I will probably be cursed with this answer but maybe your party just needs a magical healer.
I agree the Medicine checks are complicated and have drawbacks but at least the heal skill "exists".
I older versions (PF1 and D&D 3/3.5) books there's almost no way to be fast healed than magic. The old heal skill only heals 1HP por lvl per day, basically only working for threat wound that can keep you dying. In this version medicine now is projected to allow non-magical heals to have some efficiency without totally depend from magical heals, but many drawbacks like fail chances and time was imposed to avoid this heal ability surpasses the magic heals and avoid make then useless.
That's probably the why medicine don't receive alternative faster and simple rules for free (you still can buy some medicine feats to better it but it's not "free" once you wast a skill feat to do it).
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It was more weird in playtest, tbh. It works alright.
If you're looking for an easier healing system, you might benefit from Stamina? It's in the GMG.
If your group thinks is too cumbersome to use the current feats, just fully heal their HP for free after a fight ends. Problem solved and no homebrew involved.
The same result is achieved. Full HP with no effort or investment. Just gain a full heal and move along.
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Is Treat Wounds really that complicated? Okay, it's not the simplest system, but after you use it a few times it becomes second nature:
1) Pick your check DC. This may seem complicated, but there are often only two options to pick as you either want the biggest one you can do (which you might reasonably fail) or the second biggest one you can do (which you are fairly unlikely to fail but will heal less).
2) Make your medicine roll.
- If you beat the DC, you heal 2d8 plus your 'DC bonus'.
- If you crit succeed, add another 2d8.
- If you Crit failed, inflict 1d8 instead.
Okay, there are a couple of things to track, but it's not significantly more complicated than anything else in the game.
If the party is not being rushed and has a decent investment in treat wounds, you can just skip the rolls and assume the party is healed to full between encounters (for example, our party of 6 has two 18+ Wisdom characters with Expert+ Medicine, Ward Medic, and Continual Recovery feats, so topping the party off is fairly easy).
Honestly, I think I might use this in tandem with Stamina as a way of narrowing down how much HP you can regain once your stamina pool runs dry, so that no dice are needed at all to do healing (until you cast HEAL and the like), because those together narrows the bound of health regained over X amount of time. I like, but not by itself
If your group thinks is too cumbersome to use the current feats, just fully heal their HP for free after a fight ends. Problem solved and no homebrew involved.
The same result is achieved. Full HP with no effort or investment. Just gain a full heal and move along.
Sure, but that's no justification for asking players to choose between something complicated and something crude and blunt.
How about I tell you all those moving knobs and levers of the RAW Treat Wounds system can be boiled down to something exceedingly simple, yet give roughly the same results, all without making Medicine and its feats obsolete! :-)
(No, I'm not gonna tell you here - this is a thread about the RAW :-)
This is just a part of the system your players don't want to engage in, so you can simply heal to Full HP after a fight and avoid having players investing in the skills or being punished for not engaging with that part of the system.
It's pretty simple. Just make it more convenient than it already is. Free heal after a fight, then keep going with the story, no point in coming up with a bothersome substitute system.
Otherwise, just make Wands of Heal with 50 charges and call it a day. Back to the old days.
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Adding success and failure results and cooldowns does make it something of a minigame, which is more interesting to me than simply regaining HP with a short rest (stamina) and helps to reserve magic healing for when it is tactically necessitated. Having a Champion with all day healing via lay on hands is pretty boss too.
We never had any issues using Medicine. It's pretty easy to run and it quickly becomes an auto-success.
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We never had any issues using Medicine. It's pretty easy to run and it quickly becomes an auto-success.
The new system is better in every way compared to PF1e. Using wands as a cheap way of healing just brought down the already very degraded state of magic items in PF1e.
I'm playing at level 9 right now and I was really happy to see that I had 1600gp to spend on items that were NOT the Big 3 (potency, resiliency and striking). I bought a lot of cool stuff, including some items that were just some boring stats before (+X perception and +X athletics) but now have extra uses or utility benefits.
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I don't see how it's all that complicated. Your healer targets a player, declares which DC they target, and rolls. It shouldn't take more than a minute or two for the whole party. If you take Assurance:Medicine you can basically skip the rolls entirely
This is Zapp. He doesn't like Pathfinder2e at all. That's why using medicine is "complicated".
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You say you're asking about the RAW, but you don't have a rules question. You're asking a design question, that nobody here is going to be able to answer.
I don't know you well enough to have anything against you, but this really just seems like a plug for your Homebrew thread.
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Now you're dismissing players who want the same healing power as the RAW, just without all the hassle.
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Again, there's a difference between gutting a hole in the system and replacing a steampunk engine part with a sleek new cybernetic one. (One requires a lot of maintenance and supervision, the other just works automatically, but both gets the same job done.)
One might as well make sure all healing spells, elixers, and potions heal a flat amount, don't trigger AoOs and can used at any time with no chance of rolling low, or being counteracted.
Or, making it so every time you swing your sword, you do damage based on your attack modifier. Why mess with rolling dice at all? I mean, the end result is the same, yah? No need to bother with all that figuring out of spacing, seeing who has what buff or debuff, or any of that crazy complicated mess of combat. Shiny! Chrome, even!
Treat Wounds not a hole in the system. It's a feature. One many like. Since your "fix" is not supposed to be part of this thread, I guess there's not much else to say here.
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Is Treat Wounds really that complicated? Okay, it's not the simplest system, but after you use it a few times it becomes second nature:You are asked to make decisions with incomplete data which always slows down play.
"How many 10 minute chunks do you need to get well, Mike? Two I think, but could be more."
"Can we rest here? Seems pretty dangerous.
Well if we're back up and running in 10 minutes the risk is worth taking.
But we don't know that. Could be we need 20 minutes or even more.
Hmm, maybe we should fall back then.
But we COULD heal up in ten..."Add that to the rules references, and die rolling, and double checking.
And THEN add how much simpler it could be.
At some point you start asking yourself, why is the rule this complex? What is the added value we're getting that something simpler wouldn't give?
I've looked at your proposed 'solution', and it really doesn't seem to fix most of the issues you have. As far as I can tell, it just removes one decision (biggest heal or second biggest heal) and one roll, leaving all the 'how much downtime do we have' issues in place.
As for your original question, the reasoning behind the rules seems fairly simple: Create a system that uses the existing skill system, allows PCs to feasibly heal up without magic, but doesn't allow instant full-health after every encounter. Your elimination of the actual roll may seem simpler, but it makes Treat Wounds operate differently from every other baseline skill use, which kinda makes it more complicated than the original. Heck, you've already started sacrificing your 'core simplicity' by adding additional modifiers to the total amount healed, so you are probably going to eventually end up with something just as complicated as the official rules AND different enough from every other skill use that it will never be instinctive for players.
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Treat Wounds DCs and amounts healed are listed prominently on the GM screen, which IMO is a must have. I've never had an issue. Some players might need remainders when they decide what DC to roll but I've never seen anyone have to open the book for it.
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While I'm sure some groups love the intricacies of mundane healing between encounters, some groups may find the Medicine skill and assorted feats to be incredibly slow and cumbersome to use in play.
It can be a bit 'fiddly' at times. The 10 min use plus a hour immunity but you can change 10 min into an hour to double the healing but the starting dc can change if you want to heal more...
I know someone that would go bad and forth on which option was better: raise the DC or use an hour to heal [or both]. So I've seen some "analysis paralysis". What helped was getting him to take assurance [medicine] making it easier for him to settle on a dc under his roll.
I don't see how it's all that complicated. Your healer targets a player, declares which DC they target, and rolls. It shouldn't take more than a minute or two for the whole party. If you take Assurance:Medicine you can basically skip the rolls entirelyThis is Zapp. He doesn't like Pathfinder2e at all. That's why using medicine is "complicated".
I think it's less about PF2 and more about GM discretion / judgment. There's a trend where everytime something isn't explained in precise detail with one of three options to pick from (for example because you can alter it as part of the challenge) he seems to just call it off as broken.
I wouldn't be too concerned about the rule.(Also Zapp, can we stop with the triple posting?)
But yes I agree with Taja, that "houserule" changes everything except the issue you seem to have. If your issue is discretionality, why not buff the base action and remove Continuous Recovery, thus having only one healup per dungeon and not worrying about how much time players have?
You could even switch the amount healed to a fixed proportion to make up for the lower frequency - 25%, 50%, 75% or all of total HP, up to a limit based on skill rank. Am I far off?
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This is just a part of the system your players don't want to engage in, so you can simply heal to Full HP after a fight and avoid having players investing in the skills or being punished for not engaging with that part of the system.
It's pretty simple. Just make it more convenient than it already is. Free heal after a fight, then keep going with the story, no point in coming up with a bothersome substitute system.
Otherwise, just make Wands of Heal with 50 charges and call it a day. Back to the old days.
Now you're dismissing players who want the same healing power as the RAW, just without all the hassle.
"Simply healing to full" might sound simple, but now you've invalidated a bunch of feats and the better part of a skill too.
Again, there's a difference between gutting a hole in the system and replacing a steampunk engine part with a sleek new cybernetic one. (One requires a lot of maintenance and supervision, the other just works automatically, but both gets the same job done.)
You're g!#$**n right I am dismissing such players. If the players thinks this part of the game is too much of a hassle either deal with it or just fully heal after fights. This is no big deal. Medicine becomes just recall knowledge for identifying anatomy-related stuff in investigation and to use First Aid to help an ally to stabilize or stanch some bleeding. Problem solved.
No need to rewrite a part of the system that is there just to reward "mundane" healers and lessen the importance of magical healing and by extension removing the need for CLW wands that plagued the game before.
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Yeah, this is definitely something that only tripped up the party healer in my group for maybe three sessions - this being her first time ever playing 2e - and now is just second nature.