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Cha isn't a stat that 'protects' you in any way. It covers innate magic and fooling magic items in pathfinder classic. For the playtest, fooling magic items uses EVERY mental stat leaving innate magic as the only extremely tenuous link connecting CHA to item use. IMO, cha was more picked to prop up the stat as a required one than any real logical reason.I agree with the latter point - Charisma for magic was invented for game balance purposes - but there's nothing tenuous about a link between 'innate ability to use magic' and 'innate ability to use magic items'.
How about the ability to use non-magic items?: the items an alchemist makes are explicitly non-magic. And even for magic items it really does seem tenuous as you can swing around a magic sword no matter your Cha but dare to put on armor and suddenly you have to use innate magic?
If we can accept Sorcerers using Charisma for spells (as opposed to something more sensible like Wisdom) we can accept this.
Seems apples and oranges to me. Casting a spell and picking up an item and/or drinking a potion seem like quite different activities. There isn't anything indicating there is a direct manipulation or activity of magic in item use.
Secondly, the sorcerer doesn't need cha anymore: it affects saves but not the ability to cast. You still get the same amount of spells as a 3 cha sorcerer but you get less items you can wear/use.
Maybe there's a kind of spiritual energy in the Pathfinder universe that manifests itself as force of personality but which can also be used for magic...
That sounds like ki [wisdom]. Force of personality is defined as charm, presence, magnetism, ect. Even we extend it to a 'spiritual force', I don't see the link from it to non-magic item use let alone magic item use. As sorcerers prove, the amount of magic you can use isn't governed by charisma, just the strength of the magic: as the strength is preset with items, I see nothing to link charisma to number of items used.
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You don't have to make it relevant across all player levels. You only have to make it relevant for its own (item) level, as a function of the others.
In the other thread I posted what those numbers would have to be to make that happen. It's not a hard calculation. It can be tweaked to be more or less generous (I decided to go with nice, round numbers past level 1), but as soon as the higher-level items become worse than the lower-level items in value, your incentive to buy them becomes an incentive not to buy them. (You don't want to die, so you still have an incentive you use them if you find them, but you're literally throwing your money away if you buy it.)
Except that when you lower the price of the higher level items to the price of the lower level items you haven't stopped the problem you've just packaged it in a higher level purchase.
The problem not be addressed is that if healing is going to remain remotely expensive (e.g. Making healing between fights a decision & not just a "Obviously we use all the consumables") you need to be able to set a price on healing which is actually relevant to the players. Health and gold scale at very different rates. Any price you can put on healing for a level 1 character will either be pocket-change to a level 10 character or completely unaffordable for the level 1 unless there's some other cost outside gold. Lowering the price of high level consumables to the same cost per HP or even lower just makes the price of healing even more inconsequential at high levels.
The idea of using resonance as a buff on the heal really doesn't seem to work to me, as if we maintain the current rough economic pricing the second highest potion (lvl 12) charges 4.8g per HP on average. Which is to say the designers while writing felt that was a fair price to keep healing a relevant expense at that level. To lower that to the non-resonance d4 option it has to be lowered to 1.2g per HP which is 1/4 the price... or 1/8th...
How about this one for a radical idea? Have using consumables cost xp! Not to craft them, mind you, but to consume. I bet that solves the problem right away, especially if you scale the cost with character level.
Granted, that may unduly punish frontliners, so perhaps some finagling needs to take place, but moving the cost away from gold, I feel, is the crux here.
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How about this one for a radical idea? Have using consumables cost xp! Not to craft them, mind you, but to consume. I bet that solves the problem right away, especially if you scale the cost with character level.
Granted, that may unduly punish frontliners, so perhaps some finagling needs to take place, but moving the cost away from gold, I feel, is the crux here..
Why do we have a zillion different ideas for punishing players and their characters for using the items the GM makes available? Why are the players bad if they intelligently optimize their resources?
I GM'd through the making-items-costs-xp days of D&D3.X, and that was one of the first rules we houseruled away, because of the incredibly detrimental effect it had on player morale and party harmony. I can only imagine that charging xp to use magic items would be significantly worse in terms of fueling inter-party resentment and meta-gaming.
There are a bunch of folks posting detailed breakdowns of the badly balanced incentives. But no, let's keep suggesting ever more inventive ways to slap players' hands when they reach for the cookie jar that we parked directly on top of their character sheets.
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There are a bunch of folks posting detailed breakdowns of the badly balanced incentives. But no, let's keep suggesting ever more inventive ways to slap players' hands when they reach for the cookie jar that we parked directly on top of their character sheets.
But otherwise you might have players enjoying the game in the wrong way!
Cross-Posting for relevance:
Here's a thought: Paizo likes modes in this edition. They can put a small section offering different difficulty modes. Easy: No resonance to consumables, and all healing items always follow the resonance-boosted numbers; Moderate: Consumables are like they are now, but spending resonance boosts healing items to follow reasonable HP/GP guidelines; Hard: Consumables work as they are now, and cost resonance; Severe: Consumables cost resonance and healing items provide their current values as temporary HP; Iron Man: No healing items allowed.
With a system like this, you print the healing items under the assumption of moderate difficulty, with a resonance amount and a non-resonance amount. The GM tells the players what difficulty this game will be (and/or the group discusses it like adults), and everyone knows what to expect from that game. Heck, this makes it easy for any group to transition between one style and another on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Maybe your one game is a beer-and-pretzels group where everyone just wants to hang out, while your other game is playing through a really gritty horror campaign. You don't require any house rules at all!
There are a host of other difficulty- and tone-related common house rules that can be balanced and then sorted along a spectrum like that, not just healing items. Things like access to scrying, or teleportation magic, or frequency of checks for random encounters, or how many HP you get from sleeping, etc., etc., etc.
PF2 wants to be modular (even if the designers sometimes refuse to let it fully out of the box), and a system like this would be modular on a meta-level.
How about this one for a radical idea? Have using consumables cost xp! Not to craft them, mind you, but to consume. I bet that solves the problem right away, especially if you scale the cost with character level.
Granted, that may unduly punish frontliners, so perhaps some finagling needs to take place, but moving the cost away from gold, I feel, is the crux here..Why do we have a zillion different ideas for punishing players and their characters for using the items the GM makes available? Why are the players bad if they intelligently optimize their resources?
I GM'd through the making-items-costs-xp days of D&D3.X, and that was one of the first rules we houseruled away, because of the incredibly detrimental effect it had on player morale and party harmony. I can only imagine that charging xp to use magic items would be significantly worse in terms of fueling inter-party resentment and meta-gaming.
There are a bunch of folks posting detailed breakdowns of the badly balanced incentives. But no, let's keep suggesting ever more inventive ways to slap players' hands when they reach for the cookie jar that we parked directly on top of their character sheets.
The problem is never the items that the GM provides, but the fact that many, and likely most, players expect a magic mart around the corner. If wands of CLW and potions aren't in easy supply, and especially if you take away magic item crafting as a practical player option, it really is no issue at all.
Granted, this necessitates the group to have a dedicated support player, but I don't see that personally as a problem. The fact that only the cleric currently suffices in that role, however, is a bit awkward, especially since there seems to be a relatively common dislike among the younger gaming generation to play religious characters.
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The problem is never the items that the GM provides, but the fact that many, and likely most, players expect a magic mart around the corner. If wands of CLW and potions aren't in easy supply, and especially if you take away magic item crafting as a practical player option, it really is no issue at all.
Granted, this necessitates the group to have a dedicated support player, but I don't see that personally as a problem. The fact that only the cleric currently suffices in that role, however, is a bit awkward, especially since there seems to be a relatively common dislike among the younger gaming generation to play religious characters.
I view magic marts and time to craft as things from the GM, too. I also am upfront with my players about how much downtime they can expect in a campaign, so they can decide if they want to invest in crafting skills and feats. And ask the same questions if I'm going to be playing.
Our group hasn't had the issue with the dedicated healer - but we tend to run a 'distributed healing' setup. We've had 'main healers' that were oracles of metal, alchemists, and death clerics - and then 1 or 2 'secondary healers' in the party that were witches or bards or paladins or warpriests or <insert other classes that can pick up a bit of supplementary healing>. We've run campaigns with nobody able to channel positive energy, yet had sufficient healing.
I am not sure how well 2E supports the distributed healing party setup, but 1E definitely did. Not supporting it would be a definite negative for our particular group.
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The problem is never the items that the GM provides, but the fact that many, and likely most, players expect a magic mart around the corner. If wands of CLW and potions aren't in easy supply, and especially if you take away magic item crafting as a practical player option, it really is no issue at all.
Granted, this necessitates the group to have a dedicated support player, but I don't see that personally as a problem. The fact that only the cleric currently suffices in that role, however, is a bit awkward, especially since there seems to be a relatively common dislike among the younger gaming generation to play religious characters.I view magic marts and time to craft as things from the GM, too. I also am upfront with my players about how much downtime they can expect in a campaign, so they can decide if they want to invest in crafting skills and feats. And ask the same questions if I'm going to be playing.
Our group hasn't had the issue with the dedicated healer - but we tend to run a 'distributed healing' setup. We've had 'main healers' that were oracles of metal, alchemists, and death clerics - and then 1 or 2 'secondary healers' in the party that were witches or bards or paladins or warpriests or <insert other classes that can pick up a bit of supplementary healing>. We've run campaigns with nobody able to channel positive energy, yet had sufficient healing.
I am not sure how well 2E supports the distributed healing party setup, but 1E definitely did. Not supporting it would be a definite negative for our particular group.
I can say in our playtest of Part 2 of Doomsday Dawn, we have a dedicated healing cleric, and myself as an alchemist with battlefield healer, and though individual battles have been very hard so far (only part way through the adventure), we've managed to rest with no more than 1 or 2 hit points from maximum.
A party with a cleric, alchemist and paladin probably would never need to dip into wands of cure light wounds in a day. But I think every class needs some kind of access to healing (even if just self-healing), because a party shouldn't have a mandated healer.