to the RotR appendix (and the backstory in Jade Regent) Lonjiku was born in Varisia and never went to Tian at all. So...what? Was it just a strange coincidence that Atsuii was also from Minkai? Did he (or his father) deliberately seek out another Minkaian out of some bizarre wish to preserve their bloodline's purity (an odd decision when you're specifically trying to *conceal* your identity)? Or did she change her name when they married for some reason?

Pixie Rogue, I believe we're starting at level 6.

pi4t wrote:

I decided to make my character using Myth-weavers. I can always move her to some other format if that's preferred.

Ariane Wald, archer-cleric of Freya.

I technically spent slightly more than half my WBL on my bow, so I've given it a name and tied it into my backstory to acknowledge its significance.

It looks good, go ahead and join discussion when ready:)

Thanks!

Should I make the character in the Paizo forums in some way, in order to post properly as my character? How do I do that? Sorry for the newb-ish question: I haven't played a PbP game on the Paizo forum before and can't seem to figure out how to get it to work.

Ariane's HP: 5d8 ⇒ (5, 2, 2, 4, 8) = 21
Fregi's HP: 6d8 ⇒ (6, 2, 8, 7, 3, 4) = 30

I decided to make my character using Myth-weavers. I can always move her to some other format if that's preferred.

Ariane Wald, archer-cleric of Freya.

I technically spent slightly more than half my WBL on my bow, so I've given it a name and tied it into my backstory to acknowledge its significance.

Ah, right. I've read through the introductions of SoF (so I'm aware of the premise) and at one point was vaguely aware of what the different modules in the path involved, but I haven't read through the individual adventures in much more detail than that. I was specifically trying to avoid spoilers when I looked at them, as I was intending to play them solo...Speaking of which, this character is largely a merger of two character concepts for solo characters that I tried with FGG modules.

I've never actually made a character on the Paizo forums before; all my previous pbp roleplaying has been on giantitp/myth weavers. How does one do it?

Edit: Also, is Nordic/Norse/whatever a distinct language from Common in the Lost Lands? If so, is that remotely likely to come up? For flavour/backstory reasons, I think I ought to know the language if it does exist. If it's not likely to come up in the actual game and would just be flavour, perhaps I could persuade you to let me have it for free?

Edit 2: How are HP being done? Max first level then average rounded down after that?

Hmm. Count me interested. I own some of the FGG materials and have looked through them a bit, but not enough for it to be likely to be a problem. I'm aware of the general layout of RA and I can vaguely remember the first two parts of Stoneheart Valley, but that's all. I am, of course, prepared to keep my limited amount of OOC knowledge separated from my IC decisions.

Given the current party composition, maybe a cleric of Thyr? Provided that doesn't mean I'm expected to be a healbot, of course.

Edit: Or possibly an archer cleric of Freya. (Although OOC I'd like to ignore the "sexuality and procreation" part of her description if I do that.)

I'm planning on starting to run Rise of the Runelords, and am planning on making some adjustments to the plot. Based on a previous conversation with James Jacobs, I'm concerned that some of the things I'm thinking of may conflict with things in Return, which I'm interested in running at some future point.

I can't really afford to buy Return at this point; at least, not just for the sake of checking whether my changes will be cause issues if I ever end up running the AP. Of course, I'll buy the path if and when I start running it, but in the meantime, would someone mind explaining the plot of the path to me in detail? With particular emphasis on what Alaznist gets up to (and has been doing before the path began) and on the time travel elements? Many thanks.

Can I ask people that are for wands of CLW a question. Is the reason you want the wands because of difficulty? So far I'm at chapter 3 and a cleric wasn't "obligatory." We haven't had any TPKs. If you use good tactics and teamwork you can get through combats that are quite difficult and still come out with health to spare.

Speaking for myself (and I believe most people who are in favour of the mechanic feel the same way), it's not exactly because of difficulty. I'm quite in favour of difficult games and gritty settings myself. But having access to reliable healing (either through wands, or a dedicated healbot) makes the game far, far easier.

If every group has access to reliable healing, that's fine, and challenges can be balanced with that in mind. If no one has access to reliable healing, that's also fine (if a bit unusual for d&d systems). Any given GM, or writer of a module, will tone down the power of the encounters they send against the group.

However, if both modes of play are possible, and if which mode you go for depends not on the GM's choices about his setting, or the players' telling the GM how hard they want the game to be, but on whether anyone has a character concept that involves being a cleric and/or wants to play a "healbot", that's a problem. Particularly if the game is being balanced assuming you're playing one mode or the other, and incorporates that assumption into its guidance on how dangerous an enemy will be for the group. And particularly if that game is known for its modules and adventure paths, with prewritten encounters designed to save the GM having to design the encounters himself.

I congratulate you on getting through to chapter 3 without a cleric. As, unfortunately, I've not yet been able to play the playtest modules I can't comment on how much of an achievement that is. But it seems like however easy the modules may or may not be without a cleric, they'll be a good deal easier with one. Indeed, your group (who appreciate a harder challenge, and perhaps put more thought than most groups into your tactics) might have found it too easy.

If it was possible to play through the game without a cleric BUT you had to spend money and resonance on healing potions would you still not like it because you want to have inexpensive unlimited healing and start combat full hp every time to make the game easier?

If it was properly balanced, sure. That is to say, if the amount the group was losing out on in terms of extra money for gear, and extra magic item "slots" from resonance, was equal to the power gained from a character changing from a cleric who focussed their abilities on healing to a more offensive class and build. However, I don't think that's possible, at least without coming up with some radically different limiting mechanic - the amount of healing a group will need is just too variable depending on player skill, the nature of the encounters the GM likes to throw at them, etc.

And if Paizo doesn't get the balance right for your group, it becomes either inexpensive unlimited healing - but worse, inexpensive unlimited healing that the premade modules aren't balanced for - or either a TPK (if resonance stops the group healing and their hp runs out in an adventure) or a long, drawn out death spiral (if money is the limit and the group starts falling more and more behind the wealth the modules expect). This can be partly dealt with by a skilled GM who isn't running a premade module (or is willing to do substantial tweaks), of course. But "Pathfinder 2: Ignore our GMing advice and make sure you're an experienced GM before you start playing! Oh, and don't buy the modules as they won't be properly balanced for your group!" is not a very good tagline :)

And anyway, it's certainly not possible to play without a caster who can heal you at present. Unless you play a human, you can't even use mundane methods to heal hp at all until level 2, and even then medicine is almost as likely to harm you as heal you.

Maybe I'm just a different type of gamer. I like difficulty. I don't play games on easy mode because it's too boring. Or maybe it's not a difficulty thing idk. I just can't really understand the complaints because from my games a cleric hasn't been required, and our party got through fine.

I also like difficulty. That's why, in the game I'm playing in at the moment, my level 3 halfling earned the emnity of a level 20 lich wizard-king in backstory. In a game where the PCs we're using spheres of power, which is considerably less powerful at high levels. It's also why I'm running an old school megadungeon, and have added a number of house rules (to 5e, as it happens) to make things more difficult.

If Paizo would offer optional variants to the rules to make things harder for the players, I'd be rather interested. 5e has done a little bit of that - the DMG contains options for tweaking the resting mechanics, and so on.

But I don't want the difficulty to be determined by whether someone's playing a cleric or not.

Well, the traditional four-character party is a Damage Dealer/Tank, a Damage Dealer/Skill Monkey, a Healer/Buffer, and a Battlefield Controller/Debuffer. Truth is, if you don't have any of these roles, you're probably going to notice the difference (if you're an experienced player that knows what could be done, anyway). Most adventures are written with the assumption that you have some way of accessing the abilities of the traditional party, even if that means hiring an NPC back in town.

Well, I question why that should have to be the case, just because "it's always been done this way before". If we're not willing to change anything about the game, we might as well just go back to PF1 and forget the new edition entirely.

But even assuming we want to keep enforcing those roles...the four-character party from PF doesn't have a healer/buffer, it has a buffer. And a wand of CLW. And a trap option of trying to use the buffer as a healer.

Conversely, PF2 has a healer, who can also do a bit of buffing. But not a great deal of it, since buffs have been severely nerfed in this edition. And based on the frequency of threads like these, it seems like while there are plenty of people willing to play a battlefield controller/debuffer, and plenty who enjoy playing a damager dealer/skill monkey, and plenty of enjoy the damage dealer/tank role, significantly less than a quarter of the player base wants to play a primary healer. Which would mean that if the game required every group to have a primary healer, then obviously people are going to be forced to fill that role when they want to do something else, which can't be healthy for the game.

But I still think out of combat healing should be a premium and not something every party can have unlimited access to.

Trouble is that in a system where out of combat healing is at a premium, a group with a healer (whether that means someone who heals in combat, or just someone who heals out of combat, in this hypothetical system) will enter every combat on full hp, while a group without a healer will have their hp whittled away and have a far lower hp for the later battles (in the same day, or before downtime lets them heal naturally, depending on whether you use resonance or gold cost to limit the healing).

This is a major difference in power, particularly since Pathfinder expects you to have several encounters per day and end with the hardest ones. Theoretically there should be a sweet spot where you can make non-healer healing just rare enough that parties without a healer enter their last battles down [whatever fraction of their hp you think is balanced]. But in practice, I think there are far too many variables that differ between groups, and between adventures, to be able to pull it off that effectively - how many encounters do we have, how well did the PCs play them, were the dice favourable towards them, etc - which will mean that the amount of healing a group needs will vary quite a lot from game to game and from day to day, even among characters who are the same level. So one day one group, may find that the healing you've allotted them is more than sufficient to let them encounter the boss on full hp (the wand of CLW scenario) while the next day another group may find they run out of healing and TPK before reaching the boss.

neaven wrote:

Should you have some form of healing in your party? Yes. Should a player have to spend some of the relatively limited choices they get each level up on healing? Very much no in my opinion - it's not healthy for a game to mandate a particular role in that way. It makes people less likely to enjoy playing, because either they have to stick someone else with the role or they get stuck with it themselves. It should be a "nice to have if someone wants to bring it, but not mandatory to proceed" type situation.

If only there was some sort of... reliable out of combat healing. Perhaps some sort of cheap reusable item? One that could be carried easily, but wouldn't be so efficient as to make it powerful in combat. Perhaps it replicates a low level healing spell?

Nah, that can't be right. Resonance knocks that one on it's head. Oh well.

;)

What you suggest removes the healer class and healing skill from the game entirely. Additionally its literally the games job to set roles for party member heck its a role playing game.

Sorry that this is going to sound blunt, but no, it doesn't remove the possibility of a healer role. In 1e, even the optimisation community considers Dreamscarred Press's vitalist a solid tier 3 class, and that's all about healing. But unlike the 1e cleric, it's capable of doing competitive amounts of healing in combat. And someone capable of doing that is a very useful addition to the party, even in a setting that has wands of CLW for cheap out of combat healing.

If you mean that a wand of CLW means you can't have a "healer" whose healing is too slow to work in combat, then yes. But is "guy who contributes nothing much in combat, but then tells the party to restore their hit points to full after the battle" really a party role we want? Frankly, it sounds really boring to play.

Also, I've always interpreted the "role-playing" in "RPG" to refer to pretending to be your character, not to the somewhat nebulous party roles of healer, arcane caster, etc. So I'm not playing the role of a healer, I'm playing the role of a halfling who was freed from slavery by a dragon and has a curse preventing her from attacking people, but has access to certain magic powers she uses to heal the party. My character fits into the healer role within the party as it currently stands, but could theoretically switch to some other role if the party's composition changes, or she breaks her curse.

I think healers shouldn't be "mandatory" but I feel like the party should be punished for not having one. A few hundred gold (or silver in this edition) wand shouldn't completely replace the role of a character. Imagine if a wand of burning hands was the most "efficient" way to deal damage. People would hate it instantly because then all we would have is character with a ton of AC and health running around with explody wands. That's how clerics and healers feel in 1e. You HAVE to build for damage if you want to be efficient because otherwise you're not pulling your weight.

Strictly speaking, a wand of burning hands is the most efficient way to deal damage, calculated on a hp-for-gp ratio. Or it's some other level 1 spell, depending on whether you need the AoE. The "punishment" for relying on wands is that you can't do damage quickly, making the strategy useless in combat. If you had to, say, melt your way through a wall of ice, though, then a wand of burning hands would probably be your best option.

And the situation is similar here. The "punishment" for not having a healer is that you can't heal in combat. Bring along a healer, and you should be able to heal much more quickly, in a way that's actually worth doing in combat. Unfortunately, the "healing" Paizo classes in PF1e (and, to be fair, their counterparts in 3.5 and 3e) aren't able to do that, which has led to this idea that strong healing in combat is OP and that having a healer who just heals outside combat is somehow the default.

Yeah, I actually agree. Getting heavy armor proficiency is as easy as starting down the Fighter multiclass path, or you invest three general feats into it. But at the start, Mage Armor will get you through the lower levels.

I think you've misunderstood my point. Yes, getting full armour proficiencies with a single feat is also probably not great design, but even if Paizo removed that option, your best choice would still be to use heavy armour without proficiency, rather than using mage armour. Because there's no penalty for using armour you're not proficient in, other than it being slightly less effective.

There are a few worthwhile things left to put on yourself, like Mage Armor, False Life and Mirror Image.

Actually, no, Mage Armour is abysmal because of the way armour proficiencies work in PF2. All you lose for wearing armour you're not proficient in is 2 points of AC; until the very high levels a wizard gets a better AC by just wearing the heaviest armour he can afford and not casting mage armour. Even if he didn't bother to get proficiency. And that way he can also dump dexterity to no higher than 12, rather than raising it at every possible opportunity to maybe be competitive with the armour-wizard's AC. And he doesn't have to spend one of his highest level spell slots.

I also find mundane healing to be far too weak. I wrote up my thoughts in this thread.

TL;DR: Currently, mundane healing is unable to stand in for a magic healer, even suboptimally. And if you have a magic healer, it's so weak in comparison that it's not worth investing in. To solve this, allow medicine to heal hp without Battle Medic as a 10 minute activity, let each creature benefit from mundane healing once per hd per day rather than the current limit; and reduce the DC and/or remove the critical failure effect.

For various reasons, it looked like the playtest game I'm participating in was going to be without a class that could use healing magic. Initially we thought this would be fine. Perhaps suboptimal, but we could always rely on the medicine skill, and perhaps later someone could multiclass into cleric.

But we then realised that the equivalent of Treat Deadly Wounds from PF1 is locked behind a skill feat. Without that feat (battle medic) there is no way to use medicine to heal hit point damage (other than bringing people from 0hp to 1hp). This is a serious problem, since nonhumans can't get their first skill feat at level 2. Thus, at level 1 a party without a caster with healing will have no way to recover hp other than bed rest, or items/NPCs the GM plants in the adventure. Obviously, this is a problem, as it means that every game starting at first level will need a divine/primal caster.

The obvious solution to this is to shift the action that Battle Medic offers into an activity under the medicine skill, that takes a long time to do - perhaps an hour, like Treat Deadly Wounds in PF1, or perhaps ten minutes like Natural Medicine's option. Battle Medic would then turn that into a single action, allowing it to be used in combat.

In a separate but related complaint, the amount healed by Battle Medic doesn't scale properly with level. Since at each level everyone gains an extra hit die, your healing should also increase by about a hit die's worth of hp to remain effective. The Heal spell does this; it starts with (a little more than) 1d8hp, and each level it's heightened increases it by 2d8. On the other hand, Battle Medic just remains fixed. Unless you make the skill master/legendary and get a high enough bonus to meet the greater DCs, but even then it can only do a maximum of 4 dice of healing which is worse than a third level Heal spell.

This could be solved by simply allowing each creature to benefit from mundane healing once per day per hit die of the creature. Battle Medic would still be of limited value mid-battle, but at least it would be possible to play the game without someone being stuck playing a healbot caster.

This also solves another exploit/problem: since Bolstered only prevents you getting healing again from the same person, you can get more healing if you go round asking lots of different people to heal you one after the other.

A cleric would still be the best healer, since they a) have magic to augment their medicine, and b) they'll have a high wisdom naturally.

Oh, and either lower the DC for Battle Medic, or ditch the critical failure effect. Preferably both, at least for the ten minute option I suggested above. Currently Nature is better than Medicine for healing people outside combat!

These hobbies are going to cost you money, there are plenty of free systems out there, and is blatantly obvious that they're free because they're much worse systems.

Erm...you realise that Pathfinder 1e is free, right?

(Also the various retroclones of old school versions of the game, which do have enough to recommend them besides nostalgia that I have difficulty saying they're "much worse" than modern systems. Just a different style of game.)