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Traps that don't cause more than a speed bump to the day's duties also serve another purpose narratively. They concretely indicate that the people who control the area are actively hostile to intruders.
They can't later claim that they are just innocent non-combatants going about their business.
They could still claim that they have a legitimate need to defend their domain with violence against intruders. But they aren't non-combatants.
Aren't you a non-combatant in your home with a security system?
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Aren't you a non-combatant in your home with a security system?
Depends on how directly lethal the security system is... and whether it targets door-to-door salesmen who happen to wander by.
Of course, it also goes both ways. If the PCs are walking through a place, and there are clear deathtraps set up and maintained, they're no longer able to plausibly claim that they were just wandering through public space. I mean, "You shot at me when I was just innocently breaking into your house" is a bit of a thing, you know?
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Mmm, but the traps I described work just as well when anyone triggers them.
"Snap this tripwire and unleash a hound of Tindalos" isn't dependent on using a summon. It's just that if you send a summon down the hallway where the tripwire is to trigger any traps there, it doesn't actually matter that a summon set the trap off instead of a PC. You still have to deal with the monster now. If you'd actually bothered to check the hallway for traps and disarmed the tripwire, you'd have been fine.
Ditto "step on this pressure plate and set off an alarm". Just because a summon set it off doesn't mean that the guards are going to ignore the alarm. Or "steal this stone idol and collapse the entire dungeon". It's not selectively screwing the party over - it's just teaching them that setting off traps and disarming them are very different things.
Those sound like entertaining things that most people would describe as "triggering a trap" for sure. But they're pretty different from the simple hazards that just do a single burst of damage.
I think it's also good to keep an open mind for other outcomes for a trap. Yes, the default outcomes are the players making checks to Disable or triggering it with their face. But the bigger picture is that you want your players to have an entertaining interaction with it. If they spend some time examining it and coming up with a different workaround, that's also fine.
(Although if they just used the same method every time, I too would probably put in a few traps where that particular method is not the wisest.)
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Talking about healing, I like that HP attrition across multiple encounters is now a rare thing, not the default way of designing a series of encounters.
I've played plenty of campaigns where there would be one combat encounter per session and perhaps two weeks of in-game time would pass. The PF2 combat engine supports that very well because it's not as nova-heavy and it also doesn't need the PCs to already be under attrition for the fight to be tense.
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The way healing is done at the moment is good for balance. My previous comments were mostly about taste. What I would really like is a variant rule a GM could choose that would enable attrition. Something like the cool down period for Continual Healing is one hour not ten minutes, and you can't take a ten minute short rest or otherwise recover a focus point due to passage of time until an hour has past since your previous short rest. Clearly this affects game balance and encounter design. But just as an option for GMs who want a grittier game. Not as a default.
I would like to see some more variant rules to enable different styles of campaigns and different campaign worlds.
Has you said, just increase the cooldown time of off-encounter healing to 1 hour or more. Yet put in your mind that the all game balance isn't developed for this. Also depending from your party this may only prolong the resting time.
I still remember the most partys that I had played in pre-pf2 games I and many other players just stop to full rest when the healing resource (usually spellslot) was spent even if this means to risk to fail a quest many times the players will priorize their characters life.
In general the current healing system is way more benefict to players, characters and story development than without it. If you need to put pressure into the players just doesn't give them 10 minutes to rest.
No. To prolong the healing abilities to 1+ hours may force some parties to continue if they think that the urgency and risk of failure is high if they waste so much time but many times will make the complete opposite, may force the players to stop and think "OK, we alread used a good ammount of our resources and will need several hours to be full healed. So probably is better to back to a safe point/teleport/cast a safe place spell and do a full rest.
The 10 minutes rest don't press the party so much. Instead many players tries to risk a little more with less daily resources because they only need some minutes to be fully HP recovered. Also when they are pressed by encounters with less than 10 minutes interval the really fell the press of a urgent situation. The GM also can control how much time the can stop to recover. Maybe just give them 10 minutes but not 20 minutes; In 1 hour or more hour of interval to reste this limited rest times a hardier to make because the day will end sooner anyway if you use too much so if the players fell that they use too much they will just retreat.
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Yeah, storywise pausing for three hours instead of 30m does feel like a real difference. At that point it makes more sense to head home for the day.
There's also a difference of course between:
- the party has to hang around for hours to heal
- the party wants to hand around for 20m to heal twice, but gets interrupted
There's also the case where you interrupt the first 10m rest. But then it's possible some buffs are still running from the previous fight. That's actually a technique you could try to use as GM, where the added difficulty from back to back fights is compensated a bit from getting more effectiveness from your buff spells.
While attrition isn't really the main encounter balancing model in PF2 anymore, I think encounter timing became even more interesting. You have the base situation of each encounter is nicely separate and starts at full HP and full focus. But it doesn't always have to go like that. Maybe due to time pressure you can only really afford a single 10m rest. Or maybe enemies show up after five minutes already.
If you do any of those things as GM, your work gets a bit harder because you have to balance encounters seen together, not separately. But if you do it sometimes, it does make your adventures a lot more dynamic and spicy.
I'd say knowing how to do that and having a feel for how it changes balance is really one of the signs of a GM that takes the "mastery" part serious :P
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Attrition is unnecessary in PF2. The game is built around near full hit points, which is why monster's hit so hard and crit easier than prior editions.
As far as I see it, the Medicine solution to non-combat healing is an increase verisimilitude. Prior players bought tons of low level consumable healing items and healed up in minutes between fights.
This changing healing to hours waiting for Continual Recovery would just force players to go back to buying lots of cheap, low cost consumables to quickly heal. It wouldn't make the game harder or force some kind of attrition scenario on the players.
If you want to give them no time, it's very easy to do that as a DM with 10 minute rests. 10 minutes and 1 minute are just artificial constructs for a DM to use to pace battles and story. I don't even consider them exact. I just consider them tools for me to manipulate to provide the feel I want for battles and such.
I see no point in forcing players back into a paradigm that encourages consumable purchasing.
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I like that most of the time attrition isn't a big thing, but that sometimes it is. When it's an uncommon "oh we're really in trouble this time" thing it becomes more interesting.
I don't think consumables are always a lame way to play.
One of the most memorable fights I've had was a raid during Agents of Edgewatch where the point was to get into a gang compound and secure everything. But quietly taking out the sentries is hard (enemies have tons of HP so they don't drop that quickly). And it kinda rolled on into a fight in the common room and then into the boss' office where he was starting to burn incriminating papers.
That kind of story doesn't really make sense if you take leisurely 10-30m rests in between. However, this was a sanctioned police raid so we were issued a lot of extra healing elixirs so we wouldn't have to take it slow.
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TBH I'm not sure the time scale does the game many favors. Setting everything in 10-30m increments is kind of... a lot of time to wait in between encounters. It starts to strain versimilitude to take that much time off between each encounter, but if you don't other parts of the game start to break. I feel like Paizo would have been better off picking a smaller time interval. As is you're kind of expecting to just shrug and ignore the verisimilitude problems, or make certain characters suffer because of it.
I feel like this is a problem I see fairly often in 5e too, where people don't want to stop for short rests because an hour long break feels like a long time and often doesn't make sense in a dungeon (but again certain classes become much less fun if you do this).
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I think they had to pick something. How long does it take to bind someone's wounds? 10m seems more plausible than 1m. How long does it take to repair a shield? 10m seems pretty fast actually. How long does it take to pray and get some focus points back? Well that one's completely arbitrary. How long does it take to examine a suspected magic item and figure out what it is? 1m does seem rather short.
10m is a bit of a compromise, doesn't make anyone 100% happy but it's not completely without grounds either.
There might also be an element of tradition at work; 2E D&D ran its version of exploration mode in "turns" of 10 minutes. With the probability of random encounters being based on how many turns the party spent loitering in a part of the dungeon.
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I also like the 10 minutes turn because its plausible for many other exploration things too.
Do you like to check the room for hidden things? OK search for 10 minutes while the party's medic heals the woundeds and other chars refocus.
I use pretty much these 10 minutes turn for many things in exploration even in DGs because isn't like you have to speedrun it. The PC probably want to do a little rest and mend their wounds after an encounter, they need time to investigate some strange artifact, to search clues in an investigation, to find hidden trap or hidden dor in that bookshelf and these 10 minutes turns are perfect for these situations.
Only when they need to run (like we still an artifact and we are being pursued by the evil cult or they sound the alarm and need to run before become overwhelmed) that the 10 minutes turns are not enough and thats OK to put some pressure to party in these situations (I only recomendo to balance the entire runway event as a single encounter to prevent unwanted dies).
10 minute dungeon turns is a throwback to the ancient days of d&d. I figured it was picked for that as much as anything else.
10 minute dungeon turns is a throwback to the ancient days of d&d. I figured it was picked for that as much as anything else.
Haha. I remember that. That's why I look at these time tables as a means to control pace by the DM. Do things actually take 10 minutes like you are running a stopwatch? No.
As a DM you are spitballing a time. When it tells me 10 minutes, I interpret that as You have 3 periods of healing with medicine before something else happens.
Or you have no time to heal, something is coming.
DM controls the pace. The 1 minute and 10 minute times are intervals for you to use to provide a certain feel to the pacing of the adventure.
1 minute is about the length of a combat.
10 minutes is a few combats depending or a rough time period to do some kind of extended medical care to clean up some wounds quickly.
No use seeing it like some exact time. If you want to modify those intervals up or down, you have that option because the interval mechanics are in place.
DM controls the pace. The 1 minute and 10 minute times are intervals for you to use to provide a certain feel to the pacing of the adventure.
Only somewhat, because there are mechanical implications tied to that pacing.
Cutting down on the time between fights doesn't just mean creating a faster game or even just a game with less healing and therefore more risk, because I also have to consider, for instance, if I want the party psychic to have their tools or not, which comes with an entirely different set of problems.
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I love this thread. Only here do I get folks not only talking about the subject at hand but also socio-cultural asides on at what level does your high-security home defense system nullify your ability to claim yourself as a non-combatant. And to general design principles of the point of traps. And the ancient RPG relic known as Turns. As opposed to Rounds. Turns - How I have missed thee.
Getting back to the topic, I can’t favorite Trip H.’s post upthread enough. Though I have played a limited amount of PF2 the points about lethality align with my experience. Giving each enemy combatant up to three die rolls per turn vs the players sends the crit-wagon into overdrive. I would also say that those couple of posters who commented on the healers propping up the tankiest, HP heavy character also aligns with my experience.
I don’t know if I like or dislike it to be honest - I do know that I prefer the Medicine once/day after a battle in terms of my preferred level of “realism” (cue The Notbag with comments about elfgames….) and definitely in preference to wands of healing bought at ye Olde Magic Shoppe. And, again, one of my fellow noobs, likewise a grognard of decades of play said he finds the “healed to max between each and every battle”….not to his liking I can see that there is a huge range of what people find….satisfying.
From grognards to fans of MMOs you aren’t going to be able to create a ruleset that caters to everyone’s ideal, and maybe that is why people….tinker with the system. More and more I am moving toward looking at PF2R as just an elegant hackable system that isn’t doing everything that ai want, but is doing enough of a lot of different things that in and of themselves make enough of a collective sense to hold together if I stretch this mechanic that way or bend another mechanic another way. For too long I’ve felt on the Paizo boards that Society play (ironically a set of kind of hacked rules anyway) casts a monolithic shadow that represents an arch-fundament of how the game is to be played - my own self created “imagined community” that I need to be mindful of. And even as an avid homebrewer I tended not to be able to make those changes because I was mostly playing via PbP, and the PF1 games I was running were low-level, for new players and I was keeping things simple. But now, with a simpler, more elegant system I feel much more able to play PF2R the way I want, to run it the way I want and with the in game options for healing I want.
To finally get to a point the thread might appreciate. Merry Christmas. May all your presents bring you joy. And healing.