I'm in the camp for boosting the other healing options available outside of cleric's channel energy. We ran In Pale Mountain's Shadow twice, with different parties (but the same players). First time through I had a druid with a few heals prepared, and Natural Medicine. The second time I had a cleric. There was a very stark difference in how long we could adventure between the two parties.
Natural Medicine generally didn't work out too well for me, between the DC and the once/day limit. It's already limited to strictly out-of-combat due to taking 10 minutes, after all.
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Feelings towards Stamina Points aside, if your players are finding Dead Suns to be too easy, from what I've experienced and seen discussed online, they are in a small minority.No!!!! Please don't add Stamina to Pathfinder 2nd Ed (PF2e).
I'm a Starfinder GM, and have been totally frustrated by not being able to significantly hurt any of the PCs during Dead Suns. (PCs need to be hurt sometimes, in order to give them a sense of mortality.) I can usually get a couple of them to lose some or most of their Stamina in a single combat, but as soon as the combat is over they rest for 10 minutes, spend a resolve point, and viola! back to full health.
Our Mystic was totally frustrated. She had nothing to do. Medpatches? Who needs them? Medicine skill rolls? Only for diseases... I finally homebrewed a rule that the Mystic could "cure" Stamina instead of HP on a case by case basis.
I don't think that was a good solution, but at least it gave the Mystic something to do, at least until we made it to Eox. (But that's another story.)
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE... No Stamina in PF2e.
Yeah... we had two deaths just in AP1. AP2 is even more cut off from civilization and infested with poison and disease. If they are breezing through those, I think the GM has bigger issues than Stamina points.
For keeping the threat level up I like the idea of keeping your actual hit point pool pretty small, maybe only equal to your con score so a range of 8 to 22. Then it would be damaged when you're dropped below zero stamina or when you crit by something, but each instance would only drop you by a 1 point on a crit or 2 when dropped. Other effects might attack hp directly, like touch of death. That would keep the threat level interesting I think.
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I agree with the general majority consensus. It would be great to not feel like the heal bot is necessary. I very much dislike the two fight adventuring day. It has felt even more like the case in PF2.0. The cleric is basically forced to use all their spells on healing and if that is the case don't give them other spells just the one heal spell they are going to cast over and over again.
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It does have healers, that is true, but they are not absolutely required as part of play. Healing has been a part of the fantasy RPG experience forever. I am all for challenging dogma for the sake of dogma, but I am not sure this is it. Magical healing is a fantasy trope, and I feel that walking away from that trope might do a fair bit of damage to peoples view of the game.
That said, stamina might still be an option we look at, but I am not sure that we would ever put it in a position to replace healing.
Thanks for the feedback.
As a guy who absolutely loves playing healers to the point my nickname among two separate RPG groups is Oracle, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE! don't build encounters or systems presuming there is a healer.
It literally sucks all the fun out of being a healer. There is a reason why I am so vocal about making sure parties have a wand of Cure Light Wounds. Healing magic is for IN COMBAT healing. Because burning your limited resources outside of combat just feels awful. As is being forced to play a healer "cause no one else will" or having to deal with all the other players demanding healing.
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Stamina
The Starfinder system has a split "health" system, cut in half between "hit points" and "stamina points". You gain a number of hit points and stamina points from your class per level, and you add your CON to your stamina points. When taking damage, damage is removed from your stamina pool first.In starfinder, a character can spend 10 minutes and a resolve point to regain all of their stamina points, but in my view I don't see that adding resolve points is necessary or adds any appreciable depth to the game. As such, I'd say it would work just as well for characters to be able to regain all of their stamina points with only 10 minutes of rest.
I agree with most of the suggestion of adding stamina, but I think there is a value in having a limit of the number of times per day you can recover HP stamina-style.
If every encounter has to break through stamina to do any lasting effect on the party, then a lot of weaker (level-1, level-2) fights will be fairly inconsequential. Which would be a shame for me because I personally like having weaker fights unless those fights have no bearing on the rest of the day.
Also, having a limit on the number of times offers up new design space for more powerful non-combat healing based on stamina, like an alchemical remedy that allows for an additional rest to regain stamina, or a bardic song which allows the bard to spend magic to restore stamina instead of resolve. Which would also increase the value of non-cleric healers while keeping clerics the kings of in-combat healing. Clerics will save you from deaths door, but a bard's song or an alchemist's party will keep the party moving for longer days.
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As the person stuck in my group who ends up always playing the healer, please end my suffering. I would like to play something else, I really would. I spent two years stuck playing a class I didn't enjoy so that other people could because no *one* in our gaming group wanted to play a cleric, but a cleric was absolutely vital to avoid having one or two fights a day.
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In classic fantasy literature, television, and movies, heroes don't need constant healing after while they're fighting and after most of the fights. The drama in the fights is in parrying, dodging, blows, creating openings, disarming opponents, and using clever strategies. Minor hits are largely ignored, and when a solid hit happens, that's the end of the fight or the end of the opponent.
Characters are not whittled down like like Thanksgiving turkeys with hit after hit taking bits of health off.
Healers exist in classic fantasy, but they're usually at destinations to take characters to when they are grievously wounded and not a central parts of most scenes and encounters. Healers aren't a part of the fight healing people in the middle of combat, especially not people who haven't fallen and haven't for the most part been taken out of the fight.
In real life, when people become more seasoned combat experts, they don't gradually get the ability to take an order of magnitude more damage than novice combatants. They don't win fights because the same hits hurt them less. They win fights because they're genuinely more skilled.
Some people say that they like playing healers, and that's great, but often no one in a group of players wants to play the healer or someone decides to be one because no one else wanted to. It would be good if people could more easily play the characters that they want to, or at least less often get stuck with their last choice. Clerics, paladins, and druids get created less often than fighters, rogues, wizards, and barbarians according to https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-your-dd-character-rare/. Those numbers for clerics, paladins, and druids are probably even too high when thinking about what people want to play, because someone has to play them to keep everybody else from dying. People would rather be a more central part of the fight instead of doing clean up.
Healing in the middle of combat drags on fights, especially if both sides can do it.
Because party characters get whittled down on hit points during a significant portion of fights, healing takes up time after fights that would be a lot more interesting and entertaining spent on the next encounters.
Because after just a small number of encounters party characters are down on hit points and down on uses of healing spells and other healing abilities, players end the game day to replenish hit points and healing and that takes up game time that would be more interesting and spent on the next encounters instead deciding watches, dealing with night time encounters that usually have little to advance the main plot, spend time resetting daily accounting, and spend time healing what couldn't be healed the previous game day.
The game would be a lot better if it were a lot less whittling down of hit points and had a lot less need for characters to be constantly healed.
The drama, like from most classic fantasy, should come from more interesting and entertaining combat and less from the fear of seeing how low your health got before the fight ended.
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I like Starfinder's Stamina system a lot. Makes it fun resting 10 minutes after a big fight.
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I like stamina... but i don't like resolve(as it is in SF). In fact I'm not a fan of the whole, 'everything runs off of one pool of points' thing a lot off people seem to be really into, so to deal with stamina, they have to come up with something else. Though maybe resolve just being for stamina healing and not dying(instead of hero points)could work.. for me at least.
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Trying to thread the needle for the niche of healerdom is always difficult in that they are either needed, or useless. Not useless in that entire character is, but their healer based/boosting abilities are unnecessary/overkill.
Another issue with Stamina is that HP is an abstraction, so having one pool that has to be abstracted in one way and another that has to be abstracted in another way is confusing.
GM "Oh you're not actually getting hit if it's Stamina, that's you expending energy to dodge it"
P1 "But that ability [poison, spell, etc] only works if it actually hits them. Do I have to go through all their Stamina before I can use those?"
P2 "Isn't that what AC and Reflex are supposed to represent?"
But if it's supposed to be abstracted the same way then... what's the point in having two separate pools? That's where healing surges would make more sense.
An issue with Rests is the amount of HP regained. If its a lot/easy then that's world altering that mortal wounds can be napped off. This was amusing useful (to the point of being broken) in the Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2 games. In tabletop/PBP that would just be annoying honestly.
I can't really comment on Healing Surges since i didn't play enough 4th for them to leave an impression.
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It seems that, on this thread at least, we have a bit of a consensus that the game assuming ever party has a healer is A BAD THING(tm)?
I guess the question is does anyone disagree?
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Can't think why a mundane healing pool would make healers suck.
In my opinion just makes they more special! You don't need to waste resources casting heal, but you will treat injuries that will really kill people
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Humans are fragile creatures, even heroic ones. But taking one hit and going down is annoying. So different games have come up with different systems.
E.g. Nathan Drake in uncharted has "luck". As you're getting shot, you're not actually getting hit, but you are pressing your luck. If you press your luck too much then you actually get hit and then die. Because people just don't move the same after taking a bullet.
Is it contrived? Absolutely. Is it more fun than reality? Absolutely.
Stamina represents your heroic ability to evade attacks, but as you tire out from all that last-second dodging it takes it toll and eventually you get hit for real and then the healer needs to come in and heal your wounds.
Still contrived, still more fun than the alternative.
It seems that, on this thread at least, we have a bit of a consensus that the game assuming ever party has a healer is A BAD THING(tm)?
If 'a healer' means 'a healing-focused cleric', then yes.
If anyone with medicine skill can be a healer, then it's less of an issue.
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I think with stamina, you're still taking hits but they're minor cuts and bruises that can be shaken off or pushed through. That way poison and status effect attacks still make sense.
Then having critical and death effects go directly through the your actual hit points really feels like you took a serious blow.
Yeah... we had two deaths just in AP1. AP2 is even more cut off from civilization and infested with poison and disease. If they are breezing through those, I think the GM has bigger issues than Stamina points.
Poison and disease did quite a number on the PCs, but combat usually didn't get them down in HP very often.
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No! I absolutely do not want another pool of sub hit points that I have to track. PF2 characters start with more hit points than any RPG except for D&D 4E and they will end up with more hit points of any RPG at the high levels. Its absurd that people are complaining they are too fragile. If this is a big issue, other areas of the game need to be tweaked. For example
1) Raise the effectivenesss of heavy armor and limit the benefits of dexterity so there is less incentive to use this as a high stat for characters on the front lines
2) Add the parry weapon feature to more weapons such as swords. Swords are great for parrying in real life because they are much easier to control than axes, maces or flails for example. To give meele characters, especially two handed characters more options to use an action to parry the less those characters will take hits in combat and less resources needed.
3) Revisit spell nerfs - This is a serious issue as weakened spells prolong combat and prolonged combat run the risk of more resources being wasted because the monsters hang around longer to inflict more damage.
4) Look at resonance and see if it needs to be scrapped: If a serious need for additional non magical healing is needed then resonance is not doing its job properly and we might as well scrap it and return to the PF1 band aid of the wand of cure light wounds (now wand of heal) with 50 charges
5) Create spells that either offer damage reduction or grant a decent amount of temp hit points. Allow these spells to last untill the temps are gone or a certain amount of DR has been absorbed. Do not allow these spells to stack with themselves.
6) Revisit the monster encounter guidelines to make the combats less threatening on average while still allowing the PC's to accumulate experience at a decent rate so it doesn't feel like MMO grinding
So... you don't want another pool of health that you need to track, but you do want to expand the parry system and make casters more powerful by having them do more damage and grant... another pool of temporary health? Seems like you just got all that extra resource tracking back and then some.
Improving defensive actions draws out combat. Improving melee defense and making magic more powerful pigeon-holes melee into being MMO tanks and just standing there taking hits while casters take care of the problem... this also doesn't help the 15-minute work day problem, because those casters are still expending daily resources to complete encounters, and having to pick up slack because the melee people are parrying instead of attacking two or three times.
I'm not trying to come down on you, but I'd like for you to see that your solution to the 15-minute work day is to optimize and expand the elements that make the problem endemic to the system, instead of the Stamina system, which adds very mild complexity to dramatically expand the utility of all characters, including the healers.
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The problem stamina may curb does not go away. It does not end the demand for healing. The best way to avoid that dilemma is to play a game that does not simulate violence. PF2 can only benefit by expanding class choices to include "nontraditional" healing options. People really like choices. More than a few players would jump at the opportunity to be unshackled from being (or depending on) the designated healer. Let's fix the root problem before cannibalizing another system that did not.
...this looks like a suggestion for Pathfinder 2.0 to not simulate violence... I mean, I'm not opposed to nonviolent games, but that might be a hard sell.
I'm actually not sure what you are trying to suggest, here. Do you want almost everybody to have access to combat healing? 4E D&D did that, and 2.0 is borrowing enough 4E stuff that all the folks who came to Pathfinder in the first place to avoid 4E are getting a little nervous.
Stamina does actually solve the "problem" of the need for healing, because the need for healing "problem" is predicated on using scarce daily resources on general maintenance of battle damage, because everyone wants to be topped up before the next fight. Stamina restores after a short rest, meaning that anyone who didn't jet hit really hard doesn't need any extraneous healing at all. It also happens during downtime, not during a battle, so mid-combat healing is still important.
I was thinking that the stamina healing could use Spell Points, or Power Points, or whatever they end up being called. Martial characters might not have a big need for them, resulting in being more able to shrug off hits between fights.
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I'll even go as far as to say that they could wholesale replace the ENTIRE Dying system with Stamina by allowing PCs to use their Stamina only when at 0 HP, and then they have a buffer that they can "Bleed through" with degrees of value before Dying. If they don't stabilize, they take 1 Stamina Damage every turn and give them a heatlthy Stamina Pool so that they can take more than 1-2 level equivalent hits after hitting 0.
Another issue with Stamina is that HP is an abstraction, so having one pool that has to be abstracted in one way and another that has to be abstracted in another way is confusing.
GM "Oh you're not actually getting hit if it's Stamina, that's you expending energy to dodge it"
P1 "But that ability [poison, spell, etc] only works if it actually hits them. Do I have to go through all their Stamina before I can use those?"
P2 "Isn't that what AC and Reflex are supposed to represent?"
Except that's not how stamina points work in Starfinder. It's not the difference between getting hit vs. miss, it's bumps-and-bruises that impair for a while vs. more serious injury. Get hit with a poison or disease attack while you still have Stamina and you're still required to make saves. And since it's all abstraction anyway, it's no more or less plausible than hit points themselves.
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Except that's not how stamina points work in Starfinder. It's not the difference between getting hit vs. miss, it's bumps-and-bruises that impair for a while vs. more serious injury. Get hit with a poison or disease attack while you still have Stamina and you're still required to make saves. And since it's all abstraction anyway, it's no more or less plausible than hit points themselves.Another issue with Stamina is that HP is an abstraction, so having one pool that has to be abstracted in one way and another that has to be abstracted in another way is confusing.
GM "Oh you're not actually getting hit if it's Stamina, that's you expending energy to dodge it"
P1 "But that ability [poison, spell, etc] only works if it actually hits them. Do I have to go through all their Stamina before I can use those?"
P2 "Isn't that what AC and Reflex are supposed to represent?"
Ehh, it still feels wierd.
Getting hit for 50 pts of Stamina Damage and then getting 1 pt of Health Damage and the latter is supposed to be more severe?
*scratches head*
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Put me in the camp of people who love the stamina system. I am an old school gamer (Original Hard Cover AD&D times) and was very leery of stamina when I first read Starfinder but I came around in a big way.
Stamina ups the intensity of fights. When the mobs knock someone into hit points of damage "S@#t just got real" Suddenly every hit is a potential problem and crits can be down right deadly. This allows a group healer to do things other than healing for the first part of a fight and then swoop in and be a hero.
Mobs are so powerful that virtually ever fight someone would take damage. This was a much more interesting mechanic than just hit points. You know you will be going into the next fight with your stamina topped off so do you waste resources healing your 10 points of hit point damage or just allow it to linger and hope the mobs dont get through stamina again.
Stamina allows a group to run without a healer. Granted the GM will have to role back the fight difficulty a bit but I believe adventures and combats would be every bit as intense.
Stamina is a great mechanic because it slows down the rate that players "lose" fights. As soon as you burst through to hit points of damage the players are on the ropes but now healing spells and magic items can slow the descent.
Also, There are not 2 pools to track with stamina. Just one really. If I have 70 stamina and 70 hit points then you just track damage like alwasy. As soon as I have taken 71 damage I am now into hitpoints.
GM: "Iron man just hit you for 71 stamina. Thanos, you are now into hitpoints."
Player: I touch the blood on my cheek and say "All of that for a drop of blood."
GM: Nice I am going to allow a free intimidation roll.
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Well, you are tracking two pools, whether you're tracking "current HP and current STA" or "damage to HP and damage to STA". Not heaping all damage onto a single number makes your bookkeeping much easier I've found. (Case in point: face tanking an angry dinosaur for about eight rounds while it tries tries to chew off my head faster than the mystic behind me is trying to fill me up again and I'm trying to teach it to sit down with my taclash.)
I think Stamina manages to strike a really good balance on how much you want/need healers. Say that quite a few but not all encounters go through someone's Stamina into HP; a healer means that you start each encounter with about 25% total health more than without one. That's a significant advantage, and makes a healer valuable. But it's not indispensable, if that player was contributing in a different way the party could also be successful. Which is exactly the balance point we want - healers are appreciated but not required.
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If you do implement stamina, _please_ allow clerics to also have a way to restore stamina in combat. I really hate feeling so useless with my healer mystic when everyone is down lots of SP but no HP in the middle of a fight. And no, I'm not going to multiclass, the casting progression is already painfully slow.
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But whatever the mechanic, I think that non-cleric healing needs to be available and meaningful. I doubt that any cleric player is going to feel that their role is being trivialized by having other healing options available in the party. Instead, as was mentioned before, the cleric player will likely feel that they can actually use their entire spell list rather than just the one spell.
This is true, as someone that mostly plays healers. Downtime healing is a thing that has to happen somehow. It's not the thing I'm talking about after the game as a shining moment of awesome, while the clutch heal/dispel/protective buff/etc is.
That said, I don't think stamina as its own pool is a solution for two reasons. One is that I play with other people with learning disabilities, and more numbers is harder for them. Making damage come off two pools instead of one is harder for them to handle, requires more math when numbers cross from one into the other, and is another thing to remember.
Two is this excellent point from Redelia:
If you do implement stamina, _please_ allow clerics to also have a way to restore stamina in combat. I really hate feeling so useless with my healer mystic when everyone is down lots of SP but no HP in the middle of a fight. And no, I'm not going to multiclass, the casting progression is already painfully slow.
Stamina as-is cuts in half what I can effectively heal. If someone has to be kept above half-HP because they're a low HP class and could get blasted for more than half their HP in one turn by a bad guy (which happened more than once to us in dd2), I suddenly have no way of doing that as their healer. I can't be proactive.
I will also probably overheal more often becaus there will be less HP available to heal despite people being near critical health. Stamina is an effective nerf to healing.
So, what I'd support instead is effectively short rest. Rest for 10 minutes and get back half your HP, which is exactly what you'd get back from Stamina if it was depleted. You still need safety to do that, so you can't do it while you have 15 rounds to win a fight and flee, and you can't do it while being pursued. Maybe you can do it 2-3 times a day, or maybe it costs 2 resonance points or something, I don't know what the exact details would look like.
But now we've accomplished basically the same result without the side effects. Healers don't need to use as much healing in downtime and thus can bring other spells (while still having their healing feel impactful and really matter). Groups without a healer have a recovery mechanism that makes them more viable. The 15 minute adventuring day is mitigated somewhat as you have a way to stay in the fight without burning all your healing (a limited number of times).
As a bonus, it even addresses CLW wand spam by removing a lot of the reason people needed to do it in the first place. But it does all that without weakening the place of healers in the game or the game world, which is something I'm not really convinced you can say about Starfinder.
I’d love the idea of stamina in pathfinder 2!
I’d make a few tweaks from Starfinder but keep it simple.
Split health into 2, hp and stamina. Cleric is able to heal both.
Stamina can recover after a short rest. HP can only be recovered by magical healing or slowly over a long rest.
This keeps clerics relevant, but also gives the party a buffer hp if the cleric is out or there is no healing immediately available.
You know, this thread has made me think back on the speculative fiction I enjoy and yeah there aren't any dedicated healers along for the adventure pretty much ever.
In fact the most common form of 'healing' I can think of is the hero being half dead after a fight and two scenes later being back at full fighting health mysteriously with mayyyybe a bandaged head to call back to the disappeared wounds.
The idea of hero points for health recovery is awesome but if that is adopted I'd start everyone with two so the players who are going to hang on to one no matter what will feel comfortable enough to use up one.
That plus buff the healing ability of the other classes and make mundane healing halfway decent and reliable. Sure it takes away one of the schticks of the cleric a bit.... But it's the schtick that they don't want!
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Stories in that type of setting do not have healers as part of their core
It would be great to have a system that allows telling stories that require a healer, as well as stories that do not require a healer.
nor is resting in the middle of an adventure really make a lot of sense.
Respectfully, the five-minute-adventuring-day doesn't make sense in any system.
That said, we consider all feedback and we will take this under advisement, but I am not sure it is something we are going to do.
While I'm personally disappointed by the content of this sentence, I am deeply, deeply appreciative of the sentiment behind it. It illuminates and underscores designer mind-set, and lets us clearly know where you're coming from. So thank you.
I can safely consider this a dead horse, but retain hope that some day you'll decide a dead horse is less awesome than a living one.