Streamlining Treat Wounds

[Staffan Johansson]

Treat Wounds is a bit of a mess. It was changed around quite a bit in the playtest, and I'm not sure it ended up in a good place.

PF2 encounter balance assumes that PCs get into each encounter at full health. Since Treat Wounds, along with focus spells like lay on hands and goodberry let you do sort of unlimited healing with only time as the limit, that's a fair assumption. But Treat Wounds goes about the whole thing in a way that makes things a chore, particularly at low levels. A 3rd level PC has like 25-30 hp, and assuming you've lost half that's like two successful Treat Wound checks (or 3+ to get back from 0). Each check has like a 25-35% chance to fail, and a cooldown of one hour for any individual. If your whole party is down an average of half their hp, it will probably take about 3-4 hours to top up everyone and require something like 10-15 checks. That's a lot of time taken, both in game and at the table, for something that ultimately isn't all that exciting.

So in the interest of streamlining, here's what I'm considering if I ever get around to running PF2 again:

Treat Wounds
Exploration, Healing, Manipulate
Requirements: You are trained in Medicine and have a healer's toolkit.
You spend 10 minutes treating the wounds of a living creature. That creature heals 10 hp and removes the Wounded condition. Depending on your Medicine proficiency you may heal more: 20 hp at Expert, 40 hp at Master, and 60 hp at Legendary.

So: no roll, no cooldown, and no need for the Continual Recovery feat tax. It still allows for Ward Medic to speed things up. Battle Medicine would not be directly affected by this.

[Tactical Drongo]

Honestly, I think it is not in a bad place

Treating wounds in the field with a first aid kit instead of treating it in a city with a big set of aiding tools is probably a hard thing to do

and if treat wounds is really the *only* source of healing in the party there should be probably more then one to do it

but lets say your party is so far down that you need two checks to heal one up

4 checks, 1 failed

pc 1: 1/2 heal
pc 2: 1/2 heal
pc 3: 1/2 heal
pc 4: 0/2 heal

2nd hour 8 checks, 2 failed

pc 1: 2/2 heal
pc 2: 2/2 heal
pc 3: 1/2 heal
pc 4: 1/2 heal

3rd hour 10 checks lets say 3 failed

3 npcs are at perfect health now and the last one will need little extra

so your time estimation is correct, your roll number estimation statistically a bit high

but is nobody else doing healing? does nobody have healing items, focus spells or anything else on hand?

and while you remove the need for roles, you reduce the time only if bad luck is involved

so you remove the need to roll, which is imo quite fitting, and the cooldown so you can patch up the guy who guy who got his arm cut off in 20 minutes and he is good to go

the hour is already highly unrealistic in terms what pcs can do, if just slapping on a bandaid is all thats needed hp as a recource for the adventuring day become meaningless - theres a reason why focus spells to heal are of limited effect

[breithauptclan]

Often we would just handwave Treat Wounds anyway. If the party wasn't in a dangerous location where they might be interrupted, and if there was no tight deadline time crunch - healing to full with Treat Wounds just happened with no rolls needed. If needed, we picked an appropriate amount of time depending on how injured the party was.

Since your tweak to Treat Wounds is less powerful than that, I don't see any problem with it.

[Staffan Johansson]

Tactical Drongo wrote:

Honestly, I think it is not in a bad place

Treating wounds in the field with a first aid kit instead of treating it in a city with a big set of aiding tools is probably a hard thing to do

If you're looking at things from the perspective of being realistic, Treat Wounds is completely bonkers and super over-powered. I'm not. I am looking at it from the perspective of "this is the means by which PCs refill their hit points between fights."

One of the differences between PF2 and PF1, and 3e before it, is that PF2 only really has guidelines for encounter design, not adventure design. It's assumed that PCs will enter each encounter with full hp. In 3e/PF1 the assumption was that each day would have about 4 encounters, each of which would consume 20-25% of the party's "resources", which mainly boiled down to hit points and spell slots. I'm not sure if this was called out in the PF1 rules, but it was definitely part of the 3e DMG (but probably not the SRD, which would explain why it wasn't in PF1). So an adventuring day would normally consist of four encounters, and by the 4th encounter you will have spent enough resources to make the encounter actually dangerous.

(Note: this assumption didn't work out very well because for some reason the designer's of 3e didn't realize you could make wands of cure light wounds that would let you heal up for ~3 gp/hp, and that made it trivial to heal up to full between each fight.)

But in PF2, there are no guidelines on how many encounters you should have per day. This is unfortunate, because I have seen several adventures that expect PCs to have enough encounters in one day to earn enough XP to go up a whole level. Some make this explicit (Despair on Danger Island expects you to gain four levels in four days), others implicit (NPC X has been kidnapped and is kept prisoner in the Evil Temple, and you need to get him out before he's killed or corrupted). And if you're going to have 10+ encounters in one day, you can't really spend 2-3 hours between each healing up, even though that's what the game expects.

Quote:

and while you remove the need for roles, you reduce the time only if bad luck is involved

so you remove the need to roll, which is imo quite fitting, and the cooldown so you can patch up the guy who guy who got his arm cut off in 20 minutes and he is good to go

Removing the need to roll is primarily because having one player sit there and roll over and over again until everyone's topped up or nearly so is boring.

Quote:

the hour is already highly unrealistic in terms what pcs can do, if just slapping on a bandaid is all thats needed hp as a recource for the adventuring day become meaningless - theres a reason why focus spells to heal are of limited effect

Hit points already aren't meant to be something that depletes over the course of a day. They might have been at the start of the playtest, but that's clearly not where they ended up.

Treat Wounds was not part of the original beta rulebook. They were added in a later update, and originally had you treat your whole party (up to 6 characters) at once, with a level-based DC, healing level x Con modifier on a success (and a critical failure cutting off any more Treat Wounds for the day). The final rules changed them quite a bit, notably removing the direct multiplier by level and making that part of higher-proficiency uses, as well as adding the cooldown which you can get rid of with a feat.

Even so, PF2 has continued to develop toward making downtime healing easier. Goodberry was changed at an early stage to remove the 1-hour casting time and adding level-based scaling to it. More recently, Alchemists were allowed to make healing elixirs with Perpetual Infusions with the caveat that the elixirs had a cooldown of 10 minutes. And with Rage of Elements, Water and Wood kineticists have unlimited healing with 10 minute cooldowns (Ocean Balm and Fresh Produce). So basically, the hp attrition ship have already sailed, and now it's just a matter of how long and how involved to make it.

[Staffan Johansson]

breithauptclan wrote:

Often we would just handwave Treat Wounds anyway. If the party wasn't in a dangerous location where they might be interrupted, and if there was no tight deadline time crunch - healing to full with Treat Wounds just happened with no rolls needed. If needed, we picked an appropriate amount of time depending on how injured the party was.

Since your tweak to Treat Wounds is less powerful than that, I don't see any problem with it.

That's been my impression too: Treat Wounds is often handwaved, because of its boring but necessary nature. This is mostly about codifying that handwave (and removing the Continual Recovery feat tax).

[Luke Styer]

Staffan Johansson wrote:

That's been my impression too: Treat Wounds is often handwaved, because of its boring but necessary nature. This is mostly about codifying that handwave (and removing the Continual Recovery feat tax).

I guess I fall somewhere in the middle, because I am fine with Treat Wounds as it exists, but also hand wave it in situations where careful time tracking is unimportant.

That said, my hand waving takes into account whether the party medic has Continual Recovery and Ward Medic, in terms of how much time we assume passes. "Everyone needs about one Treat Wounds, and Al needs two? Bob has Continual Recovery and Ward Medic? 20 minutes pass and everyone is healed to full."

I definitely think that doing away with the roll and using a fixed number is reasonable. My own preference would be to still use the existing time frames, adjusted by skill feat investment, but if you feel Continual Recovery and/or Ward Medic are a feat tax, I can see skipping that portion.

[Captain Morgan]

My group has done something similar to the OP, but we did not remove the need for rolling a Medicine check entirely. We just limit it to only needing one success and then carrying it over. We also still use the default rules for Battle Medicine.

[Staffan Johansson]

Luke Styer wrote:

I definitely think that doing away with the roll and using a fixed number is reasonable. My own preference would be to still use the existing time frames, adjusted by skill feat investment, but if you feel Continual Recovery and/or Ward Medic are a feat tax, I can see skipping that portion.

I'll keep Ward Medic around, because I feel that that's "above and beyond" where I feel the baseline should be.

[Staffan Johansson]

Captain Morgan wrote:

My group has done something similar to the OP, but we did not remove the need for rolling a Medicine check entirely. We just limit it to only needing one success and then carrying it over. We also still use the default rules for Battle Medicine.

Battle Medicine would still use the default rules (except maybe change the base heal to 10 instead of 2d8). Rolling for Battle Medicine in the middle of a fight still has some level of excitement to it, because the consequences of failure are very real.

I do think Godless Healing should rely on the medic rather than the person healed though. "I'm good at patching folks up because I don't rely on fickle so-called gods. Whether you believe in them is immaterial. Now hold still, this is going to hurt." Plus it feels weird that you should be able to train yourself into being more easily bandaged.