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At first I was very happy to hear that it was a design goal of PF2 to reduce X times a day mechanics. X times a day never felt very real/simulationist to me, or made much narrative sense, so I was hopeful that getting rid of it as much as possible would make for a more fun game.
However, as we have seen it implemented, I realized that X times a day is a baked in element of the this gaming system, since it is how magic operates. Narratively, I am not sure that it has been explained why magic works this way, but I think that attempts to make less magical things hold to the same core limitation as spells is always going to feel awkward.
I wonder, if resonance plays awkwardly in the playtest, if it wouldn't make sense to consider doubling down on X times a day for magical items. In theory, this is largely what resonance does anyway, it just gives the player choice about which magic items they can use in a day, rather than having each item have its own limit. But it seems like players feel resistant to it because narratively, there is not a deep connection as to why the player determines how often a magic item can function instead of that limitation coming from the item itself.
I wonder if it wouldn't help either to narratively link why spells and resonance work the same way (if resonance is going to be the limiting mechanic) or if most items should just be balanced around only working 1 time a day, or some other set number, if resonance is going to be rejected?
Personally, I would rather see more of an explanation for why spells and magic items (resonance) are limited by something related to the cycles of the day (similar to what dragon lance had with its moons), but I think it is the fact that this limitation really has no narrative explanation in Golarion that is giving folks trouble with resonance, which is kind of humorous to me, since spells have always worked that way, even without a strong explanation for why.
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Some thoughts on Resonance mechanic I’ve been collecting.
Resonance is a way to put magic item use on par with spell casting. You only have X number of spell to cast each day, and with Resonance you only can activate X number of magic items a day.
Think of Resonance as a spell like ability “Activate Item” that everyone has. It requires a magic item as a material component. Useable once per level + Chr Bonus.
The main difference between spell slots and Resonance is that spell slots generally become more powerful the higher level the character is, where a Resonance point is just as powerful at first level as it is at 20th.
Wealth is the primary determination in how powerful a point of Resonance is. For example a suit of +5 Armor is much more powerful and costly than +1 Armor, but both only take one Resonance point to activate.
Since magic spells and/or items are the primary way to alter the fabric of the alternate-reality in the game world, by putting a daily limit on both the adventures day will effectively end when they start to run low on one or both resources. What low means will vary based on the risk tolerance of the player, it could be at half a tank, a quarter, or empty.
Because Resonance is item power agnostic, the most effective use will be for items that give the biggest bonus, effect, and/or duration. Players will favor expensive more effective expendables. Players will be looking at more expensive expendables, and it now becomes a choice of similar priced Permanent items or limited use expendables.
...great ideas and analysis...
GlennH, those are some good thoughts, and thank you for sharing. I agree that it moves items into the same general realm as spells which has a lot of potential.
Wealth and level have always been tied pretty closely in Pathfinder so the idea that resonance is tied to wealth and not level is a little misleading from an actual player perspective, but narratively, in world, that does seem to be the case. Rich people/royalty in Golarion, should be carrying around much higher level potions than they might of previously, because carrying 3 lesser healing potions might be cheaper, but it could also prevent you from using some very important scroll or other item later on.
Personally, I think if there were no spells in a can except scrolls and books of scrolls, then we would get rid of the idea that anyone in Golarion could have access to any level of spell, if they just have enough money for it, because you would still have to be capable of casting the spell for it to have a decent chance to work. (although we have no idea if scrolls are still limited in such a fashion, especially since there doesn't seem to be a UMD mechanic to cast scrolls from higher levels or from other spell lists).
D&D has always pushed resource hoarding, and PF2 seems to be on track to push players to count their coppers, since low level items will be much more situationally useful then they were in the past. A lesser potion of healing, might not be worth taking late in the adventuring day, even if you are injured, if you still have some other powerful magic item that might be more useful, for example.
This probably makes spells innately more valuable than they were in PF1, since magic item usage is no longer controlled solely by wealth, and it seems like some of the duration and power limits we've seen with spells reflect this consideration.
For example, a party getting by with magic item healing is going to have to spend a lot of its wealth on consumables to keep up because cheap options are going to burn up all the resonance. A party with a dedicated healer is going to be much better off financially. I have mixed feelings about this because PF1 made healing so ubiquitous that a dedicated healer was rarely worth more to the party than a character capable of ending combats faster (controlling the battlefield or doing massive damage). There have always been more options for controlling and high damage characters so prioritizing these was alright to me, but if there are lots of very different options for providing cheap or free healing, without that becoming the only utility of the character, then I am alright with a rebalancing.
Overall, I would like to see a little more narrative attention paid to why magic generally works on a day to day basis and for the mechanics to parallel that narrative choice. This seems relatively easy, but needs some thought: What powers long term magical artifacts and effects if nearly all magic requires daily investitures from people in some form (spells per day or resonance)? If they get that consistent, I think a lot of the confusion and distrust of resonance would be replaced by people buying into the larger picture of creating a richer narrative universe.
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Personally, I think if there were no spells in a can except scrolls and books of scrolls, then we would get rid of the idea that anyone in Golarion could have access to any level of spell, if they just have enough money for it, because you would still have to be capable of casting the spell for it to have a decent chance to work. (although we have no idea if scrolls are still limited in such a fashion, especially since there doesn't seem to be a UMD mechanic to cast scrolls from higher levels or from other spell lists).
There does seem to be a sort of UMD mechanic, just in Skill Feats, not Skills themselves. As the Skill Feats blog says:
"This is because many of them are based on magic, like Trick Magic Item (allowing you to use an item not meant for you, like a fighter using a wand)[...]"
I wouldn't be surprised if Scrolls and Staves fall into this category as well.
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Would you believe that Golarion has a magical unit of time called an hawr and there are exactly 36.52422 hawrs in a Golarian day? Magic items recharge in exactly 7 hawrs, 12 hawrs, or 37 hawrs because those are mystical numbers. These intervals are close enough to 5 times per day, 3 times per day, and once per day that Pathfinder says that instead.
Of course, that is utter nonsense. But it does show that a more elaborate time-based recharge system can be summarized as X uses per day. Days are easy to track.
My main argument against the X uses per day came about a month ago when I was messaging my elder daughter and talking about Pathfinder 2nd Edition previews and resonance and consumables. She said, "I've never personally cared for using consumables in TRPGs. Too much to keep track of." Resonance reduces the tracking of magic items to tracking resonance, and tracking single-use items, and tracking once-per-day items, and tracking charges on staves, ... alas, the implementation did not match the elegance of the just-track-resonance concept.
Curious, I searched for "day" in the PRD's list of Core Rulebook Wondrous Items. I wanted to see how many magic items had X uses per day. I put once-per-day items in a separate list.
Limited Multiple Uses per Day, 23 items
Bag of Tricks - 2 animals per day
Boots of Speed - 10 rounds per day
Boots of Teleportation - 3 times per day
Boots, Winged - 3 times per day for up to 5 minutes per flight.
Broom of Flying - 9 hours per day
Cloak of Displacement, Major - 15 rounds per day
Cloak of Etherealness - 10 minutes per day, in 1 minute increments
Cube of Force - 36 charges renewed each day
Figurines of Wondrous Power - varies by figure, such as 3 times per week or once per day
Gem of Seeing - 20 minute per day
Gloves of Arrow Snaring - twice a day
Helm of Teleportation - 3 times per day
Horn of Blasting - 20% cumulative chance with each extra use per day that it explodes
Horn of Valhalla - once every 7 days
Lyre of Building - DC 18 Perform check every hour, once a week
Mirror of Opposition - 4 times per day - this is a trap, activated involuntarily
Pipes of Haunting - twice a day
Ring Gates - 100 pounds of material can be transferred each day
Robe of Scintillating Colors - 10 rounds per day
Scabbard of Keen Edges - 3 times per day
Slippers of Spider Climb - 10 minutes per day
Sustaining Spoon - feeds 4 humans a day
Wind Fan - 20% cumulative chance per usage during that day that the device tears into useless
Once per Day, 15 items
Cape of the Mountebank
Cloak of Arachnida
Crown of Blasting, Major and Minor
Crytal Ball with Telepathy (suggestion once per day)
Drums of Panic
Efreeti Bottle
Gauntlet of Rust
Hand of Glory
Helm of Telepathy
Horn of Goodness/Evil
Iron Flask
Mask of the Skull
Pearl of Power
Robe of Blending
Strand of Prayer Beads
A lot of the X uses per day items measure time instead. One measures amount of material affected. Translating them over to resonance will be more work.
My main argument against the X uses per day came about a month ago when I was messaging my elder daughter and talking about Pathfinder 2nd Edition previews and resonance and consumables. She said, "I've never personally cared for using consumables in TRPGs. Too much to keep track of." Resonance reduces the tracking of magic items to tracking resonance, and tracking single-use items, and tracking once-per-day items, and tracking charges on staves, ... alas, the implementation did not match the elegance of the just-track-resonance concept.
A quick question before a long response: Does your daughter avoid using found consumables, including potions, or just actively buying consumables instead of saving up for longer-term items?
Regardless of the answer, this is very much my issue with resonance as well. An elegant concept that didn't seem to work out in practice, but they clearly threw it out into the playtest to get feedback to see how it could get refined.
I don't think the idea itself is inherently bad, but throwing it on top of PF1's monster list of magic items that work in 1000s of different ways was always going to be tricky.
One issue is that spells have a built in balance buffer with spell levels on top of X spells per day.
Resonance naturally favors higher level items than lower level items out of a general fear of "spamming" lower level items, but I wonder if a better approach would not be for items to mimic what is happening with spells in PF 2. In the new spell lists, higher level spells are better than lower level spells, even when the lower level spells are heightened. Thus, if you have a higher level spell for something, you are probably better off using it, than powering up a lower level spell.
If spell casting lost spell levels, and went to a "you can cast your level + your primary casting modifier" in spells, casters would all prioritize casting their highest level spells as often as possible. I am not sure that would be a bad thing, except that spells known would become far more important, and wizards, clerics, and druids would have to be rebalanced around their access to higher level spells.
This is essentially what we are being pushed to do with magic items, but I think there is some concern when wealth alone determines access to what power level of magic items a character could have, because NPCs really shouldn't be limited to a wealth by level cap, because power level and wealth can't really be synonymous on a world-wide basis.
So it seems like: wealth is not enough to balance magic items (PF1 system), and wealth + resonance was not enough to balance all magic items either (hence why some items have to be balanced around charges and uses a day). Which leaves many of us asking if Resonance was worth it, if it doesn't really solve the problem either.
On the one hand, I wonder if X times a day limits instead of charges on magic items wouldn't fix more of the problems: If wands can only be used 1x a day, or 1x a day per spell level, higher level wands are already going to be more valuable than lower level ones, even if they have unlimited charges (and must be priced to reflect that).
In PF1, it was only wands that were really cheap enough per spell casting to justify the kinds of spam that was the CLW wand. At high enough levels people might have considered books full of scrolls to do the same, but that really starts to pile up the weight (or Bulk in the new system).
With the new carried, ready, stowed equipment system, carrying a bunch of wands and having them be easy to access is already going to be an issue. If each one can only cast one spell a day, you will not see nearly as much wand wizards, or if you do, they are going to be blowing their action economy fumbling through bags.
Hypothesis: adopting a universal x times a day for magic items, and building magic items to do powerful stuff when activated instead of always on, would solve most of the issues resonance was adopted to fix, except of course, the x times a day issue. But if it was narratively backed and pushed into one or two categories (preferably more powerful and less times for tracking) like 1 or 3 times a day, the consistency of having a little check box by items would be pretty easy to keep up with.
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I would prefer everything I had to track was based on one of four pools:
- Spell Slots
- Spell Points
- Resonance
- Did I use this already today.
Anything else I have to track should be a genuinely special item or mechanic I am so happy to have that keeping track if it just reminds me how exciting the thing is.
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They already have powers that cost 2 spell points instead of 1. If paying 1 resonance per activation isn't enough to balance the stronger items, they could just have strong items cost 2 resonance instead of slavishly sticking to 1 per use. I'd rather track the one pool instead of a bunch of individual items on top of resonance.
They already have powers that cost 2 spell points instead of 1. If paying 1 resonance per activation isn't enough to balance the stronger items, they could just have strong items cost 2 resonance instead of slavishly sticking to 1 per use. I'd rather track the one pool instead of a bunch of individual items on top of resonance.
I'd even be fine with them rebalancing the item levels down to something like spell levels and having a straightforward system where you paid resonance equal to item level for usage, but I think that defeats the point of making less-powerful items become less useful at higher levels, if that was necessary for resonance to be the balancing mechanic. I'd just prefer they go all in on one or the other instead of half way between them.
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I would prefer everything I had to track was based on one of four pools:
- Spell Slots
- Spell Points
- Resonance
- Did I use this already today.Anything else I have to track should be a genuinely special item or mechanic I am so happy to have that keeping track if it just reminds me how exciting the thing is.
I feel generally the same way. I give a little bit of slack for staves to keep their charge mechanic, but I'd like to see wands done away with or redone.
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I would prefer everything I had to track was based on one of four pools:
- Spell Slots
- Spell Points
- Resonance
- Did I use this already today.Anything else I have to track should be a genuinely special item or mechanic I am so happy to have that keeping track if it just reminds me how exciting the thing is.
I feel similar, though I hate 1/day abilities and would love to see those gone as well. Having only once use per day makes it so that if the effect doesn't work perfectly, it feels like you just wasted your only chance for no reason. I rarely see players get excited about 1/day items or abilities because of this limitation, and think that any items/abilities which aren't constant should use one of the shared pools (Spell Points/Resonance).
I can maybe get behind staves keeping their charges (though it still seems awkward at first glance), but that's the only type of item I can think of which wouldn't be improved by just committing to the new system.
I just think that "you can only use this once a day" is a good design space which lets us create truly powerful effects that would get out of hand if someone could use them frequently.
But that means removing the one/day limit on things like "Celestial Armor lets you cast fly" so you can keep it on (to take an example from the book on my desk) Planar Keystone's ability to plane shift 8 creatures to a specific location with 100% accuracy.
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While I like the idea of "truly powerful" but limited (1/day) effects, I feel like it doesn't really play out well in practice. After all, if a 1/day ability is "truly powerful," then you run into the 15-min adventuring day boogeyman as the party wants to rest as soon as they've used up their 1/day ability. After all, they don't want to risk a dangerous encounter when their trump card is on cooldown.
And if the 1/day ability isn't truly powerful, or at least special, then what good is it? For example, in PF1 there were a number of 8th level cleric domain abilities that were limited to 1/day, with an extra use every 4 levels. Most didn't really feel special, especially something like the Magic domain which gave a single use of a 3rd level spell... which was on your spell list... and a domain spell... when you were capable of casting 4th level spells on your own.
Or another example from the recent PF2 Playtest Sorcerer blog. Primal Evolution gives a 1/day casting of summon nature's ally at your highest spell level. Except a primal sorcerer without the feat could potential do the same thing on their own, so the ability is neither special nor especially more powerful than your existing options. At which point, spending a feat for something that can only be used 1/day just feels like a trap.
Alternately, I for one would be much more interested in using the feat if it was based on spell points but limited to casting summon nature's ally at 1-2 levels below your highest spell level. Sure it might not be quite as powerful as it is now, but you'd actually have an interesting decision in using spell points to activate it multiple times or saving spell points for other abilities. Plus, it wouldn't feel as bad if your summoned creature received an unexpected crit or otherwise completely failed to do its job, since you know you have the option to spend your resources (spell points) to try again if you want.
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The issue I have with both resonance and spell points is they essentially are still x/a day powers, it is just up to you to decide which powers that you use that day. Fundamentally this is the same situation as regular spells are in, it is just that there is more nuanced systems (plural because there are many) for controlling how casters have access to these limited pools.
One of the old limits that seems hard to shed, is to limit characters even further, by having especially powerful abilities and magic items have their own set limitation on usages per day. It is hard to shed these because "balance" is a very difficult concept to achieve and, like spells, if every character could just choose their best (or two best) abilities to spam with all of their resources, they would probably choose to do that. Some other means of limitation is probably necessary, but both resonance and spell points were marketed to us as things brought about to cut out tracking those other kinds of limitations.
I am waiting to see it all in print before I am going to say that this option or that option is a trap, because it is clear that there are a lot of interconnecting parts that are working behind the scenes and much of it we don't know yet, but I am still not sure that the pools of resources is a better system that having individual limits per day, if the pools require additional limits in order to be balanced.
I think part of the reason why spell points is particularly bothersome to me is because it so closely parallels what spells are and how spells could work, but it has to different for some reason, instead of folding two such similar categories together. The cleric really bothers me with how it was apparently necessary to make so many different ways to do the same basic kinds of effects.
That flies in the face of modular design, and leads to a lot of weird narrative situations with things like scrolls,, which can record spells, but not spell powers, but some spell powers are essentially the same as spells from other lists, so maybe I have a character that can cast a spell power that pretty much is the same as the spell recorded on the scroll I just found, but I couldn't use that scroll, because spells and spell powers are not the same, even if the terminology for using them, down to the kinds of actions to cast them, are the same.
That was a little tangental, but I do think that one of the things people need to be looking at in the play test is whether things like resonance and spell points make your character feel like they have more options and utility than they did when class powers and magic items were limited individually instead of as a group or not. I hope the answer is yes, but that keeps getting challenged the more I see examples of these things in the blogs.
The bigger issue I have with the "same but different" mentality of having healing spells, spell powers, magic items, alchemical items, skill feats, etc, is going to be much more difficult to get a sense of in the play test because it only really became a problem in PF1 when option bloat started to make it impossible to track which feats work with which versions of which powers and certain combinations become wildly over powered while the vast majority become trap options.
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That flies in the face of modular design, and leads to a lot of weird narrative situations with things like scrolls,, which can record spells, but not spell powers, but some spell powers are essentially the same as spells from other lists, so maybe I have a character that can cast a spell power that pretty much is the same as the spell recorded on the scroll I just found, but I couldn't use that scroll, because spells and spell powers are not the same, even if the terminology for using them, down to the kinds of actions to cast them, are the same.
I'm not sure that not being able to make or find Scrolls of Powers is a valid assumption. I see no reason whatsoever you couldn't create such a thing. You'd need to have the Power to use it like it was on your list (since it is its own thing), but I see no obstacle at all to such a thing existing.
They're gonna be Uncommon, for the most part, since the Powers are likewise Uncommon, but I see absolutely no reason they can't exist.