The rules for resting and daily preparations seem broken and overpowered, especially for spellcasters. Have a look:
Quote: REST AND DAILY PREPARATIONS
You perform at your best when you take enough time to rest and prepare. Once every 24-hour period, you can take a period of rest (typically 8 hours), and then prepare, which typically takes 1 hour. After your rest, you regain a number of Hit Points equal to your Constitution modifier (minimum 1) times your level. When you prepare, you regain resources that you can use only a limited number of times per day. For instance, if you are a spellcaster, you regain spell slots and can prepare new spells. If you have Spell Points, you regain those. Magic item uses refresh, and so on.
You can make your daily preparations only if you’ve rested, and it’s typically best to do so right after. If you don’t rest at least 6 hours in a 24-hour span, you become fatigued (you cannot recover from this until you rest).
Suppose the party undertakes an adventure that is supposed to take place over the course of a single day. Each PC has been fresh on resources for the past few days, so of course, the PCs likewise enter this adventure fresh on resources. They slept a good 8 hours before the start of the adventure, but they did *not* perform daily preparations. Instead, the PCs blow their daily resources, and then rest for an hour, instantly recharging all of their daily resources. They can then blitz through the rest of the adventuring day.
This is broken. Daily preparations should be tied to the eight-hour rest, not delayable, or else you wind up with parties resting for an hour mid-adventure to recharge all of their daily resources, which heavily favors spellcasters.
REST AND DAILY PREPARATIONS wrote: Once every 24-hour period, you can take a period of rest (typically 8 hours), and then prepare, which typically takes 1 hour. First, it's restricted to once per day, so you can't just take an hour rest to refresh everything whenever you run out of resources.
Secondly it is, as you suggested tied to the daily rest
That does seem like an exploit, being able to 'hold' your preparation and take it later. By the way, Resonance Points recovere (and items divest) during preparations. So doing so could allow an alchemist to blow their load twice in one day if they spend a day beforehand preparing.
On the other-hand, having a benefit for taking your time to prepare for an adventure does sound nice.
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CommanderCoyler wrote: Once every 24-hour period, you can take a period of rest (typically 8 hours), and then prepare, which typically takes 1 hour. Nothing is stopping you from delaying the preparation. Indeed, the next paragraph makes it clear that you can delay the preparations.
It is not something you can do during the second consecutive day of adventuring, but during the first day of the adventure, especially in an adventure that is supposed to be a one-day one-off? It can absolutely rejuvenate the party's resources, especially those of the spellcasters.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
This one will be relatively easy to make more clear the intention vs the specific wording. They tried to make that clear by pointing out that you have to rest for atleast 6 hours in 24 or you a fatigued. They do need to make it clear that your spells and preparations from a previous cycle end once you have completed your rest.
To my understanding, your spells are only prepared until the next time you rest.
Daily preparations, page 334: wrote:
When initially setting out to explore, or after a night’s
rest, the PCs spend time to prepare for the adventuring
day over the span of 30 minutes to an hour. This typically
happens in the morning, but always after 8 full hours of
rest. Daily preparations include the following.
• Spellcasters who prepare spells need to spend time
choosing which spells they’ll use that day.
• Resonance Points, Spell Points, and other effects and
abilities that reset during preparation all reset at this point.
This includes abilities that can be used a certain number of
times per day.
• Each character equips their gear. This includes donning
their armor and strapping on their weapons.
• Characters invest magic items to use the items’ magical
abilities for the day, as described on page 377.
This indicates you lose your spells and attunements for the day after your rest, and must prepare them or do without. It looks like you -might- keep resonance/spell points from the day before up until the prep time, but seems to call out most other things as having been lost during the night.
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Note use of the term "reset". Until you Prepare, you keep all your previous day's resources, even after resting. The obvious reason would be so that the party can survive the ever-popular night ambush.
Interestingly, the "Resting" section on page 332 reads "The character recovers Resonance Points, Spell Points, and similar pools," for resting. I can only assume this is a mistake, as it doesn't make sense to have these things recharge by resting only to immediately reset during preparation.
Cantriped wrote: Note use of the term "reset". Until you Prepare, you keep all your previous day's resources, even after resting. The obvious reason would be so that the party can survive the ever-popular night ambush. One would think, but reset is used in the bullet section for points and per day abilities, where "they'll use that day" is used for spells, and the other sections lack the term as well. I think it's mostly just a wording choice.
I get the impression that as written not much thought was put to the idea of failing to use your hour upon waking up. Personally I never have liked that method, and omit it from home games, so I'm hoping for at least better wording if not outright removal of the mechanic.
Heh, yeah better wording is certainly needed. I think the intent is for resources to become available at the end of the rest - spell slots, power points, resonance points and such. Then during the 1 hour preparation you can configure your abilities and activate items.
So the ideal time to ambush the party would be between rest and preparations. Wizards would have all of their spell slots available, but they would be blank. And no one would have any magic items activated.
I don't think better wording is needed. This should be left vague for the instance where a party wants to run a one off and the GM choose to allow this kind of stuff to speed it along. Of course as the GM you dictate the rules not the player so if they are arguing tell them they are reading it wrong or explain GM discretion. In Either event the GM is the judge not Timmy power gamer.
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Seems fine to me as is (though that may be because I'm not trying to break it).
I have run seven premade scenarios so far, and I have had to manually bar off this exploit. It is really quite a bother to know that PCs can exploit the daily preparation rules to recharge their resources with an hour-long rest, especially when this blatantly favors spellcasters.
If it's broken as you say...
I have no problem with that. The adventuring day is way too short.
Consider the following:
Day #1: Do whatever one pleases. Sleep.
Day #2: Wake up. Perform daily preparations, including preparations. Spend the rest of the day faffing around. Sleep.
Day #3: Wake up. Engage in some adventuring while expending resources, then perform daily preparations over the course of an hour, thus regaining those daily resources.
Does this not work for replenishing daily resources in a single hour?
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
My only problem with this is that it's an exploit when it should be codified into the system.
In PF1e I allowed my players to recover their hit points and spells on a ten minute rest, with a limit of how many times they could do that per level. Combined with a "wound" system (suffering a critical hit or getting dropped into the negatives deals Con damage), it still gave meaningful attrition but killed the fifteen minute adventuring day.
I'd be fully in favor of something like this for PF2e.
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4E's mechanic was actually briliant. It ended up being baked into the adventure, rather than the rules themselves, but the solution was absolute genius.
Every time the party rested they regained a cumulative -1 healing surges.
Very effective way of saying, "sure, its been 15 minutes, lick your wounds if you want" but with the understanding that every time you did so, you'd be taking a cumulative penalty.
Draco18s wrote: 4E's mechanic was actually briliant. It ended up being baked into the adventure, rather than the rules themselves, but the solution was absolute genius.
Every time the party rested they regained a cumulative -1 healing surges.
Very effective way of saying, "sure, its been 15 minutes, lick your wounds if you want" but with the understanding that every time you did so, you'd be taking a cumulative penalty.
I never played 4E how did that work in detail?
vestris wrote: I never played 4E how did that work in detail? So healing surges were a Thing that every class got (I think 2 was base, some classes got more). Any time you wanted (once a fight) you could spend an action to activate Second Wind and heal 1/4 your maximum HP (so if your max was 20 and you were currently at 10, you'd gain 5 to 15).
Several classes had powers that consumed, triggered off of, or otherwise played with Surges. E.g. the warlord (sort a paladin class) could use a (once per fight) power that caused him to spend a healing surge and an ally in 30 feet got the benefits (it was 1/4 of their max, not the warlord's).
Stuff like that. Even clerical healing consumed surges (Cleric targets someone, they spend and heal with a bonus). Healing surges were the primary 'resource' you'd need to conserve across your adventuring day as most of your abilities were either per-fight or at-will. The once-per-day abilities were kind of a toss up (thematically you always wanted to use them on the boss, but mechanically you were best using it on small fry, due to the miss chance against higher ACs).
Anyway, the first published adventure was a revisiting of...tomb of horrors? Classic module, several rooms had traps described except that "someone else already disabled it." The adventure's atmosphere was what caused the lack of surge regeneration, but it had the desired effect of making the players push as far as they could before stopping: if you had all your surges and recharged to max-1 you lost that unspent surge.
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Draco18s wrote: vestris wrote: I never played 4E how did that work in detail? So healing surges were a Thing that every class got (I think 2 was base, some classes got more). Any time you wanted (once a fight) you could spend an action to activate Second Wind and heal 1/4 your maximum HP (so if your max was 20 and you were currently at 10, you'd gain 5 to 15). 2 was for the weird vampire class. Normal classes got at least 6+con mod per day.
Draco18s wrote: Several classes had powers that consumed, triggered off of, or otherwise played with Surges. E.g. the warlord (sort a paladin class) could use a (once per fight) power that caused him to spend a healing surge and an ally in 30 feet got the benefits (it was 1/4 of their max, not the warlord's). That is the paladin's Lay on Hands (except it's melee range), Warlord works like cleric below. Warlord was also an awesome, martial leader (healer/buffer)
Draco18s wrote: Stuff like that. Even clerical healing consumed surges (Cleric targets someone, they spend and heal with a bonus). Healing surges were the primary 'resource' you'd need to conserve across your adventuring day as most of your abilities were either per-fight or at-will. The once-per-day abilities were kind of a toss up (thematically you always wanted to use them on the boss, but mechanically you were best using it on small fry, due to the miss chance against higher ACs). Bosses (elites and solos) had the same defence calculation as regular creatures of their level. They just get flashier abilities, action points and more off-turn abilities to make up for their disadvantage in the actions department. This is one of the many things I very much wish Paizo would adopt from 4e: The concept of monster roles rather than just throwing a higher level monster at players and calling it a boss.
Draco18s wrote: Anyway, the first published adventure was a revisiting of...tomb of horrors? Classic module, several rooms had traps described except that "someone else already disabled it." The adventure's atmosphere was what caused the lack of surge regeneration, but it had the desired effect of making the players push as far as they could before stopping: if you had all your surges and recharged to max-1 you lost that unspent surge. I've never played Tomb of Horrors, that rule sounds horrible (heh). Was it cumulative? So if you spent 2 days there you'd be at -2 etc?
But yea, adventure day in 4e generally ends when PCs are out of surges AND daily powers. This usually starts off ~3 fights but gets longer as time goes on and PCs get more powers, the ritual to share surges etc.
Also Action Points encourage players to go as long as they could. Action points let you (1/encounter) take an extra action and you gained one every other encounter. Also certain classes, and every paragon path (kinda like a prestige class, but everyone gets one at level 11) do stuff to interact with Action Point use.
Also, to clarify the (base) rules on resting in 4e:
There are two types of rest, Short (5 mins) in which:
♦ You regain use of any spent encounter powers
♦ You can spend healing surges freely (restores your surge value, typically 1/4 of your max hp)
Then Long (6 hours) in which:
♦ You regain use of any spent powers
♦ Your HP and surges per day are reset to maximum
♦ Your action points reset to 1 (regardless of how many you had)
CommanderCoyler wrote: 2 was for the weird vampire class. Normal classes got at least 6+con mod per day. That's what it was. It's been ten years.
CommanderCoyler wrote: That is the paladin's Lay on Hands (except it's melee range), Warlord works like cleric below. Warlord was also an awesome, martial leader (healer/buffer) Warlord was the one class I did play. Couldn't remember exactly how it worked, but I loved it.
CommanderCoyler wrote: [b]Bosses (elites and solos) had the same defence calculation as regular creatures of their level. Sure, but just like PF2, boss monsters were typically higher level than everything else. I played enough of the game to know that. One class's ability was "if you hit, deal damage to an adjacent enemy." That looks like it'd be a great way to hit the boss and kill one of his minions, but the minion was easier to hit, giving you free damage on the boss!
Quote: I've never played Tomb of Horrors, that rule sounds horrible (heh). Was it cumulative? So if you spent 2 days there you'd be at -2 etc? Yes it was. Note that the first rest was all the way to full, the penalty accumulated from a base of 0.
(so if you had 6 normally you'd play the adventure with 6, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0...)
Draco18s wrote: CommanderCoyler wrote: Bosses (elites and solos) had the same defence calculation as regular creatures of their level. Sure, but just like PF2, boss monsters were typically higher level than everything else. I played enough of the game to know that. One class's ability was "if you hit, deal damage to an adjacent enemy." That looks like it'd be a great way to hit the boss and kill one of his minions, but the minion was easier to hit, giving you free damage on the boss!
I didn't read many of the published adventures (only the very first, preview one), but almost every DM I've interacted with (myself obviously included) has said to only use on-level monsters (the rules for levelling up/down monsters are there for a reason :p). Use elites/solos and more monsters relative to the PCs (elites count as 2 regulars, solos count as 5). Using higher level monsters just throws off the hit rates for PCs and monster, making things less fun.
Draco18s wrote: Quote: I've never played Tomb of Horrors, that rule sounds horrible (heh). Was it cumulative? So if you spent 2 days there you'd be at -2 etc? Yes it was. Note that the first rest was all the way to full, the penalty accumulated from a base of 0.
(so if you had 6 normally you'd play the adventure with 6, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0...) That sounds like an annoyance to deal with (and shortens adventuring days, not lengthens). Also what's stopping players walking out of the dungeon and camping elswhere for the night?
Also back on topic: The concept of a short rest, to restore some hp and get some spells/powers back is another thing I would like PF2 to adopt.
CommanderCoyler wrote: Draco18s wrote: (so if you had 6 normally you'd play the adventure with 6, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0...) That sounds like an annoyance to deal with (and shortens adventuring days, not lengthens). Given that the adventure is mean to be completed in ~3 rests, it lenghtens because players don't want to take that penalty. If they have 2 surges left and if they rest they only get 3 back (not 4) it encourages them to go One More Fight so they don't have an adventuring day in the future where they only have 2 to start with.
Quote: Also what's stopping players walking out of the dungeon and camping elswhere for the night? Namely things like resetting traps, wandering monsters, and one way doors. The drain represented the strong necromantic energies persistent in the area.
I ran the final part of Dragon Mountain (I did my best to covert the 2E adventure to 4E; went ok in some parts): the PCs couldn't just walk out of the mountain, it was HUGE and there were roving groups of kobolds everywhere. In this case, the drain represented harrying in the night by said kobolds.
Heck, the main entrance chamber features two pillbox enplacements that constantly peg the players with arrows just for being in the room.
The players get a preview of what those arrow can do just before breaching into that chamber where one of their NPC companions they'd picked up gets shot in the neck and dies in the span of a round from poison (the actual mechanical effects of the poison aren't that bad, but it's still pretty nasty and the book has a note to the GM about it, something along the lines of "here's the rules for the poison, what happened to the NPC is supposed to spook the players and either force them inside quickly or force them back down the mountain (and fail their quest)").
*wistful*
One of the few encounters in that game that went well was the boss fake out. The players are trying to find their way through a labyrinth of broken walls filled with fog (10-15 ft. visibility) and out of the darkness looms the head of a red dragon, ten feet wide, thirty feet tall. Its jaws open and bathes them in flames. Thinking "oh s&~~, we found the boss" they retreat in a hurry for a final rest-up.
It was paper mache contraption operated by kobolds and it had 40 hp.
They find out soon after that it was, in fact, life size.
I still have the origami dragon I folded to use as a mini (its on my desk). 16 inches long and still only half the size listed in her stat block.
Good times. Good times...
Is there any new word on resting and daily preparations?
Really, is there any new word on this? I have GMed 21 playthroughs of various playtest adventures so far, and I have had to manually block out this exploit each time.
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Colette Brunel wrote: Really, is there any new word on this? I have GMed 21 playthroughs of various playtest adventures so far, and I have had to manually block out this exploit each time. Why are you manually blocking exploits if you run strictly RAW? We know full well there are anti-player exploits you don't manually block under the excuse of running strict RAW so why is this different?
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