As I read and compared the rules post and pre remaster I came to the conclusion that the change in the recovery section entry in page 411 does not constitute a change in the rules but instead serve as a reminder that the wounded condition is always included in your dying value.
Some feel they different and its best to let them speak for themselves.
So. Have the rules changed and why or why not?
Relevant rules sections for dying and wounded have been posted by Ravingdork on the [Spoiler]remaster dislikes thread. Would it be possible to link to it by someone who is better at these things than I? That would help more people to see the rules.
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First, is there anything more you are hoping to get from this thread than the previous two threads on the subject?
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Yes, it is a change - the rule text literally changed.
Whether that is a correction to what the developers originally intended, or a shift in the rules that the game developers want to make - you would have to ask them. There is evidence for both cases and I am not going to put words in their mouths regarding their intentions.
Previously, the Wounded condition states that it only applies when you gain the Dying condition. The Knocked Out and Dying rules also say to add your Wounded value to what value of Dying you gain when you are dropped. The Recovery Check section of the death and dying rules did not say to add your Wounded value at any point. However, the Taking Damage while Dying rules did have a reminder to add your Wounded value to your increase in Dying - which is odd since the Wounded condition does not say to do that.
In the Remaster, the Wounded condition is unchanged - it still does not state that it applies at any time other than when you gain the Dying condition. The Knocked Out and Dying rules are also unchanged.
However, the Recovery Check rules have been updated (link to preview image) to state that when you fail or critically fail the recovery check that you do add your Wounded value to what you increase your Dying value by. That is new. That also does not contradict what the Wounded condition says. The Wounded condition does not have to be the only source of rules process. The Death and Dying rules do still exist and should be the place where the entire process is defined. If your character has the Wounded condition, then its value can be referenced by other rules without problems - even if the Wounded condition does not mention all of the places that do so.
Also, the Taking Damage while Dying rules are unchanged - including it only having a reminder that your Wounded value adds to your increase in Dying, even though the Wounded condition does not say to do that.
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i created this thread to be respectful of someone who asked we move the discussion.Thats all
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Sounds good. Hopefully the summary of my position on the matter is beneficial in some way.
I'm hiding this thread now too like I did the other one.
Thank you for linking to a preview image of the Recover Checks section.
According to the devs, the rules have been clarified. The part about recovery checks was missing completely so the RAW has changed. The part about damage was there but looked weird in the past and is now perfectly understandable in light of the change in recovery checks.
I launched the first thread just to be the first to reveal that information. Retrospectively, I'm no more that happy about it. Anyway, I'll stay outside this discussion as it is preposterous to me.
According to the devs
Just confirming is that based on the new text on page 411 or have they made a statement outside of this?
If I'm not making a mistake, Mark Seifter made a comment a long time ago to state that the new version was how the rules were supposed to be played back then.
If a more lethal game was the intention there were better and more clear ways they could have done this.
For one I don't like the idea of applying a condition in a way that is inconsistent with other conditions. Treating your current dying value as a timestamped number that has to recalculate from the latest timestamp with another condition on top of increasing 1 or 2 from failure or taking damage is very magic the gathering like and doesn't feel like pathfinder 2e to me.
This is different than treating conditions like they are on a track that progresses in a specific way and only applies the highest value when applied multiple times.
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He has several comments on it on his Discord. 31/10/2023 he has a short discussion about how people seem to think not just zerg rushing a boss and allowing it to get 3rd action attacks off is apparently advanced tactics. 13/10/2023 he has a short discussion about the team being on board with the more lethal rules because they don't kill you immediately but increase tension. 1/4/2020 has just first discussion on it where he says:
It does look like the wording on recovery checks is not perfectly clear because of the use of "gain" vs "gain or increase". But damage while dying definitely has the reminder.He's pretty clear overall that it was intended as "gain or increase".
If it is deliberate as your reference suggests, then it is a bad design because it is too complex. There is very little point in having the wounded condition with a number. You can have a very similar effect just with just saying double your dying numbers if you are already wounded. A boolean flag works just fine.
There is just no need. The problem with the Healing Word yoyo in D&D5 is that it is open ended and safe. That was stopped with the rules the bulk of the community are already using. Given multiple attacks, persistant damage, area of effects, dying 2 on criticals, lowered defences (-4 AC and reflex while unconscious) and thus higher critical chances - it is already easy enough to kill a PC that isn't wounded. Let alone wounded or this new revision.
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Thank you Ravingdork
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Same topic on Reddit. You'd think people would be grateful for a reference sheet, but I guess Redditors are a different sort.
We've got a good community here.
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I made this point in the other thread but I thought i would add it here and hopefully with a bit more humor.
Taking Damage
If you take damage while you already have the dying
condition, increase your dying condition value by 1, or
by 2 if the damage came from an attacker's critical hit
or your own critical failure. If you have the wounded
condition, remember to add the value of your wounded
condition to your dying value.
Its like when my wife tells me after trash day after work to remember to bring in the garbage cans. I usually already did it in the morning and she would have seen that its already in if she was paying attention. A reminder doesn't compel someone to go out and do something if they already did it. The remember to do this ask wouldn't be a requirement to go back out and bring in a second garbage can. If garbage cans were a condition in pathfinder bringing in another one would only go by the pne with the highest value for overlapping duration
So what they wrote was in both pre and post remaster and does not convey the intent of stacking. It reads to me as check to see if my dying value is already including my wounded value. If yes then I remembered to do it and were good. if not put it in there cause you need to really know if your dead yet.
If they meant something different this text should have been adjusted from remember to to just do. Also I would have liked to see consistency in terms so if they wanted to increase dying by wounded again i would like them to have used the term increase rather than add.
When looking at recovery checks they use the word plus which is also not increase. Consistency there would have gone a long way.
Hmm... looking at it, the underlying problem is that Wounded is a non-standard condition. It's treated as a condition that preserves Dying until you're properly treated, but at the same time, explicitly states that the is only part of the Wounded rules, and that the remainder of the rules for Wounded exist outside of the Wounded condition itself.
Looking at it that way, as worded, the Wounded condition still functions as normal, applying its value exactly once when you gain Dying. However, at least one other rule "latches onto" it in an abnormal way, applying the value from your Wounded condition (the "Wounded value") without actually interacting with the condition itself. This is, to my knowledge, otherwise unprecedented in PF2's rules, yet seems to be the intended way to do things here.
This... is an incredibly strange design choice, to be sure, but it does seem to be the intent. Even if it essentially uses weasel words to ignore the condition-stacking rules.
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I think this would go over better if they simply admitted it is a change, it's not a clarification or an errata, they made multiple rounds of errata and it never was clarified. Admit that y'all made a change.
A thing that's gotten lost in all this discussion: Has any (current) dev made any comment at all on the "new" Death/Dying Rules since they were revealed? Before we ask that the devs recant whether the change in wording counts as a change or clarification, we can wait for somebody to say something?
Like Mark Seifter is cool and all, but did he work on the remaster books? Does it matter whether he says it's a clarification, not a change? In fact, does it matter at all whether it was a change or clarification? I can see arguing about what the "new" rules actually say, but aside from trivia, does it really matter if the remaster is officially a change or not?
My last thought in the other thread was this:
(I'll add a different though after this in another post)
The below is a radical idea, likely NOT RAW. Maybe it's RAI - but if so the rules were written very poorly. Much of this idea is based on the notion that the Remaster was rushed and much of it written by people NOT on the Rules Team.
It should be noted that it's going around on YouTube that the Rules Team themselves in their own games play by the old pre-remaster rules. But that's an unverified claim.
Here's the wild idea:
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https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43wd9&page=9?Spoiler-Remastered-Dislikes#4 34
I'm leaning toward thinking the parenthetical under the recovery section is just bad grammar for a reminder be sure your total dying value includes your wounded value - not that it's added each time you make a recovery check.
Obviously I have cognitive bias because I don't like the "change" and believe it's dramatically bad game design.
My mental gymnastics on this is the conversation above on conditions and stacking, but more so from reading the text when my print copy arrived today. Note: It's the same text. I just chose to read it again in print because whatever.
First... it was a misread of grammar before to read 'gain' an 'increase' when that 'gain' had no modifier like 'gain another'. But it opens the mind to grammar issues being possible.
Second... Rules consistency. Adding in the wounded condition every time you make a recovery check is inconsistent not just with other conditions - it's inconsistent with other ways that your dying value can increase - like taking damage or being downed after coming back up.
All other methods that increase your dying value only add the wounded value once to that dying value's total.
And no other condition (that I know of) works like the recovery check does.
Weaknesses DO sort of work this way when taking damage - but the recovery check isn't taking damage, it's similar to a saving throw.
Text in parenthesis is usually written in a document to remind of something outside them, clarify, etc. Dictum - added verbage that is not actually the rule.
So I'm thinking, again my own bias plays a role here; that this note in parenthesis is just telling us to add our wounded value to the dying [value's total as a total].
- The part in brackets being the thing NOT written that had it been there would make this note in parenthesis more consistent with the other rules in the game.
Given that the change has such a major impact on the meta, a major impact on survivability, and was neither announced or play tested - I'm leaning on thinking it wasn't or at least should not be seen as intended. But that until Paizo clarifies, it should just be seen as a badly worded 'reminder' of the things that are stated outside of parenthesis.
Obviously everyone disagrees not only on the reading and intent, but on what the result should be.
So Paizo's rules team ought to step in at some point, after giving this all careful thought.
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Now on a new thought.
We need clarification of one of two things:
Either:
A. The recovery check parenthetical is a mistake.
B. The Wounded Condition is a mistake.
Which one of this is a correct statement?
Given that the two are in conflict, one of them is incorrect.
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Third thought. I'm splitting this out because I suspect people who agree with one of them will disagree with another.
If it's true that the Rules Team themselves don't use this new recovery check parenthetical - then why is it in there?
Initial Source:
Knights of Last Call livestream #144
Death and Dying in TTRPGs:
https://www.youtube.com/live/-ePzZK-QGKE?si=1DMjcmJ4Ys47BLf5&t=1710
At the 28:30 mark
Watch long enough to hear his response to the question that pops up on screen. The name referenced is the creative director of the rules team.
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Like Mark Seifter is cool and all, but did he work on the remaster books? Does it matter whether he says it's a clarification, not a change? In fact, does it matter at all whether it was a change or clarification? I can see arguing about what the "new" rules actually say, but aside from trivia, does it really matter if the remaster is officially a change or not?
I'm of course inclined to strongly disregard his stance.
He wanted this new change in during the playtest. He got it into the playtest. But then it got cut from the core 2.0. That pretty much means he was overruled.
Now his desired rule is back. But it's still a change. He can do a victory dance on getting in one of the worst rules in game design history since GURPS Supers - but he can't rightly claim it was always there. At best for him: someone still at Paizo over-ruled the people who had originally over-ruled him.
That said, I've read a lot of people claiming Mark has this stance and has said this - but no one has provided links with the proof.
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Hmm... looking into it, I've found at least two character options that might suggest that the Dying Yo-Yo is actually intended, at least for a few builds.
• Too Angry to Die: An Intimidation skill feat that encourages you to leap straight back into the heat of battle after recovering from unconsciousness. While it works with anything that knocks you unconscious, the flavour text expects you to use it after recovering from Dying-induced unconsciousness specifically. (And, of course, hitting 0 HP is the most common source of unconsciousness in a fight, so you're mechanically most likely to use it after recovering from Dying, too.
• Euphoric renewal: An apocryphal domain spell that... well, it's actually physically impossible for a spell to be more about yoyo-ing than this one, actually. It's a two-action spell, and must be cast before you go down... but while active, it actively rewards you every time you gain Dying and then regain consciousness. The reward is admittedly just "you can get back into the fight without spending resources" (Quickened so you can stand up for free, plus temp HP & a bonus to saves to make you harder to kill for a minute), but still, the spell is explicitly designed with the intent of making it as easy to yoyo as possible; once you go down, your allies just need to bring you to 1 HP, and you do the rest yourself.
It's honestly kinda fascinating how even the game's rules themselves seem to be arguing about how lethal Dying/Wounded should be.
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Hmm... looking into it, I've found at least two character options that might suggest that the Dying Yo-Yo is actually intended, at least for a few builds.
• Too Angry to Die: An Intimidation skill feat that encourages you to leap straight back into the heat of battle after recovering from unconsciousness. While it works with anything that knocks you unconscious, the flavour text expects you to use it after recovering from Dying-induced unconsciousness specifically. (And, of course, hitting 0 HP is the most common source of unconsciousness in a fight, so you're mechanically most likely to use it after recovering from Dying, too.
• Euphoric renewal: An apocryphal domain spell that... well, it's actually physically impossible for a spell to be more about yoyo-ing than this one, actually. It's a two-action spell, and must be cast before you go down... but while active, it actively rewards you every time you gain Dying and then regain consciousness. The reward is admittedly just "you can get back into the fight without spending resources" (Quickened so you can stand up for free, plus temp HP & a bonus to saves to make you harder to kill for a minute), but still, the spell is explicitly designed with the intent of making it as easy to yoyo as possible; once you go down, your allies just need to bring you to 1 HP, and you do the rest yourself.It's honestly kinda fascinating how even the game's rules themselves seem to be arguing about how lethal Dying/Wounded should be.
2 Rare feats.
The first allows a free try to debuff, thereby increasing your chance of surviving an attack.
The second helps you be in a better shape to resist a new attack.
So, both are defensive.
They are not encouraging people to get back into the fray. The second one in particular looks very much like a good opportunity to get out of the fight.
People really need to get out of the "coming back from Dying to plunge directly back into the fight" mindset.
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Oh, I hadn't actually read the new rules. Yeah, adding 2 or more to your dying value on a failed recovery check while you're wounded doesn't sound right. Probably not the right interpretation.
Recovery Checks:
Critical Success Your dying value is reduced by 2.Success Your dying value is reduced by 1.
Failure Your dying value increases by 1 (plus your wounded value, if any).
Critical Failure Your dying value increases by 2 (plus your wounded value, if any).
I fail to see how the above can be interpreted any way other than adding your wounded value when failing a recovery check. The same goes for when you take damage when dying and wounded. Some folks point to the conditions section to suggest there is ambiguity, but that section explicity states it is not complete, and to refer to the page where I got those lines for the rest of the rules. Also, even if it was true that the condition section is ambiguous (it's not), the rule about conditions not stacking is a general rule, and the rule above is a specific rule. Specific overrides general.
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Awesome, *another* thread where I can say how I think this works.
This time, I'll list things in decreasing order of confidence in what they say.
Critical Success: Your dying value is reduced by 2.
Success: Your dying value is reduced by 1.
Failure: Your dying value increases by 1 (plus your wounded value, if any).
Critical Failure: Your dying value increases by 2 (plus your wounded value, if any).
This is completely unambiguous. In order to discount it, you have to believe that it is a misprint. That is not impossible, but there is no evidence that this is a misprint.
The doomed, dying, unconscious, and wounded conditions all relate to the process of coming closer to death. The full rules are on pages 410–411. The most significant information not contained in the conditions themselves is this: When you’re reduced to 0 Hit Points, you’re knocked out with the following effects:
• You immediately move your initiative position to directly before the creature or effect that reduced you to 0 Hit Points.
• You gain the dying 1 condition. If the effect that knocked you out was a critical success from the attacker or the result of your critical failure, you gain the dying 2 condition instead. If you have the wounded condition, increase these values by your wounded value. If the damage came from a nonlethal attack or effect, you don’t gain the dying condition—you are instead unconscious with 0 Hit Points.
This is a clear indication that the rules are complicated, that there may be seeming contradictions, but that if there are, the rules on pages 410-411 govern. This is an implicit developer statement that the rules on pages 410-411 have been thoroughly vetted and edited. That means that even if I were inclined to suspect error in the Remaster Rules, that I would think that those pages are less likely to have errors.
Arguments I have seen against this focus on the listing of "most significant information" not including adding Wounded to Dying value under additional circumstances, and "how can that not be considered the most significant". Since that particular list was not held out as exhaustive, I find that argument irrelevant.
If you take damage while you already have the dying condition, increase your dying condition value by 1, or by 2 if the damage came from an attacker’s critical hit or your own critical failure. If you have the wounded condition, remember to add the value of your wounded condition to your dying value.
The controversy here is due to the words "remember to". IMO, that is just irrelevant phrasing and word choice, but a significant number of people believe that it is intended to be a pointer to a separate rule, and that since there is no such other rule, that the entire following clause is invalid. At my table, I would need more concrete evidence that that was a mistake to overrule the plain intent that you should add wounded to dying when taking damage, but if I was at someone else's table who ran it the other way, I wouldn't argue or take issue with it.
You have been seriously injured. If you lose the dying condition and do not already have the wounded condition, you become wounded 1. If you already have the wounded condition when you lose the dying condition, your wounded condition value increases by 1. If you gain the dying condition while wounded, increase your dying condition value by your wounded value.
The wounded condition ends if someone successfully restores Hit Points to you using Treat Wounds, or if you are restored to full Hit Points by any means and rest for 10 minutes.
This is fine. It doesn't mention adding Wounded to Dying, but I don't find that persuasive one way or the other. The sidebar above says that there may be information not contained in this rule, so I neither gain nor lose confidence in it due to that being missing.
You are bleeding out or otherwise at death’s door. While you have this condition, you are unconscious. Dying always includes a value, and if it ever reaches dying 4, you die. When you’re dying, you must attempt a recovery check (page 411) at the start of your turn each round to determine whether you get better or worse. Your dying condition increases by 1 if you take damage while dying, or by 2 if you take damage from an enemy’s critical hit or a critical failure on your save.
If you lose the dying condition by succeeding at a recovery check and are still at 0 Hit Points, you remain unconscious, but you can wake up as described in that condition. You lose the dying condition automatically and wake up if you ever have 1 Hit Point or more. Any time you lose the dying condition, you gain the wounded 1 condition, or increase your wounded condition value by 1 if you already have that condition.
This rule does not mention adding Wounded Value to Dying Value. I think it should. I would find that confusing and concerning, if not for the fact that the sidebar above says that this rule may not contain all the information, and points me to pages 410-411. (As does this rule internally.)
I think the text is very clear -- Wounded Value should be added to Dying Value when failing a Recovery Check or Taking Damage while wounded. In order to come to another conclusion, I think you are taking things from outside the rules -- either a belief that that "can't be right" or some kind of imputed developer mistake or disagreement. Short of a developer clearly saying one of those things, I can't see where those can be used to confuse what seem to me like clear rules.
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I see it as [increase dying by 1] plus wounded value to get total.
Not [increase dying value by 1 and your wounded value] to get your total.