I've been thinking about trying to split the middle. Put some type of limit on short rests per day. You can only do it 4X and every time you just heal up to full. After that, you have to rely on your resources to keep you upright. Not sure if it will work as intended, but I'd love to get back to resource attrition style gaming and bust up the 15 lunch break adventuring day of PF2.In my experience, the best method of generating a particular style of play is to get players that want that to be how the game works and make sure there aren't any deal-breaker-level disincentives to playing that way.
Every attempt I've ever seen at trying to make the rules force a particular style of play upon players that don't want it just results in ignoring the rule, working around the rule, outright changing the rule, or finding a different game to play. That's where the 5/15 minute workday originates; the game rules set up the expectation you'd push on until your entire party was genuinely spent (and either had prayers that no encounter would interrupt their rest or had just enough resources left to hopefully endure any interruptions while resting), but it delivered that expectation by having encounters be speed-bumps if you have your resources and death marches if you don't, so players figured out how to genuinely avoid the death march.
I believe a house-rule that limits a party to 4x per day healing up to full without spending precious resources, and after that you're left with whatever you've got would just result in parties having exactly 4 encounters and then refusing to press on further that day (5 encounters if their willing to hope for uninterrupted rest for the night), whereas PF2's current rules I've seen (and been in) parties that pressed on for 10+ encounters in a single day because the narrative suggested that was the thing to do, and the game didn't make the difference in difficulty between the first few encounters and the last few encounters significant enough for the players...
I hear you, im trying to make PF2 work for me and I think I can with a handful of variant rules. I got a nice band of players I've been with for a long time, we know what we like.
What seemed like a narrative play for you, has felt like the 15 lunch break adventuring day to us. So naturally, if I go with a 4X short rest per day thats also going to have to calculate into my GM design. If it ends up like a 15 min adventuring day, thats ok, id prefer to how PF2 shakes out now.
As a GM home brewing content, I generally set up big encounters that spill over onto each other without a chance to rest between them, and then only tend to have one or two of these mega encounters a day. By mega encounters I usually mean 2 or 3 moderate-ish encounters collapsing on to each other. Even if the party is in a dungeon, I usually bring in a few rooms together, and then usually give the party at least an hour to rest afterwards before pushing another encounter on them.
I know some GMs are hesitant to fold encounters on top of each other, but it is more brutal to give the party 2 or 3 minutes to start doing their post battle healing, after all their buffs have expired, and then have the next room peek in, than it is to just have the reinforcements arrive on top of the other encounter and have the party decide either to push through it while they are going strong, or retreat before a foe they don’t think they can handle. When parties decide to take a 10 minute rest, they often trap themselves in little rooms that they cannot easily retreat from and set themselves up for a TPK if their healing is interrupted.
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I hear you, im trying to make PF2 work for me and I think I can with a handful of variant rules. I got a nice band of players I've been with for a long time, we know what we like.
I think that's where the other part of what thenobledrake was saying comes in. Have a talk with your group about how you all want to play. How do you personally want to play, what do they want to get out of it? When you agree on the kind of rhythm and difficulty, then talk about mechanics. What do your players think is standing in the way of the game being the way you all want it?
It sounds cliche but it was definitely an insight from prior discussions on this topic. Go for open discussion with your players about what everyone likes, and avoid being judgemental ("you want it easy"). You need some open communication because finding the game pace that's perfect for your group really isn't something that obviously and automatically happens.
For me personally for example, I don't actually really need the game to be very hard. It's almost shocking to admit but I'm quite okay with an easy game, although it's also fine if it's hard from time to time. I don't really like constantly hard though. And I prefer interestingly hard over just being hit over the head with inflated numbers hard. If I look back and think "wow we had totally overlooked that sort of enemies before and weren't ready, how can we do better in the future" I like that. If it's just a L+3 monster that never fails a save against anything I'm gonna have sour grapes. We'll maybe bull through but it's most like just slogging through author cheese than an interesting surprising fight.
And what I really want from pacing is that the pacing and the narrative match. In Agents of Edgewatch there's a location that narratively you should be raiding at high speed to capture someone that you would expect to flee when he realizes you're coming. But it's also effectively a rough dungeon with almost a dozen encounters that you're supposed to level up in the middle of. To be able to slog through it you might need multiple days and definitely lots of rest in between, which really undermines the narrative.
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I hear you, im trying to make PF2 work for me and I think I can with a handful of variant rules. I got a nice band of players I've been with for a long time, we know what we like.I think that's where the other part of what thenobledrake was saying comes in. Have a talk with your group about how you all want to play. How do you personally want to play, what do they want to get out of it? When you agree on the kind of rhythm and difficulty, then talk about mechanics. What do your players think is standing in the way of the game being the way you all want it?
It sounds cliche but it was definitely an insight from prior discussions on this topic. Go for open discussion with your players about what everyone likes, and avoid being judgemental ("you want it easy"). You need some open communication because finding the game pace that's perfect for your group really isn't something that obviously and automatically happens.
For me personally for example, I don't actually really need the game to be very hard. It's almost shocking to admit but I'm quite okay with an easy game, although it's also fine if it's hard from time to time. I don't really like constantly hard though. And I prefer interestingly hard over just being hit over the head with inflated numbers hard. If I look back and think "wow we had totally overlooked that sort of enemies before and weren't ready, how can we do better in the future" I like that. If it's just a L+3 monster that never fails a save against anything I'm gonna have sour grapes. We'll maybe bull through but it's most like just slogging through author cheese than an interesting surprising fight.
And what I really want from pacing is that the pacing and the narrative match. In Agents of Edgewatch there's a location that narratively you should be raiding at high speed to capture someone that you would expect to flee when he realizes you're coming. But it's also effectively a rough dungeon with almost a dozen encounters that you're supposed to level up...
Theres no need to have an open discussion, we already had it. We dont like the short rest mechanics in PF2. We feel its too tedious to deal with all the time. Also, we feel like its necessary because fights are not something to enter at half HP in PF2. We would like to skip this monotonous "lunch break" process entirely.
We want resource attrition in our games, which I know modern games have been moving away from. It feels like some of this lunch break weirdness is because the designers were too afraid to just call focus abilities encounter powers. Even 4E had healing surges that gave you a good attrition pace mechanic. We are trying to find it in PF2. If the answer is PF2 is desperately trying to do away with that, then we will move on. We just love Paizo and want to give PF2 an honest go. We did that, now we are in tweak it to work mode, because there are many things we do like.
The AP encounters are always a crapshoot. Sometimes the author gets cute and sets up something that seems cool, but doesn't match up well at the table. Thats why I think the AP specific forums are such a great thing to have. Checking for hotspots and cool variants that people come up with is part of my AP prep. It's also not unusual for adventure writers to have some awkwardness in the beginning as they learn to write for a new system. Usually the first adventures out tend to be the worst ones mechanically and narratively on the table.
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If you figure out what you need to do to PF2 to make attrition work, that's interesting too.
I think PF2 did slightly better than call Focus "encounter powers"; instead of asking "why can I do X once and Y once" it's "you have 2 focus, you could spend it both on X or Y or one of each". But yeah, encounter powers were not a crazy idea in bases, but 4E did badly on flavoring them.
but 4E did badly on flavoring them.
Not long after 4e came out they released Psionics. Instead of having encounter powers they have a pool of points they could use to enhance the effectiveness of their normal at-will abilities, with some abilities having enhanced upgrades that cost multiple points, creating a more flexible pool of abilities you could sort of mix-and-match from encounter to encounter.
It's a shame they didn't come up with the idea sooner, because you rename it from psionics to stamina and it could have addressed a lot of the issues people had with martial encounter powers.
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Theres no need to have an open discussion, we already had it. We dont like the short rest mechanics in PF2. We feel its too tedious to deal with all the time. Also, we feel like its necessary because fights are not something to enter at half HP in PF2. We would like to skip this monotonous "lunch break" process entirely.
We want resource attrition in our games, which I know modern games have been moving away from.
You might look at the Stamina optional rules too. That would give the characters a 'most of the way' heal that they can use 3-5 times per day. The downside being that once they run out of Resolve Points, there isn't a way to get back their Stamina HP other than a night's rest.
And yes, if you and your players want this style of game, then it is certainly appropriate to use alternate rules or even homebrew houserules in order to get that type of mechanics.
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but 4E did badly on flavoring them.Not long after 4e came out they released Psionics. Instead of having encounter powers they have a pool of points they could use to enhance the effectiveness of their normal at-will abilities, with some abilities having enhanced upgrades that cost multiple points, creating a more flexible pool of abilities you could sort of mix-and-match from encounter to encounter.
It's a shame they didn't come up with the idea sooner, because you rename it from psionics to stamina and it could have addressed a lot of the issues people had with martial encounter powers.
I feel that 4e psionics are generally worse than the base. At least you have to consider using different powers at different times base (even if cycling all your encounter powers is going to be what you do anyway, you still have to decide the ordering). With psions, there’s no choice really, you just use the same power (Dishearten, Lightning Rush, Brutal Barrage, etc.) over and over again. It leads to an (in my opinion) unhealthy gamestate where because you can use one thing many times, you’re incentivised to pump everything you have into one thing, and 4e feats let you deliver on that frong.
The solution? I don’t know. I prefer mana bar to slot/use based myself, but in many years of thinking about it I’ve never come up with a way to circumvent the inherent issues a manabar has (scaling, spamming and gravitation towards high or low).