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Lately, I have been finding a couple of different GMs have been incredibly resistant to letting parties take enough time after combats to heal in AP dungeons. I GM, I understand not wanting to give parties for ever. I understand collapsing fights on top of each other, I do it a lot. It can create a tension that can be fun for everyone. One of these time, I, the healer, rolled under a 5 six times in a row and failed to heal anyone (we were 3rd level), with a party that was too beat up to press on, so I get a GM not wanting to let a party spend hours healing, and that bad luck is just bad luck.
My issue isn't actually that I think GMs are being unfair, in fact I totally sympathize with wanting to make dungeons feel dangerous.
My problem is actually with the meta that gets created by this dynamic. What happens over and over again is that very injured parties end up trapping themselves in small rooms and end up spending hours of game time creating incredibly frustrating encounters with very high chances of player death, especially when the GM doesn't give players even 10 minutes.
This has been a game stopper as pushing on with one or more character at 10% or less HP is not at all viable in PF2, and in both of my sessions this week we spent about half of the session trying and failing to create spaces where the party can heal.
As a GM, that is really not a dynamic that I want to create in my games, and I generally only interrupt healing when it really has the opportunity to create a really fun or interesting moment in the story.
Mainly I just curious to hear whether the the 10 minute healing breaks are best just done as nearly automatic time, or if you have had more fun trying to build tension around it?
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One of the groups that I am running through the Edgewatch AP consists of people new to PF2 and I've put them one level higher than they're "supposed" to be.
One really nice effect of this is that I can push the characters a lot harder from time to time. So, if the situation is such that getting even a 10 minute rest makes no sense then I can deny them that rest and they still manage to prevail. I don't do it all the time, mind.
In a group where I'm a player the GM did something similar in the first book of Abomination Vaults.
It's not the perfect solution for all problems but it's something to keep in ones arsenal. A way to keep things challenging and "realistic" that requires very little work on the part of the GM (I'm lazy :-))
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Mainly I'm just curious to hear whether the the 10 minute healing breaks are best just done as nearly automatic time, or if you have had more fun trying to build tension around it?
I for one believe the game loses something really important (not the least of which is dramatic tension) if healing breaks become automatic and expected--especially if you're in the middle of something like an active enemy stronghold.
I recently had a party hole up in just such a fashion, and I only gave them as much time as it made sense for the inhabitants to start to wonder why their companions had not yet returned from their daily rounds and send out somebody to check on things. Gave the party as much as half an hour without interruption in some cases (roughly the amount of time I estimated it would take to do a room by room search of said stronghold), allowing all but one party member to heal up to full hit points.
This resulted in one or two large encounters getting tackled as several smaller encounters instead. This, I feel, made the stronghold feel more alive and the NPCs therein more realistic in their behavior. This also added some positive tension to the scene too, I feel, though it did slow things down, with half a session being dedicated to hiding and healing.
It astounded me that they were hesitant to leave their room even though all but one had returned to full hit points.
Unless there is a time constraint of some kind, there usually isn't much stopping characters from simply leaving a stronghold, healing up, and coming back stronger. Depending on how long they take, and the nature of the enemy, the stronghold could still be in disarray from the recent raid upon the heroes' return, or it could have fortified and gained reinforcements.
I've TPK'd parties that were foolish enough to hide in the enemy stronghold's outbuildings overnight after raiding the place and slaughtering half the enemy. Being the heroes of the story, some leeway should be granted, but it only goes so far before things either seem silly, gamey, and unlosable; or everyone gets themselves killed. Ideally, the players and GM are communicating with each other well about the potential risks in advance, and can find a happy middle-ground in which the PCs are neither coddled nor paranoid.
I agree that it is important for dungeons to feel dynamic and responsive. And some times PCs just choose terrible places to rest and end up trapping themselves. Player choice should be significant. But there is also a pretty strong player driven meta (you see it reinforced frequently) that the party needs to be at full health when pushing on to a new encounter, especially in a dungeon where a powerful boss/higher level monster could be behind any next door.
I think players get into the mindset that if they leave the dungeon, then the GM might reset everything behind their backs, but if the party just closes a door, then the GM is contractually obligated not to let things change too much and progress is better saved. I think paizo might be cited to its own success a little bit in this regard because their dungeons are so dynamic and feel so alive that it is hard for the GM not to get wrapped up in showing that off.
My only real issue here is that the beat up party trying to find a place to rest becomes a bit of hostile issue where it feels like the GM is working against the players instead of with them, especial for the individual player stuck at 10% of their HP while everyone else is full enough to continue. It may be gamist, but when it is super clear your players are in heal or abandon the campaign mode, making healing into a chore just seems to turn into slog on game time because players won’t leave it alone.
One thing I want to work on as a GM is being more generous with healing potions as treasure, especially in those multi encounter dungeon crawls that feel like a race to save someone.
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I have basically embraced it. By essentially always being at full health, I have no problem throwing harder encounters at them at a much more frequent clip. This is largely due to our campaigns primarily being out doors. The encounters are no where near each other so they generally have plenty of opportunity to rest if the so choose. Its a bit different in a dungeon however, as the noise of an encounter often alerts the rest of the residents to their presence. That doesn't mean they automatically come running right away as the noise could be explained numerous ways, but as it occurs multiple times, the rest of the complex is drawn in. Not only does this make resting between much more difficult, but it tends to add encounters together and up the challenge.
This is worked very well so far, but I admit we are still low level. One campaign is level four, approaching five, the other is level two, approaching three. This might become a bigger problem at higher levels that only time will reveal.
tl;dr Its a product of the way the game is designed, so I would recommend embracing it and using it to your advantage. Good luck!
One thing I want to work on as a GM is being more generous with healing potions as treasure, especially in those multi encounter dungeon crawls that feel like a race to save someone.
That's an idea. It wouldn't be too hard to throw in an extra healing potion somewhere in many cases, and that would certainly help with the game's pacing if it starts to bog down.
"Oh look, the desk of the room you ducked into appears to have a a healing drought tucked away in the desk drawer."
Hopefully not too obvious. XD
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Mainly I just curious to hear whether the the 10 minute healing breaks are best just done as nearly automatic time, or if you have had more fun trying to build tension around it?
I've given my AV players the "Starfinder short rest". After every fight, they can take 10 minutes to get half of their hit points back, once per fight. So Medicine is still useful, but it severely cuts on the time to get to full hp.
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For what it's worth, even in BECMI D&D the game assumed that an encounter took a full 'turn' (10 minutes), between combat itself, checking that the monsters where dead/tying up prisoners, taking a breather, looking around for the enemies' belongings and other obvious treasure...
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I've given my AV players the "Starfinder short rest". After every fight, they can take 10 minutes to get half of their hit points back, once per fight. So Medicine is still useful, but it severely cuts on the time to get to full hp.Mainly I just curious to hear whether the the 10 minute healing breaks are best just done as nearly automatic time, or if you have had more fun trying to build tension around it?
I am one of Superbidi's players there and I was going to suggest his rule as a very good thing.
Note though that some Medicine skill feats lose a lot of their value with this rule, basically going from must have to might be useful some day. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I cannot say.
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In my experience with PF1 (spanning 10 years) the party always proceeded with full HP as well, they just did it with wands of cure light wounds. The big difference between how it works in practice is that in PF1, even when it took a couple of minutes, the actual healing was progressive and so if you got interrupted after even 1 minute, someone got back a fair bit of HP.
I never really liked the CLW wand approach to healing in dungeons, but I never had spite towards it either. Healing very rarely became a big part of the actual story, and while it did eat into game time, it was usually only about 5 minutes of real time at most to roll the dice one by one until done.
Healing in PF2 has a massively different effect in the game.
1. Players invest massively into the medicine skill. I almost never see a party that doesn’t have at least 1 character invest almost all of their skill feats into medicine. That is a much more single player investment than the old CLW method that usually came out of a party’s pooled resources.
2. Building off 1, I think being the party’s out of combat healer, and having invested heavily in it becomes frustrating when you aren’t allowed to do it. (Ironically, caster’s in PF2 often end up in the opposite boat, handling multiple encounters in short succession much better, until their resources run out. Then, if the party is martial leaning, everyone else feels they can dungeoneer forever if they just can get 20 to 30 minutes between each fight, but the caster is pretty much left with cantrips after 5 or 6 encounters which can get pretty frustrating for them).
3. In combat healing is effective in PF2, much more so than PF1, but is so dependent on limited resources, that players are absolutely loathe to use those options out of combat unless they are almost directly told they have no choice.
I appreciate everyone sharing there ideas here and I may experiment with some of these options as a GM myself, although I tend to go for more narrative solutions than mechanical ones. As a GM, I frequently have monsters run to call in back up, or to obviously ring a bell or spend an action that players see as calling in back up when they can and for that back up to arrive in waves, so at least the stacked encounters happen in the larger, more dynamic combat environments than the broom closets and pantries players inevitably try to hide in to heal. The other plus side of this is that it usually keeps an escape plan possible as the party hasn’t usually cut themself off from an escape route.
As a player, I think I am going to try to push my parties to avoid trying to find and secure rooms in dungeons to try and rest in, and to encourage setting up defensible camps in major choke points of the dungeon that will be very hard for monsters to assault, so that when healing is happening there, the enemy has to make a massive concession when they choose to counter attack. As a player, I’d much rather the enemy spend their time coming up with a new plan that the party can attempt to counter when they are ready to. I think some tables will feel like parties taking the route of setting up defensible positions before they might even be needed is anti-heroic, but I think PF2 makes it much less risky to be setting up your camp while you have the HP to withstand the attack rather than risking having to do so when you are hurting. Too many of the dungeons in APs are in such cramped and close quarters anyway that parties are often much better off trying to draw encounters to them in better places than engaging monsters in the rooms they would start in.
I'm in favour of people being able to heal up to full if they have the means to do so between encounters but also to instill in players that there are possible ramifications to that.
I tend to move encounters around or prepare enemies for a fight in those cases.
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I usually take a combat as war view on this stuff.
In my games, players should try to heal after every combat if they can. Optimally, I would already know what kind of room to room movement my creatures do in the dungeon so I can structure your party's skill rolls and choice points around avoiding those activities. Better choices and skill rolls grant more time to heal. I think that sort of logistics centered gameplay is really fun, and so does my party. They recently did some downtime to get more healing consumables made available to them on a recurring basis by working with local traders to develop their trade routes. They got 30 heal scrolls into their bag of holding for quick healing when they need it.
All that is to say that the rules really work for my group as is. I imagine the combat as sport folks don't like this area of the rules much.
Snares and glyph of warding are in the game to allow players to get advantaged encounters versus pursuers when they are trying to heal.
If you blanket heal, does that mean you also waive the 10 minute refocusing time for focus points? They usually occur during the same 10 minute intervals.
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Certain parts of the game, including the Medicine rules, assume that it will be exciting to track each ten minute period, and that "should we rest more?" is an interesting question, i.e. one where both answers are valid choices. This is the simulationist or world-building way of playing.This highlights why trying to label parts of games with things like "simulationist" or it's contemporaries doesn't help the conversation much:
Having to choose 10 minutes at a time what your character is doing, especially whether to rest more here, heal more while on the move, get back to exploring, or retreat to safety is a game-play choice, meaning it could be called a "gamist" mechanic.
Just like weighing the pros and cons between this action or that action during an encounter (i.e. Raise a Shield vs. Strike, or Stride vs. ready an item for next turn), weighing the pros and cons between these options in exploration mode of play is the game-play loop - it being used to simulate anything, or as a means of world-building, is entirely incidental.
Without it there wouldn't be any "buttons to push" (choices to make, illusory or otherwise).
My point is that the dev writing the rules for Medicine clearly thought it would be an interesting choice how to spend your next 10-minute period.
In actual fact, however, the correct way to write the rules, that fully supports the demands of other parts of the rules (combat and encounters), would be "nah, let's tear out all these little fiddly details and just say you heal back up fully after one hour".
No die rolls. No checks. No decision points. No analysis paralysis. No unpredictability and thus unreliable planning. Just "since the rules assume each encounter starts at full hp, we'll make that happen".
In a different game, the PF2 Medicine rules could have served a useful purpose. But that would have meant a game where pressing on at low health would have been a reasonable ask.
Thanks
I do think your impression of PF2 varies greatly from mine. I think the game supports combat as war very well, and I'm glad for the healing rules as a result.
I do think the game should contain your rules variant as an option for combat as sport games, but that rule would not be appropriate for my table.
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If you blanket heal, does that mean you also waive the 10 minute refocusing time for focus points? They usually occur during the same 10 minute intervals.If you learn how the actual rules work, you'll soon get a feel for approximately how long the rest will require. (Basically it depends on level and how many of the skill feats the character has taken)
But a good rule of thumb would be to assume there's always time for three downtime activities.
To address the specific question, I would definitely recommend you to assume every character with Focus point has time to refocus during a "short rest". Likewise repair their shield, or whatever else they might be asking for.
(In actual play, we found the average healing time to be 40-50 minutes during low to mid levels. Had this been a mere 20 minutes, it would have been too little to just assume there's time for "everything". But there is, so there is :-)
Thanks for not starting off with a note of condescension for an actual honest question.
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The (IMO) obvious answer is that it depends.
The goal, as a GM, is for the players to feel heroic. For some players, that means going in full and going nova on the most mechanically powerful monster they can possibly handle. For others, limping in and barely surviving is just as good or even better. It's the GM's job to adjust - perhaps even on the fly - the game so that the players' fun is maximized.
To that end, the metagaming comes from rigidly applying one set of rules. If the players know you'll never surprise-attack them, or if they know you'll always surprise-attack them, then they can metagame how much time they should take. If the players know you'll never adjust the severity of the combat, or if they know you'll always adjust the severity of the combat, then they can metagame how much healing they need.
The text as written for the APs assumes all encounters begin at full, yes. It shouldn't be a surprise - the authors have no other way to do it. It's the GM's responsibility to understand that a boss fight nominally labeled "Severe" may actually be an Extreme encounter if the party is depleted, or that it might be Moderate if the party has exactly the perfect consumables for the encounter.
If my players are too recklessly charging forward thinking I'm going to nerf the combats to accommodate them, I'll brush them back a little. If they're being too cautious and demanding full rest between every combat, I'll kick them in the rear a little. If the previous fights were tougher than expected, I'm softening the future combats a little; if the previous fights were easier than expected, I'm hardening them a little.
Even with the same group, sometimes players want an all-out bare-knuckle slugfest that brings them to the brink of death, and sometimes players want to slap around a few orcs, drink a beer, and chill with their friends. A good GM is going to adjust to that and sometimes slap the elite or weak templates on at the last moment to give the players what they want.
Combats in PFS scenarios are (IMO intentionally) underpowered because the GMs don't have the freedom to alter the encounters so the difficulty ends up being set by the average lowest tolerance of six random players that show up. Outside of that rigid environment, GMs should take advantage of the freedom they have to be a drill sargeant, or a family therapist, or stand-up comedian, or whatever their players need at the moment.
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TBH I've had some success addressing this concern just by reducing the timescale. Chopping the exploration 'turn' down to say... five minutes, or even two minutes doesn't actually change the game much in practice, because those opportunities to rest are core to the game and encounters move so fast, but for people who are especially time conscious it feels a lot better to be able to complete that rest on a shorter time cycle.
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What bothers me is how unreliable it is at low level so we spend 10 minutes of table time (or more) handling the recovery. I like keeping track of in game time, so that we all know it took 3 hours to rest up to full after that fight (Thank you result of 2 on 2d8.)
I really don't understand why a recovery scene should take more than ten minutes real time. You make a couple of checks, apply the effects, and move on. The whole thing should take only a minute or two if you have even a modicum of experience, especially if you're on a service like Roll20 with one-button macros or something.
In my experience, if it comes down to taking much longer than a few minutes, it's because the players are not speaking up for themselves, or otherwise being indecisive about how they want to spend their exploration activity time.
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What bothers me is how unreliable it is at low level so we spend 10 minutes of table time (or more) handling the recovery. I like keeping track of in game time, so that we all know it took 3 hours to rest up to full after that fight (Thank you result of 2 on 2d8.)I really don't understand why a recovery scene should take more than ten minutes real time. You make a couple of checks, apply the effects, and move on. The whole thing should take only a minute or two if you have even a modicum of experience, especially if you're on a service like Roll20 with one-button macros or something.
In my experience, if it comes down to taking much longer than a few minutes, it's because the players are not speaking up for themselves, or otherwise being indecisive about how they want to spend their exploration activity time.
As the healer of our group it goes as follows:
1) HP status check (how many HP are missing on each player).
2) Divide missing HP by 19 (average result for assurance medicine using DC20, in agreement with the GM I don't roll those d8 anymore).
3) Determine how long it would take to bring everybody up to full HP or near full HP, considering all available feats (Ward Medic for 2 to 4 people depending on skill level, Continual Recovery 10min duration). Usually our Barbarian is setting the maximum time, taking up to 80min to heal from zero to full (even if we have 5 players and 1 companion the Barbarian usually is the bottleneck). While minimizing our resting time I also make at least some sort of approximate healing schedule to know which player is healed by what amount in case we are interrupted or have to move on prematurely.
4) Discussion within the group if we want to and can afford to rest for said amount of time and where, usually also involving GM input and very much depending on current location and actual point in the story.
And no, this is usually not done in just one or two minutes.
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I thought I would have trouble with this, but I haven't. The adventures are pretty well set up to take into account when you have a lot of down time to heal and not much. 10 minutes isn't really that long. The higher skill medicine you have, the faster you can get back hit points combined with an AoE heal here or there.
I moderate heal checks according to what I think the enemies will do. I let the players know when they won't have much time to get back up. It becomes less of an issue the higher level you get as your hit point pool becomes larger.
I don't think you need to go into every fight with full hit points. Most fights are pretty easy. Normally you want full hit points on the big fights.
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I agree that most of the time, the use of medicine does not and should not take an hour of real time to resolve, but I created this thread because I had 2 experiences, back to back as a player where healing did end up taking that long (or longer) as the bottleneck really was that we players had decided that pressing on was no longer an option, but had clearly chosen bad spots (at least in the eyes of the GM) to try to recover in AP dungeons.
And I think that is really where the danger lies in creating hard feelings. Players seem to come into games of PF2 with the assumption that the GM will give them enough time to heal up to full before proceeding with the adventure. Many players seem to acknowledge that the NPCs will do something during that time, but if that something is disrupt a healing cycle, then the players can start to get frustrated and feel like the GM is being antagonistic.
As a GM, I know this is not really fair, but I think I slip into this mode when playing too, especially when there is one or more character with very little hit points left.
As a player I try to think about it narratively and not mechanically, but the opportunity cost of pushing on when one party member is really wounded is often one player sitting out for most of a combat that could take hours to resolve.
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Most of this is very much depending on the setting. It is one thing to rest in or even retreat from an abandoned stronghold to lick your wounds, or to have a cult perform some important ritual that needs stopping where even 10 minutes of rest could potentially be too much. The important question here is: What do you do as a GM if your group needs the rest mechanically, however resting is no option dramaturgically?
So you are playing an AP and this moderately large and themed dungeon (or have designed it yourself) that the party is supposed to solve in one go, with a couple of encounters or hazards in front of the climatic final fight, however during the "warm-up" encounters it is more than obvious that their chances to prevail are slim at best.
Perhaps they had bad luck, or they used bad tactics, or the encounters were overtuned to begin with or any combination out of the former, and the party is now low on HP and ressources.
What now?
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Or even more problematically, you are a player, and you have no idea how much farther the dungeon could go, or what could be left to face, but it is clear your GM is pushing you to clear the dungeon in one go, and yet you don't feel like that is possible. I think that is where the stand off really happens.
I have had a revelation about my own practices as a GM and a player but I will make those in a new post because they will take a bit to write up.
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Let me preface this by saying, I am stating my experience and preferences, and that a game like PF2 has to work for a bunch of different audiences not just me and mine. I am not saying how it should be done, I am saying what works and doesn’t work for me.
If a dungeon is going to feel active and alive, then the creatures in it need to be moving around and doing things all the time. Having every enemy sit quietly in their room up until the point that the heroes decide to rest is one way that players will quickly see the illusion of a dungeon ecology evaporate. Players should be rewarded by paying attention to that ecology and incorporating it into their strategy. This is why I prefer for dungeons to come alive on stage instead of behind the scenes as much as possible.
As a GM, I accomplish this by really only having fights alert neighbors in a dungeon relatively immediately and in front of the players, even having enemies actively try to escape and bring reinforcements. The effect of this is signaling right away to expect company. I know some people think PF2 doesn’t support this, but a party is much better off having reinforcements alive 5 rounds into a fight, while their buff spells are still active, than they are finishing the fight and then getting interrupted 5 minutes later. That just leads to more resource drain as the PCs try to fight the same reinforcements but with less support and less of a sense of urgency. This can get pretty dangerous for PCs, but it is also where individual enemies can really start to have personality. Injured enemies try to escape or plead for their lives and then run away to show up again later on, possibly even feeling like they might owe a player a favor. Someone can try to nab a particularly valuable weapon from a fallen enemy and either use it against the players or try to run off with it. These kind of challenges broaden the threat of these mega encounters away from total party death and towards having different levels of success and failure in an encounter.
Also, if the PCs wipe all the enemies that come at them when the base has been alerted, and maybe the boss didn’t come themselves, then they should be able to rest for a while and not have to be too worried about what is in the next room. As a GM, I think this is better for the players than keeping everything separate unless the party stops to rest because it shows the party more directly the relationships of some of the major actors of the dungeon, and it also prevents the players from having to make arbitrary guesses about what will and won’t activate very quickly. Also, it gives the GM to show conflict and strife within the dungeon. If someone who ran away is later encountered in chains or as a head on a pike, or the new head of a renegade faction, the dungeon is going to express a mood much more directly to the players.
It is also really easy for the GM to adjust this on the fly depending upon whether the party is having too easy or difficult of a time. I would never add more monsters, but having some push a little harder when it is clear that the party is well equipped to handle it will make the dungeon much more memorable. And if the PCs are getting it handed to them, then you have the opportunity to introduce new NPCs that will really endear themselves to the PCs by trying to take advantage of the situation for their own personal gain. “I can see the writing on the wall, the boss has lost their mind, let me help you find a place you can hide, rest and then take the boss out. All I want is …” treasure, a new job, a shrewd bargain the PCs might not love, but realize they need to take.
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I pretty regularly throw encounters that top 200, even 250 xp at my party in waves, and I stand by my observation that this is less dangerous and more fun that spacing them out but only giving the party a minute or two between them. But I agree that it takes nuance on the GMs part to control those dials effectively. If you don’t want to try it though, definitely give the party at least 10 minutes to recover.
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My players usually like to use spells or items to improve themselves and a good amount of them specially Heroism have a 10 minute duration, meaning that if they stop to rest, they lose the spell.
So the players usually try to push forward to keep their stuff as it makes the next battle easier and using a spellslot, item or battle medicine to heal if needed.
You can put multiple encounters together without an issue. I do it all the time.
What do you have to be aware of in PF2 that maybe you didn't as much in PF1 or earlier editions of D&D?
1. You don't want to put multiple difficult encounters together and as a DM you need to know when the PCs are about to hit a severe encounter that is a real severe encounter for your group.
Multiple martial encounters for a high level party with casters is not a severe encounter. Casters allow the party to funnel purely martial creatures into an advantageous position and thus take on numbers that look severe.
But instead put a martial party against 2 casters that are equal level but it doesn't appear severe, then they might get destroyed if invisibility they can't counter by casters launching AoE spell after AoE spell on them can turn out badly.
You have to learn to gauge what your party can handle and what's going to be tough on them.
2. The PCs can handle more encounters put together as they level. Level is big in PF2. And as the party levels, the more you can put them against because they can shift the math and recover in battle faster.
A 1st level heal spell heals 1d8+8 for 2 actions, but that might be one hit from a severe creature.
A 9th level heal heals 9d8+72. It's unlikely that a standard martial will take that damage in 1 round unless his AC is particularly low or he gets crit or critically fails a harsh spell.
At low level in Extinction Curse the party couldn't take on multiple encounters in the first module, but by the time they were 10th level they were able to take on multiple encounters at once or in quick succession with minimal healing.
Don't believe the people telling you that you have to let everyone heal up between every fight. Sure, at low levels in general you want to let them heal up and healing up is pretty quick. At higher levels you can let them put stuff together pretty easily and they can survive. But also understand that certain fights were definitely built for the party to be at or near full hit points and a good amount of resources available. If you see that coming as a DM, you need to signal the party or you might get a TPK.
Healing in PF2 has a massively different effect in the game.
1. Players invest massively into the medicine skill. I almost never see a party that doesn’t have at least 1 character invest almost all of their skill feats into medicine. That is a much more single player investment than the old CLW method that usually came out of a party’s pooled resources.
2. Building off 1, I think being the party’s out of combat healer, and having invested heavily in it becomes frustrating when you aren’t allowed to do it.
3. In combat healing is effective in PF2, much more so than PF1, but is so dependent on limited resources, that players are absolutely loathe to use those options out of combat unless they are almost directly told they have no choice.
#1 is probably the primary reason that I like focus point healing in preference to Medicine skill healing. Overall, Medicine skill healing is more powerful when increased with feats. But focus point healing (when it is available) is less build intensive and works reliably from level 1 (or whatever level you can get it at).
And I think you are spot on with #3. I briefly played a level 2 Occult tradition Witch. I didn't have Medicine skill or Life Boost. I could prepare Soothe. When I did have Soothe available, I would never dare use it out of combat. Go talk to someone with Medicine, I can't help you. Soothe is for in-combat only unless you are actually dying.
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Or even more problematically, you are a player, and you have no idea how much farther the dungeon could go, or what could be left to face, but it is clear your GM is pushing you to clear the dungeon in one go, and yet you don't feel like that is possible. I think that is where the stand off really happens.
I think that's an out of game problem, not an in game problem.
If you don't trust your GM to have the group's best interest at heart, it's going to manifest itself in a variety of ways, and trying to "GM-proof" your party is an in-game response to an out of game problem.
It's not different from the relationship between a sports coach and their players. They need to know when to push, and they need to know when the back off.
RPGs aren't a reality simulator. Sometimes we just have to agree to suspend some disbelief for the sake of fun.
I agree it doesn't make sense that all the monsters just stay in their rooms waiting to die - yet, unless other adjustments are made, moving things around is going to add unquantitated difficulty to the encounter, so you can't have a bunch of kobolds realize that their guards were killed and raise a dungeon-wide alarm without unbalancing the prepared difficulty. Some GMs want to do that, and can do that, and their players appreciate the extra difficulty. Some GMs don't want to do that, or can't do that, or their players will get angry. And most of us are somewhere in between those two extremes, so we kind of make minor adjustments and ask for a lot of feedback.
Personally, I'm pretty honest with my players. If they're doing something that's a little risky, I'll find a subtle way of warning them. If they're doing something that's a lot risky, I'll find a less subtle way of warning them. If they're not being risky enough, they get a carrot. If they don't take the carrot, they get a stick. It's not realistic at all but I can live with it.
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I've given my AV players the "Starfinder short rest". After every fight, they can take 10 minutes to get half of their hit points back, once per fight. So Medicine is still useful, but it severely cuts on the time to get to full hp.Mainly I just curious to hear whether the the 10 minute healing breaks are best just done as nearly automatic time, or if you have had more fun trying to build tension around it?
I think SF and PF2 really both have some pieces of the puzzle here yeah.
SF does this well/poorly:
+ Straightforward to use
+ Narrative; "I'm in hit points now" is a good way of saying how well a fight is going.
+ Scales well with characters with different amounts of stamina because you heal a % of health instead of an absolute number.
+ Reliable. You know that after 10m you'll have back at least X points. Where X is enough to take on at least another non-hard encounter.
+ Which also helps for the GM figuring out where to insert break opportunities.
+ Enables fairly long but not unlimited adventuring days, since resolve runs out but not extremely fast.
- Resolve is not always based on a good stat, some classes got a much better deal than others.
- The "healer" role is split awkwardly between envoy and mystic, and some skill based healing, but overall it's not a very satisfying role.
- Healing potions are too variable
PF2 does some other things
+ Healer skill matters more
+ Potentially unlimited length adventuring days
- Potentially very long breaks needed as healing at first just has 1h cooldown, and the skill isn't reliable yet
- Potions still unreliable, especially at low levels.
+ Healing magic is more satisfying because you're not limited to healing only stamina or HP
So putting those together I think indeed, you can have a happier combination. It'd go something like this:
* Your HP is split into HP and stamina, 50/50.
* Stamina is lost first, always. No "direct to HP" stuff.
* During a short rest you get your stamina back, but not any HP.
* The Medicine skill can be used during that short rest to also try to get you some HP back.
* Healing magic and skills work on HP first, and if HP is full, continue on to stamina.
* Potions/elixirs heal a fixed amount of HP, a teensy bit higher than current averages.
We don't use Resolve as a daily limit like in SF, and don't have such a hard wall between stamina and HP healing. Healing is just healing, regardless of class. You definitely can do long adventuring days if most encounters don't get deeply into HP.
Possibly, but I'm not sure about this, you could also remove feats like Continual Recovery and apply an 1H cooldown on repeated Lay on Hands style healing abilities, so that free HP healing is pushed to an 1H clock. But I'm not sure that's really needed. I think just having a short rest mechanic already moves such abilities from absolutely essential to just quite nice but not required.
The main virtue of this system I would say is that it gives the GM a new tool with which to plan encounters. Instead of saying :I estimate difficulty based on a fully rested party" and things getting hairy in a cramped dungeon with many close by encounters, you can say "I estimate difficulty based on a 75% rested party, because if they just had a 10m break then they're almost certainly there". If you're positioning encounters closer than would allow for a 10m rest, then you also know they're going to be less healthy. If you position them more than 1H apart then most likely they're going to be at full health.
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This is a very interesting thread. It strikes me as a bit of a return to earlier debates with Zapp, but now everyone's had about a year to think things over and come up with new ideas :)
I'm currently playing Agents of Edgewatch and Age of Ashes. Both of them feature dungeons with LOTS of encounters in them, often close to each other. So close that it's hard to believe they don't overflow, but if they did, they'd be too hard.
I think for Edgewatch this is more of an issue. It makes more sense for that campaign to conduct some dungeon crawls as SWAT style raids - at high speed, so that perps don't get a chance to escape. Narratively speaking, you want encounters to come quite quickly after another, the PCs busting into room after room to arrest folks before they can reinforce, destroy evidence/hostages or flee.
If you really played like that with a Paizo adventure it'd go horribly wrong. Way too many level-appropriate encounters. Just plain too hard.
We've improved on this a bit because we play a 5P party, and our support organization gives us batches of healing elixirs (that we can't keep/sell because they're 1-day items). This has certainly improved the narrative side of the campaign although it's diminished the witch's role as healer a bit.
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Paizo's dungeons are often massive affairs, that might take you through one or more whole levels (in the middle of a non-stop police raid?!). Compare that to the five room dungeon concept. There's really more than one way to design a dungeon, and then to design encounters in them. And I think that plays into how healing should be viewed too.
Standalone encounter
This could be a random encounter at your camp, or a planned beastie while travelling or whatnot. But it's hours away from the next encounter, and often how far away from the next encounter is entirely up to the PCs because they can just pause until fully healed again. This works very well with the rules as they currently are.
Static dungeon
Then monsters tend to stay where they are. Maybe they're undead that just pathologically refuse to leave their death site. Maybe they just can't climb out of their hole. Maybe they're infinitely patient waiting for prey to drop into their pit. Maybe they're mindless golems. There are a lot of critters that make sense as stationary foes. Players can take their sweet time with this and the current rules work fine.
Widespread dungeons
Monsters may wander a bit, there could be some random encounters, but overall the space is so big that players can still find a safe space to hide and heal up. For example, the "dungeon" may in fact be a whole ruined city with a monster here and there in some of the houses, with whole city blocks of territory in between them. Paizo doesn't do these very much.
Compressed dungeon
Written sort of like a widespread dungeon, but then when you look at the map, they're quite close together. Almost as if the artist got told to put all this into a single picture. Paizo does a lot of these. These are a problem because here you'll get encounters spilling over into each other and finding a resting spot that won't be invaded is hard.
Organized dungeon
Like a camp, or keep staffed by an organized force, as opposed to dumb stationary monsters. This sort of dungeon might have patrols, reinforcements, lookouts, alarms, and even just plain crews moving through it on their daily routines. Along with Paizo's tendency to compress the map into a single image, these kind of dungeons don't lend themselves to resting. Unlike the previous one, these dungeons often make a lot of sense to really be this compressed. It's just that they don't play well with the healing rules.
As a side matter, any of these can of course be made harder if the PCs are on a narrative time limit ("do X before the ritual reaches Y stage").
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I think most of these dungeons are valid stories and should be playable. Notably, I don't think we should get rid of organized/active dungeons, and shouldn't get rid of SOME adventures being on a time limit. We should be able to wield the game system to run games that match all common narratives.
So how can we do better?
* For the static dungeons and the spread-out dungeons, we don't really have to change anything.
* For organized dungeons, I think it's good to re-conceptualize some encounters. Instead of putting separate encounters in three adjoining rooms, consider all of those rooms one encounter, with some of the creatures arriving in later rounds. You can increase the encounter budget by 20-50% by spreading it across creatures that arrive in waves. So under the hood it's all one encounter, but on the surface it looks like multiple small encounters flowing into one another. Whenever you can't really imagine that you could do encounter A without also triggering B that's close by on the map, then you should build AB as a single encounter with waves.
* The compressed-but-not-organized dungeons really are the worst, narratively they're a bit forced and the difficulty doesn't play out well. I would strongly suggest checking if all of the encounters are really required by the story, or if you can just thin it out by cherry-picking only the really fun ones. But when doing so, make sure you don't keep only the hard ones, try to maintain a spread of difficulties. This is a pitfall because easy encounters often are also a bit less interesting, re-using creatures to save on word count and so forth. But for players not to feel like the game is a merciless grind, you need this balance of easy and hard fights.
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Note that all of what I just wrote would also go well with the 10m short rest mechanic discussed above.
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If other games allow the GM to put two or more encounters together and have the party come on top, it's because those encounters are not challenging by themselves. You can easily do the same in PF2.
I make sure my players have realistic expectations about time. If they're going to attack a heavily guarded building or castle, they're not going to have 10 minutes between each fight. Same with any dungeon that has lots of moving enemies.
Making 10 minute rests automatic or even instantaneous would be dumb because it kind of ruins any opportunity for players to plan differently from one scenario to the next. A ticking clock would be useless because the players wouldn't behave any differently without it. There'd be no need to come up with clever infiltration plans if you know you can go one fight to the next throughout a closely packed bandit camp without worry.
There's a great 4e mechanic that would help in this situation. Make some or all of the additional encounter monsters into "minions", having 1 hp so they are a threat but easy to take out. This works well with milestone exp and non-AP adventures, as you often won't award much exp or loot for such creatures and you might just be fabricating these creatures up to fill a role. Figuring out ways to make patrols and wandering creatures into extra yet weaker adversaries is a good skill for a GM. Meanwhile the creatures that are "stuck" in their rooms are usually busy doing things, sleeping for nocturnal creatures, preparing for their daily routines and such. So long as there is a reason every creature isn't roaming around, you can find good ways to mix and match roaming "minion" and static full encounters or vise versa to get the feel of a living dungeon.
You can throw "minions" at a party resting in a bad place to force them to move without the threat of a tpk but also not throwing -4 creatures at them that likely won't even do notable damage.
Making sure you have reliable ways to heal is part of party building and adventuring, even as much as I personally hate buying healing consumables. Also a quick 10 minute rest should be a given unless the party has put the area on alert and creatures are actively searching for them. Doing more then one quick rest can start chancing fate though. In such cases you get attacked and don't feel you can handle a fight, the GM should run a chase scene as you try to get away, as such should always be an option unless you paint yourselves into a corner.
If a GM thinks a party is unable to recover HP after a fight in less then half an hour or so without spending lots of money on consumables perhaps think of using the stamina rules. Maybe let over healing restore some stamina to reduce the friction stamina causes healers.