Yes you can as the Treat Wounds action restores HP and additionally removes the Wounded condition.
Requirements You are holding healer's tools, or you are wearing them and have a hand free
If you succeed at your check, you can continue treating the target to grant additional healing. If you treat them for a total of 1 hour, double the Hit Points they regain from Treat Wounds.
The result of your Medicine check determines how many Hit Points the target regains.
Notice the requirements do not list having the Wounded condition
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Yeah it's something that surprises many new GMs, but healing to full HP in between combats is normal. It takes a long time at level 1 but it gets easier a few levels in, with feats like Continual Recovery and Ward Medic. But even at level 1 there are abilities like a champion's Lay on Hands spell that allow you to just heal up entirely.
PF2 doesn't really rely on the party suffering attrition from encounter after encounter to make combats feel appropriately challenging. Between focus spells, cantrips and good out of combat healing, parties can do many encounters per day. But each combat is also balanced as if it was all on its own. So if you're doing just one encounter per day during overland travel, it won't feel pointless. Same if you play on say, weekday nights and only have time for one or two combats; they're still meaty even if you don't have four or five combats.
Now, sometimes in an adventure there's time pressure. If you wait too long the evil princess will eat the baby dragon, the cultists will sacrifice someone, the bad guys will flee, evidence is destroyed. So you can't always heal up full. That's when you reach for potions and spells to heal up faster. But the amount of that that you can afford is pretty limited. If you're going to use time pressure as a GM, you should probably make the fights themselves a bit easier. Because they're already harder if you start them without full HP.
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To expand slightly on it being normal, it isn't like it's never appropriate for encounters to run close together, without time for healing, but when you expect that to happen as a GM, you should balance the encounters around that. Basically, a "level 4 Severe encounter" means that it will be a Severe encounter for a fully healthy level 4 party. Back to back Severe encounters would therefore be quite dangerous, but multiple smaller encounters that run together can still be a reasonable alternative to one big one, if it's a better fit for the narrative.
Honestly, that can get pretty squishy, too, depending on how you run it, and "sure way to TPK" is an overstatement.
"Encounter 2 suddenly rushes into encounter 1, with full force and readiness, while Encounter 1 is in full swing" means you have one giant encounter and can easily turn a couples of Moderates into an Extreme. That is a good likelihood of TPK.
"One guy from Encounter 2 comes into Encounter 1 after a couple of rounds, and is followed by the rest if Encounter 2 in varying states of readiness (and having to spend preparatory actions)" dilutes the amount if enemy infective capability that can come to bear at once by a lot, and makes a massive difference in what the difficulty of the encounter actually is.
Combining encounters can be fine, but pacing matters and is more art than science, especially as the number of level-appropriate hits a creature can take shifts over the range of levels, and changes what the pace of reinforcements should be to get the desired effect.
So combining encounters isn't a thing to avoid at all costs. It's just a dangerous tool that you don't want to use recklessly. As a dangerous tool, I'd recommend holding iff on it until you have a good feel for how your group's normal encounters go.
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Honestly, that can get pretty squishy, too, depending on how you run it, and "sure way to TPK" is an overstatement.
"Encounter 2 suddenly rushes into encounter 1, with full force and readiness, while Encounter 1 is in full swing" means you have one giant encounter and can easily turn a couples of Moderates into an Extreme. That is a good likelihood of TPK.
"One guy from Encounter 2 comes into Encounter 1 after a couple of rounds, and is followed by the rest if Encounter 2 in varying states of readiness (and having to spend preparatory actions)" dilutes the amount if enemy infective capability that can come to bear at once by a lot, and makes a massive difference in what the difficulty of the encounter actually is.
Combining encounters can be fine, but pacing matters and is more art than science, especially as the number of level-appropriate hits a creature can take shifts over the range of levels, and changes what the pace of reinforcements should be to get the desired effect.
So combining encounters isn't a thing to avoid at all costs. It's just a dangerous tool that you don't want to use recklessly. As a dangerous tool, I'd recommend holding iff on it until you have a good feel for how your group's normal encounters go.
I was indeed talking about the first case. Which I have also encountered as "on the PCs' second foray, the enemies are on full alert and are all together."
In PF2 seeming common sense kills.
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Honestly, that can get pretty squishy, too, depending on how you run it, and "sure way to TPK" is an overstatement.
"Encounter 2 suddenly rushes into encounter 1, with full force and readiness, while Encounter 1 is in full swing" means you have one giant encounter and can easily turn a couples of Moderates into an Extreme. That is a good likelihood of TPK.
"One guy from Encounter 2 comes into Encounter 1 after a couple of rounds, and is followed by the rest if Encounter 2 in varying states of readiness (and having to spend preparatory actions)" dilutes the amount if enemy infective capability that can come to bear at once by a lot, and makes a massive difference in what the difficulty of the encounter actually is.
Combining encounters can be fine, but pacing matters and is more art than science, especially as the number of level-appropriate hits a creature can take shifts over the range of levels, and changes what the pace of reinforcements should be to get the desired effect.
So combining encounters isn't a thing to avoid at all costs. It's just a dangerous tool that you don't want to use recklessly. As a dangerous tool, I'd recommend holding iff on it until you have a good feel for how your group's normal encounters go.
I was indeed talking about the first case. Which I have also encountered as "on the PCs' second foray, the enemies are on full alert and are all together."
In PF2 seeming common sense kills.
To be fair this is as much the fault of the game conceit that 3-5 heroes will fight their way through an entire compound of enemies. In this game, heroes die if they fight on actually 1-1 odds and for some reason foes rarely seem to recognise their attackers are vastly more dangerous than themselves.
On that note, common sense tactics by the enemies can be preserved if: You balance all the 'likely to join' encounters as a single difficult encounter which triggers only if the other rooms receive warning (or hear the fight), and/or you allow there to be a delay before other rooms join, thus potentially letting the PCs whittle down an easier encounter before it achieves full mass.
On the other hand, you could encourage your players to be very wary about 'raising the alarm' such that they know that once reinforcements start piling in, they should reconsider their options. Unless all the foes have AoO, it's much easier in this edition to beat a hasty retreat once things start getting out of hand, only so long as the players are mentally prepared for the possibility of retreating before it's too late--and assuming reinforcements didn't cut off their escape. Depending on your group, this could lead to some quite engaging tactics attempting to lure a stronghold of alert enemies out into smaller fights until the possibility of taking the compound in a bold assault is reached.
Of course, this would depend strongly on your players--players who aren't interested in such strategic engagements will not be very pleased to find that their bust-down-the-door strategy is so often met with a quickly spiralling encounter which, once they retreat, becomes a tedious slow assault. Just because it's realistic doesn't mean it's fun after all! One of my most engaging fights featured enemies joining from side rooms a round or two after the fight started, then a boss arriving a round or two after that. It was very intense encounter which came the closest to killing a PC I've had (yet) in 2e, but part of it was predicated on the fact that I intentionally designed the individual rooms to be relatively trivial encounters on their own, and relied on the players' ability to semi-clear each phase before the next arrived (which they... did not excel at with their unfocused attacks, but they still managed it)
But this is all besides the point and I realize now looking at the thread title I'm spiralling further and further from the topic.