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Two big questions here. Just reading on my phone so I may have missed some things ... Help!
When you lose the dying condition, you regain consciousness
When you’re unconscious and at 0 HP but no longer dying, you naturally return to 1 HP and awaken after sufficient time passes. The GM determines how long you remain unconscious, from at least 10 minutes to several hours.
The target loses the dying condition, though it remains unconscious at 0 Hit Points.
The creature at 0 Hit Points loses the dying condition (but remains unconscious)
(1) The dying rules say that when you lose the dying condition you wake up. But (2) the dying condition itself doesn't say that. And (3) stabilize and first aid see the contemplate a PC losing the dying condition but remaining unconscious. And (4) the unconscious condition also contemplates that.
But then you have the odd circumstance of being able to "roll to consciousness" via recovery saves if you're dying but not if you're stable. So what, you yell at the Cleric "don't stabilize my fighter! I want to wake up!" That's confusing!
Now, that reading see to undercut the stated goal of getting PCs back in the action more reliably. So I would have thought it an oversight. But the stabilize rules explicitly call it out! So how's all this supposed to work?
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A separate confusion is that if you roll to consciousness you're awake and acting at 0hp, which under these rules seems to mean that you're invincible, since dying only triggers when you're "reduced to" 0 hp or take damage while unconscious. So *definitely* don't heal that fighter!
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Actually, the Dying rules state
You lose the dying condition upon returning to 1 or more Hit Points. When you lose the dying condition, you regain consciousnessSo I'm assuming the consciousness regaining is only upon losing the dying condition when returning to 1+ hit points. As every other mention of losing the dying condition while at 0 hit points leaves you consciousness.
That's definitely one possibility for the designers' intent. I'm hoping the ambiguity resolves the other way, however, since this would mean that you could never roll your way to consciousness. Not only does that remove that avenue for getting back in the fight that was available under the first set of dying rules (and that my players really appreciated), but that would seem to contradict the stated design goal of wanting to get players back in the fight more reliably.
I think this is one where we just have to wait for an update on the update. As the preface says, this is just a draft...
You regain consciousness when you are healed or when the GM decides you regain consciousness (10m to several hours).
When you’re unconscious and at 0 HP but no longer dying, you naturally return to 1 HP and awaken after sufficient time passes. The GM determines how long you remain unconscious, from at least 10 minutes to several hours.
I liked the old rules better
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I also liked the idea of keeping the "Dying x" condition even after healing to represent the physical, if not mental, trauma. With PF2E I've been able to relate game mechanics to things I've experienced in real life, and this particular game mechanic was another one of them.
SCA Heavy List fighting is perhaps the closest you can come to a hack and slash medieval armored combat. I've taken some serious hits (though not real-life fatal) and needed a moment or two to come back around.
Maybe keeping "Dying x" isn't the answer, but there needs to be some kind of status effect/penalty for nearly dying and then coming back to life. Maybe Fighters, Barbarians, and characters with the Die Hard feat can bypass these detriments.
Thoughts?
EDIT: I re-read the rules and you still have the Slowed X condition, with X being equal to the X of your Dying X value. So you are penalized for 1 round. Sorry, I think it should take 1 round for EACH level of Slowed X.
I am thinking off adding a homebrew option. Something along the lines of. Fred the fighter is struck by an ogre's maul for x damage. Ribs crack and he falls to the ground unconscious. With the ogre's backswing his body is propelled 10 feet into a wall with a sickening crunch.
Ogres are mean! :)
So, by the rules he would have Dying 2; and an assigned Fort save DC X to reduce the dying condition. With the new rules however, one heal spell for 3 hp's and he leaps to his feet and re-engages the ogre. Fred's brush with death is as if it never happened, even though his hit points have him barely standing.
Magical healing is of course a wondorous thing, its Magic! after all. Still, I would appreciate some reflection of the characters near death experience.
I was thinking of the following additions. When a creature takes a mortal wound, he gains the Drained condition equal to his Dying value until he takes a daily rest. So, Fred gains dying 2 (drained), is healed and looses the dying condition. He enters the fray, and once more goes flying into the bushes and gains dying 1 (drained). Cleric heals him again. This is getting wearisome thinks fred. Charges ogre and is backswinged into a tree for dying 1. The ogre is defeated, and Fred is healed once more. At the end of the battle he accumulated Drained 4 until he takes a daily rest.
You could also apply the Clumsy condition until the character is healed to say 50% or more of his hp total.
Thoughts?
I think that since the slow is proportionnal to the dying condition (dying 2-->slowed 2), there is enough of a penalty. You don't get back up and jump into the fray easily. Action 1, get up (maybe provoke AoO?) Then action 2 pick up weapon. Next turn, maybe you could move and/or strike.
I liked the old rules better
The old rules meant you were out of combat for 2-4 rounds. For a player, this is not a great experience.
I also liked the idea of keeping the "Dying x" condition even after healing to represent the physical, if not mental, trauma. With PF2E I've been able to relate game mechanics to things I've experienced in real life, and this particular game mechanic was another one of them.
EDIT: I re-read the rules and you still have the Slowed X condition, with X being equal to the X of your Dying X value. So you are penalized for 1 round. Sorry, I think it should take 1 round for EACH level of Slowed X.
Yeah, I also like that the previous rule where you kept Dying, even when conscious. It would have definitely prevented whack-a-mole in my playtest (but they would be dead).
Maybe they should be Slow 1 for their Dying value. If they were Dying 3, I don’t think they should be Slow 3 for 3 rounds, that’s too punishing and we might as well have recovery rolls for consciousness again.
I was thinking of the following additions. When a creature takes a mortal wound, he gains the Drained condition equal to his Dying value until he takes a daily rest. So, Fred gains dying 2 (drained), is healed and looses the dying condition. He enters the fray, and once more goes flying into the bushes and gains dying 1 (drained). Cleric heals him again. This is getting wearisome thinks fred. Charges ogre and is backswinged into a tree for dying 1. The ogre is defeated, and Fred is healed once more. At the end of the battle he accumulated Drained 4 until he takes a daily rest.
I like the idea of retaining some condition after almost dying. I always thought it was weird that when you had the Dying condition, you were operating at 100%.
Instead of drained (that affects your hp and fortitude, does not affect your abilities, and is slow to recover from), maybe fatigued (AC and saves) or perhaps Sluggish (attack, AC, reflex) would be better. Maybe they could lose that condition after 10 minutes of rest.
What happened, when you take damage while Dying? I was pretty sure, that you increase your Dying value by 1 (or 2 on crit), but...
If you take damage while you’re already unconscious, apply the same effects as if you had been knocked out by that damage, except you don’t move your initiative position.
If the damage came from a lethal source, you gain the dying 1 condition. If the effect that knocked you out was a critical success from the attacker or the result of your critical failure, you gain the dying 2 condition instead.
and
If you’re affected by a condition with a value multiple times, you apply only the higher value, although you might have to track both durations if one has a lower value but lasts longer.
So you increase your dying value from damage only if you have dying 1 and take a crit. Otherwise attacks just update DC for recovery saving throw. Am I misinterpreting this?
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Asking someone to sit out several rounds is a pretty crappy experience.
As it stands, you lose at least a round due to having to stand up, regain your dropped stuff, and being slowed. Sitting out longer just isn't fun.
I do agree that the wording still needs some adjustment. The bit about healing and losing the dying condition needs to be cleaned up. The big about "gaining" dying 1 and 2 from a hit doesn't jive with the taking damage while down rules.
The book would benefit tremendously from some examples in this case. We spent a long time last night trying to parse it out and still didn't really understand it.
That said, I really dislike the idea that if you're at dying 3 and get healed, you should stay out for 3 rounds to work your way back up to dying 0. That's just player hostile, especially if they got taken out by a lucky crit or an ambush or something. Telling players to sit out for 20 minutes while everyone else does stuff isn't a fun experience.
But if I heal you back up, you're no longer dying. Saying you should sit out two more rounds because reasons is effectively saying "take out your phone and do something else for a while".
When that happens because you got crit on the first round of combat and really couldn't do anything about it, it's just a way to disengage players from caring about what is going on.
If you want that... then yeah. We are looking for very different experiences.
Saying you should sit out two more rounds because reasons is effectively saying "take out your phone and do something else for a while".
Personally I'd hope that, in one my games, when a PC is lying on the floor half-dead and the rest of the party is desperately trying to turn the battle around, the player of that PC would be engaged enough in the campaign that they would want to watch what's going on, even if they can't directly affect the result.
As an aside, I found the rules for how much a comatose character weighs. It is listed under the Petrified condition of all places, p 323:
You have been turned to stone. You can’t act and you have the blinded and deafened conditions. You become an object with a Bulk equal to twice your normal Bulk (typically 16 for a petrified Medium creature or 8 for a petrified Small creature)...
From this we can surmise that a Small creature that is not petrified is 4 bulk and a Medium non-petrified creature is 8 bulk.
A fighter character with 18 Str can carry 14 bulk (encumbered). This means that to rescue a comrade, he must drop all but 6 bulk of objects. Tough.