A disease has an incubation period, then a Fort save, and then WHAM! the victim has something very nasty happen to them. The bit of nastiness seems to come without warning - make a Fort save, if it fails, take the consequences.
Should players get some warning of the coming disease -- they start feeling sick but don't yet have any consequences? This would give them time to Remove Disease before the nastiness. You'd have to let them make the Fort save in advance to see if the disease will actually progress.
Or maybe after incubation and the Fort save, the disease manifests in a minor way (say 1 point of ability damage) then quickly does it's full damage (within 6 hours let's say). That gives them time to adjust to it.
Thoughts? Do diseases come out of nowhere to do too much damage?
Getting prewarning of a disease (or exposure to a disease) sounds like a use for the Heal skill (or maybe the appropriate Knowledge skill for a monster-transmitted disease like devil chills).
The initial damage for most diseases doesn't seem that bad. Usually it's something like 1d4 ability damage (which can be healed easily enough with a Lesser Restoration or two).
The initial damage rolls are a 1d3. Not world shattering to PCs. And I believe the disease description says something about the initial symptoms being a cough.
I used flu-like symptoms, those visual ones where NPC close friends tell you that you don't look so good. "You look tired," was a commonly heard comment from NPCs.
I used flu-like symptoms, those visual ones where NPC close friends tell you that you don't look so good. "You look tired," was a commonly heard comment from NPCs.
And don't forget that with one night of rest, they recover 1 point of ability ;-)
What about immunities? I can't recall any rules on whether or not surviving exposure to certain diseases will prevent you from contracting them again.
Then there's the complex issues, like "does Golarion civilization have the germ theory of disease?"