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For treat wounds the ward medic and continual recovery skill feats make those restrictions go away as they increase but yeah the expectation by the game is that in general the party can heal themselves up between fights
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Any advice on handling spamming healing would be much appreciated.
Yes, this is somewhat expected.
This is a change from previous editions that tried to do challenge by attrition and spending daily use resources sparingly over the course of an adventuring day.
Attrition challenge didn't really work - all it did was give incentive to the party to spend all of their resources in one or two encounters and then try and rest for the entire day. Or give incentive to find the most cost effective source of healing (wand of Cure Light Wounds, usually) and spam that instead.
So instead, PF2 has non-attrition challenge design. Encounters are designed with the expectation that characters are going into it at least fully healed. They may be down a few spell slots, and some of their 1/day abilities may have been used, but they won't be down HP.
That doesn't mean that you can't spring an additional encounter on them while they are resting and healing up. Keep the players on their toes by all means. But don't have it be a full difficulty challenge while they are at reduced effectiveness. Down that path lies TPK.
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Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a precise and accurate Encounter Budget system with Trivial-Threat encounters, Low-Threat Encounters, Moderate-Threat encounters, Severe-Threat Encounters, and Extreme-Threat encounters. It is explained in the PF2 Core Rulebook on page 488 under Building Encounters. And the system assumes that the party is close to full resources, including hit points.
I point out in my threat Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters that four circumstances make this system less accurate: luck, terrain, readiness, and tactics.
Party readiness includes being able to heal up. If they proceed with much of their hit points missing, say at only 75% health, then they could lose against the tougher threats. Since the players don't know whether the next encounter is Low Threat or Severe Threat, the wise course is to be ready for the Severe Threat before they advance.
The GM has storytelling tactics to goad the party into advancing while not fully ready. For example, suppose they have the element of surprise. They took out the guards at the back gate and can now enter the enemy stronghold before the enemy realized they are there. Pausing to heal would mean that the back-gate guards do not yell their scheduled report, "Midnight and all is well!" and the stronghold will realize that the back gate is in trouble before the party gets past that bottleneck.
However, realize that the party that advances before it is ready is weaker than usual. Don't throw Severe-Threat encounters at a party that is at 75% health or less. Don't throw Moderate-Threat encounters at a party that is at 50% health or less. Don't throw Low-Threat encounters at a party that is at 37% health or less.
I am working on a careful balancing act right now. In my game session on Tuesday, October 31, the party scouted out a bandit camp--the bandits had taken over a small hamlet. This part of the campaign is based on the Seven Samurai (also The Magnificent Seven). In the movies, the heroes had realized that the bandits were stronger than them, so they had to train the villagers to defend themselves to counteract that strength. In my game, the party decided that they could take out the 6 bandits on guard that evening and then catch the other 18 bandits without their armor on. They will play out that encounter in about 18 hours, the evening of Tuesday, November 7.
The party consists of six 5th-level leshies (this is the party from Playtesting in A Fistful of Flowers with 7 Leshies). They also have two 2-level heroic NPC villagers with them. The bandits are 2nd level, so six of them would be 6×15xp = 90 xp, which is Low Threat against a 6-member party. But 18 of them would be 18×15xp = 270 xp, an Extreme Threat against the party. They have the advantage that they will attack at dusk, when the low light will make them concealed against the bandits but the leshies can see fine in low light so the bandits won't be concealed. And the 18 bandits won't have time to don their armor, so their AC will be 2 lower than expected.
On the other hand, if the party is injured while battling the six guard bandits, then their advantage of armor and low light will be negated by their disadvantage of being more vulnerable than usual. And of course, taking time to heal with Treat Wounds would give the bandits time to light torches and don their armor. Thus, the party has to avoid injury.
That is the tension that occurs when the player characters does not have time to heal yet know that they have a tough fight ahead. I don't like skirting this close to a Total Party Kill, but my players chose this course.
Hello!
I'm new to Pathfinder 2e so I'm not sure how everything works yet.
I'm the GM. I have a champion in my group and pretty much after every combat, the party waits as long as they have to for the champion to use Lay on hands over and over. Also they always want to take the time to Treat wounds. I know they can only do that one on a character every hour, so it's not as much of a concern.
I don't really have a major problem with it since it keeps the adventure going, but I'm wondering if I'm allowing it "too much."
The times they've done it was in places away from immediate danger and no "wandering monsters" so I didn't really see a problem in them taking an hour to heal everyone up to full (or close to it).
They aren't on a time crunch with the adventure, so maybe it's not a problem. I'm just not used to a player spamming an ability like this.
Is this how everyone's games are? Should I limit them somehow? There will eventually be times where wandering monsters may be a problem, but they haven't made it there yet.
Any advice on handling spamming healing would be much appreciated.
It's generally expected that players will enter into each combat at full or nearly full hit points. If you're going to intentionally cause them to enter combat at less than full hit points you should be adjusting your combats down to compensate for this. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, just you have to be careful about subsequent fights where the party isn't at full. It's expected that the party have someone who has focused on the Medicine Skill and picks up the feats that will eventually let them heal the whole party and only take 10 minutes to get one round of healing. LOH honestly becomes back up healing or emergency healing rather than between combat healing once a few skill feats are obtained.
The party consists of six 5th-level leshies (this is the party from Playtesting in A Fistful of Flowers with 7 Leshies). They also have two 2-level heroic NPC villagers with them. The bandits are 2nd level, so six of them would be 6×15xp = 90 xp, which is Low Threat against a 6-member party. But 18 of them would be 18×15xp = 270 xp, an Extreme Threat against the party. They have the advantage that they will attack at dusk, when the low light will make them concealed against the bandits but the leshies can see fine in low light so the bandits won't be concealed. And the 18 bandits won't have time to don their armor, so their AC will be 2 lower than expected.
The first half of that battle between leshies and bandits took place tonight and reminded me of another technique to prevent 10-minute healing during a battle: steadily streaming enemies at the party. At any given moment the total enemies around the party is a Moderate-Threat encounter, but reinforcements arrive as quickly as the party defeats their foes.
The players had a lucky roll on weather conditions at the beginning of the game session. The sky was clear and the moon was bright, so that they had dim light all night. So the leshies waited until all the bandits except the six guards were asleep. Four PCs and their 2nd-level NPC allies sneaked to a house near one of their horse corrals. The PCs attacked the sleeping bandits in the houses while the NPCs chased the horses away. The other two PCs, barbarian and animist, were poor at sneaking, so they walked into town from the south to distract the southern guard while the roving guard patrol was to the north. The southern guard tried to ring the church bell to wake all bandits, but he was taken down on the doorstep to the church. Thus, the bandits woke up piecewise based on Perception checks, which created the stream of opponents.
The end result so far is 11 bandits dead, the 13 surviving bandits are awake and armed, but two are injured. One PCs is badly injured and should retreat, so the party is down to five PCs and two NPCs. Some might use magic to heal up the injured PC, but since that would take the healers out of combat temporarily, the effect is equivalent to a PC retreating. In combat strength, the bandits have 195 xp total and the party has 230 xp without the injured PC, so the difficulty is between Severe Threat and Extreme Threat. Nevertheless, not all the bandits are mounted and only one surviving bandit is wearing armor and the dim light still favors the leshies, so the good guys have a solid advantage. They still risk death of a PC or NPC.
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As a rule of thumb, if you run encounters close together so there's no time to heal up in between, you should estimate those later encounters to be a grade harder than they would normally be.
So a moderate encounters going quickly into a moderate encounter would be as difficult as a moderate and then a severe encounter
I think it's good to sometimes have encounters close together, because it can be exciting. But behind the scenes as GM, it means you have to be more careful with planning the difficulty.
For example, the party is raiding a gang hideout. There are sentries (one encounter), a bunch of gangsters in the main room (another encounter) and the boss in his room (a third encounter). Since enemies have plenty of HP, you don't expect the sentries to be taken out quietly so the middle encounter will probably be on guard. When the players encounter the middle encounter the boss decides to start burning papers with incriminating evidence, so the players have to go fast to make sure they put a stop to that.
Each of those is probably a moderate fight already, so that's quite hefty. The party's gonna run out of resources doing all those back to back. However, as a GM there are ways you can balance that out. Since we're talking raiding a gang hideout, the players might be part of a police force, they're essentially doing a SWAT job here. So the police could also supply them with extra consumable resources.
The police alchemist brews up a whole lot of healing elixirs. Those will expire the next day so the players know they're for using on this job, not hoarding for five levels. Also give the casters some scrolls with extra offensive spells, to balance out that they won't have time to regain focus spells. You can also give some buff spells scrolls, or have an NPC cast them. 10m buffs normally only work for one encounter because then you rest, but now they'll work for the whole raid because there's no resting.
So now the party is ready to do a bunch of encounters quickly after another. You had to give them extra consumables to compensate for the stuff they don't have time to recover if they had done the encounters at slow pace. So why go to all the trouble as GM? Because you get to run an exciting big showdown, and get to vary the pace of how your adventures go. That's a lot of fun for you and the players.