An Ethical Solution To The Healing Problem


Magic Items

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Things become 'worse' value for money as you level up. That's standard.

It's 65gp to give a weapon a +1, and 53,860gp to increase a legendary weapon from +4 to +5. If each +1 is of roughly equal value, then the value for money gets exponentially worse.

But when you're rich enough, it makes sense to get a +5 weapon rather than 828 +1 weapons, because you don't have 828 hands. Similarly, it makes sense to bring along the expensive healing potion, because you might not have the time/resonance to drink lots of small ones.

Good and Bad options are meaningless in a vacuum. There are only Better and Worse options in any given situation. Is it better to push on while injured, drink a horribly expensive healing potion, drink multiple cheaper healing potions that consume all your Resonance, or go and find somewhere to rest? The answer will depend on the urgency of the situation, how injured you are, and how much money you have. That has the potential to be an interesting decision, and games thrive on interesting decisions.

(I actually think the healing situation is pretty bad in PF2; I'd just use different arguments to support my case. For example, given the costs of healing by other means, it seems like every party should bring along at least two clerics if they want to make it through a few encounters without having to rest overnight. This is bad class balance.)

Liberty's Edge

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I don't understand how everyone seems to have lost the entire legacy of Ancestral Memory of when all TTopRPGS required a Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard at EVERY table in order to survive the first 2 encounters, let alone DAYS of an Adventure.

I for one think there is already too much in the way to varied and easy to access options for Magical Healing to non Divine Spellcasters & Martials. I don't think it jives with ANY fiction fantasy I've ever read that a group of Adventurers can just rely on what essentially amounts to "Energy Drinks" to keep them standing after EVERY battle.

If you get beat up, are bleeding out in a dark hole in the ground, and your first complaint is that you ran out of Resonance instead of kicking yourself for not bringing a Healer... there is something fundamentally wrong about how your party has chosen to balance itself.


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Themetricsystem wrote:
I don't understand how everyone seems to have lost the entire legacy of Ancestral Memory of when all TTopRPGS required a Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard at EVERY table in order to survive the first 2 encounters, let alone DAYS of an Adventure.

Not too hard to grok -- 20 years is an entire GENERATION's worth of gamers. There are people alive today who can't fathom how quick it used to be to board airplanes twenty years ago, let alone something less significant like "oops, can't go into The Ghost Tower of Inverness without a cleric."


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Themetricsystem wrote:
I don't think it jives with ANY fiction fantasy I've ever read that a group of Adventurers can just rely on what essentially amounts to "Energy Drinks" to keep them standing after EVERY battle.

In fantasy fiction, adventurers don't get severely injured several times a day.

Themetricsystem wrote:
If you get beat up, are bleeding out in a dark hole in the ground, and your first complaint is that you ran out of Resonance instead of kicking yourself for not bringing a Healer... there is something fundamentally wrong about how your party has chosen to balance itself.

Or with the game.

It depends on if the goal is a game about creating a balanced team, or a game where players can create the character they want to play and play that without having to ask for group permission.

Given the existence of PFS, I imagine they're going for the latter.


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Matthew Downie wrote:
Things become 'worse' value for money as you level up. That's standard.

I submit that something being standard or "the way it's always been" doesn't make it good or correct. An edition change and a playtest is an opportunity to fix all the things that were broken about the previous version, and establishing one's own identity apart from the franchise from which this game is an offshoot is a perfect time to drop some of those legacy elements which are holding the game, as a whole, back.

Matthew Downie wrote:

It's 65gp to give a weapon a +1, and 53,860gp to increase a legendary weapon from +4 to +5. If each +1 is of roughly equal value, then the value for money gets exponentially worse.

But when you're rich enough, it makes sense to get a +5 weapon rather than 828 +1 weapons, because you don't have 828 hands. Similarly, it makes sense to bring along the expensive healing potion, because you might not have the time/resonance to drink lots of small ones.

In fairness, I do also have a problem with magic weapons and I started a thread about it. That thread is approached more from the angle of real vs false choices, though, because apart from +X weapons, I think PF2's rune system is a really outstanding improvement over the way magic weapons used to be priced. My biggest problem is that the game expects you to have a +X weapon to keep up with its math, but then continues to present it as "optional."

There are some key difference between the two systems, though. Your choice of property rune doesn't usually have as direct of an impact on a group's overall survival than healing items do, and doesn't really have much of an impact on what party compositions are "allowed" by the game. "Thou must have a healer" as a commandment is, in my opinion, an archaic notion that should be excised from the genre. "Thou must need healing," is a much improved version of that commandment, and allows player agency for how to best fulfill that requirement for maximum player enjoyment... assuming, of course, that the options aren't totally broken.

Matthew Downie wrote:

Good and Bad options are meaningless in a vacuum. There are only Better and Worse options in any given situation. Is it better to push on while injured, drink a horribly expensive healing potion, drink multiple cheaper healing potions that consume all your Resonance, or go and find somewhere to rest? The answer will depend on the urgency of the situation, how injured you are, and how much money you have. That has the potential to be an interesting decision, and games thrive on interesting decisions.

(I actually think the healing situation is pretty bad in PF2; I'd just use different arguments to support my case. For example, given the costs of healing by other means, it seems like every party should bring along at least two clerics if they want to make it through a few encounters without having to rest overnight. This is bad class balance.)

On this we mostly agree, especially the part I bolded. I've mentioned before that I don't think this is a silver bullet that will cure all of the game's problems with healing. But if the items have the proper incentives, and the medicine skill works, and more classes have options they can use to be effective at it, and (basically) the game is designed around the commandment of "Thou must have healing" instead of "Thou must have a healer" it will be a better experience for it.

One of my proudest moments as a GM was from one of my campaign session zeroes, when the group was discussing what they wanted to play, and someone asked "what are we going to do about healing" because everybody had a concept that wasn't a very good healer. Someone said "how about we set aside a portion of all the loot we get as a healing fund?" The players all agreed, set a proportion and we got underway. It was much harder for them (as is appropriate) but they made it work.

I want PF2 to support that as a possibility.


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Leedwashere wrote:


There are some key difference between the two systems

There's really only one difference that matters for this discussion though, and that is that five +1 swords aren't nearly as useful as a +5 sword and so a +5 sword can cost whatever you like, but 5d8 worth of healing is basically the same as five lots of 1d8 and therefore can't cost much more than five times as much. (the fact that is costs 1 action not 5 is irrelevant if in combat healing isn't viable, and even if it is viable it can't cost exponentially more and still be worthwhile)


Five +1 swords are worse than one +5 sword because they require five people to use them.

Five 1d8 potions are worse than one 5d8 because they would use up way too much Resonance. It's a logically consistent system... or it was, but it looks like Paizo are abandoning it for consumables it now. Which is probably a good call, because it was an 'all stick and no carrot' approach that felt bad. It took away the convenient healing we were used to from PF1 and didn't provide anything resembling an adequate substitute.

Without Resonance or similar, the only sensible reasons to buy a 5d8 potion instead of a 1d8 potions would be (a) you plan to drink it in combat, or (b) they provide the same value for money.

I suspect Paizo will stick with the tradition of 'high level stuff costs exponentially more'. I wonder if we'll end up with high level characters drinking twenty potions in a row.


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Matthew Downie wrote:
It took away the convenient healing we were used to from PF1 and didn't provide anything resembling an adequate substitute.

This, absolutely this. This is basically the difference between me shrugging my shoulders about this through all of PF1 (at least you can make it work!) and ranting in the forums about it come PF2.


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Themetricsystem wrote:
I don't understand how everyone seems to have lost the entire legacy of Ancestral Memory of when all TTopRPGS required a Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard at EVERY table in order to survive the first 2 encounters, let alone DAYS of an Adventure.

I think it's that everyone does remember it. They just agree that removing that requirement has improved the game markedly, and that returning to that state would be a step backwards.


Leedwashere wrote:
One of my proudest moments as a GM was from one of my campaign session zeroes, when the group was discussing what they wanted to play, and someone asked "what are we going to do about healing" because everybody had a concept that wasn't a very good healer. Someone said "how about we set aside a portion of all the loot we get as a healing fund?" The players all agreed, set a proportion and we got underway. It was much harder for them (as is appropriate) but they made it work.

Ah, the good old healing fund. Pretty much a must have around here since 3E, as nobody ever plays a cleric. Too many atheists around, too much experience with jerk-ass GMs using the gods quirks to kill the players' fun. And that is something I worry about in PF2, the gods seem to once again have full license to screw their clerics over.


There should be four to five times as many Players tired of being screwed over as there are bad GMs, so my favorite answer? Make new GMs, and give the crap GMs an ultimatum: Shape up or get relegated to player status. Honestly, the problem of terrible GMs is literally self-correcting, far more than any ruleset can be.


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Matthew Downie wrote:
Themetricsystem wrote:
I don't think it jives with ANY fiction fantasy I've ever read that a group of Adventurers can just rely on what essentially amounts to "Energy Drinks" to keep them standing after EVERY battle.
In fantasy fiction, adventurers don't get severely injured several times a day.

This is something that bugs me as a complaint. "OH You don't see them popping energy drinks or CLW wands or whatever in setting X! That's so unrealistic and would kill the pace!

Okay.

Show me a setting where the heroes, heroes mind you not the NPCs that die in 1-2 hits all around them, get injuired to the point they either need healing, walk it off anyway(Healing Surge?), or are shown to be in bandages for maybe a few hours to days.

The heroes usually dodge or are missed. OR take slight damage that a simple rest to First Aid should be enough. Or just Auto Die if they take enough damage but even then that's not enough if we don't see the body(Amazing how much Fast Healing you have off screen/page).


If I remember right, there was a ton of conversation about why everyone picked CLW over all of the other cure spells. The answer I thought made the most sense was one of action economy:
HP really only did one thing (outside of specific Martyr builds):
When you ran out of HP, you were Unconscious and out of the game. When you had HP, you could do things to help your team out, no matter how much HP you had.
So, four characters at 20% health actually had a lot better chance of winning a fight than one character at 100% health.
But this creates kind of a Whack-a-Mole problem.
See, movement in PF1 was kind of restricted, which meant that monsters and PCs kind of just paired off and swung until someone died. So even if you would rather that a monster was hitting you instead of your buddy, you couldn't really switch places if you didn't want to eat an OA or two. So, it turned out that instead of trying to spread the damage out among a few team members, it was easiest to just revive the PC once he hit 0 HP.
Of course, it would be best if you could give enough HP to your buddy that you didn't have to heal him every round. But the healing options at the time didn't really keep pace with the damage that a Full-Attacking monster put out.


We should brainstorm ways to solve this.
Penalizing characters for reviving.
I don't like this one, but it might work. If you get another penalty every time you go down, there's a heck of an incentive to stay upright. But I think that the playerbase would probably just shift to figuring out ways to remove the negative condition.

Reward characters for having higher HP.
This one's really interesting.
I could really see this being the spot for some super cool Morale bonuses. The best part, you don't have to worry about condition removal cheapening this. Definitely more "carrot" than "stick." As an extra bonus, you could use this to replace item bonuses (since HP scales with level)

Give everyone ways to sacrifice HP:
I mentioned Martyr builds upthread, and while that would be an interesting way to encourage healing, I'm thinking that PF2 is a little too deadly to want to sacrifice MORE of my HP.

Bake healing into the characters themselves:
Someone mentioned this upthread, but I kind of like the idea of having characters slowly reheal if they aren't taking damage. It removes the need for a healer, makes battles more dynamic (the real strategy would be to cycle who's on the front lines so that your other guys get a chance to heal). I'd point to high-tier MOBA play as an example. But on the other hand, I could see this slowing down combat pretty badly.


There are some interesting ideas, here, and I'd like to give my thoughts on each of them.

Floppy Toast wrote:

Penalizing characters for reviving.

I don't like this one, but it might work. If you get another penalty every time you go down, there's a heck of an incentive to stay upright. But I think that the playerbase would probably just shift to figuring out ways to remove the negative condition.

I think there's nothing inherently wrong with applying a penalty as an incentive to apply in-combat healing before getting to 0 HP. If the problem that needs to be addressed is that there's too much yo-yo-ing, then a cursory look at the mechanics shows that this is likely because a character at 1 HP is just as effective on their turn as one at 100 HP, so why spend actions on healing them until you have to? With no penalty, those actions would obviously be better spent trying to end the fight faster.

In the dying rules before 1.3, that penalty was that you were slowed for 1 round when you got back up. Now the penalty is the wounded condition, which makes the next time you go to 0 even more deadly. I think this is a perfect penalty, because it doesn't negatively impact your ability to contribute if you continue to try to take part in the fight, but makes you consider the looming specter of death as the consequences for doing so.

Not all penalties are created equally, and the stick and the carrot don't have to be used to the exclusion of the other. You can use a little bit of both to adjust behavior as well.

Floppy Toast wrote:

Reward characters for having higher HP.

This one's really interesting.

I could really see this being the spot for some super cool Morale bonuses. The best part, you don't have to worry about condition removal cheapening this. Definitely more "carrot" than "stick." As an extra bonus, you could use this to replace item bonuses (since HP scales with level)

I don't think there should be inherent bonuses just for being at full HP. That state is too easy to achieve, and all adversaries usually start out meeting that condition all the time.

But I would like to draw attention to the soothe spell, which does apply a buff at the same time as healing. That spell isn't the best healing per spell level compared to other spells, but its additional utility provides an incentive to use it to heal during combat instead of between combats, because it bridges the gap between spending your actions healing or contributing to the actual end of the combat.

There's probably some wiggle room to apply a rule that if you are healed to full HP you get a morale boost until the end of your next turn. The benefits of soothe last for a minute, and don't require you to reach full HP to get them. It's a minor carrot, but when combined with a minor stick like the wounded condition they work together as both a positive and negative incentive to heal before your ally gets to 0 HP working in tandem. But you have to be careful with something like this, because you don't want to have an incentive for characters to heal up to full, then cut themselves for a few HP so that they can quickly heal up for those sweet bonuses. That would be a strange game state, and should almost certainly be avoided.

Floppy Toast wrote:

Give everyone ways to sacrifice HP:

I mentioned Martyr builds upthread, and while that would be an interesting way to encourage healing, I'm thinking that PF2 is a little too deadly to want to sacrifice MORE of my HP.

HP is a resource, and having interesting ways of interacting with that resource is certainly interesting. The value of that resource depends entirely on how easy it is to replenish it. So while things like the Holy Vindicator's stigmata can be neat, I think this topic is really only tenuously related to a discussion on healing at best.

Floppy Toast wrote:

Bake healing into the characters themselves:

Someone mentioned this upthread, but I kind of like the idea of having characters slowly reheal if they aren't taking damage. It removes the need for a healer, makes battles more dynamic (the real strategy would be to cycle who's on the front lines so that your other guys get a chance to heal). I'd point to high-tier MOBA play as an example. But on the other hand, I could see this slowing down combat pretty badly.

This is the only area where I think I fundamentally disagree with you. I think totally free healing is uninteresting and would have a detrimental effect on the game by removing one major area of opportunity costs. As I mentioned earlier in this thread I think the state of the game should require healing, just not require a healer. Parties should have to consider how they want to stay alive, and work toward that goal. Do they want to have a cleric that specializes in it? That works. Do they want to keep a trained medic on hand? That works now (as of 1.3 anyway). Do they want to spend money on it instead of spending that money elsewhere? That should work, too.

Or a more balanced approach might be some combination of any of the options, or even other options not listed. But if you just hand out free healing it takes one area of resource management out behind the shed and shoots it. I think the game would be lesser for losing it, and some character concepts become entirely pointless.

Each trade in resources should have its own benefits and drawbacks. Using spell slots (or channel energy) is fast, but has hard limits in quantity costs you versatility elsewhere. Using medicine (1.3) is very repeatable, but slow and comes with a chance that you might botch it. Using healing items is fast, but costs you the ability to afford other equipment that might help you stay alive more proactively - except that it's also an exponentially increasing money-waster if you try to use anything other than the lowest level healing items in any circumstance other than a dire emergency, so in practice they're not actually really competing with other items of their own level and you can spend trivial amounts to get all the healing you could possibly want as long as you're willing to spend time on it. The opportunity cost is broken.


Leedwashere wrote:


I think this is a perfect penalty, because it doesn't negatively impact your ability to contribute if you continue to try to take part in the fight, but makes you consider the looming specter of death as the consequences for doing so.

Not all penalties are created equally, and the stick and the carrot don't have to be used to the exclusion of the other. You can use a little bit of both to adjust behavior as well.

I must confess, I didn't get a good look at death/dying until last night. I really like the Wounded(X) condition! It looks like it puts a super-cool importance on mundane healing.

Leedwashere wrote:


I don't think there should be inherent bonuses just for being at full HP.

I get where you're coming from.

With Monsters having (on average) more HP than PCs, and by extension, a bigger buffer of "almost-max" HP, I could see that being brutal too.
Leedwashere wrote:


I think totally free healing is uninteresting and would have a detrimental effect on the game by removing one major area of opportunity costs.

I'm not sure if I agree with you here.

I don't know a lot of character concepts that hinge on healing.
Outside of martyr builds, (who really care about healing options, because healing increases both their distance from Unconscious and their expendable resources, it's like if Wizards gained more spell slots every time they got healed.) I don't know if anybody really interacts with the system besides providing healing options.


I don't mind the idea of a wounded condition.

There's a game called Darkest Dungeon; kinda remind me of a gritty table top module. Anyway the game has "Death's Door" a mechanic where you don't auto die at 0hp. Rather each blow has a chance to kill you. You can get healed up but each time you land on Death's Door without dying, you get stacking debuffs. Sooner or later, you're walking through that door if the mission goes long enough

If Wounding is like it(Haven't seen 1.3 yet) then that's a nit of a plus for me


Leedwashere wrote:

I've mentioned a few times in a few threads that, when it comes to healing items, the incentives are all wrong. The best healing items in terms of HP/GP are the lowest level items, and once you get away from the really low levels the HP/GP ratio drops of dramatically. It was the same way in PF1, too. This is why the wand of CLW was unbeatable. And because the wand of CLW was unbeatable, we got resonance applying to consumables in PF2 - the wrong solution to the problem.

Here's the problem, the game isn't designed around gold efficiency. It is designed around an exponential increase in the amount of gold required to get to the next most powerful item.

The problem wasn't that higher level potions and wands were less gold efficient, the problem was that gold efficiency was a solution to acquire healing.

Lets imagine a completely ridiculous scenario that breaks all the laws of "physics". A fighter is capable of carrying a near infinite number of swords, and with zero time pressure, can apply multiple swords to a single attack, gaining the magical bonus from each sword and adding it to the total of the attack. From a gold efficiency point of view, should they buy +1 (2000g/+) or +5 (10,000g/+) swords? The +1 swords obviously, because they are 500% more efficient.

Obviously, that's a ridiculous scenario. The reason you can't do that is because you can only apply one sword to any given attack, so spending the exponentially higher money to get the better sword works, because you have a limit on how many swords you can use per attack.

The problem with what you are presenting is you are forgetting that WBL is a resource that increases. If it were static or linear, than your analysis would work, but it isn't. Let's look at what elixirs cost as a % of party wealth.

Minor Elixir of Life costs 9% of the party's wealth at level 1.
Lesser Elixir of Life costs 6% of the party's wealth at level 4.
Elixir of Life costs 6% of the party's wealth at level 8.
Greater Elixir of Life costs 6% of the party's wealth at level 12.
True Elixir of Life costs 6% of the party's wealth at level 16.

If the party is limited by how many items they can carry and use, the higher level items become more valuable because they provide a larger effect, even if their cost is higher and they are "less gold efficient".

Also, your new calculations make a Greater Elixir of life capable of fulling healing a Dwarf Fighter at lvl 20 with about 100 hp left over (starting at 16 con and adding a stat boost every 5 levels). The changes you've made don't fit within the general ecosystem of the rules. You'd need to make broad and sweeping changes all over the place.


We can go 'round and 'round on whether the math makes sense from a developer point of view, but I really don't think that it makes a difference. I've seen players in real time, and read stories on the boards. People really do make their purchasing decisions based on the efficiency of those options. Not everyone does, sure, there have been examples of that in this thread, too.

But enough people do that the "wand of CLW" problem was a thing. If the efficiency remains un-fixed, then it will continue to be a problem in second edition. Maybe it won't have as much of an impact on the game because of the impact of the medicine skill. I can't say, but I am confident that the majority of healing purchases in most games will be the lowest-level items. People interested in efficiency will find a way to make it work. Bags of holding are a thing.

As has been pointed out in this thread as well, there are more knobs to turn than the ones I put in the opening post. In fact, my favorite ideas have come from other people once the discussion started. The numbers I put forth in the opening post are patently absurd, and I know that - but they were used to show how absurdly the system breaks down when you scrutinize it from a practical standpoint instead of a theoretical one.


I fully understand what you're trying to say. I'm saying the premise of your argument is flawed.

If you are allowed to take an infinite number of actions, then the most resource efficient action will take priority (this results in wands of CLW). If instead, you limit the number of actions, than what becomes important is how much can be achieved with each action.

Let's assume you're a 10th level character. You can only be healed by 1 wand per day, and that wand can only heal you one time each day. A wand of CLW is still the most efficient use of gold spent per hit point, but would that be your primary concern?

How you frame the problem determines what kind of solution you seek.


You've just re-invented resonance. This is one of the reasons why stick-only resonance, especially resonance for consumables, was so heartily reviled. Because instead of using any of the many dials available for adjusting the incentives to make people want to buy the better healing items, you are instead artificially enforcing the less efficient options on people.

It chafes on people because the incentives are telling you one thing, while the stick slaps your hand every time and says "Nyet!"

Usual disclaimer: bigger numbers are bigger and action economy in a turn does matter. These are incentives to use bigger healing items, but they are not incentives to buy them. Your best option is to buy low, find high for emergencies, and try your darnedest to avoid spending your actions on healing in combat. That's what the incentive structure says.


Leedwashere wrote:

You've just re-invented resonance. This is one of the reasons why stick-only resonance, especially resonance for consumables, was so heartily reviled. Because instead of using any of the many dials available for adjusting the incentives to make people want to buy the better healing items, you are instead artificially enforcing the less efficient options on people.

This is called a distinction without a difference.

None of this is "real", it's all artificial. It is literally a made up world. Everything you're proposing is artificial too. The entire game is artificial.

Resonance is a change to the incentive structure. It just turns out that people got angry about that change. I still think that overall, it is a good idea, and gets to the heart of some of the problems.

Also, you're still thinking small. All you're doing is talking about moving the gold/hp ratio.

Why not change the structure of how healing works outside of combat?

Minor Wand of Rest - heal 1 hp per round for 15 rounds.
Lesser Wand of Rest - heal 1d4 hp per round for 15 rounds.
Wand of Rest - heal 1d8 hp per round for 15 rounds.
(Taking damage ends the healing effect).

Or....

Lesser Wand of Rest - heal 1d4 hp per round, last for 1 round per level of the receiving character.

Slow healing that brings characters up, but is largely worthless inside of combat. Potions and spells are used for in combat healing, but the wand takes care of what happens between fights.

Change the question, and you get different answers.


Irontruth wrote:

This is called a distinction without a difference.

None of this is "real", it's all artificial. It is literally a made up world. Everything you're proposing is artificial too. The entire game is artificial.

Resonance is a change to the incentive structure. It just turns out that people got angry about that change. I still think that overall, it is a good idea, and gets to the heart of some of the problems.

It's not a distinction without a difference. The reason people got angry is not because it was a change to the incentive structure - full stop. Rather it's because it set up a conflicting incentive structure. The efficiency tells you one thing, and resonance tells you something different. Actually, this is the reason I disliked resonance for consumables. I can't actually speak for anyone else, just strongly suspect.

Irontruth wrote:

Also, you're still thinking small. All you're doing is talking about moving the gold/hp ratio.

Why not change the structure of how healing works outside of combat?

Minor Wand of Rest - heal 1 hp per round for 15 rounds.
Lesser Wand of Rest - heal 1d4 hp per round for 15 rounds.
Wand of Rest - heal 1d8 hp per round for 15 rounds.
(Taking damage ends the healing effect).

Or....

Lesser Wand of Rest - heal 1d4 hp per round, last for 1 round per level of the receiving character.

Slow healing that brings characters up, but is largely worthless inside of combat. Potions and spells are used for in combat healing, but the wand takes care of what happens between fights.

Change the question, and you get different answers.

I'm not sure where you get anything resembling this sort of impression from my continuing post history in this thread. I've said repeatedly that what I want is for the incentive structure to be fixed. I started by providing an absurd extreme that was literally just adjusting the HP numbers to match the GP numbers to show how ridiculous they would have to be to even approach having an incentive structure that makes an efficiency-minded consumer even consider spending their money on them.

But since then, as other ideas have come in and the discussion progressed, I've made it clear on multiple occasions that I'm aware of and in favor of any dial that acts as a solution to the incentive problem, be that adjusting prices, adding intangibles that make it harder to get concrete math, having items that you can sometimes get your money's worth (but not always), making items work in a fast healing method, whatever. I don't sweat the specifics as long as the incentive structure gets fixed somehow.

Your wand suggestion sounds absolutely fine to me, too, provided the incentive structure surrounding it (i.e. prices, etc.) make people not just prefer the higher-level ones, but eagerly anticipate it, because the next option is actually the better one - you were just too low-level and poor to afford it before this lucky day. I want the same to apply to potions and elixirs. How that happens is functionally irrelevant to me, so long as the incentive structure works.


The problem with your proposal to lower the cost of higher level healing potions is: who is making all these higher level healing potions?

The answer is probably higher level NPCs, and ethically they deserve to be paid for their services. If they don't get paid substantially more for making higher level potions than a lower level person would get paid for making a lower level potion, why would they do it?

They could be engaged in other professional tasks where this level of enforced market isn't present.

Eventually the availability of high level healing potions would become very rare and their price would go up.


Leedwashere wrote:
Irontruth wrote:

This is called a distinction without a difference.

None of this is "real", it's all artificial. It is literally a made up world. Everything you're proposing is artificial too. The entire game is artificial.

Resonance is a change to the incentive structure. It just turns out that people got angry about that change. I still think that overall, it is a good idea, and gets to the heart of some of the problems.

It's not a distinction without a difference. The reason people got angry is not because it was a change to the incentive structure - full stop. Rather it's because it set up a conflicting incentive structure. The efficiency tells you one thing, and resonance tells you something different. Actually, this is the reason I disliked resonance for consumables. I can't actually speak for anyone else, just strongly suspect.

That is a distinction without a difference. It really, really is. A "conflicting" incentive structure is just a change to the incentive structure. Yes, they are different incentives, but they're both still incentives.

A job that offers overtime offers you more pay, but conflicts with your available free time. Available free time isn't a "conflicting" incentive structure and amount of pay a different structure, they are both incentives within the same equation of how you determine whether you want to work that overtime or not.

Resonance was just a new incentive for a specific behavior. It is a new variable to the incentive structure, but it isn't a wholly new structure.


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Conflicting incentives are what makes for interesting decisions. Without conflict, decisions are trivially obvious.

They're only become a problem when they're too brutal. "Do you want to spend all your money on healing, or probably die from lack of healing?" "Do you want to rest overnight and fail the quest, or continue without resting and probably die?"

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