I'm just curious how you all prevent the "5 minute adventuring day" problem in your games. I've never really had a problem with it, but my group is new to PF and finding combat more challenging then they're used to. I don't mind letting them spend an hour or so to let the Champion refocus/lay on hands enough to get everyone back to max HP, but at what point is it too much? I know it mostly depends on the situation, but I hate making arbitrary decisions, so I'd like to hear how it goes in other people's games.
On a similar note, I'm thinking of adopting something like the organized play rules for "earning" downtime days to strike a balance between too little/too much downtime (I'll adjust based on my player's preferences, but the organized play rules seem like a good baseline). Does anyone else use a system like this for casual games, or do I just have a stick up my butt from too many years of broken game systems?!
I think you can't have a rule about rest time. You have to be careful when chaining encounters without rest. You also have to adjust based on level. At low level, it's very frequent to need an hour or even hours for everyone to be at full hp. At mid level, you expect a 10 or 20 minute rest to be enough. At high level you can chain encounters without caring much as long as your characters have a few rounds to heal between combats.
I think PFS gives way more downtime than you need. You need to give a week or two per levels, to handle the occasional retraining + a little bit of crafting + getting Familiars back. Now, as with rest, it also depends on your party. If you have a dedicated crafter (or multiple) then downtime will be very important for them (and nice to give). On the other hand, if your party doesn't have anyone interested in doing something out of his downtime, then one week every now and then for retraining is enough.
Thanks for the input! I hadn't considered that it might change as they level.
From the 5 games we've played, letting them heal fully hasn't had a huge impact (there seems to be a lot of severe encounters in Plaguestone for such a low level adventure), but the champion has already taken the Ward Medic feat to allow speed healing and I don't want her to feel like it was a wasted feat.
One week per level is actually exactly what I've given them so far. I had to make it really clear that they shouldn't worry about the BBEG destroying the town while they retrained, though.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Just clearly communicate when they have time, and when they don't.
"The NPC needing rescue is currently being spirited away. Resting now may give their captor time to escape."
"The dragon's been sleeping in his lair for ten years. You have no reason to believe waiting another day will matter."
That sort of thing.
I hear what you guys are saying, but part of my brain is like "the rules are so specific with how long things like Treat Wounds take, I feel like I should track them closely!"
To be honest, the feats that accelerate abilities have lost some luster due to the excessive amount of "lull" time between fights.
But narrative pressure does start to build when those hours add up.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm just curious how you all prevent the "5 minute adventuring day" problem in your games.
The five minute adventuring day (or fifteen minute, or some other low number) is the classic PF1/D&D3.5 problem. The problem being, that the party would burst into a dungeon, do 1-2 encounters at full throttle, burn through all of their spells, and then call it a day.
This had a number of undesirable side effects, such as mostly invalidating the "an encounter of this CR is about this hard" guidelines. If the players are using much more of their daily % of power in an encounter, that encounter becomes easier.
It also caused complaints from GMs (and players) about it being unrealistic, that the plot just kinda had to cool its heels waiting for the players to regain their spells.
There's roughly 20 years of internet discussion about it. You may have seen some of it. The thing is, this phenomenon has been vastly reduced in second edition. Also, we do things in ten-minute blocks now :P
2E reduced the problem in a number of ways:
- Magic isn't quite so all-decisive anymore. The world doesn't revolve around the wizard anymore.
- Focus spells are basically per-encounter abilities so you can't burn through all of them in the first encounter and then complain you got nothing left.
- Cantrips are available all day, so casters can be magical every round in combat without burning through their spells. While cantrips aren't as powerful as regular spells, they're not that poor either. When you can see that the fight is basically won, you can use cantrips to mop up, and save your real spells for the next fight.
- 1E had the Wand of Cure Light Wounds which was widely regarded as extremely efficient and useful, and also a bit cheesy. 2E just made out of combat healing fairly easy.
Overall, 2E abandoned the 1E concept of making encounters difficult by having a lot of them in the day and attrition of player resources. 2E fights are balanced much more as standalones. One fight in a day, four fights in a day with breaks - doesn't make a huge difference in second edition.
I've never really had a problem with it, but my group is new to PF and finding combat more challenging then they're used to. I don't mind letting them spend an hour or so to let the Champion refocus/lay on hands enough to get everyone back to max HP, but at what point is it too much? I know it mostly depends on the situation, but I hate making arbitrary decisions, so I'd like to hear how it goes in other people's games.
Suppose the party is working on a dungeon which contains only mindless undead and animated statues that don't come out of their room. Why shouldn't they comfortably rest between breaching each chamber? You're struggling with some kind of instinct that says lazy players need to be whipped, or that it's unsportsmanlike or something like that. But it's not reasonable. Put yourself in the shoes of the characters. If the opposition was kind enough to just sit still and wait for you, wouldn't you take advantage of that? Your chances of survival, success, and eventual fame and glory are much bigger that way. So taking it slow is the most sensible IC thing to do. But your instinct is saying that that's somehow unsportsmanlike.
I hear what you guys are saying, but part of my brain is like "the rules are so specific with how long things like Treat Wounds take, I feel like I should track them closely!"
I would say, part of the art of GMing is getting a feeling for how to vary the pacing. The most fun adventure has parts that are happening fast and furious, and then some slower parts, and then some faster parts again, perhaps building to a climax, and then slower again.
The rules for Treat Wounds are kinda specific because they want to give you the tools to do that. (Also, most of the other post-combat activities like repairing shields and identifying loot take 10 minutes too. That's just convenient.)
If the party is traveling ten miles from A to B and they have an encounter, afterwards they're basically in control; they can decide to sit down and heal up completely. And then get on their way. Meanwhile, when they're in the enemy fortress, it might be that they manage to find a little used room to hide for a bit and have 10-20 minutes to recover before enemy search parties intensify in that part of the fortress and they need to get going again.
The clear 10m duration for Treat Wounds has an important consequence. There is no way to get rid of the Wounded condition that's faster than 10m. So any combats that are happening closer together than that are much higher stakes. You should sometimes do that. Stakes should not always be the same, that'd be boring.
On the other hand, if the party can totally heal up after a standalone encounter, what was the point of it? If it's not making things harder for the players later on in the day because they don't have another encounter, what is the "random" encounter for? That's an often-heard complaint but I think there are good answers:
- Because it could be a fun fight. If a fight is fun for the players, you don't need much justification besides that. Maybe it's a cool creature with an interested combat gimmick, that makes more sense there as a standalone enemy. Or maybe it's an interesting location (a flipmat you want to use, where you have some ideas for interesting terrain bits).
- Variety. Maybe you've been having a lot of encounters of one kind and you want something different to change it up. After all those serious hobgoblins with their systematic tactical formations, you just have a crazy comical owlbear fight.
- Because you have a short session with mostly talk and RP and story development, but players wanna go home having had some action, too.
- Because it says something about the area or the plot. A good combat also tells a bit about the story. Plaguestone does this pretty nicely with the wilderness encounters in part 1 and 2. You can also have an encounter with starving desperate bandits to say something about the state of the kingdom, perhaps foreshadowing some later plot.
So that's a whole bunch of reasons why standalone encounters can be totally fine, even though players can heal up easily afterwards.
I hear what you guys are saying, but part of my brain is like "the rules are so specific with how long things like Treat Wounds take, I feel like I should track them closely!""You just defeated the first wave of orcs, but scouts tell you the second wave is 10 minutes away. What do you want to do?"
And that can be problematic if the players aren't alerted.
Did you poke around a bit first? Oops, there goes your 10-minute window for such tasks.Hopefully PFS adventures don't phrase it so exactly (not that I'd avoid loosening it up a bit for "C'mon" reasons.
It also caused complaints from GMs (and players) about it being unrealistic, that the plot just kinda had to cool its heels waiting for the players to regain their spells.
Yeah, ultimately this is my biggest issue. My players just defeated some guards outside the bad guys lair and want to rest for 2 hours, does it feel realistic that none of the other bad guys come or go in that time?
I guess I could always leave it to chance and make a roll.
2E fights are balanced much more as standalones.
I agree 100%, but I think I'm still getting used to it. PF combat still feels challenging even letting my players heal, while in D&D combat was mostly a cake walk in the tea park.
The rules for Treat Wounds are kinda specific because they want to give you the tools to do that. (Also, most of the other post-combat activities like repairing shields and identifying loot take 10 minutes too. That's just convenient.)
And I do really like that fairly uniform 10 minute time block.
Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. I think I'll continue to only limit rest if time's an important factor for the adventure (ie. "We have to stop the ritual!"), but now I feel a little more confident about it.
It also caused complaints from GMs (and players) about it being unrealistic, that the plot just kinda had to cool its heels waiting for the players to regain their spells.Yeah, ultimately this is my biggest issue. My players just defeated some guards outside the bad guys lair and want to rest for 2 hours, does it feel realistic that none of the other bad guys come or go in that time?
I guess I could always leave it to chance and make a roll.
I think this really comes down to a question of what kind of lair we're talking about. If the guards are actually just the creatures that like hanging out around the entrance to a cave, maybe nothing comes by unless they're unlucky. If it's a guard post of an organized fortress, then some time in the next hour, it's more likely someone comes by to check if anything's been seen, or to change shifts, because they do that regularly, on a deliberately imprecise schedule (so that someone watching can't be sure they have a certain amount of time before the next check).
I'm just curious how you all prevent the "5 minute adventuring day" problem in your games.
I kill 'em in the first two.
I don't mind letting them spend an hour or so to let the Champion refocus/lay on hands enough to get everyone back to max HP, but at what point is it too much? I know it mostly depends on the situation, but I hate making arbitrary decisions, so I'd like to hear how it goes in other people's games.
I give them more time than they need, but less time than they want. The point it's too much is if they're underchallenged, or feel/act like they're invincible. The point it's too little is if they're too worried about survival to be heroic about moving forward.
strike a balance between too little/too much downtime (I'll adjust based on my player's preferences, but the organized play rules seem like a good baseline). Does anyone else use a system like this for casual games
Organized Play is a rough guideline, but there are two variables - the Task Level available to the characters, and the length of downtime. You can adjust one to compensate for the other.
PFS gives a Earn Income TL of CL-2 (with notable exceptions), and 24 days of Downtime per level (with notable exceptions). It gives a pretty big advantage to crafters (who Craft at CL+0) and characters in certain factions or who have certain boons. But roughly, it's adding something like 5-10% to WBL.
You don't want Downtime earnings to come anywhere close to the rewards of adventuring or else characters will rationally sit around and craft all day. I actually think PFS is too generous with Downtime, I'd actually prefer to see it go away (alternatively, more interesting options for Downtime besides Earn Income and Crafting [the Practiced Medic boon is an example of a good one IMO]).
|
|
It also caused complaints from GMs (and players) about it being unrealistic, that the plot just kinda had to cool its heels waiting for the players to regain their spells.Yeah, ultimately this is my biggest issue. My players just defeated some guards outside the bad guys lair and want to rest for 2 hours, does it feel realistic that none of the other bad guys come or go in that time?
I guess I could always leave it to chance and make a roll.
You mentioned you're running Plaguestone. I recently ran it, and I think part of the problems you're having are because of how that adventure is designed, not with the system per se.
Especially the flipmat dungeons, have a lot, a LOT of fights door to door. To the point where it's unbelievable that they won't spill over. But L1-3 characters really don't have the power to do that many fights. That's just too hard.
IMO the module really suffers from a "we ordered one map and we have to cram a whole level's XP into it" problem. This causes an impossible tension between immersive gameplay with enemies behaving believably, and a halfway doable challenge.
In the last dungeon I cut about a third of all the encounters (all of the elementals!) that weren't really needed for the story anyway. That significantly improved the fun around the table.
If I ran it again, I might instead put it as: "You've figured out where the villain's lair probably is, and it's probably going to be a tough nut to crack. The villagers go through all their cupboards and give you all the healing potions they had lying around to help you get through." And then give them an unusually large amount of 1d8 healing potions. That's not something that'll really boost them up in individual combats because it's just too many actions to use. But it can cut down the recovery time in between encounters. And it's not that likely to cause trouble in any follow-up adventures because 1d8 just isn't that much, even if you can do it for a lot of rounds in a row.
---
As a more general lesson, when designing a story, of course sometimes it makes sense to have encounters located close together or even built to lead into each other. But as a rule of thumb (that Plaguestone does NOT adhere to), you should treat any encounter without enough rest after the last encounter as if it were one grade harder. So two Moderate encounters after another feels more like Moderate+Severe. Good tools for estimating difficulty let you design fun adventures!
There's also a very noticeable changing of gears between very low and mid-level+ adventuring. At level 1-2, characters often don't have a lot of reliable large-quantity out of combat healing. Champions healing for 6HP every 10, or hoping for a success on Treat Wounds is basically it.
But this can improve quickly. From level 3 onwards, Assurance (Medicine) can guarantee success on basic Treat Wounds. (Rogues taking Expert Medicine at level 2 can do it earlier.) With the Continual Recovery feat you can also reduce time-to-full-HP by a factor of 6. And it stacks with Ward Medic.
Suppose a cleric takes Expert Medicine at level 3, and spends their precious general feat on Continual Recovery and Ward Medic at level 4, then they can treat 2 people each 6 times per hour, which is a big difference. (Also, rogues using Assurance can get this whole thing online by level 3, and auto-succeed at the Expert DC by level 6.)
So needing a long breather after a fight is mostly a level 1-2 problem that a steady party can solve in a few levels, at which point usually 10-30 minutes is enough to recover from non-catastrophic fights.
I struggled with this myself. For a while I was using a device called s tension pool which had mixed results. At least one of my players really resented it, although said player resented most things that didn't go his way. Ideally, variety is important and you should just rely on what makes sense in the context of the story. If you want to chain a bunch of encounters, make them easier encounters or evaluate if the players have ways to buy time.
You mentioned you're running Plaguestone. I recently ran it, and I think part of the problems you're having are because of how that adventure is designed, not with the system per se.
That's good to hear. I'm using Plaguestone to get familiar with the system before I start the Extinction Curse with my main group.
And maybe you'll know the specific encounter I referenced above:
I struggled with this myself. For a while I was using a device called s tension pool which had mixed results. At least one of my players really resented it, although said player resented most things that didn't go his way. Ideally, variety is important and you should just rely on what makes sense in the context of the story. If you want to chain a bunch of encounters, make them easier encounters or evaluate if the players have ways to buy time.
You read the Angry GM I'm guessing? :) That's actually the sort of mechanic I was considering when I started this thread!
|
|
Ah, the tension pool. I think the AngryGM article comes across as a bit too adversarial, "get those players of their lazy asses". It's a bit too much focused on the "punish unrealistic inaction" spectrum. For Plaguestone, I would say:
Plaguestone is so difficult that players are forced to resort to unrealistic amounts of resting
You can mitigate it a bit by retreating into the woods before resting, but that should still cause the folks inside to eventually go to the loo outside and notice everyone is dead and maybe react to that.
So I don't think the Tension Pool mechanism is a great idea for this particular circumstance. That requires a moderately balanced adventure, and it also requires a bit more advanced party tactics.
I'm not against tension pool in general, if it's done less as an adversarial thing and more as a dramatic device. You might get a party that learns tactics for retreating together (which is pretty difficult actually; try it sometime!). And they'll learn to think about escape routes, hidden camps near the dungeon, sneaking together, how to take out sentries quietly. And of course, they'll learn about the value of fast out of combat healing procedures.
Pretty interesting stuff, but also a bit harder. And doesn't work super well for Plaguestone. So what I'd recommend is that you don't dial up the thumbscrews right now, but after Plaguestone maybe discuss with the players about what kind of playstyle you and they would enjoy.
Remember that you don't have to be playing the game on hard and realistic mode to "do it right". Whatever playstyle is most enjoyable is the right one. So if your group (including you!) likes a more casual style that's less realistic and maybe just a bit easy, but lets them unwind after a workday and enjoy the story - that's totally fine.
This is adjacent to another thread we're having about monster sitting static "in a dungeon" waiting for players to come and kill them.
The main thing to keep in mind, is if you don't allow players to rest up in between fights you have to take that into account for subsequent fights, which could (in PF2 almost certainly) means reducing the severity of the fight because it's not really a separate fight if they're not a full HP/spells/focus points.
Fights in PF2 are really designed around the party being at full power, and if you chain fights together you have to account for the fact that they're no longer at full power.
PF1 assumed the PCs would wear down until they reached the boss fight, and then have more of a challenge (with their diminished resources) against that boss. But that didn't happen. The party fought 3 out of 5 encounters, rested (somehow magically in the dungeon with patrols looking for them), and then fought the last 2 battles starting with full resources and knowing the boss fight was only a bit away.
PF1 fights were often not at all challenging, even boss fights because of this dynamic. PF2 fights get to be very deadly if you chain them together and don't account for that by reducing severity of subsequent encounters.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, honestly I'm no stranger to modifying encounters in a published adventure, so when I start my full campaign I will have Low/Moderate/Severe variants for each encounter and adjust as I go.
I'm not doing that with Plaguestone because I like to get a feel for how things run as presented before I tinker. This conversation is helping a lot.
Whatever playstyle is most enjoyable is the right one.
As a player I like realism and challenge, and that's why I brought the question to the forum, to see a wider picture.
Ultimately I will have a conversation with my players during session zero, because you're right, I need to find something that's fun for the whole group.As Captain Morgan's post illustrates, my players may resent having a constant ticking clock if they didn't buy into the idea from the start.
No one really mentioned this but PF2E has more realistic "time frame" of adventuring than in PF1/5e. Yes battles are quick but in between battles you spend lots of time in between.
PF2 for example.
You spend the first minute fighting (1 Minute)
Then the players spend 10-40 minutes healing (41 Minutes)
Then they start a second fight (1 Minute)
Then the players spend 10-40 minutes healing (82 Minutes
Then there is a third fight (1 minutes)
Then the players spend 10-40 minutes healing (123 Minutes)
The players probably have spend about another hour identifying items (183 Minutes total)
Fourth fight (1 Minutes)
Everyone runs away to go heal and spend time "relaxing (200 Minute adventuring day)
There is also quite a bit of time spent searching/walking and time really feels smoother.
So overall it feels a lot more realistic than 5e/PF1 where you just run through fights and spend less than 10 minutes fighting. Early levels are kind of "weird" where you spend hours healing between each fight though. Once you get continual recover or have a Champion it is a lot better.
Most people agree PF2E is best if you let players Refocus/Heal between every fight, of course add some variety and chain some "weaker fights". No one wants to do the same thing every adventure. What you don't want to do is have everyone half dead and then send in a hard encounter... it will quickly just end with a TPK or players dying while the others run away.
Now on the reverse side you mention that you like realism and sadly PF2E encounter design doesn't really deliver on that. Here are the three ways I see what you can do.
-I think most GMs just lets the players heal in the dungeon after every fight. This 100% breaks the realism since you spend 40 minutes healing when there could be monsters in the next room.
-Otherwise you would have to make the players have to run away and find a "safe place" after every single fight, as a player that would be more annoying than fun though.
-If you want to chain fights to "interrupt healing" make sure they are just easy fights and increase the XP rewards since they would be harder.
In general even if you make players run and find a safe place between fights for "realism" it still doesn't feel real. Who sieges a keep runs in the woods for an hour to heal for 1 fight and repeat. So adding realism for the most part takes away from enjoyment. Since you will have players "waste" time looking for a "safe" spot in between each encounter. Depending on the group that could be horrible if they spend like 10+ minutes saying "this place looks safe! No lets rest over there! etc.." If players just spend 2 minutes deciding on a safe space then it would be fine though.