I would certainly prefer to have a stamina and wound system. Have numerous options for recovery of stamina but keep healing wounds to magic, medical attention, and time. And please tie poison and other such damage riders to wound damage.
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Stamina and HP in starfinder plays smooth as butter. The only people who lose out are pure healers, since combats can go buy where they can't contribute to healing since everything is Stamina damage. The simple solution is to let healers heal Stamina too, if they want to, and give them access to proactive healing like adding bonus temp HP.
It seems like Paizo is trying their hardest to make an MMO style healer necessary, and that's the main reason they haven't defaulted to the successful Stamina system.
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Treat Wounds seems like a decent fix to a really bad problem. It's not quite how I would have done it, but it works alright and adds about 3 hours to the 15 adventuring day.
As far as difficulty;
A level 1 a barbarian with 12 wisdom and a healer's kit would have a 50% of hitting a DC 13 medicine check (+1 from level, +1 wisdom).
A level 1 a cleric (or druid) with 18 wisdom and a healer's kit would have a 60% of hitting a DC 13 medicine check (+1 from level, +4 wisdom, +0 item quality).
A level 20 barbarian with 14 wisdom, a master healer's kit, and expert medicine proficency would have a 50% of hitting a DC 36 medicine check (+20 level, +2 wisdom, +2 item quality, +1 expert)
A level 20 cleric is going to be much higher (70%?)
Each attempt takes 10 minutes. Half may fail, increasing the time spent, and when you critically fail (5%), you are locked out for the rest of the day. Additionally it requires a modest investment of player resources, but that certainly seems reasonable to me.
Some people are saying Treat Wounds is too weak, some are saying it's too strong, so I guess Paizo isn't going to be able to make everyone happy.
Friday's Twitch broadcast implied that the designers are looking at this this, and the current iteration is probably the top end. We will likely see a tweak to Treat Wounds that brings it down a bit in a coming update.
Part of my issue is the ability to fully heal hp via Treat Wounds up to full hit points without magic. A problem multiplied by the fact that no resources are managed or consumed in doing so. We went from "depletion of most/all healing resources" or 15-min adventuring day to "virtually guaranteeing full HP before each combat". For FREE.
Do you find in PF1e the cost of CLW wand to be significant after level 5? Is your group ever without one beyond level 2 or 3? If actually be okay with not needing the medicine check myself. But I understand it's trying to appease those who hate rapid non magical healing.
Posted this in another thread:
(Emphasis on most relevant part)
For sure, I agree with others that Treat Wounds DCs shouldn't be tied to the user's Level.
That is an obvious flaw.However, by tying the DC to the target's Level, now the game is implying that treating the wounds of a more experience character is more difficult than treating a similar wound on an inexperienced character.
That still feels wrong.
Why should it be more difficult to treat a higher level creature?
The nature of the wound should dictate how difficult it is to treat.
Otherwise, it is gamey nonsense.I submit that Treat Wounds should have a tiered DC based on how much damage the target has taken.
Perhaps add some more conditions besides Wounded.
If HP is below 75% they get the Hurt condition.
If HP is below 50% they get the Injured condition.
If HP is below 25% they get the Impaired condition.
Each condition would increase the base DC of Treat Wounds by an appropriate amount.I would also tie the amount of healing to the severity of the condition.
None: Cannot use Treat Wounds. (This limits the use of Treat Wounds)
Hurt: Success, 1x Level; Critical Success, 1.5x Level.
Injured: Success, 1.5x Level; Critical Success, 2x Level.
Impaired: Success, 2x Level; Critical Success, 3x Level.My reasoning to disallow the use of Treat Wounds on a character that has no damage condition is to prevent the over use of the skill.
This helps mitigate the 15 minute adventuring day while also assuaging the party from just taking an hour to heal back up to full after every battle, aka the stop-and-go adventuring day.Additionally, the amount of time it takes to use Treat Wounds should depend on the most severely injured target's condition.
For example if at least one target is Injured, the time increases to 30 min.However, I would also give the user of Treat Wounds the option to treat any target as if they were of a lower tier condition in order to save time and reduce the DC.
This approach would incentivize using a combination of magical healing and mundane healing, but still leave a...
I haven't run any numbers or anything.
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My group has decided to use the hard DC of the enemy that damaged you (if more than one enemy, the highest one). The rationale is that a higher level enemy has more powerful weapons or causes more vicious injuries, and it parallels nicely with the recovery DC when dying
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Part of my issue is the ability to fully heal hp via Treat Wounds up to full hit points without magic. A problem multiplied by the fact that no resources are managed or consumed in doing so. We went from "depletion of most/all healing resources" or 15-min adventuring day to "virtually guaranteeing full HP before each combat". For FREE.Do you find in PF1e the cost of CLW wand to be significant after level 5? Is your group ever without one beyond level 2 or 3? If actually be okay with not needing the medicine check myself. But I understand it's trying to appease those who hate rapid non magical healing.
1. CLW cost is irrelevant. If they're in the game, they're a tool and a consumable resource. Even a healer's kit in PF1 was a consumable resource.
2. Ever without a wand past level 3? Sure. It happens. Sometimes they're depleted, sometimes they preferred to spend gold on other things, sometimes gear is lost, etc.
3. "Auto-heal" would be a non-starter. Part of the game has always been evaluating the 'can we or can't we press on?' question. Instantaneous healing - and the healing provided in the current iteration of Treat Wounds - is immersion breaking. If immersion in the game isn't your bag, no worries, but for myself and just about every player I've ever gamed with it's one of the defining traits of tabletop RPGs. It's one of the key reasons people choose to play games like PF rather than just playing video games.
As a side note (not specifically directed at any one person), the whole "have to be at full power" for every encounter doesn't compute for me when there's a vocal group simultaneously clamoring for increased PC power. I don't understand the mindset of "I want my PC to be a demigod" (split mountains, swim in lava, fall from any height, etc. without magic) while simultaneously combining it with "Whoa, whoa, whoa there! I'm down 5 hit points, Jerry has the sniffles, and Francine's down 2 spells. We should wait until we're at full strength to attack. And unless we can teleport back to town and be assured we can rest without a random encounter, you're an unfair GM, Mary."
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"Auto-heal" would be a non-starter. Part of the game has always been evaluating the 'can we or can't we press on?' question. Instantaneous healing - and the healing provided in the current iteration of Treat Wounds - is immersion breaking. If immersion in the game isn't your bag, no worries, but for myself and just about every player I've ever gamed with it's one of the defining traits of tabletop RPGs. It's one of the key reasons people choose to play games like PF rather than just playing video games.
For me it's the injuries, not the healing, that break immersion. Oh, I got hit by another six arrows? Never mind, I can still fight just as well, so I'll just drink a few potions later.
The least immersion-breaking thing for me is the idea that most hit point losses represent something like stamina loss rather than real injury.
And the "can we go on?" question still applies without hit-point attrition. I've seen very few characters that don't rely on some kind daily resources other than HP to fight effectively. It just makes the answer more likely to be "yes" than "no".
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Upvote Stamina system. It’s fun and works well. You feel tough not needing clerics and medics so often.
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Treat Wounds works great as far as i'm concerned. With the proviso that the DC might be better based on the target than the medic.
Why is it fine?
- Everyone wants to enter each fight with full hit points. This used to be achieved with wands of cure light wounds. So Treat Wounds removes the 'wand spam'.
Verdict: better than PF 1, because 'no wand of CLW spam'.
- The GM is given a lever to pull if they want to put pressure on the PCs and prevent them healing up: time. If the GM doesn't want a full HP party then no problem: interrupt the party. Compare that to the wand of CLW method: where healing happened in a minute or two.
Verdict: better than PF 1, because 'GM has control over how healed the party can get'.
Also, don't forget that a critical failure means no Treat Wounds for 24 hours.
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The DC issue aside...
From my point of view, except for the critical failure and not being able to use it in combat, there is very little difference between Treat Wounds and spamming CLW wands.
The flimsy economic limiter is gone, and a competent GM can interrupt the 1e group using the CLW wands just as easily.
I've already even heard at least one GM mention that their group just sat there for an hour and topped off everyone's HP between each battle.
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The idea that some dude with a roll of bandages can completely heal someone that 10 minutes ago was having a near-death experience is a total SNAFU for me.
No, but they can heal the scratches and limited reserves of heroic luck that hit point loss can represent.
I never liked the heroic luck interpretation of HP.
It makes healing spells and potions seem wierd.
Plus, Hero Points fills that role.
And, no, I don't entirely like Hero Points either.
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I never liked the heroic luck interpretation of HP.
It makes healing spells and potions seem wierd.
Plus, Hero Points fills that role.
And, no, I don't entirely like Hero Points either.
GM: "With luck and a little bit of stamina, you were able to mostly avoid the blow."
P: "Great, then with a quick rest I should be ready to go right?"
GM: "What? No. You were stabbed, that takes a lot of time, medical attention, or magic to heal.
P: "Oh...so can I carry on?"
GM: "Of course, it's only a little bit of HP damage. It doesn't impair you in any way."
P: "So can I just like wrap some bandages on it or something?"
GM: "How would bandages heal the wound? Let's be realistic here."
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Spamming Treat Wounds without limit makes no sense as Adventure Paths rarely takes into account time sensitive quests and it becomes an extra burden for the GM.
Stamina/Resolve is indeed a much better system so either they use that or they limit the number of uses of Treat Wounds per day. Another example of a much more elegant system is like short rests are handled in 5e: you can only use your hit die to heal a number of times equal to your level.
Spamming Treat Wounds without limits has to go away also due to the stupidity of rolling up to six times per use, it's unbearable. How could the devs expect players to like that?
If you don't like spamming Treat Wounds, just add +1 to the dc for each attempt, which also makes sense and adds to verosimilitude. That plus using the hard dc of the enemy that damaged you makes it a competitive check that can't be repeated indefinitely. Presto. You don't have to use ridiculous things like stamina or hero points or short rests or whatever.
Also, you can't always take 40 minutes to heal and not have the enemies ambush you
I really liked the Stamina system. The only things I didn't like were:
1) It felt awful playing a healer because healing magic doesn't affect Stamina
2) It added another resource pool to track.
However, both of these are easily fixable.
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I really liked the Stamina system. The only things I didn't like were:
1) It felt awful playing a healer because healing magic doesn't affect Stamina2) It added another resource pool to track.
However, both of these are easily fixable.
1)I specifically like that about stamina because it pushes the healer out of a passive reactionary role and makes them need to be designed as a more active participant in combat.
2) Tracking another resource pool can be a pain but this can be designed to be a very story rich resource pool.
Keep the wound pool very small, like negative hit points, say half your con score and gain one each of them only from falling below zero stamina, taking a critical hit or certain specific magic. Then you can track them individually and have cursed wounds, poisoned wounds or crippling wounds that can effect the story and have interesting story ways to heal them.
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The more I think about it, the more Stamina just makes sense.
First, it's a great, elegant solution that makes it WAY easier to describe to new players when something is a mortal wound versus "luck, near misses, nicks and scratches".
Second, it's being used in Starfinder, which is really an excellent system that both systems would benefit from keeping similarities between. Starfinder is getting pretty popular, and it'd be a shame to make it too difficult for a group to switch between the two new systems.
Third, it fits the narratives D&D and Pathfinder are based on. Like so many people have said, how often in books and movies do the protagonists get skewered and have to be magically healed? Resting and taking a breather are far more common, which Resolve point spending really helps.
Fourth, Resolve is a pretty nice system too, that Pathfinder could quite effectively use, especially if we get rid of the dumpster fire that Resonance is. Without Resonance mucking things up, there's room for another resource pool. It could even be combined with Hero Points, hypothetically.
Fifth, having a relatively easily refreshed pool of stamina and a harder to fill pool of HP actually introduces the concept some people like of pressing on despite wounds. I've gone into many fights with missing HP, as long as my Stamina was filled. It introduces significant risk, but not a guaranteed TPK.
All you really need to do is let magical HP healing spill over into stamina, so that combat healing matters.
Speaking as both a player and a DM, treating time as an infinite resource strikes me as lazy. The PCs don't operate in a vacuum. Things react to their presence, NPCs have their own time schedules in which they make patrols/etc....
Right now, in my pathfinder I campaign, we just finished a mission to save some children from an evil cult. We didn't even take the time to loot everything, we had so much time pressure.
Sure, sometimes there won't be any time pressure at all...but in my experience, that should be the exception, not the rule.
On the other hand, always having a time limit to keep the party in check can be rather tiresome, for both DMs and players. It's also narratively limiting. It's especially annoying as a player when you can't stop for 5 minutes to catch your breath and shop but your opponents seem to have infinite time and resources for their overly convoluted plans.
I really liked the Stamina system. The only things I didn't like were:
1) It felt awful playing a healer because healing magic doesn't affect Stamina2) It added another resource pool to track.
Yeah I find healing magic not recovering stamina a bit odd as well but it's a super easy fix to just say it does.
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If there's literally no time limit, it doesn't matter what sort of healing the game uses. You will always have time to heal.
If there's literally no time limit, it doesn't matter what sort of healing the game uses. You will always have time to heal.
Absolutely true, unless the story/GM force time to be a consideration the players can always choose when and where a fight will happen. This means if the party wishes they are at full health. Even if it means that it's achieved by the rather weak healing from a night's rest. If you allow players to control when the next encounter will happen (by having them go looking for it rather than it coming to them, or by not having consequences for the party not looking for the fight) then they can do whatever the please.
Of course this is an extreme example, and usually there is always some level of time constraint. The question is more on how much constraint and is it relevant.
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First, it's a great, elegant solutionI don't really see how having two different health pools that are healed (and sometimes harmed) by two completely separate things is all that elegant.
Like so many people have said, how often in books and movies do the protagonists get skewered and have to be magically healed?Irreverent, magical healing is a boon and staple of fantasy games. I don't care what movies and novels do, I'm not playing them.
Fourth, Resolve is a pretty nice system too, that Pathfinder could quite effectively use, especially if we get rid of the dumpster fire that Resonance is. Without Resonance mucking things up, there's room for another resource pool. It could even be combined with Hero Points, hypothetically.I find this amusing since Resolve is suffering the same issues as Resonance and I don't care for it precisely because. Resolve is your timer for dying, so important to keep those stocked. BUT you also use it for regaining Stamina during Rests. BUT BUT you also use it to power your cool class abilities. But because of the first (the whole not dying thing) the other two don't get used as a much, if at all. If Resolve just governed one of those things it'd be okay, but all three? It's exactly the same as Resonance, with all the annoying clunkiness that follows.
Fifth, having a relatively easily refreshed pool of stamina and a harder to fill pool of HP actually introduces the concept some people like of pressing on despite wounds. I've gone into many fights with missing HP, as long as my Stamina was filled. It introduces significant risk, but not a guaranteed TPK.Since refilling Stamina costs Resolve I wouldn't really label it as "easily refreshed.
All you really need to do is let magical HP healing spill over into stamina, so that combat healing matters.
Then what's the point of having two different health pools then?
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I don't really see how having two different health pools that are healed (and sometimes harmed) by two completely separate things is all that elegant.
I agree with your entire post - this in particular I think I can answer though.
From the earliest editions of the game - until now - there have been a very vocal group of people who *hate* the hit point system. They don't like it, they don't like how it works, they don't like how it abstracts combat, they invent all kinds of ways to describe how combat wounds are only 'the last hit that takes you down' - because getting hit for 80 damage and living is too 'absurd'. This is entirely why so many systems have alternate wounds systems, and taken to it's extreme where you target specific body parts with attacks.
I get that - and I don't mind people who house rule to the 'nth degree' or use wounds/vigor or some other system. The only time that this becomes an issue is when 'hit points' and 'healing' get touched at all - they all come out of the woodwork to describe how 'healing is breaking the game' and 'we need a different system'.
Pthooey I say. Hit points are fine - healing is fine - it's a game. If the game gets too real it's no longer fun. I want to play Pathfinder not "Actuaries and Accountants".
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I don't really see how having two different health pools that are healed (and sometimes harmed) by two completely separate things is all that elegant.
I refer you to Corrik's post that outlines the absurdity of HP as wounds but not wounds. People want to bend over backwards to make sure it's not too easy to heal, but don't want the other half of that realism which is that you won't be pushing onward when your literal entrails are hanging out. In that sense, Stamina/HP is far more elegant.
Irreverent, magical healing is a boon and staple of fantasy games. I don't care what movies and novels do, I'm not playing them.
There's a vocal group, represented by some among the developers, who felt that magical healing ought to be rare. That's the whole reason they swatted the CLW wands out of our hands. If we can't have cheap magical healing, I'd rather have a functional system like Stamina than a hackneyed "crit fail and you're boned" system that is the current treat wounds system, which still doesn't make logical sense.
Resolve vs Resonance
Resolve works fine because you can build a character around not really using it, and the times you want to use it the choice is made in the moment and has a clear cut cost/benefit. It's also keyed off of character abilities, not gear. The fact that using Resolve is risky to your health was built into the system.
Resonance as it stands now is your life line (potion/wand use), your equipment slots, your fun utility item ability limiter, and a consequence of how good you are at talking to people. The fact that using it risks your life was not accounted for when it was slammed into the PF2 system, and it shows.
Resolve is much more aligned with Hero Points than Resonance.
Since refilling Stamina costs Resolve I wouldn't really label it as "easily refreshed.
That's funny, I never had a problem with it.
Then what's the point of having two different health pools then?
Not sure what you mean. Magical healing being so powerful that it also gives you back some stamina doesn't impact the need for having a separate pool that can be refilled without magical healing. It just makes magical healing more useful.
To be clear, if we could go back to PF1e's system of no stamina, no Resonance, and cheap CLW wands, I would go back to that in a heartbeat. That doesn't seem to be in the cards though, so Stamina is easily a superior alternative to weird "Wounds" which are a hodge podge of Stamina and Resolve, anyway, that takes a mandatory skill to heal.
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Agreed. I don't really play high fantasy RPGs for the realism. If you want realism, gurps is good, but a single shotgun blast to the face is likely to take you out for days or weeks.
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All you really need to do is let magical HP healing spill over into stamina, so that combat healing matters.Then what's the point of having two different health pools then?
You know Rysky, I was thinking about this when it struck me...while I like the Stamina system from Starfidner, you're absolutelu right that allowing you to heal your stamina would be ludicrous and there would be no point in having separate tracks of stamina and hp.
Which makes me, we should simply formalize "hp" to be described as part actual damage and part stamina, and to enable a system in which you can have resolve to restore the portion of your "hp" that is represented as stamina. But are only one track.
Honestly, getting away from requiring a healer for HP is great IMO. But I could see making conditions much more prevalent that require someone to remove them, which can make healing magic (but not hp renewal) still important without making the party reliant on having it.
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Sorry for the necro, but I feel the issue has not really been resolved, as Treat Wounds does not make it easy to find a logical stopping point for the adventuring day.
Since I play a lot of Starfinder, I am perfectly fine with the system, it works and limits the adventuring day in an organic way.
Maybe bring Resolve into PF2, but not stamina. When someone uses Treat Wounds on you, you have to spend one of your Resolve points to receive the benefit of it; or at least for each time after the first in a given day. Meanwhile, also scrap hero points and make those functions of spending Resolve, and make Resolve the thing you spend to buff a consumable item as they are talking about doing, so you have other things competing for the resource beyond just using it as "healing surges."
I mainly just don't want to have to track Stamina/Wounds like in Starfinder. The less math we have to deal with, the better.It could be done slightly simpler:
* You have a pool of hero points (gotta find a better acronym than HP though...)
* You can spend a hero point to heal HP equal to 50% of your max.So, if you have 80HP and took 50 damage, spending one hero point would heal you 40HP and bring you back up to 70. At that point you could spend another hero point to heal up the last 10HP, but that doesn't seem very efficient, so maybe you decide to do another encounter first.
The thing is, you don't need a separate Stamina and HP pool to make this work. The math can be simple. One number that you only have to compute once per level: 50% of your full HP.
Whether or not Stamina would work, the idea to give Hero Points to option to heal/rename them to Resolve should work, after all both kinda represent the character's energy to push on.
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I guess I'll lay out the case for Stamina over Treat Wounds one more time:
Design goal: post combat healing to prevent a 15min adventuring day.
In theory both Stamina and Treat Wounds achieve this. However, Treat Wounds makes it very random whether the day will end after encounter 1 or 10, depending on when you critfail the skill check.
People seem loath to spend hero points for anything except stabilization/recovery.
Because we can't trust Treat Wounds, we use hero points a lot like resolve in a stamina system; the last couple are always reserved for healing. Might as well make it official.
Scaling DC on Treat Wounds is an abomination
You simply cannot convince people the skill system isn't a treadmill when one of the most central skill checks in the game will have a constantly scaling difficulty that you never really get better at.
You can sort of sell the higher DC by saying that it's harder to heal more HP, but then you immediately get the logical response: "well, then I'd like to heal fewer HP at a time but roll at a low enough DC that I can't critfail".
Stamina points create interesting design space
Barbarians could have all sorts of abilities trigger when they're down into only HP, bards could focus on peptalk that increases stamina while divine healers infuse HP-laden life essence. There's lots of potential here to make classes do useful things but also be different from each other.
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Design goal: post combat healing to prevent a 15min adventuring day.From what I've observed Stamina also doesn't deal with this that well, since you have another resource pool to track and that is costly to replenish.
People seem loath to spend hero points for anything except stabilization/recovery.
Resolve being tied into everything and thus never getting used for anything in case you were dying is one of my biggest turnoffs from Starfinder.
Back to 2e the Treat Wounds and Dying rules are still very much in a constant flux, but they're still vastly more friendly than Starfinder's dying system.
Scaling DC on Treat Wounds is an abomination
This needs to be addressed (and I'm pretty sure it is).
Healing a specific amount/range is one way to go about it, since that still keeps the time cost.
Stamina points create interesting design space
Eh, I feel like that would possibly too much trouble than what it would be worth, besides the starting point of having to track two different HP pools.
Some additional points:
Every single ability would have to specify if it dealt Stamina or HP damage, which would be easy for some abilities and items to slip through the cracks, or overcompensate and also cause confusion. "Vicious Impale say's it deals 4d12 Stamina damage... so it can't deal HP damage at all? That doesn't sound right..." Compounded with the GM/players accidentally saying the wrong damage type when attacking and no one catching it.
Verisimilitude breaking, since you have to flavor two different health pools differently. If Stamina is just HP but not, then there's not really a point. If it's shrugging off/dodging then what is AC/Reflex? Also if the latter than that comes into conflict with things like poisons delivered by injury. "You dodge at the last second, take 14 Stamina damage and make a Fortitude save." "Uh, why? You said I dodged." "Uh, just do it."
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Design goal: post combat healing to prevent a 15min adventuring day.From what I've observed Stamina also doesn't deal with this that well, since you have another resource pool to track and that is costly to replenish.
Costly to replenish? I'd have thought that with any short rest your Stamina instantly goes back to full, for free, an unlimited number of times.
Having to track another resource pool might be annoying (as might rolling dice for Treat Wounds) but that doesn't mean it doesn't succeed at preventing a 15min adventuring day.
People seem loath to spend hero points for anything except stabilization/recovery.Resolve being tied into everything and thus never getting used for anything in case you were dying is one of my biggest turnoffs from Starfinder.
That does sound bad.
If anything, I'd prefer multiple pools. It's almost impossible for the game design to balance "reroll a skill check" against "don't die", so if you want both as options, it's probably best not to make them both cost the same resource.
Every single ability would have to specify if it dealt Stamina or HP damage
Disagree. By default, all abilities should hit Stamina first, and then go through to HP when Stamina is exhausted.
Verisimilitude breaking, since you have to flavor two different health pools differently.
Two options for how Stamina could work:
(1) Stamina damage is superficial scratches. HP damage is more serious injuries.(2) Stamina damage is damage you avoid. This would require it to be more of a major mechanic: If you only take Stamina damage then you would be immune to any 'rider' effects such as poison.
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A) It costs Resolve to do the Short Rest.
B) All abilities don't hit Stamina first, some bypass it. And one was incorrectly labeled in the Core book in Starfinder.
1) So we have Minor and Major damage? Eh...
2) Which would make most rider mechanics useless, since everyone would make sure to keep their Stamina topped off so as to be immune to all of that.
Never running out of Stamina while being attacked by enemies sounds like it would be difficult to do in any remotely well balanced game. "All I have to do is never lose a single hit point ever and I'll be immune to poison!"
(I never played Starfinder so I was describing a Stamina system as I'd imagine it working.)
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Yeah, you do (eventually) run out of Stamina, but most people don't add poisons in the middle of the fight, it's what you open with. So they'd never get used or get used and it would be utterly pointless.
Plus there's the weird meta of NPCs knowing when PCs run out of Stamina then.
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Yeah, you do (eventually) run out of Stamina, but most people don't add poisons in the middle of the fight, it's what you open with. So they'd never get used or get used and it would be utterly pointless.
Plus there's the weird meta of NPCs knowing when PCs run out of Stamina then.
True, but I absolutely hate the "you weren't actually hit unless there is a rider effect, then you definitely were, but it's still only a scratch." aspect of the AC and HP systems. Poison and other riders only effecting you when they deal actual wounds to you makes sense. Plus I also don't think it's a fair mechanic to have the defense system assume you'll get hit but include things that bypass HP.
It does not work with the "used up on a hit" nature of poisons and other riders. You'd need to change that to lasting for a period of time instead of uses. That way it would stay in effect but only come in to play when a foe dropped to wound points. Honestly though, I'm just not a big fan of poisons as a mechanic. I find them incredibly difficult to balance for gameplay and verisimilitude and not worth the effort. I mostly keep them to the narrative.
I'm actually inventing my own d20 system for fun at the moment. My rule for making a healer less mandatory is "after any short rest you get temp HP equal to half your maximum HP".
I thought I could then say poisons don't effect you until you run out of temp HP. If you added poison to your sword it wouldn't take effect or get used up until you did some real HP damage.
Poisoned arrows would be more of a problem. Maybe I'd need to say that certain things (sneak attacks, falling damage) don't affect Stamina, they go direct to HP. So a poison attack while an enemy is flat-footed would be fully effective...
Plus there's the weird meta of NPCs knowing when PCs run out of Stamina then.
That's called "first blood".
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Yeah, you do (eventually) run out of Stamina, but most people don't add poisons in the middle of the fight, it's what you open with. So they'd never get used or get used and it would be utterly pointless.
Plus there's the weird meta of NPCs knowing when PCs run out of Stamina then.
I am seeing some interesting interpretations of the Stamina mechanic here, the way understand it (and I am running and playing a lot of Starfinder) that poison really does not care if you took the hit point damage (and there really is just that, I know only one ability that ignores stamina and that is a healing ability where it makes a lot of sense) in your stamina pool or if deducted from the actual hitpoints.
A somewhat fitting example in the PF1 context would be getting stabbed with a poisoned dagger while having temporary hitpoints, your actual hitpoints might not be affected, but you definitely got poisoned.
When it comes to Resolve, at higher levels you have a couple of abilities that allow you to spend resolve, but you usually have a rather generous pool at that point (depending on your key ability score and level), most of the time I see Resolve used to refresh resonance, though that comes from the fact that I don't see a lot of people dying in Starfinder.
Right now, rerolls are quite separate from your Resolve unless you get something like an ability that costs Resolve to use.
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Whether you use hit points or stamina, giving players the option to rest after a fight does have some merit, if you flavor that rest as actually taking a break or using medicine to heal, is more or less cosmetic to be honest.
Players were rather open that they don't like to go into new encounters with significant chunks of their HP missing but on the flipside, a mechanic like stamina/Resolve really shines when it comes to letting players decide whether to stop and spend that resolve or not.
In the old system, you would likely just use a wand to top of your hitpoints, though that also means that any "easy" encounter that does not kill anyone or inflict a nasty condition, really does not really matter and it just an unnecessary speed bump.
In the Playtest (and as I would argue for) losing 30% of your stamina actually matters, do you take the break now and spend that Resolve, or do you keep that Resolve for something else and risk it?
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Looking at the current version of Treat Wounds, time is the critical factor, but that also means that every scenario/adventure would need to add some level of time management, and in many situations that really does not make a lot of sense.
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"Tracking two pools is hard"
No, it really isn't. You do it all the time. Your barbarian tracks hit points AND rage rounds. Your sorcerer tracks spells per day of each level separately. You can track arcane pool for your magus and his black blade separate.
And it really works quite easily. Imagine Damian Goreface, a hopeful minotaur metalhead adventurer. He has 24 Stamina and 27 HP. He fights some goblins and takes 2, then 5 and then 2 and then another 8 damage. That's 17 in total, still less than his total Stamina so actually I've just been tracking one number so far and comparing it to a number that only changes once per level. After the encounter, I spend a resolve point and erase those 17 damage. This took a few seconds of IRL time to do, and I didn't have to roll Treat Wounds three times and look up whether that's a success or not.
Second encounter is rougher and he takes 10, 10, 10 and 10 damage. The first two hits go up against stamina. The third would go over, so I note down that I'm at 24 stamina and 6 and later 16 hit point damage. Then my buddy casts Mystic Cure and heals me for 7HP, so my HP damage is now only 9. At the end of the fight, I spend a point of resolve and erase the 24 stamina damage. As easy as that.
The very small overhead of tracking two numbers is much smaller than having to make multiple skill checks after each encounter and remembering that Joe is bolstered against Bob's Treat Wounds because he critfailed, but that Paul could still be healed by Bob because he didn't get hurt in that first encounter so didn't get un-healed, but he's bolstered against Joe after Joe critfailed after the third encounter.
"What do Stamina and HP represent"/verisimilitude
Both of them represent your health. You're an action hero, Die Hard style. You can take a beating, but by the next scene you've shrugged most of it off. Only when people give you a sustained pounding does it really carry over into the next scene (i.e. hit point damage). Doesn't mean that those other hits didn't touch you, just that that's something you can still easily recover from.
So yeah, they represent the same thing. Stamina is a lot like temporary hit poins in Pathfinder, except they last longer. If you get hit by a poisoned weapon it doesn't matter if you still have stamina / temporary hit points; you get exposed to the poison. Stamina doesn't represent "near misses", it represents your ability to recover quickly from some of your injuries. If you didn't take a really heavy beating, then you'll be back to full power in the next scene.
Is that realistic? That's the wrong question; the right question is, "does it match narrative conventions"? Nothing about people getting more hit points for getting a degree in applied wizardry is realistic. But it does fit the style of the genre we're playing.
"I don't know if this ability should target stamina or hit points?"
You just deal damage. If the guy still has stamina that's lost first, just like temporary hit points. Abilities don't (except for maybe some really scary necromancy) get to go directly to your "real" HP.
"People don't spend resolve on other things in Starfinder"
Yes they do. At higher levels you get more abilities that use Resolve and you also get more Resolve. A cautious player reserves enough Resolve to recover from 3-4 fights, but anything beyond that can certainly be used for other things. Especially if those things will let you win faster and give enemies less time to hurt you.
The problem in PF2 is that you get so few hero points that you can't make that choice.
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Finally, my main reason why I think Treat Wounds is a bad idea remains:
The end of the adventuring day should not happen because someone randomly crit-fails a post-combat healing check
Imagine a PFS scenario where someone haplessly rolls a 1 after the first encounter. Do they now go through the scenario without any more healing? Pause for the day and fail the mission? This is way too swingy for a "level playing field" organized play format.
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Yes?
The first couple of attacks reduce your stamina. The next strike actually draws blood (reduces your HP) - in this hypothetical system. This is how NPCs know the PC is out of stamina.