| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
You need to control their time better. If they are abusing the mechanic to spend hours healing after fights in a relatively dangerous area, you need to remind them that it is a relatively dangerous area. If they are retreating somewhere safe to do it, then you need to have the world move on around them so that they are either missing opportunity or failing in their pursuits by wasting that time instead of using their resources
If you don't, then they can quite happily Treat Wounds once on each of them once an hour until they are healthy again.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The intent, as demonstrated by Treat Wounds, and the various Focus spells that can heal (like Lay on Hands), is for parties who have invested resources in healing (Skills, Spells, etc.) to generally go into most combats at full health.
It is not really the intent for being Trained only to do this (the intent seems to pretty clearly be for it to generally require someone to have maxed out Medicine for their level), but I must agree with Asethe that putting even mild time pressure on the PCs will solve that particular issue.
Remember that having your wounds treated makes you immune to all Treat Wounds for the next hour (not just that of the person treating you), so people being healed with only Trained Medicine basically heal only roughly 9 HP an hour. By even the mid levels, that can easily mean 10 or 12 hours of medical treatment before they're at full health...or only one, maybe two, fights per day. It's not hard to pressure PCs to do more than that.
The reason for the low per day healing is to give people incentive to invest actual resources into healing. But those resources don't need to be daily spells, and maxing out your Medicine is a pretty big investment in terms of your Skill resources.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The intent of the system is that 90% of the time everyone is going into every fight full HP, yes. But of course, there will be the 10% where time limits are a constraint, and then you need to bust out the consumables and expendable resources, like spell slots and potions.
But honestly, it is pretty mandatory to have someone in every group that is investing at least a little in medicine, which in my experience is always being at top proficiency and getting these feats, in order of priority, minimum of one:
Continual Recovery
Battle Medicine
Ward Medic
Risky Surgery
The new Medic Archetype from the APG is also a way to ensure your healing needs are met.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
If you're running published Paizo material (Adventure Paths, PFS Scenarios, modules) be aware that freely available healing is pretty much essential for success. While SOME time pressure is ok lots of time pressure will generally result in characters failing or dying.
Medicine skill or spammable focus based healing (Eg, Champions Lay on Hands) essentially replaces the wand of cure light wounds from PF1.
APs and PFS are mostly built around 4 encounters a 'day' at their fastest pace, so if they are not keeping the cadence, they will fail, and after they have done that once, it's likely that they won't do it again
|
Clearly the Medicine skill is the elite skill in 2E, so expect a lot of characters will invest in it. However, if everyone is focused on Healing, they are neglecting other aspects of the game. Hyper-specialization means a lack of pragmatism. If no one has Forger, it might be challenging to feed themselves on a long journey. Or they may struggle with some social encounters if no one is taking Diplomacy/Deception/Intimidate feats. Or they may have trouble with sneaking if the expert in Stealth isn’t taking Quiet Allies. If you game is mostly built around combat, you cannot be surprised when players focus on combat-related feats and abilities. You want to give them in-game reasons to select other options. Good luck
|
|
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Clearly the Medicine skill is the elite skill in 2E, so expect a lot of characters will invest in it.
This isn't strictly true. I'd expect most parties to have one person with some investment in it, but more than one and you hit rapidly diminishing returns. It is one of the Skills that I'd expect most parties to have one player with, but it's not alone in that regard and it rewards more people having it less than many others do.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This isn't strictly true. I'd expect most parties to have one person with some investment in it, but more than one and you hit rapidly diminishing returns. It is one of the Skills that I'd expect most parties to have one player with, but it's not alone in that regard and it rewards more people having it less than many others do.
Yeah, one medicine character and one with some form of magical healing seems to be the sweet spot atm imo.
Medicine character going up to master and getting, continual, ward and battlemedicine as well as the medic dedication fills that role nicely.
Magical healing is deal with by anyone with heal or soothe on their list imo.
Legendary medicine is nice, but very dependent on party makeup imo.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
This isn't strictly trueIt is for me and my experience, though technically no one's opinion is strictly true to anyone other than themself. Based on my experience with two APs and dozens of PFS2 sessions, it is absolutely true. YMMV
PFS is a very specific environment that rewards you, specifically, investing in Medicine a lot more highly than most other environments. Due to not knowing party composition in advance a whole lot of 'self sufficiency' things that are less useful in most games become much more so in that environment, doubling up on Medicine included.
As for the APs...are you speaking of people taking it a lot, or more than one person having it being actually useful a lot? Because the former doesn't necessarily surprise me, it's early days and that sort of thing can look enticing, but the latter would surprise me, as having two people with Medicine above Trained has very limited actual use cases.
|
|
I agree about PFS. Since there is a much more prevalent idea that groups don't need a healing-focused cleric in 2E over 1E, most players seem to be afraid to be caught without adequate healing. Medicine, and to some extent Battle Medicine seem to almost be mandatory in org play even for character's who's build/theme wouldn't really make it obvious.
I am running a converted Ironfang Invasion campaign. We are roughly half way thru book 1. The characters are level 2...
- *all five are trained in Medicine
*two of five have Battle Medicine
*the rogue is an expert in Medicine with Continual Recovery
*one has Natural Medicine
*two of the other players indicated they will select Battle Medicine with their next skill feat. They would have taken it with their 1st feat, but the ranger needed Snare Crafting and the Sorcerer took Foraging because it is especially important to this specific AP.
By the time we finish book 1 (level 5), assuming the players do what they have discussed, four of five characters will be experts in Medicine and have Battle Medicine. The fifth player is still deciding, but is leaning towards adding Battle Medicine at level 6. It is somewhat common for at least one character to drop during combat so someone using Battle Medicine is fairly common. The sorcerer is mostly offensive, but does have access to healing magic. They find that having redundant Battle Medicine allows for them to share the healing role and cover more territory without one person being forced to do it.
I have not done an actual statistical review, but it "feels" like their average dice rolls are lower than mine. Roll20 has not been kind to them which may impact their decisions.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
APs and PFS are mostly built around 4 encounters a 'day' at their fastest pace, so if they are not keeping the cadence, they will fail, and after they have done that once, it's likely that they won't do it again
No, really they aren't.
We had several threads about this half a year ago when people wanted to know what the "canonical" speed of adventure paths should be, and various Paizo folks said that there really isn't one.
The plot is almost always presented as if it's very urgent, but if you go looking for the actual timer ticking down, there isn't one written into the adventure. It should feel like that way for the players, like they're just on time. But actually, the plot mostly waits for the players.
If the players are really fast because these are veteran gamers whose party works like an efficient SWAT team they don't come in a day early, they still burst in just as the boss is about to finish the great ritual. If the players are really new and kinda stumbling through, making suboptimal choices, and need to heal up a lot, they come into the boss room just in time to stop the boss from finishing the great ritual.
Even in PFS, the "4 encounters a day" paradigm doesn't really hold. Some adventures only have two combats in them. Some of them have one combat followed by days of travel, then another, then more days of travel, then another combat and so on. And then some of them have a string of six combats in a row, but with the PCs firmly able to determine how fast they're going from one to another. And sometimes you have two combats back to back. There really isn't a standard paradigm here.
Four encounters a day was the design baseline in PF1 and D&D 3.x, based on the idea that it took about four level-appropriate encounters to burn through the daily resources of a party. This turned out to be useless as a design method though, because different classes go through resources in completely different ways. If you had a Wand of Cure Light Wounds a level 1fighter can keep going for twenty combats in a row. A level 1 wizard is played out after two or three of them. Meanwhile, lots of player groups play on weekdays, have a game session of about three hours where they do various exploration and investigation and RP things and "the fight of the night" so it's one big fight per game session and then usually several days of in-game time go by.
So PF2 came up with an entirely different way of balancing encounters: just toss the whole "attrition over the day" idea out of the window. Every class has some resources that don't run out (Strikes, Cantrips) and many of them also have per-encounter resources (Focus). There are some per-day resources (spells from slots, Heals, Battle Medicine uses) but depending on party composition, they don't take up such a large part of the group.
The point of PF2 encounters really is to see them in isolation. Is this encounter balanced on its own, is it interesting, is it fun? Not: "is this hard enough to tire them out for the real encounter later on". People don't run into the 15minute adventuring day problem in PF2 so much, they heal up and refocus and do another encounter.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The encounter design system being focused around starting every encounter fresh is genius, really. You don't need three tire-you-out encounters to make the fourth one feel just right. It works both for groups that want to do one encounter per day and ones that want to do five per day.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So, I've just recently started GMing Pathfinder 2e, and the one major thing I have a question about is Treat Wounds. From what I can tell, this game intends for you to not usually go into combat with all of your resources (given that a 24 hour rest heals very little health as compared to 5e's full heal long rest). However, the Treat Wounds ability seems to break this in half. Half of my players picked up training in Medicine, and now after every combat encounter they just sit around for hours healing each everyone without wasting any spells. I'm not sure what to do about this? I don't want to be a jerk and create a chance that I will throw combat at them while they are healing, but I don't see any other way to deal with this issue. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
They are basically supposed to do this.
There isn't enough spell slots or focus spells to heal properly without spending a whole day to do so (spell slots are once per day but focus can be regained to spend on focus spells). At low levels you're expected to not have more than 1 or 2 combats per day. At around level 6 you're expected to have someone in the party with the Continual Recovery feat, allowing you to treat someone's wounds 6 times an hour. And with Ward Medic to treat the whole party in such a fashion.
You need to strike a balance on how much time to allow them though.
However the game expects the party to be at or very near full health each combat. If they are not, the chances that at least one player character dies is very high. My experience with PF2 is that every combat a player character was knocked out or very nearly knocked out (low enough HP that one more hit would do it), even when starting from full HP. If someone goes into combat with half health it's likely asking to be killed.
The math is already not in the players favor, they have to use good tactics to swing combat in their favor, and if you play the enemy well and very tactically you can turn PF2 combat into a meat grinder against PCs who don't work together well.
|
|
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
I agree with Claxon, but to look at it from a different angle:
This makes your job as a GM a lot easier. All those rules in the CRB and GMG about estimating the difficulty of an encounter? They work because you have a consistent party starting situation to use them on. So when you want a moderate difficulty fight you can just use the recipe for constructing a moderate encounter and 99% of the time you get a fight that feels exactly like a moderate challenge. This is extremely useful to the GM! But it's based on the party being at full HP.
It would be boring if all fights were comfortably separated and fought fresh. The tempo in an adventure shouldn't be the same throughout the whole thing. But you need to understand rules before "breaking" them.
Two Moderate fights with full healing in between are easier than two Moderate fights without full healing (and refocusing!) in between. This sounds obvious but it's very important to keep in mind. Once you start putting encounters closer together, the easy encounter difficulties that you get from the CRB starts to fall apart.
It might be easier to use as rule of thumb that every encounter directly after another is effectively one step harder. So Moderate+Moderate is actually as hard as Moderate followed by Severe, despite using only a Moderate XP budget worth of creatures. As a corollary, you should almost never use a Severe or Extreme encounter after another encounter.
I think it feels natural that during an adventure, the feeling of tempo and tension should go up. For example:
We're going into the forest to seek out the lost castle. Day one, we travel through the forest and run into a monster. We defeat it, heal up, and continue.
Day two, we get to the castle, and surprise, it's not abandoned! There are some guards on the walls and there's ominous chanting coming from inside. Bad cultists are doing bad things. We need to stop them. So we climb the walls and fight the guards on top of them (a Low threat fight made closer to Moderate because we have to do it while climbing) and the noise attracts more guards (Low threat fight because now we're on top of the wall).
After that back to back fight we listen to the chanting, and it seems to be holding steady. Okay, let's heal up, but after 20m of healing we hear the chanting starting to go towards a crescendo (hint from the GM that we could get some time to heal, but not all the time in the world). So now we go inside the main tower and confront the bad guy before he finishes summoning a demon (severe encounter).
There, that's an adventure with variable speed resting times, and a couple of fun encounters that are easy to balance. Easy to build as a GM, wasn't it?
Note that under the hood, I used the chanting as a convenient explanation why the bad guy wasn't coming out to help the guards: he couldn't hear them / was busy.
One problem with some published adventures (Plaguestone!) is the pressure on writers to fit all encounters onto a flipmat, so as a result they're located very closely together. This makes it seem like you can't really heal up in between encounters because it makes no sense that you could just park your behind next to so many monsters for so long. Sorry, but those map designs are just wrong. Either make the encounters easier, or spread them out. That adventure has a name for TPKs for a reason. It's not how you should design them.
You can write a dungeon based on the idea of rapidly fighting multiple groups from room to room. This door to door combat raid could be really cool. But it does need some extra GM attention to set up well. The players should probably have some extra healing potions and maybe some more spell scrolls. You can use these consumable items to do more encounters back to back. The encounters themselves should also be relatively easy; the challenge now isn't so much in the bare fights, but in keeping for example the monsters from having enough time to respond, regroup, raise the alarm. But altogether, this is not the default setup.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
my experience in 1e is that parties complete whole dungeon in single day regardless of how many encounters there are <_<
No offense, that experience has no relevance in PF2. The flow of the games is that dissimilar.
To me PF1 and PF2 do not feel at all the same. While the wrappings/trappings of the game are often called the same things, and while the mechanics are similar once you start looking at how things actually work underneath you realize it's not remotely the same game.
I think a decent analogy is to think about something like a 1960s Ford Mustang vs a 2020 Ford Mustang. They model of car is called the same, they have similar functions as transportation and being "sports cars". The have similar engine mechanics (4 stroke internal combustion). But when you look at the electrical system and computers (or lack thereof) the design of the engine (carbureted v8 vs fuel injected 2.3 turbo charged [on some models] ) and the huge differences in suspension and body design...it's clear these aren't even remotely the same vehicle. There are superficial similarities.
That is how PF1 relates to PF2, imo.
The intent of the system is that 90% of the time everyone is going into every fight full HP, yes. But of course, there will be the 10% where time limits are a constraint, and then you need to bust out the consumables and expendable resources, like spell slots and potions.
But honestly, it is pretty mandatory to have someone in every group that is investing at least a little in medicine, which in my experience is always being at top proficiency and getting these feats, in order of priority, minimum of one:
Continual Recovery
Battle Medicine
Ward Medic
Risky SurgeryThe new Medic Archetype from the APG is also a way to ensure your healing needs are met.
Bonus points if your class is investigator with the Forensic Medicine methodology. ;)
I wonder if the Stamina rules would work well for people who find Medicine an overcentralizing skill or the flavor of constantly treating wounds a strange one to justify, especially when there's time pressure. I haven't heard Stamina talked about much, but maybe that's because it kinda becomes more difficult to heal in combat (and Resolve Points are quite limited by default).
|
my experience in 1e is that parties complete whole dungeon in single day regardless of how many encounters there are <_<No offense, that experience has no relevance in PF2. The flow of the games is that dissimilar.
I mean that was in reference to claim that 4 encounters per day was standard in 1e too
|
|
I wonder if the Stamina rules would work well for people who find Medicine an overcentralizing skill or the flavor of constantly treating wounds a strange one to justify, especially when there's time pressure. I haven't heard Stamina talked about much, but maybe that's because it kinda becomes more difficult to heal in combat (and Resolve Points are quite limited by default).
I doubt it -
The parties where everyone has Medicine are parties where everyone is using Battle Medicine. It's for in-combat healing.
Out of combat, there's very little gain to everyone having Medicine. Once you've been treated you become immune to further treatment for an hour (unless the doctor had Continual Recovery), so multiple healers is only useful at very low levels before Ward Medic comes online.
After that, it's just better to let the best doctor treat everyone at once for the most hit points.
Now, what does Stamina do? Out of combat healing. So it doesn't actually interact with the reason a whole party might be taking Medicine.
|
I wonder if the Stamina rules would work well for people who find Medicine an overcentralizing skill or the flavor of constantly treating wounds a strange one to justify, especially when there's time pressure. I haven't heard Stamina talked about much, but maybe that's because it kinda becomes more difficult to heal in combat (and Resolve Points are quite limited by default).I doubt it -
The parties where everyone has Medicine are parties where everyone is using Battle Medicine. It's for in-combat healing.
Out of combat, there's very little gain to everyone having Medicine. Once you've been treated you become immune to further treatment for an hour (unless the doctor had Continual Recovery), so multiple healers is only useful at very low levels before Ward Medic comes online.
After that, it's just better to let the best doctor treat everyone at once for the most hit points.
Now, what does Stamina do? Out of combat healing. So it doesn't actually interact with the reason a whole party might be taking Medicine.
Even with Ward Medic, you can only treat two patients until you get your medicine up to Master, so multiple Medicine characters is useful for a while if damage tends to get spread around the party...
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Even with Ward Medic, you can only treat two patients until you get your medicine up to Master, so multiple Medicine characters is useful for a while if damage tends to get spread around the party...
Eh. I mean, that only makes for 20 minutes to treat everyone even at Expert (which you can have at 2nd level with the Medic Archetype). 20 minutes is fast enough the vast majority of the time. Hell, even 40 minutes will usually be fast enough.
Yeah, continual treatment allows a typical party of 4 to be up and running in an hour or less most of the time. Even without ward medic.
1 individual may need to be treated 2 or 3 times, but it's unlikely the whole party needs that much. Reducing the effective treatment time from something like 2 or 3 hours after a fight to 30 minutes is huge.
|
|
Let's not make a single-use of Medicine to be the end-all of healing. 2d8 even with the +10 for DC20, is not a lot at mid levels. Unless you are supplementing it with magical healing or elixirs, its often going to take more half-an-hour or more to healing a party of 4-6 PCs even with Ward Medic and Continuous Recovery. So, if you want efficient use, you'll need more than one doctor.
This isn't strictly trueIt is for me and my experience, though technically no one's opinion is strictly true to anyone other than themself. Based on my experience with two APs and dozens of PFS2 sessions, it is absolutely true. YMMV
By my count I've GMd 2e for over 150 different players now. Twilight is mostly correct. Of a 6 player table you'll have at least one or two players who have invested in medicine skill feats. In the rare instances where nobody has been trained in medicine it's because players had access to lay in hands or Heal.
As for OP. Of course it makes sense that players would stop to heal after a fight. If you weren't on a clock and just got a nasty bite wound and a scimitar slash wouldnt you stop to bind it?
Encounters are scaled to a party with full health. Just see the lengths that Age of Ashes went to to make book 2 area B not trigger all the fights at once. Even there they tuned it so that new monsters enter at particular times.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Let's not make a single-use of Medicine to be the end-all of healing. 2d8 even with the +10 for DC20, is not a lot at mid levels. Unless you are supplementing it with magical healing or elixirs, its often going to take more half-an-hour or more to healing a party of 4-6 PCs even with Ward Medic and Continuous Recovery. So, if you want efficient use, you'll need more than one doctor.
But how much do multiple doctors actually help?
If you have two with Continual Recovery, Ward Medic, and maxed out Medicine you can double the speed of treatment...but that's 4 Skill Feats (6 if they also have Battle Medicine) and two maxed Skills.
If you're often under severe time pressure, that might be worth it, but how often are you actually under severe time pressure? In my experience, this isn't nearly common enough to be worth the investment.
Battle Medicine is slightly more defensible as a reason for multiple Medicine characters, but even then just carrying healing potions is probably better, and usually not notably expensive (you can take them off fallen foes in most games). This alternative technically costs money, but not really enough to matter most of the time.
|
|
By my count I've GMd 2e for over 150 different players now. Twilight is mostly correct. Of a 6 player table you'll have at least one or two players who have invested in medicine skill feats. In the rare instances where nobody has been trained in medicine it's because players had access to lay in hands or Heal.This isn't strictly trueIt is for me and my experience, though technically no one's opinion is strictly true to anyone other than themself. Based on my experience with two APs and dozens of PFS2 sessions, it is absolutely true. YMMV
Er...this is more or less exactly what I was saying. I specifically stated that I'd expect one person with Medicine in every party, at least on average (0-2 is about the variance I'd expect). Averaging a bit higher than that in PFS is also very much something I'd expect given the increased value of self sufficiency there.
It's averaging much higher than one per party outside of PFS I'm skeptical of.
Let's not make a single-use of Medicine to be the end-all of healing. 2d8 even with the +10 for DC20, is not a lot at mid levels. Unless you are supplementing it with magical healing or elixirs, its often going to take more half-an-hour or more to healing a party of 4-6 PCs even with Ward Medic and Continuous Recovery. So, if you want efficient use, you'll need more than one doctor.
I am calling doubt on the value of more than one doctor in most scenarios though. Unless there are 5+ characters who consistently gain fairly equal levels of heavy injury, there is less value in having a second medicine specialist in the party, and almost zero value in having people who hover around trained/expert by the mid levels.
Treat wounds is 2d8+30(+40 with medic) for the majority of the mid levels, continual recovery and ward medic will have that character doing this every 10 minutes. Sure you could refuse to treat without using assurance, but then your averages are lower anyway so speed isn't really an option.
You cannot have two characters treating the same patient at the same time thanks to immunity (outside of the aid activity ofc), so while it might sometimes save time in edge cases or with 6+ character parties I don't see it as being a priority skill.
Couple this with the backup doctor having to also grab continual recovery so they don't apply that 1 hour treat wounds immunity to people they are treating. I would rather have a more diverse skill set in the party and more useful skill feats grabbed (Rather than having people being forced to double up on continual healing)
Being the groups dedicated healer and using Assurance (Medicine), Continual Recovery and Ward Medic and being master in Medicine my character is able to heal 4 x 19 = 76 HP in 10 minutes (with GM approval I don't roll the 2d8 but just take the median result of 9). That is if there really are 4 wounded targets to treat in parallel. For comparison our character HP at level 7 are somewhere in between 65 to 120. Usually that is in between 30 and 60 minutes to get our party of 5 (plus an animal companion) from severely wounded to pristine health.
Encounters are scaled to a party with full health. Just see the lengths that Age of Ashes went to to make book 2 area B not trigger all the fights at once. Even there they tuned it so that new monsters enter at particular times.
Can't tell about the GM view or how this area is suppossed to be played, however our whole party really massively disliked this just recently finished area for its seemingly illogical, earshot range set-up. As a logical consequence of said set-up our level 6 group ended up fighting 3 or so encounters at more or less the same time and decided to retreat when encounters number 4 and 5 threatended to chain just after we had depleted almost all our daily ressources already. Note that this is our outside player view, i.e. not knowing the area description and GM notes, so we can't tell if something went wrong or our group did something wrong. After we cleared the area every single player complained about the guesome experience and tedious battle(s) and being frustated instead of having fun.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Let's not make a single-use of Medicine to be the end-all of healing. 2d8 even with the +10 for DC20, is not a lot at mid levels. Unless you are supplementing it with magical healing or elixirs, its often going to take more half-an-hour or more to healing a party of 4-6 PCs even with Ward Medic and Continuous Recovery. So, if you want efficient use, you'll need more than one doctor.
As I mentioned, 1 hour is a believable recovery time between fights.
Spending 4-6 hours trying to rest before realizing "we should just pack it up for the day" and coming back tomorrow is the real timeline/immersion breaking thing.
Effectively, continual recovery reduces recovery time 1/6th of what it would have been which is pretty huge IMO.
Of course, you could also ban or limit Medicine. But then I suggest the opposite!
If you make healing quick, simple and always available, such as with the following (crude) proposal, you should find that focus returns to where it should be: squarely on adventure! :-)
For each 10-minute period spent on an activity, you heal damage equal to one third of your maximum hp.
This ensures that rests complete in 10-30 minutes of in-game time, take far less play session time to resolve, and shifts the focus back to what you're going to spend your activities on (focus spells, repairing, scouting and so on).
Sure it obsoletes Medicine and its feats, but that could well be an easy price to pay.
That's an interesting proposal that I like Zapp. Although I would probably go further and say:
1) Medicine isn't a "skill" you invest in anymore and the skill feats are (mostly) gone (maybe battle medicine remains). For anything that might remain you just treat any player character as having the maximum proficiency bonus they could have.2) You introduce the concept of a "heroic recovery". Basically stamina, but without a separate "hp" pool. So you can recovery 1/3 or maybe even 1/2 your HP with a 10 minute rest and spending a point of resolve. Honestly the stamina mechanic is one of my favorite things about Starfinder.
This removes any need for investing in the skill which opens up everyone to do whatever while still providing some limit on how PCs can heal.
|
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Encounters are scaled to a party with full health. Just see the lengths that Age of Ashes went to to make book 2 area B not trigger all the fights at once. Even there they tuned it so that new monsters enter at particular times.Can't tell about the GM view or how this area is suppossed to be played, however our whole party really massively disliked this just recently finished area for its seemingly illogical, earshot range set-up. As a logical consequence of said set-up our level 6 group ended up fighting 3 or so encounters at more or less the same time and decided to retreat when encounters number 4 and 5 threatended to chain just after we had depleted almost all our daily ressources already. Note that this is our outside player view, i.e. not knowing the area description and GM notes, so we can't tell if something went wrong or our group did something wrong. After we cleared the area every single player complained about the guesome experience and tedious battle(s) and being frustated instead of having fun.
You have identified one of the areas where the rules does not work very well.
Encounters are generally so difficult you can't ask your players to keep adventuring without being fully healed (or close to it). At least not when you're running an official Adventure Path.
Even a Moderate encounter can easily down a hero, and starting the fight at 50% hp is a significant handicap that players simply will not endure.
I think we're all in agreement here on a couple of points:
- The system for designing encounters works quite well when encounters are viewed in isolation. You can decide to serve up a Moderate or Severe encounter and do so quite accurately.
- A key assumption for designing those encounters is that they're engaged in at full health. So there has to be space and time to heal in between.
- Adventure writers have a LOT of trouble with that assumption. For two main reasons: (1) many good stories don't work that way, and (2) map pressure. I think Age of Ashes 2 was particularly aggravating with maps, where as soon as you step on the map you're in range of some hazard + monsters combination. Which is ridiculous because most of those encounters were outdoors and there's no good reason why you couldn't try to for example lure the monsters away from their hazard, or attack them from farther off. Just really contrived maps. Also annoying: when all the encounters in a dungeon area are nextdoor to each other and you need eye-watering explanations of why they don't all pile up on you. But it's really not just Age of Ashes; part of what makes Plaguestone so hard is that they felt under pressure to fit a whole level's XP worth of encounters onto two flipmats. You can't keep your fights socially distanced that way! In PFS this gets particularly bad with the old map packs, such as when you're fighting a colossal bird (6x6 footprint), outside, on a 8x10 map.
I don't blame writers for sticking to the rules for encounter design, because it's a new game system, rules written by experts, and the rules seem to be valid when you try them in isolation. But the truth is that the rules only work when you adhere to the distance-between-encounters assumptions. It's like a cake recipe; if you turn your oven up to twice the heat in the recipe, don't be surprised your cake gets burned.
So on the one hand you have a recipe that when you follow it, it really works. But you don't always want to adhere to the required assumption (because you have to have this particular map, or because you want a story about running battles instead of isolated set pieces). So what's really needed then is another recipe, for designing properly challenging combats (of various challenge levels), but with the assumption that enemies are clustered closer together (either joining the combat partway through, or back to back, or with a minute breather).
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Of course, you could also ban or limit Medicine. But then I suggest the opposite!
If you make healing quick, simple and always available, such as with the following (crude) proposal, you should find that focus returns to where it should be: squarely on adventure! :-)
For each 10-minute period spent on an activity, you heal damage equal to one third of your maximum hp.
This ensures that rests complete in 10-30 minutes of in-game time, take far less play session time to resolve, and shifts the focus back to what you're going to spend your activities on (focus spells, repairing, scouting and so on).
Sure it obsoletes Medicine and its feats, but that could well be an easy price to pay.
This is actually quite elegant - I like how the shift to relative gains (one third of your HP) makes this work well both for a barbarian and a wizard who might have a HP difference of 50 points.
You could still keep Medicine effective in here, for example letting a medicine check double the gain to two-thirds. Use of medicine could then be the difference between needing a 20m or 10m rest before the party feels good about continuing. And there is of course the use of Medicine to remove the Wounded condition.
But altogether, making healing predictable and action-movie-speed fast, would be helpful.
Encounters are generally so difficult you can't ask your players to keep adventuring without being fully healed (or close to it). At least not when you're running an official Adventure Path.There are enough variables in play that this isn't a guarantee. Some of us, while running an official Adventure Path, have watched parties take on Severe encounters while missing roughly 50% of the party's HP and coming out victorious and without any dead characters.
Note: this isn't a statement for you, Zapp, it's for other people reading this thread that perhaps don't already know you phrase your experiences as if they are universal even when they aren't so don't know to adjust your statements accordingly.
I think it is fairer to say pathfinder 2e is universally swingy and the new crit system can compound misfortune especially vs a boss encounter into numerous crits and calamity. The reverse is also true.
Its the swingiest non-d100 system I have played.
This came up a bit when the system first launched if I remember correctly, and was one of the biggest divides between people who liked the system and people who didn't. The other being the changes to spellcasting obviously, but I think that ties into the swinginess a bit.
Its the swingiest non-d100 system I have played.I swear when other people say "swingy" they are meaning something way different than what I am used to the word meaning.
PF1, for instance, is way more swingy than PF2 in my experience.
I think it's a difference of whether you're measuring roll-by-roll, or encounter-by-encounter.
I think when people talk about being swingy I think they mean being more random, or more controlled by the outcome of the die.
And to that extent, I will say that PF2 is far more swingy (by that definition) than PF1. In PF1 combat was swingy at low levels, because you had bonus of only +2-4 in something typically. The die roll represented 80% of you total final roll. As you level up your bonuses to things grossly outweighed the d20 roll. You succeeded on anything you focused on, on a roll of 2 or more (except maybe your last iterative attack). PF1 was incredibly predictable. You knew you were going to hit. You knew you were going to make that hard (but level appropriate) skill check. There was no element of surprise. You knew you could accomplish the tasks you dedicated yourself to.
Conversely, in PF2 the outcome is always up to the dice. You will never be so good that the dice don't contribute significantly to the final result (or the challenge is so low level compared to you that it doesn't matter). Which means it can be very swingy if the players have strings of bad rolls or the enemy has strings of very good rolls.
|
|
I'd say thenobledrake has the right of it - it's very swingy roll by roll. But encounter by encounter? I find it very consistent actually. Moderate encounters almost always feel easier than severe encounters for example. You're far less at the mercy of "did the monster writer have a bad day, and cross out CR 10 and write in CR 6".
PF1 could be really swingy when against any kind of enemy, you either had the perfect button to win, or were completely up to your neck in trouble. Like swarms and the (pretty much mandatory) swarmbane clasp. Makes the encounter very swingy depending on whether you have it or not. Same with robots and adamantine weapons, golems and alchemists basically ignoring all their defenses. Grab/constrict monsters being either brutal or trivial, depending on freedom of movement.
PF1 relied very much on "perfect answer" abilities and hard immunities. Encounters were won or lost on the drawing board, long before initiative was rolled. PF2 monsters don't have as many immunities and PCs don't get to be immune to as many of their gimmicks. But the numbers are balanced so that you almost always come out on top, minus some HP.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I guess the difference from my perspective (primarily as a player) is that swinginess roll by roll feels worse to a player.
The swinginess you're describing in encounters Ascalaphus is what I would consider the onus of the GM (or bad GMing when not handled properly).
Sending swarms against a level 3 party composed of only martial characters? Bad GMing unless you have given them some swarmbane clasps as loot in the area or maybe just some alchemist flasks.
Since you're the GM you get to control stuff like that very easily.
The player basically only controls the choice of their character and primarily interacts with the world through those d20 rolls. When you fail more often than you succeed (or even close to that ratio) the game feels very unfun, even if it is just a series of unlucky rolls, it feels extremely bad. And that's why I stopped playing PF2. At least until such time that options are introduced that change that (which I know is unlikely since the whole of combat is rooted in a system which drives it that direction).
Here's an example of the swingiest experiences I've had with Pathfinder so far.
PF1: A monster won initiative, moved up to my character, and as a result of a single turn my fighter character went from full HP to dead. The rest of the party then killed the monster before it took a second turn. A "speed bump" killed a PC. This kind of thing happened numerous times, at any level of play.
I can't say I've ever seen/had this experience in my gaming group outside of the first 5 levels or so, but I can understand where you're coming from. Even if I don't personally find your example to be likely.