I would react to this rule by getting scrolls of CLW instead of a wand. Yes, it is more expensive, but not so much more that they aren't practical.
Usually the adventuring day ends when the casters start running out of spells. If you desire a shorter adventuring day, make out of combat healing less available, and you will get it. Most people seem to think that the 15 min day is short enough tough, and find that cheap out of combat healing enhances rather than detracts from the game.
I tend to treat it as the "first aid kit" in any action movie -- one first aid kit, someone that can use it and boom instant fixed broken leg.
But then even my more serious games tend to have some level of this simply to keep things going, unless we are specifically looking for the full on nitty gritty one bullet can end your life, and everything takes forever to recover from stuff. Even then we tend to find a different system to use for that honestly.
My group has an aversion to disposable magic items. I've only seen this wand in play on the rare occasions we found one, and ran out of spells mid-adventure...
It does seem cost effective, but in an ongoing campaign, every gold spend on disposable magic items is gold lost...
If anything out-of-combat healing like that should be more available rather than less, IMO. As a DM one of my least favorite aspects of the 3.5/PF system is the drag on adventure pacing that the healing system imposes; anything that leads to longer adventuring days is a plus in my book, especially in the low levels where the wands really make a difference.
It's also, in my experience, a more fun game for low level divine casters when they get to use their real spell slots for things other than cure light wounds.
As noted above, then scrolls would become the cheapest means of getting healing, because you can cast them at level 1.
People would look for other methods of cheap healing.
Because of the cost formula for spells, it's still cheaper per HP then buying CMW or CSW spells at level 5 casting.
CLW at level 5 = 3750 gp for 9.5 hp/charge = 7.8 gp per hp.
CMW at level 5 = 7500 gp for 14 hp/charge = 10.7 gp per HP.
etc
Level 1 scroll of CLW at 25 gp for 5.5 healing = 4.5 gp/hp
You're not doing anything but increasing the costs of healing.
if having cheap access to healing is the problem, then you may simply need to remove item crafting feats, the ability to buy healing, or put major time constraints on them (i.e. making a CLW wand involves casting the spell 50 times).
In all cases, what you are doing is not reining in the players, you're slowing down the game. If that's your goal, that's fine, let them know. If you want the 'risk' factor of fighting with fewer hp...that's generally not your call to make. If the PC's play at all like real life, they'd rather retreat and take a couple days to heal to full before going back in, whereas with a wand they might take ten minutes and head on down.
The effect is the same, the time gets stretched out, is all. And in the latter case, they'll be at full loads on other spells and resources, too.
This is how it was in AD&D. You MIGHT have one combat at less then full HP, but if you got even close to half, you pulled out, your healers went all healing spells for a day or two to get everyone back to full, and then you went back in with full load-outs.
==Aelryinth
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If you remove cheap easy healing all your going to do is slow down your campaign as your players turtle up after every combat and your cleric/oracle/druid/whoever waste their remaining spell slots on healing.
Which might be the goal, just be aware of it, as I intimated!
==Aelryinth
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If anything out-of-combat healing like that should be more available rather than less, IMO. As a DM one of my least favorite aspects of the 3.5/PF system is the drag on adventure pacing that the healing system imposes; anything that leads to longer adventuring days is a plus in my book, especially in the low levels where the wands really make a difference.
It's also, in my experience, a more fun game for low level divine casters when they get to use their real spell slots for things other than cure light wounds.
Well, it's more 'video-gamey' when you have access to lots of healing.
If you want grit and realism, you have access to less. Which is why non-casters don't have healing ability. Except barbs. But they're really magical warriors masquerading as anti-magic warriors.
It forces a change in play style to really smart play to avoid being injured, and potentially having to fight while wounded. Which happened in AD&D all the time, but which people used to Video Games really, really hate.
==Aelryinth
Wands of CLW are what allow clerics and others do something other than be a heal-bot. Having them available make the classes that can do CLW much more interesting to play since you are no longer expected to fill up on cure spells.
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Counterpoint: It degrades the importance of healing magic and the role healers play since you have cheap and easy access to healing.
It's all in the play style.
Spontaneous healing for clerics was put into the game to allow clerics to have other spells memorized.
CLW is there to speed up recovery time between fights. That's it.
==Aelryinth
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Please don't bring "video gamey" into this, because I will just give you a list of video games where you don't get to heal up between fights, or games where healing to full is a luxury.
It's not "video gamey" it's "resource management". Going into a fight at low HP is basically suicidal if the fight is remotely party level appropriate, because the CR system assumes that people will be roughly at max HP. The CR system assumes that you are using resources during and after the fight to recover. Removing resources available to the party effectively reduces the parties abilities to handle CR appropriate challenges (or at least multiple challenges in a day).
One of the things I really like about 5E and 13th Age, when you rest you get everything back at max. You don't have to do math and manage resources, the rest is a reset on your resources. The management of resources is in deciding what to use during a fight and knowing how many fights you might have to deal with.
My question for the OP: what specifically is it you don't like about the wands? Is it the healing? or the wands themselves?
If it's just the wands, and not the healing, give them an alternate way to heal that's efficient and tell your players you're removing CLW wands. For example, if channeling out of combat provides max value (say it takes 2 rounds to do a channel like that and can be interrupted), that puts the focus back on healing classes and not the wands without reducing available resources.
Please don't bring "video gamey" into this, because I will just give you a list of video games where you don't get to heal up between fights, or games where healing to full is a luxury.
And those are 'grim and gritty' games.
'Video gamey' is a term that applies to a fast and blowthrough style of play, where its always on to the next thing, go go go, and you have access to stuff that accelerates and complements that playstyle. The Resource Management aspect typically comes in recharge times, times between visiting the shops, instead of careful allocation of materials between this and that stat or asset.
It dominates most of the games out there, hence, 'video gamey'. 'No downtime' is a typical benefit of this style of play, and rapid out of combat healing is a signature of it.
Sure, there's immersive games where you don't play that way, but those aren't the mindset that 'video gamey' is referring to.
==Aelryinth
The fact that you have to debate me on it's definition implies that the definition is not as set in stone as you would like it to be. My point stands, video games that defied your definition immediately jumped to mind, making your definition counter-productive to your point.
I honestly think we'd be better off leaving video games out of the discussion entirely. I'm sure you'll disagree and pull us further into this tangent though.
Do you think it is unfair and overpowered?
No.
How would you react to this rule?
My first thought would be that you haven't put enough thought into it. See the scroll comments above for more on that.
My second thought would be that I'd be unlikely to enjoy a game that tries to hinder the player's access to affordable downtime healing. Being able to rely on wands for downtime healing rather than dedicating spell slots to it is a huge factor in allowing players to play genuinely different divine spellcasters. I sat down at enough tables where someone said "Great, we need a healbot" back in the old days to value that freedom very highly.
And those are 'grim and gritty' games.Please don't bring "video gamey" into this, because I will just give you a list of video games where you don't get to heal up between fights, or games where healing to full is a luxury.
Not really.
Grim and gritty is when a single dagger to the gut kills the character and there is no raise dead. Wounds have an effect on your ability to perform and getting close to death makes it hard to do stuff. In those games you need defenses because going all glass cannon means you will die.
You aren't going to get grim and gritty in Pathfinder.
Bringing "videogamey" into it serves no purpose other than to rile people up. I mean, I've been playing since 1982. My preferences are not informed by being "used to videogames".
It's just a preference for a different focus in the game. It isn't like out of combat healing takes away the resource management part of the game, it just changes the number of encounters you can get into per day, which in my experience gives me more narrative tools as a DM, earlier, and leads to a more cinematic sort of experience.
Wands of CLW do help to remove the onus of "Who wants to play the cleric?" No one. "Why should I? All they do is heal."
Even as a grognard that despises the Magic Mart aspects of 3.x/PF, I like that healing is more accessible and accessible to more characters (rangers, pallys, etc with a wand of CLW) Cheap 'between fights' healing leaves the door open for more players to play the character they want, not the duties the game assigns them.
DM's have a mental idea of characters getting slowly beaten on over the course of an adventure or dungeon so that the final battle is sort of gritty and the whole resource management thing is rather interesting.
The wands (and indeed, any cheap healing method) destroy this.
I'd advise trying to get there through other means- preferably through means the PC's don't necessarily realize. Hard, Line in the Sand type time limits are a good one. The princess is dying, the crops are spoiling, the bad guys are getting away and you are chasing them, the cultists are going to blow up the world if you don't get there in time. Whatever it takes to keep them moving. This creates a resource (time) that they aren't in control of and forces them at every step to make decisions based on that resource. Do we stop and heal? We do take 20 on this search check or everyone roll and keep moving? Do we have time to go shopping for a new wand since the very last one we had turned to dust? Do we have a day to stop and let the cleric craft a new one?
Make Time the resource you use rather than wands or whatnot. This allows You to keep the pressure on when You want it and relax it when you want that, too. (not every thing they do should be under a super time crunch afterall). You can even vary it to hard deadlines, soft deadlines, long, short, medium, and all that to keep things moving the way you want.
That would be my suggested solution to the CLW. Keep it, and make time the enemy instead.
-S
DM's have a mental idea of characters getting slowly beaten on over the course of an adventure or dungeon so that the final battle is sort of gritty and the whole resource management thing is rather interesting.
Some DM's, yes. But that's something very hard to do properly because of natural variance in the die rolls. If you take a critical hit early or someone simply rolls really well on their damage, that can easily mean that the final battle never happens at all because either the party TPK's in the next-to-final battle, or decides to stop and camp for the evening relatively early, possibly in literally every room. (I had a group that did that some years ago; they were advancing into the dungeon at the rate of 20-25 feet per day -- there are glaciers that move faster than that.)
It's much easier, from a design perspective, to assume that in-combat resources are always at full, and then design each encounter to be as gritty as you like assuming a party with full resources. That's explicitly the approach that 4th edition D&D took with the "encounter" powers. They also explicitly allow people to take an unlimited number of "short rests" to regain encounter powers and to heal up. This means that an encounter is, in practical terms, just as hard whether it's your first or fourth of the day.
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I play with a GM who has a no heal sticks rule, and find it incredibly frustrating. Having to decide whether to press on or turn back after you get ambushed 10 miles out of town, still nowhere near the dungeon, because some mooks happened to get some good rolls in is not a fun experience.
Increasing the cost of healing just tells the players they have to play the way you want them to, not how they want to. You basically make a heal bot cleric essential, and I can't speak for every player, but the heal bots are the least fun characters I've ever played, and I'm a guy who likes playing support.
So for the love of fun, please don't take cheap magical healing out of the game, unless you plan on running the kind of campaign that only has one or two combats a day. If you're running a dungeon crawl type adventure it's just going to be an exercise in frustration.
Wands are resources, they have to get the wands still. Also, if stories had access to items such as the CLW wand then I bet they'd use it all the time. I don't know of any fantasy world that mimics the Pathfinder world.
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The problem with realism is that it's not always as fun. It's why there's no handedness when dealing with weapons, or why characters don't gain ability penalties after taking damage. Or why characters can go from near death to perfect health with a good nights sleep or two.
Pathfinder isn't realistic, and you have to consider whether making it realistic is going to be more fun for you and your players.
One wand houserule to consider is rather than making them an item with 50 lifetime charges, make it an item with three or five daily charges, at the same cost.
This means no hoarding cheap wands with 7 charges of a utility spell.
This means you need several wands if you want to CLW out of combat for everyone.
But 'goto spell' wands of combat spells are effectively unchanged.
Multiple wands of CLW are still more cost effective than single wands of bigger healing spells, but bigger spells are at least more appealing than they are now.
It also somewhat complicates preparing loot: no longer can you give a wand with reduced charges to fit within the budget of an encounter.
Realism is when a sword blow takes weeks of rest to recover from. Combining realism with fun is difficult.
Do you believe pathfinder modules and scenarios are really written with the assumption that PCs are going to heal to full after every fight using virtually limitless resources?
I've no idea.
For the most part the adventure paths I've seen allow the players to retreat and rest almost whenever they feel like it. So parties without wands can instead just fight only one or two encounters a day.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
My primary motivation is probably best classed as "realism". Maybe that's not the best description, but I really dislike the idea of "wanding" everyone back to full after every fight. It just seems lame. I can't think of any successful fantasy story (movie, book, comic) with this kind of dynamic.
!!!
Actually, the idea that the hero simply shrugs off any and all of his aches and pains ("Ach, 'tis only a flesh wound! It will take more than that to keep Gridley Quayle, Adventurer [tm] down!") is common to the point of being a cliché. Here's TVTropes' view on the subject.
Some examples (also from TVTropes)
* Harry Dresden. Seriously. In Fool Moon alone, he gets chin-decked, shot in the shoulder, pistol-whipped, beaten with a tire-iron, slammed into various walls, savaged by a werewolf, knocked out by overuse of magic, stomped to a pulp, duct-taped to a pillar from which he rips himself free, tossed over a wall, dropped out of a moving car on the Interstate, and tossed down into a 20-foot pit, yet still manages to use powerful magic, climb hand-over-hand up a 20-foot rope, and otherwise kick the living s+$$ out of the bad guy by the end. His friend Murphy also somehow manages to climb up a rope and rapid-fire a .38 mere hours after sustaining a compound fracture to her right arm. And that's just in Book 2!
* In R.A. Salvatore's The Legend of Drizzt, the Companions of the Hall sometimes seem to be made of iron. For example, in The Halfling's Gem, the five of them take on an army of wererats, a hydra, get sent to Tartarus where they're swarmed by demons, Drizzt has the fight of his life against an opponent who is his equal... and when it's all said and done they have not only managed to beat all of the bad guys, not only managed to survive, but none of them are even seriously injured. And even though they're kind of tired, you get the sense that they could have kept on fighting for another few hours if they had to.
* Conan the Barbarian: In "A Witch Shall Be Born", Conan himself not only survives being crucified, but after his cross is chopped down (with him still nailed to it) he helps pull the nails out and rides 10 miles before his injuries are treated.
Basically, whatever doesn't kill immediately incapacitate Conan doesn't count as soon as the scene changes. Which is more or less what encounter-based healing is all about. Every encounter, a new set of hit points.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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It forces a change in play style to really smart play to avoid being injured, and potentially having to fight while wounded. Which happened in AD&D all the time, but which people used to Video Games really, really hate.
Hm, you raise an interesting point. Comparing old-school D&D gameplay with trends in modern video games does show us some things.
For instance, the trend of modern long-form video games to have stories and characters and motivations teaches players to think like they were actually in the situation (i.e., roleplay), which means they would not fling themselves at a challenge they were ill-equipped to handle (such as by already being injured, or even knowing that they *could* get injured and need weeks to recover) unless they were provided with a particularly compelling in-character motivation to face terrible odds.
By contrast, in an old-school D&D game in which the PC is a bundle of stats wrapped in a fantasy trope, the only goal is to go from room to room in a dungeon to see how many monsters you can kill and how much treasure you can amass. Since your character isn't a person and therefore doesn't need motivation, you'll always be looking to the next room, rather than considering whether this is something Stockdwarf #13448 would actually choose to do. And since the only depth of gameplay is the overcoming of challenges (as opposed to telling a story, which requires reasonably-believable in-character decisions), things which increase the challenge (and therefore the tactical decision-making), such as low access to healing, will enhance that style of play.
So yeah, I could see where VG-influenced roleplayers would chafe against mechanics meant to enhance a non-narrative, tactical dungeon-delve type of gameplay.
That's what you meant, right?
You could adopt the Strain Injury rules. This reduces the amount of injuries taken from damage, making healing wands largely unnecessary.
Another thought:
I did a change to the cure spells to make caster level matter more:
Cure light 1d8 plus 1d8 per 5 cl
Cure mod 2d8 plus 1d8 per 4 cl
And so on.
Higher level cure spells are now better and Means having a higher caster level matters much more.
This makes each healing spell mean more requiring less healing over all and making each more individually important.
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Since your character isn't a person and therefore doesn't need motivation, you'll always be looking to the next room, rather than considering whether this is something Stockdwarf #13448 would actually choose to do.
Wait, characters in PF are not a bundle of stats and in fact are real people???1?!??
Or...PF characters are real characters (with feelings, sex drives and other motivations) while all other characters in all other games in every edition made (and yet to be created) are just "a bundle of stats"?
Because wands of CLW help with motivation?
Good try, fail - but herculean in effort so credit for that one.
There are plenty of pathfinder based (and other 3.5 rpg worlds) novels out there and while I havent read them all I'm pretty sure none of them go through a constant CLW wand narrative after each dramatic combat. They wouldn't. Because it's a lame narrative.
How many of them go through a narrative where the protagonists go 2 rooms into a dungeon every day, then retreat to rest repeatedly? Which narrative is lamer? To me glossing over the healing scene is much easier and much less immersion-breaking.
I'm pretty sure in narratives the good guys usually never get injured.
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Since your character isn't a person and therefore doesn't need motivation, you'll always be looking to the next room, rather than considering whether this is something Stockdwarf #13448 would actually choose to do.Wait, characters in PF are not a bundle of stats and in fact are real people???1?!??
Or...PF characters are real characters (with feelings, sex drives and other motivations) while all other characters in all other games in every edition made (and yet to be created) are just "a bundle of stats"?
Because wands of CLW help with motivation?Good try, fail - but herculean in effort so credit for that one.
How did you get "all other games in every edition made (and yet to be created)" out of my saying "old-school D&D"? Maybe you hit the "reply" button on a different post than you thought you did?
I'm pretty sure in narratives the good guys usually never get injured.
HahahahahahahahahahaheeheeheeheeheeheeheehohohohohohohoHAHAHAHAHAHAHA<ga sp><gasp>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!
The good guys always have plot armor, unless the plot dictates that they don't for plot reasons.
That is to say, there is never "just a lucky critical that killed him". It's always some deeper contribution to the overall plot of the story.
Something that is often not the case in Pathfinder.
Do you believe pathfinder modules and scenarios are really written with the assumption that PCs are going to heal to full after every fight using virtually limitless resources?
I do actually. Seeing how most encounters are scaled if the PCs are at half health or less it usually means any party member will be knocked out or dead after one or two hits. I do think it's possible to run a game without any CLW wands but for it to work most of the encounters would have to be scaled down. And looking at games where there isn't a mechanic for constantly topping up character health, you're going to have to deal with the inevitable immersion breaking top up before the PCs go into the serious fights.
Do you believe pathfinder modules and scenarios are really written with the assumption that PCs are going to heal to full after every fight using virtually limitless resources?I do actually. Seeing how most encounters are scaled if the PCs are at half health or less it usually means any party member will be knocked out or dead after one or two hits. I do think it's possible to run a game without any CLW wands but for it to work most of the encounters would have to be scaled down. And looking at games where there isn't a mechanic for constantly topping up character health, you're going to have to deal with the inevitable immersion breaking top up before the PCs go into the serious fights.
In my current game I'm playing a level 6 character. So far we've had no healing wands. We rarely run out of healing spells / cleric channels. Short adventuring days plus killing/incapacitating enemies quickly are all it takes.
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Most likely the players are just going to play the annoying way with lack of healing, which is of course a possibility. They will use a bunch of summons, they don't care about healing summons and they bring a lot of utility to the field. Rinse and repeat for every fights, 3 celestial dire tigers? always useful.
Usually from personal experience, the more restriction you put on a game, the more people goes out of their way to break it or wants to make a point that your solution doesn't work.
Okay but with short adventuring days aren't you still running on a premise of infinite healing? I really don't see it as a reasonable trade if the party consistently goes for an eight hour nap after four hours of adventuring just so they can enter every battle with full health.
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I really don't see it as a reasonable trade if the party consistently goes for an eight hour nap after four hours of adventuring just so they can enter every battle with full health.
Four hours of adventuring? Intensive adventuring involves around one encounter per two minutes. In a wandless campaign, you can still usually manage around three encounters before your healing resources run low. On this basis, I recommend a 5-minute adventuring day.
Well I was giving for the possibility of some wandering around and getting lost between combats and you know not sleeping in the middle of battle grounds but I suppose that depends on the adventure.
And really even if we disagree on the method it seems like we agree that Pathfinder seems to be designed on the assumption that a party will be more or less at full health for most encounters.